Shel shot out of her chair. “Don’t do it,” she screamed.
The Dart screeched to a stop right out front and the car door flew open. Cesar’s eyes followed the sound, giving Abatangelo the chance to bat the arm away. Shel saw it and dove. As Abatangelo struggled with Cesar again, she found the strength and speed and lurched across the room, grabbed Cesar’s hand and sank her teeth into the flesh of his wrist, down to bone, as Abatangelo pinned that arm against the Coke machine and drilled the other, limp and bloody, over and over against the wall. Cesar found his scream then, dropping the gun with a curse. Shel stumbled away, her mouth bloody, scrambling on the floor for the gun and shouting, “Watch out for the other one. The gun. At his back.”
Eddy charged through the door, triggering the tinny little bell again. Abatangelo didn’t dare turn. He reached around, trying for the second gun as Cesar, gritting his teeth, flailed with his legs. Cesar caught Abatangelo in the groin, Abatangelo howled, clenched his jaw and kept reaching for the gun. Crouching down, bending at the waist, Cesar got his hand back to the weapon before Abatangelo could. Abatangelo picked him up bodily off the floor, slammed him against the wall, ramming his shoulder over and over into Cesar’s chest, driving the air from his lungs.
Eddy shouted from behind, “Put your hands out. Now. Let me see ’em.”
Cesar looked up, his tongue lolling free as he fought for breath. He met Eddy’s stare but kept his hand where it was. Abatangelo leaned his entire weight against him, pressing him against the wall, his hand locked on Cesar’s wrist, pinning it behind his back. Abatangelo’s head spun, he gasped for air, too, fighting an urge to hurl. Shel sat there on the floor, wiping Cesar’s blood away from her mouth and getting a proper hold on his gun.
“Don’t do it,” Eddy shouted, edging closer, training the Browning shotgun on Cesar’s face. “Your hands, get ’em out. Ain’t gonna say it again.”
“Come on,” Abatangelo said, straining for a tone of compromise. “Doesn’t have to be this way. Let go.”
Cesar lifted his chin and smiled. He regarded Abatangelo, eyes darkening. “The problem with stupid people,” he murmured. His good arm jerked and the gun went off. He fired into his own body, arching his back, aiming for Abatangelo, too. The discharge jerked him half around, his side exploded in blood and Abatangelo jumped back unthinking, shielding himself with his arms as Shel screamed, “Danny… Danny…”
Chapter 25
In the end, it was the pictures. They appeared with Waxman’s articles, the paper running a series of multipage layouts, the largest since the mass suicides at Jonestown: frames shot from the hilltop above Shel’s house, showing Felix Randall and his henchmen gathering just before the Andrus Island shoot-out; Shel herself, brutalized by Frank; Frank’s remains, smoldering piecemeal amid the smoke and flame and charred debris of the bomb-blown milk shed; Rolando Moreira’s surreal fete for his fifteen-year-old daughter, celebrated only hours before the bloodbath at the marina; the massacre itself, the dead and dying left behind, crowned by the image of a youth named Roberto, offering a death gaze to the camera, snared atop the hurricane fence.
There was also a shot of Cesar Pazienza from Chalco, sprawled in stillness and his own blood on the waiting room floor of I-GO YOU-GO BODY REPAIR. Abatangelo didn’t take that picture. Someone in the coroner’s unit did. Abatangelo at that point had joined Shel, the two of them wrapped in blankets, dazed, weak, fouled with blood, sitting in Eddy’s small airless office and waiting for the marshals to arrive.
Abatangelo had called them, using a telephone in the waiting area after watching Cesar’s body convulse, his eyes swimming in their sockets as one hand flailed blindly behind him for his gun, the other pinned at an impossible angle beneath his body. Face to the floor, Cesar had arched his back, trying to regain his feet, then his knees slid back and he lay still. Closing his eyes, he coughed up tangled spumes of blood. Abatangelo, finding himself caked in human muck but whole, reached for the small of the dying man’s back and withdrew the gun. It came away lathered in gore. Cesar, white-faced, dull-eyed, gasped for air and moved his lips, trying to draw breath. Eddy dialed 911, but the small feral man with the thumb-sized birthmark was dead before the paramedics arrived.
