Carlucci

by Richard Paul Russo

  A hand on his shoulder abruptly brought him back, and he opened his eyes to see Diane standing over him.

  “You looked like you were in heaven, Frank.”

  Carlucci smiled and nodded. “I was.” He got to his feet and tugged at his pants. “And you brought me back to earth. Thanks a lot.”

  “Sorry.”

  Diane was a beautiful woman in her forties with light brown curly hair; her large, round glasses were attractive on her, and her smile always cheered Carlucci. She was, probably, the happiest person he knew.

  “You look terrific,” he said.

  “I always look terrific.” Diane took his arm in hers and they walked down the steps to the sidewalk. “Where to?”

  Carlucci led the way through the crowd and into a stream of people flowing north. “Not far,” he said. “A few blocks.”

  “Have I been there before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, God. Then it’s one of your holes.” But she smiled at him and squeezed his arm.

  Pine Crest. With the heat and humidity and the people and noise pressing in on him from all directions, he could almost believe that Pine Crest was nothing more than a fantasy, that it didn’t really exist. How long had it been? He hadn’t talked to Tony or Imogene in years, didn’t know if they even owned the cabin anymore. Was the lake still there, as cold and blue and deep as it had always been, or had the interior drought killed it off as well? He had no idea.

  Carlucci cut off the street and into a crowded, shop-lined alley. Two doors up they entered Pattaya Thai Cafe, one of his regular places. Inside was swirling air from half a dozen fans and a babble of voices even louder than the noise outside. One of the waiters looked at Carlucci, pointed at the ceiling, then held up three fingers. Carlucci nodded, then led Diane through the jammed maze of tables and toward the back.

  They had to go through the kitchen to get to the back stairs. “I remember this place,” Diane said, shouting over the hissing, sizzling, clanging noises of the cooks. “They must have a dozen health code violations in here.”

  Carlucci just shrugged and smiled and motioned her up the wooden steps. They climbed four cramped half-flights, and by the time they reached the top, Carlucci was breathing heavily and sweating.

  “You’re out of shape, old man,” Diane said.

  “Thanks a lot. It’s this damn heat.”

  The third floor was much quieter than the first, but it was nearly full as well, and they couldn’t get a table anywhere near the open windows. The circulation was better, though, and the air was almost comfortable. They sat at a table under a pair of carved shadow puppets mounted on the wall; Carlucci could not decide whether the puppets were preparing to fight or embrace.

  They ordered pork satay, hot and sour soup, lard nar rice noodles with shrimp, and Thai iced tea. Diane would eat at least as much as he would, but it wouldn’t go to her gut like it did to his. She was right, he was out of shape; he needed to exercise. Christ, there were times he felt like an old man.

  “How’s Lissa?” Carlucci asked.

  Diane smiled. “Still making me happy. We’re going to Alaska in a couple of weeks, ten days of camping in what’s left of the Refuge.” She shook her head. “Even after nearly four years together she worries about the age difference. But that’ll be fine. Our relationship may go into the toilet someday, but it won’t be because of the age difference.”

  The waiter came by with their iced tea. Diane picked up her glass, said, “Cheers,” then drank deeply. She set down the glass and looked at him.

  “So tell me, Frank. What do you need from me?”

  “Information,” Carlucci replied.

  “Frank.” There was irritation in her voice. “Just tell me.”

  “What I need, I need off-line, Diane. I can’t have Vaughn or McCuller or anyone know what I’m looking into.”

  “No record of a download, no trace of the search itself, that’s what you want? Serious stuff, Frank.”

  Carlucci nodded. “Have you got a demon who could do it?”

  Diane smiled, shaking her head. “What you mean, is, someone who can do it, who would be willing to do it, and who can be trusted.”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “How important is it, Frank?”

  “Pretty damn important, I think, or I wouldn’t be asking.”

  “You think?”

  Carlucci didn’t respond. He took out his wallet and pulled the yellow sheet of paper from it. For a moment he hesitated; then he unfolded it and handed it to her.

