Fury

19

Tuesday, December 21

Marlene was looking forward to an afternoon alone. The twins had run out of the house, headed for the basketball court; they'd be going on from there to bar mitzvah class with Butch so she'd probably have the evening, too.

Lucy and John Jojola were still staying at the loft, but they'd been spending a lot of time out at night on some mysterious mission they wouldn't talk about. She figured that it had something to do with Jojola's notion that David Grale was still alive, although the evidence indicated that it wasn't very likely. John, who'd offered to stay in a hotel but Marlene wouldn't hear of it, said he wasn't sure either. He seemed almost embarrassed to admit that the only thing he was going on was a recurring dream.

"My old friend Charlie Many Horses came to me and said I needed to find David Grale," he told her. "When I told him Grale was dead, he turned his back and walked away. I could be misinterpreting-sometimes the spirits are not very clear about what they're trying to say-but I thought I should come and at least try to do what Charlie asked. It can be a mistake to ignore the spirits, too."

Marlene had not dismissed Jojola's dream as metaphysical nonsense. She knew that he was a deeply spiritual man-a member of the Gray Coyote, a spiritual clan-and that he believed that the spirits talked to those who listened.

Then again, when you're the mother of Lucy Karp, who regularly claimed to converse with a martyred saint, you get used to the people around you having strange invisible companions. And Lucy said she'd been having a dream similar to Jojola's. Neither would go into any detail about what the dream entailed, but Marlene could sense that it greatly disturbed them both, and if she hadn't known Jojola's courageous spirit, she would have thought he was afraid.

Whatever their reasons were, ever since their arrival Lucy and Jojola left in the morning and often did not return until late at night, long after the "old folks" had gone to bed. So Marlene had found a good book and was looking forward to her first concentrated and quiet hours of pure reading in months, when the telephone rang.

"Marlene!" said the nearly hysterical voice of her father. "Your mother is missing again!" He started sobbing.

"Calm down, Dad, I'm sure everything's all right," she said, seeing her dream of an evening alone with a book pop like a soap bubble. "Have you looked everywhere? Remember, she was in the basement the last time."

"Everywhere, everywhere," he cried. "She even left a note on the refrigerator. 'Gone to walk Barney.' She's crazy, Marlene."

Marlene sighed. Barney was the family beagle, dead for more than forty years. Her mother had been his favorite person in the family, and she'd returned the love, letting him sit on her lap while she watched television and sleep on the bed. "She's not crazy, Pops, she has Alzheimer's…it's a disease," she said, trying to sound convincing.

"Marlene…she left her clothes at the front door."

"I'll be right over."

Marlene drove as quickly as she could to her parents' home. So quickly that she nearly missed seeing the elderly naked woman strolling along the sidewalk four blocks from her house, dragging an old dog leash. Her mother appeared to be looking for something but apparently couldn't see or didn't care about the two young boys who danced around her, pointing and laughing.

Screeching to a stop at the curb, Marlene jumped out of her car. "Get the hell out of here, you little bastards," she yelled. The boys took one look at her face and ran off, yelling "crazy old bag lady" over their shoulder.

Marlene flipped the boys off, then turned to her mother. "Mom, Mom, what are you doing?" she said, whipping off her coat to cover her mother.

The old woman was shivering from the cold but brightened when she looked up and recognized her daughter. "Marlene," she said. "How nice of you to come help me look for Barney. That rascal got out, and I'm afraid he's going to dig up Mrs. Johansen's rose garden again."

Mrs. Johansen, like Barney, had departed the earth decades earlier, but Marlene took it as a hopeful sign that her mother had called her by name.

"But what are you doing home, dear?" her mother said, a look of concern crossing her face. "Is something wrong? Why are you out of school already?"

Marlene put her arm around her mother's shoulders and guided her to the car. "Come on, Mom, let's go home," she said. "Pops is worried."

"Oh, that man," her mother said. "He's impossible. 'Do this. Do that.' Who does he think he is, my husband?"

