that there wasn’t a known actor in the 4-6 who didn’t come to dread hearing the phrase, usually spoken in a low-key, near-distracted monotone, “Get out of the car, please?”
Milton took the dirty towel and carefully folded it into a thick band. He then straddled the drunk and laid the towel across his throat. Snapping the telescoping baton out to its full length, he perched it lengthwise along the center of the towel. Carefully stepping on the narrow end with his right foot, he pressed the steel rod into one side of the guy’s throat. Then, holding on to a branch in order to keep his balance and modulate the pressure, he placed his other foot on the handle end so that now his full weight was coming down on the Adam’s apple, that weight fluctuating between 180 and 190 pounds, depending on the time of the year and what holidays had just passed.
The drunk’s suddenly bulging eyes turned a damp, golden red, and the only sound he was capable of making was a faint peeping like a newborn chick heard from one farm over.
After thirty seconds or so, Milton stepped off the baton one foot at a time, then squatted and lifted the thick towel beneath; the throat was unblemished. He replaced the towel on the guy’s throat and once again balanced the baton across its center.
“One more time?”
The drunk shook his head, even the weak peeping sound gone.
“Come on . . .” Milton rose to his height, found his balance again at both ends of the rod, and started seesawing. “In case I never get to see you again.”
Chapter 2
As they crossed the Triborough Bridge in Pavlicek’s cream-colored elephant of a Lexus, Billy felt like he could stand up in the shotgun seat without grazing the ceiling. For its owner, though, the oversized SUV was a necessity. Pavlicek was nearly big enough to have his own zip code, six foot four, with a head as big around as a diving bell, the upper body of a power lifter, and hands that once, on a bet, had crushed a raw potato. Even with his face and frame somewhat softened by retirement and wealth, his presence still tended to make everyone around him, including Billy, behave. Big man, big car, big life.
In Billy’s opinion, of all their original crew, Pavlicek had played the exit game most righteously. Any cop working a precinct could tell you where the money went, but Pavlicek’s genius back in the ’90s was to see where it wasn’t: in the roofless brownstone shells that had become crack squats, the decimated walk-ups, the derelict working-class ghost palaces that had peaked in the 1940s, if they had ever peaked at all. He had bought them one at a time for a renegotiated accumulation of back taxes and liens, either from the city or the desperate owners themselves, paying an average of $7,500 in the beginning, never more than $50,000 later on, once other speculators started to get in the game. And after completing the purchase, Pavlicek was good at vacating buildings, offering first cash, then violence to the squatters and junkies still cooping after the sale.
In the early days, Pavlicek did all the dirty work himself, rarely needing to do more than show up unannounced at dawn and display his holstered service revolver or a baseball bat. As his holdings grew, he began contracting out these spontaneous evictions, as he called them, to others: mainly defrocked cops, guys who had gotten jammed up for taking money or beating a prisoner or worse, losing both their badges and their pensions in the aftermath and now desperate for even the shadiest of paydays.
Once the troublemakers and deadbeats were gone, he quickly rehabbed the properties and got decent people to move in—there were always decent people—Pavlicek specifically courting the elderly on Social Security or other kinds of fixed income, as well as those who could arrange for the city or their bank to make direct rent payments to his corporation, the bottom line being that five years after retirement Pavlicek owned twenty-eight