Onion Street

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Bobby was sleeping when I walked into his room at Coney Island Hospital, but it wasn’t the sleep of angels. His face, his long brown hair were bathed in sweat. His fingers twitched. His head jerked violently from side to side. His lips curled and moved. His arms struck out wildly at an invisible enemy. Maybe it was a nightmare. Or maybe he was being crushed beneath the weight of his deals with various devils. I didn’t much care either way, as long as he suffered. I stood there watching him for what might have been an hour, trying to feel something other than anger. I think I could have stood there for days and not felt anything else. Eventually Bobby’s night terrors calmed, and he fell into a more restful sleep. I sat down, reading while I waited. He stirred again at around eleven, this time opening his eyes. I got up. I wanted to be standing over him when he woke.

“Hey, Moe.” He yawned, stretching his muscles, not without pain. “What time is it? How did you get in here with — ”

I might have told him what time it was. I might have told him that I had called Detective Casey to make sure I could get past the relief cop at the door without any hassles. I did neither. What I did instead was to toss something onto Bobby’s chest.

He grabbed at it. “What the fuck is this?”

“It’s a dead cop’s badge.”

“What the — ”

“Shut up, Bobby. For once, just shut the fuck up. I’m already sorry for saving your life. Don’t make it worse.”

“About that,” he said, “about saving my — ”

“Twice, Bobby. I saved your worthless life twice. So please shut up. Shut up!”

He put his hands up in surrender. “Okay.”

“We’ll talk about the badge later. First, I wanna talk about this.” I handed him a photo of the big guy loading up his trunk with drugs. “Are the bricks heroin or cocaine?”

“Where did you get this?”

I ignored him. “Heroin or cocaine?”

He bowed his head. “Heroin.”

“What a perfect setup, huh, Bobby? By volunteering to be Detective Casey’s rat inside Susan Kasten’s bomb plot, you got a pass from the cops that would let you drive all the heroin you could carry through the streets of New York without risking a day in prison. If you got stopped, like we did that day you got a flat tire coming back from the airport, you just told the cop to call the number Casey gave you and the cops would send you on your way. Those weren’t dummy explosives in your trunk that day. It was heroin, right?”

“Right.”

“You musta gotten a fucking hard-on when Casey explained to you about the number to call if you ever got jammed up. Me, I wouldn’t’ve been able to see a way to turn that into profits, but that’s always been the difference between us, Bobby. You could always see all the possibilities in any deal, whether it was trading baseball cards or smuggling heroin.”

“Everybody’s good at something, Moe.”

“Well, I guess that makes it all okay. Hitler was good at killing Jews, and you’re good at making money. So, whose idea was it to use your cover to smuggle drugs, yours or Tony P’s?”

He looked like he was going to deny Tony Pizza’s involvement, but didn’t bother. “From when I worked for him a few summers back, I knew Tony was involved in all sorts of smuggling: jewelry, car parts, electronics, fireworks. You know about the fireworks. Everybody in Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach, and Coney Island knows about the fireworks, even the cops at the 60th and 61st precincts buy their fireworks from him. At worst I thought Tony would ask me to move some hot jewelry or bottle rockets.”

“Bottle rockets. If this wasn’t so fucked up, I might even laugh at that. But I guess when you went to him and told him about your sweet setup, he had bigger plans than bottle rockets.”

Bobby shrugged his shoulders. “Once I told him, I couldn’t take it back, not if I wanted to keep breathing.”

“Not if Jimmy Ding Dong knew about it.”

“No excuses, but even after Tony mentioned drugs I thought the worst I’d be doing was moving some pot. Not even you could get bent outta shape over a little pot. I swear, I didn’t know it was heroin until I moved the first load. I told Tony I didn’t like it, but he just told me that was too bad for me, that I should just take the money and keep my mouth shut, so that’s what I did.”

“I thought you two were old pals, you and Tony P,” I said.

“Guys like Tony and Jimmy, they don’t have friends. They see you as an asset or a liability.”

“Better to be a living asset than a dead liability.”

“Especially with drugs. Drugs are big money, Moe. Big as in huge block letters in neon lights. Big as in Times Square on New Year’s Eve big.”

I was curious. “How much have you made?”