When Marlene arrived home with her mother, her father was standing at the door. He tromped out of the house, and before Marlene, who was coming around from the driver's side, could intervene, grabbed her mother by the shoulders and shook her. "Where the hell have you been, Concetta?" he shouted. "Walking around the neighborhood without your clothes. I'm ashamed of you."

"Help me," her mother screamed.

"Pops!" Marlene shouted, jumping between her parents. "What are you doing?"

Her father backed off, panting, with a wild look in his eyes. He pointed at his wife. "She's just doing this to torment me," he said. "There's nothing wrong with her. She just wants to give me a heart attack." He turned and fled into the house.

"I don't know that man," her mother said. "That's not Mariano. I don't know what they did with my poor husband but that's not him." She started to cry. "Oh, I just want to die."

"Don't talk like that, Mom," Marlene said.

"I don't care. I don't care," the old woman yelled and fled upstairs to her bedroom, where she closed and locked the door. Marlene followed and knocked but her mother responded, "Go away. Just go away."

Marlene left and went downstairs, where she found her father kneeling in front of the small family shrine to the Virgin Mary. He'd lit a candle and was praying fervently but so low that she couldn't hear him. When he finished, he looked up at his daughter.

"I'm sorry Marlene…I…I don't know what came over me," he said. "I'm just tired. And ashamed. Ashamed that I go to confession and have to tell the priest that I sometimes wish that the woman I love was dead. But I don't, you know…I don't want her to die, I just want her back."

Marlene knelt beside her father. "I know, Dad," she said. "But you heard the doctor when we took her in for her checkup the last time. She's not going to get better. In fact, she's going to get worse, until she doesn't know anyone…not you…not even herself. It's the disease, Dad, and no amount of praying is going to bring Mom back. If you can't deal with that then you need to let me look into putting her into a nursing facility where they can take care of her."

Her father had resisted all efforts to remove her mother from the home they'd shared for fifty years. Nor would he listen now. "It would kill her to be in such a horrible place. Like a prison they are," he said. "At least here, she recognizes her things and seems happy most of the time, even if she's on another planet. And those nursing homes…you hear stories about what they do to old people…sometimes alone at night…I can't let that happen to her."

"Dad, I know you want to keep looking after her," Marlene said. "But there's going to be a day when she's going to be better off in the hands of professionals who know this disease and know how to minimize the impact on her. I have plenty of money, and you've never let me help with anything, so let me help with this. We can find the best there is where those bad things don't happen. You can visit her anytime you want. But she'll get the care she needs, and you won't have to worry about her so much."

But her father shook his head. "I'm not ready," he said. "Sixty-six years we've been married. Sixty-six years of sleeping in the bed next to the same person. What would I do without her? No, Marlene…we do okay most of the time. Maybe later. You go home now; sorry you had to come all the way out here to deal with your crazy old parents."

Marlene looked at her father. He was a stubborn man; he'd ignored the prejudices and conquered the obstacles and built a good life for himself and his family. But that stubbornness could be hard to deal with at times, too.

"Okay, Pops, we leave it alone for now," she said. "But you can't let your frustrations get to you so that you end up hurting or yelling at Mom. She's already afraid of a world that is closing in on her; she needs your love and support, even when she's not all there. When the day comes when you can't deal with it anymore, you have to promise me that you'll tell me so that we can find a place. Promise me?"

The old man nodded and hugged her. "Yeah, yeah. Like I said, I don't know what came over me. I've never hit your mother in sixty-six years of marriage. So now it looks like I'll have to go have another talk with the priest."

Marlene kissed her father's cheek and patted him on the back. "You do that," she said. "But don't be too hard on yourself. You've been the best husband a woman could ever wish for…and the best dad."

That evening, Marlene was grateful when Butch and the boys got back home, and he told her about the note Guma had found in the file. "Regards some letter from a guy named Kaminsky about Villalobos that Breman apparently received and passed on to Judge Klinger." What made that even more interesting was that "an old friend" told him that he should pass on the name Igor Kaminsky to her as the former cellmate of Enrique Villalobos.

