Godchild

by Vincent Zandri

  I started for the stairs, pushing past Tony, very unsteady, my midsection feeling like an elephant had stepped on it.

  “Keeper,” Val shouted. “You can’t take out Barnes now.”

  Tony grabbed my arm just before I reached the stairs.

  “Listen to her, paisan,” he said. “You go off half-cocked now, you’ll blow this thing out of the water. With the manuscript and Renata’s testimony, Ryan will be able to nail Barnes on conspiracy to commit murder as well as the first-degree murder of his son and the second-degree murder of your wife.”

  I pushed his hands away.

  “Don’t you see?” he said. “You go off on a personal vendetta, you’ll blow this for everybody.”

  “Including Fran,” Val added. “And little Charlie.”

  I looked at her, then Tony, then Renata. Looked them all in the eyes.

  “When have you ever abided by the law?” I said to Tony. “You’ve always done what was right, regardless of the law. Look at Lenny Jones. We all know you made the hit on him. You know Barnes and the Bald Man have to die. So why the sudden change?”

  “Because this one is different,” he said. “Jones was already in prison. He was beyond due process. The only alternative was active vengeance. For Barnes and the Bald Man it’s different. Law and order will take them down for good.”

  Tears ran down Renata’s cheeks. “You have to do this for my son,” she said. Val wrapped her arms around the writer’s shoulders, led her back into the kitchen.

  I turned and took another step up the stairs. “Whatever you say, counselor.”

  I felt a sharp jolt of pain in my groin with every step I took up the stairs. But I didn’t care about the pain. All I cared about was revenge. Maybe I’d assured Tony that I would play by his rules. Maybe I’d made the same assurance to Renata. But it was my wife we were dealing with. My wife, her death, my life. What was left of it. So the physical pain didn’t really have that much effect.

  What I felt inside was anger. No, that’s not even close. What I felt was anger, but what I wanted was blood. Screw it, I told myself as I made the final stair to the landing. For now I’d do what everyone expected of me. But in the end, I’d do what I had to do, no matter who got hurt, no matter who got killed.

  Chapter 62

  For two more days I sat around Tony’s place, not going outside, not talking on the phone, speaking only to Detective Ryan, who came and went two separate times on two separate days. Maybe he was hoping for two separate versions of my testimony—too bad. First of all, the story wasn’t that complicated (man attempts to assassinate wife while using me as the patsy). Second of all, I had no reason to cover anything up (other than my desire to kill both Barnes and the Bald Man).

  In the meantime, Renata’s manuscript sat on the desk, unread.

  I knew I should have been going through it, scanning each and every paragraph for the details behind Barnes’s plan for killing me. But something inside prevented me from looking at it. I had to be honest with myself: Fran died in my place. The ultimate responsibility rested with me, and that’s exactly what I could not get over. So I didn’t need to make things worse by reading all about it.

  Not when I had already lived it.

  I rolled out of bed, picked up the phone.

  I called information for the number to Reel Productions.

  I dialed the number.

  When the receptionist came on the line I asked for Barnes. She said he wasn’t in but was expected back in an hour or so. Could she take a message or transfer me to his voice mail?

  I told her that I’d call back.

  “Whom should I say is calling?” she insisted.

  “Santa Claus,” I said. “Ho, ho, ho.”

  She hung up before I had the chance to do it first.

  Chapter 63

  It was getting dark when Val came upstairs with a tray of food in her hands.

  I pretended to be asleep.

  She set the tray down on the little wooden secretary pushed up against the far wall.

  I sat up while Val sat down beside me. I wasn’t wearing a shirt, just a pair of Tony’s flannel pajama bottoms. She ran her hand along my chest, gently.

  I kissed her, gently. Then I kissed her some more.

  After a while we lay together on the bed, Val’s head in the space between my shoulder and left arm. True, I wasn’t up to the task of making love. I was still in too much pain for that. But there were other things we could do, and we did them very well.

  We said nothing while the lights from the cars that sped by on Eagle Street, along with the halogen lamps that lit up the governor’s compound, reflected against the white ceiling. Val rolled over onto her stomach, looked up at me with big, brown eyes.

  “What are you going to do about Barnes?” she asked.

  “I’m going after him,” I said.

