‘Still big, still bad,’ Carter responds.
A large man with broad shoulders and a swelling gut, Carl Maverton fancies himself a tough guy, a self-image Carter never challenges. New York might be the safest big city in the country, but Carl believes it to be the center of all that’s evil, a cauldron of mixed-race liberalism committed to the destruction of America.
‘Time to get out, old buddy.’ Carl winks and grins. ‘Because it’s comin’.’
Carter doesn’t inquire into the ‘it’ part. That’s because he knows Carl will launch into a rant about taking back his country – by any means necessary – that won’t end before sundown. The very idea seems pitiful to Carter, a bunch of jerks marching around in the forest with semi-automatic assault rifles as they prepare to battle the United States military. Carter was in Falluja, working as a merc, when the Marines stormed the city. He was at Tora Bora, watching American jets slam missiles into cave openings six feet wide. Should Maverton and his survivalist buddies ever become a serious threat, they’ll be eliminated forthwith.
For the next hour, Carter devotes himself to his training. He uses a Smith & Wesson revolver and a Glock semi-automatic, working with single and multiple targets from various positions. The pinnacle of the exercise occurs halfway through, when he rolls from a squat on to his left side and notches a tight, six-round pattern into a target twenty feet away.
Carter fires off more than a hundred rounds with each weapon, until his wrist aches and he can’t fight the recoil. Then he puts his weapons away, satisfied with his overall progress. The military hadn’t placed much emphasis on handgun training, but his speed and accuracy have both improved since his return to the States. He’s not as fast as Gentleman Jerry Miculek, of course, not even close, but he’s not really competing. For one thing, Miculek’s weapons are heavily customized, while Carter’s, for good reason, are not. Carter discards his weapons (as he discarded the .22 used to dispatch Ricky Ditto, along with the stolen license plates on the van and the clothing he’d worn) after a single use. There doesn’t seem to be much point in customizing them beforehand. No one misses from six feet away, not if he’s got a hand as steady as Carter’s.
As Carter hikes across the yard to the rifle range, he wonders about Miculek’s heart. How would he react if bullets were coming back at him from all directions, accompanied by the occasional RPG and mortar round? Unless Miculek’s been to war, he can’t know.
Carter was far more skilled with a rifle than a handgun, when he left the military. In the field, he’d consistently buried his first round into living targets eight hundred yards away. But eight hundred yards is nearly a half-mile, a distance covering ten New York City blocks, and there are very few ten-block sightlines in New York, or even in the surrounding suburbs. Thus Carter practices out to a distance of three hundred yards, a bit more than three city blocks, calculating distance with a fairly low-tech rangefinder purchased second hand at a gun show.
At these distances, Carter is deadly from any position, standing to prone, and he doesn’t prolong what amounts to a boring practice session designed only to maintain his skills. He’s on the road by eleven o’clock, stopping for an outdoor lunch in Stroudsburg on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. He attracts no attention while he eats, blending into the scenery, virtually invisible. Back in his van, he stays five miles above the speed limit, just another weary traveler heading home. But not to Janie’s apartment in Woodhaven. Janie’s name and address appear on Carter’s service record and he’s already been tracked to her apartment by a man out to kill him. Now he lives, for the most part, in a condo he sublets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The arrangement is private, with the utilities remaining in the name of the condo’s owner. Carter’s locksmith shop is down here as well, Gung-Ho Locksmiths on Avenue A near Tenth Street. He’ll spend the next few hours in the shop, examining various ways to open magnetic locks. Then he’ll go for a run along the East River, only a few blocks away.
Carter’s thoughts turn to Angel Tamanaka as he crosses the George Washington Bridge. He’d been standing in the dining room when he first heard her voice, and he’d assumed she was Ricky’s wife, returned unexpectedly. Killing a man in front of his family isn’t Carter’s style, but there was no going back and he’d pulled the trigger without regret the minute his target presented itself. Then he’d stepped into the kitchen to find this doll of a woman, eyes wide as saucers.
I’m horny, Carter thinks. I’m a victim of the itch that must be scratched. All those stories, the fantasies Angel described, have finally done their work.
Carter likes goals, perhaps because he has so few of them in his life. He doesn’t really care about money, doesn’t dream of limos or mansions or watches big enough to substitute for wrist weights, doesn’t fancy ocean-going yachts or bespoke suits. That leaves only the necessities with which to fill his days: food, drink, shelter and the itch.
Carter maps out a weekend of bar hopping. His mission will be to find a woman equally determined to scratch that same itch. A woman who’ll head back to her workaday life on Monday morning, a woman whose imaginings of him, should she remember him at all, will begin at his neck and work their way down.
FIVE
Bobby Ditto loses his temper for the first time that day. He slams the desktop with the side of his fist and tosses a jar of mint-flavored TUMS at the hapless tech sweeping the room for bugs. The TUMS jar bounces off the tech’s shoulder and he begins to shake.
‘What, you’re gonna be all fuckin’ day?’ Bobby demands. ‘I got things to do. I’m runnin’ a business here and I can’t do it with you in the goddamn room.’
Benedetti and the tech, Levi Kupperman, are in the Bunker, an underground room in a wholesale carpet warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Benedetti had the room built when he purchased the warehouse in 2005, the year his first big deal went down. The walls and ceilings of the windowless bunker are solid concrete, two feet thick, and proof against any remote listening device. That leaves the mismatched furniture, the alarm, the sprinklers, the ventilation system and the computer (used only for the carpet business and not connected to the Internet) as the only points of vulnerability.
‘You want me to stop?’
Bobby Ditto stares at Levi for a moment, then shakes his head. When he first hired Levi, the kid was a hotshot with his own equipment and an expanding electronics company. That was before he got too strung out to think about anything but cocaine and more cocaine. Now he’s a scarecrow who works for an eight-ball of coke – three and a half grams of white powder that’ll be gone up his nose by tomorrow morning.
‘Ya know, you’re tryin’ my patience.’ Benedetti notes the kid’s panicky look with some satisfaction. Bobby’s renowned for his bad temper and his willingness to act on it. Not this morning, though. Now he’s got more important things to consider. ‘Just finish up and get the fuck outta here.’
Fifteen minutes later, Levi opens a door thick enough to defend a castle and disappears. Two men replace him, Marco Torrino, called ‘the Blade’, and a man named Samik Atwal. In the old days, the Blade would have had a formal title: capo. But the old days are gone, brought down by a get-the-wops mentality that allowed black, Latino and Russian gangs to freely organize. Thus, Torrino has no title. He’s just the man who’ll come to kill you if you fuck with Bobby Ditto, a role he’d played for Bobby’s father, now deceased.
The Blade’s companion, Samik ‘Sammy’ Atwal, has come to the Bunker as a courtesy. Atwal’s a second-generation Indian-American who captains a small crew located in the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights. The crew deals powder and crack to Atwal’s countrymen. That’s fine with Bobby Ditto, who’s as big on ethnic identity as he is on entrepreneurship. But he does sometimes wonder how the raghead came to be best buddies with his brother, Ricky, now deceased.