His face lit up in spite of himself. That always happened when he talked money. “A hundred grand, give or take, and that’s just from the deal itself.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve invested almost all of it in the stock market. It’s already up to almost half a million.”

“Such blasphemy,” I said with mock scorn. “Karl Marx is spinning in his grave.”

“Fuck Karl Marx.”

“What about Samantha?”

Bobby didn’t like that. “What’s Sam got to do with this? Why bring her name up?”

“Because you got her killed, you asshole. That’s her badge on your chest. Sam was a cop.”

He sat up in bed and swung his legs over the side. “What the fuck are you talking about, Moe?”

I pulled the letter out of my pocket and threw it at him. “Read up, Bobby.”

As he did, I explained to him how I’d gone to Koblenz, and about the discrepancy in her age. I told him about Sam’s dad being a Pennsylvania state trooper, and how Sam had wanted to follow in his footsteps.

“It all adds up,” I said. “She was determined to be a cop, only no one knew about it. See there in the letter, where she explains that she was recruited to be in a special program to infiltrate radical groups using nontraditional means to finance their agendas. And when she hooked up with you, she thought she had hit the daily double. You were connected with every radical group at Brooklyn College and with major heroin trafficking. Just one problem. She fell in love with you. She had enough evidence on you to put you away for a hundred years, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.”

Bobby just stared at the letter, open-mouthed, stunned. Then in a whisper, said, “But the bomb, who did — ”

“Jimmy Ding Dong is my guess. C’mon, Bobby, think. Tony had to protect his interests. He couldn’t afford to let Samantha fuck up your sweet deal. See in the letter where Sam talks about the investigation being compromised, and that she couldn’t be sure who to trust anymore. I bet you if you find out who was in her unit, you’ll find a crooked line back to Tony P.”

“Huh?”

“That apartment she lived in, some guy claiming to be her father rented it for her. Only it wasn’t her father. It was another cop. If her landlady hadn’t forgotten about the suitcase Sam had stored in her attic, Sam’s death would’ve gone down forever as a screw-up by some half-assed radical group. Don’t you see, Bobby? Susan Kasten had nothing to do with Sam’s death. For all we know, Sam and Marty just went for a hot dog at Nathan’s that night and had no idea the bomb was in the car. The only explosives the Committee had were the dummy explosives you supplied them with, but it wasn’t dummy explosives that blew up Sam and Marty all to hell. It was Tony P protecting you, his cash cow. That’s why Jimmy Ding Dong tried to run me off the road in Pennsylvania. They thought I was on to something about Sam. The irony is that if Jimmy hadn’t tried to kill me, I probably would’ve put down my trip to Koblenz as a painful waste of time.”

“But why didn’t the cops do a better investigation if Sam was one of their own? They always go nuts when another cop gets killed.”

“Because no one knew she was a cop. That was the whole point. Read the letter again. Her name wasn’t on the books, she got paid in cash, and she had only one contact whose real name she didn’t even know. It protected her from being exposed, and it protected the cops who could deny any connection to her. I hope that half a million dollars was worth it to you, Bobby.”

“Do you want some of it, Moe? I’ll cut you in for half. You and your brother can go into business, take care of your folks, never have to worry about anything again.”

I felt myself squinting at him in disbelief. I couldn’t quite believe I’d heard what Bobby had just offered. “Are you outta your fucking mind? I don’t want your blood money, Bobby. Forget all the junkies whose lives you and Tony are ruining. You can probably rationalize that away, but you can’t rationalize away what happened to Sam. You’ll be repaying that debt the rest of your miserable fucking life.”

“You’re right,” he said, swallowing his words. “I’ll never stop repaying it. I promise.”

“Well, it’s over now. I won’t turn you in, Bobby. I should, but I won’t. Tony P would have you killed the second you got inside because he could never trust that you wouldn’t rat him out. I don’t want that on my conscience too. I figure you’ll have to run anyway because without your magic get-out-of-jail number, you’ve become a liability to Tony. Either way, you’re fucked.” I turned to go.

“There’s one problem,” Bobby called after me.

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“It’s not over. I have one more run to do. That’s what Tony and Jimmy were doing here before, letting me know.”

“But you’re not protected anymore.”

