The Good Guys Read online

  If the media ever found out that Slattery had handed the Russians to the Mafia, that he had made murder possible, both he and the bureau would have been sliced, diced, and tattoed. Calling it a scandal would be like calling Vietnam a skirmish. And Special Agents O’Brien and Russo would have fallen into that infamous category best known as “What ever happened to?” If the real story was discovered, both of them had a real good shot at a secure job stamping license plates under federal supervision.

  The only thing that could have saved Slattery was the growing suspicion in the bureau’s personnel division that he never actually existed, as all traces of his paperwork had disappeared. It would have been extremely difficult for the bureau to fire someone who wasn’t anywhere.

  O’Brien and Russo had spent the night waiting anxiously with Slattery in his office, listening to reports on an NYPD radio. The best news they could hear was none; if the cops got a “shots fired” call, Slattery could start packing. Fearing it was going to be a long evening, O’Brien had brought in a couple of six-packs of Coke and big bags of potato chips and pretzels. The early part of the evening was quiet. In addition to the usual domestic disputes, missing children, car accidents, animal attacks, heart attacks, muggings, and excessive noise disturbances, a naked man in Brooklyn was seen walking down Kings Highway carrying a machete, an unidentified man in the Bronx was spotted going up to a rooftop with either “a small woman or a large child who was crying,” two women in Queens were brawling surrounded by a group of men who apparently were betting on the outcome, and in Manhattan residents of a brownstone on East 77th Street were terrified because a resident’s exotic snake had escaped its cage and crawled into the ventilation system.

  O’Brien remained hopeful that they would sit there all night without knowing what happened at the gas station. If Vaseline was left standing, there was little chance he’d report the attack. There was no way the Russians wanted the cops anywhere near the gas station. Bobby Blue Eyes would just disappear: buried, burned, chopped, or dropped. He’d be given “the Hoffa.” But if it was Bobby who survived, he’d have a much tougher time getting rid of the body or bodies and would probably be forced to leave them there. So unless the Russians provided special janitorial services, somebody would discover the carnage and make the call.

  Three bites into a half-pepperoni with extra-cheese pizza O’Brien asked Slattery, “You got a horse in this race?”

  Slattery shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Gees, you’re tough,” Russo responded with a touch of disbelief. “How about rooting for the old home team, you know?”

  O’Brien frowned at that thought. “You mean like be true to your wiseguy?” He turned to Slattery and said in a slightly condescending tone, “She’s just a sentimental fool. Besides, she thinks he’s sort of cute.”

  “Fuck you, O’Brien,” she said, and at that moment she meant it. Then she pleaded her case to Slattery. “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” She looked at O’Brien and added, “Least it is to most people.” Then, back to Slattery, passionately, “Just look at the facts, Jim. We got this guy by the balls. And whenever we need to, all we’ve got to do is squeeze.” O’Brien winced and she ignored him. “He knows damn well that we can put him in a hole for thirty years to life. He’ll have to talk to us. The Russian doesn’t owe us a thing.”

  Jim? She called him Jim? Now, let’s just hold it a second here, O’Brien thought. She’s feeling pretty confident this evening, isn’t she? And in fact, he knew, she was probably right. Ole Bobby boy could certainly help them out from time to time. But he also knew that it didn’t matter to Slattery. As always, Slattery had his eyes fixed squarely on the bull’s-eye. So long as somebody got killed in the gas station, and naturally the more bodies the better, it’d be a long time before the Italians and the Russians trusted each other again. If ever. Cosentino’s dreams of an alliance controlling the billion-dollar bootleg oil business would be finished. This had all the makings of a beautiful feud. And that result was all Slattery cared about.

  Admittedly O’Brien did hope it was Bobby who walked out of the gas station, and while Slattery would never admit it, Connor suspected he felt the same way. It wasn’t simply the devil-you-know kind of thing, it was also the devil who knows all his fellow devils and speaks your language.

