'You get done dusting yet?'
'Naw.'
'Smells great in here.'
'Jesus.' Eichord put a handkerchief up to his face.
'Herrrrrrrre's Vinnie.'
Eichord looked and turned away after a bit.
'Obviously whoever did this —'
'Yeah.' He laughed without humor. 'You could say that, all right.'
'Seriously. Whatever the reason why he was killed, whoever did it was trying to get something out of their system. Nothing professional about that.'
'I figure two, three, maybe four guys taking turns. Really getting themselves worked up. Nothing professional about it, as you say. Unless they were pros trying to tell somebody something — that your point?'
'Right.'
'Really did a J.-O.-B. on the little mother.'
Vinnie was upside down, with maybe nine hundred puncture wounds in him, turning into maggot food under the kitchen counter there in his ex-wife's house.
'Who called it in?'
'His wife, er, uh, HEY!' He motioned to a detective. 'Yo.' He motioned for him to come over to the kitchen area.
'Tell him how you caught the call.'
'Yeah. Well, it was his ex-wife. She said she'd just come in and found him. Claims she was shacked up with her latest old man in Atlantic City. We're checking it out. Vinnie's got a little yellow sheet. Little half-assed rat package.'
'Maybe he ratted out the wrong dudes.'
'Could be Rikla's people. I admit it don't look like no hit. Anyway, he was always trying to get made and didn't have the eggs for it, and — far as I ever heard — he just never had his shit together.'
'He's got his shit together now.' They laughed.
'F'r sure.'
'Lynch Street people got here first. They called us. I came. You came. That's about the whole shot.'
'Think they'll have anything on the street on this?'
'Naaaaaa. I doubt it.'
'A payback thing. Somebody's gonna say somethin' otherwise it's all wasted. You know how the wise guys are.'
'Nobody gives a shit about Vinnie. Nobody's gonna miss him. He was a schmuck. Even his ex-old lady pegged it. She said when she came home and found him gathering little white wormies and smellin', in her words '— the cop looked at a notebook — 'like ten bags of dead skunks.'' They chuckled. 'It was no big surprise. She told the Lynch Street guys, 'Hell, he was lucky he lived THIS long.''
'Quite an epitaph.'
'Leech.'
'Yo.'
'Can we take this fucker yet?'
'NO, GODDAMMMIT YOU CAN'T TAKE THIS FUCKER YET, I done tol' y'all fourteen times. Whatsa big hurry, fi'r shit sake?'
'No hurry at all. We LIKE standing here smellin' this puke 'n' shit.'
'Right. I know it's a revolutionary theory but what if we would bring latent in here and dust this scene and, you know, find the FINGERPRINTS of the dudes what did the crime. You know, like on TV?'
'Sure. Wonderful.'
And that was what happened. Jackie Nails, a.k.a Jack Annelo, and Big Mike Stricoti of the Dagatina family —'alleged gunmen,' as the papers worded it — had left their big guinea paw prints all over the house. It was enough to make a couple of tentative arrests and within twenty-four hours media was running neat little sidebars about the 'big break in the mob slayings.'
The entire unit was on hand by chance when the next 'big break' took place. A lab finding nailing Annelo to one of the earlier shootings. In the best spirit of
He was prepared to believe almost anything, on one hand, and on the other his healthy skepticism had been replaced by a monumental paranoia about the case. For one thing, ever since the Ventura Boulevard hit in Studio, there had been no more EYEBALL murders. He kept thinking one of these gangland kills in St. Louis would tie to California, but it wasn't happening.
All the facts and the serious conjecture indicated solutions involving more than one perpetrator.
A: The street rumors floating back to Homicide at LAPD pointed to a couple of local punks for the Studio City job.
B: The Laclede Landing shooting had been a shooter and a wheel man at the least.
C: The two Dagatina hoods were tied solid to the Betters killing. Jackie Nails to at least one other hit.
But for all that, Floyd Streicher of the hooded eyes would not get out of his head. And Jack rubbed his eyes, sighed, and looked down at the phrase he'd been doodling:
DID I LIVE? EVIL I DID.
And in a long expulsion of air he emptied his lungs and read the sentence backward. Realizing as he did so that he had no idea what the fuck he was involved in here. And against his better judgment he took in more air and kept going.
* * *
At precisely 1430 the following Monday all hell broke loose. The CP was screaming on the phone to Victor Springer that the notorious mob lawyer Jake Rozitsky and another individual believed to be an innocent bystander had just been blown up in a gangland bombing downtown. An unprecedented number of units responded, as well as the fire department, and Eichord.
Brass balls to the walls. Media going insane. A circus of mobile units, flashing lights, roiling smoke, sirens, you name it. Two television news choppers almost got into a midair chickie fight trying to jockey for position for best shots of the burning building and the obligatory scene of cops and paramedics and firemen taking Rozitsky and the other man, thought to be a building worker, out to a waiting ambulance in body bags.
Glass came running up to Eichord hollering something at him and it was so noisy he couldn't hear.
'What?'
('MUMBLE MUMBLE') 'WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU!'
('SOMETHING') He looked like he was saying metro something. Then he made the universal sign for telephone and Eichord got it and grabbed his two-way, switching it over to the metro freq and taking the call from McTuff. It was one of the things he'd put into play on his own, and the Task Force had reached out just in time. He went over and told Springer, 'Lieutenant?'
'What?'
'Come inside the car here.' He motioned.
'Huh,' Springer screamed.
'In HERE.'
'Jesus,' Vic Springer said, falling into the car. 'Sounds like World War Three goin' on out here. Shit, unfuckin'-real, I can't hear any —'
'We got something, maybe,' Eichord told him.
'Yeah?'
'I got a court order for a wiretap. I put it in through McTuff. Roundabout through the DAs office.'
'How come you didn't ask me about it, Jack?' He looked so dyspeptic Eichord wondered if he was going to be
