The Dark Path Page 3

  Bukowski’s self-effacing scowl turned into a half flattered grin. “And I’d have been interested in taking you up on that, John.”

  Morrigan saluted. “Good luck out there tonight.”

  Bukowski shook her head and made a move toward the door. “I look like crap and smell like you.”

  “Is that your way of saying that the odds aren’t in your favor?”

  She laughed. “Quite the opposite. I’m a woman—I could look like I got into a scuffle on the street and five guys would still line up to buy me a drink.”

  Bukowski walked around him, patting him cordially on the shoulder as she headed for the exit.

  “Hey,” he called out.

  She turned around.

  “What if I did ask to buy you a drink?”

  Bukowski mulled it over.

  Morrigan shrugged.

  “Interested doesn’t necessarily imply desperation…” she said.

  He took a long drag of his cigarette and looked away as Bukowski left. On top of approaching the cusp of being overworked—now he was hot under the collar.

  Doesn’t get any easier, he thought as he crushed out his smoke.

  Does it?

  Thirty minutes later

  The silver Ford Mustang with the tinted windows rolled up to the apartment complex in the dead of night, its headlights off and engine idling at a low rumble as Alex Petrovic put it into park.

  He turned to the right, his focus on the brownstone apartment building next to him. He checked the rear-view mirrors—right-to-left—scoping out every inch of the surrounding neighborhood for any nearby witnesses.

  There were none.

  He leaned toward the glove compartment and softly unlatched the handle before pulling down the drawer, the light from the bulb overhead casting a dim glow across the black-plated Colt .45 stashed inside. Next to it, a silencer made of carbon fiber, and next to that a spare clip with eight additional rounds. He equipped the silencer to the Colt, slowly turning it into place. Once the silencer was secured he tucked the gun into the top of his long black coat. He took one last look around the rear-view mirrors—left-to-right—and then he slowly slipped out of the car.

  His breath was blowing every five seconds on the dot—a byproduct of having complete mastery over his heart rate. It was a prerequisite for most assassins and Alex Petrovic had developed his abilities well after fifteen years in the Serbian special forces, 63rd Parachute Battalion, before moving into the private sector eight years ago.

  He took a right, the entrance to the brownstone now directly in front of him. Opening the glass door that led inside he ascended the creaky wooden staircase, up to floor number two.

  Petrovic didn’t bother covering from the cameras.

  There weren’t any.

  The intruder took a left at the top of the stairs and walked in a straight line toward the last apartment in the hallway—apartment 201. He came to a stop just before the door, a hallway light above his head casting a spotlight that washed over him with an ominous glow. Reaching up, he loosened the bulb and terminated any trace of light in the hallway. Everything around him now was completely dark as he took a step forward, curled his fingers into a fist and knocked twice on the door in front of him.

  A shuffle from inside, the muffled sounds of a television broadcasting a game show. It took twenty seconds before the sounds of the locks being disengaged on the other side rang out, the door swinging slowly open just a sliver of a crack as the voice of an older woman called out, “Hello?”

  The Serbian raised his Colt, extended his arm fully, and squeezed off one fatal round that punched its way into the woman’s skull and blew out the back of her head. The force of the impact threw her onto her back, the entire event unfolding in less than two seconds flat.

  The door to the apartment swung fully open, the older woman’s sprawled corpse lying flat with a pair of now-soulless eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling. Her thick-rimmed coke bottle glasses lay in a crimson pool of blood next to her. Petrovic took two steps forward, observing the dead body in front of him for any trace of life.

  There was none.

  But he fired off two more shots into her sternum just to make sure.

  Closing the door, he stashed away his pistol and made his way back to the staircase. Hands in his pockets he descended the steps, arrived outside on the sidewalk, returned to his Mustang and started the engine, peeling out with the headlights still off as he cruised his way back toward Jersey.

