Charlie Cimino, of course, was all around the PCB back then, too. Surely he knew all about the Delroy Bailey contract. He and Hector were two of the main pigs feeding at that trough. So one of them figured out about Greg wearing a wire—I don’t know which—and told the other. Then they jumped Greg and did a little water boarding routine on him to find out what he’d told the federal government before they killed him and dumped him on Seagram Hill. Had Greg told the feds about Adalbert Wozniak and Ernesto Ramirez? I didn’t know. But either way, Hector couldn’t let Greg just walk away and carry on as a snitch for the government. Greg had to die.
One of them—again, I didn’t know which—also decided that I might be a threat, and treated me to the same fun-filled question-and-answer session. Only I managed to pass and live another day. They’d have been far better off killing me that night.
Regardless, it was Hector calling the shots, not Charlie. That was clear to me now. I didn’t know where he got those guys working me over, but they were his guys, not Charlie’s.
I never thought of Hector as “above” Charlie, and in many senses he was not. But he had the ear of the governor, and even if he wasn’t respected by anyone else in the inner circle, he was probably feared because the governor seemed to listen to him as much as anyone.
My fingers formed around the gun in my pocket. I looked up at the bedroom on the third floor, where Hector Almundo was sleeping peacefully next to Delroy Bailey. My entire body—every limb, every muscle—ached from the tension, the flowing rage.
“Have a nice sleep, Senator,” I whispered. Doing this right now, it would let him off too easily.
I released the grip on the gun. I headed back to the car and drove off, mindful of the speed limit, focused now on the last stop I would make tonight.
To the home of the man who carried out Hector’s wet work, who killed Adalbert Wozniak, Ernesto Ramirez, and Greg Connolly.
84
THE SKIES EASED UP AS I DROVE, THE PELTING RAIN
turning to soft drops. The roads were empty and I was making good time, not that it mattered. I was doing math that didn’t add up, logic that had no linear path. The law does not permit unlimited cause and effect. A guy commits a crime, you can’t blame his mother for giving birth to him, even though if she hadn’t, the crime wouldn’t have been committed. The law talks about “proximate cause,” meaning reasonably foreseeable cause and effect. But there was probably nothing reasonable about my thinking right now.
It was a song I’d been singing, I realized, since this whole thing started. If he hadn’t killed Wozniak, Ernesto Ramirez wouldn’t have mattered. And if he hadn’t killed Ernesto, I would have taken that trip with my wife. Different parts of my brain were battling this out but it was clear who was winning, who had won in a knockout.
By the time I pulled up in the alley that ran behind a line of houses including Kiko’s, the rain had stopped. My chest was heaving. Everything was dark. The rain in my hair, on my wet coat and collar, felt like ice water.
I got out and closed the car door, which made a recognizable noise but probably one so familiar as to be innocuous, even at two in the morning.
I moved down the alley, thinking about obstacles. Probably a guy at his rank in the Latin Lords had a security system. Probably a guy like Kiko had several weapons at his disposal, too.
I stopped when I was positioned in the alley so that I could see the back of Kiko’s house. The light downstairs was on. Through a sliding glass door I could see him, sitting on the carpet, his back against the couch, alternating lights emanating from a television set. So, even if he had an alarm system, it probably wasn’t armed. And he seemed to be alone, consistent with my intel from Joel Lightner that he lived by himself.
I didn’t have a definitive plan, and nothing particularly effective. Misdirection always works. Ring his front doorbell, maybe have something outside his front door—a note or something, to make him actually leave the house, occupy his attention on the front porch—while running around to the back of the house and breaking in, ready to surprise him when he returns. There was a side window, as well, probably to a bedroom, as an alternative point of entry.
All of those made sense, until the calculator started tabulating in my head again, as I watched Federico “Kiko” Hurtado lazily stretched out on his floor watching something on the tube. The man who took everything from me, from Essie Ramirez, from Adalbert Wozniak’s and Greg Connolly’s families, was resting in the comfort of his own home watching some inane sitcom or infomercial or soft-core porn.
Those other ideas would work, the misdirection. But other ways were effective, as well, especially if you had nothing to lose.
My walk was steady, one deliberate step after the other, but I found myself picking up the pace as I crossed his backyard and removed the gun from my pocket. I took an angle head-on toward the sliding glass door, out of his sight line, seeing only his outstretched legs. I raised the gun as I approached. When I was within about ten, nine, now five yards, I started shooting.
The bullets splintered the glass in five spiderwebs, one of them wildly apart from the others but the other four close enough to compromise the glass’s integrity. I lowered my shoulder and crashed through, just as Kiko’s feet began to move. I kicked out my leg with everything I had to complete my entry, to get my legs inside. I had the gun trained on him before he’d had the chance to react.
He looked up at me. His matted hair and puffy, unfocused eyes told me he’d been asleep. The multiple beer bottles lying sideways and the odor of cannabis told me that it had been an intoxicated slumber. Good for me. A guy quick on his feet might have had the chance to at least get some headway toward another room and, at that point, a real chance at escape. But none of that mattered now.
He didn’t speak, though his nonverbal communication—the widening stain in the crotch of his gray sweats—told me I had his attention. Here was the most notorious assassin on the city’s streets, in a t-shirt and urine-stained sweats, frozen in place with both palms planted on the carpet and one leg bent, as if he were just on the verge of bouncing up.
I trained the gun on him and let it all consume me. This, I now realized, was why I’d been on this quest from the beginning. Someone had to pay for what had happened to Talia and Emily, and I was tired of it being me.
“Why?” he said.
“Why?”
I nodded at him. “How many people you kill?”
He was watching the gun more than me. “Not one,” he said, “that didn’t have it comin’.”