It seemed grotesque but apropos- fitting and fair, as Frank would have put it- for Abatangelo to begin haggling for his freedom drenched in the blood of a man lying dead only a few feet away. He told the operator at the marshal’s office who he was, gave his CID number and his P.O.’s name, told her where he was and why he assumed the Bureau of Prisons would insist on his being detained. Now that Shel was safe, he wanted to nip it in the bud, lay the story out himself, what he’d done and why, before somebody on the review committee waxed righteous over having to do it himself. Once the operator confirmed that a detail was en route, he put the phone back down, gathered Shel in his arms and guided her back to Eddy’s office to wait.
The marshals arrived as the coroner’s people were bagging up Cesar’s body and homicide inspectors were grilling Eddy, trying to find out how anyone but a contortionist could shoot himself in the back. Evidence techs scoured the waiting room for trace evidence, while the street outside was logjammed with patrol cars, uniformed officers milling about, knocking on the doors of neighboring businesses and walk-ups, canvassing everyone and anyone who had something to say. Abatangelo and Shel deferred answering questions till Tony Cohn arrived, and though he’d been called he wouldn’t get there before the marshals did. Abatangelo murmured good-bye into Shel’s ear, kissed her brow, her hands, her cheek, then left, one marshal on each side. An hour later they delivered him in come-alongs to the detention center in San Bruno.
Tony Cohn did the legal work for his parole review, Waxman worked the press angle. The double-team paid off. Once his pictures hit the papers, and Waxman told the story of the price paid to get them, an outcry arose on Abatangelo’s behalf. And it came not just from Waxman’s usual readership. Average citizens wrote letters. Editors of the major local dailies chimed in. Assembly members and Congressmen, keen for a sound bite, put themselves on record. This man, they said, deserves our thanks, not punishment.
Not everyone on his review committee agreed. A penology wonk named Trimble, with designs on a state-level appointment, argued that the law’s the law, choices have consequences. He was a sharp-featured man with a boyish haircut and hard eyes, who had a strangely soulful manner of speech. He talked a lot about responsibility and used the phrases “send a message” and “the letter of the law” as part of a droning litany. “There is no demonstrable evidence,” Trimble claimed, “of true reform or even remorse on this inmate’s part.” He ticked off the violations, as he saw them- contact with a known felon; conspiring to conceal evidence in at least one homicide investigation; obstruction of justice; battery; harboring a fugitive; felony murder. “These are material crimes, and the list goes on and on,” he intoned, pushing hard for full revocation, a return to federal custody for five years with prosecution on additional charges. “Is this what we’ve come to, where we’ll even condone the systematic breaking of the law for a few good pictures? What’s next? Paying rapists for the rights to live coverage?”
Abatangelo, allowed five minutes to speak on his own behalf, took only two. Dressed in his orange jumpsuit, the rim of his T-shirt peeking through the open collar and a patch bearing his inmate number stitched above his heart, he stood before the committee members without written notes or prepared remarks, hoping that, if he spoke directly and impromptu, the sincerity of his words would outweigh their disjointedness. When he was finished he sat back down, no questions ensued, and the committee took the matter under submission.
They conferred for three weeks before issuing a decision. During that time, Trimble, the hard-liner, provided the text of his remarks to a right-leaning talk show host who recited selected segments in his broadcasts. “The Founding Fathers would spin in their graves,” the radio voice thundered, “if they saw the way deadbeats, pornographers, and, yes, criminals hide behind the First Amendment.” He called any comparison between what Abatangelo had done and the work of real photojournalists or, as some had suggested, combat photographers, “phony” and “insulting.”
“There can be no neutrality in the war against crime,” he roared. “Not on our streets. Not in our neighborhoods. Not with our children at stake.”
It created the desired effect, a backlash against the previous sympathy Abatangelo had enjoyed. Even with the momentum the radio show created, though, Trimble couldn’t muster the votes. In a split ruling, the committee decreed, “Daniel S. Abatangelo poses no discernible threat to the community at large. Charges of crimes committed, in particular the most serious allegation, felony murder regarding the death of Frank Maas, do not bear up under thorough scrutiny. What questionable acts said probationer performed in violation of his release conditions are arguably outweighed by the service he has provided to law enforcement and the general citizenry.”
Release from custody was ordered; his probation, however, remained intact. Reading the report, and wincing
