Authors: Michael Kerr
Crying out, he reared up, bathed in sweat. It was as dark and quiet as a crypt. The panic ran its course and subsided, to be replaced by a searing anger. Purpose overcame all other emotions. Santini and his paid assassin were going down for what they had done. Tom was right, he was too close to the case. It was in his face; personal business. Only revenge would extinguish the fire that raged in his soul. And if he got his hands on the cop who’d sold them out, then he didn’t think he would be able to stop himself from ripping the no good bastard’s heart out with his bare hands.
DOMINIC
Santini was seated behind an oversize solid oak desk in his father’s office on the top floor of Rocco’s. His loafer-clad feet were up on the leather-bound blotter, ankles crossed. The room looked to be a throwback to Victorian times; dark, panelled walls that matched the desk. And opaque glass-masked wall lights, their glow a dull ivory creating soft-edged shadows that melted to black at the room’s edges.
Rocco’s was a private gambling club off Wardour Street. The haunt of high-rollers. There were suites for the serious players, for whom booze, nose candy and even female or male company was laid on gratis, should they wish to partake. Inside, the club was as lavish as many of the joints on the Strip in Vegas; a magnet to both serious players and well-heeled celebrities visiting the capital.
In the foyer – hung pride of place – was a poster-size photograph of Frank, pallying up to his namesake, Sinatra, who had played the tables for a couple of hours one evening back in the early eighties, after a gig at the New Festival Hall.
The interior of Rocco’s was done in an Italianate motif, with gilded chandeliers and ornamentation. Frank had spared no expense to impress.
“I got the cop here,” Eddie Costello said into the intercom on the outside of the office door.
Dom pressed a button on the console in front of him. Detective Inspector Victor Pender entered nervously, with Eddie behind him.
Take a load off, Vic,” Dom said, sitting up and placing his feet on the floor, nodding to the dark green upholstered chair facing him.
“I don’t like this, Dom. What if someone saw me come up here?” Vic said, lowering himself onto the edge of the seat, feeling as uncomfortable as he looked.
Dom’s smile resembled an animal’s snarl. “What you do or don’t like counts for shit, Vic. If I snap my fingers, you jump. That’s the way it is, so don’t whine.”
“Your father
¯”
“My father owns your chickenshit arse, Pender, which means I do, too.”
Vic’s head dropped and his shoulders slumped. He sighed audibly, and then waited to be told why he had been summoned.
“That’s better, Vic. You gotta get a philosophy. Realise that you reap what you sow in life,” Dom said, motioning for Eddie to get them a drink from the well-stocked corner bar.
“So what’s the problem?” Vic asked, taking the proffered Scotch from Santini junior’s goon.
“You tell me. Because I hear that the cop who survived when Lester was creamed isn’t going to leave it alone. And that the woman from next door to the safe house is also pulling through.”
Vic fidgeted, pulled at the knees of his trousers. Shuffled his feet. “There’s no sweat, Dom, believe me. The cop, Barnes, is out of the loop, and he’s hurting. He lost a kidney and can’t walk without a crutch. He got a look at a baseball cap and a gun. There’s no way he can identify the shooter.”
“And the woman?”
“She’s cabbaged. They moved her to a private clinic, but she doesn’t even know her own name. She’s a pot noodle.”
“Okay, Vic, stay on top of it. If this...Barnes saw more than you say, then he gets to lose his other kidney. So keep him out of it, or order a wreath.”
“I’m not his boss. I
¯”
“Don’t start getting fucking negative, Vic. Just use your limited initiative,” Dom said, putting his glass down and standing up to signal that the meeting was at an end. “Why don’t you go and relax...Play a little roulette? Eddie will organise a few chips to set you up. Have some fun.”
Vic went downstairs, but didn’t take Dom up on his offer. He walked through the casino, ignoring the sound of dice being thrown, the ball careering around a roulette wheel, and the non-stop metallic clunks of fruit machines being worked. The allure of all this shit was the reason he had become bought and paid for by Frank Santini in the first place.
Walking out onto Wardour Street, he moved quickly away from the club, head down, staying close to the buildings and praying that no one he knew spotted him.
Just a slight, nondescript looking man, Vic Pender was in a hole that he couldn’t climb, buy or talk his way out of. He had somehow run up a marker for forty grand at another West End club as he tried to play his way out of debt with the dumbfuck optimism that always keeps gamblers coming back to the well for more heartache.
