Fourth Victim (2 page)

J
oe Serpe stood atop the tank of his old green Mack, guiding the six foot long fill manifold through the open hatch. When he heard the mouth of the manifold clank against the bottom of the aluminum tank, he eased the manifold handle forward and the pump squealed slowly to life. Joe knew the routine; the first fifty gallons of the three thousand to be loaded would fairly trickle out, the meter click, click, clicking like the second hand on a watch. Then the oil would gush out of the pipe against the bottom of the tank with such force that it would lift the top of the manifold six inches above the rim of the hatch. He had seen rookie drivers panic the first time they loaded their rigs by themselves, when, seemingly with a a will of its own, the manifold reared up that way.

Serpe didn’t need to look behind him to know the sun was coming up. He could feel it warming his back and see its rays reflected in the fine, red-dyed mist spraying out of the open hatch. As he kneeled to look into the abyss of the tank to make sure the manifold was still seated right, he caught a full on whiff of #2 home heating oil. Some people’s mornings smelled like fresh roasted coffee and frying bacon. His smelled like a high school chemistry experiment. His entire life smelled of it, though he rarely noticed. He spent even less time worrying about what these fumes and his truck’s diesel exhaust were doing to his lungs. It didn’t pay for a man to focus on those kinds of things.

Although he had loaded the tugboat—his nickname for the green Mack—this way six days a week for years now, the process was still a revelation to him. Just lately he’d become fixated with the fifty-first gallon, with the transition from trickle to gush. It was that transition, the moment when things went from control to chaos, the moment when things slipped away that fascinated Joe Serpe. If only he could learn the secret of that transition, he thought, he might comprehend how he had lost Marla. For as sure as the sun was coming up at his back, she had slipped slowly away from him. He knew the signs. He had heard the clicking of the meter, but still he had been unable to stop her from leaving. No one knew loss better than Joe Serpe. No one.

Over the past decade, he had lost everyone and everything of value in his life. Once a legendary NYPD narcotics detective, Serpe had gotten jammed up covering for his partner and best friend Ralphy Abruzzi. Not only was Joe forced to leave the job in disgrace, but he had to testify as a prosecution witness in open court. Ralphy, godfather to Joe’s son, ate buckshot for breakfast the weekend before his sentencing hearing. After the suicide, the few cop friends Joe had left, abandoned him. Although it was Ralph who had the coke habit, who stole and extorted money, who eventually sold information and protection to dealers, it was Joe Serpe who was to be punished.

The media frenzy surrounding the trial and the fallout from the suicide cost Serpe more than a few friends. The stress destroyed his already fractured marriage; his wife and son fleeing to Florida before the ink was dry on the divorce decree. Joe didn’t mind losing his wife so much, but the distance—emotional and geographical—between him and his boy was pure hell. While the distance in miles remained constant, the emotional distance grew so that they barely spoke.

None of it—the trial, the suicide, the divorce, the estrangement—hit Joe nearly as hard as the death of his fireman brother on September 11, 2001. Vinny was crushed by debris as the first tower collapsed. That was the final blow. On that day, Joe Serpe’s world grew so small that it would have fit inside a paper cup. God, Joe thought, had a funny way of showing his boundless love for humankind. That day he handed the Almighty Mindfucker his pink slip and began his slide into the bottle.

So no, no one had to school Joe Serpe on the subtleties of the signs of loss: the emptiness, the nagging questions, the long sleepless nights. Very few men had lost as much or fallen quite as far and lived to tell about it. Even fewer had picked themselves back up and rebuilt their lives. But to rebuild his life, Joe had been forced to come to an uneasy understanding with loss.

