The Striver Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Stephen Solomita

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Stephen Solomita

  DAMAGED GOODS

  A GOOD DAY TO DIE

  NO CONTROL

  A PIECE OF THE ACTION

  THE POSTER BOY

  TRICK ME TWICE

  MONKEY IN THE MIDDLE *

  CRACKER BLING *

  MERCY KILLING *

  ANGEL FACE *

  DANCER IN THE FLAMES *

  THE STRIVER *

  * available from Severn House

  THE STRIVER

  Stephen Solomita

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2014

  in Great Britain and 2015 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2015 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2014 by Stephen Solomita

  The right of Stephen Solomita to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  Solomita, Stephen author.

  The striver.

  1. Gangsters–New York (State)–New York–Fiction.

  2. Drug traffic–Fiction. 3. Usury–Fiction. 4. Noir

  fiction.

  I. Title

  813.5’4-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8462-6 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-554-4 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-601-4 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  ONE

  Teddy Winuk came out of the bathroom to find Sanda Dragomir sprinkling breadcrumbs on the window sill. Despite a cool breeze that rippled through the pink curtains to either side, she wore a silk T-shirt that barely covered her ass. Her perfectly round, perfectly smooth ass. Her magnificent, for-profit-only ass.

  As though reading his mind, Sanda bent slightly at the waist and the purple T-shirt lifted far enough to confirm what he already knew. She wore nothing beneath. Teddy bit at his lower lip. She’s a whore, he told himself, a worker, an earner, a small piece of the puzzle I’ve been assembling for as long as I can remember.

  Sadly, as Winuk admitted, most of the puzzle pieces were still in a jumbled heap off to one side. But this section was definitely complete. Talk about a time-consuming, low-return activity. Whores were more trouble than they were worth. Besides which, now that he was moving up, he wanted to shed the pimp label. Teddy’s peers consigned pimps to a category in the criminal hierarchy only a bit above child molesters. This was a fair assessment, in his opinion, given the casual brutality demonstrated by most pimps, though not in his particular case. Teddy managed four high-end escorts, the deal between them a matter of mutual consent. He’d made that clear from the outset.

  ‘You can walk away anytime you want. No hard feelings.’

  Teddy started across the room, but stopped himself after a couple of steps. He’d never felt a moment’s desire for the other three girls, yet he could barely keep his hands off Sanda, even now.

  ‘I got some bad news for you, Sanda. Or maybe good news, depending. I’m gonna cut you loose.’

  Sanda turned to stare into his eyes, her own laughing blue eyes for once serious. She brought a hand to her face as though brushing away a slap, then dropped it to her side. Teddy found the pose theatrical, which was only to be expected, theatre being the most important part of any sexual transaction more elevated than a quick blow job underneath the Williamsburg Bridge.

  ‘For what do you punish me?’

  Rather than answer, Teddy spun around and headed for the closet by the door. He slid his navy pea jacket off a hangar and put it on.

  ‘Where am I to go, Teddy?’

  Teddy responded with a shrug, then took an H&K 9mm from the jacket’s outer pocket and stuffed it inside his belt. He had other problems to deal with, pressing problems of the most urgent kind, life and death problems.

  ‘Do whatever you’d do if I turned up dead last night.’ Squeezed between high cheekbones and a prominent forehead, Teddy’s green eyes were small and pinpoint sharp, especially when he allowed them to harden, as he did now. ‘Tell the other girls to never mention my name again. You, too, Sanda. If I hear you’re talkin’ up my business, I’ll make you wish you never left Romania.’

  Message delivered, Teddy headed for the street, taking the single flight of stairs two at a time, graceful as a gymnast despite his bulk. He crossed the apartment building’s lobby, pushed the door open and stepped onto the sidewalks of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. As the November air washed over his face, he breathed a sigh of relief. An Arctic front had swept down out of Canada to bathe New York in the first cold air of the season. The temperature, this early in the morning, was just above freezing.

  Teddy pulled a black watch cap over his head, but didn’t button his coat. On the whole, he preferred cold weather because it was a lot easier to conceal a gun beneath a coat or a jacket. Which is not to say that Teddy packed heat as a matter of habit.
The penalty for a concealed gun in New York, three years in a state prison, was too harsh for that. But right now, while Johnny Piano and his boys were looking to beat him to a pulp, the rewards more than balanced the risks. Johnny Pianetta ran one of the last all-Italian crews in the city. In fact, Johnny Piano owned a house in the Northside, a small Italian enclave just a mile away. And it was Johnny who’d given him that nickname, Teddy Winks, which he hated.