Stopping in shadow, Vic lit a cigarette with shaking hands as he recalled the night his life had changed forever. He had parked the car in the drive of his semi at Feltham, opened the garage and been braced by two thugs who appeared from nowhere to push him inside and pull down the up-and-over door. That was when he was read the gospel according to St Francis Mario Santini.
“Say your prayers, copper,” Eddie Costello had said, pressing the muzzle of a gun to his temple as the other gorilla gripped him by the neck and forced him to his knees.
Vic still had nightmares in which he heard the crisp metallic click as Eddie pulled the trigger on an empty chamber, and the resulting laughter of the two greaseballs as a stain spread out on the front of his pants.
“Here’s how it is, Pender,” Eddie had said. “Mr. Santini bought your marker, so you now owe him forty big ones, plus interest. Call in Rocco’s tomorrow at noon, and Mr. S will see what he can do to help you straighten things out.”
Christ, how had it come to this? He’d gone to the club as instructed. Been told by Santini that for just a little intel here and there, he could soon wipe out the debt. And that was it; he’d stepped over what had always been a hard line, and got in way too deep. Had even given up Joey Demaris to clear the books and get out from under the cosh. But that had just been the beginning. Frank Santini had made it clear that it was in Vic’s best interest to stay on the winning side.
“If I go down, you go down harder,” Frank said at the dockland warehouse where Vic had been taken to witness the demise of the undercover cop he had sold out.
He had openly wept as Joey – his mouth taped and arms bound – looked at him, accusation mingling with fear in eyes that were little more than slits in bruised, torn and swollen flesh.
Vic had watched, mortified, as the young cop was beaten to a bloody pulp by four men wearing overalls and wielding pickaxe handles.
It had been Dominic who had performed the coup de gráce, cutting Joey’s throat, even though his multiple injuries had rendered him unconscious.
“Now you’ve been blooded, so to speak,” Frank had said. “This is what happens to anyone who acts against me in word or deed. I want you to know that you work for me now, Victor. You’re in up to your traitorous fuckin’ neck. And if you get noble and try to do the right thing, just remember tonight. What happened to this piece of garbage can happen to your wife, daughter, and everyone you care about. Capite cosa intendo?”
Oh, yeah, Vic understood all too well. Only by feeding Santini with any intelligence that might harm the organisation, would he be able to keep his family alive and his arse out of prison, which was not a place a cop wanted it to be. Suicide was an option he had considered at least once every day, though he did not possess the strength of character to do what he believed would be the right thing. It would be a pointless exercise. He couldn’t even leave incriminating evidence behind to bring the gangster down. His family would only be victimised by proxy. There was no way out of the shit-pile he’d jumped into.
Dom poured another Scotch and smiled as he looked at the framed photographs that graced the walls of his father’s office. It was a gallery of Frank’s heroes, featuring: Caruso and Lanza, who Frank said were singers, not crooners like Como, Bennett, Martin, and a host of other Italian Americans, Including Francis Albert. There was also a signed promotional shot of Rocky Marciano, who Santini senior proclaimed to have been the best fighter to ever climb into the ring. Maybe he hadn’t had the footwork or finesse of an Ali, Frank would opine, but he came out swinging with a killer instinct, and did the business, every time. Another wall could have been out-of-date mug shots of the FBI’s Most Wanted: Al Capone, his cousin Joe Fischetti, Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Sam Giancana, Frank Nitti, and Benny Siegal, the New York gangster who had contracted hits for Murder Incorporated, and had turned the dusty, one-horse desert town of Las Vegas into a glittering, glamorous and hedonistic gambling capital; a money pit with no equal, that had laundered vast sums of dirty green for the mob.