Marlene knew that more murderers had probably been caught because they opened their big mouths than because of all the detective work ever attempted. Prisoners were notorious for boasting about their crimes, if for no other reason than to make themselves seem tougher and meaner, so that maybe they wouldn't have to prove it physically. But their "friends" and cellmates were equally notorious for ratting them out to the authorities, hoping to work out some sort of deal in exchange for information.

The next morning, Marlene called a friend with the Department of Corrections, who told her yes, Igor Kaminsky had served time at Auburn and yes, Igor Kaminsky had been kept in a cell with Enrique Villalobos for a short time that past spring. "But he's not there now," said the friend, a middle-aged black woman she'd once helped protect from her abusive husband. "In fact, there seems to have been a screwup. He was paroled and let go but was supposed to be handed over to the INS to deport back to Russia. Instead, they just gave him some bus money, a suit, and let him go-we have no idea where. But a start might be Brooklyn; that's where he got arrested on the robbery charge that planted his ass in the pen. If they catch him, it'll be good-bye New York, hello Moscow. Hey, that's funny…"

"What's funny?"

"Well, there's a federal BOLO for him. 'Consider armed and dangerous.' Pretty heavy-duty for a one-armed-"

"He's got one arm?"

"Yep, just like the bad dude in The Fugitive. Makes sense, don't it. Anyway, someone got a federal judge to issue a bench warrant for his arrest. They must want him back pretty damn bad for a one-armed, small-time crook who, according to his dossier, was so bad at his job that he let a Korean shopkeeper take his gun and nearly blow his ass away."

"Not exactly Public Enemy Number One, eh?"

"Not exactly."

"Who was the judge?"

"Let's see…Marci Klinger. Hey, ain't she the one presiding over the Coney Island case?" There was silence from the other end of the line. "Marlene? You there?"

"Yeah, I'm here. Just…writing this down. Um…I don't suppose there's anything else in that file of interest-like maybe Igor was the second shooter on the grassy knoll in Dallas? Igor's Russian, right? Maybe Oswald was working with the Soviets."

"Too young," her friend said with a laugh. "But as a matter of fact, I was just about to tell you…your Kennedy assassin was almost assassinated himself. Shortly before his parole, he got stabbed in the stomach by another inmate named Lonnie Lynd. And that's even more interesting because-this part ain't in Kaminsky's file 'cause it happened after he left, just four days ago as a matter of fact-if I'm remembering this right, I saw a report that an inmate named Lonnie Lynd got his neck snapped by some Russian dude named Svetlov."

"Snapped his neck?"

"That's what it says, but there ain't a lot of detail. Just that they were playing basketball."

"Full-contact sport."

"Yep. You might talk to Dr. Ron Jendry; he's the gang counselor at Auburn. This gang ball project is his pet. He probably knew both guys."

"Anything else?"

"Nope. That's pretty much it. Oh, one last thing…it says here that he listed his brother, same DOB, as his next of kin in case anything happened to him in prison. The brother's name is Ivan. Igor and Ivan, the Russian twins."

"Any address for Ivan?"

"No. But it says to contact Ivan through a Father Stefan Sarandinaki with the Russian Orthodox Church in Brighton Beach, and I suppose that's a start."

"It is indeed," Marlene said. "Thanks, I got to run, but I owe you big."

"How about we go dutch for lunch next time I'm in the city?"

"Nope. Like I said, I owe you. I'm paying or don't bother to call."

"Okay, okay," the woman said with a laugh. "You're paying. See you soon, honey."

Marlene hung up and whistled. When her friend named Marci Klinger as the judge who'd signed off on the bench warrant, Marlene's hesitation to respond had a lot more to do with shock than because she was writing something down.

She knew from Butch that some sort of message or letter had apparently gone from Kaminsky, a potential material witness, to Breman to Klinger. Yet nothing had been said about the letter to Corporation Counsel.

