The Devil's Necktie (15 page)

30

Jack was ushered into the guidance counselor's empty office by an officious secretary and told to wait. Like a penitent student, he was doing just that.

Except for baseball, Jack didn't have fond memories of high school. With the violence he had suffered at home, being a teenager was a rough time, with little joy. He was amazed by how just visiting a school—the sights, the sounds, the smells—could bring the feelings back. The office was Spartan, with pastel peach walls and dark brown wainscoting. A round clock on the wall reminded him that his life was passing every time the second hand jumped.

A buzzer sounded, classes were dismissed, and the hallways filled with the excited voices of liberated teenagers. Lockers banged, cell phones engaged, and the bleed from iPods created an ambient adolescent roar.

Joan Sternhagen walked into the room and smiled, thrusting her hand forward. It was a generous, engaging smile that imparted warmth and a feeling of well-being. She had bright, unblinking eyes, a narrow face, and a scooped chin that threatened to touch her thin, hooked nose. Jack couldn't miss the fact that she looked very much like a bird. Correct that, a peacock.

Jack stood politely and towered over the petite woman as he shook her hand.

“I pulled the files for the years you requested, Mr. Bertolino. Most everything is in the computer nowadays, but that only dates back the past few years or so. Now, let me get a good look at you.”

She stood back and gave Jack the once-over. Jack wouldn't bet the house on it, but he decided that her accent was from New Zealand and not Australia. It was lilting and musical, and he couldn't help but smile.

“You have a strong smile that probably doesn't get used all that often. You are serious to a fault. The lines on your face read integrity, sincerity, and strength. I wouldn't want to be a badster going up against the likes of you. How am I doing so far?”

“A badster?” he said.

“Oh, you know, the criminal element.”

“So far so good,” Jack said while she walked around her desk, sat down demurely, and opened the files.

“I'm appalled by that horrible picture circulating on Facebook. Everyone in the school has seen it. That poor boy. Simply terrible. Nobody deserves to die like that.”

Jack nodded in agreement. “Any rumors as to why he was killed?”

“None that were shared with me,” she said wistfully. And then, “Let's get to work.”

Jack eased down onto his straight-backed wooden chair and glanced at her threadbare padded swiveling office chair with envy. Joan swept her shoulder-length straight blond hair back behind her ears and pulled on a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses that hung from a red braided cord around her neck.

“The kid I'm looking for was off,” he said.

“Off how?”

“You know, different.”

“You're not helping me, Mr. Bertolino.”

“I know . . . sorry. I'm looking for someone with the potential to kill. The potential to slaughter the young man you saw on Facebook and be cold enough to post it to send a message.”

“I think I understand.”

“Let's just go down the list, and if anything comes up, anything jogs your memory, we'll talk about it.”

“Fair enough.”

She read the names of the teenagers Jack had provided and showed him the pictures that were on file.

Jack recognized Raymond Higueras as being the man on crutches. He looked at the file and took notes.

They were all teenagers-turned-men, sixteen-year-olds with the countenance of killers, and now all members of a notorious street gang. Joan went down the list and gave Jack her recollections or handwritten notes if the young men's case files had crossed her desk. He learned that most of the boys were latchkey kids, lower income. If there were two parents, they both worked. The 18th Street Angels provided these kids with emotional, personal, and financial security. Same story, different city. The common denominator was that the young boys had to kill to gain entrance to the promised land.

Joan's eyes softened when she reached Johnny Rodriguez's file.

“Good kid. No, great kid. Had all the potential in the world. Strong family, two sisters who graduated from John Burroughs with honors. It says here that he was enrolled in college prep classes, and then he dropped out of sight. I take that as a personal failure. These kids. When they fall, they fall very hard, Mr. Bertolino. I wrote a note in the margin.”

She spun the file on her ink blotter to read her handwritten scrawl.

“His sister blamed a friend of his for . . . Oh.”

Joan Sternhagen stopped at a particular name, looked up over the top of her reading glasses, and stared into the distance, trying to conjure up a memory.

