I opened my coat, held the .45 in my hand while I fumbled my key out. I shouldn’t’ve bothered because the door was already open. I took my hat off, held it while I felt my way to the living room and flipped on the switch.
Even before the first blossom of light filled the room I remembered what was wrong. Pete-the-dog hadn’t mentioned one name: Mario Sen.
And here he was waiting for me to come in the door and his gun was leveled right at my stomach. He waited to let me see him smile his killer’s smile and it was a smile too long. He never noticed the .45 in my fist under the hat I was holding and my first slug blew his brains all over the wall. The cordite and blood stink rushed into the room and for the first time I felt a little sick.
Out in the kitchen I let the water run until it was cold, took a long drink to wash the bitterness away that stained my mouth and went to the phone. I dialed the Big Man’s number and when he came on I said, “This is Ryan. I found Lias. He’s dead.”
“I heard the report.”
“He wasn’t dead when I reached him, Big Man.”
The intake of his breath made a sharp hiss. “What was it?”
“Big Man... about how much would eight kilos of heroin be worth on the final cut?”
He tried to keep the excitement out of his voice but couldn’t make it. “That’s way up in the millions. There hasn’t been a single shipment that size in twenty years!”
“That’s what was in your package mister. That’s why everybody died.”
“Have you located it?”
“Not yet. But I will. If you had a tail on Billings all the while, where did he hang around?”
“Hold on.”
I heard a file drawer slide open, the rustle of papers, then the drawer slam shut. He picked up the phone again. “His movements were pretty well regimented. Mornings at the Barkley for breakfast and a shave, on to the Green Bow or Nelson’s, several bars in the Forties and generally into the Snyder House for a card game at night. Just before he was killed he made two trips to where the city’s planning that new Valley Park Housing Development. Walked around the block, but that was all.”
“Those buildings are going to be torn down,” I said.
“In a few months. There are still some families there yet.”
“I know,” I said.
“Any help?”
“Yes. Yes. Lots of help. Meantime you can pick up another dead man at my place. His name is Mario Sen. He won’t be missed. He was planted here to get me and you guys passed him over. I took care of it myself.” I paused, then added, “I’ll call you back.”
I hung up the phone while he was still trying to talk and sat down. It made lots of sense now. I knew what Billings was doing in that old section. I had an apartment there for 10 years and he found out where. He was going to plant the stuff in my pad before he died and let it go from there.
The only thing he didn’t know was that I had just moved out!
I reached for the phone again, held my hand on it and thought back, all the way back to the beginning and ran it up to date. There was no more puzzle then. The pieces became a picture and faces and times and events and now there was nothing left to find out at all... except for one thing.
All the tiredness left me and I felt good again, like that day in the beginning. The sucker trap was over and I was out of it and after tonight there wouldn’t be a kill list at all. Not for me. For a lot of others, maybe, but not me.
I grabbed at the phone, rang Carmen’s number and she had it before it finished ringing the first time. Her voice almost cracked with anxiety when she said, “Ryan, Ryan, where are you?”
“Home, Baby, I’m okay. What happened?”
“We left with the rest. The police came up as I came out but there weren’t enough to catch us. We heard those shots and I thought it was you. I couldn’t get over there. It was like being caught in the tide. Everybody was screaming and pressing forward...”
“You can forget it now.”
“Who was it?”
“’Fredo. They got him.”
“Oh, Ryan.”
“He was alive when I got there. He talked, kitten, and now I can really twist some tails. You want to see it happen?”
“Only... if I can help.”
“You can. Look, grab a cab and come over here, I’ll be waiting outside. We can go on from here.” I gave her my address, hung up and went in and changed my shirt. I walked past Mario Sen to the street and stood in the shadows, waiting.
When the cab stopped I got in and there was my lovely Carmen. Her breath half-caught in a relieved sob. She said my name and buried her face against my neck. I gave the driver my old address.
The street was dying. What life it had left showed in the few windows glowing a sickly yellow. Only a handful of kids made noises under the street lights. The plague it had even seemed to reroute traffic which hurried by as if anxious to get away from the old and decaying.
I stopped, and Carmen looked up at me quizzically, her hand tight on my arm. “Thinking?”
“Reliving a little.”
“Oh?”
“I used to live here.” I nodded toward the blank row of windows that faced the second floor.
A thin stoop-shouldered old man, his face gaunt under the grey velvet of a beard, shuffled out of the darkness, glanced at us suspiciously, then twisted his mouth into a grin. “Evenin’, Mr. Ryan. You come back for a last look?”
“Hi, Sandy. No, just a little unfinished business. How come you’re still here?”
“That Kopek Wrecking outfit got a bunch of us around. Supposed to keep out sleepers. You remember when they knocked down that place with them two bums holed up inside? Cost them for that.”
I motioned toward the hallway on my right. “Anybody here?”
“Steve. He’ll be drunk. You want to see him?”
“Not specially.”
He flipped an off beat salute and said, “Well, have fun. Can’t see why anybody’d come back here. Three more weeks everybody’s out and down they come.”
We watched him walk off and Carmen said, “Sad little man.”
I took her arm and we went up the time worn brownstone steps into the open maw of the tenement.
The scars of occupancy were still fresh, the feel of people still there. The pale light of the unshaded bulb overhead gave a false warmth and cast long, strange shadows around us. From somewhere in the back came a cough and the mumble of a voice thick with liquor.
A box-like professional torch with Kopek Wrecking stenciled on it was wedged in the angle between the bannister and the newel post. I picked it up and snapped on the switch. Then I smiled at Carmen, took her hand and started up the stairs.
At the door I stopped and turned her head toward mine. “You haven’t said anything.”
Her eyes laughed at me. She waved her hand at the darkness outside the light. “What can I say? Everything is so... strange.” An involuntary shiver seemed to touch her and she drew closer to me. “The things you do... are so different. I never know what to expect.”
“They’re hood things, kitten.”
For a moment she seemed pensive, then she shook her head lightly. “You’re not really, Ryan. In the beginning you were, but something’s happened to you.”
“Not to me, sugar. Nothing in this whole lousy world is going to shake me up. I like being a hood. To me it’s the only way I can tell off this stupid race of slobs. I can keep out of their damned organizations and petty grievances and keep them away from me. I can drink my own kind of poison and be dirty mean when they want me to drink theirs.”