FORTY-NINE

My first thought was that I was going to avoid surgery after all. I smiled. My second thought was about missing Sarah’s wedding. I wasn’t smiling anymore.

“I’ll take that, asshole.”

I didn’t recognize the voice, yet there was something vaguely familiar about it. Powerful fingers grabbed the cell phone out of my hand, but I wasn’t sure the guy pressing the gun to my neck was the same guy who took the phone. I sensed there were two, maybe three of them. If I was wrong and there was only one, I still didn’t like the odds. A gun to the neck counts for a lot.

“He’s probably carrying.” This voice I knew. It belonged to Nick Roussis. Hands were patting me down; one reached under my jacket and yanked my old off-duty piece out of its holster. “Come on, let’s get him off the freakin’ street and into the van.” The headlights of a car turning the corner cast our own shadows ahead of us. “Come on, come on.”

I counted the shadows. There were three of them: Nicky and two other guys. The muzzle of the gun was pushed hard into my neck, urging me forward so that I almost tumbled head first. The car flashed past. I wasn’t hopeful that the driver would see or understand what was going on. Even if the driver had been looking right at us, it was too dark for him or her to see much. Now we were at the side door of the van. The muzzle eased off my neck. My arms were pulled backwards, my wrists pressed close, and taped behind me. I was shoved face first onto the van floor and rolled over on my back. Nick crawled in beside me and sat across from me with his back against the van wall. He was pointing my own .38 at me. His two friends got into the front seats and we were moving.

“You just couldn’t leave it alone, could ya?” Nicky said. “When did you know?”

I didn’t answer immediately. Instead I stared at the man sitting in the passenger seat and at the driver. The guy in the passenger seat was squat, thick-necked. His hair was more salt than pepper and I couldn’t make out much of his profile except that his left cheek was scarred and pitted. I had a better angle to see the driver. He was a twitchy bastard, but he looked like a skinnier, younger version of Nick Roussis.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your brother?” I mumbled.

Gus jerked his head back at me. “Shut the fuck up or I’ll kill you right here.”

Nick screamed at his little brother in Greek and not the kind of Greek Aristotle or Socrates were known for. Gus screamed back at Nick. I didn’t fool myself that this dissention was going to help me. I didn’t let it breed any hope. They were brothers and that’s what mattered. I was being taken to die, to be shot in the back of the head and dumped in a shallow grave or thrown in the ocean for fish food. I used their distraction to work myself onto my knees and then flop back into a sitting position. Through all the screaming the passenger sat stoic and unmoving, not once turning his head.

When the brothers quieted down, Nick turned his attention back to me. “I asked you a question. When did you know?”

“About three seconds before the gun was shoved into my neck.”

Nick shook his head at me. “Why couldn’t you just leave it alone?”

“That’s the funny thing,” I said.

“There’s something funny about this?”

“I guess I mean ironic, not funny.”

“What’s that?”

“It wasn’t me who couldn’t leave it alone. It was you, Nicky. You made a big show of giving me the security footage. You were the one who made noise about us getting together. It was you who treated me to dinner. You who served up Jorge Delgado up on a silver platter for me. If you had just shaken my hand and said goodbye that first time I stopped by the Grotto, we wouldn’t be here now.”

“I guess that was pretty dumb, huh? But I always did kinda look up to you when we were on the job and I was honestly happy to see you when you came to the Grotto that day.”

“For all the good it’s gonna do me now.”

“Sorry, Moe. I got no choice. We work for him,” he said, pointing his free hand in the direction of the passenger, “not the other way around.”

“You’re not a killer, Nicky. It’s not in your nature. That’s why you quit the job. You said it to me yourself. You couldn’t stand the bodies and the blood. You hated the smells: the piss, the shit, the decay.”

“Don’t fool yourself, Moe. I’ll do what I have to.”

“I know that. You’ll do anything to protect your family. That’s what this is all about, right? You protecting the family business, you saving your fuck-up brother. He is a fuck-up. That’s right, isn’t it, Gus?”

Gus, half-turned, one hand on the steering wheel, a Sig Sauer pointed at my head. “Keep talking, motherfucker and I’ll—”

Gus never finished his threat because the stoic passenger slapped him across the face. The sharp smack was amplified by the metal walls of the van. “Shut up mouth and drive van. Pay attention.”

Slavic accent, I thought, but not Russian.

“You’ll kill me. I know that, Nick.” I tried sounding calm, but I wasn’t. I thought I would have been okay with dying, with avoiding the pain of surgery, of recovery, and loss of pride that was sure to come with the treatments, but I never wanted to live more than at that moment. “No, I’m talking about Alta Conseco. I know it wasn’t in you to kill a woman like that. That had to be your brother.”

Nick didn’t say a word, hanging his head in shame. That was answer enough.

