A Thousand Tombs

by Molly Greene

  And for the most part, it had.

  The trio piled out of the truck and went inside. A big, yawning, nondescript brown mutt rose from a bed on the living room floor and trotted out to greet them.

  Mack had found Stella when he was a uniform and she was a half-grown stray, running the streets. She looked like she was a mix of retriever and shepherd; back then, she was scrawny and scabbed and desperately needed help, and so did Mack. He’d hauled the dog into his black-and-white and brought her home and nursed her back to health, and Stella adored him for it.

  Gen wondered if he would try to do the same with Luca. If that was his strategy, she hoped the kid didn’t break his heart.

  “Hey Stella,” Mack said. “Brought you a friend.”

  Luca dropped to his knees and offered a hand. “Hello girl,” he cooed. His voice was gentle, tinged with happiness and longing. Stella snuffled his fingers, then, after careful consideration, she wagged her long, feathered tail.

  He stroked the dog’s broad head slowly. When Stella sat on her haunches beside him, Luca scooted over and threw an arm around her and hugged her tight, then buried his face in the thick fur on her neck and whispered.

  Gen and Mack stared at one another again, this time with a shared look of compassion. Mack was probably feeling what she was feeling, which was appalled at the kid’s current state and grateful for their own good fortune.

  He held out his hand, and she laced her fingers with his.

  Gen had been surprised the first time she’d come to the house. They’d been dating since mid-August, and after a few weeks of candlelit suppers out and a proper courting, he’d invited her here for dinner. He was a bachelor, so she’d braced herself for an old leather couch and a big screen, and not much else. But once again, Mackenzie Hackett was a surprise.

  His place was masculine, no doubt about it. But the floors were distressed hickory planks, the area rugs were thick, and the furniture was eclectic and comfortable, not the shabby cast-offs many single men were content to own. She knew before she came that he was interested in art, so the framed oils were expected.

  The biggest surprise was the handful of metal sculptures sprinkled among the décor: a woman, rendered in rusty chunks, stark and beautiful and evocative. A copse of standing trees, so delicate that the leaves appeared to shiver when she passed. The third was in the kitchen, a pan rack hung from the ceiling, formed of intricate intertwined hands.

  “Put your things in here.” Mack spoke to the boy as he opened the door to the guest room. “Bathroom’s that door, there. If you want to take a shower later, there’s clean towels in the cabinet. Help yourself. For now, stow your stuff. Come on back when you’re ready and we’ll talk.”

  Then she and Mack went into the kitchen. He pulled a bottle of Corona from the fridge and held it up.

  “No thanks,” she said. “I should take off soon, and I already had wine for dinner. You know how the authorities feel about drinking and driving.”

  He smiled, but there was a distinct air of disappointment in it. “I’m sorry, Genny.” He put the beer back in the fridge and turned to face her.

  “Don’t worry about it. I wouldn’t have wanted it to work out any other way.”

  His eyebrows went up.

  “I mean about the kid, Mack, not our sleepover.” Tonight was to have been the night. No way that was going to happen now.

  They’d taken it slow, spent a lot of time just developing a friendship. With an appropriate amount of necking thrown in, of course. The pace was her decision and a direct result of her last relationship debacle. Ryan Connelly had called it quits when she thought he was thinking about rings. She didn’t want that to happen again, so she’d told Mack from the get-go that she wasn’t going to jump into his bed right away.

  Mack’s response? He’d told her it was her body, and her decision. That made it harder to wait, of course, and she wondered if he’d been aware of that. But wait she had, and at this point they were both beyond ready to move it all forward, so she’d packed some things to stay over.

  She’d been looking forward to this. She slung her arms around his waist and tucked her fingers into the back pockets of his jeans.

  “Don’t leave.” Mack sighed and nuzzled her hair. “Damn, I wasn’t thinking. I could tell he was in trouble, so I just reached out and grabbed him. I’m sorry, Genny.”