  A neighbor would call in the shots ten minutes later. The cops would arrive in less than twenty. It would then take all of ten minutes for everyone on the scene to sort out that the victim of the shooting was a well-known and well-liked woman by the name of Mrs. Jeanette Ruiz.

  4

  Rest for the Wicked

  Wednesday, January 9th

  Morrigan’s apartment,

  12:55am

  Morrigan checked his watch as he snagged the ice pack from his fridge. He sighed, kicked off his boots, and held the ice pack firmly against the back of his neck, strained from hunching his shoulders too much during his shift, a habit he had been trying to break for quite some time and that caused tension headaches to gather in the back of his head. Trying to take his mind off the pain, Morrigan indulged in his other vice that he plain straight refused to quit, before sliding down onto the couch.

  With a fresh lit cigarette now dangling from his lip and a lukewarm bottle of beer that had been sitting on his counter clutched in his hand, Morrigan turned on the television and gave himself five hours to recover before getting back at it. But two minutes into his reprieve his cell phone rang.

  “Shit,” he seethed, debating whether to reach into his pocket to answer the call.

  Six rings later, he did. “Yeah?”

  “What has two thumbs and just got sprung from the joint?” a familiar voice inquired from the other end of the line.

  Morrigan felt his heart skip a beat as he sat forward on the couch. A long beat passed before he cleared his throat and said, “Tommy?”

  A tobacco-stained laugh from the other side. “Yeah,” the voice said. “The one and only.”

  “How—” Morrigan began. “When did you get out?”

  “Yesterday,” Tommy said. “Terms of my parole say I get to travel, only if I give my PO a heads-up, of course.”

  Nothing from Morrigan. But he could smell a fair amount of bullshit was being pushed his way.

  “So,” Tommy said after what felt like an interminable silence, “how’s it going, little brother? You don’t got anything to say?”

  Morrigan collected himself and ashed the cigarette he had forgotten was dangling from his lip. “No,” he said. “No, nothing. I just got in a second ago.”

  “NYPD’s still busting your balls, eh?”

  “Every minute of every day.”

  “Yeah. That’s why I knew I could never be a cop. All that authority bullshit doesn’t swing too well with me.” Tommy said it with a hint of a laugh, like it was funny to play out the felonies that had gotten him locked up for a ten-year stretch.

  But Morrigan wasn’t amused in the slightest. “What’s going on, Tommy?” he asked, his voice now sounding similar to that of his old man.

  “Christ, Johnny,” Tommy said. “What the hell’s got into you? I can’t call my brother up to say hello?”

  “You only call when you’re giving me a heads-up that you’re coming into town, man. You only call when you need something. Don’t bullshit me.”

  A pause.

  “Is it really so hard to believe,” Tommy said with a solemn tone, “that I might just want to talk to you? That I might just want to hear from my kid brother? Not everything is an angle, Johnny. I mean,” a sigh, “I get why you’d be unsure with me. Really. There’s been enough history between the two of us to fill a shelf’s worth of text.”

  Morrigan squeezed the phone tightly in his hand. He wanted to believe his brother. He did. The guy was his blood, after all. But To
mmy, even though he and John looked, sounded, and dressed (hell, even smelled) the same, worked on a different side of the law.

  Morrigan enforced it.

  Tommy broke it.

  Plain and simple.

  “Cut to the chase, Tommy,” Morrigan said. “You coming into town or not?”

  “I am.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow… Or more correctly later today.”

  “Why?”

  “I gotta talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  Another sigh from Tommy’s end. “I gotta tell you in person, Skip.”

  Morrigan rolled his eyes. He absolutely despised it when Tommy called him “Skip”—the unfortunate nickname Morrigan had picked up after giving himself a black eye in their youth while skipping stones with Tommy on the lake near Dad’s cabin. Morrigan managed to ricochet a stone off a tree and clip himself good in his right eye, hence the nickname Skip.

  He never lived it down.

  “You still living at the same place?” Tommy asked, his tone anticipatory of Morrigan’s next response.