As he noticed the rising pink foam near the lip of the hatch, Joe gazed quickly at the meter to his left. With fifty gallons to go, he eased back gently on the loading handle to slow the pumping: … 2956 … 69 … 76 … 89 … 96 … 97 … 98 … 3000. Silence. Serpe hit the red cut-off button and lifted up the spring-loaded manifold so that its mouth rested only inches above the surface of the oil in the tugboat’s tank. This permitted whatever oil was left in the pipeline to drizzle out into the tank. When it was down to a spit, he lifted the manifold up to shoulder height, hooked a capture bucket onto the end of the pipe, and folded back the loading arm to clear room for the truck that would follow the tugboat into the loading rack.

Climbing down off the loading platform and disconnecting the grounding plug from the chassis of his truck, Serpe realized he had learned nothing, that there were no lessons to be learned from the fifty-first gallon. Marla was gone. Deep down he knew that even if he comprehended the mechanics of her leaving, he couldn’t have stopped it.

He removed the wheel chock, got into the tugboat and drove the fifty feet or so to the checkout booth. Out of the truck again and inside the booth, Joe waved his magnetic loading card at the scanner and the printer spit out his bill of lading. Still thinking about Marla, it took him a minute to see the notice posted on the wall above the printer. Even then it didn’t quite register.

WARNING:

ALL C.O.D. OIL DRIVERS BEWARE
FOURTH DRIVER ROBBED AND MURDERED
MEETING 7PM TONIGHT AT ST. PATRICK’S GYM
SUFFOLK P.D. REPS TO ATTEND

Only when Serpe saw the second notice, the one about the wake for Rusty Monaco, did it hit home. He mouthed the dead man’s name and hung his head. There was history between Monaco and Serpe, a debt that now could never be repaid.

The trucks were all out and the phones had slowed down, so Bob Healy finally had a chance to breathe. He sat down at his desk with a fresh cup of coffee, a buttered roll, and a copy of
Newsday.
He still hadn’t gotten quite used to the five o’clock alarm and life in a trailer in an oil yard. He’d been coming into the office for a few months now, quoting prices, answering phones, taking stops, laying out delivery routes, but he wasn’t liking it much. The yard was either dusty or muddy depending on the weather. It stank of diesel fumes in the morning when the trucks warmed up and of heating oil the rest of the time. And when they used certain runways at nearby MacArthur Airport, it smelled of spent jet fuel. The trailer itself was a dump; too hot in summer and an icebox in winter. Besides all that, it was paradise.

Like he had told Joe in the hospital after Serpe had been shot, retired cops were good at only two things: owning bars or working security. Joe didn’t disagree. The plan was that the two of them would open a bar together someday, but Joe Serpe knew the oil business. He had learned it the hard way; starting on the bottom rung as a hose monkey, then driving Sunday, holiday, and night shifts. He knew how to make money at it. So the two of them had compromised. They pooled their resources to buy back Mayday Fuel from the government who had seized it from a Russian mob’s front company. They put aside a set amount of money each week out of the profits toward the purchase of a bar. Two years, that was the plan. Two years and then Healy could get out from behind the dispatcher’s desk and get behind the bar.

Healy sipped the coffee and made a sour face. Christ, he thought, even the coffee was beginning to taste like fucking heating oil. He flipped the paper over from the sports section to the front page, saw the headlines, and nearly shit.

B
ob Healy heard the throaty growl of the tugboat before it even turned off Hawkins onto Union. He held up his right wrist, checking his watch against the reality of the night. It wasn’t as late as it seemed, only 5:15, but John and Anthony had brought in the other two trucks over an hour ago and cashed out. That was Joe’s new rule. Until the cops caught the skell killing the COD drivers, he didn’t want his trucks out on the street after dark. A life, anybody’s life, was too precious to be pissed away for an extra forty or fifty bucks. Anybody’s life, of course, except Joe’s.

He didn’t feel the rules applied to him. He had once been supercop, Joe “the Snake” Serpe, doing buy and bust operations in the worst parts of New York City. He could smell trouble coming and felt sure he could handle anything. If Colombian drug gangs didn’t scare him, he wasn’t going to be intimidated by some cowardly piece of shit who hid in dark corners killing hard working men. Although Joe had lost his carry privileges when he had his troubles, he always kept the Glock Healy had given him tucked in his waistband.