  “I need whatever you can get me on these people,” he said. “Especially any connections to each other.” He almost asked her to concentrate on Chick Roberts, but decided it was better if he didn’t steer her one way or another.

  Diane studied the list, a frown working into her expression. She glanced up at him, back down at the list, then looked up at him again.

  “Frank, even doing an off-line demon run isn’t going to get you any more than what you’ve already got on these people.”

  “I haven’t got anything,” Carlucci said.

  She looked at the list, shaking her head. “Chick Roberts…Tory Mango…Boniface…Jenny Woo…I don’t know, maybe not all the names, but a lot of them. You’ve got what’s in the feeds. I can’t get you any more than that, Frank, even with a demon.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s where you got these names, isn’t it?”

  “From where, for Christ’s sake?” Carlucci was getting that bad feeling in his gut again, burning through him along with his confusion.

  “The slug sublevel feeds,” Diane said. “For the mayor’s nephew’s case.”

  Oh, shit. Carlucci leaned back in his chair, looking at her. He didn’t want to hear this. He picked up his glass and drank deeply from the thick, sweet, creamy iced tea. The cold liquid felt like molten ice in his belly, solidifying. He set down the glass and shook his head.

  “I didn’t get the names from the feeds. I haven’t had a chance to look at any of them except the Prime and first sub.”

  “Then where…?”

  “A different case,” Carlucci said. “Something completely unconnected to the mayor’s nephew. At least that’s what I thought” He leaned forward. “Which names—?” he started, but the waiter came by with the satay, cutting him off. When the waiter was gone, Carlucci started again. “Which names on that list are in the sublevel feeds?”

  “Hell, I can’t tell you for sure, Frank. My memory’s good, but not that good.” She looked down at the list. “Not all of them, probably, but at least half. The ones I mentioned, plus, oh, Poppy Chandler, I think…Ahmed Mrabet…maybe Rossom.” She looked back at him. “I can take these back and check for you, Frank, but you can do it yourself. You’ve got all the feeds, right?”

  Carlucci just nodded, staring at the sheet of yellow paper. He reached across the table and picked it up, stared at the names for a minute, then folded the sheet and put it back in his wallet.

  “If you want,” Diane said, “after you’ve checked those against the feeds, I can arrange a demon run for the names that aren’t in the feeds.”

  Carlucci shook his head. “Thanks, but…I’ve got a feeling the ones I want are in the feeds.”

  “What’s this mean, Frank? About what you’re doing?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. Nothing good.” He shook his head again, then gave her a half smile. “Let’s eat.”

  Carlucci picked up one of the skewers, dipped the meat in hot mustard sauce, and bit into it. The satay was good, but he was no longer hungry, and eating was nothing more than something to keep his hands occupied. He chewed, swallowed, then dipped the meat again.

  What did this mean? Carlucci tried to organize his thoughts and work it all through logically. It was possible, barely, that the overlap of names was just coincidence—strange coincidences were more common in this job than most people thought. But Carlucci didn’t believe it. Not this time, not with so many names ove
rlapping the two cases. There had to be a connection.

  Pressure was coming down through Vaughn and McCuller on both cases. But the pressure was to solve the one case, and bury the other. That didn’t make sense, did it? If there was a connection, solving the one was liable to blow open whatever was involved in the other. So what was going on?

  A couple of possibilities, it seemed to him. One: the pressure was coming from two different sources, down through the same conduit of Vaughn and McCuller, unknown to each other and, presumably, for different reasons. Or: the pressure was coming from the same source, but whoever it was didn’t realize the two cases were connected; they wanted the one case solved, for one reason, and the other buried, for a completely different reason, unaware that the one could screw up the other.

  The soup and noodles arrived. Carlucci continued to eat mechanically, hardly noticing the food, hardly noticing Diane. She knew him; she would let him alone as he ate and thought, and she wouldn’t take offense.

