Don't Blink (2 page)

She was right about that much.

Table chatter, clanking silverware, the iconic jazz of John Coltrane filtering down from the recessed ceiling speakers — they all combined to fill the mahogany-paneled dining room
of Lombardo’s with a continuous loop of the most pleasant sort of white noise.

Torenzi heard none of it.

He’d been hired because of his discipline, his unyielding focus. In his mind there was only one other person in the busy restaurant. Just one.

Thirty feet …

Torenzi had spotted the table in the far right corner. A special table, no doubt about that. For a very special customer.

Twenty feet …

He cut sharply over to another aisle, the heels of his black wingtips clicking against the polished wood floor like a metronome in three-quarter time.

Ten feet …

Torenzi leveled his stare on the bald and unabashedly overweight man seated alone with his back to the wall. The picture he’d been handed could stay tucked in his pocket. There was no need to double-check the image.

This was him, for sure. Vincent Marcozza.

The man who had less than a minute to live.

VINCENT MARCOZZA — WEIGHING in at three hundred pounds plus — glanced up from what remained of his blood-rare porterhouse steak, stuffed baked potato, and gaudy portion of onion strings. Even sitting still the guy looked woefully out of breath and very close to a coronary.

“Can I help you?” asked Marcozza, seemingly polite. His raised-on-the-streets-of-Brooklyn tone, however, suggested otherwise. It was more like,
Hey, pal, what the hell are you staring at? I’m eating here
.

Torenzi stood motionless, measuring the important man. He took his sweet time answering. Finally, in a thick Italian accent he announced, “I have a message from Eddie.”

This amused Marcozza for some reason. His pasty complexion spiked red as he laughed, his neck fat jiggling like a Jell-O mold. “A message from Eddie, huh? Hell, I should’ve known. You look like one of Eddie’s guys.”

He lifted the napkin from his lap, wiping the oily cow juice from the corners of his mouth. “So what is it, boy? Spit it out.”

Torenzi glanced to his left and right as if to point out how close the nearby tables were. They were too close.
Capisce?

Marcozza nodded. Then he motioned his uninvited lunch visitor forward. “For my ears only, huh?” he said before breaking into another neck-jiggling laugh. “This oughta be good. It’s a joke, right? Let’s hear it.”

Over by the far wall a waiter stood on tiptoe on a chair, erasing the Chilean sea bass special from a large chalkboard. Hustling by him, a busboy and his gray bucket carried the remains of a table for four. And at the bar, a waitress loaded up her tray with a glass of pinot noir, a vodka tonic, and two dry martinis with almond-stuffed olives.

Torenzi stepped slowly to Marcozza’s side. Placing his left hand firmly on the table, he unclenched his right fist, which was tucked neatly behind his back. The cold steel handle of a scalpel fell promptly and rather gracefully from his sleeve.

Then, leaning in, Torenzi whispered three words, and only three. “Justice is blind.”

Marcozza squinted. Then he frowned. He was about to ask what the hell that was supposed to mean.

But he never got the chance.

IN A HELLISH BLUR, Bruno Torenzi whipped his arm around, plunging the scalpel deep into the puffy fold above Marcozza’s left eye. With a good butcher’s precision and hard speed, he cut clockwise around the orbital socket. Three, six, nine, midnight … The blade moved so fast, the blood didn’t have time to bleed.

“ARRRGH!” was a pretty good approximation of the sound Marcozza made.

He screamed in agony as the entire restaurant turned.
Now
everyone noticed Bruno Torenzi. He was the one carving the eye out of that fat man’s face — like a pumpkin!

“ARRRRRRGH!”

Torenzi was outweighed by over a hundred pounds but it didn’t matter. He’d positioned himself perfectly, his rigid choke hold keeping Marcozza’s head dead still while the rest
of his body violently jerked and thrashed. What was premeditated murder if not calculated leverage?

Squish!

Scooped out like a melon ball, Marcozza’s left eye fell to the white linen tablecloth and rolled to a stop.

Next came the right eye.
Slice, slice, slice …
Beautiful handiwork, to be sure.

But the right eye didn’t pop out like the left one. Instead, it dangled, held by the stubborn red vessel of the optic nerve.

