Buffalo jump

CHAPTER 49

We made it to the Peace Bridge in under ten minutes, melting into the long line of cars inching toward the border. It was getting dark, and not just because the sun was finally starting to set on a long June day. Thunderclouds were building in the northwest, gunmetal blue, stacked high like rearing horses. The heat wave was nearing its end.

Neither Ryan nor I had said a word since leaving the house. My lips and throat felt dry. My eyes were burning, my left ear ringing. I couldn’t get the image of Amy Farber out of my mind. Her body on the floor, one leg draped over her fallen chair, the warmth and life gone out of her.

We cleared Canadian Customs without incident. Ryan’s gun was back in the trunk of his car, locked in its metal case, and I had nothing to declare. Absolutely nothing.

The first raindrops fell as we sped along the flat stretch of land between Fort Erie and Niagara Falls. Ryan switched on the wipers. I lowered my window a few inches and felt splatters on my face and arm and breathed in the smell of ozone. “Thank you,” I said to Ryan. “And don’t make me say what for.”

“Don’t worry. We’re pretty even.”

“How so? I still don’t know who ordered the hit on Silver. You might still have to carry it out for all we know.”

“You gave it everything,” he said. “So for that I owe you. Anything you ever need you can ask me, for the rest of your life. Or the rest of mine, anyway.”

“How long were you outside?” I asked.

“I never left. When I came around front and saw you talking to that fed-”

“How’d you know she was a fed?”

“You kidding? That car? That suit? That hair? I knew something was up but where was I going to go? After you left, I went back to the garage and kept watch. When you got back, I moved up to the kitchen door to listen in. And did what I had to do.”

“The husband’s at the movies,” I said. “That’s the only reason he didn’t get it too. He got the jitters and had to go sit in the dark until he calmed down.”

“Lucky him.”

“Some lucky. He’s going to come home and find his wife lying dead with another dead woman he’s never seen.”

“At least he’s alive.”

“Because he wasn’t man enough to stand by his wife when his nerves got bad.”

“Didn’t like him much?”

I pictured the warm, earthy woman who had let her hair go gray, confident enough in herself not to do anything about it. “I liked her more.”

Rain was slanting through the beams of our headlights. The image of one dead body lying on the floor led to another. “I wonder if Marco and the others have been found yet,” I said.

“This kind of heat, it can’t take too long.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. I’m too tired to know. Tomorrow I’ll make some calls and see what I can find out. Maybe Uncle Looch will give me the lay of the land.”

“It would help if we knew who was pulling the strings in Buffalo. Ricky Messina doesn’t strike me as management.”

Ryan eased a cigarette out of his pack and lit up. I reached for the pack. He covered it with his right hand. “Don’t,” he said. “You’ll hate yourself in the morning.”

“I’m going to anyway.”

He moved his hand and I took out a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked one since Israel. I put it between my lips and lit up and blew a stream of smoke out my window. Some people think the first cigarette you smoke after you’ve quit a long time is the best. They’re wrong. The second one is the best. The first you just have to get through without passing out or throwing up.

The rain started to fall harder, fat drops bouncing off the pavement in front of us. Ryan moved the wiper speed to double time. I took another drag off the cigarette and felt light-headed as nicotine rushed through my blood, tagging familiar receptors that whispered, Where have you been all this time?

I threw the fucking thing out the window and slept the rest of the way.

When I woke the car was at a full stop. I jerked upright in my seat, forgetting for a moment where I was. I peered out through the rain-streaked window-we were on Carlaw, north of Lakeshore-and remembered everything that had happened.

Forgetting had been better.

It was after eleven by Ryan’s dashboard clock. The rain was still coming down hard. We drove north on Carlaw, past old warehouses that had been converted into film offices and workshops that created distressed pine neo-antiques. I told Ryan which street to take over to Broadview and we came to it just south of the high-rise I called home. As we neared the front of my building, Ryan asked where he could park without being seen. I pointed to the visitors’ lot on the south side of the building.

“I need to get my guns out of the trunk,” he said. “Since I know yours is probably in a shoebox in the attic.”

“I don’t have an attic.”

“Yeah, you do. Only your steps don’t go up all the way.”

As we were pulling into the lot, I yelled, “Don’t stop!”

A dark green SUV was idling in a parking spot just past the entrance, exhaust snaking around its rear tires. The window of the passenger side was all the way down in the rain.

“Turn around! Go! Go!”

