Blindsight

9

“Not bad,” Tony said. He and Angelo were just leaving an all-night pizza joint on Forty-second Street near Times Square. “I was surprised. The place looked like such a dump.”

Angelo didn’t answer. His mind was already on the job that lay ahead.

When they arrived at the parking garage, Angelo nodded toward his Town Car. The garage owner, Lenny Helman, paid money to Cerino. Since Angelo usually collected it, he parked for free.

“Better not have scratched the car,” Angelo said after the attendant drove the car up to the curb. Once he was satisfied there wasn’t a mark on its highly polished surface, Angelo got in. Tony did the same. They pulled out onto Forty-second Street.

“What’s next?” Tony asked, sitting sideways so he could look directly at Angelo. The light from the glittering neon marquees of the neighborhood movie theaters played over Angelo’s gaunt face, making him look like an unraveled mummy in a museum.

“We’re going to switch to the “demand’ list,” Angelo told him.

“Great,” Tony said with enthusiasm. “I’m getting tired of the other. Where to?”

“Eighty-sixth,” Angelo said. “Near the Metropolitan Museum.”

“Good neighborhood,” Tony said. “I’ll bet there’ll be souvenirs for the taking.”

“I don’t feel good about it,” Angelo said. “Wealthy neighborhood means fancy alarms.”

“You handle all that stuff like a breeze,” Tony said.

“Things have been going a little too well,” Angelo said. “I’m starting to get concerned.”

“You worry too much,” Tony said with a laugh. “The reason things have been going so well is because we know what we’re doing. And the more we do it, the better we get. It’s the same thing with everything.”

“Screw-ups happen,” Angelo said. “No matter how much you prepare. We have to expect it. And be able to handle it when it does.”

“Ah, you’re just a pessimist,” Tony said.

Engrossed in their banter, neither Tony nor Angelo took note of a black Cadillac cruising two cars behind them. At the wheel, a relaxed Franco Ponti was enjoying a tape of Aida. Thanks to a tip from a contact in the Times Square area, Franco had been tailing Angelo and Tony since their stop at the pizza place.

“Which one are we doing?” Tony asked.

“The woman,” Angelo said.

“Whose turn?” Tony asked. He knew Angelo was due but hoped he might have forgotten.

“I don’t give a damn,” Angelo said. “You can do her. I’ll watch the man.”

Angelo drove by the brownstone several times before parking. It was five stories tall with a double door at the top of a short flight of granite steps. Beneath the stoop at the ground level was another door.

“The service entrance is probably the way to go,” Angelo said. “We’ll be a little shielded by the stoop. I can see there’s an alarm, but if it’s the kind I think it is, it won’t be a problem.”

“You’re the boss,” Tony said. He took his gun out and attached the silencer.

They parked almost a block away and walked back. Angelo carried a small flight bag full of tools. When they got to the house, Angelo told Tony to wait on the sidewalk and let him know if anyone was coming. Angelo descended the few steps to the service entrance door.

Tony kept an eye out, but the street was quiet. No one was in sight. What Tony didn’t see was Franco Ponti parked only a few doors down, blocking a driveway.

“All right,” Angelo whispered from the shadows of the service entrance. “Come on.”

They entered a long hallway, moving quickly to the stairs. There was an elevator but they knew better than to use it. Taking two steps at a time, they climbed to the first floor and listened. Save for a large antique clock ticking loudly in the dark, the house was quiet.

“Can you imagine living in a place like this?” Tony whispered. “It’s like a palace.”

“Shut up,” Angelo snapped.

They continued upstairs, climbing a curving, double staircase that circled a chandelier Tony guessed was six feet across. On the second floor they peered into a series of sitting rooms, a library, and a den. On the third floor they hit pay dirt: the master bedroom.

Angelo stood to one side of the double doors that no doubt led to the master suite. Tony took the other side. Both men had their guns drawn. Their silencers were attached.

Angelo slowly turned the door handle and pushed the door in. The room was larger than any bedroom either of them had ever seen. On the far wall-which seemed very far to Angelo-stood a massive canopied bed.

Angelo stepped into the room, motioning for Tony to follow. He went to the right side of the bed, where the man was sleeping. Tony went to the other side. Angelo nodded. Tony extended his gun while Angelo did the same.

Tony’s gun went off with its familiar hissing thump and the woman recoiled. The man must have been a light sleeper. No sooner had the shot gone off than he sat bolt upright, eyes wide. Angelo shot him before he had a chance to say a word. He toppled over toward his wife.

“Oh, no!” Angelo said out loud.

“What’s the matter?” Tony questioned.

Using the tip of the silencer, Angelo reached over and separated the fingers of the dying man. Clutched in his hand was a small plastic device with a button.

“He had a goddamn alarm,” Angelo said.

