Johnny Porno

Chapter 21

John was still frustrated when he left Melinda and wasn’t paying attention when a big man standing near his car asked him for a light.

“Huh?” said John, looking up too late to avoid the punch.

He felt the air rush from his lungs a moment before he folded at the waist. The second punch, one to the back of the head, dazed him enough so he didn’t feel his forehead hit sidewalk when he fell forward.

Melinda was kneeling alongside him a few minutes later. She helped him back inside the house and sat him on a kitchen chair. His forehead was scraped where it had made contact with the cement. Melinda held a damp dish towel against the bruise.

“The hell happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know but I looked up and saw one guy holding a gun on another guy and there you were lying on the ground and I screamed. By the time I got outside, the guy with the gun and the big guy were gone. Who were they?”

“I have no idea. I never seen the guy hit me before. All I know is he nailed me in the stomach and I couldn’t breathe. Then you were there.”

“What about the other guy, the one with the gun?”

“Never saw him.”

“Who could it be? What for?”

“Maybe some guy looking to rob somebody, I was the lucky one.”

“Should we call the police?”

John felt for his wallet. “They didn’t take anything.”

“That guy had a gun, though.”

“I’d rather not get the police involved,” he said, then leaned forward. “Back a my head hurts. You got aspirin?”

Melinda went to the bathroom, brought back two aspirin, filled a glass with cold water and handed them to John.

“I think I should call the police,” she said. She felt around the back of his head and he flinched. “Sorry,” she said.

“Hurts back there.”

“You’ve got a little lump.”

“Sure it’s little?”

“From what I felt. You probably have a slight concussion. Did he hit you with something?”

John finished half the glass of water before shaking his head no. “I don’t know, but I don’t wanna involve the police. I just need to get home and get some sleep before tomorrow. I have a busy day.”

“You can stay here you want.”

“You mean all I hadda do was get jumped?” he said.

“You still won’t get anything,” she said, “but you can stay. You probably shouldn’t drive like that anyway.”

He winked at her. “I’ll manage,” he said. “Just knowing you made the offer.”

There was no traffic when he left a few minutes later. He wondered if Nick Santorra had sent the goon or if he was the most unlucky guy in the world. Before he knew it, John had pulled into a gas station to look through a public telephone book for Santorra’s address.

A few minutes later, his headache hurting a lot worse than it had been earlier, he was driving through Howard Beach. He made one pass by the ranch home and saw where a line of bushes ran the length of the driveway dividing Nick Santorra’s property from the neighbor on his left. The Pontiac was parked up close to the garage door in the driveway.

Earlier in the day his son had gotten a whistle from a candy machine and it reminded John of a story his brother had told him before he joined the Marines. Paul Albano had worked part-time at a local gas station during his junior and senior years of high school. After a teacher failed him for cutting class, a mechanic at the garage told him how to vandalize a car without damaging it.

“Duct-tape a whistle to the bottom of his tailpipe,” the mechanic had said. “All it does is make noise, but it’ll drive your teacher crazy.”

It was a silly, harmless prank, but John had borrowed the whistle from his son to give it a try. It gave him pleasure to think about Nick Santorra trying to figure out the noise his car would be making the following day.

He parked half a block up from Santorra’s house and walked quickly and quietly back to the driveway. He used the bushes as a shield. The pain in his head throbbed as he dropped to all fours and crept toward the car. The house across the street posed the greatest threat, but the lights were off. John worked with speed, using duct tape to secure the whistle to the bottom of the tailpipe about a foot from the end so it wasn’t easy to spot. Then he crawled back out from under the Pontiac and hustled back to his car.

When he finally made it home, there was no sign of Elias on the stoop again. Dizzy from what he suspected was a minor concussion at the least, John gingerly knocked on the old man’s apartment door to double-check on his friend. There was no answer. Too woozy to inquire with the super, John headed up to his apartment.

He skipped his gin and tonic, turned on the air conditioner and stripped. He lay on his back and closed his eyes. He let the air conditioner’s hum ease him into a dream about Melinda and how close they had come to consummating their relationship. He could hear her moan when he grabbed her ass. He felt himself getting excited and thought he heard himself grunt a moment before he woke up in a cold sweat.