A muzzle flashed on the passenger side and our front windshield shattered, showering us with glass. Ryan didn’t need any further encouragement. He hit the gas and spun the wheel hard with the heel of his hand. The car fishtailed on the wet pavement. He spun the wheel the other way and floored it once we were pointed more or less at the street. We got out to Broadview with the SUV close on our tail.

“Right,” I said.

He turned right and sped up the street. A northbound streetcar was stopped at the next corner, its rear doors open to let passengers off. Streetcars have the right of way in Toronto-when their doors are open, cars are supposed to come to a full stop, like it was a school bus. Ryan just hit his horn and kept going. A man about to step down from the rear exit jumped back up and yelled at us. The driver rang his bell as an admonition. Then the SUV sped through too, drawing another peal of protest.

Ryan gunned it north. “My guns!” he spat. “They’re all in the fucking trunk!”

We blew through the red light at the next intersection. So did our pursuers. I remembered the manoeuvre I had pulled the other day in a similar situation, faking a turn left onto Pottery Road and then juking right through the streets of East York. The SUV didn’t even give me the chance to suggest it. It pulled out into the southbound lane and roared up beside us on our left. We couldn’t match his acceleration. When the SUV was alongside us, the passenger leaned out: Ricky the Clip, his round face wet and shiny with rain. Ryan’s window exploded and he screamed and clutched his left eye. Blood streamed through his fingers and over his knuckles as the car began to drift toward a line of cars parked on our right. “I can’t fucking see!” he cried.

I grabbed the wheel with my left hand and steered us back into our lane.

We were coming up to the Pottery Road intersection. I snapped off my seatbelt and got my left foot over the centre console and hit the brakes. The SUV driver, still accelerating, couldn’t react fast enough and we slipped in behind him just in time to make a hard left turn down Pottery Road. The other driver hit his brakes, his lights flashing bright red in the darkness, reflecting on the wet road like two smears of blood. His wheelbase was too long to make a U-turn; he had to make a three-point turn instead, which gave us a lead. We swerved through one S curve after another down Pottery Road. I was trying to keep control with my left leg draped over Ryan’s right, my foot jumping from gas to brake, and my left hand spinning the wheel back and forth like a helmsman on a wild sea. The road grew narrower as thick foliage reached out from both sides. The Dadmobile banged off the guardrail on our right. I overcorrected and we veered into the left lane, narrowly missing a northbound cab. Headlights appeared in our rear-view. The SUV was gaining. Bayview wasn’t going to work. Pottery Road ended there. If we caught a red light, we’d have to come to a dead stop. Ducks waiting to be blasted.

An idea came to me. A way to better the odds. We were coming to the bike path where I’d rollerbladed the other day. If we could make them chase us on foot, they’d lose some of their advantage. I knew the path well. Ricky was from Buffalo; no way he’d be familiar with it. And the driver-Vito himself or one of his thugs-was equally unlikely to know it like I did. I hit the brakes and spun the wheel hard, and the car slid sideways into the fenced-off lot where the path began. I undid the catch on Ryan’s seatbelt, opened his door and shoved him out. I popped the release on the trunk and scrambled out my side.

Ryan’s eye was a mess, but not from a bullet. He’d be dead if he had taken a direct hit. Because the SUV stood so much higher than the Volvo, the bullet had deflected downwards when it hit the window, rather than penetrating it in a straight line. But there had to be glass in his eye, the way blood and tears were running out of it together.

I was reaching into the trunk for Ryan’s gun case when the SUV shrieked to a stop behind us. Two shots from the passenger side rang off the open trunk. We ducked. I grabbed Ryan’s hand. “This way,” I said, and we slipped gunless through the gap in the fence and ran down the road. I heard another shot behind us and a bullet smacked into the trunk of a poplar. We kept running, hunched down as far as we could while still making speed. To our left was the Don River, to the right the Don Valley Parkway. We passed the first lifesaving station. Another shot, another tree trunk pocked.

“Down the bank,” I said.

Along the river were elms, cedars and oaks, their foliage thick enough to provide cover. We slid down the bank and huddled behind a thick stand of hollyhock. My white shirt offered too tempting a target. I ripped it open and shrugged out of it and smeared cold black mud on my torso, arms and face. I got Ryan to cup his hands and rinse his eye with river water.

“Can you see?”

“A little in my right.”

“Ssh.” I could hear footsteps on the road now. The beam of a flashlight swept from side to side.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Ricky sang.

We started creeping silently along the muddy bank.