  At seven in the morning, Teddy had time to kill, a common occurrence for a man who never slept more than five hours a night. Five hours was enough, though, enough to refresh him. Teddy had the energy of three men and no talent for leisure – two of his biggest advantages, at least in his opinion.

  He liked being outside, no matter the weather, constantly on the move when he didn’t have an appointment. Now he ambled down Ash Street, past the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory toward the Pulaski Bridge connecting the counties of Brooklyn and Queens. For the most part, Greenpoint was a mixed neighborhood of apartment buildings, three-family homes, factories and low-rise warehouses. But just here, only a few blocks from Newtown Creek, the irretrievably polluted body of water that separated the counties, industry predominated. Not behemoths – there were no auto plants or steel mills in Greenpoint. The businesses here, like Hong’s Seafood Company and Sightline Fabrications, focused on small-scale services, with long hours of hard work the common thread binding them.

  Having grown up in Greenpoint, Teddy found the odd mix familiar. It seemed that no matter where you lived, you couldn’t avoid the noise of the workaday world, forklifts lugging goods to and from eighteen wheelers, a cement mixer turning in a construction yard, the eerie whoop of a diesel engine starting up, the sharp hiss of released air brakes. All of this as basic to him as trimmed green lawns to suburbanites, a class he generally despised.

  The nights, when the businesses closed down, were different. Nights and weekend mornings at seven o’clock. Now steel shutters covered every window and door, while the sidewalks and streets were empty, the frigid air absolutely still. Otherwise, Teddy would never have heard the faint sobs. But he did hear them, coming from behind one of the Pulaski Bridge’s concrete footings.

  Hyper-alert by nature, Teddy made the first jump instantly: not a threat, not to him.

  And therefore not his business, right? He started to move on, but found the sobs unnerving. They sounded like his sister’s the first time their stepfather went into her room.

  ‘Shut the fuck up.’

  Followed by the thud of a descending fist. Followed by the requested silence.

  Teddy had killed three men in his life. Tadeuz Gorowski, his stepfather, was the first. Now he took a step toward the concrete pillar, then another and another. He had no idea what he’d do, but he was anxious to find out. He was curious.

  The answer wasn’t long in coming and once again Teddy evaluated the situation in an instant. The woman was on her back, lying on the bare pavement. Her eyes were swollen shut and blood dripped from a wound to her scalp. The man knelt between her legs, thrusting into her. His hands gripped her ankles. Drops of sweat flew from his soaked hair.

  Play the white knight? Or mind your own business? The dilemma was rendered meaningless by the rapist being Carlo Pianetta, Johnny Piano’s son.

  ‘Hey, Carlo,’ Teddy said.

  Though initially startled to find himself looking at a man condemned to a severe beat-down, Carlo immediately reverted to the hard-ass he imagined himself to be.

  ‘This ain’t your business.’ When his threatening tone produced no detectable result, he quickly added, ‘Forget about her. She’s a whore.’

  The conflict between Teddy and Johnny Piano was simple. For the past two years, while he built his business, Teddy had been paying tribute. But not anymore. Fuck the guineas. They’d never thrown him any work, never offered him a piece of their action. Meanwhile, he was expected to fork over a piece of his own action every week. And to kiss their asses, too.

  Carlo returned to his frantic thrusting. The woman now lay unmoving. Teddy couldn’t see past her swollen lids, but he was pretty sure her eyes were unfocused. If she was aware at all, she was merely enduring.

  ‘I’ll be through in a few minutes,’ Carlo said. ‘In case you wanna take a turn.’

  Teddy didn’t react on instinct. He made a decision – reasoned, in his view – before he drew the semi-automatic from beneath his belt and fired a hollow-point round into Carlo Pianetta’s skull. The bullet clipped off the top of Carlo’s left ear as it plowed through bone, then brain, then bone again. It exited behind his right ear, drawing the expected plume of human tissue in its wake.

  Carlo remained upright for a moment, as though considering the implications. Then he crumpled, every muscle limp, his body little more than an empty sack of bones.

  ‘I’ll tell your daddy to say hello,’ Teddy muttered, ‘when he meets you in hell.’