Healy didn’t talk right away when his partner came hobbling through the office door. First, he let Joe put down his map and metal ticket box, let him exhale and wash up. Only after Joe emerged from the trailer’s coffin-sized bathroom, his limp more pronounced after a full day on the truck, did Healy speak.

“The leg hurting?” Bob asked.

Like a motherfucker.
“It aches a little all the time, but it just gets weak after twenty-three stops.”

“So, you heard about Rusty Monaco, huh?” “I heard.”

“I knew him,” Healy said.

“You did?” “Yeah.”

Joe shook his head. “Internal Affairs detective knows you, that can’t be a good sign.” “I knew
you.”

“Yeah, and you ruined my career.”

“That was your loyalty to Ralph Abruzzi that did that, remember? I just came around with the broom and dust pan to sweep up what was left.”

They let that hang in the air between them like a balloon filled with poison gas. This was the first time since Joe had been in the hospital recovering from his leg wound that the subject had come up. Although now friends and partners, they both took great pains to avoid the details surrounding Joe’s dismissal and disgrace. Neither one of them could claim innocence in this area.

“Fair enough,” Serpe said, diffusing the tension. “So what was your beef with Monaco?”

“You mean besides the fact that he was a miserable son of a bitch?”

“Not for nothing, Healy, but half the NYPD are miserable fucks. So yeah, besides that.”

“First five or six times it was for excessive force. He tended to be a little too enthusiastic with his fists. Then the last time it was that rooftop thing in Brooklyn. You know, when the black kid allegedly waved a pistol at him and the kid wound up impaled on the courtyard fence twenty stories below. If that incident didn’t happen right after Nine/Eleven, it would’ve been a major scandal.”

“Did he murder the kid, do you think?” Joe asked.

“We couldn’t prove it. Doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. And let’s just say that in the wake of the terror attack, the department didn’t have much enthusiasm for hanging a cop, any cop, even one like Rusty Monaco, out to dry.”

“But do
you
think he did it?”

“Rusty Monaco was a piece of shit and a disgrace to the shield.” “Don’t pull your punches or anything, Bob. Tell me how you really feel about him.”

“Why are you so interested, huh? Were you two buddies or something?”

Serpe shook his head yes. “Or something. I knew the man, too.”

“And what’d you think of him?”

“That he was a violent, miserable, racist prick, but—”

“But! Are you kidding me? You’re not seriously going to defend this guy to me, are you? It was miraculous that he didn’t end up in prison, never mind lose his pension. He was an asshole.”

“No doubt, but an asshole who saved my life.”

Albie Jimenez was breathing easy. He had gotten his green card a year ago and his Hazmat license two months after that. Finally, he had been able to stop living in that shadow world in which most of his friends were forced to exist. Life on Long Island was strange enough for a man from Tehuacan, Mexico without having to loiter in front of the 7/Eleven on Horse Block Road with a hundred and fifty other Mexicans and Salvadorans waiting to be chosen like cattle at auction.

Those days were in Albie’s past. Now he kept his eyes only ahead. Soon he’d have the cash to send for his wife and son. He even had a binder on a two bedroom house on Westwood Avenue in Brentwood. It needed some work, but he wasn’t afraid of work. Life was good and it would get better as soon as the authorities caught that
cono
who was killing his fellow drivers. Not that Albie was too worried. He did his deliveries far away from the
myates,
in towns where his own skin was darkest.

He turned his Ford right off Indian Head Road onto Old Northport Road, past the driving range and into the heart of the industrial area between Commack and Kings Park.

A little bit before the gates of the masonry supply yard, he spotted a car parked in the road at an odd angle. There was a woman lying between the side of the car and the shoulder of the road. Albie skidded the Ford to a stop, put on his flashers, and hopped out of the cab.

“Hey, lady,” he called, reaching for his cell phone. “Lady, you okay?”