  O’Brien was finishing his second slice when the police radio crackled with a report that an intruder with a knife was trapped in the vestibule of a brownstone on West 19th Street. Now, there’s an easy one, he thought, no moral ambiguity there. Bad guy holding a weapon, caught in the act. Beautiful.

  Every man and woman working in law enforcement loves that kind of case. It doesn’t require any soul-searching. There’s a bad guy waving a knife? You do whatever’s necessary to bring him down. You become the bad medicine. Every cop knows the first order of business: Do harm to the bad guys before they do it to you. No shades of gray. It’s those other types of cases that cause you to lie awake at night. This one, for example. This case had started so simply, a missing person case. Find the professor? That part was easy; everything that came with it was hard. It had taken more twists than a Philadelphia pretzel to get them from the Country Club to the meeting with San Filippo.

  Maybe what was bothering O’Brien the most was that he had so willingly gone along with Slattery’s plan. No questions, no reservations. In fact, he didn’t just acquiesce, he had enthusiastically participated in it. Worse, he hadn’t felt a pinprick of conscience. O’Brien adhered to a strict rule where pizza was concerned: two slices and done. And rarely more than once a week. Not this night, though. He finished his second slice and without any hesitation went for a third. Well, he decided, after you’ve broken every rule in the book—in all the books—by setting up a guy to kill or be killed, it’s easier to have that third slice without feeling guilty.

  He’d relived that walk and talk with San Filippo in his mind maybe a hundred times. Had they been straight with him? The honest answer to that, he had decided, was absolutely yes and no. Yes to the girl, no to Skinny Al. What’d they have on Skinny Al’s murder really? A bullshit remark made in anger and repeated by Gradinsky. That was it. More than enough to make a DA laugh if you tried to make a case out of it. But that wasn’t the way they’d presented it to Bobby Blue Eyes. For him it was the whole ball game, the whole shebang, a fait accompli. One commie killer delivered on a silver platter, s’il vous plaît. Oh, and by the way, here’s where you find him. O’Brien wanted to believe that San Filippo was so determined to avenge the murder of the girlfriend that he would have gone ahead with or without the skinny on Skinny Al. But Skinny Al’s murder gave him cover within the family. His killing was, literally, a lifesaver. San Filippo was a bright guy; he must’ve figured that out right away. What he didn’t know was that the evidence proving that the Russian did it was as strong as air.

  O’Brien wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of questions about that meeting in a courtroom. Um, tell me, Agent O’Brien, does the phrase “aiding and abetting” mean anything to you? He was pretty certain that the right answers were the wrong ones.

  Sometimes he could just kill for a good old-fashioned perp with a knife.

  The first call came over the radio long after the pizza crust was stone-cold. “Unusual activity reported at a gas station on Brighton Beach Boulevard.” Two squad cars took the call. It was the address that caught Russo’s attention. But there wasn’t anything they could do about it, except wait. FBI agents couldn’t respond to a seemingly ordinary NYPD radio call without attracting a lot of unnecessary attention.

  It took almost forty minutes for the first patrol car to get to the scene. There was no sense that this was any kind of priority call—except to the three people sitting in Slattery’s office. But within a few minutes the cops were moving at hyperspeed. “We got four men down,” one of the cops reported in a nervously high-pitched voice. “Send the meat wagon. Shit, send everybody!” And then, just barely on the professional side of hys
teria, he added, “You better get some gold badges down here right away. I never seen anything like this.”

  These police officers had absolutely no idea what they had stumbled into. To them it probably looked very much like a robbery gone real bad. The existence of a lavish conference room hidden in the rear would certainly raise their curiosity—it was pretty obvious this wasn’t any ordinary gas station—but their initial assumption would most likely be that the Russians were running a gambling or drug operation. And that assumption would serve to support the robbery theory.

