CHAPTER TWO

 

 

The same night. 

Nevada.

The driver was being driven. 

Lenny Long sat in the passenger seat of the family car. After driving in shifts for nearly three days straight everyone was a little sharp. And the desert heat, even at night, really wasn’t helping anything. They badly needed a change of scenery. They were in the same tired and bone dry car that escorted them all the way across from Florida. 

The same car that escorted Lenny away from the wrestling business.

They only had time to drag all their worldly belongings into their tiny motel room before Bree got the call.

“Where is it?” Luke asked from the backseat. Both he and his toddler brother James Henry were truly sick of traveling and upheaval. 

“Around the corner,” Lenny lied.

“Is it?” Bree covertly mouthed.

Lenny shrugged. Vegas wasn’t one of his towns. He had spent the last few years driving Danno Garland and his wife, Annie, wherever they needed to go. Just happened they never needed to go to Vegas. 

“Do I make a right?” Bree asked as she anxiously navigated the sign-infested streets.

Lenny noticed the white tan lines of his wife’s missing rings. He swore all the way from Florida that he’d make that better when he got himself settled and made some money.

“Right?” Bree asked again.

“I don’t know about this,” Lenny mumbled away from the children.

“About the right turn?” Bree asked.

“No, the job,” Lenny replied.

Bree tapped the map on Lenny’s lap to get him to focus. She had explained this to her husband a hundred times since she got the call the day before. “I’m just going to be dealing the cards. That’s all.”

“There’s a reason they don’t let women work in these places. Or didn’t until now.”

Bree gripped the steering wheel and talked herself out of another argument. Before they moved their whole lives across the country things hadn’t been great between her and Lenny. His job with Danno meant that he was gone for weeks and sometimes months at a time. It nearly killed their marriage. This big shiny mess of a town was now their clean slate and Bree was doing her best not to dirty it.

“That’s all they’ve asked you to do for now,” Lenny said. “Deal cards, I mean.”

“Just look for The Plaza.”

Lenny snapped the map open in front of his face. “We’re looking for Main Street.” 

Bree took a deep breath, “I know that.” She tried to read all the hundreds of signs as they rolled by. 

Every now and then Luke would crane his neck and ‘whoa’ at the pomp and cheap splendor of the buildings and their gimmicks. To Luke it looked like the town could have been designed by one of his seven-year-old friends. There were motel signs and restaurant signs and signs for shows and clubs and gas and coffee shops. Red signs, blue signs, round ones and small ones. Signs to tell you that there were signs ahead.

“Turn here,” Lenny mumbled from behind the map.

“Here?”

“Yeah, here.”

Bree began to think that maybe he was pulling them around in circles on purpose. She knew he didn’t want to leave New York. She knew he didn’t want to leave his job. She also knew he’d keep all that to himself.

“We should be coming up between First and Second street,” Lenny said. The nose of their car guided them around the corner and onto a stacked street that presented itself as both beautiful and gaudy. Lights, bright colors, flags and banners. There was a giant cowboy and a huge star perched on the side of a casino. Down the end of the crammed, sparkling street The Union Plaza stood above them all. It was a light, tall and spurious design with a gaping foyer that sucked the road right in. 

“Fuck, is that it?” Lenny asked.

“Says so right on top,” Bree excitedly answered as she nodded Lenny’s attention to the big red letters on the roof. 

“And they’re hiring ladies?” Lenny asked one last time.

Bree slowed down. “We could just go straight to my folks and stay there, Lenny.”

“I wanna see Granpa,” Luke said from the back.

Lenny shook his head. To him Las Vegas was the lesser of two evils. He may have been out of work, he may have been a near stranger to his kids – but Lenny was still the man of the Long house. 

Or at least that’s what he was trying to be. 

He’d be damned if his wife would go to her folks looking for a place for them to stay. The motel was fine for now. And even though it made him nauseous – so was Bree’s job. 

Lenny put his hand on his wife’s leg. She was beaming as the reflection of the hotel flicked across their windshield. She was happy. Her family were around her, she was getting to earn her own money, and she could work on things with her husband.

For the first time in a couple of years she was starting to think that maybe they could make it as a family.

 

Ricky didn’t want to make the call. That feeling was familiar to him lately. He felt as though he spent most of his time doing things that were against his nature. 

But business was business. And it was his job to protect the wrestling business at all costs.

He had parked outside a dingy bar about 10 miles from where they had left Proctor. It was dark and quiet and still pouring rain.

Ricky stood in the phone booth outside. He dialed and waited for a voice to pick up at the other end.

“Hello?” answered the voice.

“Gilbert?” Ricky asked.

“Who’s this?”

“You know who it is. Where’s Proctor?” Ricky asked.

“Ricky, I told you yesterday and the day before, I don’t know. My mother doesn’t know.”

