Fat Ollie's Book (24 page)

She could just imagine him twitching and grinning.

“Exactly,” her husband said. “We know she'll be there with the coke, she'd be stupid not to bring the coke when we went to all this trouble setting this up. We mow everybody down, grab the coke, and split.”

“She'll have goons with her,” Lonnie said.

“How many? Two, three? Even half a dozen? We got the element of surprise on our side.”

“That's right,” Constantine said. “Nobody's gonna expect us to come in shootin.”

“Exactly!” Harry said, and laughed. “Who'd think we could be that stupid?”

Me, Suzie thought, and sliced another tomato.

 

HE HAD TAKEN HER
into the back room of his shop, where there were all sorts of sex toys. She had seen all of them before, of course—there was nothing she hadn't seen or done—but she looked at them all agog and amazed like an Irish virgin, and pretended to be shocked when he asked her to put on a leather merry widow and thigh-high leather boots, so where's the whip, honey? she was thinking. It turned out he wasn't into the dominatrix scene, after all; it was just the opposite. He merely wanted to see what a nice Catholic girl like Aine would look like all dressed up like a whore.

She figured she wouldn't break his heart just yet.

She'd go along with it, let him believe she was Cathleen the Colleen for a little while longer. Then she'd tell him she was a working girl, bro, and ask him for a deuce. Or whatever the traffic would bear.

Instead, he started talking about himself.

She kind of found this interesting about him.

The way he opened up to her.

He told her he was a spy named The Gaucho.

Shut
up,
she said, a
spy?

Verdad,
he said. Or Cowboy, I'm sometimes called.

Boy, she said, a spy.

For the Police Department, he said.

So what it was, he was a snitch, was what it was.

She didn't say this to his face.

She let him talk.

And, of course, like all men, he wanted to show her how important he was.

So he told her he had been instrumental in uncovering valuable information that would lead the police to a big drug bust tomorrow night at midnight in the basement of an apartment building on Culver Avenue.

3211 Culver, she thought, but did not say.

Midnight, she thought.

That's when it's going down.

Midnight tomorrow.

A hun' fifty keys of coke will change hands, he told her.

Three hundred thousand dollars will change hands, he told her.

So she didn't ask him for any money, after all.

He had given her enough already.

And besides, it was kind of nice to make love instead of to be fucked all the time.

 

I FOUND THE LETTERS
from her the night before.

I knew right then I had to kill him.

We kept a gun in the house. I don't know where Lester bought it. I think in a pawnshop someplace downtown, near his office. He bought it when the first of our children was born. Lyle. When he was born. We'd heard there'd been a kidnapping in Smoke Rise, many years ago, at the King estate, on the water. Douglas King. So we figured we needed a gun. I don't know whether Lester registered the gun or not. Frankly, I didn't care. Lester was a councilman, he often took liberties. I mean, he parked in clearly marked No Parking zones, he went through red lights when he'd had a little too much to drink, he was a great one for breaking the rules. He felt he was privileged, do you know? A city councilman. Only this time, he broke one rule too many.

I know I'm not a beautiful woman, but I've always been a good wife. To think of him with a nineteen-year-old girl—how could he? I had to kill him. That was all I knew. Never mind confrontation, never mind asking for explanations, never mind forgiving him, I wanted him dead, I wanted to kill him. I knew he'd be going directly to King Memorial after his trip upstate. I knew what time he'd be getting there. I knew all this, he'd told me all this on the phone. The only thing he hadn't told me was that a young girl was in bed with him.

The gun was in the safe in his study. Same place I found the letters. The desk in his study. I wasn't looking for the letters, I was looking for his appointment calendar. Because we were supposed to go to a dinner party that Sunday when he got home, and I had the time written in my calendar as six o'clock, which sounded early, so I wanted to check it against his calendar, to make sure. But I couldn't find it anywhere on his desk, his calendar, so I started looking through the drawers, and that was when I found the letters, at the back of the middle drawer to the right of the kneehole, buried under a stack of papers.

