Chapter
27
* * *
“You sure you wanna be dropped here?” The cabdriver was a huge man, his hair lank with sweat, which dribbled down his cheeks and over the rolls of fat in his neck, eventually losing itself in the greasy collar of his shirt. He seemed to fill the whole front of the cab. The door looked too small for him to have entered through. He gave the impression that he had lived and eaten in the cab for so long that it was no longer possible for him to leave: the cab was his home, his castle, and his bulk gave the impression that it would be his tomb.
“I’m sure,” I replied.
“This is a tough area.”
“That’s okay. I have tough friends.”
The Morelli wine warehouse was one of a number of similar premises that lined one side of a long, ill–lit street west of Northern Boulevard in Flushing. It was a redbrick building, its name reduced to a white, flaking shadow below the edge of its roof. Wire screens covered the windows on both the ground and upper levels. There were no visible lights on the walls; the area between the gate and the main building was in almost total darkness.
On the other side of the street stood the entrance to a large yard filled with storage depots and railroad containers. The ground inside was pitted with ponds of filthy water and discarded pallets. I saw a mongrel dog, its ribs almost bursting through its fur, tearing at something in the dim light of the lot’s filthy spotlights.
As I stepped from the cab, headlights flashed briefly from the alleyway by the warehouse. Seconds later, as the cab pulled away, Angel and Louis emerged from the black Chevy van, Angel carrying a heavy–looking training bag, Louis immaculate in a black leather coat, a black suit, and a black polo shirt.
Angel screwed up his face as he drew nearer. It wasn’t hard to see why. My suit was torn and covered with mud and dirt from the encounter with Hyams in the Dane house. My arm had begun to bleed again and the right cuff of my shirt was a deep red color. I ached all over and I was tired of death.
“You look good,” said Angel. “Where’s the dance?”
I looked toward the Morelli warehouse. “In there. Have I missed anything?”
“Not here. Louis just got back from Ferrera’s place, though.”
“Bobby Sciorra arrived there about an hour ago by chopper,” said Louis. “Reckon him and Pili are having a real heart–to–heart.”
I nodded. “Let’s go,” I said.
The warehouse was surrounded by a high brick wall topped with barbed wire and spiked fencing. The gate, inset slightly as the wall curved inward at the entrance, was also wire topped and solid except for a gap where a heavy lock and chain linked its two halves together. While Louis lounged semidiscreetly nearby, Angel removed a small, custom–built drill from his bag and inserted the bit into the lock. He pressed the trigger and a high–pitched grinding sound seemed to fill the night. Instantly, every dog in the vicinity started to bark.
“Shit, Angel, you got a fuckin’ whistle built into that thing?” hissed Louis. Angel ignored him and moments later the lock fell open.
We entered and Angel gingerly removed the lock and placed it inside the gate. He replaced the chain so that to a casual observer it would still appear secure if, oddly, locked from the inside.
The warehouse dated from the thirties but would have appeared functional even then. Old doors at the right and left sides had been sealed shut, leaving only one way in at the front. Even the fire exit at the back had been welded in place. The security lights, which might once have lit up the yard, now no longer functioned and the illumination from the streetlights did not penetrate the darkness here.
Angel went to work on the lock with a selection of picks, a small flashlight in his mouth, and less than a minute later we were in, lighting our heavy Mags as we went. A small booth, which was probably once occupied by a security guard or watchman when the building was in use, stood directly inside the door. Empty shelves stretched along the walls of the room, paralleled by similar shelving through the center, creating two aisles. The shelves were separated into alcoves, each sufficient to hold a bottle of wine. The floor was stone. This had originally been the display area where visitors could examine the stock. Below, in the cellars, was where the cases were kept. At the far end of the room stood a raised office, reached by three stairs to the right.
Beside the small flight of stairs up to the office, a larger staircase descended down. There was also an old freight elevator, unlocked. Angel stepped in and pulled the lever, and the lift descended a foot or two. He brought it back to its original level, stepped out again, and raised an eyebrow at me.
We started down the stairs. There were four flights, the equivalent of two stories, but there were no other floors between the shop floor and the cellars. At the base was another locked door, this one wooden with a glass window through which the flashlight beam revealed the cellar’s arches. I left Angel to the lock. It took him seconds to open the door. He looked ill at ease entering the cellars. The training bag appeared suddenly heavy in his hand.