Dom stood up and checked himself out in a full-length mirror. Damn, he looked good! Only the slightly thinning hair dismayed him. He was a victim of hereditary male pattern baldness, and supposed that at thirty-eight it could be worse, which gave him little comfort. One thing he wouldn’t do was wear a rug. It would be better to wear his hair ultra short than succumb to the vanity that his father had fallen prey to. Frank’s toupee was a joke. At the moment, Dom chose to keep his hair long, tied back in a ponytail. He turned to look at his profile, admired the diamond that graced his left earlobe (a rock that any woman would give a lot to have on her finger), and smiled at his reflection, pleased with the strong, handsome image. Dom was six foot three, and had shoulders so broad that his head looked a little on the small side for his body. He still pushed weights, did not smoke, or do drugs...to excess. He drank in moderation, and required – needed – sex at least once every twenty-four hours, preferring to use the high-class whores owned by the organisation, than to form relationships. Women in general expected to be taken out and pampered, which was too much like hard work. He didn’t confuse lust and love. The working girls knew the score and were paid well for their services. He did not have demands made of him by anyone, with the exception of his father.
“Eddie, I don’t like the idea of that injured cop or the woman being able to finger the hitter,” Dom said when his aide returned from downstairs. “Check them out and get back to me with the story of their lives. Then I’ll decide whether we have a problem, or if there’s enough leverage to shut them up. If they don’t have the sense to quit while they’re ahead, then we’ll vanish them.”
“The shooter was sloppy, Dom,” Eddie said. “I thought he came highly recommended?”
“He’s a pro, Eddie. He did the job at short notice and got that creep, Little. Leaving witnesses was an oversight that proves he’s human. Maybe I’ll get him to clean up his own leftovers. I’ll sleep on it. In the meantime, tell Courtney to get her cute little arse up to my suite in thirty minutes.”
Eddie grinned. “You got it, boss.
Dom nodded. “Yeah, Eddie, I have.”
IT
was ten o’ clock the next morning when Tom knocked at Matt’s door and waited; knowing that in his present condition it would take his DI a while to hobble through the house.
“I just put the coffee on” Matt said, opening the door, then turning awkwardly to make his way back to the kitchen.
“All you need is a bloody parrot on your shoulder,” quipped Tom, closing the door and following him, with the image of Long John Silver coming to mind as Matt clumped along the hall under crutch power.
Matt took a seat as Tom placed a carrier bag on the table, and then went to pour the coffee.
“What’s in the bag?” Matt asked.
“Take a look. It isn’t grapes or Lucozade.”
Matt reached into the bag and withdrew a nine millimetre Beretta and shoulder rig. “Thanks, Tom,” he said. “I feel safer already.”
“Sign for it,” Tom said, putting the mugs of coffee on the table and pulling a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket. “And let’s hope to Christ you don’t have to use it.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Matt said, picking up his mug and taking a sip of the steaming black liquid. “What about the rogue cop? Anything?”
“No. There’s no one involved who stands out. We had a close look at one of Vic Pender’s DC’s, Mike Vernon. He moved into a five hundred grand mock Tudor gaff at Chingford recently, but it was left to him. His mother checked out and he was the sole beneficiary.”
“What have you done about the other cop you’ve got on the inside? He’s on borrowed time if we’ve got a leak, which I know we have.”
“He’s safe. Or as safe as anyone under deep cover can be. He’s from outside the Met, and only his handler knows his real ID, and is in contact with him.”
“You?”
“Yeah. After Joey Demaris went missing, I decided that anyone on the inside needed total anonymity.”
There was a knock at the door.
“That’ll be Dick Curtis,” Tom said, getting up and going to answer it.
Dick was an artist on a retainer, who could work-up a near perfect likeness from a description. He spent the best part of an hour drinking copious amounts of coffee as he attempted to capture on paper the fleeting glance of the killer from Matt’s memory.
Matt nodded, studying the finished pencil portrait of a thin-faced young man with black, menacing eyes and sharp features. “That’s good, Dick. His chin was maybe a touch firmer, though.”
Dick quickly erased and redrew.
“That’s who I saw,” Matt said, grinning, amazed at the artist’s ability.
“Pity he was wearing a baseball cap,” Dick said.
Tom had been on the phone. He closed it. “We’ll soon get to see how good it is,” he said, giving the sketch a hard look. “I just checked in with the cop at the clinic. The Page woman came out of it. She’s got her memory back, but they had to sedate her when she was told that her husband didn’t make it . When she’s able, we should get a lot more to work with.”
All Penny wanted when she came to, was her baby. He was brought in by her parents and she cradled him and cried for a long time. The relief and grief to know that Michael was unharmed, but that her husband had not survived the ordeal, threw up a mix of bittersweet emotions that no one who had not been there could appreciate. She was in a bad place.