Torenzi smiled and flicked his wrist. He was almost finished here, so hold the applause.

Snip!

Marcozza’s right eye, with a gooey tail of flesh and vein, careened off the bread plate and fell to the floor.

Blood, finally catching up to the moment, now gushed from Marcozza’s empty eye sockets. In medical terms, his ophthalmic artery had been severed from his internal carotid artery, the high-pressure main line to the brain. In layman’s terms, it was just a god-awful, horrifying, and disgusting mess.

A few tables away, a woman wearing everything Chanel fainted, passing out cold, while another threw up all over her tiramisu.

As for Torenzi, he simply tucked the scalpel into the breast pocket of his Zegna suit before heading toward the kitchen to exit through the back door — back into broad daylight.

But before he did, he leaned down again to repeat his message into Marcozza’s chubby ear as he lay hunched over the table dying a slow, mean death.

“Justice is blind.”

A JOB TO DIE FOR

THE WORDS I will never be able to forget were “Hold on tight, because this is going to be one hairy ride.” In point of fact, those words not only described the next several minutes, but the next several days of my life.

I had been lying fast asleep under nothing but the high, bright stars of an African night sky with only a frayed, moth-eaten mat separating me from some of the poorest dirt on the planet when suddenly my eyes popped open and my heart immediately skipped a beat. Make that a couple of beats.

Holy shit! Is that what I think it is?

Gunfire?

The answer to my question came the very next second as Dr. Alan Cole raced over to me in the darkness and grabbed my arm, shaking me hard. We’d been sleeping outside because our pup tents were like saunas.

“Wake up, Nick. Get up! Now!” he said. “We’re being attacked. I’m serious, man.”

I shot straight up and turned to him as the sound of more gunfire echoed in the air.
Pop! Pop! Pop!

It was getting closer. Whoever was shooting —
they
were getting closer. And moving quickly.

“Janjaweed — that’s who it is, right?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Alan. “I was afraid this could happen. Word got around that we’re here.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Follow me,” he said with a wave of his flashlight. “Quickly, Nick. Keep moving.”

I grabbed my pillow — otherwise known as my knapsack. From the corner of my eye I spotted one of my notepads over by the stack of crates that had been functioning as my desk. I took one step toward it when Alan grabbed my arm again, this time to hold me back.

“There’s no time, Nick. We’ve got to get the hell out of here,” he warned. “Otherwise, we’re both dead. And that’s after they torture us.”

Well, when you put it like that …

Lickety-split, I fell in line behind Alan as we raced past the few shanties of plywood and corrugated metal that were used as operating rooms at this makeshift hospital on the outskirts of the Zalingei district of Sudan. It dawned on me how in control the doctor seemed, even now. He wasn’t screaming or shouting.

Meanwhile, that’s all I wanted to do.

For crying out loud, Nick, what’s with you and the death wish? Did you really have to take this assignment? You knew
this part of Darfur was still too dangerous for journalists! Even Courtney said so when she offered you the assignment
.

But that was the whole point of the article I was writing — the reason I knew I had to be here and see it with my own eyes. This part of Darfur was still too dangerous for doctors as well. Obviously. But that didn’t stop Dr. Alan Cole from coming here, did it?
No
. The acclaimed thoracic surgeon had left his wife and two beautiful kids back in Maryland to be here for four months with the Humanitarian Relief Corps to save the lives of Sudanese civilians who would otherwise suffer and die without medical care.

Now I was relying on Alan Cole to save my life, too.

Pop! Pop-pop-pop-pop! Pop-pop-pop-pop!

I kept running behind him and the hazy glow of his flashlight, ignoring the sting against my bare feet as I stepped on the sharp rocks and spiny twigs that littered the ground.

Up ahead I could see some movement: the two female Sudanese nurses who worked full-time in the hospital. One was starting up a rickety old Jeep that Alan had pointed out to me when I’d first arrived days earlier.

He’d called it the “getaway car.” I thought he was joking.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Think again, Nick
.

“Get in!” Alan told me as we reached the Jeep. The nurse in the driver’s seat jumped out to let him take over the wheel.

