The Good Guys Read online

  A doorway separated the office from the garage. If there had ever been a door there, all evidence of it was gone. Bobby stepped through it and took one step down into the cold garage. He went directly to the uncovered window and refastened the paper, figuring no one outside would notice. Little actions like that can sometimes save a life. That done, he turned and took a good long look at the place. No matter where he looked, though, that ball of blue under the workbench wouldn’t go away. In his mind it just grew larger and larger. He knew what it was, he just wasn’t ready to confront it.

  He ran out of time. Carefully avoiding the black signal hose that rang when stepped on, he walked to the back, to the bench. And he reached down and grasped it. He knew instantly. It was a Pan Am flight attendant’s skirt, Pam’s skirt. It had a couple of grease spots on it and was ripped in several places, but it was her skirt. He held it close to his chest. She had been here. Here, in this garage. They had probably grabbed her just as she was getting ready to take that flight to Paris. She was dressed for work. Fifteen minutes more, twenty maybe, she would have been out of there. Safe. Alive. He held on to her skirt, but he didn’t want to think about her. What they did to her. What made her scream like that. He looked at the variety of pulling and hammering tools, he looked at the torch, at the hooks and the cutting tools. At all of them. And wondered. And then he neatly folded her skirt and placed it on the bench.

  Seconds later he knew the answer. As he turned around, he was facing the front of a car four feet in the air, resting on the metal skids. He took one deep cleansing breath, then headed back to the office. It was time to get even. He took four or five steps and stopped. Just stopped. It was the color, again, that got his attention. Caught in the hinged joint of one of the skids was a small ragged piece of Pan Am blue fabric. A piece that had been torn from her skirt. And he knew then what they had done to her. The cop had said it. “They crushed her,” he’d said, “limb by limb. Her feet, her hands, arms, and legs.” In his mind he heard that cop again and again. They crushed her. They crushed her.

  Control, he thought. Control. A mammoth sorrow threatened to overwhelm him, smother him, but he wouldn’t let that happen. This was a time to focus. He took two steps backward, but his shoes stuck briefly to the cement floor. Fucking grease, he figured. When he looked down, though, he knew how terribly wrong he was. He was standing in a coagulating puddle of a deep red substance.

  If he was going to lose control, this would be the moment. Instead, he closed his eyes, feeling his despair being transformed into pure white rage. And rather than compelling him to strike out mindlessly, this rage empowered him. It took away his fears. It bestowed on him the invincibility of a man beyond caring.

  Whatever happened, happened.

  “Now,” he said to Eddie. Taking hold of the bells once again, Bobby opened the door and they slipped outside. They moved in the shadows. At the corner of the building he paused, an infantryman on patrol. He looked around the side of the building. Clear. Both men stayed close to the wall as they approached the bathroom door.

  They stood directly in front of the door. Bobby pushed the barrel of his gun deeper into the doll. He checked again to make sure his safety was off. Then he turned to Eddie, who whispered, “Fuck ’em.”

  Holding the gun in his right hand, he turned the doorknob with his left hand. As the door opened, he put his left hand on the doll’s head to hold it in place. A large man was sitting on the toilet seat, fully clothed, an automatic weapon resting on his lap. When the man looked up in surprise, Bobby saw the gold crowns on his front teeth. The only thought Bobby had time for was how much this man reminded him of James Bond’s Oddjob.

  The attendant scrambled for his gun. Bobby coolly raised his right arm, aimed his Cabbage Patch Kid, and fired. One shot. Pstew. The doll ate most of the noise. Bits of cloth flew all over the bathroom. The bullet smashed through the attendant’s gold teeth and exited the back of his head. He still appeared to be looking at Bobby, but he was already dead. His body slumped to the right, his fall stopped by the wall. He remained seated on the toilet, his dead eyes still open. The filthy tiled wall behind him was covered with blood spatter and tiny bits of brain matter.

  Bobby watched the stain spreading with curiosity. Some people were superstitious about the blood patterns they created and examined them closely. Supposedly one wiseguy saw the Virgin Mary in a blood spatter pattern and never fired another shot. To Bobby this one looked mostly like a work from Picasso’s abstract period.

