Angel Face Read online

  They crest the hill and head down toward 110th Street, another borderline. No more gardens, no more tulips or daffodils or cherry trees, no more Columbia University. They’re in an obscure neighborhood called Manhattan Valley. Twenty years before, Manhattan Valley was an open-air drug market that would have put a Moroccan bazaar to shame. Now it’s partially gentrified, like all of Manhattan. This is where Angel lives.

  Carter double-parks in front of a fire hydrant midway between 108th and 107th Streets. He looks at Angel in the rear-view mirror as he releases the door locks, but he’s thinking of his sister. Only two weeks ago, he’d be heading for the Cabrini Nursing Home on the Lower East Side to pay Janie a visit, maybe read a little from the Bible. Angel looks back at him, catching his eyes in the mirror, and again he’s struck by her beauty.

  ‘This outfit you work with …’

  ‘Pigalle Studios.’

  ‘Yeah, Pigalle Studios. Do you have some kind of stage name? So the clients know who to ask for?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Angel’s smile reveals porcelain-white teeth. ‘Angel Face.’

  ‘OK, Angel Face, one more piece of advice. Over the next few days, you’re gonna be sorely tempted to tell somebody what happened. Don’t do it. As far as you’re concerned, everyone’s a cop. You run your mouth, you’ll go to jail. Let the cops prove you were in that house. Don’t help them. Benedetti was a mob guy and there are plenty of suspects out there, so it’s entirely possible the cops won’t connect you to him. In which case, it’s even more important that nobody else knows what happened. And get rid of the outfit, the dress and the shoes. Do it tonight.’

  FOUR

  Carter spends the evening, until ten o’clock, at Milton’s, a sports bar off Queens Boulevard in the community of Woodhaven. Milton’s is all about the American male’s addiction to athletics. Twenty flat screen televisions, small and large, suspended from the ceiling or attached to the walls, are tuned to networks telecasting every sport currently in season. Priority naturally falls to New York teams, the Yankees and the Mets, and to the ongoing play-offs in hockey and basketball. Lesser attractions play in the corners, a soccer match from England, thoroughbred horse racing from a California track. On a small set to Carter’s left, a mixed martial arts champion beats his hapless opponent to a bloody pulp.

  Carter’s chosen Milton’s partly because it’s close to Janie’s condominium apartment, where he’s spending the night. But Carter’s also drawn to the bar’s vibrancy, and to its varied clientele. There are as many degenerate gamblers as there are sports fans, a few bookies taking last minute wagers, and a bevy of young women out for an evening with their perpetually adolescent boyfriends. They root their favorites on, fueled by alcohol, marijuana (the bathrooms reek of weed) and the cocaine peddled by Milton’s resident dealer, a small-time jerk named Sal who pretends to be connected.

  Carter hangs by himself at a free-standing table near a back wall, munching on a hamburger and sipping at a mug of Bass Ale. He has no friends here, or anywhere else for that matter, but the intensely social behavior of the fans enthralls him. Carter believes that athletic contests simulate the more serious business of mortal combat, the big differences being that fans get to watch and the losers don’t go home in coffins. But the ability to slap a puck into a net doesn’t impress Carter, nor do the virtually subhuman fist fights between the hockey players. He doesn’t feel himself diminished by loss, or enhanced by victory, only fascinated by those who are.

  The fans gathered before the largest television emit a collective moan. The New York Yankees are playing the Boston Red Sox and one of the Boston players – Carter doesn’t know who – has hit a home run. Carter watches him jog around the bases, then watches a series of replays, none of which alters the outcome. Two men standing at a table only a few feet away attempt to hide their satisfaction. They’re gamblers, these men, and they’ve bet against the home team, a fact they’d just as soon keep to themselves, but which doesn’t escape Carter’s attention.

  Carter finishes his hamburger and orders another beer from a harried waitress. Despite the charged atmosphere, his thoughts turn to his sister’s ashes drifting on the gray waters of the Hudson. Janie was his anchor. Tending her gave him purpose, much as athletic contests give purpose to Milton’s patrons. But there’s always another game for the sports fan, another season, another chance. Janie can’t be replaced, or so Carter thinks as he tips the waitress when she returns with his beer.