“Hey, Ryan!” Ricky called. “Dante Ryan? You know who this is?” He paused as if Ryan were really dumb enough to answer. “Ricky Messina. Remember? Out of Buffalo? We were introduced at the Ierullo funeral. They call me Ricky the Clip.”

Even in his pain, Ryan mouthed the word they and shook his head.

“I’ve always admired your work, Ryan. You were like a future hall-of-famer in the trade. But this thing… taking up with detectives

… turning down a fat fucking payday. Going against our thing? What the fuck were you thinking?”

I wished he’d shut up and let the other man speak, but Ricky wasn’t through. “You’d never catch me consorting with outsiders like this. Telling tales. Leaking family news. Man, you fucked up. You and this Jew you’re with. You there too, Jew?” he cackled. “Yoo-hoo! Jew-Jew! You’re through, Jew. You and Ryan both, you’re fucking done!”

His rant helped cover our sound as we crept upstream. Just as he stopped to take a breath, Ryan’s foot slipped on a wet rock. The splash seemed as loud as a right whale breaching. Two shots came at us almost simultaneously. Two muzzle flashes. Two pocking sounds in the trees. So they both had guns. Two men with guns and a flashlight versus two unarmed men, one of them half blind. Our only chance lay a hundred yards away. I reached for Ryan’s hand and we started moving again.

“Come on out, guys,” Ricky called. “Come meet the new generation.” His voice was almost lost amid the rushing sounds of the river and traffic. “I heard you’re good with a knife, Ryan, that true? Say the word, I’ll put down my gun and we’ll go mano-a-mano, blade against blade, what do you say? You like to dance, Ryan? Not answering? That’s okay. You’ll make a fine trophy. I already know what I’m going to cut off the Jew, but you-I have to think about what part I’m going to take as a souvenir.”

The other man still hadn’t said a word. Maybe too dumb to think of anything to say. Or maybe the smart one.

“A little farther,” I whispered to Ryan.

“What’s there?”

“A lifesaver,” I said.

I peered through the foliage at the road. Saw nothing but dark green leaves and the black sky beyond. We kept going. Branches scratched my arms and face. Ryan’s hand felt wet and clammy in mine.

“There!” I hissed. A flash of orange in the trees. The life-saving station with the long metal pole. Time to put the equipment to good use.

“Wait here,” I told Ryan.

“For what?”

“You want Ricky?.”

I crawled up the bank as quietly as I could. Judging by their flashlight beam, they were maybe twenty yards down the road. I picked up a rock and threw it as far as I could upstream. It hit some brush and landed in the water with a loud splash, drawing more gunfire.

“Up there,” Ricky urged.

As they started up the road, I crept up to the lifesaving station and silently eased the pole off its hook. I waited in the shadows, hoping my pounding heart wasn’t making as much noise outside my chest as it was inside. The men drew closer. The flashlight beam grew brighter. I could hear their shoes scraping the surface of the road. One man murmured something I couldn’t hear.

“We’ll get them,” I heard Ricky say.

I kept the pole steady, careful not to snag any branches overhead. I breathed in and out, calming my body. The footsteps grew louder. The moon was hidden by clouds but tungsten lights on tall black stands lined the Parkway. I saw their cold light glint on gunmetal. Then I saw a hand holding the gun, then the arm.

Now!

As Ricky came into view I slipped the ring of the lifesaving pole over his head and yanked it as hard as I could. He gave a strangled cry and tumbled down the riverbank to where Ryan was waiting.

The other man yelled, “Ricky!”

The Clip’s gun landed on the road a few feet in front of me. I was reaching for it when the other gun roared and a bullet smacked the pavement inches from my hand. I dove down the bank, rolling through brush. My right wrist hit a rock as I landed and went numb. I could hear Ryan and Ricky struggling in the water. There was the sound of a fist smacking something and one of them cried out. Which one?

A cedar had toppled over at the edge of the riverbank, its exposed root system creating a wall of dirt I could hide behind. I huddled there, wondering if I could make it across the river without getting shot in the back. A line of large stones made a natural walkway to the far side, and the water level was low at this time of year. The rocks looked either dry or just barely submerged. Up the opposite bank were railway tracks that led back to a crossing at Pottery Road, not far from Ryan’s car and his case full of guns.

No. No way. I’d be in the open too long. If the man on the road was any kind of shot, he’d drop me before I made it halfway. I crouched beneath some brush and waited for him to make a move, listening to the splashing sounds where Ryan and the Clip were struggling. The numbness in my wrist started to give way to pain. I wondered if it was broken.

