Authors: Reed Farrel Coleman
Fourth Victim
A
STRING OF SHOOTINGS.
A list of victims. A wealth of suspects. And it all hinges on one dead man …
It’s been a year since ex-NYPD detectives (and former enemies) Joe Serpe and Bob Healy teamed up to solve the murder of a retarded young man who worked at Joe’s company and prevented the Russian Mafia from infiltrating the home heating oil business on Long Island. Now partners in an oil business of their own, Serpe and Healy are faced with an even more heinous series of crimes: Five oil truck drivers have been robbed and shot to death, their lifeless bodies left to bleed out on the cold and loveless suburban streets.
But the killer should have chosen his victims more wisely. The fourth victim, Rusty Monaco, was another retired NYPD detective—one who once saved Joe Serpe’s life while they were both still on the job—and Serpe won’t let that debt die with Rusty.
As Serpe and Healy dig into the murders of the five Long Island oil truck drivers, they descend through several rings of hell, a hell that isn’t just confined to the Long Island suburbs. Following a trail littered with the bodies of the guilty and innocent alike, they investigate leads from a crime-ridden Indian reservation to a Brooklyn housing project, from a day-old homicide to a nearly forgotten murder that happened in the wake of 9/11. There are reams of evidence, but none of it seems to hang together. What possible connection can there be between a firebrand African-American preacher from Brooklyn and the murders of oil truck drivers in Suffolk County? How is the owner of a failing auto body shop connected? Are Serpe and Healy too busy looking at the wrong suspects that they miss the most obvious suspect of all?
The Fourth Victim
is a tale of greed, blackmail, corruption, vengeance, racism, fear, and what righteous men do in the face of a world gone wrong.
Also by Reed Farrel Coleman
Hose Monkey
REED FARREL COLEMAN
THE
FOU4RTH
VICTIM
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
[Canadians]
: TUESDAY, JANUARY 4TH, 2005
[Fifty-first Gallon]
: WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5TH, 2005—MORNING
[The French Connection]
: WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5TH, 2005—LATE AFTERNOON
[Poospatuck Creek]
: WEDNESDAY JANUARY 5TH, 2005—EVENING
[Zeus]
: FRIDAY, JANUARY 7TH, 2005—BEFORE SUNRISE
[Fu Manchu]
: FRIDAY, JANUARY 7TH, 2005—AFTERNOON
[Preferences]
: FRIDAY, JANUARY 7TH, 2005—EVENING
[Omerta]
: SATURDAY, JANUARY 8TH, 2005
[Confetti]
: SATURDAY, JANUARY 8TH, 2005—EVENING
[The Brain God Gave Me]
: SUNDAY, JANUARY 9TH, 2005—EARLY MORNING
[Iago]
: THURSDAY, JANUARY 13TH, 2005—MORNING
[Walking Around Money]
: THURSDAY, JANUARY 13TH, 2005—EVENING
[Target of Convenience]
: FRIDAY, JANUARY 14TH, 2005—MORNING
[Thong]
: FRIDAY, JANUARY 14TH, 2005—LATE AFTERNOON
[The Unfortunate Truth]
: SATURDAY, JANUARY 15TH, 2005
[In Any Language]
: SATURDAY, JANUARY 15TH, 2005—EVENING
[Cloaking Device]
: SUNDAY, JANUARY 16TH, 2005
[Hard Hard Days]
: MONDAY, JANUARY 17TH, 2005—MORNING
[Dracula’s Dog]
: MONDAY, JANUARY 17TH, 2005—LATE AFTERNOON
[Last Laugh of the Day]
: THURSDAY, JANUARY 20TH, 2005—AFTERNOON
[Lies and Favors]
: FRIDAY, JANUARY 21ST, 2005
[Torture Works]
: SATURDAY, JANUARY 22ND, 2005
[Go]
: SATURDAY, JANUARY 22ND, 2005—LATE AFTERNOON
[All The Kings Horses]
: SATURDAY, JANUARY 22ND, 2005—EVENING
[Dead Cow]
: FRIDAY, JANUARY 28TH, 2005
[Dead Serious]
: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 14TH, 2005—VALENTINE’S DAY
[Twenty-two Gallons]
: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 15TH, 2005
[Vengeance and Forgiveness]
: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 17TH, 2005
I would like to thank my first readers and listeners Peter, Megan, Ken, and Ellen. I would also like to thank Bob Gloria and everyone else at Bell Oil, Inc. None of this would have been possible or worth it without Rosanne, Kaitlin, and Dylan.
For Meredith, Jesse, Bradley, Jeremy, and Laura
And now the sparrows warring in the eaves,
The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky,
And the loud chaunting of the unquiet leaves,
Are shaken with earth’s old and weary cry.