  I listened to her breathing, heavy, from deep inside her lungs.

  “And the Bald Man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does Tony know?”

  “I think he knows.”

  “Why doesn’t he stop you?”

  “He knows there’s only one thing I can do.”

  Val propped herself up on her elbow.

  “What was all that two days ago?” she asked. “Tony trying to convince you that it has to be done his way. The legal way, with Ryan?”

  “A genuine appeal to do the legal thing. Regardless of emotion.”

  “How could it be genuine when he knew all along what you were going to do anyway?”

  “People like Barnes and Wash Pelton,” I said, “they’re in directly with the governor. And in this town that’s a lot like saying you’re above the law.”

  “Pelton’s dead.”

  “If the cancer never got to him he would have been back on the street in a couple more years. Maybe less. Probably holding some political office.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “These men live a code of silence no different from the Mob. Why do you think Barnes was never implicated in any of this until now? Because Pelton kept quiet about him, even while rotting away in prison. That’s the kind of brotherhood—or resolve, or whatever you want to call it—that they have.”

  Val laid her head back down on the pillow for a while. Then she said, “Is Tony going to help you?”

  “It’s something I have to do alone.”

  I slipped out of bed and out of the room, into the bathroom across the hall, shutting the door behind me. I ran the cold water and splashed it on my face until I felt more awake or more clean, I’m not sure which.

  But the water didn’t help.

  I couldn’t stop myself from falling to my knees in the corner of the room, between the door and the edge of the bathtub. I could feel the tears building up against the backs of my eyeballs. The tears blurred my vision. But when I tried to let them go—when I tried to let it all out—the tears wouldn’t come.

  After a time I wiped my face with a wet towel.

  I took a deep breath, tried to compose myself. For Val.

  But the effort had been for nothing. When I came back out of the bathroom, she was gone.

  Chapter 64

  Tony’s bedroom.

  Palatial. Four-poster bed. Antique dressers and chests. Gold-framed mirrors.

  Inside the walk-in closet, my Colt .45, wrapped up in the leather holster, set on the top shelf beside the three extra ammo clips.

  I knew Tony.

  I knew the piece would be there. Waiting for me.

  Keeper, back in business.

  Back in the guest bedroom, a second call placed to Barnes’s office.

  “Whom should I say is calling?” The same receptionist as before.

  “Wash Pelton,” I said.

  “J-J-Just a minute p-p-please.”

  The stuttering voice was replaced by smooth Muzak.

  “Who the hell is this?”

  Barnes, pissed as hell.

  “Hell of a way to treat
an employee,” I said. “Especially one you haven’t paid yet.”

  “Marconi,” he said, suddenly bright, suddenly cheerful. A break in the clouds on an early spring day. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I thought it was a prank.”

  “No prank,” I said.

  “I trust you have my wife,” he said.

  “You know I do,” I said.

  “And you want to be paid,” he said. “Is that it? You want your money.”

  “You put me in that psycho ward,” I said.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Fake laughing, as if the charges he’d pressed against me weren’t legal record. “I’ve assumed you were in Mexico on the job.”

  “How did I know you’d deny that?”

  Heavy breathing.

  “My turn to play Let’s Make A Deal.”

  “I’m listening.” His voice suddenly soft and low.

  “You know that manuscript Renata was going to write and publish? The one you never told anybody about? The real one describing how you drowned your own child? The one you tried to have Renata killed for?”

  More breathing.

  “I have it,” I said.

  “Completed.” A question.

  “Fast writer, your wife. A real talent.”

  “You broke into my house.”

  “Give the dog a bone,” I said. “But you haven’t asked me what I want yet.”

  “Maybe I don’t care what you want.”

  “I think you do,” I said. “From where I’m sitting right this very second, I can hear Tony Angelino and Detective Michael Ryan going over their plan to nail you on the strength of this document alone. Face it, Barnes, you can either be screwed the legal way or you can be screwed my way.”

  Dead air.

  Then, “What is it you want?”

  “The Bald Man.”

  “How and where?” No hesitation.

  On the nightstand beside the bed, the Capital District section of the Albany Times-Union, the headline reading, COHOES FALLS OVERLOOK: AN ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN!

  “You know Cohoes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Meet me at the overlook by the falls. Midnight. I give you the manuscript. You give me the man and the rest of the two hundred Gs you owe me and Tony.”

