by Landon Beach
“Allison, you need to listen to me. These are the kind of people you may run into at that house, and right now it’s just you and an illustrator from a small-town press. I’m calling the Detroit FBI Field Office, okay? Do not enter that house without hearing back from me. Got it?”
She paused. Of course, this was the right and prudent thing to do. Set up a surveillance position, watch, and then wait for the Feds to arrive. She looked at Brad, who seemed anxious to find out what the phone conversation was all about, and thought about him and why he had hired her. What if they waited too long, and Conrad was dead or seriously injured by the time they got there? And what about the woman that might be with him? Dicey. Uncertain. She’d have Mike make the call, tell Brad what she had just discussed over the phone, and then evaluate the situation with him.
“Go ahead and make the call, Mike. Then get right back to me.”
“Got it,” Mike said and then hung up.
“What was that all about?” Brad asked.
She turned, and they started walking. “I’ll tell you on the way to the boat.”
✽✽✽
FBI Detroit Field Office
Patrick Bruno sat behind a desk in Terrance Nolan’s office with a heap of files and papers taking up the left-hand side and a telephone and his cup of coffee the other side. He was going back through the entire set of correspondence between Nineteen and Nolan, and he was pissed. Nolan had called him this morning and said that he would not be in today—stomach flu, and it was a doozy.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got the press on the defensive, and if anybody needs to make a call, they’ll handle it in D.C. No. No more shit is going to go down today. It’s already gone down. With any luck, we’ll be turning over in a down period of violence. Questions? For me? No problem. Look, I’ll be in tomorrow, and I’ll take you to breakfast and tell you whatever you want to know, and then we’ll talk about our upcoming meeting with Nineteen. Okay? Okay. What? Your niece? Man, I’m sorry to hear about that. You need time off? No? All right. Well, you call me if you need something. And, Patrick? We’re going to get these guys.” And that was how the phone call had ended. Stomach Flu? Well, Nolan had looked like he’d been hit in the face with a sack of coins yesterday. He just looked...older. Maybe the murder of the little girl was weighing on him more than he had said, and maybe Patrick was right, and Nolan had known about the girl, Debbie Archer, who had been murdered in 2007. He wanted answers now, but, at this point, what would one more day matter?
His phone rang. Should he even bother? After staying up most of last night consoling his wife because of the death of their niece, all he wanted was peace and quiet and coffee. He’d received the report and video this morning. Traces of semen had been found in his niece’s mouth, vagina, and anus. One of the sexual partners had overdosed with her and was found ten feet away, facedown in the grass near the park bench. The kid was seventeen. A surveillance camera mounted on a lamppost across the street had recorded most of the incident; the camera had been placed there by local law enforcement after they had received a tip a week ago that the park bench was a drug dealer distribution point. On the video, she had first appeared emerging from the woods at the edge of the frame. She sprinted barefoot to the bench where the kid and an older man were. After a minute of talking, the three-way sexual encounter began. When it was over, the older man helped Patrick’s niece and the kid shoot up and then took off. Patrick had watched the video, helplessly, as they both began to overdose, fall over, and eventually stop moving. The phone rang again.
Fuck it.
He picked up the receiver and heard a man introduce himself as Mike Martinson.
Fifteen minutes later, he dropped by Nolan’s house. No one answered, and he couldn’t get Nolan on the phone. Maybe the guy had had enough. He was what, weeks away from retirement, and that might be postponed now? Maybe the little girl had taken it all out of him, and he had taken off for a day. And maybe this was Nolan’s way of extending his middle finger at the bureau for trying to extend him past his retirement date. Patrick frowned. He’d played the stomach bug card a few times in Nashville when he needed a break. He couldn’t really blame Nolan. This was his show now. He could have tried to put together a task force, but he knew what that timetable would’ve been. Jumping through bureaucratic-ass-covering hoop after bureaucratic-ass-covering hoop until the initiative had been lost and the mission doomed before it even commenced. Not even Nolan’s seasoned wizardry of cutting through the red tape could set things in motion fast enough, and Nolan was nowhere to be found. Screw it all. He was tired of reacting and had decided to act instead.