  ‘Thanks, sport,’ she says with a wink.

  Like most males, Carter’s easily distracted. He’s also a master of the hook-up, the casual encounter, sex as pure sensation. An Australian merc named Arthur had explained the principle on a rooftop in Basra while they awaited the appearance of a doomed tribal sheikh.

  ‘Friction, that’s all it is, mate. Friction, friction, friction. The testicles are two organs that fill up every forty-eight hours and have to be emptied. There’s nothing more to the game.’

  Now Carter observes the bar maid’s butt as she sashays across the room, his gaze speculative. Was she flirting? Or is flirtatiousness part of the show? Angel had flirted with him as they walked to the van, describing this fantasy and that. Not only didn’t he blame her, Carter was impressed with her control, and her obvious skill at projecting unfelt desire.

  The beauty of the hook-up, Carter thinks, is that you can be certain your partner is attracted to you, at least physically.

  But the waitress flirts with her next customer and with the next, leaving Carter to conclude that she’s just not into him. Carter isn’t disappointed. He finishes his beer and heads back to Janie’s apartment, walking the few blocks beneath clearing skies.

  An hour later, still restless, he stands in Janie’s gallery, a narrow hallway lined on both sides with photographs taken many years before. The newest, judging from the Chevrolet parked at the curb, dates back to the 1950s. On this night, Carter’s eyes are drawn to one of the oldest photos, a wedding portrait. Here the groom is seated in a finely carved chair while the bride stands to his left and slightly behind him. She wears an embroidered white dress, tightly pinched at the waist, with a high collar that rises almost to her ears. Her veil drops from a spray of flowers to brush the floor.

  Carter steps a bit closer. The bride’s lips are thin and her eyes appear sad to him. The groom isn’t smiling, either, although it’s hard to be sure because he sports a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache thick enough to obscure his mouth. In any event, they don’t touch each other, don’t stare lovingly into each other’s eyes, don’t exhibit any sign of affection. They might be strangers hired for a photo shoot.

  These are photographs, Carter assumes, of his relatives, his and Janie’s, a family legacy. There can be no other reason why Janie went to the trouble of framing and hanging them. But Carter doesn’t know who they are because Janie compiled the photos after he left for the military. He’s searched the apartment for some sort of inventory and taken several of the photos out of their frames, hoping to find them labeled. Not happening. Janie has taken their identities with her. There was a time, of course, while Janie was still being cared for at home, when she might have identified the anonymous faces, might have connected them, one to the other. But Carter was in Sierra Leone, a soldier of fortune dumb enough to believe that blood can lead to anything but blood.

  Soldiers learn to sleep when the opportunity presents itself and Carter nods off shortly after he gets into bed and pulls up the covers. Most nights, he sleeps soundly for about six hours and awakens refreshed. But on this night he rises just before dawn. Outside the room’s single window, the spring air is filled with birdsong.

  Carter lies on his back, overwhelmed by the tattered remains of a dream. He’s in bed, as he is now, but there’s no room surrounding him, no walls, no floor, no ceiling, no sky, no Earth, no wind, no sun, no stars. He is utterly alone.

  ‘Goodbye, Janie,’ he whispers. ‘Goodbye, goodbye.’

  Carte
r’s up and out of the apartment by six thirty, heading west over the George Washington Bridge and across New Jersey, to an outdoor gun range near the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. As he proceeds inland, from the warmer coast to the Watchung Mountains of western New Jersey, the season reverses. The grass on this end of the state is still winter-brown and the leaves on the trees barely formed. The day is warm, however. Even at this early hour, the temperature approaches sixty degrees and the sun, rising in his rear-view mirror, seems playful and determined. This is especially true as Carter crosses a bridge spanning the Delaware. The river’s running high and the angled sunlight dances in the spray. Fishermen stand on the banks of the river, casting out, while a flotilla of blue, red and green canoes braves the rapids in the main channel.

  Carter reaches his destination, a shooting range tucked into the hardwood forest that covers most of north-eastern Pennsylvania, at eight o’clock. He’s driven all this way for two reasons. First, the Liberty Shooting Range has a training facility designed for handgun combat, a skill Carter’s determined to acquire. Second, Carl Maverton, the range’s owner, is an NRA nutcase obsessed with the constitutional right of high school students to carry weapons.