  Eddie pushed inside the bathroom behind Bobby and shut the door. Bobby took a quick look around. The place was pretty awful, so disgusting that even a dead body on the toilet didn’t make it much worse. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since the Flood. He glanced at the ceiling and the corners, searching for a security camera. If this bathroom was being watched, the camera was well hidden. His eyes professionally swept the room. Tiles were missing from the floor and the walls, there was a layer of caked dirt on the floor, both the toilet and sink were cracked. The sink was dry and stained brown. A filthy cotton towel hung limply from a broken dispenser. There was, however, a full roll of toilet paper sitting on the cracked toilet lid. Fortunately the familiar smell of gunpowder dampened the stench of urine.

  “What’re you, sightseeing?” Eddie whispered urgently. “Where’s the fucking door?”

  At first Bobby didn’t see it. Then he looked at the drab, dirty raincoat hanging on the wall directly opposite the toilet. “There,” he said. He pushed the raincoat aside, and beneath it, as he figured, was the doorknob. He took a few seconds to shove the remnants of Penny Nichols back down on the barrel of his gun, then put his left hand on the faded silver doorknob. “Ready?” he whispered.

  “Just fucking go,” Little Eddie told him impatiently, waving Myrtle toward the meeting room.

  Bobby guessed it wasn’t locked. There really wasn’t any reason to lock it. The room was hidden and protected by a hulking armed guard; putting a lock on it wasn’t going to make much difference.

  He turned the doorknob without pushing open the door. It turned easily. “I’m going right and down,” Bobby whispered.

  Eddie was getting irritated. “Yeah yeah, just go, huh?”

  Bobby pushed open the door to another world. Hidden in the rear of the dilapidated gas station was a high-tech conference room that more properly belonged in a Park Avenue law firm. High-back leather chairs were set around a highly polished oval mahogany conference table. A second row of chairs was arranged several feet behind this table. The walls were paneled in dark wood. There were no windows, but the room was brightly lit by mostly recessed lighting that gave it a warm reddish tint. For an instant Bobby was stunned by the contradiction in rooms, but recovered almost immediately and got out of the doorway, ducking down and to his right. Moving at full speed, Eddie followed him through the open door.

  There were three men in the room. Two of them were sitting at the table, obviously waiting for the meeting to begin, their shoes resting comfortably on the mahogany. They reacted almost immediately. One of them screamed a single word in Russian. And then Bobby and Eddie began firing. Bobby’s first shot hit the man closest to him, a fat, balding man sitting less than six feet away, in his left shoulder. The doll burst open, hurtling off the gun. The force of the bullet ripping through the Russian’s body at close range caused his chair to begin spinning counterclockwise. Bobby fired again, through the back of the chair. The chair just about completed a full revolution and slowed to a stop. It was the Wheel of Misfortune. The Russian was dead before it stopped moving.

  Simultaneously Eddie sprayed the room, laying a track of bullet holes the length of the table and straight up the far wall. The second man at the table, the stocky Russian with a blond flattop, dived off his chair and onto the floor. The third Russian, tall and thin, was standing on the far side of the table next to an open minirefrigerator. He reacted first. Whether he recognized Bobby or saw the guns, he was the one who shouted the one word of war
ning, then dived for the light switch on the wall. The recessed lighting went off, leaving lit only two floor lamps—one on either side of the room.

  Seconds later the Russian on the floor began firing back. It was defensive fire, shots fired rapidly and wildly, firing to force the aggressor to take cover. As the Russian was firing up from beneath the table, most of the shots hit the top of the wall or the ceiling.

  Eddie calmly moved out of the light. He figured it would be ridiculous for a man as big as he was to try to take cover, so he didn’t bother. Instead, he laid down a rain of fire.

  Wiseguys aren’t Superman. Although just about every soldier is knowledgeable and comfortable with a wide variety of guns, they’re not John Wayne. So most hits are pretty basic. Boom in the back of the head. That kind of thing. Nobody can practice for a gunfight.

