Vengeance is mine, p.9
Vengeance is Mine, page 9
Plus, he wanted to make sure José’s wife wasn’t missing him too much. Help her out with a little cash. Something to keep her happy for a few days at least. He didn’t think that would be so hard, but again, getting there early, before she thought there was anything more than a bender wrong with her husband was key. Carver had ruined that as well.
After leaving the station house, Ray hailed a gypsy cab and went to see José’s widow. It wasn’t the most urgent thing he had to do, but it was the easiest. Then he could concentrate on Manny.
* * *
“He’s not here,” Mary Vargas said. Once again the chain was on the door, the door cracked open only a few inches, Mary sticking her nose into the opening.
“Oh, I know,” Ray said. “I know where he is. I just have to give you a message from him.”
He hoped this would open the door all the way and get him inside and out of the hallway, but that wasn’t happening.
“I don’t want to say where he is,” Ray added, looking around as though someone in the building might overhear and give a damn. “I can give you the message if you let me in.”
Mary thought about it a moment before giving in and opening the door all the way.
Ray went in and started talking quickly.
“First of all, José says he’s caught up, can’t come back here for a good long while. He might be able to call you in a week or two, but it might be longer.”
“What happened to him?” Mary asked. She put her hand to her lips and looked concerned. Ray wondered if she were acting. He couldn’t imagine actually liking an abusive man. Even he had never raised his hand to his wife though there were plenty of other things to regret.
“I can’t tell you everything. Let me just say he got the wrong person upset, and now he has to spend some time away. Maybe even a few months.”
“A few months?” she repeated. She didn’t seem too concerned. Probably this had happened before.
“Well, he left you the money that I brought last night, and he has more money that’s supposed to come in. A guy named Manny, Manny González, owes him a few thousand more, but I haven’t heard from Manny in a while. Any idea where he might be?” Ray tried. He didn’t think Mary knew anything at all about Manny, but there was a chance.
“Sure,” she said.
“Really?” Ray couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice.
She gave Ray an address a few miles from where they stood.
“And you’re sure it’s the same guy?”
Her description matched the one José had given the night before.
“He’s not a nice guy,” Mary said. “Not at all. And, oh, my god, his wife…she’s wicked.”
Mary held her hand to her chest as though her heart were about to stop from the contemplation of evil.
“Bad people, huh?” Ray said.
“Wicked, wicked, wicked,” Mary answered, and Ray thought that if anyone was a connoisseur in these things, it would be Mary.
“Well, I’m supposed to collect the money from them to bring it to you,” Ray said. “Hope I find them.”
“Well, his wife is always there. She babysits. But she won’t give you a dime. Cheap.”
Ray shrugged and put his hands up as if to say that things were out of his control. He was about to leave, but remembered something.
“Almost forgot. José wanted me to show you his stash. He said it wasn’t much, but you might need it.”
“Oh, I know where it is,” Mary said, then she put her hand to her lips to check herself. “Don’t tell him,” she added quietly.
“Nah, nah, don’t worry. Look, he can’t come back for a good long while anyway, we’ll keep it our little secret,” Ray said.
He got a kitchen chair and took it to the bedroom and retrieved the shoebox for her. It was heavy and Ray figured that was a good thing. Inside, it held three thick bundles of cash laid on their side – fifties and hundreds with a couple of small stacks of twenties on top. Rough guess? Fifty thousand. Maybe twice that much. On top of it all was a handgun – a compact semiautomatic, seven in the magazine and one in the chamber. A thinking man’s getaway stockpile.
“Oh, I’m supposed to take this to José,” Ray said.
He was improvising as he lifted the gun out of the box by the handle, pinching it as though it were dirty. He dropped it into his jacket pocket without Mary caring for more than a glance. She kept her eyes on the money that had become hers.
“Don’t talk about this money to anyone,” Ray said. “Use it little by little. José might not come back for a while.”
He was already headed toward the front door. She stopped him with his hand on the doorknob.
“Is he still alive?” she asked. Ray couldn’t tell what answer she wanted to hear.
“Last I saw him, he was,” Ray lied. “But he really did piss off the wrong people. I’d say if we don’t hear from him in a week or two, you might want to take that money and the baby and move out of here.”
“My family has property in Puerto Rico,” she said. It probably wasn’t meant for him. He answered anyway.
“That sounds very nice,” he said.
* * *
It was fully dark out by the time Ray got to the address Mary had given him, and he was tired. A lot of sitting and waiting and walking and talking and a cold that had seeped into him as soon as he left what had been José’s apartment. The temperature hadn’t been too bad while the sun was out, but it had plummeted with the coming of night.
The intercom panel for Manny González’s building was outside. Ray scanned the names and found the right apartment. He gave it a buzz. There was really no plan. He hadn’t even bothered to bring his car along with him, and he wasn’t sure how he would handle two people at the same time.