  ‘I’ll say this,’ he told Carter just two weeks before. ‘If every kid in Columbine was packing heat, a lotta lives would’ve been saved.’

  Carter’s beliefs run in the opposite direction. He’d be happiest if the entire population was disarmed. Except for him, of course. He also finds Carl’s lectures as tedious as they are repetitive. But there’s good news, too. Carter’s weapons are illegal and Carl doesn’t give a shit.

  Carl’s sitting behind a battered metal desk when Carter walks into his office, the first customer of the day. There are two American eagles on the desk. One augments an ashtray filled with cigar butts, the other carries the flag in its talons. A Gadsden rattlesnake flag – ‘DON’T TREAD ON ME’ – decorates the wall to Carl’s right. A framed poster of Gentleman Jerry Miculek hangs to his left.

  Gentleman Jerry wears a blue and white shirt with the name of his corporate sponsor, Smith & Wesson, emblazoned across the chest. A competition speed-shooter, he holds a world record unlikely to be broken any time soon. On September 11, 1999, Miculek fired twelve rounds, hitting a target with each shot, in 2.9 seconds. That wouldn’t be impressive if he’d used an automatic with a capacious magazine, but Miculek accomplished this feat with a revolver, which meant he had to reload in the middle. Without the reload, Gentleman Jerry’s able to draw and empty a revolver (a Smith & Wesson, naturally) in less than a second, the shots coming so fast they sound like rolling thunder.

  Training is what Carter’s life is mostly about. Contracts come to him once a month, on average, and are usually filled within a week. The rest of his time is devoted to staying sharp, an orientation developed in the military. Delta Force specialized in covert ops and was only sporadically deployed. Their assignments were invariably dangerous and filled with a tension that could only be overcome by training. The more you prepared, the greater the chance you’d survive. Carter harbors no illusions about the chance part. In the world of war, there are no certainties. At any given moment, the bullet might already be in the air. As, even now, the police might be knocking on his door.

  Carter exercises three afternoons a week at a mixed martial arts gym in Manhattan, working alongside ranked cage fighters. Whenever possible, he spends his mornings and evenings at a locksmith shop, which he owns. Carter doesn’t install locks, or drill out locks for citizens who’ve lost their keys. He has an employee for that. Carter spends the hours opening locks with various tools, including picks and drills, and memorizing the wiring schemes for home alarm systems. As an assassin, he much prefers the privacy of a target’s house or apartment to the street.

  ‘So, how’s the big bad city?’ Maverton leads Carter to a yard enclosed by an earthen berm lined with bales of hay. There are eight targets in the yard, stationed at distances ranging up to thirty feet.

  ‘Still big, still bad,’ Carter responds.

  A large man with broad shoulders and a swelling gut, Carl Maverton fancies himself a tough guy, a self-image Carter never challenges. New York might be the safest big city in the country, but Carl believes it to be the center of all that’s evil, a cauldron of mixed-race liberalism committed to the destruction of America.

  ‘Time to get out, old buddy.’ Carl winks and grins. ‘Because it’s comin’.’

  Carter doesn’t inquire into the ‘it’ part. That’s because he knows Carl will launch into a rant about taking back his country – by any means necessary – that won’t end before sundown. The very idea seems pitiful to Carter, a bunch of jerks marching around in the forest with semi-automatic assault rifles as they prepare to battle the United States military. Carter was in Falluja, working as a merc, when the Marines stormed the city. He was at Tora Bora, watching American jets slam missiles into cave openings six feet wide. Should Maverton and his survivalist buddies ever become a serious threat, they’ll be eliminated forthwith.

  For the next hour, Carter devotes himself to his training. He uses a Smith & Wesson revolver and a Glock semi-automatic, working with single and multiple targets from various positions. The pinnacle of the exercise occurs halfway through, when he rolls from a squat on to his left side and notches a tight, six-round pattern into a target twenty feet away.