So what is up with the judge? Marlene wondered. Did Breman receive the information and, not knowing what to make of it, went to the judge for guidance? The Kings County DA had just announced that her office would be settling with the defendants for an undisclosed amount-believed by the press, who'd probably been tipped off by Louis, to be in the neighborhood of twenty million dollars. But that wasn't even a tenth of what Louis was suing the city of New York for, and he'd filed the papers intending to go after the ADAs and cops individually.

Breman must have made a sweetheart deal, she thought. Louis never even tried to squeeze that turnip for any more than he got.

After talking to her friend, Marlene had hung up and immediately called Auburn and asked to speak to Jendry. The man answered his telephone but was reluctant to say anything until she mentioned that she was the wife of the district attorney of New York.

"Butch Karp?" Jendry perked up. "He probably won't remember me, but I was a freshman on the Brooklyn High basketball team when he was a senior… Terrible what happened to his mother that year… But man, could he post up and drain the bucket. I'd hoped to follow his career in the NBA, but at least I've been able to keep track of him at the DA's office. He's not exactly flying under the radar down there, is he?"

"No, Butch is pretty much flying where everybody can launch missiles at him," Marlene said, amused at the man's still-evident hero worship.

"It's funny they still call him Butch," the psychologist said. "Tell him hi from Birdlegs Jendry."

"I certainly will, and if you're ever in the city, you ought to look him up," Marlene said. "He loves to talk about the good old days with old friends." Actually, Butch rarely talked about the "good old days"; he wasn't one to live in the past, but the thought of Birdlegs Jendry, whom he'd never mentioned, dropping in on him unexpectedly was too rich for her to miss the opportunity to set him up.

"I will," Jendry said, sounding extremely pleased. "Wow! Now, that's what I call serendipity. So, what was it you needed, Marlene? I hope you don't mind me calling you Marlene, but I feel as if I know you."

"No, not at all," Marlene said. "Any friend or former teammate of Butch Karp is a friend of mine. I insist…Ron. It's nothing much. I'm just trying to find out what I can about a former inmate named Igor Kaminsky, who was apparently stabbed by another inmate named Lonnie Lynd."

"Oh, yes," Jendry sighed. "Terrible business, these gangs. So much violence, most of it traceable back to their dysfunctional families and growing up without male role models in the ghetto. Such a hard pattern to change."

Gag me, Marlene thought. Rehashed sixties psycho-pablum. She doubted Butch would have had much to do with this former teammate. "I'm sure you're making a real difference," she said.

"Well, I'm trying, but to be honest, some days I just want to throw my hands up and go work for McDonald's," Jendry said with a great theatrical sigh. "The ones like Lynd and Svetlov…they're incorrigible. Lynd's dead, you know. Svetlov broke his neck like you'd snap a pencil, and Lynd was a big guy."

"What started the fight?" Marlene asked.

"That's just it, who knows? One minute they're playing a game of basketball, the next there's a riot with the Bloods and Russians going at it like a pack of wild dogs."

"Bloods? The gang?"

"Yes, yes. The Bloods gang. Hard-core gangbangers, but the Russians are just as rough and better organized. Anyway, Lynd gets his hand on a knife of some sort, but Svetlov, a hulking brute if I've ever seen one, just sort of grabbed him and pop, Lynd's dead."

"Svetlov say what started it?" Marlene asked.

"Nope. The snitches we have in the general population are saying that it was planned retaliation for the attack on Kaminsky. He seemed to have some sort of pull with the Russian mob. But Sergei's not talking, except to note, correctly, that Lynd pulled a knife on him. Self-defense, he says. But we got him in lockdown anyway."

"So what do you think my chances are of getting Svetlov to talk to me?"

"None and none," Jendry replied. "He's a stone-cold killer. The Russian mob's main muscle, and absolutely loyal to his bosses. He doesn't say anything they don't tell him to say."