  It was that last line, “I never seen anything like this,” that sent cops scurrying to the scene. On the job cops see just about everything imaginable. It’s the stuff they talk about quietly in the locker room and the bars. They see so much of it that eventually they become inured to human depravity. So when one of their own makes a claim like that, they respond. They all want to see something they’ve never seen before.

  The remnants of Slattery’s sense of self-preservation still proved stronger than his curiosity. An FBI supervisor showing up uninvited at an NYPD crime scene would certainly be noticed, so O’Brien and Russo went by themselves. By the time they got there, the gas station had been transformed into a crime scene. In addition to about two dozen officers and detectives, at least six different NYPD units were on the scene. Still, a steady stream of police cruisers and ambulances continued to arrive, some of them with their sirens wailing as if getting there quickly would make a difference. Spotlights had been set up on tripods, giving the gas station an otherworldly look of artificial light and elongated shadows. Yellow crime scene tape had been stretched between poles and trees to create a security perimeter, keeping the curious onlookers and the rapidly gathering—and loudly complaining—media storm at a distance.

  The place was an organized mess. Radio reporters screamed questions at anybody looking even mildly official who passed within shout-shot of their microphones. The bodies had not yet been removed, and chalk outlines were being drawn around them. It would still be several hours before they were transported to the morgue. Forensic teams had been assigned to each body, officers were conducting an inch-by-inch search both inside and outside to collect all possible evidence, all types of measurements were being taken, photographers were recording the crime scene for potential use in a courtroom, in a corner of the garage an officer from media relations was helping a lieutenant prepare a statement, a department chaplain was wandering around to provide counseling for any officers disturbed by the brutality, and out on Brighton Beach Boulevard officers were trying to keep traffic moving past the scene.

  In the hubbob O’Brien and Russo faded easily into the scene. Having worked in New York for several years, O’Brien knew a few of the cops, and they accepted his presence as normal procedure. Russo, however, was a new and pretty face, and several detectives made a point of introducing themselves. When either agent was asked what they knew about the Russians, they responded simply, “You know, they were around some people.” Inevitably the cops nodded. Even if they didn’t know, they knew.

  O’Brien and Russo went around back first. They still didn’t know the identity of the victims. The small men’s room was lit up brighter than a movie set. The first victim was wedged between the toilet bowl and the wall. He’d been shot once, the bullet going right through his mouth, exiting the back of his head. That shot had obviously been fired at close range—there wasn’t room for any other possibility. His mouth was open, a line of caked blood running from his mouth onto his lap, and a splash of dried blood was on the wall behind him. A small piece of gold, apparently the remnants of a gold tooth, rested on a crease in his shirt. An automatic weapon lay at his feet. O’Brien recognized the victim as the attendant who’d flirted with Laura. That he had obviously been sitting on the toilet with his gun on the floor made it clear to O’Brien that he had been totally surprised.

  Normally, several hours after a killing the odor of death would already be permeating the air, but in this case the stench of urine was so strong it overwhelmed everything else.

  O’Brien recognized the smell of the restroom from his previous visit. In his notebook he’d described it as “Eau de Yankee Stadium.” “The guy must’ve had a wooden nose,” he whispered in Russo’s ear. “You see who it is?”

  She grimaced. “Yeah.” She had not seen enough dead bodies to have become comfortable with the sight.

  O’Brien said judgmentally, “You ask me, he looked a lot better with the gold teeth.” He took her arm and urged her forward, into the conference room. “C’mon.” He was eager to see the hidden room. Big picture, little picture, he had been fooled completely, never suspecting there was a larger room hidden behind the bathroom. How the hell do you miss seeing a door? he asked himself. But he had no answer. Apparently they’d intentionally made the bathroom as disgusting as possible to discourage people from spending a second more than necessary there.