“But what did Alta see that made Gus chase her down the block, stab her in the back—that was really brave of you, by the way, stabbing a defenseless, unsuspecting woman in the back—”

“That’s not how it happened!” Gus yelled, half-turning again. “I didn’t want to—”

“You didn’t want to, but what, you fucking coward? Your mommy made you stab her in the back?”

“Shut up! Just shut up, Moe!” Nick yelled, shoving the short barrel of the .38 into my chest. “Shut up, Moe!”

“No! Let him speak,” the passenger ordered.

“Serbian?” I said. “No. Bulgarian, maybe.”

“Very good, smart man. Not idiot like Nick or moron brother. Maybe I get rid of them and keep you alive.” He had a good laugh at that. He was the only one laughing. “Go ahead vit you story. I am entertained.”

“Alta saw something or you thought she saw something she shouldn’t have, like one of these late night deliveries of yours. And I’m thinking there aren’t many things even an asshole like Gus would think was worth killing a woman over. Drugs come to mind. Heroin?”

Gus confirmed it. “That’s right, asshole.”

“Keep quiet, Gus,” Nick warned half-heartedly.

“Why? He knows we’re gonna kill him. What the fuck does it matter?”

There, he said aloud what we all knew. Don’t ask me why, but I wanted to thank him. I could deal with it now. With no hope I was less tormented, calmer. If I was about to die, though, I didn’t want to die curious.

“The Pizza Connection all over again,” I said, referring to how the Mafia had distributed heroin through New York pizzerias from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. “It’s Afghani heroin, isn’t it?”

The passenger applauded.

“How could you know that?” Nick asked.

“Look at a map. Bulgaria has access to the Black Sea and the Adriatic and it’s not really that far away from Afghanistan. You could transship it through Greece, Turkey, the Balkans. I hope that protecting your fuck-up brother is worth helping finance al-Qaeda.”

“Enough!” The passenger turned around, a Glock 26 in his hand. The rest of his face wasn’t much prettier than his profile. “Enough!”

“We’re here anyways,” Gus said, the van rolling to a stop.

The Bulgarian and Gus flung their doors open. Nick crawled past me, keeping a bead on me as he slid open the van’s side door. “Get out, Moe. Come on.”

We were all standing along the shore of Coney Island Creek; the not too distant buzz of cars from the Belt Parkway and the rumble of the subway from Shell Road would have covered the firing of a howitzer let alone the loud pop, pop, pop of a 9 mm. I knew very well that my body wouldn’t be the only one in the creek, but I took little comfort in that.

“Did you know there’s a scuttled submarine in here?” I heard myself say.

They all looked at me like I was crazy. I was crazy, crazy with fear. That calm I’d had in the van only moments before was gone, evaporated.

“Okay, asshole, let’s go,” Gus said, pushing my shoulder, poking me in the neck with his Sig.

It was then I realized I wasn’t as crazed with fear as I might have been because I dropped to the moist, rocky ground and kicked Gus’s legs out from under him. He fell into the creek. “Fuck you! You fucking coward!” I screamed at him.

The Bulgarian barked at Nick, “Kill him. Now!”

Nick fired without hesitation, but not at me. The Bulgarian grabbed his throat, fell to his knees, then toppled face forward onto an old tire, stone dead. I struggled to my knees.

Gus came up out of the creek. “What the fuck, Nicky! We’re dead. Do you know what they’re gonna do to us? Wait a second. Let me—I know.” Gus reached down and took the dead man’s Glock, aiming it at me. “We’ll kill Moe with Iliya’s gun. Then we’ll put the .38 in Moe’s—”

“Drop your weapons! Drop them down on the ground and kick them away.” It was Fuqua. Sirens were blaring in the background. “Do it. Do it now!”

Gus wheeled on Fuqua just as an F train pulled into the station a few hundred feet away. It was the last stupid thing he would ever do. Three flashes lit up the night and Gus Roussis collapsed to the ground, his body rolling back into the creek. His head was covered by black, filthy water. Reflexively, Nicky raised the .38, but I lunged forward off my knees, my shoulder connecting with the back of his legs and Nick crumpled backwards over me. By the time he collected himself, Fuqua was there and Nicky had no choice but to drop the gun.

“It wasn’t Esme. It was him,” I said, nodding at Gus’s body.

Ten minutes later this dirty, mostly forgotten patch of Coney Island was swarming with blue uniforms. Crime scene tape seemed to appear as if by magic. I was rubbing the feeling back into my wrists as I sat on the back deck of an ambulance.

“Thanks, Fuqua. I take it that was your car that came around the corner and passed us as I was getting shoved into the van.”

“Good for you I could not sleep and I was in the mood for pizza.”

“Not really. The pizza at the Grotto stinks.”

“Are you all right?”

“For now. I have stomach cancer.”

He crossed himself. “I am so sorry.”

“Don’t be. My daughter’s getting married next weekend and now I’ll live to see it. You gave that back to me: the last best gift I’ll ever get.”