  Actual gunfights are extremely rare and almost never last longer than a few seconds—but for the shooters it will be the longest few seconds of their lives. Bobby had a big advantage: He was already ducking down to get out of Eddie’s range of fire, so when the lights went off, he just kept going. He hit the ground, lay down flat, and kept firing. That meant his direct line of fire was below the table.

  Nobody had time to aim. So what happened was pretty much luck. The stocky Russian was trying to scramble to his feet, still firing wildly, when Bobby’s fourth or fifth shot hit him directly between his legs, taking off the head of his penis and one testicle. It was as if someone had burst a balloon full of blood; the blood just poured out of him. Frantically he tried to stop the bleeding by squeezing his penis. The excruciating pain forced him to try to rise up, but as he did, he smashed his head into the bottom of the table. He was unconscious when he hit the ground, falling face-first into a pool of his own blood. The coroner would not be able to determine if he died from the gunshot wound or choked to death in his own blood.

  Little Eddie got the third one, the tall one, Vaseline. Once bullets start flying, it’s impossible to predict their path with any accuracy. For example, bullets will bounce off the ground, one of the reasons that hiding behind a car when someone is shooting at you may not provide adequate protection. One of Eddie’s shots bounced off the door of the minifridge, angled almost straight up, and smashed a bottle of vodka. The bottle exploded, and razorlike slivers of glass sprayed Vasily in the face. In that one instant he looked as if he’d just had the worst shave in history. His face was marked with dozens of small cuts. And when the vodka hit that raw skin, his face began burning terribly. He threw up his hand to try to wipe away the vodka and blood, and as he did, another bullet tore through his hand. It literally made a hole he could look right through.

  “Quit! Quit!” he screamed. “Quit!” Seconds later he tossed his gun on the remnants of the table. Eddie had a hunch, yelling, “Throw the other one too.” And after a brief pause a second gun landed with a clunk on the table. “Stand the fuck up,” Eddie ordered. “Get in the light.”

  The entire shoot-out had taken no more than fifteen seconds. In about the time it takes to sneeze three times two men were dead, a third was wounded.

  The Russian was obviously in tremendous pain. He stood up, holding his wounded right hand with his left hand, stuffing a handkerchief into his palm to stanch the bleeding. Curiously his hand did not bleed excessively. But rivulets of blood flowed down his face, the blood dripping onto the carpet like drops of water from melting icicles. A cloud of gun smoke hung over the room and everybody’s ears were ringing. The floor was covered with shell casings. Neither Bobby nor Eddie bothered to pick them up. It didn’t matter that they could be linked to specific weapons, since by the end of the night those weapons would no longer exist.

  The Russian was muttering something to himself. Whatever he was saying, to Bobby it just sounded like gibberish. It didn’t matter. In the same heavily accented English Bobby recognized from the phone call to the Freemont, Vasily asked for another handkerchief, for something to wipe his face.

  Bobby picked up the remains of the Cabbage Patch Kid. The head was gone and what remained of the torso was practically ripped in half just above the midsection. It was still smoking. “Sure,” he said, pulling out a turpentine-soaked rag and tossing it across the conference table. Vasily picked it up and used it to wipe his face.

  Bobby waited patiently. Only after Vasily began screaming did he smile.

  “You want me to do it?” Little Eddie yelled. Eddie was shouting because he could barely hear a word. It sounded like the Hunchback of Notre Dame was practicing the bells in his ears.

  Vasily’s screams dampened to a whimper. “Fuck you,” he shouted at Bobby. Bobby did have to admire him. There he was, standing there with blood dripping from his face and hand, two guys dead on the carpet, another guy dead on the toilet, and he hadn’t lost a whit of his arrogance. “That motherfucker Cosentino he cut off your fucking balls you kill me.”

  Bobby appeared to be considering that. “Maybe,” he agreed.

  “Fuck that, Bobby,” Eddie shouted dismissively. “Don’t listen to that asshole.”

  “Get your hands behind your back,” he ordered the Russian.

  Vasily looked at him smugly as he did exactly as ordered, believing that Bobby had taken his warning seriously.