  Both agents were stunned at the opulence of the hidden conference room. It was like walking through a bodega into Versailles. The large conference table as well as the paneling on the walls was a rich mahogany. Several avant-garde sconces affixed to the walls provided warm recessed lighting. There were two rows of chairs; eight tall leather chairs were around the table while a second row of smaller leather chairs—obviously seating for the assistants—was about four feet farther back. The room was crowded with the law. Several people were busy collecting evidence, while gawkers were hanging around to get a better look at the bodies.

  The room had been shot up. O’Brien counted a line of seven bullet holes running right through the center of the table and several more holes going up the far wall. There were at least as many holes in the wall behind him and the ceiling, apparently made by the Russians returning fire. Most of the holes had already been circled and numbered in black marker for investigative purposes.

  At first O’Brien saw only the body seated in the leather chair. The victim was partially visible, turned at an angle away from the door, his chin slumped onto his chest. Seen from this angle, he could have just as easily been sleeping as dead. He asked Russo, “Recognize him?”

  She shrugged, then shook her head.

  The plush carpeting on the floor absorbed much of the normal conversation, so even with more than a dozen cops working there the room was funereally quiet. “’Scuse me,” a detective said to O’Brien as he walked out carrying a clear plastic bag presumably filled with evidence. O’Brien politely stepped to the side to let the officer pass—and that’s when he saw the second body sprawled beneath the table. He moved a couple of steps closer. The carpet around the body was saturated with blood. The victim was lying on his stomach, his face practically buried in a pool of his own blood, making it impossible to identify him from across the room. It didn’t look like San Filippo, but O’Brien took a couple of steps closer to be certain. Russo was a step behind him.

  Much of the torso was hidden by the tabletop, but the back of his head and his shoulders were visible. “It’s not him,” O’Brien said, with more relief in his voice than he intended.

  Russo grabbed hold of his forearm. Her eyes were riveted on the body. “It’s him,” she said.

  O’Brien was surprised at the intensity of her reaction. “No, it’s not,” he insisted. “It doesn’t look anything like him.”

  She dug her nails into his arm. In her mind she was considering her fate. “No, no, not San Filippo.” She closed her eyes and took a controlled breath. “Connor, that’s the guy who tried to break into my apartment.”

  “Oh gees,” he said involuntarily. “Are you sure? I mean, how can you . . . It can’t be.” She had never seen him so clearly flummoxed. “How . . . I mean, are you really sure about that?” His mind was racing, trying to find a rationale that made sense. What the hell was a Russian gangster doing trying to break into an FBI agent’s apartment? That was supposed to be the Mafia’s job. It made no sense at all.

  “I’m positive. It’s him.” There was no doubt
in her voice. “I saw the back of his head when he went down the stairs. Believe me, that’s him.” She couldn’t take her eyes off the body, and deep in her mind all she could hear was a woman’s long, awful scream.

  A burly detective whom O’Brien had met at the beginning of his career during a bank robbery hostage situation squeezed between the two agents and the table. “How are you doing?” O’Brien said as the guy pushed by, identifying himself.

  “Yeah,” the officer said, “I remember. The Chase chase. How’s it going?”

  Good, O’Brien told him, then asked, indicating the body on the floor, “You ID that guy yet?”

  The detective glanced at the corpse. “He’s some Russian guy.” He flipped open a spiral notbook. “Cher-nan-ko. Alexander Ivan Chernanko. He’s got a hack license in his wallet but . . .” He shook his head. “He sure isn’t dressed like a cabbie, is he?”

  Laura finally looked away. “Any idea what happened here?”

  The detective frowned. “Who the hell knows? These guys, they’re into anything where they can make some money.” He waved his hands to indicate the shot-up room. “I mean, c’mon, look at this. Looks like they really pissed somebody off.”

  O’Brien chuckled. “They sure did a job on them, didn’t they?”

  The detective raised his eyebrows. “On these guys? You kidding me? This is nothing, this is just the appetizer. You didn’t see what they did to the other guy yet, right?” As he said that, he pointed toward the garage.

  O’Brien and Russo shook their heads in unison, like the Captain and Tennille.