I wanted him dead.

I read the letters, and I went directly to the wall safe, and opened it, and took out the gun, and loaded it. We kept it unloaded, because of the children. The box of cartridges was in the safe, with the gun. I loaded the gun, and then I went upstairs to dress.

I dressed for expediency. Nothing else. I wasn't thinking of any kind of disguise, I had no thought of getting away with it, I just didn't give a damn. I merely wanted him dead. So I dressed for ease of movement. Baggy blue jeans I used when I was gardening, a T-shirt, white socks and Reeboks, my hair up under Lyle's baseball cap so it wouldn't fly all over my face, wouldn't get in my eyes when it came time to shoot him. I put on a ski parka when I left the house. We used to ski a lot before the children were born. The gun was in the right hand pocket of the parka.

I took a taxi up to the Hall. I walked right in, nobody there to stop me, you'd think after all this terrorist stuff there'd be people frisking me or something. But no. I walked right in with the gun in my pocket. I opened the door at the back of the auditorium, opened it just enough so I could look in. He was onstage with a lot of other people, Alan Pierce, Josh Coogan, some other people I didn't know. I closed the door and came around the side of the auditorium, to where there were a lot of offices and a corridor running between them. I went down the corridor almost to the end of it, and then opened a door that led to the stage.

My heart was beating very fast.

I opened the door and found myself in this backstage area, the wings I guess you'd call them, looking out at the stage. It was very dark where I was standing. There was no one around. Everyone was onstage, calling directions and adjusting lights and what not. Alan told Lester to go off left and then walk toward the podium so they could make sure the follow spot was on him, something like that. I took the gun out of my pocket.

Alan said Okay, start your cross, and Lester stepped out of the wings on the other side of the stage and began moving toward the center of the stage, this bright light on him, it was as if they were illuminating him for me, so I could kill him, the son of a bitch.

My hand was shaking.

When he reached the podium, I shot him.

I fired six times. I don't think all of my shots got him. But I saw him falling, and I could see blood all over his pink sweater, so I figured I had got him good. Then everyone started screaming and yelling. I turned and ran.

That was the first time I had even a notion of survival. Of getting away.

Before then, I'd only wanted him dead.

I could hear yelling behind me.

I kept running.

There was a corridor with an
EXIT
sign at the end of it. I was heading for the door under it, when someone came out of an office at the end of the hall, a woman, and I turned and started running in the opposite direction again, back toward the stage. But there were voices ahead of me now, coming off the stage, so I opened the nearest door and went in whatever it was, I didn't know what it was, I was just trying to hide.

The room was dark except for faint daylight coming through a narrow window at the far end. I could hear people running by outside, shouting. In the dim light, I saw urinals. I was in a men's room. I ducked into one of the stalls just as someone cracked open the door. Anyone in here? a man's voice yelled. I held my breath. The room was dark, the light from the window filtered. Where's the fuckin light switch? the man asked himself. Silence. I heard him fumbling around on the wall. Then he asked Anyone in here? again, and muttered something, and closed the door, and was gone. I heard more running outside, voices passing by, fading. I waited.

I didn't know where to go. I wanted to cry. I had killed him, and now I wanted to cry. Not because he was dead, the son of a bitch. But because they would catch me and put me in prison forever. The children, I thought. I kept still in the dark, terrified that the man would come back and put on the light this time, and search the room, and find me, and take me away.

I don't know how long I waited there in the dark, in the stall. At last, I came out of the stall and stood still, listening in the dark, for several moments. Then I went to the window. It was open a crack, just some three or four inches. I opened it all the way. I was looking out onto what seemed to be an airshaft, the sky far above, a narrow paved passageway below. I climbed up and over the sill and dropped to my feet on the other side. The passageway ran behind the building for the entire width of it. I ran down it, enclosed by walls on either side of me, and saw another window on the far wall. This one was open just a little bit, too. I reached up, and opened it all the way. Then I hoisted myself up and climbed into what I realized was another men's room, a smaller one this time, just two stalls, and a single urinal, and some sinks.