“Hector Lopez.”

“Who?” Jack asked. The name wasn't on his list.

“I don't remember too much. He was assigned to me, a habitual truant. A lot of kids, a lot of faces, a lot of problems,” she explained.

“What do your notes say about Hector?”

Jack felt he was finally on to something and didn't want to stop the flow. Joan flipped through another folder until she located Hector's file.

“ ‘Would rather be anywhere but sitting across from me,' is what I wrote at the time. He would say whatever was needed to end the interview. No college aspirations, tested in the lower seventy percentile.”

“Was he in the gang?”

“Not as a matter of record . . .”

“But?”

“It seems likely. Hector's father abandoned the family in his junior year. It says he moved to Guadalajara. Hector dropped out his senior year.” Sternhagen peered at Jack over her reading glasses. “I remember that he was big for his age. If there had been a football team at John Burroughs, he might have played.” She added with regret, “I can't get through to them all. But I do what I can.”

“Big, huh,” Jack said to himself. And then, “Do you have a picture of Hector?”

“No, if it's not in my files, one didn't exist.”

Jack wasn't sure he could accomplish anything more, and the loud ticks of the clock reminded him that he had to get a move on. He jotted down Hector Lopez's last known address, his father's work history, and then the current addresses of the various 18th Street Angels on the list, photocopied their pictures, and thanked Mrs. Sternhagen for her time.

He listened to the echo of his shoes as they reverberated on the scuffed linoleum floor and walked out of the school with increasing speed; he did not look back. He thought he'd hit a vein. He just had to see where it led him.

—

Jack was driving with one hand, eating a bean, cheese, and rice burrito with the other. He had made a quick stop at a roadside taco stand; the Excedrin and caffeine were burning a hole in his gut, and he realized that the burrito might just create the perfect storm. But he kept on eating.

The late-afternoon crosstown traffic was bumper to bumper, and two blocks from Royce Motors the primer gray car raced past him driving in the opposite direction.

Nobody worked a full day anymore, Jack thought.

He tried to execute a one-handed U-turn after their car had made a left onto the main thoroughfare. But he couldn't make the turning radius. He dropped the greasy burrito in his lap, banged the car into a tire-spinning reverse, and then nearly clipped the cars parked on the side of the street as the Plymouth lurched forward.

He picked up his food about the same time he caught sight of his quarry and then eased up on the gas, staying five cars behind. He finished off the burrito in two quick bites, wiping his hands onto his already stained black jeans. He'd worry about the salsa spill later.

Jack slowed as he watched the gray car pull off the road into a strip-mall parking lot. He drove past, keeping his eyes straight ahead, and in his rearview mirror watched the men exit their vehicle. Jack did a quick run around the block and pulled over to the curb a half block away. The man on crutches, Raymond Higueras, made his way into the Black Stallion Inn. The bar shared space in the low-rent mall with a Laundromat, a Mexican
panaderia,
and a store that sold wedding dresses.

The Black Stallion Inn had no windows and the front facade was covered with rough-hewn planks. A blue neon horse with a wild mane reared up and down as if it were stomping a rattler to death. Jack enjoyed the symbolism, and as he watched the front door, another car pulled into the lot and parked. The two young men who walked into the bar had the dead eyes of gangbangers but were hardly street legal.

Nick had explained the tiered system of the 18th Street Angels while giving Jack and Tommy the tour of Ontario. It worked like the Mafia in Jack's old stomping grounds. There were the “made men,” their lieutenants, and then the young sharks or soldiers who worked on their crews.

The 18th Street Angels, a Chicano street gang, also had three tiers: the Lil' Angels, the Angelitos, and at the top of the food chain, the 18th Street Angels. To make it into the top tier from one of the other two groups, a young gangster needed to prove himself by killing or assist in the killing of a rival gang member, someone who had dissed the Angels in some way.

Jack checked his parking meter and saw that it was after six. The sun was about to shut down for the day. Staying close to the storefronts across the street, using their thrown shadows, he snapped off a series of pictures of the cars in the strip-mall lot, capturing as many license plate numbers as he could get from his vantage point.