The medical staff could not answer her questions. They didn’t know why she and her husband had been shot.
When Tom arrived, Penny was a willing witness; wanted to talk to him. There was no reluctance, just a need on her part to try and understand. She was both victim
and
witness, who apart from Matt, was all Tom had to run with.
“Why?” Penny asked, after waiting until her mum and dad had taken Michael out of the room.
Tom pulled one of the chairs up next to the bed and sat down before answering. “You’d seen him, Mrs. Page. May I call you Penny? I’m Detective Chief Inspector Tom Bartlett...Tom.”
Her shoulders hiked a little, as if to say that she didn’t give a damn what he called her. She just wanted an explanation. Tom knew that whatever he said would be woefully inadequate.
Penny looked down to where her hands were clasped on top of the blanket, but not still. Nerves seemed to have given them a life of their own; her fingers began to clench and unclench independent of any conscious control.
Tom waited, not forcing the issue.
“He said he wouldn’t harm us if we did exactly as we were told and promised not to say anything,” Penny said, looking up with disbelief in her eyes, tears running down her cheeks as she spoke in a still, small voice.
“I’m sorry, Penny. He was lying to you. After he left your house, he shot six other people, and only one survived.”
“What brought him to our house? Why were we involved?”
Tom saw anger forming in the expression on her drawn face, and in the accusatory look in her sunken eyes. There was a new edge, a trace of steel in her voice. She wanted, needed someone to blame, to vent her wrath on. Tom sensed that he was going to be the sacrificial cow, like it or not.
“A witness who was due to appear in court was being protected by officers in the bungalow next door to your house,” he said, having made the decision to give her all the information he could, barring names. “Someone found out where he was and sent a professional to kill him.”
Penny sat up straight, hands now fisted, her whole body trembling. “You put innocent people in danger, and...and Jerry died.”
“I can’t alter what happened, Penny. All we can do, with your help, is find the man who did it and put him away for life.”
Penny blinked her eyes and swallowed hard. Her throat hurt with the effort it was taking not to break down. “Are Michael and I safe from him, now?” she asked.
“You want the truth, Penny?”
She nodded.
“He attempted to kill you because you could describe him. I can’t tell you that he won’t try to finish the job. He’ll still regard you as a threat.”
“So until he’s caught, my son and I are in danger?”
“I doubt it, but we have to assume that you are. That’s why we moved you to a private clinic. And why there’s an armed officer outside the door, and others in the building.”
“Weren’t the officers in the bungalow armed?”
She was distraught, but not to a point that prevented her from rationalising the situation.
“Yes,” Tom conceded. “So you can appreciate we need all the help you can give us. Anything you can tell me that might help us to track him down.”
Penny licked her lips. Her mouth was dry as tinder. Tom got up and poured water from a jug on the locker next to the bed into a plastic tumbler and handed it to her. She took small, birdlike sips. Her hands shook, and water splashed out over the rim.
“I’ll tell you everything I can,” she said.
“Thanks, Penny,” Tom said, bending down to take a small recorder from his briefcase. “I need to tape it. I don’t do shorthand or try to commit statements to memory. And with your permission, I want another officer to be present. He’s the one that survived the shooting and got a glimpse of the man who did it.”
“Okay,” she whispered. There was no resistance in her demeanour. She
wanted
to talk; to attempt to expunge some of the locked-in horror.
It took Tom all of his willpower not to lean forward and hold Penny Page in his arms. He wished that he could absorb some of the deep and poignant distress and pain she was suffering. For a second, he saw her not as a mother and newly grieving widow, but as a little girl; an orphan, lost, frightened and dazed by the accumulation of events that had led to her present predicament.
Tom went to the door, opened it a few inches and nodded to Matt, who was talking to an armed cop, Bo Silver, known as Boris the Spider from the Who’s old sixties hit, because he was quick, and a little creepy.
Matt held Penny’s hand firmly for a few seconds as Tom introduced them. He didn’t offer his condolences, just exchanged looks that spoke volumes. Words could sound so lame and empty, even when well meant and sincerely voiced.
Penny saw the mental and physical pain in the cop’s eyes. His set expression could not hide the underlying emotions emanating from him in unseen waves.
“You were shot,” she stated, watching him as he carefully, awkwardly lowered himself into a sitting position.