John could feel a tingle below his waist. When he looked he saw the sheet was wet. Between the prank with the whistle and the wet dream, John wondered if he was going through a second adolescence.

Billy shot Stanislaus Bartosz in the back as the big man was getting out of the car. He’d just parked on an abandoned strip of road intersecting Fountain Avenue in Brooklyn. The putrid smell from the sanitation dump was overwhelming. Billy lit a fresh cigarette before getting out of the car and finishing off Bartosz with two bullets behind the big man’s right ear.

Earlier he’d been forced to pull his weapon and a replica of his old detective badge to keep the ape from beating John Albano to death, what it looked like might happen. Bartosz had caught Albano off guard with a solid punch to the solar plexus, then nailed him with a jackhammer right that sent the windless man face-first to kiss the concrete.

Billy had spotted Bartosz’s tail to the house in Queens and was sure the big man was there to do some damage when he saw Bartosz waiting near Albano’s Buick. The rest was easy. Bartosz had to respect both the badge and the gun.

Billy had made him sit up front. They rode in silence until Billy turned onto Linden Boulevard. Then Bartosz had wanted to know where they were going.

“Have a talk,” Billy told him.

“About what?”

“About what you were doing beating on the man back where your car is.”

“What’s it to you?”

“Whether or not I charge you with assault. How’s that for starters?”

The big man had seemed to sulk.

“What?” Billy asked.

“It’s embarrassing.”

“You can tell me or spend the night in lockup.”

Billy had turned left off Linden Boulevard onto Eldert Lane. Bartosz said, “The fuck we going?”

“Come on, fella, I got better things to do tonight myself. What was the beef? The broad he was with your sister or what?”

“Where we going?”

“I told you, for a talk. Or I can swing back to Linden, take you to the Seventy-fifth Precinct. Up to you, except personally I don’t recommend it, spending the night with however many smelly coons they have waiting for transport in the pen there tonight. Worst time inna world to go through lockup’s the summer. Something tells me you already know that.”

“She was my ex,” Bartosz had said then.

“Your ex what? Good-looking broad like that was letting you plow her? Why don’t I believe it?”

“Believe what you want.”

Billy found the area he’d been looking for, a dirt road that led to a hill behind a clump of trees. He stopped, put the car in park but left it running.

“Okay,” he’d said then. “You can go now.”

Bartosz did a double-take at the area. “You fucking kidding me?” he’d said. “It’s the fuckin’ jungle over here. I don’t know where I am.”

“Brooklyn,” Billy said. “Fourth largest city in the world.”

“The fuck I’m supposed to get back to my car from here?”

“I look like I care?”

“You really gonna make me get out here?”

Billy had turned his gun on the big man then. “Or I could shoot you,” he’d said. “Then push you out, let the rats have a three-day feast, the size of your carcass.”

The big man had opened the door and swung one leg out. He had to push himself the rest of the way using the door frame and the back of the seat for leverage. He had just planted his second foot on the ground when Billy shot him. The force of the bullet sent the big man sprawling forward. With the door open, the smell from the Fountain Avenue garbage dump was too strong to ignore. Billy had lit a cigarette to offset the fetid odor. He’d taken a few drags while Bartosz moaned a few feet from the car. When Billy felt he could hold his breath long enough, he got out of the car, walked around the back and approached the big man from the right. He leaned over and fired two shots behind the big man’s right ear.

That had been earlier. Now Billy drove past the building on Rockaway Parkway in Canarsie where John Albano lived. Billy was searching for Albano’s car, but couldn’t find the Buick. He circled the block twice as he contemplated parking, going up the stairs, knocking on Albano’s apartment door and getting it over with already. He could kill him right there and still get home in time to have Kathleen read him a story.

He started to yawn again and pulled to the curb. He had parked a full block away from Albano’s building. He could use another jolt, but was out of cocaine. He knew of two places he could get some, one back in Queens on Cross Bay Boulevard and the other further west on the Belt Parkway near Coney Island.

Billy yawned one more time before he decided he needed the jolt tonight more than he needed to kill John Albano. Then he pulled away from the curb, turned left on Rockaway Parkway and headed for the Belt. He was thinking he might pick up a jelly apple for Kathleen in Coney Island. Or some saltwater taffy. She had a sweet tooth and liked that stuff, too.