Then something disrupted his world. There was a thunderous ringing, but it sounded as if it was coming from inside his head. Except for the pounding of his own heart and the whoosh of his breaths, the ringing was all he could hear. The asphalt came to life, rolling like black waves beneath his boots. He nearly steadied himself against the asphalt tide, but in the end he just could not keep his balance and he tumbled face first into the solid surf. Then, when he was down, things got quiet and dark, impossibly dark.

“He saved your life, huh? How’d he manage that?” Healy asked.

“It was eighty-nine and me and Ralphy and Monaco were assigned to a federally funded task force aimed at clearing drugs out of city housing projects.”

“Yeah, like that was ever gonna happen. You could blow up everyone of those projects and they’d be selling drugs outta the rubble.”

“Wasn’t my idea.”

“What happened?”

“Ralphy and me got a tip that Papa Doc Willingham’s crew was running a major crack distribution center out in one of the apartment houses in Bath Beach across the little bridge from Coney Island. I forget the name of the project, but you know the one. It’s where they shot that sniper scene in
The French Connection.”

“Yeah,” Healy said, his face lighting up, “the ones by the elevated subway over there by Dewey High School.”

“Right. So the thing is we got this information, but we’re supposed to run everything up the chain of command before we take any action. It was a total cluster fuck because by the time any info got up to the top of the chain, it was worthless. Big drug operators aren’t stupid. They’re moving their shit around all the time to protect their assets from the cops and competitors. And there were other problems too. Not only was our chain of command long, but it was leaky too. Anything we knew tended to get known by anyone who was a target. Even when we could manage to keep intelligence in house, the feds always insisted we do a full on assault. It was like trying to catch someone by surprise with the Third Army behind you. Spotters saw us coming from the next neighborhood over.”

“So you decided, what, that you were going outside the chain of command?”

“Something like that, yeah, but it was just me and Ralphy who wanted to go in. Monaco was put on the task force by his captain to dump his problem child on somebody else’s doorstep. This was after one of those incidents you were talking about, so Monaco was just doing time, you know, trying to keep his nose clean until his next assignment. But he was on duty with us that night and knew the layout of those buildings better than we did. I’ll spare you the details of how we got inside and got passed the spotters. It’s the kind of stuff that would just piss you off.”

“Okay, I’ll take your word for it,” Healy said.

“Anyway, we grab the last spotter in the stairwell and we persuade him that it’s in his best interests to help us. He was easy to convince. So we step into the hallway and it’s completely quiet. We get to the door and the spotter gives the password and we think we’re in. The door pulls back and the minute it does, I know it’s wrong. Before I can even blink, all hell breaks loose. Ralphy got our shotgun and hears something to his left and wheels around that way. I step out to push the spotter out of the line of fire, but a shotgun blast comes out of the apartment and hits him square in the chest. He falls back taking me with him, so I’m down with this guy’s body on me and my gun hand is pinned to the floor. Ralphy’s screaming ‘NYPD, don’t move!’ at whoever he thinks is coming down the hall. I’m trying to free myself and this fat fuck charges out of the apartment with a sawed-off in his hands.

“Monaco can’t fire because the hall is so dark and Ralphy’s just a few feet away on the opposite side of the big man. If he misses, he’d hit Ralphy. He can’t even fire a warning shot because the hallway’s all concrete and tile. A bullet might ricochet anywhere. Meanwhile the fat man bends over me and puts the shotgun so close to my face I can feel the residual heat from the first shot. I squeezed my eyes shut and started praying. There’s a second blast. Its heat registers even before the concussion. My ears are ringing like crazy and there’s Monaco all over the big bastard. Ralphy comes over and puts the cocksucker down with the butt of his shotgun. In the end it was all bullshit. There was no stash in the apartment. We’d been set up.”

“Wait a second, Joe. I read all of your jackets. I’ve gone over everyone of your cases. Fact is, I probably know your cases better than you do and I never saw anything about this.”