Nobody answered the buzz anyway. The apartment was on the second floor, and Ray took a few steps from the building to see if he could figure out which one it was. Four apartments had windows facing the street. One apartment was totally dark. He figured that was the one he wanted, and he stored that information away. No idea what good it might do him in the future.
There was no point in hanging out in front of the building so that he could be remembered by passersby later. He walked a few blocks back the way he came and took a seat in a cuchifrito. It was one of the better-quality places and he ordered a big meal – fricasseed chicken, yellow rice, red beans, fried plantains, a wedge of avocado, a salad in case there were any empty spots inside him and a tall Corona to wash it down. Somebody might shoot him before the night was over, but he wasn’t going to die hungry.
He ate slowly, tried to savor the food and thought about the chances that Manny González and his wicked wife had gotten wind of what happened to José and decided that it was best to get the hell out of the city. Usually a good meal lifted his spirits, made him optimistic even in the worst of times, but even after he had murdered the half chicken on his plate, he felt like he’d blown it. His little pointless dance with Carver had meant Mr. and Mrs. González had had enough time to take a hint – maybe they heard something on the street, just like he had heard about José – and they were gone. It didn’t much matter where they’d moved off to – Brooklyn, China – one way or the other, he had no good connections anymore and finding them might be impossible if the FBI, NYPD and whoever paid Manny were looking just as hard as he was.
It was past eight in the evening when he shoveled the last of the rice into his mouth. Outside, fat snowflakes were falling, sticking.
He paid his check and was about to leave. Two uniformed officers walked in, and Ray sat back down. He felt nervous for the first time since his daughter had come to him – unequal to the effort he needed to make. He waved a waitress over and asked for a coffee. The only place he didn’t look was where the officers took a seat.
The coffee, more than his bladder needed really, calmed him a little. He paid a second time and left without ever having looked at the police and without them noticing him in the least.
* * *
The lights were still out in the apartment Ray thought might belong to Manny and his wicked woman. He leaned on the intercom buzzer as well. No response. He walked a few blocks off and tried again but with no luck. He became truly afraid that he had missed his opportunity, and he worried about what Manny might do if he thought the woman he had beaten was hunting him down.
It was past nine now. The snow was slowing down, but the cold was sharper, and Ray hadn’t had a good feeling from his toes since leaving the cuchifrito.
Ray was about to walk a half dozen blocks to the nearest train station. A young black man came around the corner, his hands buried in his pockets, his face almost completely covered by the hood of his parka. Ray called him over.
“You live here?” he asked, pointing up at the building.
The guy shook his head and was about to keep going.
“I need some information about someone who lives in there. Can you help me out?” Ray asked. He held up a fifty-dollar bill and the young man gave him his full attention.
* * *
It took ten minutes, but the information was what Ray wanted to hear, and that made it almost as good to Ray’s ears as sworn testimony.
“They out clubbing. The baby’s at apartment 3B.”
“And you got the description?” Ray asked.
The description the teenager brought back was the same as the one José had given him the night before, down to the scratches Elena had given out.
Ray peeled out a couple more fifties and the kid took them happily and jogged away, probably late for whatever party he was headed to.
* * *
There was no use in waiting, but he waited anyway. The snow stopped and the wind picked up instead. Ray watched the door of the apartment building from a half block away, shuffling his feet to keep warm. It didn’t help. Nobody entered the building or left it for the next couple of hours. Nobody was stupid enough to be on the street at all.
At midnight, the cuchifrito turned off its lights, closed its doors, and the staff filed out. The owner rolled a gate across the front of the store and padlocked it. He eyed Ray for a moment, but Ray ignored him. Then the man moved on. A few minutes later, Ray did too.
* * *
Back in his apartment by one in the morning, Ray summoned the energy to step into the shower, but it was a close call. He wanted to dive straight under a pile of blankets, but he thought a hot shower would warm him. It didn’t. He set the shower to scalding, and he was still shaking as the water coursed over him.
He got into sweats and got out flannel blankets – three of them. He kept them folded lengthwise and got under six layers. He lay facedown and put his pillow over his head. He started to think he might wake up sick, but he was asleep before he could come up with the word ‘pneumonia’.
* * *
For a fraction of a second, he was awake. He thought he had heard something, and then he did. The swish of a baseball bat cutting through the air above him, on its way down.
The first thud hit him square between the shoulder blades, and there were a few others that caught him on the back, then there was one that smacked his left thigh. Hands grabbed his ankles – he wanted to kick them away, but his legs weren’t of a mind to do him any good.
He was pulled off the bed. He tried grabbing on to the headboard, but missed. Instead he caught hold of the mattress but that didn’t last long. The next whack was at the back of his head. The pillow took most of the blow, but what was left over nearly knocked him senseless.
Next, he was sitting on the floor near the bed and someone hit him good and proper on the right side of his face with something – not the bat, maybe a knee. Then he felt a rush of air go past his ear – the bat again, someone trying to smack his head off his neck like it was a golf ball on a tee. He tried to kick and caught the bat on the backswing with his thigh – not good for him. He tried kicking again and caught a small bookcase he kept near the bed. It toppled, everything crashing – books, a change bowl, a small lamp. It hit someone on the way down.
