The grease gun was empty.
And I had no more clips. I got out the .45 but down below was nothing but silence and the smell of cordite and bodies flung haphazardly in various awkward postures of death with the pools and smears and streaks of blood glimmering under fluorescent lighting that had taken not a single hit.
Nobody was alive down there, or if they were, they were faking it well enough to deserve a pass. Still, something told me not to go out that front door. That was where reinforcements had entered, and more would be waiting.
So I went back up the stairs, slamming a fresh clip into the .45, and nobody was waiting in the second-floor reception area, nobody alive anyway. I took the fire stairs up and came into an empty hallway. I moved slowly down the carpeted pathway, waiting for somebody to pop out of the doors to the suites on either side, like a real-life Hogan's Alley.
But nobody did.
The door to the suite at the far end was locked. I shot the knob off and shouldered in, sweeping the .45 around a living room decorated tacky bachelor pad—style. The fake fireplace was already ajar. Somebody had used it as an exit.
I went down the narrow, unlighted stairs with the .45 ready. When I found myself in the cellar, where a lot of empty boxes were piled up, I heard somebody whimpering. A small, pale figure was huddled in a corner, hugging its legs, trying to turn into a mouse. It was a girl in panties and no bra, maybe twenty, with a lot of makeup that had run with tears, and lots of permed blonde hair.
"Please don't kill me," she said, her raccoon eyes pleading. Basement dirt smudged her slender little shape like bruises.
Somebody's mistress or hooker of the day or whatever. Poor kid. Like Ginnie Mathes or Dulcie Thorpe, she was just another victim of thoughtless, selfish assholes. I didn't want to be one of them.
"Shush, baby," I said, putting my coat around her shoulders. "It's all right. Nobody's gonna hurt you. I'm a cop."
Not a complete lie.
I helped her to her feet and she hugged me.
"Do you know the way out of here?" I asked.
She swallowed and nodded and pointed. Beyond some stacked boxes, an arched doorway opened onto a brick tunnel, an escape route for the Bonettis in case something bad went down. Hadn't been much help today. It was just big enough for the kid and me to go holding hands as we moved down. My other hand held the .45, though.
The tunnel came out in another basement, which had steps up to old-fashioned storm-cellar doors leading onto a gravel parking lot. A padlock had a key waiting in it for quick escapes, and I used it. We were half a block down from the Y and S Club, standing under an overcast sky on a spring afternoon that had turned chilly.
She gazed up at me, got her first real good look at my face. I assume there were streaks and spatters of blood on it, and even under the best of conditions, that mug wouldn't instill much confidence in any sane human. Her eyes, which were big and blue, saucered, and her mouth made an O, and she ran away from me on bare feet, the sport jacket slipping off her shoulders onto the gravel.
I picked up the jacket, put it on over the now-holstered .45, and started walking. I was maybe twelve blocks from Cummings's office, where I could hole up. The sky growled at me and I couldn't blame it. A lot of men had died this afternoon, some very young, as young as they'd been stupid. I felt nothing for them. I had given old man Bonetti a chance to make peace and he chose war.
Bad choice.
If the family had been crippled by the shoot-out on the pier a year ago, it was decimated now. Over. History.
I limped off, the two hits I'd taken on the bulletproof vest burning, making each breath I took a clutching, clawing thing. One of the hits had punched very near that hot spot under my ribs, turning bad into worse.
But I was still alive, and when the rain began to fall, I welcomed it. It would wash off the blood and save me the trouble.
Chapter 12
SOMEHOW I GOT UP the stairs to the little landing outside the ancient office, the weathered wood under my shoes wheezing as bad as me. I worked the key in the lock, stepped inside, didn't bother hitting the light switch. I got out of the wet sport jacket and let it drop to the old wood-slat floor like a sodden little corpse.
With some effort—the painful places from where bullets had pounded the bulletproof vest were prodding me like sadistic children with a helpless pet—I climbed out of the speed rig and flung it somewhere, retaining the .45, which I tossed onto the old leather couch.
Wracked by a hurt that threatened my consciousness, I wriggled in the dark as rain clawed at the windows and got out of my shirt and the bulletproof vest, kicked out of my shoes, and stepped out of my drenched trousers, just dropping things in damp clumps wherever they chose to fall. Then I stumbled in my T-shirt and shorts, which were moist not wet, to the supply closet where on a high shelf I'd seen an old folded-up blanket. I dragged that behind me like a squaw's papoose over to the leather couch. The .45 I moved to the floor where I could reach it—the wood-and-pebbled-glass door was to the right of the file cabinets, and I had a decent enough view of it.
The blinds behind Cummings's desk, a vague blobby shape over to my far right, were shut, but there was no daylight out there to get in. On my walk here, I'd seen the afternoon give way to night, hours early, thanks to the thunderstorm and black clouds that rolled and roiled like a black tidal wave in the sky, shot through with crackling veins of white.
After reclining in slow motion, I settled on the couch, on my right side, the plump armrest my pillow. Soon I got to like the driving sound of the storm. The thunder had let up, mostly, its roar reduced to an occasional halfhearted murmur. Now there was just downpour, cleansing the gray collection of steel and glass and concrete that New York had become, or giving it a good goddamn try.
I didn't dare go back to the Commodore, not right now. Too many people knew I was staying there. And too much temptation for me to return to those pill bottles, the magic vials that quelled the hurt and beat my subconscious into submission and mellowed me out when that was the last damn thing I needed.
But the temptation remained, as the pains in my side and my midsection throbbed and burned and traded spasms like they were in competition for my attention. They had it, all right.
The saving grace was how tired I was, the energy I'd burned in the jungle of that three-story brownstone, followed by a wind-whipped, rain-lashed twelve-block walk, had left me spent, empty, and it didn't take long for sleep to roll in like fog and fill me up.