“Want me to take that for a while?” asked Louis.
“When I’m that old you’ll be feeding me through a straw,” replied Angel. Although the cellars were cool, he licked at sweat on his upper lip.
“Practically feeding you through a straw already,” muttered the voice from behind us.
In the basement, a series of curved, cavelike alcoves stretched away before us. Each had bars running vertically down from ceiling to floor, with a gate set in the middle. They were the old storage bins for the wine. They were obviously disused, strewn with litter. The flashlight beams caught the edge of the floor of one bin that differed from the others. It was the one nearest us on the right, bare earth showing where the cement floor had been removed. Its gate stood ajar.
Our footsteps echoed around the stone walls as we approached. Inside, the floor was clean and the dirt neatly raked. In one corner was a green metal table with two slits on either side through which ran leather restrainers. In another corner stood a large, industrial–sized roll of what appeared to be plastic sheeting.
Two layers of shelving ran around the walls. They were empty except for a bundle, tightly wrapped in plastic, that had been tucked in against the far wall. I walked toward it and the beam of the flashlight caught denim and a green check shirt, a pair of small shoes and a mop of hair, a discolored face whose skin had cracked and burst, with a pair of open eyes, the corneas milky and cloudy. The smell of decay was strong, but dulled somewhat by the plastic. I recognized the clothing. I had found Evan Baines, the child who had disappeared from the Barton estate.
“Sweet Jesus,” I heard Angel say. Louis was silent.
I drew closer to the body, checking the fingers and face. Apart from natural decay, the body was undamaged and the boy’s clothing appeared undisturbed. Evan Baines had not been tortured before he died but there was some heavier discoloration at his temple and there was dried blood in his ear.
The fingers of his left hand were splayed against his chest but his small right hand had formed into a tightly closed fist.
“Angel, come here. Bring the bag.”
He stood beside me and I saw the anger and despair in his eyes.
“It’s Evan Baines,” I said. “Did you bring the masks?”
He bent down and took out two dust masks and a bottle of Aramis aftershave. He sprinkled the aftershave on each mask, handed one to me, and put the other one on himself. Then he handed me a pair of plastic gloves. Louis stood farther back but didn’t take a mask. Angel held the flashlight beam on the body.
I took my pocketknife and sliced through the plastic by the child’s right hand. Even through the mask the stench grew stronger and there was a hiss of escaping gas.
I took the blunt edge of the knife and pried at the boy’s fist. The skin broke and a nail came loose.
“Hold the light steady, dammit,” I hissed. I could see something small and blue in the boy’s grip. I pried again, heedless now of the damage I was causing. I had to know. I had to find the answer to what had happened here. Eventually, the object came loose and fell to the floor. I bent to pick it up and examined it by the light of my own flashlight. It was a shard of blue china.
Angel had begun scanning the far corners of the room with his flashlight as I examined the shard and then had left the room. As I clutched the piece of china, I heard the sound of his drill and then his voice calling us from above. We went back up the stairs and found him in a small room, little bigger than a closet, almost directly above the room where the boy lay. Three linked videocassette recorders were stacked one above the other on some shelving and a thin cable snaked through a hole at the base of the wall and disappeared into the floor of the warehouse. On one of the VCRs the seconds ticked off inexorably until Angel stilled them.
“In the corner of that cellar there’s a tiny hole, not much bigger than my fingernail but big enough to take a fish–eye and a motion sensor,” he said. “An ordinary Joe couldn’t have found them unless he knew they were there and he knew where to look. I reckon the wire follows the ventilation system. Someone wanted to record what went on in that room anytime it was entered.”
Someone, but not whoever went to work on the children in that room. A regular video camera set up in the room would give better–quality pictures. There was no reason for concealment unless the viewer didn’t want to be noticed.
There was no monitor in the room, so whoever was responsible either wanted to watch the tapes in the comfort of his or her own home or wanted to be sure that whoever picked them up couldn’t sample what was on them before handing them over. I knew a lot of people who could put together a deal like that, and so did Angel, but I had one in particular in mind: Pili Pilar.
We went back down to the basement. I took the folding spade from Angel’s bag and began to break the earth. It didn’t take long for me to hit something soft. I dug wider and then began to scrape away the earth, Angel beside me using a small garden trowel to help. A film of plastic was revealed, and through it, barely discernible, I could see brown, wrinkled skin. We scraped away the rest of the dirt until the child’s body was visible, curled in a fetal position with its head hidden by its left arm. Even in decay, we could see the fingers had been broken, although I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl without moving it.