“Jesus Christ!” someone yelled.
Ray reached out, tried for the lamp. Heard the rush of air again, put his left hand up and caught the backswing again. His hand broke – probably a couple of bones. The knee again, smack to the bridge of his nose and he knew it was broken and draining blood. He found the lamp – one of those little metal ones that clip on to tables. The baseball bat scraped his chest – more pain than any other hit so far – then the knee caught him in the forehead, scrambled his brains though they hadn’t done him much good yet in this fight.
“Enough!” someone shouted, and Ray heard the hammer on a gun being cocked back.
“You,” the man said, “have been snooping a little too much.”
The barrel of the gun was pressed hard up against Ray’s forehead.
“Now it’s time for me to kill you and—”
Ray whipped the lamp up and caught the gun hand. There was a roar. He whipped it again and caught the man’s knee. The man stooped, Ray didn’t know why, but even with only one eye open and with the darkness all around, Ray knew this was an opportunity. He whipped the lamp up and caught the man across the face, hard.
There was a stutter step back, and the man went out the bedroom door and fell down in the living room of the apartment – Ray heard his coffee table getting knocked over. It didn’t survive.
Then the rush of air again. This time, the bat didn’t go past. One hit to the back of his head and he was out.
* * *
“Cruz. You can’t be having your friends over at two in the morning.” It was the superintendent of Ray’s building, crouching over him, shaking Ray’s head by the jaw, waking him. The super’s bathrobe was open.
“They’re not my friends,” Ray rasped out. Sounded like the cold he was waiting for had started early.
“Well, whoever. You look horrible. If they’re not your friends, then who the hell was that running down the stairs?”
“Amateurs,” Ray said. He tried to get up, but sitting on the floor was about as good as it was going to get just then.
* * *
Ray drove himself to the same hospital he had taken Elena to a few days earlier. Same emergency room, same triage nurse. This time, there was no skipping to the front of the line. It was an hour before he was seen. The nurse sent him for X-rays and that was another hour.
“Two bones broken in your hand, broken nose, no fractured skull,” she told him.
She was cold, and he knew she remembered him from his first visit. She didn’t like him and held a grudge. Thought he was a rapist.
“We’ll need to set the bones in your hand,” she said. “Dr. Warwick should be around in a bit.”
“Warwick’s the young Howdy Doody-looking guy?” Ray asked.
The nurse looked at him with what was almost a smile, but that faded fast. She sighed.
“I can set it for you, but it’s not fun,” she said.
Ray thought about it a moment.
“That Warwick was an asshole with my daughter,” he said. He offered her his hand.
She gave him a shot to numb his hand but told him it wouldn’t really do much good. Dr. Warwick came down to ‘oversee’, but he admitted he’d only ever seen the process once before.
She clamped Ray’s five fingers, the clamps each having a lead wire that fed through a pulley and, at the other end, a bucket of water.
“Ready?” she asked.
Ray’s hand was in the air; he held on to the arm with his good hand. Before he could nod to her, she let the bucket drop, pulling straight the broken bones. He winced.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered to himself a few times, his eyes glued tight against the pain.
He didn’t pass out. He just wanted to.
Chapter Eight
The guys who had attacked him in the middle of the night may have been amateurs, but Ray knew that it didn’t take a professional to pull a trigger. The streets of New York were filled with people who thought they had what it took to kill – many of them were right. The cemeteries of New York were planted full of the victims of amateurs.
When he went out to his car, he looked over his shoulder every few steps. Failing to kill someone doesn’t mean you just give up and go home. Sometimes the killer learns from his mistakes and tries again.
With his hand in a plaster cast and tape over his nose after Dr. Warwick had tried smushing it back into place for ten minutes without much to show for his efforts, Ray drove himself to his daughter’s apartment.
“Jesus, what happened to you?” was Willie’s greeting.
Ray walked in past Willie.
“Where’s Elena?” Ray whispered. It was seven in the morning.
“In the bathroom.”
“And Rosita?”
“Still sleeping. What happened to you?”
“What do you think happened? Someone tried to kill me.”
“Then why aren’t you…. How did you…. What happened?”
“A couple of guys came to the apartment and beat me with a baseball bat and put a gun to my head.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“They didn’t pull the trigger?” Willie asked.
“I’m here, aren’t I? Look. I fought back and they ran. End of story.”
“Did you get a good look at them?”
“It was the middle of the night. They didn’t turn on the lights. It was pitch black.”
“Then how do you know they had a gun? Maybe it was just a pipe or something.”
Ray pulled a small revolver from his jacket pocket, held it up for inspection using thumb and forefinger.
“They left it behind,” he said.
Willie didn’t have any more questions. He looked around as though he thought someone could be watching them through the walls.