  So, two possibilities, and Carlucci didn’t like either one. And of course there might be a third, or even a fourth possibility that hadn’t yet occurred to him. And there was always the fallback position, which he liked even less: that nothing was what it seemed.

  Fuck. This whole thing was far messier than he’d ever imagined. Until he had a better idea of who was applying the pressure on the cases, and why, he’d be stumbling blind, and there were too many ways to sink into deep shit.

  “The food’s not that bad,” Diane said.

  Carlucci looked up at her. “Oh, you still here?” he said, smiling. Her plate was empty, the serving plates were empty, but his own plate was still half full. Only the soup was gone. Carlucci put down his chopsticks. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  “How bad is it?” Diane asked.

  “Bad,” Carlucci said. “Bad enough I’d really like to walk away from it all.”

  “But you can’t.”

  Carlucci shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “There’s something else, Frank. Might be unimportant, but it probably won’t make you feel any better.”

  “Great. What is it?”

  “Tremaine’s been digging around in the nephew’s case. He’s requested interviews with you, which we’ve turned down, of course. And he’s been asking about the Butler case, wanted to know who was in charge of that one.”

  Terrific. What the hell was Tremaine after?

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” Diane asked.

  “No. Well, yeah. Forget you saw that sheet of paper. Forget we talked about anything except Lissa and the damn weather.”

  The waiter came by, raised an eyebrow at Carlucci, and, when Carlucci nodded, picked up the plates and took them away. Carlucci finished off his tea and chewed on what little ice remained.

  “You’ll crack your teeth,” Diane said.

  “Nag.” He crunched twice more on the ice, then swallowed the tiny pieces.

  “Frank?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If there’s anything I can do…”

  There won’t be, Carlucci thought. He wouldn’t allow it, he wasn’t going to get her mixed up in all this. He would get himself out of it if he could.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

  He looked up at the shadow puppets on the wall. Fighting or embracing? Making love or war? He could see it now. He knew: they were preparing to do both.

  11

  THE ONLY REASON Paula saw him come in was because the place was half empty. It was Dead Wednesday at The Final Transit and the Black Angels were playing the ten o’clock slot, filler until the hip-lit crowd arrived and the Deconstruction Poets took over the stage for another of their shouting fests—poetry reading as primal scream therapy. Or was it the other way around?

  The Black Angels were halfway through “The Dead Drive Better Than You,” Paula backfilling with her bass for Bonita’s solo, when Tremaine came into the club. Paula nearly missed a beat when she saw him standing in the doorway, staring at her and smiling, but she kept it together and moved farther back from the spots on Bonita, wishing for a moment that she could disappear from the stage altogether. What was it about Tremaine that made her feel so weird? She watched him work his way to a table against the side wall, maybe thirty feet back from the stage.

  Then it was her time, and she moved up to the microphone, hot red light glaring down on her, and began to sing:

  “There you go again,

  Driving the wrong side of the road,

  Forgetting all your Zen,

  Flashing along in hit-and-run mode.

  There you go again,

  Swerving and skidding and sliding,

  Scattering women and men,

  You at the wheel, but no longer driving.

  So never make fun of that Haitian Voodoo,

  ’Cuz the walking dead drive better than you do.”

  As always when she sang those last two lines, Paula had to work hard to keep from laughing. Stupid lyrics. Worst of all, she’d written them herself.

  She glanced over at Tremaine, who was shaking his head and smiling; he held up his glass and tipped it toward her, then drank. Christ, Paula thought, she’d hardly met the guy, and she had to admit she was attracted to him, somehow, despite the fact that he wanted to talk to her about Chick. It was all too weird. She looked away from him, backed off from the mike, and dug into her guitar as if she were trying to rip the strings from her heart.

  When the set was over, Paula put her guitar in its case, set it by the drum kit, then asked Sheela and Bonita if they could get by without her, loading up all their equipment.

  “Sure,” Bonita said, shrugging. “Fergus and Dolph are here tonight.”