  “I’ve made you wait this long. A few more days won’t make any difference. We have plenty of time.”

  They moved apart at the sound of footsteps in the hall. Gen took a seat at the table that served as an island in the middle of the room, just as Luca came in with Stella padding along behind. She pulled out the chair beside her, then drew the bag with the coin from her pocket and plunked it down.

  Luca sat, still silent.

  Mack ruffled the dog’s fur and gave her a Milk Bone, then rummaged in the fridge and overheads and joined them with a tub of chocolate chip ice cream, a liter of 7-Up, and two thick bar glasses. He dropped ice cream into one, then added soda and a spoon and pushed it across to Luca.

  “What’s this?”

  “You’ve never had a 7-Up float?” Mack winced. “Man, you haven’t lived. Try it.” He winked at Gen. He knew she’d pass on dessert if he asked her, so he didn’t. Instead, he grabbed a juice glass and made her the baby version.

  “Okay,” Mack said. “Showtime. What’s your last name, Luca?”

  “Torello.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Cut the crap.”

  “Okay, seventeen.”

  “In about a year, maybe.”

  “No, really. I’m seventeen, I swear.”

  “Hunh. Luca Torello is a nice Italian name. You got family in North Beach?”

  “Somewhere. My mother lost touch, but I came here to track them down. I was staying with somebody while I looked, but that’s history.”

  “As of when?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Why?”

  “I needed a change of address.”

  “Explain.”

  “I’ve been playing my guitar on the streets around North Beach for about a month. You know, for tips. A week ago I set up near some shops on Grant. Right away this old guy starts coming by. Every day, and always late in the afternoon, about four o’clock.

  “He’d listen for a while, then he’d drop a ten bill in my case and keep going. So I made that my regular spot. One day I gave him a five-minute head start and followed him. He lives in a house not too far from that big Catholic Church near the park.”

  “I know the one,” Mack said. “Why’d you want to see where he lived, were you planning something?”

  The kid’s chin came up and his eyes blazed. “No.”

  “Then why?”

  “I was curious. I mean, I’m good, but ten bucks a day? That’s a lot of dough. I wondered if he had something else in mind, if you get my drift.”

  “And you trailed him home because you were willing to put out.”

  “Hell no.” Luca’s hands fisted and he dropped them in his lap. “No way.”

  “They why were you interested?”

  “Because I like to know the lay of the land.”

  Mack studied Luca’s face. “All right, we’ll leave it for now. Keep going.”

  “Yesterday the old man dropped that bag when he was pulling the bill out of his pocket. My jacket was on the ground, and it fell on the sleeve. I heard it, but he didn’t seem to notice, so I covered it with my foot. He walked away.

  “I flipped the jacket over it and kept playing, waiting for him to figure out his pocket was lighter and come back to look. It got late. He never showed. So I packed it in and scooped up the bag and stashed it in my case. I grabbed a burger and headed for home. When I opened the bag, I found the money.”

  Mack pushed aside his glass and reached for the square of velvet, then dumped out its contents. The coin spun on its side for a second, then tipped over and lay still. He p
icked it up and examined it. “It looks old, all right. I wonder how old?”

  “Maybe Greek,” Gen replied. “Seems impossible, though, if it’s that ancient, that anyone would misplace it so carelessly.”

  “It’s Roman,” Luca said.

  “How do you know?” Gen looked more closely at the writing. “Do you know Latin?”

  “No.” He frowned. “Today I took it into a pawn shop. I’d been playing a few doors down from this place all week. They liked that I was there, I guess. Maybe I was good for business.

  “Anyway, I asked how much it was worth. The guys who work there were real interested and told me it’s an old Roman coin and probably looted. They both got intense and asked where’d I get it. I was bummed. I didn’t expect that. Took me by surprise, so I told ‘em the old man who walked by every day dropped it in my case as a tip.”

  “Then what did they do?” Gen asked.