Angel looked slowly around the floor of the cellar and I knew what he was thinking. It was probably worse than that. This child had been buried barely six inches beneath the ground, which meant there were probably others below. This room had been in use for a long time.
Louis slipped into the room, his finger pressed to his lips. He glanced once at the child, then he pointed slowly above us with his right hand. We stayed still, hardly breathing, and I heard the sound of soft steps on the stairs. Angel retreated into the shadows beside the shelves, clicking off the flashlight as he went. Louis was already gone when I stood up. I moved to take up a position at the other side of the door and was reaching for my gun when a flashlight beam hit me in the face. The voice of Bobby Sciorra simply said, “Don’t,” and I withdrew my hand slowly.
He had moved quickly, surprisingly so. He emerged from the shadows, the ugly Five–seveN in his right hand and his flashlight focused on me as he neared the open gate. He stopped about ten feet away from me and I could see his teeth shining as he smiled.
“Dead man,” he said. “Dead as the kids in the room behind you. I was gonna kill you back in that house but the old man wanted you left alive, ‘less there was no other option. I just ran out of options.”
“Still doing Ferrera’s dirty work,” I replied. “Even you should have scruples about this.”
“We all have our weaknesses.” He shrugged. “Sonny’s is short–eyes. He likes looking, you know. Can’t do nothing else with his limp dick. He’s a sick fuck but his daddy loves him and now his daddy wants the mess cleaned up.”
And so it was Sonny Ferrera who had recorded the death agonies of these children, who had watched while Hyams and Adelaide Modine tortured them to death, their screams echoing around the walls as the silent unblinking eye of the camera took it all in to spew out again into his living room. He must have known who the killers were, must have watched them kill again and again, yet he did nothing because he liked what he was seeing and didn’t want it to end.
“How did the old man find out?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. I knew now what had been in the car with Pili when he crashed, or thought I knew. It turned out that I was as wrong in that as I had been in so much else.
There was a scuffle of movement in the corner of the alcove and Sciorra reacted with the swiftness of a cat. The flashlight beam widened and he stepped back, the gun moving minutely from me to the corner.
The beam caught the bowed head of Angel. He glanced up into Bobby Sciorra’s eyes and smiled. Sciorra looked puzzled for a moment and then his mouth opened in slow–dawning realization. He was already turning to try to locate Louis when the darkness seemed to come alive around him and his eyes widened as he realized, too late, that death had come for him too.
Louis’s skin gleamed in the light and his eyes were white as his left hand clamped tight over Sciorra’s jaw. Sciorra seemed to tighten and spasm, his eyes huge with pain and fear. He rose up on his toes and his arms stretched wide at either side. He shook hard once, twice, then the air seemed to leave him and his arms and body sagged, yet his head remained rigid, his eyes wide and staring. Louis pulled the long, thin blade from the back of Sciorra’s head and pushed him forward, and he fell to the ground at my feet, small shudders running through his body until they stopped entirely.
Angel emerged from the darkness of the room behind me.
“I always hated that fucking spook,” he said, looking at the small hole at the base of Sciorra’s skull.
“Yeah,” said Louis. “I like him a whole lot better now.” He looked at me. “What do I do with him?”
“Leave him. Give me his car keys.”
Louis frisked Sciorra’s body and tossed me the keys.
“He’s a made guy. Is that gonna be a problem?”
“I don’t know. Let me handle it. Stay close to here. At some point, I’m going to call Cole. When you hear the sirens, disappear.”
Angel bent down and gingerly lifted the FN from the ground using the end of a screwdriver.
“We gonna leave this here?” he asked. “That’s some gun, what you say is true.”
“It stays,” I said. If I was right, Bobby Sciorra’s gun was the link between Ollie Watts, Connell Hyams, and the Ferrera family, the link between a set of child killings that spanned thirty years and a mob dynasty that was more than twice as old again.
I stepped over Sciorra’s body and ran from the warehouse. His black Chevy was pulled into the yard, its trunk facing the warehouse, and the gates had been closed behind it. It looked a lot like the car that had taken out Fat Ollie Watts’s killer. I reopened the gates and drove away from the Morelli warehouse and Queens itself. Queens, a mass of warehouses and cemeteries.
And sometimes both together.