  Morrigan pondered for a long beat.

  Then he gave his brother his blessing. “Yeah,” he said, almost defeated. “You need the address again?”

  “No,” Tommy said. “I remember where you’re at.”

  “What time you getting in?”

  “Late afternoon. I’ll grab a ride from JFK.”

  “All right. I’ll meet you here real quick and let you in.”

  “Thanks, Skip. I’ll only stay the one night.”

  “Yeah. All right. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  And with that, Morrigan hung up. He didn’t want to say goodbye to Tommy for a myriad of reasons. He couldn’t even recall the last time they had. They were close only until Tommy’s first “incident” when they were twelve and fourteen. Nothing was the same after that. After that day, their relationship felt like one that was closer to friends than brothers. But before Morrigan had a chance to become too lost to memory lane, his cell phone rang again.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Hackett. You’re not gonna believe this.”

  “Try me.”

  “It’s Mrs. Ruiz,” Hackett said. “Someone just shot her in the head at her apartment.”

  Morrigan froze in the midst of slipping on his jacket, shoulder pressing the phone to his ear—completely shocked and unsettled.

  5

  Cry Little Sister

  Morrigan found it odd that “Cry Little Sister” from The Lost Boys soundtrack was playing on the radio when he piled into his Subaru and booked it in the direction of Mrs. Ruiz’s apartment. He was too worked up and preoccupied with the thoughts running rampant through his brain to fully realize that the music was adding a rhythm to his pondering, so as he drove with the sirens wailing and blaring, he found himself in a cocoon comprised of eighties vintage beats and nagging suspicions in his mind which added their own lyrics to the tune.

  What the hell is going on? Morrigan thought.

  Someone pops Mrs. Ruiz.

  Tommy calls me up.

  Bukowski tries to make a move on me.

  It’s like the whole world is going topsy-turvy.

  The thoughts played in a kind of repeat fashion the entire drive over. Morrigan could spot the red-and-blue lights from a half block away as he arrived on the scene and parked at an angle near the yellow police tape. Hackett recognized the rumble of Morrigan’s engine and met him at the curb.

  “Royal fucking cluster bomb,” Hackett said, shaking his head as Morrigan moved in a hustle toward the brownstone. “Neighbor heard something hit the floor and called it in.”

  “Who responded?”

  “Valdez and Shaw. Valdez knew you had spoken to Mrs. Ruiz earlier, so he called it in directly to the precinct.”

  They entered the building and strode up the stairs, skipping every couple of steps as they hung a left and found a gaggle of patrolman dealing with the tenants and a Lieutenant Davis from homicide playing quarterback as he hovered near Mrs. Ruiz’s front door.

  “Morrigan,” he said, beckoning toward him and forcing the crowd of officers to part. “Over here.”

  Morrigan positioned himself in the doorway with Hackett standing behind him. “How long have you guys been on the scene?” Morrigan asked.

  “Not long,” Davis said. “I was running lead on this, but when I found out the body was Mrs. Ruiz, I wanted to give you the heads-up. I heard that you were investigating another homicide yesterday in the same area.”

  “Thanks, buddy,” Morrigan said, and slapped Davis on the shoulder.

  Morrigan stepped inside as the clicking and flashing of CSI cameras lit up the foyer. Standing in a semi-circle next to Mrs. Ruiz’s sprawled-out body was a collection of crime scene techs taking prints, snapping photos, and going about the evidence collection.

  “Christ,” Morrigan said, shaking his head and gazing at Mrs. Ruiz’s lifeless and pale body spread out along the floor.

  “She has two bullet holes in her sternum and one planted firmly in the center of her forehead,” Davis outlined.

  “Looks like a professional hit,” Morrigan responded.

  Davis nodded and pointed to the body with a gloved hand. “Double tap entry wounds to the sternum, one to the head. Couple millimeters apart.”

  “Slick shooting,” Morrigan added. “Question is—why the hell is someone taking out a professional hit on an elderly woman.”