So, he had asked Maggie Schiff, his preferred choice to be his partner whenever he would meet with Nineteen in the future, if she wanted to go with him on a little trip today. She had accepted, and they were now in a car headed to a house on Lake St. Clair. A fellow agent’s brother-in-law, retired cargo pilot Scooter ‘Scooty’ Daugherty, had a floatplane that was tied up to a dock behind Scooty’s lake house.
And since the amount of cash that had been discussed was right, Scooty was fueling up to fly Patrick and Maggie to South Bass Island.
✽✽✽
Put-in-Bay, South Bass Island, Ohio
“He’s coming here in a what?” Allison said into her cell phone, sitting in the cockpit of Larry’s Stingray 25. There was a no-wake rule in the harbor, and Brad was motoring them out to sea where they could turn to port and follow the coastline down to the house where they thought Conrad was being kept.
“A floatplane,” said Mike Martinson. “He knows you could get to the house before him, but he wants you to anchor out and wait. He’s flying with another agent named Maggie Schiff. They’ll land near you and then come over to your boat. Got it? Good. I gave him your number, and he said he’d call you soon. You both take care, you hear?”
The phone call ended, and she said to Brad, “We’re going to have company.”
He eased the throttle forward as Gibraltar Island started to pass down their starboard side, and she explained the situation to him.
“Let’s get close enough so we can take a look with the binoculars,” Brad said. “If I see that Conrad is in any danger, then all bets are off. I’m going to try and save him.”
Allison went to protest but checked herself. After observing him for the past day, she knew there would be no talking him out of it. It was his brother.
He took his eyes off the water for a few seconds and said, “I just want to say thanks. You’ve done your job and don’t have to do any more. I don’t want to put you in any danger because of what my brother might have gotten himself into.”
“You won’t be alone,” she said, and pulled a Glock 22 out of her bag and loaded a fifteen-round clip.
He grinned, shook his head, and then concentrated on the navy water off the bow.
As they passed by Peach Orchard Point, the waves grew in height. Brad opened the throttle, and soon whitecaps were everywhere. She sat down and pulled the binoculars out of her bag and then hung them around her neck. Water sprayed Brad and Allison as the bow hit the waves, and they cleared the remaining land off the port side. As he began to swing Reminiscing to the west, it started to rain, and thunder could be heard in the distance. The sky was dark purple in the direction they were heading.
✽✽✽
Conrad Cranston felt like his legs would bend at any moment. He was standing in the middle of Nico Colombo’s living room with Stansie standing on his shoulders. Only his affinity for westerns had conjured up the memory of watching Once Upon a Time in the West where Charles Bronson is placed in a similar situation with a smiling Henry Fonda looking on, waiting for Bronson’s legs to give out—which would spell death for the man standing on Bronson’s shoulders. Why? Because that man’s neck had a noose around it like Stansie’s had now. If Conrad could no longer stand, the rope would pull tight, and, as GiGi Rizzo had said more than an hour ago when the torture had begun, “We’ll have ourselves a hangin’!”
&nb
sp; Conrad’s arms and feet were spread apart and chained to huge steel rings countersunk into opposite walls. His neck had a shackle around it, and a chain ran straight down where it was padlocked to a ring countersunk in the floor. Stansie’s hands were bound behind her back with rope, and the ring from where the noose was hung had held a large chandelier before being removed for the event. He hadn’t noticed the rings on the wall when they had stayed here a few days ago, but he had remembered the chandelier. The ring on the floor beneath him had been covered by a rug with a coffee table over it.
They could not communicate with each other, for their mouths were gagged with red handkerchiefs. All they could do was moan in agony or moan in an attempt to encourage each other to keep fighting. His legs felt like they had been dipped in hot oil, and sweat slid all over his body. He didn’t know how much longer he could hold out.