“What does that mean?” Tony asked.

“It means we have to get the hell out of here,” Angelo said. “Come on.”

Moving as quickly as they could in the semidarkness, they ran down the stairs. Rounding the bend onto the first floor, they practically ran into a housekeeper who was on her way up.

The housekeeper screamed, turned, and fled back down the way she’d come. Tony fired his Bantam, but at distances greater than six feet, his gun wasn’t accurate. The slug missed the housekeeper, shattering a large gold-framed mirror instead.

“We have to get her,” Angelo said, knowing that the woman had gotten a good look at them. He threw himself down the stairs, the flight bag bouncing its shoulder straps.

Reaching the bottom, he skidded on the marble strewn with shards of mirror. Regaining his footing, he hurled himself down the first-floor hallway toward the back of the house. Ahead he could see the woman struggling to open a pair of French doors leading to the backyard.

Before he could catch her, she was out the door, pulling it closed behind her. Angelo got there just seconds behind her. Tony was right behind him. They ran out after her only to trip on a pair of garden chairs they couldn’t see in the dark.

Angelo peered into the darkness. The backyard could have passed for a public park. There was a rectangular reflecting pool in the center of the space. To the right was an ivy-covered gazebo that was lost in shadow. A thick oak had a swing hanging from a broad branch. Nowhere could Angelo spot the woman.

“Where did she go?” Tony whispered.

“If I knew would I be standing here?” Angelo said. “You go that way and I’ll go this way.” He pointed to either side of the pool.

The two men groped their way around the garden. They strained to look into the dark recesses of the ferns and shrubbery.

“There she is!” Tony said, pointing back at the house.

Angelo fired two shots at the fleeing woman. The first bullet shattered the glass of the French doors. After the second, he saw the woman stumble and fall.

“You got her!” Tony cried.

“Let’s get out of here,” Angelo said. He could hear sirens in the distance. It was hard to be sure, but they seemed to be approaching.

Not wanting to risk coming out of the front of the house, Angelo turned to the back wall of the garden. Spotting a door on the far side of the pond, he yelled, “Come on!” to Tony. Angelo reached the door first. He unbolted the dead bolt securing the door and rushed into a debris-strewn alleyway. They made their way down the darkened path, trying each garden door they passed. Tony finally found one with nearly rotten planking and broke through.

The garden they found themselves in seemed as neglected as the door.

“Now what?” Tony said.

“That way,” Angelo said. He pointed to a dark passageway leading toward the front of the house. At the end of the passageway they came to a bolted door, but it was bolted from the inside. Passing through it, they found themselves on Eighty-fifth Street.

Angelo brushed off his clothes. Tony followed his example. “Okay,” said Angelo. “Now be cool, confident, relaxed.”

The pair walked slowly down the street and around the corner as if they called the neighborhood home. Slowly they made their way to Angelo’s car. The sirens had indeed been heading for the brownstone they’d just left. Ahead they could see three squad cars with emergency lights flashing, blocking the street in front of the house where they’d made the hit.

Angelo unlocked his car doors with a remote control and the two men climbed in.

“That was awesome!” Tony said excitedly once they were a half dozen blocks away. “That was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Angelo scowled at him. “It was a disaster,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Tony questioned. “We got away. No problem. And you got the housekeeper. You dropped her right in her tracks.”

“But we didn’t check her,” Angelo said. “How do I know if I really got her or just winged her? We should have checked her. She looked directly at both of us.”

“She dropped quickly,” Tony said. “I think you hit her real good.”

“This is what I mean: screw-ups happen. How would we have guessed the guy would sleep holding a panic-button alarm?” Angelo was glad he had the wheel to grip; his hands were shaking.

“Okay, so we got the “bad luck’ hit out of the way,” Tony said. “Now you can’t say that things are going too well. What’s next?”

“I’m not sure,” Angelo said. “Maybe we should call it a night.”

“What for?” Tony questioned. “The night is young. Come on! Let’s at least do one more. We can’t pass up this kind of money.”

Angelo thought for a minute. Intuition told him to call it a night, but Tony was right. The money was good. Besides, hits were like riding horses: you fall off, you get back on. Otherwise you may never ride again.

“All right,” he said finally. “We’ll do one more.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Tony said. “Where to?”

“Down in the Village. Another town house.”

Angelo took the Ninety-seventh Street transverse across Central Park and got on the Henry Hudson Parkway.

For a while they didn’t talk. Each was recovering from the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum: Angelo from fear and anxiety and Tony from pure exhilaration. Neither noticed the black Cadillac in the distance.

“It will be up here on the left,” Angelo said once they turned onto Bleecker Street. He pointed to a three-story town house with a lion’s head knocker on the front door. Tony nodded as they drove past.