  Bobby yanked a telephone cord out of the wall, then pulled the other end out of the phone. He wrapped it around the Russian’s wrists. “Move,” he said, poking him forward with his gun. Vasily started talking, blabbing something about Cosentino, fuel oil, you and me, but Bobby wasn’t listening. Instead, he picked up one of the doll’s severed arms, grabbed a hank of the Russian’s hair, and pulled back his head. When Vasily opened his mouth, Bobby shoved the doll’s arm down his throat, shutting him up. As the Russian gagged, struggling to cough it out of his mouth, Bobby pushed him forward.

  “What’re you gonna do with this piece of shit?”

  “Watch.” They moved through the bathroom. The dead attendant had slumped off the toilet seat and appeared to be wedged between the bowl and the wall. The first flies had already appeared and were buzzing around the hole in his head. Bobby pushed Vasily out of the door. Vasily continued struggling to get the arm out of his mouth. Bobby held on to the Russian’s hair with his left hand and prodded him forward with the gun in his right hand. He stayed in the dark as much as possible and pretty much pushed and prodded him around to the front of the gas station. He probably realized what was about to happen to him when Bobby pushed him into the office.

  With his hands still bound behind him, he whirled around, lowered his shoulder, and charged into Bobby, trying to force him backward into Eddie. Trying to do anything to change the equation. Bobby fell back a couple of feet into Eddie, but Eddie was a wall. Bobby just stopped. The Russian charged again, but this time, just before he slammed into Bobby, Bobby smashed him in the head with the butt of his gun. He really didn’t want to hurt him too badly; he wanted the Russian fully conscious.

  The blow staggered the Russian. Bobby went right at him, kicking him hard in the balls, literally lifting him off the ground. He landed on his stomach; unable to cushion his fall with his hands, his face smashed into the concrete floor. His nose must have been splintered because blood immediately began gushing out of it. Bobby stepped over him and took hold of one of his feet, then dragged him into the garage, his face leaving a trail of blood on the floor.

  At some point the doll’s arm was jarred loose. The Russian started screaming in a mix of Russian, English and agony, the English consisting mostly of “motherfucker” this and “motherfucker” that. The actual threats—Bobby assumed they were threats from the tone—were screamed in Russian. Bobby paid no attention to him.

  Eddie had no idea what Bobby intended to do, but nothing would have surprised him or, in fact, horrified him. In his career he’d seen some pretty brutal things done to people. Once even he had cut up a body with a hacksaw, then dropped the various pieces in different sewers. Bobby’s reason for torturing this guy was a little light on the details,
but that made no difference. He played on Bobby’s team and Bobby knew the rules. Besides, it was just some Russians, and whatever they were doing, it probably wasn’t right.

  When Bobby dragged the guy into the garage, Eddie figured that whatever he had planned, it probably had something to do with the tools in there; he’d heard about some real crazy things people had done with tools. And why else drag the guy in there? It doesn’t matter where you shoot somebody. The Russian in the bathroom was just as dead as the two Russians in the conference room.

  Vasily was squirming and kicking like a hooked fish. He eventually managed to turn over onto his back. That was just fine with Bobby; he wanted this fuck to see every single thing that was happening to him.

  Bobby dragged him across the floor until he was directly under one of the skids. He knew exactly where he wanted him to be—lying in that sticky deep red puddle. As soon as he let him go, though, the Russian began cursing at him—and used his legs to wriggle out from under the hydraulic lift. In response Bobby took a long orange extension cord off the bench. While Eddie stepped on the Russian’s face to keep him still, Bobby methodically wrapped the cord around his legs tight as a mummy. When he finished, Eddie asked loudly—his ears were still ringing—“Where do you want him?”

  Bobby looked at the hydraulic, and Eddie knew. Now, that’s creative, he thought. He liked the whole idea. Following Bobby’s instructions, he dragged the guy back, until he was right under the lift. “Here?” Eddie had a little problem moving around because his shoes were sticking to whatever that crap was on the floor. And when he stepped on the guy’s face, the sole of his shoe left a purple splotch on his skin.

  “No, no, no. Just his feet,” Bobby directed, standing by the hydraulic control lever.