“That’s right, you didn’t. Officially, it never happened.”

“Forget it. I’m not even going to ask.”

“Okay, but the fact is that Rusty Monaco, nasty prick that he was, is the reason I still got this head on this neck. I owe him for that.” “Yeah, but how much?”

He held the dead man’s driver’s license up to the flashlight.

“Not your lucky day, Jimenez … Alberto, you stupid fuck. How much did he have on him?”

“Twenty-two seventy-eight. He was a busy little amigo.”

“Yeah, meanwhile all he had in his wallet was four bucks. He was really living the American dream. Stupid moron. Come on, let’s wrap him up.”

They rolled the body onto the blue plastic tarp, neatly tucking in the edges.

“He’s like a little burrito.”

“Very funny, asshole. D’you get rid of—”

“Don’t worry about her. She’s not gonna say nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I gave her a sample of what would happen if she opened her mouth.”

“Okay, then let’s finish up with Alberto over here and get going.”

Serpe didn’t answer Healy’s question, but they both knew he was going to take Monaco’s murder on his shoulders. That’s what made Serpe the man he was and what made Healy admire him even as he built the case against Joe that would end his police career. Healy hadn’t been a sentimental type or the kind of man to lose sleep over putting other cops away. Healy was a man who believed in right and wrong, good and evil; one type of good, all sorts of evil. And to mask evil with a badge or hide it behind a priest’s collar was plain wrong. It was that granite conviction that gave him the strength to withstand the withering criticism and abuse he received at the hands of other cops during his twenty plus years in the Internal Affairs Bureau.

Soon after putting in his papers and settling into retirement with his wife Mary, the bottom dropped out of the assumptions by which he had lived his life and that rock solid foundation crumbled. He and Mary had long ago agreed that she would put up with whatever she had to until Bob left the job, but after that, the time was hers. Problem was, the time wasn’t hers to bargain with. Within a year, she was dead of pancreatic cancer.

For months after Mary’s death, he’d been haunted, haunted by the anger in her eyes, by the silent accusation that he had somehow cheated her out of her due. He was haunted by the thought that Mary had paid his karmic bill for all the lives he’d help destroy. The faces of dirty cops came to Bob Healy in his sleep, especially the ones that had, like Ralphy Abruzzi, eaten their guns instead of facing the fallout from their crimes. Bob Healy questioned everything about his beliefs and for the first time in his life he found little solace in the church. So it was no small irony that Joe Serpe had been the man to help him find his way back and why, in spite of how he felt about the late Rusty Monaco, that he would help Serpe find the killer.

“You’re going after this guy, huh?” Healy asked, threading the thick chain through both sides of the yard gate.

“You have to ask?” Serpe hooked the heavy lock through the end links of the chain and snapped it shut.

“Stupid question. I know.”

“Where you headed?” Joe tugged hard on the chain.

“I’m gonna grab a bite and then head over to that meeting at St.

Pat’s. You?”

“Heading home and then maybe I’ll drop by Lugo’s to hear if the drivers have any ideas about what’s really going on.” “Okay. See ya in the morning.”

“Yeah.”

Healy sat in his car a minute, watching his partner’s taillights fade in the distance. Rusty Monaco might have been a worthless piece of shit, but, Healy thought, it would be good to feel like a cop again.

“Where the fuck are we gonna put him?” “Shit! I didn’t really think about that. Let me see.” “Now’s a little late to start thinking about it, don’t you think?” “What the fuck else you want me to do, asshole? We can’t leave him here.”

“We can unscrew the brace that holds the hatch to the top of the tank and throw him in there.”

“You must be a fucking rocket scientist. If we throw him in there, then how the fuck are we supposed to get him out of the tank when we get where we’re going? We’d have to jump in there after him and I ain’t diving into no fucking tank fulla heating oil. Besides, it sorta defeats the purpose if the cops can figure out Speedy Gonzales’s body’s been moved.”