  Fergus and Dolph were Bonita’s two inseparable, six-and-a-half-foot-tall boyfriends. Huge men. Paula got the shivers whenever she thought about the three of them in bed together. Fergus and Dolph could handle all the loading by themselves, and would enjoy it.

  “What’s up?” Sheela asked.

  “A friend dropped by during the set.”

  “Oh, yeah? Who?” Sheela stood on her toes to look past Paula and Bonita, searching the tables.

  “Just a friend.” Paula turned to Bonita. “Take my bass home with you?”

  Bonita nodded. Fergus and Dolph came out of the club’s back door, stepped onto the stage, and started unplugging the sound equipment. Bonita turned away and joined them.

  “Who is it?” Sheela asked again. “That guy by the wall?”

  Paula turned to see who Sheela was looking at, sure that somehow Sheela had picked out the right guy. Yeah, she had. She was looking right at Tremaine, who was calmly returning her gaze.

  “Yes,” Paula said. “That’s him.”

  “Jesus, Paula, Chick’s hardly been dead a couple of weeks.”

  Paula grabbed Sheela’s arm, jerked at it until Sheela turned to face her. “Hey, back off, Sheela. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. He’s just a friend. Besides, anything like that, I don’t answer to anyone but myself and Chick. And, as you so delicately pointed out, Chick’s dead. Got it?”

  Sheela pulled her arm out of Paula’s grasp and looked down at the floor. She nodded slowly and walked back to her drum kit. Dolph was breaking it down, but Sheela pushed him away and set to work on it herself.

  Christ, Paula thought, what’s going on around here? She grabbed her jacket, stepped down from the stage and made her way to Tremaine’s table. She leaned on the back of the empty chair across from him, but didn’t sit down.

  “Hello, Paula Asgard.”

  “Hello, Tremaine. You’re not going to tell me this is a coincidence, are you?”

  Tremaine smiled. “Of course not. I came here looking for you.” He gestured at the chair. “Please, have a seat. Let me buy you a drink.”

  Paula looked at her watch. “A short one,” she said. She pulled out the chair, hung her jacket over it, and sat. “The poets are set to go on in twenty minutes, and I want to
be out of here when they start.”

  “The poets?”

  Paula shook her head. “Don’t even ask. Take my word for it, you don’t want to be here either, unless you can get into two hours of incoherent screaming.”

  “Sounds lovely,” Tremaine said.

  “Yeah.” Paula flagged down a waiter and ordered a Beck’s; Tremaine ordered another warm ale.

  The club was filling up. The Black Angels audience was almost gone, but the hip-lit crowd was pouring in; flowing in, Paula thought, with their capes and longcoats, several men and women draped in window-silk, the shiny fabric projecting television shows in shimmering color.

  The waiter came by with their drinks. “Maybe we can go somewhere else,” Tremaine suggested. “Where it’s quieter.”

  “Maybe,” Paula said. “I’ll think about it.” She still wasn’t sure what to do about Tremaine. She drank deeply from her beer. Damn, it was good; she hadn’t realized how thirsty she was. “You caught about half our set,” she said. “How’d you like it?”

  Tremaine shrugged. “It was all right. Good energy. But I guess I like my music slower and quieter.”

  Paula laughed. “Most people do. Fast and loud is the whole point of slash-and-burn. Like a shot of speed to your heart and head.”

  “You like it, don’t you?” Tremaine said.

  “I love it. It keeps me alive.” Paula turned the bottle around and around in the ring of moisture that had formed beneath it. “So tell me,” she said, cocking her head at him. “What keeps you alive?”

  Tremaine didn’t say anything for a minute. “The stories I do,” he finally said.

  “I can’t talk about Chick,” she told him.

  “Why not?”

  “Look, I don’t know why he was killed, and I don’t want to know why.”

  “Yes you do,” Tremaine said.

  Paula drank from her beer. “All right, sure. I want to know who killed him. But the whole thing scares me a little.”