Marlene hung up. Well, won't hurt to ask, she thought. Several hours later, she wasn't so sure when, with a buzz and a metallic snap, hidden bolts slid into place and the steel bars of the gate in front of her slid open. "Please step forward," said a monotone male voice whose owner she assumed was behind the dark window of the control booth. She did as told, stepping into what amounted to a cage large enough for one and fought a momentary urge to retreat before the gate slid home behind her.

Silly, she thought as the gate closed, they have to let you out. She thought of the "release from liability" form she'd had to sign just to get this far, especially the part that said if she was taken hostage by the inmates, the Department of Corrections would not negotiate for her release. She'd be on her own.

There was more buzzing and metallic clicks, and the next gate in front of her slid open. "Step forward, please," the voice said again. Ever since she'd been escorted beyond the waiting room, which at least made an attempt at softening the scenery with a few magazines, a television set to CNN, and a motley collection of children's toys in a corner, every sound seemed magnified, as if unable to find anything to absorb its energy in all that steel and cement. God, I'd go insane if I was locked up, she thought. A good reminder to stay on the straight and narrow, Ciampi.

As soon as she stepped into the hall beyond the cage, she was met by a hard-eyed, square-jawed corrections officer. He handed her a Visitor badge. "Place this somewhere visible and keep it on you at all times," he instructed. "Follow me." Without waiting for a reply, he turned and led the way down a long, brightly lit hallway of gray-painted cinder blocks.

Reaching a row of doors, each marked with a letter of the alphabet, he opened the one marked B. She looked inside and saw that it was a tiny interview room with a single mushroom-shaped metal stool bolted to the floor in front of a window she was sure was probably capable of stopping an automobile. This was max at Auburn State Prison-not the most hard-line in New York's prison system but no joke, either.

"Have a seat, he'll be here in a minute," the guard said and closed the door behind her.

Marlene sat down on the stool and picked up the telephone receiver from its place on the wall to listen. Nothing but a slight buzzing noise. The walls were white and glossy; there were no nooks and crannies, no place to hide anything, even if they hadn't confiscated her purse and searched her before letting her proceed. A horrible place. Then again, she thought, it's designed to secure and punish pretty horrible people. She looked up and saw the eyes of a camera gazing down at her. Nothing would go unnoticed, not that she had any intention of trying.

A door in the room opposite her opened and the largest human being Marlene had ever seen shuffled in. His massive wrists were cuffed to a chain that ran around his belly and between his legs. She assumed the shuffling was because he was shackled. He stood blinking in the bright light, looking at her as a guard unlocked the fastener holding the handcuffs to the belly chain while two more guards looked on. He waited for them to back out of the room before he took a seat on the stool.

Marlene picked up the telephone. When he made no move to do the same, she indicated he should do so with her head. He gave her a bored look but reached up and plucked the telephone off the wall with his manacled hands.

"Da?" the big man said.

"Sergei Svetlov?" Marlene asked.

"Depends. Who vants to know this?" His baritone voice seemed to rumble up out of some deep dark well.

"Marlene Ciampi…I'm a private investigator working for Corporation Counsel in New York."

Svetlov shrugged. "Means na-think to me."

"It does to me," Marlene replied. Jendry was right-Svetlov wasn't likely to be very helpful. But it couldn't hurt to ask. "I was wondering if you could help me find Igor Kaminsky?"

Svetlov pursed his lips and said, "I don't know this man."

Marlene tried a different tack. "He's not in any trouble with the law. In fact, his life might be in danger, and I might be able to help."

"I tell you, I don't know this man," Svetlov said again.

"But you killed the man who tried to kill him," Marlene said. "Those people might try to kill him again."

Svetlov, whose big, round, scarred head reminded her of a jack-o'-lantern, shrugged and said, "I killed the shitty man who tried to stab me…is self-defense."

