He quickly attached the silencer, a Gemtech SOS-40, a nice one. They always gave him nice toys on these jobs, anything he wanted. And he was a creature of habit – what had worked in the past would work in the future. He held the gun so his back was blocking it from the sight of any pedestrians on the street. He glanced out there. Nobody was looking. He stepped closer to his quarry.
“You know me, Carmine?”
Carmine looked up, his eyes half-closed and bloodshot. He squinted at Cruz.
“No.”
Cruz approached and put an arm around Carmine’s massive shoulders. Cruz felt nothing out of the ordinary. His heart wasn’t beating hard. He wasn’t sweating more than the humid southern night warranted. If anything, he felt a pang of mild embarrassment, what with Carmine’s Italian sausage hanging there.
“No, you’re right. You don’t know me. We’ve never met before. But I know you.”
Carmine peered down at his fancy alligator shoes, wet now with urine.
“I think I’m gonna puke.”
“Carmine. I know you, you understand? It’s important you understand this.”
Carmine looked at Cruz again. Something like a dull light ignited behind his eyes. “They sent you? From New York?”
“That’s right.”
The big man nodded. “Okay.”
“You get it?” Cruz said.
“Yeah. I get it.”
Cruz clapped him on the back. “Good man. You got anything you wanna say?”
“Yeah. Tell ‘em to go fuck themself.”
Cruz brought the Glock around with his left hand and placed the silenced muzzle against Carmine’s meaty chest. Carmine looked down at the gun. Cruz looked at it. All it took was a few ounces of pressure and he would send Carmine off to the next world.
The seconds passed.
And for some reason, the finger didn’t pull the trigger.
Shit, it was happening again.
Then the gravity of the situation penetrated Carmine’s pickled brain. His eyes opened wide and he came awake. “Hey, get that fucking thing away from me.”
His reflexes, now activated, were fast. He grabbed the gun with both hands. He forced Cruz to point it heavenward, pushed Cruz back against the brickwork, then came up with a savage knee to Cruz’s gut.
Cruz felt his wind go out of him in a long hiss. He felt the gun yanked out of his hand. He sank, knees to the hard pavement, trying to catch his breath. He ripped the buttons of his shirt away and reached inside.
Carmine tottered over him, huge, towering. Gun in one giant hand.
He brought it down to point at Cruz. Cruz stared down the black maw, death just seconds away. He felt nothing, thought nothing.
“Hey dickhead,” the Nose said.
Cruz pulled the surgical tape away from his chest. He grabbed the four inch Buck Woodsman knife he kept strapped there.
“Tell ‘em I ain’t that easy, see?”
Cruz lunged, just as Carmine fired. He stabbed, fast and crazy, in and out, four times, five times.
The gun made a near silent, “phut, phut, phut.”
A breeze went past Cruz’s head. Bullets whined off the brick wall and ricocheted down the alley.
Cruz looked up at Carmine, who stared down with something like surprise. Cruz had plunged the knife up to its handle. It was buried in Carmine’s lower abdomen. Cruz renewed his grip. Then he ripped upward, all the way to Carmine’s rib cage. Carmine’s face went slack again. Blood flowed from his mouth.
Gently, Cruz took the gun from Carmine’s hand.
He stood and put the gun to the big man’s heart. Again. Again he hesitated. Carmine was weaving. His eyes had gone blank. Blood flowed from him. Either it was the booze or his own brute strength and stupidity that kept him standing.
Well, he was going to die anyway.
Cruz pulled the trigger. He fired three times into Carmine’s heart, then lowered him to the ground.
Back out on the street, gloves off. The crowds were still there. People staggered to and fro. A woman with a big floppy sun hat fell down, laughing. Cruz began to stagger just a little, as if he himself were drunk. His flowery shirt was splashed with some of Carmine’s blood. Worse, Carmine’s smell was on him. The sharp scent of booze mingled with the coppery stench of blood.
It made him sick. It made him shake.
Cruz walked around the block. Knots of people laughed, stumbled, screamed. More beads flew through the air. Cruz turned a street corner, quickly wiped the knife handle for any possible prints and dropped the knife down a sewer hole. He would break down the gun and get rid of it later – a piece here, a piece there, the farther apart the better.
He came past the alley again. From the street, there seemed to be nothing down there. Just a big drunk sleeping off a bender.
A beam of cold moonlight stabbed into the room.
Smoke sat up in bed, sipping his last glass of wine. It had been a lovely evening, sitting on the deck with two lovely ladies, eating a fine meal, watching the ships pass as the sun set behind the building. They had chatted and laughed with Pamela until it was full dark and too cold to sit outside anymore. Then they had made an assembly line and washed all the dishes.
Some coffee, a little more wine and laughter in the living room, then Lola and he had come in here for a long, slow bout of lovemaking. They began, but the spark wasn’t there. His hands had felt like lead.
It started, it stopped. It fizzled out.
“You seem distant,” he said after they gave it up for good.
“Not distant,” she said. “Just thoughtful.”
“Okay. Thoughtful.”
Now, Lola’s warm and sleeping form pushed up against his. Her arm was around his waist. Across the room, the digital clock read 2:35. There was no sound anywhere. That was the thing about this city – when night came, the sidewalks rolled up and it was almost as if no one lived there.
Her voice came, quiet and thick with sleep. “Smoke?”
“Yeah, babe.”
“Do you love me?”
“You know I do.”
“That’s good, Smoke. Real good.”
A few moments passed, and her breathing deepened and became rhythmic. She was gone again and he was here, awake and on the case. Her protector.
He was going to have to tell her something soon. He just didn’t know what that something would be.
CHAPTER THREE
Cruz slumped in the back of the black Mercedes S-500, sunk deep into the plush leather, his eyes closed behind reflector sunglasses. The earphones of his Sony Discman hung slightly askew, just enough that he could hear everything being said up front, but not so much as to arouse suspicion. At the same time, he could listen to his music. The compact disc was DANCE PARTY HITS OF THE 70’S, the soundtrack of his youth.
The song was Le Freak, by something called Chic.
He remembered it. He saw himself at a Manhattan dance club, brooding, holding up the bar, watching the young girls flaunt themselves out on the dance floor as the lights strobed crazily, streaks of technicolor electricity flying through the air. Again, he felt the rage, the yearning and the frustration. Nearly 30 years had passed since those days, and in all that time he had only managed to slap a few thin coats of whitewash over the real Cruz. His personality was like a slice of linoleum pasted over a dark abyss – if you dropped through, there was no bottom.
He had done this kind of work since the age of eighteen. That year, he had been cut loose from the youth home with two hundred dollars, plus cab fare to his aunt’s house in Corona, Queens, and an appointment to see a job counselor out there a week later. They had let him go with a kiss on the cheek and a kick in the ass.
He never made it to Queens.
His aunt didn’t want him, and why should she? He had lived with her at the age of ten, then again at fourteen. He was bad news, the product of her sister the drug addict’s wasted life. His face carried a deep knife scar from one of her sister’s many boyfriends, a maniac who one night decided to cut the little boy’s eyes out. Luckily, the maniac had been too drunk to see what he was doing or hold onto the boy for long – Cruz – who ran screaming out of the squalid apartment. But the scar on his face was only an emblem of the deeper scars he carried. Cruz was trouble, and he knew it. No, his aunt would not have him, and on some level, he didn’t blame her. She wasn’t yet thirty years old herself, struggling with three young kids of her own. Cruz was enough to sink them all.