—W. B. Yeats “The Sorrow of Love”
T
UESDAY,
JANUARY 4TH,
2005
A
t his best, Rusty Monaco was a miserable, self-absorbed prick and tonight he was paying even less attention than usual to the world outside his head. That was saying something given that it was raining like a son of a bitch and that the night had swallowed whole any last traces of daylight. If he’d been the type of man to notice, the transition from day to night would have taken him by surprise. It snuck up on a man; at one stop the sun was out and by the time he got his truck to the next drop, it was like the sun had never shined. It was light, then it wasn’t, and the dark was always mournful. But Rusty Monaco wasn’t the type of man to notice.
Even when he was on the job, he never gave the quality of light much thought. Rusty’s two years on the truck, the two years since he’d put in his papers, hadn’t much changed him. He lived at face value. Everything was, according to Monaco, as is. You look beneath the surface and you find more surface. Beneath that, only bullshit. That attitude had served him well on the streets. Yet even he would have been forced to admit that spending so much time alone on the truck allowed a man to sometimes see things that maybe he’d forgotten or things he never knew existed. Not tonight. Tonight he was blind with distraction.
Monaco had a lot on his mind other than the wet, the cold, the dark. He was oblivious to his normal misgivings about doing deliveries at night, about the fact that he had two more to go after this next one. Shit, he didn’t even care that the stops were in Wyandanch. Usually, he’d swap out his Wyandanch and Wheatley Heights deliveries regardless of the extra driving involved. The other drivers at Armor Oil, Inc. were only too happy to trade in their pain-in-the-balls north shore stops—backing down long driveways, hundred foot uphill hose pulls, my-shit-don’t-stink customers—for a little time with the Canadians.
Canadians, that was copspeak for niggers. Monaco knew several other colorful code words for African-Americans, but they all meant the same thing. Twenty-three years on the job in the city had given him his fill of Canadians, thank you very much. First in uniform and then as a detective, no matter where the NYPD stuck him, it was always jungleland.
“The eggplants are ruinin’ this city,” he remembered his training officer saying. “Fucking animals, the lot of ‘em.”
Nothing in Rusty Monaco’s experience had done a thing to disabuse him from that point of view. After more than two decades in the shit, his own assessment wasn’t nearly so pleasant. Soon none of it would matter, as the envelope of signed closing documents on the seat next to him attested. His condo in Plantation City was singing the siren’s song, but currently the growl and rumble of the truck and the noise of his own thoughts made it impossible for Rusty to hear it. Finally, he turned the International left off Nicholls onto Buchanan.
“Ah, fuck!” he groaned, the darkness and rain refusing to be ignored any longer.
Squinting his eyes as he slowly rolled the truck down the block, Monaco looked through the sheets of rain for an address, any address, so he could establish odd and even sides of the street. He was a third of the way down Buchanan Avenue before he found a numbered house.
“Niggers,” he said. “No pride.”
The delivery would be on the driver’s side of the street. Although that was of no consequence, he was about to discover something that was.
“Shit!” He slammed his fist into the steering wheel. “A dead fuckin’ end.”
He pressed down hard on the brake pedal and clutch, the truck lurching to a stop. The rig swayed slightly as seven hundred gallons of home heating oil sloshed around in the tank behind him. Not only was Buchanan Avenue a dead end, it was a dead end with no turn around. Monaco cursed himself for his unfamiliarity with the area. The other Armor drivers would have known to back down the street. In good weather, in daylight, he might back the rig up to Nicholls, swing her around, and come down the block ass end first, but with shitty visibility and parked cars lining both sides of the street, that wasn’t an option now. Already two thirds of the way down the block, he was committed. He let his foot off the brake, put the International in first gear, and eased up on the clutch.
It just gets better and better, Monaco thought, pulling up to the last house on the left side of the block. He checked the ticket. The address was right. Unfortunately, the house was utterly dark, but not just
no-one’s-home
dark. It was
the-bank-has-foreclosed-on-this-shitbox-and-they-can’t-give-it-away
dark. Still, he had to get out of the truck and try to make the delivery. You got paid per delivery, not per attempt. He didn’t like it, but that’s how the system worked. One way or the other, he’d been banging his head against the system his whole life. He popped out the parking brake, stepped on the clutch, flipped on the PTO, released the clutch, grabbed the delivery ticket, and climbed down out of the cab.
It was colder out than he remembered, his breath throwing out huge plumes of vapor before him. At least the rain had let up some, but the thin sheet of water on the asphalt felt slick beneath the soles of his boots. If the temperature dropped another degree or two, it would be a holiday on ice. Nothing like driving a thirty foot long, thirty ton rig on icy roads. Every red light became an adventure.
He took the stoop steps two at a time. There were jagged remnants of a bulb in the porch light fixture and two moot copper wires sticking through a hole where a doorbell should have been. He rapped his knuckles on the front door, peeling paint flecking off like dandruff.
“Armor Fuel,” he said, feeling foolish for even bothering. He didn’t bother trying a second time and rushed back to the warmth of the cab. He never quite made it, slipping on the last step and sprawling face first out into the street. Before Rusty could push himself back up, he felt something colder than the air and very hard being pressed into the back of his head. “Fuckin’ nig—”
He never did finish the thought or make those last deliveries.