  A female CSI tech stepped forward. “9mm rounds,” she said, holding up a plastic evidence bag with three copper-colored shells inside. “Custom, from the looks of it.”

  Morrigan slipped on a pair of gloves and took the bag, looking it over and holding it up to the light. “Full metal jacket,” he said. “Look how smooth it is.”

  Davis leaned in to get a look. “What do you think?” he said. “Anyone we know?”

  Morrigan shrugged. “I dunno. Only two people I could think of who might be able to craft this stuff.”

  “Who?”

  Morrigan handed the bag back to the tech. “Dalton and Miller. They’re a couple of south-siders who moonlight selling guns. Dalton got locked up twice already for it.”

  “Want me to knock on their doors?” Hackett inquired.

  Morrigan shook his head and leveled his attention back at Mrs. Ruiz’s body, stepping around it as he checked her apartment for anything out of the ordinary. “No,” he said to Hackett. “Not yet. I’ll want to do it with you.”

  A half salute from Hackett. “Copy that.”

  Davis and Hackett waited idly by as Morrigan walked slowly about the apartment, practically sniffing the air as he moved around. He looked in the kitchen and the living room, examining the food, the television, the pictures on the walls—the same ones Mrs. Ruiz had shown him back when she was still among the living. She was a sweet old lady with warm memories of her past and approaching life with an optimistic smile. A flesh-and-blood human being with a heart, and a soul, and an abundance of love. But now she was dead. Now she was a victim and Morrigan knew in his gut that this was the result of something to do with the murder at the pawnshop. Clearly, Mrs. Ruiz saw something she shouldn’t have, and her contact with him essentially gave her a death sentence. Somebody had observed him calling to her apartment earlier, he thought. He felt responsible for the poor lady’s death. And as much as Morrigan felt that sting that always came with seeing an innocent person getting caught in the crossfire, he knew the only way to put it right was to bring the person responsible to justice.

  “Anything?” Hackett asked.

  Morrigan bit his lip and moved back to the hallway, his eyes scanning from person to person and object to object before settling on the light bulb in the hallway just outside the door.

  He pointed. “How long as this been out?”

  A young female neighbor of the victim who was standing in the hallway answered. “It was working earlier today.”

  “When did it go out?” Morrigan
asked her.

  The tenant thought about it. “I came home at six,” she said. “It was still on then.”

  Morrigan did the math and deduced that the light went out right when Mrs. Ruiz had gotten shot.

  He sighed.

  “What’s up?” Hackett inquired.

  Morrigan motioned to the bulb. “Blacked-out hallway just points to the shooter being a professional.”

  “We’ve established that,” Hackett replied.

  Morrigan sneered back at him.

  Lieutenant Davis motioned to the apartment. “My people are almost wrapped-up. They’re going to take her body in soon. Listen, I called you, Morrigan, because we both know this may be connected to your thing, but we gotta figure out how and why that is before we got lost in the clusterfuck of interdepartmental politics.”

  Morrigan flexed his brow. “Is this you saying you’re going to give me a hard time if the wavelengths on our cases become crossed?”

  Davis pulled him out of earshot from everyone else. “No, but the top brass might. Look, what I’m trying to say is that even though this may be connected to the Zimmerman case, the head guys will want this whole thing wrapped-up as quickly as possible. With the homicide rates in New York being what they are, the last thing they’re going to be inclined to indulge in is something that, on paper, reads like a conspiracy involving a hitman knocking off an old lady.”

  “Even if it’s true?”

  “Even if it’s true.”

  Morrigan huffed, he realized that the city was a dangerous place right now. Everyone knew that. But in order to keep the crime figures low, there were more than enough instances of politicians and other people of influence forcing departments to wrap-up homicide cases quickly and ordering them to brush as much dirt under the carpet as possible.

  “Give me a window,” Morrigan said. “How long can I run lead on this before someone comes in and tells me I need to back off?”