“You know this, but I’m gonna remind you again since your thick fucking head seems to have missed the memo.” Blanket relaxed his grip on Charlie’s shoulder. “I don’t say shit to you. I decide what you need to know. You make one more comment like that, I’ll be scraping your balls off the bottom of my Cole Haans.” Charlie groaned. “You get me?”
“I got you. Now let go.”
Blanket let Charlie hit the floor. He got up, wiped his knees, rubbed his shoulder.
“You have anger issues, man. You gotta control that…”
“Are you saying something?”
“No, Blanket. I ain’t saying nothing.”
Blanket smiled, ran his fingers along the dusty brick corridor. He could hear voices from the other end, a mixture of panic and calm. Blanket took a deep breath, swallowed the phlegm in his throat. He knew he was about to walk into a buzzsaw. Meetings like this didn’t happen often. Seeing Michael DiForio in such spur-of-the-moment circumstances was like spotting one of those rare white elks or Haley’s comet or some shit.
They came to a metal door, green with rust, a grated slat on top. Blanket knocked. The slat opened. A pair of eyes popped into view.
“Hey, Blanket. Charlie. Mike’s waiting for you.”
“I was afraid you’d say that. How bad is it?”
“He forgot to eat breakfast this morning.”
“Fuck me, that’s bad.”
The man gave a nervous laugh, threw back a dead bolt and opened the door.
A large mahogany conference table was set up in the middle of the nondescript gray room. It smelled of ammonia and dust. The table looked out of place, like a de Kooning on the wall of a prison cell. Water pitchers lined the table. There was no alcohol. This wasn’t a social gathering. A dozen men were seated, and appeared to be in various states of unease. All older men, gray hair slicked back and oily. Dull ties. Questioning eyes. Waiting for answers. One man sat at the head of the table, facing the doorway. His green eyes were serrated blades.
“Blanket,” Michael DiForio said.
“Boss.”
Blanket looked at the man’s face: thin nose, arched eyebrows. Olive complexion. Trim in his tapered suit. He looked hungry. Now sixty-one, more athletic than most men half his age, Michael DiForio was vying to lead his family and usher in a new era of prosperity. Like Gotti before him, DiForio was a legend in his hometown, and a savvy real estate developer to boot. Everything about the man commanded respect, and in return he would offer his friendship. He was smart, ruthless, vicious, but always in control. Except for today. Today, DiForio looked like a man who, for the first time, had to question everything.
Now Blanket stood opposite this man, and all eyes waited.
Michael finally spoke, his voice calm.
“What’s the news?”
Blanket cleared his throat and tried to speak in a confident voice.
“Well, my sources told me…”
“Fuck the pussyfooting. Speak.”
Blanket toed the floor, looked up.
“The cops don’t have Parker yet. That’s a fact. He fled the scene before the boys in blue showed up. This morning some towel head at a meat market called 911, claimed Parker stole a newspaper after threatening his sons. Cops’re combing the area, but they couldn’t find a doughnut if they fucking sat on it. Rumor has it since they killed a cop, the Feds will be called in soon.”
DiForio looked like he was about to swear, then held back. “Have they locked down the building on 105th yet?”
Blanket nodded. “Place is tighter than my old lady.”
“Fuck,” DiForio spat. It startled Blanket, this sudden loss of composure. DiForio rubbed his temples. “What are Parker’s outs?”
Blanket scratched the back of his neck and looked at Michael. “Well, Port Authority’s out of the question. There’s no way he’s buying a bus ticket out of New York without a thirty-eight going up his ass. Airports, not a chance. Guy’s a college grad, figure even nowadays that’s worth something, so he’s too smart to try and use a passport.”
“What else?”
Blanket coughed.
“The Path could be a tough one. They’re sending cops to cover entry points at 33rd and Union Square, but there’s a definite chance he could have made it to Jersey.” The Path was an underground train service running to and from New Jersey. It was as hard to monitor as the subway system and ran just as often. There were several stations in the city, and a constant, bustling stream of crowds. “The kid doesn’t have any relatives there, maybe some college friends, who knows. Definitely nobody who’d take a bullet or get sent to lockup for him.”
“He got a girlfriend?” DiForio asked. Blanket stayed silent. Michael stood up, pushing his chair back. Metal scraped against metal. His voice effortlessly thundered in the small room. “Blanket, does he have a girlfriend? Boyfriend? He like transvestites?”
“Actually, boss, I’m not sure about that yet. Cops’re checking phone records, my man at the 24th said he’ll tell me whatever they find, but they’re still looking. We’re not gonna know anything until they do.”
DiForio picked his chair up and heaved it across the room. A dozen pairs of eyes watched it fly over their heads and clang against the wall. Michael walked around the table and approached Blanket, his chest mere inches away.
Dom Loverro stood up. The man weighed three hundred, three-fifty easy. Body fat percentage hovering around ninety-five. He said, “Mike, you want us to take care of it? Find this prick Parker?”
DiForio looked at him with contempt. “If I need a fat asshole to walk up behind a deaf and dumb guy and hit him in the back of the head with a crowbar, I’ll let you know. I need to chase down a fugitive thirty years younger than us, something tells me I’ll need a guy who can see his toes.”
“Mike?” Blanket said.
“The package from that junkie shutterbug,” DiForio said. “Where is it?”
Blanket’s heart caught in his throat. He blinked rapidly, felt sweat leaking through his pores. “The cops don’t have it. It wasn’t at the scene.”
DiForio slowly turned around, taking two steps away from Blanket. Then in the blink of an eye, he spun around and slapped Blanket across the face.
Spit flew from his lips. He tasted salty blood, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, took it in stride.
“So, would you find it safe to say that since Luis Guzman doesn’t have my package, and the cops don’t have it yet, either…you see what I’m getting at you stupid fuck?”
Blanket spit a cluster of blood and phlegm onto the concrete. “Parker,” he said. “He must have taken it last night when he ran.”
DiForio nodded. “Blanket?”
“Yeah, boss?”
“Call the Ringer.”
Blanket felt a shiver, an electrical pulse, course through his body. A smile crept over his busted lip. He felt no pain, only a sense of satisfaction. At that moment, Blanket wouldn’t have traded places with Henry Parker for all the riches on earth.
10
Federal Plaza felt like 3:00 a.m. during a graveyard shift, everyone walking around like zombies. Many of the agents knew the man who died last night. And they were all looking to Joe Mauser to bring Henry Parker to justice.
Mauser banged open the office door. The younger agent, Leonard Denton, was already there. Clean shaven, smelled like a bottle of Drakkar Noir threw up all over him. Joe offered an imperceptible nod and sat down at the table. He sniffed, grimaced, the younger man’s aftershave reeking like holy hell. Hygiene be damned, Joe didn’t care much about anything at this point. Parker was still out there. Goddamn NYPD had the kid pinned like a rat and let him squirm away.
Leonard Denton had a squeaky clean rep in the department, squeaky to the point where people almost assumed he would flip out one day and go postal. He was efficient and by-the-book, admirable qualities. But being admired and having admirable qualities were two totally different animals. Denton requested this case for that very reason, to prove to the rank and file that he would take down a man who killed one of their own. When it came to tracking down a fugitive cop killer, you set the book on fire and laughed at it while it burned. And Mauser could tell from Denton’s face that the man was completely prepared to do that.