As I practically hurled myself into the shotgun seat I waited for the two nurses to climb in the back. They didn’t.

Instead they both whispered the same thing to us.
“Salaam alaikum.”

I’d already learned what that meant.
Peace be with you
. But I was confused. “Aren’t they coming with us?” I asked Alan.

“No,” he said, jerking the creaky gearshift out of park. “The Janjaweed don’t want them. They want us. Americans. Foreigners. We’re interfering here.”

With that, he quickly thanked the nurses, telling the two he hoped to see them soon.
“Wa alaikum salaam,”
he added.
And peace upon you
.

Then Alan hit the gas like a sledgehammer, plastering me against the back of my seat.

“Hold on tight,” he told me over the rattle and roar of the engine, “because this is going to be one hairy ride.”

A BLAST OF the hot desert air nearly burned my face as we hit the road, or at least what passed for the road in this god-forsaken part of the world. There was no pavement, only a beaten track of dirt that was now flying off our tires as we fishtailed back and forth with Alan doing his damnedest to avoid the occasional citrus tree that had managed to survive the wretched heat and droughtlike conditions here.

Did I mention we had our headlights off?
Welcome to the Ray Charles Grand Prix
.

“How we doing?” Alan shouted at the top of his voice. “Do they see us? Can you see
them?
”

He and I were a mere foot apart from each other, but we still had to shout to be heard. I swear, a fighter jet breaking the sound barrier was quieter than this Jeep’s engine.

“See us? How can they not
hear
us?” I shouted back. “I don’t see anybody yet.”

I’d done a good bit of homework on the Janjaweed before arriving from the States. They were the proxy militia of the Arab Muslims in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, and had long been fighting and killing the African Muslims in the countryside over, among other things, land allocation. The bloodshed had been relentless and mainly one-sided. Hence, the genocide we keep hearing about.

But reading articles and a few books on the Janjaweed from the comfort of my couch in Manhattan was one thing. This was entirely another affair.

I turned to look over my shoulder, the cloud of dirt and dust flying in our wake making it hard to see anything. That’s when I felt the air split open around me as a bullet whizzed by my ear.
Jesus Christ, that was close
.

“Faster, Alan!” I said. “We’ve got to go faster! You can go faster, can’t you?”

Alan gave me a quick nod, his eyes squinting as he struggled to see through the darkness and flying dirt.

As for me, I contemplated my premature death at thirty-three by counting the unchecked boxes on my life’s to-do list. Winning a Pulitzer. Learning how to play the saxophone. Driving an Enzo Ferrari along the Pacific Coast Highway.

Oh yeah, and finally having the balls to tell a certain woman back home that I loved her more than I had previously cared to admit — even to myself.

What could I say that one of my half-dozen favorite authors, John Steinbeck, hadn’t already figured out? Something about the best-laid plans of mice and men often going awry?

But hold on!

Speaking of plans, the doctor at the wheel apparently had one of his own. “We need something heavy!” declared Alan.

Heavy?
“Like what?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. Check in the back — the cargo area,” he said, handing me his flashlight. “And stay low! I don’t want losing you on my conscience.”

“No, I don’t want that either, Alan!”

Like an added exclamation point, a bullet ricocheted off the metal roll bar.
Ping!

“Make that
real
low!” Alan added.

I grabbed the thick rubber handle of the flashlight, quickly snaking my way into the cramped quarters of the backseat. Peering into the cargo area I spotted nothing but a few empty water bottles bouncing around like jumping beans.

I was about to tell Alan the bad news when I caught the reflection of something shiny strapped to the side, near the spare tire. It was a lug wrench.
Yes!

But was it heavy enough? I had no idea, since I didn’t know what it was needed for.

I handed it up to Alan, who gave it a shake as if weighing it in his hands. “Good enough,” he said. Then he flipped on the Jeep’s headlights. “Now hold the wheel steady for me, all right?
Very
steady, Nick!”

I climbed back into the shotgun seat, reaching over for the steering wheel as Alan lifted his left foot and yanked off his running shoe. I could just make out the swoosh of the Nike label.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

Right back? Where the hell are you going, doc?