  That was enough. Gunshots attracted attention, even in industrial neighborhoods like this one. Teddy grabbed the spent cartridge, then double-timed the single block to Newtown Creek and tossed the 9mm forty feet out. His eyes searched the sidewalks and alleyways as he went. His ears listened for the wail of sirens, but the streets remained empty, the cold air quiet. Gradually, he settled down, so that by the time he reached his destination twenty minutes later, his thoughts had turned to the ramifications. Johnny Piano couldn’t ignore the murder of his son without looking weak. Someone had to pay. But that person didn’t have to be Teddy Winuk. No, no, not at all. That person might even be one of Teddy’s competitors, a case of the enemy of my enemy being, if not exactly my friend, at least an unwitting ally.

  TWO

  Andy Littlewood strolled into his son’s kitchen two days later at eight o’clock in the morning. He muttered a greeting, poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down at a small wooden table. The table was painted a particularly repulsive greenish-gray, as were the four chairs surrounding it. Boots, of course, would never consider changing the color, or covering the table’s cigarette-scarred surface with a tablecloth. Yet the room was neat, the floor swept, the stovetop clean, the ancient sink, its porcelain worn micron thin, freshly scrubbed. Andy Littlewood was as close to Boots as a father can get to a son, but he didn’t pretend to understand his only child’s many contradictions.

  ‘I have to eat fast,’ Boots said. ‘Lieutenant Sorrowful called about a body underneath the Pulaski Bridge which I need to attend forthwith.’ He opened the oven door, removed a cookie sheet bearing a pair of nicely toasted onion bagels and laid the sheet on a burner. Then he dropped four well-stirred eggs into a cast-iron skillet. Boots wore his gray suit pants, a matching vest and a light-blue shirt. A red tie hung loosely beneath his collar.

  ‘I should already be gone, as a matter of fact.’

  Boots cut the eggs in half with the edge of a spatula and flipped the halves. Only a few seconds later, since both men liked their eggs a bit loose, he shoveled each of the halves onto the bottom of a sliced bagel, replaced the tops and threw the sandwiches onto plates. He carried the plates to the table and dropped into a chair. ‘The bagels have been sittin’ around since Saturday. It was this morning or never.’

  ‘You always did have a way of makin’ your old dad feel special.’

  Andy lived above his son in a two-family home on Newell Street in Greenpoint, a home Andy owned. He’d only come downstairs to discuss Boots’s role in his wedding. Andy’s marriage to Libby Greenspan would be celebrated in two months and Boots had volunteered to walk Libby down the aisle.

  Boots merely grunted before biting off a chunk of his sandwich. He was in a testy mood and he’d remain that way until Thanksgiving if the past was any indicator. For reasons Andy was never able to comprehend, Boots’s relationship with the New York Yankees went beyond fanaticism. For Boots, winter began with the final out of the final game and lasted until opening day in April. The Yankee’s season having concluded on an especially dismal note only two weeks before, Boots was as edgy as
a heroin addict in the early stages of withdrawal.

  ‘That’s the curse of livin’ where you work,’ Boots observed. ‘If it’s Monday morning and there’s nobody around, you’re definitely gettin’ the first call.’

  ‘Tell you what, Irwin.’ Andy was the only person on the planet allowed to use Boots’s given name. ‘Why don’t you wrap up the sandwich and leave the dishes to me?’

  ‘That’d be a good idea if I hadn’t already finished it.’ Boots shoved the last bite into his mouth and rose from his chair. ‘Here’s one thing I never figured out,’ he said. ‘A crime in progress, a robbery, a burglary? I can understand the rush. But dead bodies don’t move. You can take your time and they’ll still be layin’ there when you arrive. They’re patient that way.’

  Boots slipped on his shoulder harness, eased his Glock into the holster, then shrugged into his suit jacket and pulled up his tie. ‘I had a partner once, talked about the dead cryin’ out for revenge. But me, I don’t think murdered people sit on clouds waitin’ for their killers to be punished. I think they know that dead is forever and it’s time to move on.’

  ‘So you’re sayin’ that justice is for the living?’

  But the door was already closing and Boots on his way, taking his foul mood with him.

  THREE

  Boots was right. The body lay where it had fallen, its temporary resting place altered only by ribbons of yellow tape that ran from the bridge footings to a chain-link fence enclosing a small yard. All of the space beneath the city’s many bridges belonged to the city, of course, but much of it was leased to private businesses. This particular slice was currently being rented by Amoroso Construction. Amoroso used the yard to park its smaller vehicles. Boots noted three pickup trucks, several sedans, a mud-spattered Payloader, two yellow backhoes and a grader. Each bore the Amoroso emblem: a stylized letter A, shiny gold, on a blood-red background.