  “The owner says I need to tell him everything I know about it, or he has to call the cops. He’s going to report me, he says.”

  “So he accused you of stealing,” Mack said.

  “That’s right. I freaked out. I didn’t know what to do. I just figured I better take it back where it belonged, and fast. So I grabbed it up and took off.”

  “That was today?”

  “Yeah, this morning. A guy who works in the pawn shop chased me a few blocks, but I lost him. But like I said, I’d been around for a while, and I worried they might know where I was hanging out. So I went and got my stuff and split.”

  “Where were you going to stay tonight?”

  “A place I know. I didn’t go play in my regular spot today, obviously.”

  “So who was chasing you tonight?”

  “Man, I have no idea. I went over to the old dude’s house to return the coin. I didn’t want anything to do with it, didn’t want anyone else to know I had it.”

  “Better late than never,” Mack said. “What happened at the house?”

  “I wasn’t sure how I was going to return it, you know? I thought maybe I’d leave the bag on the back porch or something. It was dark, so I walked around to the side and eased in behind the bushes and looked in a window.

  “These gorillas were there with the old man. They were having a loud conversation in Italian. And Mack, one of them went agro, yelled at the old guy. I blew it, tripped and fell into the bushes. One of them came over to the window and saw me, and he yells something about ragazzo.

  “I know enough Italian to know that means boy. So I took off running, and damn if two of the dudes didn’t come after me. You know the rest. They were gaining on me when I ran into you.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Gen said. “Why would a bunch of Italians break off an argument and chase a kid?”

  “Could be they were arguing about some unrelated thing, saw the boy, thought he was a prowler out to get the old man,” Mack said.

  Gen peered at him like he’d gone crazy. “Is that Detective Mackenzie Hackett talking? You’re the one always driving home the ‘there are no coincidences’ thing.”

  “Okay, you’re right,” Mack replied. “It’s more likely they either knew the kid had the coin because the pawn shop people told them, or the old man told them the kid still had the coin. The question is, why would they be rousting him about this coin in the first place?”

  “Either because they knew it was worth a lot of money and they were there to take it, or it was theirs in the first place and they wanted it back,” Gen replied.

  “The old guy would have been frantic to find it if the stakes were that high,” Mack said.

  “He would have been combing the streets,” Gen added, “retracing his steps. He’d have remembered tipping Luca if he stopped there every day.”

  “Maybe he did remember, and that’s the scenario he mapped out for the goons,” Mack countered.

  “You guys sound like Kojak,” Luca said.

  “Kojak?” Gen laughed. “You must watch a lot of reruns.”

  He slid his eyes to her. “You a cop, too?”

  “Genny’s a private investigator,” Mack replied. “So what do you want to do, Luca? You should go to the police. That would be my suggestion, tell your story and make it official.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “As far as we know,” Gen added, “there hasn’t been a crime committed. They’d just take his statement, have him look at mug books. Take the coin for safekeeping until they got the old man’s story, maybe.”

  “True enough,” Mack said.

  “No.” Luca’s words were clipped and overly loud, and his face was pale and strained. “I can’t go to the cops. I won’t.”

  Stella sat up on her bed in the corner and whined, worried about Luca’s tone. The conversation was getting too intense. He was holding out on them, Gen guessed.

  “You’ve left something out.”

  Luca blinked and clenched his jaw again. That was the boy’s tell; she thought maybe he was trying to decide if he could trust them with the truth.

  “They’ll send me back,” he said.

  “Where?” Gen asked.

  “To my father.”

  “So he doesn’t know you’re here,” Mack said.

  Luca shook his head. Gen could see his hands, curled into fists in his lap. “I ran away. I hitched out here. My Mom’s parents are in the city somewhere.”

  “Seems like you do a lot of running,” Mack said. “It’s not a good life skill, trust me.”

  “How about your mother?” Gen’s voice was gentle. “Does she know where you are?”

