triggered by the face of a bewildered gang-banger on a perp walk, or the odor of blood in a butcher’s shop.
‘The plan belonged to Thorpe and it was simple enough. We’d let Youboty and his technicals—’
‘What’s a technical?’
‘Technicals are unarmored pickup trucks, usually Japanese, with large caliber weapons mounted in the beds, in this case fifty caliber machine guns. Anyway, the plan was to let Youboty turn into the village, then open fire from behind with small arms and a mortar. We were hoping that he’d retreat through the village and into an ambush on the other side.’
Carter stops long enough to accept a spoonful of yogurt. ‘The village was in the Nimba Mountains, above eight hundred meters, where the jungle bleeds into a mix of pine forest and grasslands. This was in midsummer, in equatorial Africa, and we were completely exposed to the sun, a ragtag collection of mercs from every continent except Antarctica. Even in the mercenary world, we were the lowest of the low, like the bandit Samurai in that movie. We served no master.
‘I remember the wind hissing over the rocks and a family of jackals that searched the huts in the village, one by one, and the sweat running from my hair to my toes, and the hours ticking by. Thorpe had made an educated guess, but a guess is still a guess. If Youboty took a different route – and there were others open to him – we’d have to fight our way back to the coast with nothing to show for the risk.
‘But Thorpe was right this time. Youboty and his boy soldiers arrived at two o’clock in the afternoon, crowded into four technicals. Youboty was in the cab of the lead vehicle. The boy soldiers were huddled around the fifty caliber machine guns in the truck beds. They wore rags and their eyes were hollow, their faces gaunt. I knew they were vicious. I’d seen, first hand, what they did when they happened on an occupied village. They were cruel, needlessly cruel, but there was a method to their cruelty. Little bands like Youboty’s had no access to supplies. They pillaged to survive.
‘Anyway, the first part went exactly as planned. Golabek fired off a mortar round just after Youboty’s technical cleared the first house. As luck would have it – bad luck – he scored a direct hit. Youboty and his lieutenant were blown to pieces. See, the boy soldiers couldn’t fight, even with their master alive. They had no training and no real experience defending against soldiers who did. That’s why they panicked when Paul and I eliminated the machine gunners with our M16s. Instead of retreating through the village, away from our fire, they jumped out of the technicals and ran into the mud huts.’
‘I think I might have done the same thing,’ Angel declares. ‘Duck for cover.’
‘The cover was an illusion because the roofs had fallen in and they were completely exposed to mortar fire from both ends of the village. The huts were death traps. But they still had options. They could have massed and attacked my position, or they could have dug in, forced us to come for them, or they could have surrendered. But they didn’t, Angel. No, what they did, in ones and twos and threes, was dash into the open and fire off their weapons. I don’t know what they expected to hit – not a single round came anywhere close to our position – but standing out in the open, only a few hundred yards off, they were as unprotected as targets on a shooting range. As far as I could tell, I never missed, not once.’
Carter pauses to ease the pressure in his diaphragm. He’s having trouble drawing a breath. Angel’s watching him, eyes wide, mouth open. She’s never seen him like this, and she doesn’t know what to make of his story. Carter doesn’t help matters when he finally says, ‘You know the expression that mob guys use? Making your bones? Like you’re one thing before you kill for the first time, then you become something else?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘Well, I killed children for money, Angel, and not because they were vicious murderers, which they were. I killed them for the diamonds they were guarding. What does that make me?’
TWENTY
Bobby Ditto grunts with each upward thrust of his arms. He’s on the deck behind his home in Howard Beach, Queens, only a few miles from Kennedy Airport on Jamaica Bay. Bobby’s doing bench presses, pushing two hundred and fifty pounds into the air with each rep. This is a workout weight, and far from his best efforts, which reach beyond three-fifty.