“Well, he’s obviously jumped ship somewhere. If he couldn’t take being Danno’s champion then he should have been fucking man enough to say it. When you do see him, tell that weasel that I’m stripping him of the belt.”

“ I … ”

Ricky slammed the phone down and tried to manage his own disgust. He had already contacted the few wrestling media outlets that were left and spun the story that Proctor King wasn’t man enough to accept a rematch with Babu.

Danno made the decision that Proctor had to go. Now Ricky had to clean up the fallout of that decision. 

 

Danno went through the routine of getting undressed but to simply lie in an empty bed, after all those years of marriage, was strange and unusual. He wasn’t glad to be home like he usually was. His house held nothing for him anymore.

Downstairs, Ricky was locking the doors and securing the house for the night.

“You okay up there?” Ricky shouted.

Danno didn’t answer. 

Ricky listened some more and took the silence to mean he was safe to proceed. He quietly walked into the hall and peered up the stairs to make sure Danno wasn’t there. He then slid his hand into Danno’s jacket and carefully took out a bunch of keys. Ricky removed one of the keys and placed the bunch back where he found them.

In his room Danno sat in silence as he was slowly being introduced to the restrictive frailty of being alone. All the years he worked and schemed to get the big house and the wall full of money  meant absolutely nothing. Danno was left an old man, companionless. 

In his head he harassed himself about the time he didn’t talk to Annie for nearly a month because of something she said about his mother. He couldn’t remember what. Or what about the time he frightened her after that dinner party? How he let her rot for years on those pills? The time he told her he couldn’t have children? 

He thought of Proctor’s head pressed against his gun. The startling whack of noise as he pulled the trigger. It made him sick. All this made him sick. Seeing her laid out on the metal table. Knowing that the killer was still alive. 

Danno got up and walked quickly to his bathroom where he stooped to vomit in his toilet bowl.

Just a few days ago, Danno was king. He managed to outmaneuver the other bosses to keep his New York territory and to add San Francisco and Florida to his budding empire. It all had to happen with precision. That’s why he felt he had no choice but to agree with his wife when she suggested she go and negotiate for Texas.

Danno was the first boss in their business’ history to move outside his own boundary lines and buy up other territories. That made him a huge threat to the other bosses. When was he coming for their patch? How long until he had the whole business to himself?

Danno thought about his celebration that night and everyone laughing and backslapping each other. He now knew that at the same time his wife was lying dead on the floor of a small, dingy hotel room in Texas.

It made him sick.

The thoughts of having to kill again made him sick. The thoughts of never seeing her again made him sick.

Danno sat on the floor of his bathroom and looked out to their bedroom. Or his room, now. It looked like old people lived there. 

He remembered leaning into her cold ear and whispering, “I promise you I’ll make this right before we meet again.”

He couldn’t lift his eyes from the bathroom floor. The only comfort he allowed himself was the fleeting thought that maybe Annie was waiting for him. 

There was nothing else of meaning left in his life. And he was old and scared without her. The house was too big all of a sudden, and the noises outside were exhausting. Every couple of minutes he’d have to check a window to make sure there was nothing unusual coming his way.

Danno dragged himself off the bathroom floor and walked back into his room. He laid out his best suit on the end of the bed and checked the single bullet which lay in wait in the chamber of his chosen revolver. 

It was a bullet, he knew, that had his name on it.

He slapped the cylinder closed and rested the gun beside his suit. Very soon he would return and dress himself in that suit and use that gun.

But not before he made good on his promise to his wife.

 

The next day. Four days after the murder.

New York.

The NYPD was down, riddled with systematic corruption and continually fending off accusations of crooked behavior. For many years the dysfunction was a private, dirty little secret, but now it was so well known that even Hollywood had begun to make movies about it. 

It was an organization that was rotten from the top down. It was like an old boy’s club that made false arrests, fabricated evidence, engaged in racketeering, beatings, bribery and even attempted murder.

The NYPD was a festering wound down the middle of a dying city.

Nestor Chapman tapped lightly on the one door in the world he hated entering. Even before the new guy showed up, Nestor hated that door. 

“Come in,” called the voice from inside.

Nestor turned the handle and walked sheepishly into the captain’s office. 

“Have a seat,” Captain Miller said.

The captain reminded Nestor more of a doctor than a captain. He was near retirement, long and lean, and had a perfectly shiny bald head. 

Nestor sat and tried to assess the situation. He had been in Miller’s company a few times since Miller arrived from Brooklyn, but never on his own. He very much liked it that way.

“Did anyone ever tell Cooper that he types like a fucking retard?” the captain asked as he tried to make sense of a report on his desk.

Nestor smiled and nodded in league with his boss. The captain closed over his folder and focused solely on Nestor.

“Tell me what you know about Danno Garland,” the captain said frankly.