  He shook his head again, and his chin trembled. Not a good subject. “I hate him,” Luca hissed. “He as good as killed her.”

  When the tears began to trickle down his cheeks, Luca pushed out of the chair and repeated, “I won’t go back.” He stood and strode away down the hall. Three minutes later, they heard the shower running.

  Mack sighed and reached for Gen’s hand. “Poor kid,” he said. “Tough place to be in.”

  “Makes my teenage years look like gravy.”

  “Genny. I know this will sound strange, but I want to hire you. To check out his story. Obviously something’s going on, and I can’t dig around in it.”

  “Hire me? I won’t take your money.”

  “I mean it. If I got formally involved, I’d have to make him come forward and tell his story. That means as a minor, he goes into the system. And like the kid said, he doesn’t want to go back home. So I’ll pay you for your time. I want to keep this at arm’s length.”

  “Arm’s length?” Gen chuckled. “Is that what you call that?” She hitched a thumb in the direction of the bathroom. “I’d say you were in it up to your eyeballs.”

  “You know what I mean.” Mack smiled, then reached for her hand and kissed her palm. “For now, I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear anything he said tonight. I thought maybe you could try to track down this old man and get his story, then we’ll go from there.”

  “I’ll do it,” she replied. “But as a favor. No money changes hands. If you can find out where this mysterious old man lives, I’ll go see him tomorrow. The truth is, if it gets the boy out of your guest room faster, I’ll be happy to help.”

  “It won’t be long.” Mack angled his head and gave her a look filled with remorse that did a lot to make her feel better about their changed plans. “You need to be careful. Stay out in the open and have the stun gun ready. I hope I don’t regret getting you tangled up in this.”

  “Ha. Whatever went down tonight will be long over by tomorrow morning.”

  Mack grinned. “Even so, I’m going to pray for you.”

  Gen snorted. “I think I better pray for you. You’re the one who just acquired a teenager.”

  Chapter Four

  Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church was on Filbert Street next to Washington Square Park. Gen lucked into a spot at the curb on Stockton and locked up the car, then shouldered her purse and walked north along the green. L
ast night Luca had described the house and gave them the street name. It was located on a cul-de-sac not far away.

  She found it easily. What happened after that, however, was trouble enough for the rest of the year.

  The place was a two-decker set back from the sidewalk. It was well tended, painted dark brown and sage with some neatly stacked rock work across the front. A line of shrubs were trimmed square and lined up beneath the windows like sentries.

  On the right a driveway cut from the sidewalk to the detached garage in back, bisected by a stone path that ran to the front door. The path continued beyond the entry and connected the drive with a closed wooden gate on the left side of the yard.

  Gen walked to the door. It had a small square of glass in it, covered by a sheer curtain. She peered in as she knocked. She could barely see the foyer on the other side, but the sound echoed clearly through the room. No response. She stopped and waited five beats, then rang the bell. No echo of footsteps approaching. She rang the bell again and waited.

  Nothing.

  Next she opted for the garage.

  She tried to get a peek in the side windows as she strolled toward the back. No luck, the shades were drawn. Just as Luca had said, the line of shrubs continued here and one looked disheveled, probably where he took his spill.

  A small gate blocked her passage into the yard. She unlatched it and let herself in, then turned into an alcove that shaded the rear entry from view. The door was closed.

  Something about the silence made the hair stand up on her arms, like it was just a little too quiet. Everything was holding its breath this morning, including the birds.

  Her heartbeat ramped up, anticipating trouble. She may have been wrong to brush off Mack’s warning. If Luca’s story was true, something unfortunate might have come of the argument. A smart investigator wouldn’t assume things were copacetic.

  Maybe she should act like she was that savvy.

  Gen shoved her right hand into her bag and pulled the stun gun from its holster, then activated the switch and held the weapon clear of her side. Then she peeled the purse strap off her shoulder and stuffed it under the bushes where it couldn’t be seen. If something was going down, she didn’t need baggage in the way.