I moved closer. Then I lowered the gun and delivered a kick into the center of his chest. He didn’t take it well, his mouth popping open, his hands off the floor, his body falling to his right side. Something unleashed in me and I tossed the gun on the couch, then dropped my knees down on him, swinging wildly with my fists, missing more than landing, hitting his hands as they shielded his skull. I was doing plenty of damage anyway, slamming his head into the floor from my blows. When I took a brief pause, he surprised me with a surge upward, trying with his legs and arms to toss me off-balance. For one brief moment he almost succeeded, then I brought my full force down on him. He was now turned over on his back, facing up at me. He swung at me with both hands but he had nothing behind the blows, lacking the advantages of gravity or momentum. It was all me, and now that I had him square on his back, I made his face pay. He tried to run interference but it was raining down on him. I landed about a dozen solid blows before his defenses subsided.
I caught my breath and reached for my gun, which luckily I was able to do without compromising my position. I didn’t know what I was thinking, giving up that gun, except that I hadn’t been thinking at all.
Kiko made a low burst of noise, blood coming from his mouth in the process. I didn’t recognize the sound at first but then I got it. He was laughing.
“You gonna kill me, you’d a done it.”
That would make it all the more satisfying. I placed the gun against his forehead. The cymbals clashed inside my head, the hatred and anger poisoning everything inside me. Everything about this made sense. This guy had killed so many people. Maybe some of them not so innocent, but I could count a number of them that didn’t have it coming. I didn’t really know my God anymore but I couldn’t comprehend a world where taking this guy out wasn’t a good thing.
“Don’t, Jason.”
I stifled the instinct to turn, because I knew the voice hadn’t come from behind me. Or next to me or in front of me. I imprinted the barrel of my gun into Kiko’s forehead. He started mumbling something in Spanish. I thought he was praying.
“Don’t ask God for help,” I said. Then I raised the gun off his forehead. I pushed myself off him and stood over him. He wasn’t moving, the only sign of life his soft moans and a bubble of blood enlarging and contracting from his mouth.
I opened the glass door, rather than work my way through the jagged glass, and walked through the yard. A couple of lights were on in the neighborhood, maybe even some people looking out. They might be able to identify me but I doubted it. Some white guy in a suit and long coat, walking through a dark backyard. Anyone living close by knew who resided at this particular address, and odds were they wouldn’t be in a hurry to involve themselves in this affair.
I made it to the car and drove through the alley. When I got onto a main thoroughfare, I let out a long breath. The post-event adrenaline flooded me; it was all I could do to keep my hands on the wheel. I was confused, or at least incapable of rational thought, so I focused on getting myself home, on getting the car in the garage and myself into bed.
I would sleep tonight, I decided, at least for the few remaining hours of night afforded me. Like the flip of a switch, I was utterly exhausted. I fell onto the bed and closed my eyes. It was true, I’d been blaming Ernesto’s killer for the death of my family. Maybe I’d done so to transfer culpability from where I thought it really belonged, at my own feet. But I now realized it had been something different altogether.
Don’t, Jason
.
She’d meant so much more with those two words, I thought, than just sparing Kiko’s life. I’d assigned blame for her death everywhere I could find—myself, Hector, Kiko, whomever—to avoid the more plausible and, therefore excruciating truth, that what happened to my wife and daughter was nobody’s fault.
The next thing I remembered was her hand in mine, our fingers interlocked, gripped so tightly that one hand ceased being independent of the other. Then, slowly, a release, our fingers straightening, our palms separating, nothing but our fingertips in contact.
And then my hand reached for hers and there was nothing. I opened my eyes and it was morning.
85
I NEEDED SOME EXTRA TIME TO GET READY THIS
morning, having discovered a number of cuts along my hairline from shards of glass last night. My hands were swollen and sore, but I didn’t think I’d broken any fingers. I had plenty of reminders of what had happened last night but it still felt more like a dream than anything else.
Lee Tucker and Chris Moody were waiting for me when I walked into Suite 410 at eight in the morning. They’d been deliberating quietly and hadn’t heard me enter. They popped to attention when I showed my face.
“Cut myself shaving,” I said when Tucker asked.
“Shaving your forehead?”
“I wasn’t paying attention.”
Moody leaned back in his chair. He didn’t look good. His eyes were set deeply and shaded dark. He usually had a bright-and-eager look about him, but these were long days he was spending.
“Do you think you’ll be having more conversations with Snow?” Moody asked. “I mean, after the incident last night. Is he too embarrassed now? Or do you think you’ll still be on the inside?”
“Hard to say,” I said. “My guess, I’m still in.”
“Good. Because we need more,” he told me. “Snow’s a slippery one.”
The same word Tucker had used.
Slippery,
as in, we know he’s guilty but he doesn’t quite admit it.
“You mean,
you
need more,” I said.
“You need to pin him down,” he said. “When he gets on a topic, you have to keep pushing it. You just let him move on.”
“It’s not cross-examination,” I said. “It’s conversation. I can’t force it.”
“You’re being too cautious, Jason. You already passed their test. You passed. Greg failed.”
“Whose test? Charlie’s test? Yeah, I passed
his
test.”
“Oh, and what happened to ‘Charlie wasn’t calling the shots’? You think Snow doesn’t know anything about what happened to you and Greg Connolly that night?”
These guys had listened to every word of the F-Bird from last night. They’d heard what both Madison and the governor had said about Greg Connolly. They’d heard Charlie Cimino say that he hadn’t told Madison anything about it.
Chris Moody did one of his patented chuckles, filled not with humor but condescension. “You think because Madison Koehler and Governor Snow played dumb last night, it means they don’t know anything?”