He didn't want to make his presence known until he was ready.

Seeing the door to the Black Stallion Inn swing open, Bertolino dropped his camera, spun on his heel, and turned to face the window of a video store.

Raymond Higueras, finding a way to swagger on crutches, clomped across the lot with a young woman in tow. In the window's reflection he could see the couple walk over to a compact car. He braced the young girl against the car, and their good-bye kiss turned into a groping clinch.

Jack took the opportunity to walk back down the block to the Plymouth and get in. The woman was now in the driver's seat of a Toyota Corolla. She applied some lipstick in the vanity mirror, another thick layer of black eyeliner, and then drove out of the lot, waving good-bye to her bruised warrior. Jack snapped off a few shots of the old car as she drove past him. He could make a positive ID of the woman, but he wasn't sure if the pictures would read through the black tint of his windshield and the encroaching night sky.

Balancing on one crutch, Higueras pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag. The cigarette's tip glowed orange and his expression was smug as he glanced up and down the block on the exhale, not seeing anything that piqued his interest.

King of the world.

The door to the bar swung open again and his two coworkers spilled out, obviously feeling no pain, and sauntered over to their car. David Reyes helped Higueras into the backseat and they motored out. Jack fired up the Plymouth and waited until their car was a safe distance up the street before turning on his lights and carefully following.

—

All three men lived within a six-block radius of each other in south Ontario. Jack noted the two new addresses. Then he picked a point somewhere in the middle and parked. From here he would walk to his destination.

Raymond Higueras's house had a similar layout to the Reyes house. Every room in the small bungalow was lit as Jack, dressed in black, carefully made his way around the perimeter of the building, checking windows, his nine-millimeter out of the shoulder holster and ready. He could hear a neighbor's television set, smell onions wafting from someone's kitchen exhaust, heard a few barking dogs, but thankfully the street remained empty. More important to Jack, none of the surrounding houses had a direct view of Higueras's front door.

Jack's target was alone in the house, lounging with his cast propped up on a scarred wooden coffee table, watching a rerun of
Two and a Half Men
. He'd taken his work shirt off and his cut, bare chest, from the neck down, was an inked shrine to the 18th Street Angels. Jack could see a small mirror next to his foot with a pile of cocaine big enough to satisfy an addict's itch for a week. A bottle of Dos Equis was sitting opened next to the mirror, and he realized that his own throat was bone dry.

Jack Bertolino had spent many years on the NYPD serving warrants on drug cells and money-laundering cells with a team of trained men. Even with electronic battering rams, shields, automatic weapons, flash grenades, and a tactical plan firmly in place, each raid was a life-or-death experience. He never knew what was waiting on the other side of the door, whether he was going to get shot in the face as soon as he entered the premises.

Tonight Jack was going in alone, illegally, and without backup. There was no other way.

He checked the road for foot traffic one more time, and when he was sure it was all clear, he stepped silently up onto the small front porch and sucked in a breath.

Jack pounded his fist on the door and shouted, “Police, open the door! Open the fucking door!”

He heard a shuffling, the banging of crutches, something getting knocked over, a “shit” intoned from within. “What the fuck!” Higueras cried as he cracked open the door.

Jack's foot pistoned out, snapping the security chain and splintering the wooden door into the gangster's face, knocking him backward into the room. His broken nose gushed blood. His .38 skittered across the stained hardwood floor. His crutches toppled, his arms pinwheeled, and he crashed down hard on his back.

In a blur of motion Jack kicked the door shut behind him, straddled Higueras, and jammed the barrel of his Glock into the young man's throat.

Jack chambered a round. The precision metallic ratcheting sound a Glock nine millimeter makes when a bullet is forced out of the gun's clip and into the killing chamber is a universal sound that good guys and bad guys and wild animals alike all understand on a primal level. When he had Higueras's undivided attention, he flipped him onto his stomach, snapped a pair of plastic cuffs around his wrists, and shoved the gun into the base of his neck.