Angelo felt his pulse start quickening. “It’s the man this time,” he said. “Same plan as before. You do him, I’ll cover the wife.”

“Got it,” Tony said, thrilled to have yet another turn.

This time Angelo parked farther away than usual. They walked back in silence except for the occasional clank of tools in Angelo’s flight bag. They passed a few pedestrians.

The streets weren’t empty as they had been uptown; the Village was always livelier than the Upper East Side.

The alarm at the targeted house was child’s play for Angelo. Within minutes he and Tony were tiptoeing up the creaking stairs.

Conveniently, there was a small night-light plugged into a socket in the upstairs hall. The rosy glow it cast was just enough to see by.

The first door Angelo tried proved to be an empty guest room. Since there was only one other door on the floor, he assumed it was to the master suite.

Once again the two men positioned themselves on either side of the door, holding their guns alongside their heads. Angelo turned the knob and briskly pushed open the door.

Angelo managed one step into the room when a snarling dog sprang at him in the half-light. The beast’s paws hit him in the chest, knocking him back through the door to the opposite wall of the hall. The dog snapped at him, biting through his jacket, shirt, and even a bit of his skin. Angelo wasn’t sure, but he thought it was a Doberman. It was too long and lean for a pit bull, although it certainly had the temperament. Whatever it was, it had Angelo terrorized and effectively pinned.

Tony moved quickly. He stepped to the side and shot the dog from point-blank range in the chest. He was sure he’d hit his mark, but the dog didn’t flinch. With a snarl he ripped another large patch of cloth out of Angelo’s jacket and spit it out. Then he lunged for another bite.

Tony waited until he had a clear shot before pulling the trigger again. This time he hit the dog in the head, and the animal went instantly limp, hitting the floor with a solid thud.

A woman’s scream sent new chills down Angelo’s spine. The woman of the house had awakened just in time to see her dog slaughtered. She was standing a few feet from the foot of her bed, her face contorted in horror.

Tony raised his gun, and again there was a hissing thump. The woman’s scream was cut short. Her hand went to her chest. Pulling her hand away, she looked at the spot of blood. Her facial expression was one of bewilderment, as if she could not believe she’d been shot.

Tony stepped over the threshold into the bedroom. Raising his gun again, he shot her at point-blank range in the center of her forehead. Like the dog, she collapsed instantly in a heap on the floor.

Angelo started to speak, but before he could say anything, there was a frightful yell from the first floor as the husband charged up the stairs with a double-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun. He held the gun in both hands at waist height.

Sensing what was about to happen, Angelo threw himself onto the floor just as the shotgun discharged with a powerful concussion. In the confined area the sound was horrendous, making Angelo’s ears ring. The concentrated buckshot blew a hole twelve inches in diameter in the wall where Angelo had been standing.

Even Tony had to react by reflex, throwing himself to the side to avoid the open bedroom doorway. The second blast of the shotgun traveled the length of the bedroom and blew out one of the rear windows.

From his position on the floor, Angelo fired his Walther twice in rapid succession, hitting the husband in the chest and the chin. The force of the bullets stopped the man’s forward momentum. Then, in a kind of slow motion he tipped backward. With a terrible racket he fell down the stairs and ended up on the floor below.

Tony reappeared from the bedroom and ran down the stairs to put an additional bullet into the fallen man’s head. Angelo picked himself and his flight bag off the floor. He was shaking. He’d never come so close to death. Rushing down the stairs on shaky legs, he told Tony that they had to get the hell out of there.

When they got to the front door, Angelo stood on his tiptoes to look out. What he saw he didn’t like. There was a handful of people gathered in front of the building, gazing up at its facade. No doubt they’d heard glass smash when the bedroom window was blown out. Maybe they’d heard both shotgun blasts.

“Out the back!” Angelo said. He knew they couldn’t risk a confrontation with this crowd. They easily scaled the chain-link fence in the backyard. There wasn’t even any barbed wire at the top to worry about. Once they made it over, they went through a neighboring backyard and through to another street. Angelo was glad he’d parked as far away as he had. They made it to his car without incident. Sirens started in the distance just as they were pulling away.

“What the hell kind of dog was that?” Tony asked as they cruised up Sixth Avenue.

“I think it was a Doberman,” Angelo said. “It scared the life out of me.”

“You and me both,” Tony agreed. “And that shotgun. That was close.”

“Too close. We should have called it quits after the first job.” Angelo shook his head in disgust. “Maybe I’m getting too old for this stuff.”

“No way,” Tony said. “You’re the best.”

“I used to think so,” Angelo said. He glanced down at his tattered Brioni jacket in despair. By force of habit he glanced in the rearview mirror, but nothing he saw worried him. Of course, he was looking for cop cars, not Franco Ponti’s sedan, which was pursuing them at a discreet distance.