Somewhere in his head, Nestor had been waiting for that question but when it came it still disarmed him a little.

“Well,” he started. “Not much. He’s a promoter here in the city. Across the north-east here. Wrestling. Or professional wrestling. Seems to have made some real money over the last few years judging by his… the way he lives now. I … I … he’s … low to the ground. Doesn’t cause trouble. I don’t know.”

Miller watched Nestor’s face very carefully. He leaned back in his creaky chair and thought for a second before following up.

“You’ve been following Troy Bartlett for a number of months,” said the captain, making his words both a question and a statement.

Nestor nodded. He too leaned back and tried to make himself look less guilty of something.

“And this man, Troy Bartlett, is Danno Garland’s lawyer?” the captain asked.

Nestor shrugged his shoulders and adjusted his body some more. 

“And Danno’s name never comes up when you’re digging on this other guy?” Captain Miller asked.

“He does something for Garland but there’s never been anything we could move in on. I’m interested in Bartlett for different matters. Missing monies. Shady practices. That kind of thing.”

The captain again disconnected from the conversation to think. Nestor had heard how shrewd Miller was and how he played a tight game in terms of strategy. Such talents around this particular topic made Nestor anxious.

“Is there something?…” Nestor let his sentence trail off. He wanted to know what this was about but didn’t want to ask directly. He knew that a high rank wasn’t fishing around for nothing. 

Captain Miller leaned into his desk and looked Nestor straight in the face. “I’ve got a US Senator who was stabbed in both legs a few blocks from here. I’m sure you’ve heard by now. It’s everywhere. My goddamn wife has called me 10 times today to tell me it’s on the radio and the TV.”

“Yeah, I heard. Hell of a thing,” Nestor answered, trying to sound sympathetic. 

“Yeah well, the senator says he doesn’t know what happened. He gets a lot of crazies, he says. Could have been anyone. He’s calling for more money from the federal government for policing.”

Nestor nodded accordingly. “This city is … everyone who goes out there is on their own,” Nestor replied, sounding totally unaware of his responsibility. 

“Well, we might have something to do with that. Don’t you think?” the captain asked.

Nestor realized how stupid his answer was. He wanted to get the conversation back on track. “What makes you think Garland had anything to do with it?”

The captain stood up and walked to the mesh-covered window. “When the news broke, I personally got a call from the head of the Athletic Commission. He comes down here to our boxing club. Maybe you’ve seen him around. Melvin Pritchard? Anyways, he says that the Senator, just before he was attacked, was scheduled to bring Garland before a committee on match fixing or some such nonsense.”

Miller turned back from the window slowly and rested his hand against the wall.

“I didn’t know that,” Nestor lied.  

“US Senators don’t get stabbed on the street in the United States of America. Not even in this fucking city. I just need to know whether I should chase this wrestling guy or discount him and move on. ‘Cause someone is gonna notice … ”

The captain stopped himself.

And there it was, Nestor thought. The money shot. The reason he was called in at all. A high ranking politician with a national profile gets knifed on the street and someone is either getting squashed for mishandling it or highly rewarded for fixing it. There had been talk around the department of the First and Fourth precincts being amalgamated under one roof. No police house in the whole of New York had two captains. 

Nestor thought that Miller was fixing to move up the chain.

“This police force can’t afford another high profile fuck up,” the captain said. “If they’re going to make another movie about us … it’s gotta be ... we’ve … we’re the good fucking guys you understand?”

Nestor nodded in agreement. Captain Miller looked at his detective and couldn’t decide on him one way or the other. 

“I’ve ordered some officers to go out and shake a few bushes. Make a few inquires into this Garland person.”

Nestor nodded.

“Just so you know,” the captain said. 

“Okay,” Nestor answered, not quite knowing what he should say.

“I’ve asked every cop in this building to bring me what they know about Danno Garland.” The captain sat back down and lifted his pen, ready. “So you have nothing to tell me in this regard at this time?”

Nestor shook his head. “Not at this time,” he said.

“But when you do … ”

“But when I do … ”

Nestor sat easy even though he felt like bursting out the door and running to his car. He knew he needed to stay ahead of what was coming.

Luckily he had already started.

 

Danno descended the large creaky stairs dressed in a black suit. He really tried to resist it but in the end he felt compelled to shout. “Hello?”

He wasn’t sure whether he wanted somebody to reply or not. It was just something he did now. Now that he was there on his own.

He picked up his phone and dialed Lenny Long from his pocket phone book. The number just returned a disconnected tone. Danno tried again but got the same result. 

He noticed a note lying on the floor just by his front door. He carefully walked towards it and checked the doorways of his house before he stooped. 

He opened it, and it read: 

There’s a heatwave coming up from Florida. You better cover up. 

He didn’t recognize the handwriting. But the headed paper was something he had seen a thousand times before.