The Blade stands behind the bench, his hands beneath the weight bar as it rises and falls. At a signal from his boss, he guides the weights on to the bench’s hooks. Unburdened, Bobby sits up, dropping his feet to the ground as he lifts a pair of forty-pound dumb-bells and does a set of rapid-fire curls. Just after dinner last night, one of his favorite whores injected a mix of human growth hormone and steroids into his left buttock. His ass is still sore, but the rest of his body’s humming along, all gain, no pain.
Except when he thinks about Paulie Margarine and his boy, Freddy. Bobby has a half-assed connection in the NYPD, a sergeant named Casey, who he called as soon as he heard the news. According to Casey, Paulie and his son were discovered in their beds, shot once through the forehead. There was no sign of forced entry, despite the house being alarmed, and no physical evidence was recovered. Nevertheless, given Paulie’s long-term mob affiliation and the kid’s being released from prison only a year before, the cops are looking at the usual suspects, including Bobby Ditto.
Right after hanging up on Casey, Bobby used a throwaway cellphone to call Louis Chin. No answer on the first, second or third attempts. Goodbye, Mr Chin.
Levi Kupperman’s face appears in the sliding door leading from the deck into the house. ‘I’m done,’ he says. ‘The house is clean.’
Bobby lays the weights down and stares at the kid, standing there with his little meter in his hand, hollow eyes pleading, a bag of bones. Bobby’s thinking that Levi’s usefulness is coming to an end, that maybe his addiction has reached a terminal phase. The kid looks like death warmed over, like he’s waiting for someone to open the lid on his coffin so he can climb in and make himself comfortable.
‘Take care of him,’ Bobby tells the Blade. Then he gets up and strolls to the edge of the deck. Located on a channel leading to Jamaica Bay, Bobby’s home is on stilts, the better to avoid the inevitable flooding when nor’easters push the Atlantic Ocean in his general direction. Below him, tied to a wooden pier, his pride and joy bobs in the swells, a twenty-two-foot SunDancer with enough cabin space to bed a pair of whores, or hide several bodies. Bobby keeps the SunDancer fueled and ready to go from early April until mid-November.
‘OK, boss, he’s gone.’
Bobby turns to his most trusted advisor – the Blade’s as close to a father as Bobby’s ever known – and smiles to himself. Right this minute, two of Bobby’s men are sitting in the living room, looking through the windows. As if they could stop – or even slow down – Leonard Carter.
‘See, Marco, what I can’t figure is why I’m standin’ out here in the sunshine.’ He jerks a thumb toward the sky. ‘Instead of bein’ up there, tryin’ to explain my life to St Peter.’
‘You’d need a hell of a shyster to bring that one off,’ the Blade responds.
‘Is that what you figure? That we’re gonna burn, no questions asked?’
‘No, what I figure is that when you’re dead, you’re dead, and that’s the end of it. But what could I say? To each his own.’
‘OK, but the question I’m still askin’ is why I’m not dead.’ Bobby walks back to the weight bench. He picks up a pair of thirty-pound dumb-bells, leans back and begins doing flys, his arms fully extended.
The Blade follows Bobby over. He positions himself at the foot of the bench and folds his arms across his chest, but says nothing. The Blade’s wearing a royal-blue track suit with white piping on the arms, a high-end knock-off. The Blade never buys retail, not if he can help it. He figures legit manufacturers are even bigger crooks than the factory owners churning out the fakes.
‘I’ve been thinkin’ along the same lines as you,’ the Blade finally says, which is not the truth, not at all. The Blade’s been primarily focused on their upcoming deal.
‘This guy, Carter?’ Bobby lays the weights on the bench. He’s breathing a little harder and his massive chest is slick with sweat. ‘He’s like a magician, right? Like he walks through fuckin’ walls? Hey, face the facts. Paulie was nobody’s asshole, and neither was his kid. Meanwhile, they got whacked in their beds.’
The Blade’s quick to agree. ‘The man’s good. I seen for myself what he can do, like first hand. Know what I think? I think the army trains these guys to be supermen. Like the Jews, ya know? Like the Mossad. They could