Marlene looked at the man, who looked impassively back at her. "Well, thank you, Mr. Svetlov, for agreeing to meet with me," she said. "If you remember anything that might help me, you can contact Dr. Jendry and he'll be able to reach me."

Svetlov smiled, and she was surprised how pleasant it made his face. "Is not often I have visit from a beautiful woman. This pleasure is mine."

Hmm, a ladies' man; maybe a little of the old Ciampi sex kitten will turn the trick, Marlene thought. She smiled shyly and brushed a strand of her hair from in front of her eyes. "If you remember something important about Igor Kaminsky, I could come back up and talk to you again."

"Perhaps," Svetlov said in a way that let her know that he was on to her game and had, in fact, expected it. "But unfortunately, I do not know this man."

Ten minutes later, Marlene stepped outside the prison, relieved just to be beyond the clanging doors and metallic voices. It was only sixty miles down the road to the next stop in her Department of Corrections tour but a world of difference in attitude. The Roxbury Prison Farm was considered a model of humane and progressive incarceration for model prisoners. There were a few lifers at the farm, who for one reason or another had managed to get transferred there, but most were inmates who were expected to return to society as changed men.

The looming walls of Auburn were topped with razor wire and watched over by men with rifles in guard towers. But there was only a fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence between the inmates at Roxbury and freedom. There were no guard towers or men with guns in plain sight of the inmates. The guards patrolled in cars around the perimeter, but most of the security work was done by cameras.

The grounds of the prison farm were immaculately kept and appeared to have been professionally landscaped with bushes and trees. Beyond the campus, there were rows and rows of crop fields-barren now, but plowed and furrowed for the spring planting.

Hell, if they had a pool and a bar, I could almost live here, Marlene thought after a cursory check of her identification at the front gate. She pulled up to the building with the pretty painted sign that read Administration.

Again she had to invoke her husband's name to get the superintendent, an officious little mouse of a man named Andrew Vundershitz-an unfortunate but appropriate name-to cooperate. Vundershitz had a guard escort her to a waiting room with overstuffed chairs and a well-stocked magazine rack. The guard disappeared and a couple of minutes later reappeared with Enrique Villalobos, who was even uglier in person than the mugshot she'd seen.

The prisoner was wearing jeans and a clean blue prison shirt, but it was the only thing clean about him. His yellow, jaundiced eyes held hers for only a moment before drifting down to her breasts. The purple scars of a childhood bout with measles looked hideous against his ocher-colored skin. There was something about the way he combed his greasy black hair back from his pointed face and his rodentlike teeth that made her think of a large rat she'd seen once in the alley next to the loft building on Crosby.

The creature had seen her too-it was broad daylight-and rather than scurry away, stood on its hind legs and hissed at her. Marlene was no coward but there was something about the hissing rat that unnerved her and she'd turned and ran.

"You want me to stay in the room, ma'am?" the guard asked. He looked like a big, strong farm kid, probably from one of the neighboring farms, who was supplementing his income with a job at the local prison. He evidently thought it was a good idea if he remained.

"No, that's okay, officer," Marlene said. "I'll be fine."

"Yes, Officer Richardson," Villalobos sneered. "She'll be just fine. I'll treat her real good."

Officer Richardson pointed a thick finger at Villalobos. "You behave or if this lady complains, you and I will have a little discussion out by the toolshed."

Villalobos feigned a hurt look. "I wouldn't hurt a fly, Officer Richardson. You got no call to talk to me like that." Then he turned and leered at Marlene. "Obviously, this fine-looking bitch has heard that Enrique Villalobos is a stud and wants to find out for herself."

Marlene felt grateful that she was no longer carrying a gun. Otherwise, she thought, I might be tempted to wait for Officer Richardson to disappear, then put a hot one in this piece of shit's brain.