“Ricky!” the other man called. “Ricky, answer me.”

I peered up through the leaves. I could see his arm and chest, his gun pointed at the water where Ryan and the Clip were entwined. No way he’d shoot; he’d be as likely to hit one as the other. As he watched them, I smeared more mud on my face and arms and started up the bank. My bad wrist made crawling awkward. I felt a gnarled root tear the skin of my belly as I dragged myself over it.

I reached the top and peered over the edge. Across the road metal glinted in the cold light. Something I could use as a weapon? No. A shopping cart miles from nowhere.

In the water behind me someone grunted loudly. There was a thrashing sound like a gator taking down its prey.

As I neared the top of the embankment, I could see the second gunman bracing himself against the trunk of an oak twice as thick as he was, pushing branches aside to get a better view of the water. I closed my left hand around a stone the size of a tennis ball and eased myself up onto the road. I stood looking at the gunman’s profile. Like Roni Galil had said to me once in firearms training: you could be our King David, our Melech David, going up against Goliath with a slingshot. I wished I could get closer but the more I moved, the more noise I might make. I breathed in slowly, trying to blend in with the background and stay out of his peripheral vision. Just envision a catcher’s mitt where his head is, I told myself, and whip it sidearm. An accurate shot would knock him out or kill him. And if it didn’t kill him, I was fortunate to have on hand someone with the necessary skills, experience and tools to finish the job.

As I cocked my wrist to throw the stone, something rustled behind me in the bushes along the riverbank. The gunman turned to see it and swung his pistol my way, holding it in both hands, firing twice. I hit the road, scraping my hands and elbows. Eyes flashed in the darkness behind me as a red fox dashed across the road to the Parkway embankment and disappeared near the base of a willow.

The gunman looked at me, half-naked, smeared with mud, lying on the road. “Don’t move,” he said. “I’ll shoot you, I swear.”

I stayed where I was. I could see all of him now and he certainly wasn’t Vito Di Pietra. He was all of five-five, slightly built and well dressed. Fine features. Delicate hands. It was the earnest young man I had seen at Meadowvale arguing with Alice Stockwell. His eyes were wide and the hand holding the gun on me didn’t look steady.

“So you’re Geller,” he said.

“And you’re Stefano Di Pietra,” I said. “Also known as Steven Stone.”

“Make one move and I’ll kill you.”

“I believe you.”

The thrashing in the river had stopped; there was just the sound of shallow water moving over rocks. The sound of traffic. The sound of Stefano’s breathing and mine.

“Ricky!” he called. “Are you okay?”

The silence was comforting to a point. If the Clip was dead, Ryan might be able to take Stefano down before he shot me. But even if Ryan were still alive, he only had one good eye. In the land of the blind that might make him hot shit, but here and now I couldn’t count on him. That left just three possible outcomes: rescue my own damn ass; pray to God to drop an anvil on Stefano’s head; or take it like a man and hope that Katherine Hollinger would avenge me like a demented angel.

“Ricky?” he brayed. No answer. “Ricky!” Still nothing. “God help you if he’s hurt,” Stefano said.

I had to keep him looking at me, not down at the river where Ryan might be moving. If he was moving. I stood up. Stefano pointed the gun at me. I held my ground and kept my hands where he could see them. I said, “It’s been you all along, hasn’t it? The little brother. The one who wasn’t supposed to be a player.”

“Only because they never let me.”

“Your brothers?”

“My father, too. Morons, all of them. They’d look at a truck full of medication and think, ‘Hijack it.’ I looked at the same truck and envisioned a fleet crossing the border.”

“Your father should have put you in charge.”

“Damn right. He named me for Don Magaddino, you know, because I was born the year he died. But I was small and sick a lot and mysteriously prone to being beaten up by my brothers. So my father made me the family bookkeeper, adding up numbers while my brothers ran the crews and made all the money. Got all the women. Played with the toys.”

“You hooked up with Jay Silver when you did your MBA?”

“Taking that course was the smartest thing I ever did. I started to really see how things could work if they were run by a businessman instead of a thug. I truly understood how huge the market could be for good, clean Canadian pills.”

“But when the law changed, you needed your brothers to keep the business going.”

“My brothers? What do they have to do with this?”

“Isn’t Vista Mar owned by all of you?”

“No. The Vista Mar Care Group is owned and operated by me.”

“But what about Buffalo?”

“What about it?”

“Who was running the operation on that side?”

“You still don’t get it, do you? When I say I run this show, I mean I conceived, coordinated and carried out the entire production.”

