Fourth Victim Read Free Page A

There was a thunderous ringing, but it sounded as if it was coming from inside his head. Except for the pounding of his own heart and the whoosh of his breaths, the ringing was all he could hear. The asphalt came to life, rolling like black waves beneath his boots. He nearly steadied himself against the asphalt tide, but in the end he just could not keep his balance and he tumbled face first into the solid surf. Then, when he was down, things got quiet and dark, impossibly dark.
    “He saved your life, huh? How’d he manage that?” Healy asked.
    “It was eighty-nine and me and Ralphy and Monaco were assigned to a federally funded task force aimed at clearing drugs out of city housing projects.”
    “Yeah, like that was ever gonna happen. You could blow up everyone of those projects and they’d be selling drugs outta the rubble.”
    “Wasn’t my idea.”
    “What happened?”
    “Ralphy and me got a tip that Papa Doc Willingham’s crew was running a major crack distribution center out in one of the apartment houses in Bath Beach across the little bridge from Coney Island. I forget the name of the project, but you know the one. It’s where they shot that sniper scene in
The French Connection.”
    “Yeah,” Healy said, his face lighting up, “the ones by the elevated subway over there by Dewey High School.”
    “Right. So the thing is we got this information, but we’re supposed to run everything up the chain of command before we take any action. It was a total cluster fuck because by the time any info got up to the top of the chain, it was worthless. Big drug operators aren’t stupid. They’re moving their shit around all the time to protect their assets from the cops and competitors. And there were other problems too. Not only was our chain of command long, but it was leaky too. Anything we knew tended to get known by anyone who was a target. Even when we could manage to keep intelligence in house, the feds always insisted we do a full on assault. It was like trying to catch someone by surprise with the Third Army behind you. Spotters saw us coming from the next neighborhood over.”
    “So you decided, what, that you were going outside the chain of command?”
    “Something like that, yeah, but it was just me and Ralphy who wanted to go in. Monaco was put on the task force by his captain to dump his problem child on somebody else’s doorstep. This was after one of those incidents you were talking about, so Monaco was just doing time, you know, trying to keep his nose clean until his next assignment. But he was on duty with us that night and knew the layout of those buildings better than we did. I’ll spare you the details of how we got inside and got passed the spotters. It’s the kind of stuff that would just piss you off.”
    “Okay, I’ll take your word for it,” Healy said.
    “Anyway, we grab the last spotter in the stairwell and we persuade him that it’s in his best interests to help us. He was easy to convince. So we step into the hallway and it’s completely quiet. We get to the door and the spotter gives the password and we think we’re in. The door pulls back and the minute it does, I know it’s wrong. Before I can even blink, all hell breaks loose. Ralphy got our shotgun and hears something to his left and wheels around that way. I step out to push the spotter out of the line of fire, but a shotgun blast comes out of the apartment and hits him square in the chest. He falls back taking me with him, so I’m down with this guy’s body on me and my gun hand is pinned to the floor. Ralphy’s screaming ‘NYPD, don’t move!’ at whoever he thinks is coming down the hall. I’m trying to free myself and this fat fuck charges out of the apartment with a sawed-off in his hands.
    “Monaco can’t fire because the hall is so dark and Ralphy’s just a few feet away on the opposite side of the big man. If he misses, he’d hit Ralphy. He can’t even fire a warning shot because the hallway’s