Sitting in leather recliners, each with an end table that held a heavy glass ashtray, lit cigar, and a glass of bourbon, were the men witnessing the torture. Stansie had yelled their names before being gagged: Fabian De Luca, GiGi Rizzo, and Nico Colombo. There was another man whom neither recognized who was the quietest of the four, just sipping his drink, smoking his cigar, and watching Conrad’s feat of physical strength. On the dining room table, behind the men, were five lines of cocaine, a rubber band, and two loaded syringes.
The previous night, they had been loaded onto a large yacht and then injected with something to knock them out. When he awoke, he was in a familiar darkened place—Nico Colombo’s guest bedroom—only this time he was kneeling at the foot of the bed. His feet were bound with heavy rope, and his hands were handcuffed behind his back. On one side of him was GiGi Rizzo, and on the other side was one of the security men from the yacht. They held him as he watched Nico inject Stansie with heroin and then rape her on the bed. His struggle was useless, and his screams could not be heard behind the rag, gagging his mouth. When Nico had finished, Conrad was stood up and carried out of the room. He was given another injection, and when he awoke, he found himself where he was now.
He heard a moan from above. It was the worst sound he had ever heard because he knew that somewhere in the sound was a plea for more heroin—and it broke him. Tears began to stream down his face, mixing with the sweat of his exertion to keep his legs from buckling.
“Oooh, is big dumb gardener crying?” asked Nico Colombo, approaching Conrad.
GiGi Rizzo looked at Conrad and cracked up. “I think he is.”
Nico got up close to where he could smell Conrad’s rank body odor. All Conrad had on was his underwear. “Still thinkin’ about last night, aren’t ya,” he said, winking. “Waterbeds, if you get in sync, can provide a mind-blowing experience.” He motioned with his eyes up at Stansie. “And your girl up there, man, she got in sync!”
Conrad lunged at him, coming to within inches of Nico’s face. Stansie’s feet started to slip, and he had to pull back so she could readjust them in order to stay on his shoulders.
Nico let out a high-pitched laugh.
28
Don Fabian De Luca, who until this point had remained seated with his legs crossed and his hands on his recliner’s armrest, eased forward and joined his hands together. With a calm smile, he said, “Nico, I hear you are a man who can enjoy his cocaine and not let it dull your senses.”
Nico turned away from Conrad, and his smile disappeared. “Well, my Don, I don’t know where you heard that, but I assure you that I never mix business with pleasure.”
Fabian did not take his eyes off him. GiGi Rizzo casually rose from his chair and began to approach Nico.
Then, Fabian rose. “As you know, I do not partake in our product, Nico. Once you start, it never ends well.” He motioned with his right arm across the room as he started to walk. “You have quite a few tissue boxes spread around the house.” He watched as Nico’s eyes started to count them. The Don tapped his own nose. “Your mucus membranes are damaged, and I’m sure some sores have formed.”
GiGi motioned Nico toward the dining room table, and all three men began to walk toward it.
Static from the two handheld radios that Fabian and GiGi carried broke the silence in the room. Fabian brought the radio up to his ear and listened. After thirty seconds, he shook his head and turned the volume almost all the way down. “Turn your volume down, GiGi,” he said.
“What was it?” GiGi replied, turning his volume down and then placing his radio on the dining room table.
“A broken transmission from the Captain. I think he said they were diving.” He set his radio on the table too. “Anyway, I don’t want any interruptions right now. Where was I? Oh, yes. Nico, in my forty years of being in The Association, I also know that when I find something out that my boss should know about, I tell him.”
Nico started looking around nervously as he reached the table.
He stopped too late and bumped the edge, turning the five neat and separate lines of cocaine into one wide dusty line. Nico took a step back. “Sorry, Don De Luca.”
Fabian went all the way to the other end of the table and stopped, then turned and faced him. GiGi now had one of Nico’s arms in his firm grip; GiGi’s dagger was in the other.
“Sorry for what?” Fabian asked. “Sorry for jarring the table?” He paused, looking at the three-inch white powder stripe a foot from where Nico and GiGi stood. “Or sorry because you did not tell me immediately, when you found out that I was Don, about the money in an underwater cave a thousand yards off your shore that belongs to me?”
