Rosary girls

43

"Whatever you need," Ernie Tedesco said.

Ernie Tedesco owned Tedesco and Sons Quality Meats, a small meatpacking company in Pennsport. He and Byrne had formed a friendship years earlier when Byrne had solved a series of truck hijackings for him.

Byrne had gone home with the intention of showering, grabbing something to eat, and rousting Ernie out of bed. Instead, he showered, sat on the edge of the bed, and the next thing he knew it was six o'clock in the morning.

Sometimes the body says no.

The two men gave each other the macho version of a hug-clasp hands, step forward, strong pat on the back. Ernie's plant was closed for renovations. When he left, Byrne would be alone there.

"Thanks, man," Byrne said.

"Anything, anytime, anywhere," Ernie replied. He stepped through the huge steel door and was gone.

Byrne had monitored the police band all morning. The call had not gone out about a body found in an alley in Gray's Ferry. Not yet. The siren he had heard the night before was another call.

Byrne entered one of the huge meat storage lockers, the frigid room where sides of beef were hung from hooks, and attached to ceiling tracks.

He put on gloves and moved a beef carcass a few feet from the wall.

A few minutes later, he propped open the outside door, went to his car. He had stopped at a demolition site on Delaware, where he had taken a dozen or so bricks.

Back inside the processing room, he carefully stacked the bricks on an aluminum cart, and positioned the cart behind the hanging carcass. He stepped back, studied the trajectory. All wrong. He rearranged the bricks again, and yet again, until he had it right.

He took off the wool gloves and put on a pair of latex. He took the weapon out of his coat pocket, the silver Smith amp; Wesson he had taken off Diablo the night he brought in Gideon Pratt. He gave another quick glance around the processing room.

He took a deep breath, stepped back a few feet, and assumed a shooting stance, his body bladed to the target. He cocked the weapon, then squeezed a shot. The blast was loud, ringing off the stainless steel fixtures, caroming off the ceramic tile walls.

Byrne approached the swinging carcass, examined it. The entry hole was small, barely noticeable. The exit wound was impossible to find in the folds of fat.

As planned, the slug had hit the stacked bricks. Byrne found it on the floor, right near a drain.

It was then that his handheld radio crackled to life. Byrne turned it up. It was the radio call he had been expecting. The radio call he had been dreading.

The report of a body found in Gray's Ferry.

Byrne rolled the beef carcass back to where he had found it. He washed off the slug first in bleach, then in the hottest water his hands could stand, then dried it. He had been careful to load the Smith and Wesson pistol with a full-metal-jacketed slug. A hollow point would have brought fiber with it as it passed through the victim's clothing, and there was no way Byrne could have duplicated that. He wasn't sure how much effort the CSU team was going to put into the murder of another gang- banger, but he had to be careful nonetheless.

He took out the plastic bag, the bag in which he had collected the blood the night before. He tossed the clean slug inside, sealed the bag, collected the bricks, scanned the room one more time, then left.

He had an appointment in Gray's Ferry.