He laughed. “You think they give a shit about that now? Besides, Moe, it’s not like I have a choice.”

“Yes, you do. You have to run anyway. Why not run now, before this last shipment? I’ll help you get out of here tonight and you can be on a flight to Mexico before they know you’re gone. With all your money, you can get to Europe and make a nice life for yourself. You’ll even have your guilt to keep you company.”

He shook his head no. “Can’t do it.”

“Why the hell not?”

“For one thing, even if I get away, you’ll still be here. And …”

“And what?”

“Tony and Jimmy have Lids.”

“How?”

Bobby shouted, “Hey, you told me to find Lids, right? Wasn’t it you who said I had all the connections? So I used my best connection, and Tony had the number you gave me traced. Tony said he would keep Lids safe. I had no reason not to believe him. How the fuck was I supposed to know you’d gotten yourself tangled up in all this shit?”

He was right. When I asked Larry to help me find Lids, I hadn’t thought anything through. Now I’d helped deliver Lids into the hands of the man he feared most. After a moment of quiet came the revelation: Whether he did the one last drug run or not, Bobby, Lids, and I were all on the roster of the soon-to-be deceased. Bobby and I seemed to hit on that realization at about the same moment. We were both looking off into space and then, as it came to us both, we turned toward one another, our eyes locking together in mutual understanding and fear. If this was what seeing the future was like, I wanted no part of it. We are all born into this world under penalty of death, but we don’t walk around with destiny on our shoulders. Now I felt like I would snap in half under its weight. Bobby too, from the look of him.

I said it first. “We’re all dead, you know that, right?”

“I know. Tony P may be a fat gavone and a buffoon with his stupid magic tricks, but he’s not stupid. Believe me, the guy’s smarter than you think. He makes all kinda money.”

“That’s why we’re dead. He knew your deal with the cops was gonna come to an end sooner or later. What, did you think he was just gonna give up the drug trade and happily go back to car parts and fireworks?”

“I never thought about that. All I could see was the money,” he said, his face turning red with shame. In all the time I’d known Bobby, I’d never seen him red-faced. “Besides, I haven’t been doing a lot of clear thinking since Sam got killed.”

“Well, think about it now. The whole time you’ve been doing these runs, Tony and Jimmy have probably been looking for another way to transport the heroin and to cut you out of the deal. My guess is the only reason you’re not dead yet is because all the pieces of their new system of getting the heroin out of the airport aren’t in place yet.”

Bobby seemed surprised. “Get outta here.”

“Christ, Bobby, use your brain. If you’ve made a hundred grand, that means he musta cut you in for what, half?”

“Forty percent.”

“Did you really think he was gonna keep giving up almost half of the profits?”

“Like I said, Moe, I haven’t been thinking.”

“The most fucked-up part of this, Bobby, is that I’ve admired you my whole life. I wanted to be like you. Shit, I wanted to be you. You always seemed to know where you were going and how to get there, and I’ve always felt lost.”

Bobby didn’t say anything to that and then he mumbled, “I can’t die yet.”

“Do you know where they have Lids?”

“Tony said they’ll have him at the drop and that when I deliver the last shipment, they’ll let him go.”

“Yeah, and Santa will come down the chimney holding the Tooth Fairy’s wing and the Easter Bunny’s paw.”

“What can I tell you? That’s what he said, that he’d let Lids go if I did this last thing for him.”

“Is this drug run the same as the others? You park in the lot outside the Eastern terminal at JFK, they load your trunk, and you deliver it?”

“That’s how it’s always works.”

“Okay, I think maybe there’s a way to keep us alive.”

“You can’t go to the cops. Like you said, if I go away, Tony P will have a hit put on me. I won’t last five minutes inside.”

“For once in your life, Bobby, you don’t get a say in things. You do what I tell you or you won’t live to see the inside of a prison. When’s the drop set for?”

“Monday. I’m supposed to get released tomorrow.”

“In a few hours, you call Tony P and tell him I ran, tell him I figured out that Jimmy was trying to kill me. He’ll ask where, so tell him you think I caught a bus to Texas at the Port Authority. Tony will believe you.”

“But — ”

“Just do it. I’ll call you in the morning with the rest of the details.”