  Carter fires off more than a hundred rounds with each weapon, until his wrist aches and he can’t fight the recoil. Then he puts his weapons away, satisfied with his overall progress. The military hadn’t placed much emphasis on handgun training, but his speed and accuracy have both improved since his return to the States. He’s not as fast as Gentleman Jerry Miculek, of course, not even close, but he’s not really competing. For one thing, Miculek’s weapons are heavily customized, while Carter’s, for good reason, are not. Carter discards his weapons (as he discarded the .22 used to dispatch Ricky Ditto, along with the stolen license plates on the van and the clothing he’d worn) after a single use. There doesn’t seem to be much point in customizing them beforehand. No one misses from six feet away, not if he’s got a hand as steady as Carter’s.

  As Carter hikes across the yard to the rifle range, he wonders about Miculek’s heart. How would he react if bullets were coming back at him from all directions, accompanied by the occasional RPG and mortar round? Unless Miculek’s been to war, he can’t know.

  Carter was far more skilled with a rifle than a handgun, when he left the military. In the field, he’d consistently buried his first round into living targets eight hundred yards away. But eight hundred yards is nearly a half-mile, a distance covering ten New York City blocks, and there are very few ten-block sightlines in New York, or even in the surrounding suburbs. Thus Carter practices out to a distance of three hundred yards, a bit more than three city blocks, calculating distance with a fairly low-tech rangefinder purchased second hand at a gun show.

  At these distances, Carter is deadly from any position, standing to prone, and he doesn’t prolong what amounts to a boring practice session designed only to maintain his skills. He’s on the road by eleven o’clock, stopping for an outdoor lunch in Stroudsburg on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. He attracts no attention while he eats, blending into the scenery, virtually invisible. Back in his van, he stays five miles above the speed limit, just another weary traveler heading home. But not to Janie’s apartment in Woodhaven. Janie’s name and address appear on Carter’s service record and he’s already been tracked to her apartment by a man out to kill him. Now he lives, for the most part, in a condo he sublets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The arrangement is private, with the utilities remaining in the name of the condo’s owner. Carter’s locksmith shop is down here as well, Gung-Ho Locksmiths on Avenue A near Tenth Street. He’ll spend the next few hours in the shop, examining various ways to open magnetic locks. Then he’ll go for a run along the East River, only a few blocks away.

  Carter’s thoughts turn to Ange
l Tamanaka as he crosses the George Washington Bridge. He’d been standing in the dining room when he first heard her voice, and he’d assumed she was Ricky’s wife, returned unexpectedly. Killing a man in front of his family isn’t Carter’s style, but there was no going back and he’d pulled the trigger without regret the minute his target presented itself. Then he’d stepped into the kitchen to find this doll of a woman, eyes wide as saucers.

  I’m horny, Carter thinks. I’m a victim of the itch that must be scratched. All those stories, the fantasies Angel described, have finally done their work.

  Carter likes goals, perhaps because he has so few of them in his life. He doesn’t really care about money, doesn’t dream of limos or mansions or watches big enough to substitute for wrist weights, doesn’t fancy ocean-going yachts or bespoke suits. That leaves only the necessities with which to fill his days: food, drink, shelter and the itch.

  Carter maps out a weekend of bar hopping. His mission will be to find a woman equally determined to scratch that same itch. A woman who’ll head back to her workaday life on Monday morning, a woman whose imaginings of him, should she remember him at all, will begin at his neck and work their way down.

  FIVE

  Bobby Ditto loses his temper for the first time that day. He slams the desktop with the side of his fist and tosses a jar of mint-flavored TUMS at the hapless tech sweeping the room for bugs. The TUMS jar bounces off the tech’s shoulder and he begins to shake.

  ‘What, you’re gonna be all fuckin’ day?’ Bobby demands. ‘I got things to do. I’m runnin’ a business here and I can’t do it with you in the goddamn room.’

  Benedetti and the tech, Levi Kupperman, are in the Bunker, an underground room in a wholesale carpet warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Benedetti had the room built when he purchased the warehouse in 2005, the year his first big deal went down. The walls and ceilings of the windowless bunker are solid concrete, two feet thick, and proof against any remote listening device. That leaves the mismatched furniture, the alarm, the sprinklers, the ventilation system and the computer (used only for the carpet business and not connected to the Internet) as the only points of vulnerability.