“Yeah, but I’m paid to take risks. You and your family shouldn’t have been in the firing line.”
“He enjoyed it,” Penny said, when Tom had set the tape running. She told them everything, pausing several times to regain her composure. “He said he killed people for a living. But that wasn’t the truth. He does it because it gives him pleasure. He was...was feeding off our fear.”
“Can you describe him?” Tom asked.
“Young. In his twenties,” Penny said, her eyes closed as she recalled his features. “He was the same height as Jerry...five-nine. And he was slim, but looked strong. His hair was light brown, receding at the temples. And his eyes were black, somehow not human. I had the feeling he was...crazy
She gave a full account of everything the intruder had said and done. Of how he had wanted to know when Becks, their dog, was taken for walks; of his changing moods. Of the fact that one minute he could be pleasant and friendly, and the next, threatening and violent.
Tom showed her the sketch.
Penny physically shied away from it. Tom could have been holding up a live cobra in front of her.
“That...that’s him. And the New York baseball cap is Jerry’s.”
“Did Jerry own a red jacket?” Matt asked. It pained him to hear Penny talking about her husband in the present tense, as though he was still alive. It would take a long time for her to accept that he was no longer among the living.
“A fleece. He has a red fleece. Why?”
“The killer was wearing the cap and fleece when I saw him.”
“Why would he do that?”
Matt wasn’t prepared to hold anything back. She deserved the full picture. “There were two cops in a van outside the bungalow. I believe he wore Jerry’s stuff to get near to them without causing any alarm. They would have seen him leave the house with the dog and not given him a second look.”
“Did he...?”
“Yes, Penny. He shot them both before entering the bungalow. We have a lot of people going through what you’re having to face. I know that that won’t help. But what he did affected a great many lives.”
“His voice, Penny,” Tom said. “Did he have an accent?”
She shook her head. “He sounded local. Definitely a southerner.”
“Anything else?” Matt asked her. “Try and picture him, Penny. Was he wearing a ring or neck chain? Did he have a tattoo?”
“No...But he had scars on his wrists.”
“What kind of scars?”
“As if he had slashed them lots of times,” Penny said, running a finger across her own wrist repeatedly to illustrate what she meant. “Some were just white lines, but others looked fresh. There was a bandage on his left wrist. I don’t recall any jewellery. He wore a dark sweater, blue jeans, and trainers.”
There was no more.
“Okay, Penny. Thank you for going through it with us,” Tom said, before stating the time and date and turning off the tape. “And try to feel safe. No one knows where you are, apart from us and your parents. Be sure to tell them to keep your location to themselves.”
“Why does he do it?” Penny asked, looking from Tom to Matt.
Tom had no answer for her.
“You answered that yourself, Penny,” Matt said. “He enjoys it. Some people don’t need a reason to hurt others. They do it because they can, and because it fulfils some sick inner need.”
After leaving Penny’s room, Tom and Matt went to the clinic’s small cafeteria on the ground floor.
“That was more than I hoped for,” Tom said, returning from the self-service counter with two cups of coffee. “It confirms there was only one perp involved.”
Matt propped the crutch up against the wall behind the corner table, grunting as he twisted slightly and his back and side complained. “You can feed that sketch to the media,” he said. “It’ll negate any reason for the killer to try and take Penny and me out. The only threat we were, was that we’d seen him.”
“I’ll arrange a press conference when I get back, after the super is clued up. He’ll want to be the mouthpiece. The cameras love him.”
Matt pulled a face. He had no time for their boss, Jack McClane, who he considered to be a lard-arsed pen-pusher, only interested in brown-nosing to the suits on the top floor.
“I know,” Tom said. “He’s a dickhead. But he can be pointed in the right direction if things are put to him in a way that leaves him thinking it was his idea in the first place.”
“This shooter should be easy to find,” Matt said, not wanting to waste time discussing a superintendent who he thought was little more than dead weight. “We have every reason to believe he’s local. And he self mutilates. This is a head case that may have a history of mental illness, a criminal record, or both.”
Tom agreed. “I’ll have a couple of the squad run what we’ve got through the computer. His face might come up. Even if it doesn’t, someone out there will recognise him when this hits the front pages. And the scarred wrists will confirm his ID to anyone who knows him.”