The lights were on.

A man was in one of the stalls.

I heard him coughing, and then I heard the toilet flushing.

I ran for the door at the other end of the room, opposite the sinks.

I opened the door, and stepped out into a long corridor. I was on the stage-left side of the auditorium. A door painted red was immediately to my left. An illuminated
EXIT
sign was above it. I opened the door and went out into an alley. Sunlight struck my eyes. I dropped the gun down a drainage sewer near the wall, and began running.

An old bum in army fatigues was just stepping into the alley at the far end.

I almost knocked him off his feet.

He said, Hey!

That was all he said.

Hey.

After I'd just killed a man.

 

THEY ASKED HER
if there was anything she wished to change or add to her confession. She said No. They asked her to sign it, and handed her a pen.

She signed it.

It was all over but the shooting.

 

AT MIDNIGHT
that Tuesday, they came into the basement simultaneously, the six detectives in Kevlar vests, and the three men wearing ski masks. It would have been a regular traffic jam if Emilio and Aine had also showed up at the stroke of midnight, but at that very moment they were just coming around the corner to 3211 Culver. When they heard the shooting start, they almost turned and ran in the opposite direction.

It was Rosita's goons who started shooting first.

They did not know in which direction to turn. It was as if the Northern Alliance were coming down the stairs from the ground floor, and the Pashtun were breaking in the door from the back yard. Everybody had guns. Somebody was bound to get hurt. The goons figured it wasn't going to be them. So they started shooting.

They took out the three men in the ski masks first.

They were easy marks, these three. They came down the steps one after the other, in single file. You shot the first guy in the row, he fell over and gave you a clear shot at the second one, and so on till all three of them were lying on the steps bleeding from a dozen holes, one of them between the eyes of the first guy's ski mask.

The guys in the Kevlar vests were another matter.

To begin with, they came in following the business end of a battering ram that sent wood from the door flying all over the place. And they were all six of them carrying assault rifles.

Rosita's goons—Rosita herself, for that matter—recognized the weapons as AR-15s, heavy Colt carbines that could tear off a man's head. As the goons turned toward the door, one of the guys coming in yelled, “Police! Hold it right there!”

The guy was a woman.

The goons had no qualms about shooting a woman, police detective or not. It was only the AR-15 assault rifles that gave them pause.

The pause was all the team needed.

They swarmed over the room like fire ants, yelling and swearing, and snapping on handcuffs, and telling anyone in sight that he, or she in Rosita's case, was under arrest. Parker picked up the suitcase with the hundred and fifty keys of coke in it.

“Better file a report on that,” Eileen reminded him.

He shot her a dirty look.

As if he would ever
not
file a report.

 

EMILIO AND AINE
huddled in the shadows near the building.

There were police cars angled into the curb now, their dome lights blinking. There were unmarked cars as well. It looked like the whole police department was here. The guy they'd seen in Shanahan's last night came out carrying a suitcase. Livvie came out behind a woman in handcuffs. There were other detectives with assault rifles. This had to be a big bust.

As Emilio took a step forward, Aine put her hand on his arm, trying to stop him. He shook it off.

“Detective?” he said.

Eileen Burke turned.

“Yes?”

“Don't worry about your report,” he said, and winked.

“What?”

“I burned it,” he said. “The bad guys won't ever see it.”

“What?” she said again.

“But you don't have to worry. I memorized it,” he said, not realizing that in that moment he became one of a long line of traditional storytellers.

Eileen still didn't know what he was talking about.

Just then, Rosita made a sudden move as if to run. Eileen grabbed her by the arm, and said, “Don't get any ideas, sister,” and shoved her toward one of the cars at the curb.

Emilio's only regret was that he would never know how she'd got out of that damn basement.