“I—I...”
GiGi sliced Nico’s right cheek, and blood began to ooze from the clean line. “Do not speak unless the Don tells you to speak.”
The Don exhaled. “Nico, I think you are lying to me. And I do not like to be lied to. So, one more chance to be straight with your Don.”
Nico nodded.
“Do you use our product?”
Nico’s eyes shifted to GiGi, and then they shifted to the man still sitting in the recliner watching Conrad and Stansie struggle. He looked back at the Don. He nodded.
“Thank you for your honesty, Nico. Your Don appreciates it. Now, I want you to demonstrate for me.” Fabian pointed at the table. “Sniff. All of it.”
“All of it, my Don?”
“Do it!” yelled GiGi.
“I will do a quarter,” Nico said.
GiGi went to slash him with the dagger again, but the Don held up his hand.
“And what, my dear Nico, would you have that could buy yourself out of the other three-quarters? You’ve already told us where the underwater cave is.”
Nico straightened up. “Well, my Don, I guess I’m not the only one with secrets at this table. That man sitting over there—what? Are those Camels he’s smoking now instead of that expensive Cuban cigar I put down for him? Fuckin’ loser.”
The man turned toward him. It was FBI Special Agent Terrance Nolan.
“He’s a Fed. I saw you meet with him one night. Swam up to your sea wall and was met by this guy,” he said, leaning his head toward GiGi. “You’re a rat, Don De Luca, and you too, GiGi.” He paused, letting his words take hold. “But now, what you’re both wondering is if I have pictures, who I’ve told, what emergency protocols I have in place if this ever happened, right?”
The FBI agent exhaled in disgust and went back to calmly smoking his cigarette and watching Conrad’s knees wiggle.
“So, I believe that I’m the one in charge now, okay?” Nico said. “In fact, I don’t think I’m going to sniff any of this precious white powder. I think you are, my Don.”
GiGi’s right hand dropped the dagger, and his left hand released Nico’s arm.
Confused by the move, Nico was too late to react as GiGi stepped behind him and pulled both of his hands behind his back. Nico struggled, but there was a reason that GiGi was the Don’s bodyguard—his strength, quickness, and power drove Nico’s head to the table and held it there.
Don De Luca took his time rounding the corne
r of the table and took quiet steps toward the men. “Now, Nico, unfortunately, you have only one option left.” He pulled out a dagger of his own. It was sleek and had a ruby at the far end of the pommel. “You are going to tell me if anyone else knows about what you just said, or I am going to insert this dagger into your ear farther and farther until you give me what I want. Although, if you do it now, I won’t have to use this.” He placed the tip of the blade on the outer rim of Nico’s ear and started to make slow circles.
After the third circle, Nico said, “Okay, okay. I didn’t tell anyone else; I swear.”
“That’s a good start,” said Fabian. Then he plunged the knife into Nico’s left ear.
Nico shrieked in pain but was unable to move due to GiGi’s grip.
Fabian withdrew the blade. “I’ll ask again. Does anyone else know?”
Nico was crying now. “No. No. I already told you. Why did you do that?”
GiGi looked back at Fabian. They both shook their heads in agreement.
“Because I like to know things for sure,” Fabian said. He wiped the dagger clean with Nico’s shirt. “You won’t be able to hear out of that ear again, but maybe with only one good ear, you will listen better.”
GiGi pulled Nico’s head off of the table until it was just an inch above the cocaine.
“Now, sniff,” Fabian commanded.
Nico drew in a breath and then sniffed the entire amount of cocaine. GiGi released his grip slowly, and Nico began to stumble, grabbing his injured ear.
“Impressive,” Fabian said.
GiGi pulled a pair of handcuffs from one of his back pockets and cuffed Nico’s hands behind his back.
“Let’s take a little walk to the sunroom,” GiGi said.
Nico’s glazed eyes struggled to focus as he heard the words. “Nooooo!”
Fabian followed. They left their radios on the dining room table.