When she first agreed to take the case, Marlene had looked at Villalobos's PSI, the presentence investigation report done on every prisoner to give the judge some guidance on the appropriate place and severity of incarceration. The psychiatrists who'd examined Villalobos had recommended maximum security because of the likelihood that he would reoffend if he escaped. The psychologist had noted that Villalobos both hated and worshipped his mother, with a strong possibility, though it had been denied by both, that the mother had had sexual relations with her son from an early age. "It is felt by this board," the examining physicians wrote, "that the crime perpetrated on his victims was a way of acting out repressed anger at his mother. Yet, publicly at least, he professes a great love for her."

When Richardson left, closing the door behind him, Marlene smiled at Villalobos. "Mr. Villalobos, I'd like to talk to you about a friend of yours."

"Oh, yeah?" he said, placing his hand on his crotch. "I got lots of friends. Like the women I fucked. They always want more from their 'friend,' Enrique."

"Yes, I'm sure," she said sarcastically, but it didn't affect his smile or what he was doing with his hand. "But I'm here to talk about another man…Igor Kaminsky."

Villalobos's smile disappeared and his hand returned to the arm of his chair. "I don't know no fuckin' Kaminsky."

"No? The DOC's records say he was your cellmate at Auburn in February. About the time you 'confessed' to the rape of Liz Tyler."

"I remember sweet Liz, all right," Villalobos said, regaining his composure. "I always remember them tight asses I fuck. Um, um, it's so g-o-o-o-d."

Marlene again wished she was packing heat, or at least a Taser, but forced herself to continue. "Well, I just thought you might be interested to know that Mr. Kaminsky has been in contact with the Brooklyn DA's office."

Villalobos scowled. "Oh, yeah, now I remember that lying sack of shit. I think I fucked him, too, in my cell. That's what I do to liars and bitches."

"That's what you did until you had a 'positive prison experience' and found Jesus, right?"

The smile returned to the convict's face. "Thas right, bitch. Me and God is tight like this," he said, crossing his fingers.

"Yeah, Enrique, I'm sure God has something special planned for such a good friend…someplace cold and dark and alone except for the voice shrieking in your head," she snarled.

The sudden turn in her demeanor shocked him at first. But he recovered and hissed, "Fuck you, bitch…when I get out of here-and you better believe I will-I'm going to come visit you and do what I did to sweet Lizzie."

Marlene fought to keep that other side of her-the one she'd been trying to conquer-from jumping up and ripping Villalobos's heart out through his throat. She only partly succeeded as she leaned forward. "Listen, you fuck. When I leave here, you ask some of your piece-of-shit friends, if you have any, if they know Marlene Ciampi. Ask them, ass wipe, if they think that there's maybe something not quite right about her, in fact, maybe something's quite wrong. I know a lot of really bad people in the world, and some of them owe me favors. And maybe before you can get out, I send a few of them to visit your mother-I believe she's still living over off West Fourth in Brooklyn-and I have them do to her what you did to Liz Tyler."

Marlene's threat to have the man's mother raped-one she would not have wished on any woman no matter what the provocation-had the desired effect on Villalobos. "You go near my momma, and I'll kill you," he hissed again only louder. "I will hunt you down and rape you, and slit you open like a chicken."

"I'll bet she screams like crazy when they do to her what you did to Liz," Marlene said. "I bet she cries and begs for her son Enrique to save her…but he won't be able to because he's locked up here."

"Fucking whore," Villalobos screamed and lurched out of his chair at her.

Out in the hall, Officer Richardson heard the scream and rushed for the door. But before he could get it open to rescue the pretty woman inside, something had happened to the prisoner, whom he found lying on the ground gasping for air and clutching his sides.

"What happened to him?" Richardson said with an amused look.

"I think he hurt himself stumbling against the chair," Marlene said. "But you might want to get him to the infirmary." She tapped Villalobos in the side with the toe of her boot, which caused him to scream in pain. "I do believe he broke his ribs in the fall."

"Yeah," Richardson smiled. "Good thing I saw the whole thing or he might have tried to accuse you of beating the tar out of him."

Marlene grinned back at him. "Oh, my, yes, good thing. I wouldn't want something like that to hurt my reputation."