Johnny Porno

Chapter 29

They had gone at it a few times before they both collapsed and fell asleep. When John woke up, it was from his stomach growling. He saw it was a few minutes before eight o’clock and nudged Melinda from her sleep.

“Hey,” she said, “I was dreaming.”

“Sorry,” John said. “It’s getting late. We should order something or go out.”

“Dinner?”

“I’m pretty hungry.”

“I can make something,” she said through a yawn. “Oh, excuse me.”

“I remember something about steaks, but we should probably order out now.”

She pulled the covers off. “Let me wash up first.”

John waited for her to finish in the bathroom, then used it himself while she brewed a fresh pot of coffee. They had agreed on Chinese. She was calling the order in when he joined her in the kitchen.

Melinda wore an open terry cloth robe. John was in his boxers. She poured the coffee at the table and sat across from him.

“This was a first for me,” she said. “I’m serious.”

“Me, too,” John said. “I mean going more than once so soon after. I usually need a couple of hours to recover.”

He sipped his coffee.

“You can stay the night if you’d like,” she said.

“I don’t have a change of clothes.”

“I can wash those.”

“That’d be great. It’ll give me a head start in the morning.”

“To go to work, which is no longer driving for a car service, but might still be a construction job you had this week, but you never really told me yet.”

John looked at her a moment, trying to phrase what he was about to say so she wouldn’t ask anything else about his job. “A different form of driving,” he finally said.

“Except you had to think about it first. Why’s that?”

So much for careful phrasing, he thought.

“Uh-oh,” Melinda said. “I’d rather know up front, John, before we’re anymore involved than we already are.”

He was embarrassed to tell her, yet he knew he had to. Melinda wasn’t the type of woman to ignore lies. He sipped his coffee, but couldn’t speak.

“John?” she said. “What’s it about?”

There it was. He took a deep breath, looked into her eyes and told her.

He could tell she was upset by her expressions. The doorbell rang and she closed her robe to answer it. He saw it was the food delivery and passed her a five-dollar bill.

After retrieving their meal from the delivery man, Melinda set the table. They ate in silence. John wondered if she would ask him to leave when they were finished. He wouldn’t blame her if she did. She was clearing the table when he asked her what she thought.

“Does it have to do with what happened outside the other night when you were jumped?”

“What? Oh, no, no way. I don’t know what that was about.”

“Because there was a guy there with a gun that stopped it, except we don’t know what happened after that, do we?”

“I have no idea what that was about. I swear.”

“Well, then I think you made a mistake.”

“Yeah, and?”

“You lied to me.”

“About borrowing money. I apologize.”

“I don’t like liars, John. I hate them.”

He waited. After a pause, Melinda asked, “Is there anything else you lied about?”

“No.”

There was a long pause of silence before Melinda said, “You need to get yourself out of this.”

“How?”

“Get a new job, for one thing. As soon as possible.”

“It’s not that easy. I can’t walk away before I have something to replace the money I’m making now.”

“Suppose it takes a while before you find one?”

“Then I’ll have to wait. I have responsibilities I can’t ignore.”

“Suppose it takes a year?”

“It won’t.”

“Suppose it does.”

“Then it’ll take a year. I don’t have other options right now. I have to make a living.”

Melinda bit into an egg roll.

“I guess you’ll hold it against me,” he said.

“Your poor judgment or what you’re doing on weekends?”

John didn’t answer.

Melinda said, “I don’t think we can go forward like this.”

“We can try.”

“I think you’re a good guy. Maybe one of the really good ones, but I also think you should’ve run away from those people instead of going to work for them.”

“I did that and I wouldn’t have met you.”

“That’s not close to being funny.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“I guess I’m disappointed,” she said. “I don’t have a right to be, but I am. I hate to see a good guy get dragged down and I certainly wouldn’t want to get dragged down with him. Then again, we’re not there yet, so….”

She was being vague. He needed clarity. “So what comes next? You throw me out, you let me stay, what?”

“Tonight? You can stay if you want. I’ll have to think about us some more, though, I won’t lie to you about that. I don’t want to get involved with somebody destined for jail or an early death.”

“Nobody is going to kill me,” John said. “And I have no intention of going to jail.”

“You get caught driving those films around with all that money you’ll have tomorrow, it won’t make a difference what your intentions are. I mean, those people….”

John knew her concerns were genuine, but he had bills to pay and a kid to support. He couldn’t leave the one job without another.

“Maybe I should go,” he said.

“Yeah,” Melinda said. “I think maybe you should.”

Billy Hastings had decided against the sound suppressor and left it in the basement. He still had the .38 he had used to kill two men and had to get rid of it. He pulled off the parkway a few hundred yards short of the first bridge past the Rockaway Parkway exit and spent a few minutes covering the gun with black electric tape. When it was fully covered and then some, he got out of the car, walked to the crest of the bridge and let the gun drop into the middle of Spring Creek.

Five minutes later he drove to the Cross Bay Boulevard exit, made one left turn, then drove a few lights before he could make a U-turn and head back toward the exit for the Belt Parkway heading west.

This time he got off at the exit and drove the length of Rockaway Parkway until he passed the building where John Albano lived. The old man he had spotted sitting on the stoop a few nights ago was there again now. Billy looked away from the geezer as he turned the near corner.

The apartment building was close to the last stop on the L train on Rockaway Parkway. The firehouse and the Sixty-ninth Police Precinct were also nearby. Billy had served his first two years on the force at the Sixty-ninth.

The area was mostly commercial with a lot of local traffic bottlenecked between Flatlands Avenue and the train station on Glenwood Road. Billy parked a few blocks off the main drag and walked back toward Rockaway Parkway. He had disguised himself with a blonde wig, fake eyeglasses and an exaggerated limp. Police experience had taught him how most people avoided looking into handicapped people’s eyes.

He stopped for a slice of pizza and a soda and could see Albano’s building on the next block from where he stood outside the pizza parlor. His mind wandered to an image of Kathleen with Albano entering the same building; Albano’s hands around her waist as they climbed the stairs to his apartment. Billy imagined them kissing inside the apartment doorway before Albano guided her into the bedroom. He imagined them shedding their clothes and then the look on Kathleen’s face as Albano positioned himself between her legs.

Fire engine horns blared from inside the firehouse and interrupted Billy’s daydream. A single fireman stood in the middle of Rockaway Parkway to halt traffic while the engines pulled out of the garage. Billy was impressed with how fast they were on their way. Vehicular street traffic had been halted less than a minute.

He walked in the same direction the fire engines had gone, stopping once to bend over and tap the gun he was carrying in an ankle holster. Today it was his weapon of choice, a Walther PPK. Five years ago he had killed a perp from across Kings Highway with a single shot to the forehead using the same gun. It was what he thought about as he headed toward John Albano’s address; if it became too inconvenient getting up close, he could always shoot from a safer distance.

He was close to the building when he saw the old man was no longer sitting on the stoop.