Executed would have been a good word too. I was glad he didn’t use it.

“My brothers never knew about it. Their confreres in Buffalo never knew about it.”

“Then how did Ricky-”

“Ricky was with me, you idiot! Me. Not Marco, not Vito, not anyone in Buffalo.”

“You could handle all the distribution with just one guy?”

“We didn’t need a big infrastructure,” Stefano said. “That was the beauty of it. It was already in place. This New Fifty club has chapters all over the Northeast. Full of people who’d go broke if they had to pay full fare for their meds.”

Only then did I solve the mystery Dante Ryan had engaged me to investigate. Stefano had put the hit on the Silvers. Killing Page had not had the desired effect. It only pushed Jay Silver into committing the same rash act: telling Stefano he wanted out. Maybe Silver was counting on their school ties to shield him from harm. He had probably never seen Stefano as I saw him now; coldly murderous and without affect.

Now I just had to live long enough to tell Ryan the news.

“Why did you hire out Jay’s killing?” I asked him. “Why pay fifty grand when Ricky could have done it free?”

“I wanted Silver and his family dead. I wanted the other pharmacists to know what would happen if they threatened me. And I wanted Dante Ryan kept busy while we took care of Marco. I was always afraid of Dante Ryan,” he said. “He never hit me or did anything bad to me-he never even threatened me-but there was something about him. The way he looked at me.”

“He looks at everyone that way.”

Stefano’s eyes darted toward the river and back at me. The silence was unnerving, but not to me. The longer it stayed quiet, the more sure I felt that Ryan had prevailed over Ricky. But where was he? Could he even see what was going on?

“Ricky killed Marco and his men?”

“I helped,” Stefano smiled. “Ricky shot Tommy and Phil when we came in, but we both shot Marco. Ricky shot him in the chest and I shot him in the head.”

“While he was asleep.”

“Asleep or drunk, it was hard to tell.”

“Good thing you were there to help,”

“Shut up! Every shitty thing he ever did to me-every time he beat me up or put me down or embarrassed me in front of friends because I was different-he’s lucky all I did was shoot him in his sleep.”

I heard a faint rumbling sound behind me and a light behind me cast my shadow along the road. Stefano looked over my shoulder and I turned too. A westbound train was coming around the bend, following the curve of the river. I looked back at Stefano and in the light cast by the train I saw a dark figure move up the riverbank behind him.

“Is Vito dead too?” I asked.

He nodded. “We took care of him just before we came to see you. Made it look like a robbery at a club he owns. Dad’s going to be awfully upset when he hears about it, the old vegetable. I might have to water him extra to help him get over the shock.”

I stood shivering in the rain, looking at this cold little bastard in his trim suit and polished shoes. The sound of the train grew louder. Then behind Stefano I saw Dante Ryan steal across the road, near the embankment that led up to the Parkway. What was he doing? Bailing on me?

The train blew a long loud whistle as it approached the level crossing. I heard bells ringing: the barrier lowering across Pottery Road. Ryan was behind the abandoned shopping cart, pushing it out of the weeds onto the road.

“Was Christine Staples in on it from the beginning?”

“Not quite,” Stefano said. “She actually did her job at first, tried to stop us from bringing goods across. But she turned out to be a most impressive woman. She saw things the way I saw them. She understood what the future could hold.”

Ryan was closing the gap between him and Stefano as the train drew closer, the sound of it getting louder, the light on Stefano’s face growing brighter. When Ryan was ten or twelve feet behind Stefano, he broke into a run. Whatever noise the cart wheels made was drowned out by the sounds of the approaching train, the river and the Parkway. Stefano never heard it coming. The cart slammed into his back at full speed. The gun flew out of his hand. As his slight body lurched forward toward me, I stepped forward and kicked him hard in the chest. He staggered backward. I kicked him again and he sailed off the road and landed on his back in the river with a splash and a groan.

Ryan leaned on the cart. I asked if he was okay and he nodded.

“And the Clip?”

“Dead. Drowned. Busted his head with a rock and held him under.”

“Saving my life is becoming a habit with you,” I said. “Don’t feel any need to kick it.”

“We’re not done,” Ryan said. “We can’t leave this one alive.”

I swallowed hard. Killing someone in a fight was one thing. Doing it while he lay helpless was another.

Ryan picked up Stefano’s gun.

“Just make it quick,” I said.

“I’m not going to shoot him,” Ryan said.

“No?”

“No,” he said, extending the gun-butt to me. “You are.”