  “What about Renata?”

  “We’ll talk about her then.”

  “How will I know the manuscript is the real thing?”

  “The manual Royal typewriter is Renata’s signature, dropped Ns and all.”

  “What about carbons?”

  “No carbons,” I said. “As far as copies go, you’ll have to trust me.”

  “Doesn’t look like I have much of a choice.”

  “Take it or leave it,” I said.

  “Twelve midnight,” he confirmed. “The overlook. Don’t be late.”

  “Don’t be late? That’s my line, motherfucker.”

  Chapter 65

  The city of Cohoes.

  Located only about five miles north of Albany.

  Set inside a natural ninety-degree cul-de-sac formed at the very spot where the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers merge. Home to the Cohoes Falls, the most powerful natural waterfall in the state of New York next to Niagara. Where Hiawatha, the godchild of the Iroquois nation, died.

  As the story was told to me, Hiawatha, having fallen asleep inside her canoe one summer afternoon, never noticed the movement of the bark craft when it broke away from its banks and drifted out into the center of the Mohawk. Startled awake, and quickly realizing that she was caught in the intense current, Hiawatha resigned her fate to the falls and her newly found Christian God.

  Neither her body nor the canoe were ever recovered. But, then, that’s where the name Cohoes originated—from Hiawatha and her canoe. Because a literal translation of the name is broken canoe.

  A century or so ago a massive hotel was built on the edge of the falls, constructed right into a rock declivity that measured about one hundred feet from bottom to top.

  The Cataract Hotel.

  A five-story Victorian monstrosity that served as a tourist destination for some of the rich and famous then living along the East Coast. And just to add some high-flying adventure to the hotel, a trolley car called the Belt Line was rigged up via a cable system that started in the sublevel of the hotel and spanned the entire length of the falls, directly over the one-hundred-foot drop.

  But as the years and decades passed and the city of Cohoes became the victim of economic chaos, the breathtaking falls were ignored. After all, why go to Cohoes when you could take a Greyhound to Niagara? The hotel was shut down and boarded up and the trolley car ceased to run, the cables still hanging over the river like some useless clothesline behind an abandoned tenement house.

  How was I privy to all this local color?

  My father and mother had both been born in Cohoes back in the city’s better days, their parents having settled there years before after stepping off the boat at Ellis Island. Now what was left of the city was rubble and crime, the theater closed and turned into a warehouse for plumbing fixtures, the textile mills burned to the ground, the merchants and mercantiles boarded up, a city curfew not enough to discourage the kids who made the trek down the hill from the projects beside St. Agnes Church and ran crack on the street corners at all hours of the night. Even the life-insurance salesmen had shut down their shops, locked their doors, and snuck out in the middle of the night, briefcases tucked under their overcoats.

  The falls are still there, although no one really cares anymore.

  Except for me and little Richie Barnes.

  I was sitting in the front seat of the rented Ford Explorer, Renata’s manuscript set out beside me on the passenger seat. It had been no problem smuggling it or myself out of the condo. Quite simply, I’d waited until the entire place had gone to sleep. Then I dressed myself in jeans, black turtleneck, and black leather bomber. I strapped on my .45 and placed the manuscript in a plastic shopping bag lifted from Tony’s kitchen. I found my keys resting in a candy dish set on a coffee table in the middle of the living room, and I walked out.

  Just like that.

  Like that had been the plan all along.

  Three minutes to midnight, the full April moon high over the Mohawk, lighting up the water that ran deep and heavy over the massive falls. A perpetual mist rose up the hundred-foot walls of the cliff and into the night sky. I turned the Explorer around so that it faced the overlook entrance.

  Then I killed the engine and got out.

  The overlook was nothing more than a parking lot surrounded by a dilapidated wood-slat safety fence. On the left-hand side, facing the river, sat the boarded-up remnants of the Cataract Hotel—the abandoned five-story stone structure looking as desolate as the city of Cohoes itself. Emerging from a man-made cave at the base of the hotel was a series of cables that I knew extended all the way to the other side of the falls, although it was impossible to see them at night.

  Two headlights shone from out of the distance. Belonging to a car that made a quick right turn into the lot. I reached inside the open window of the Explorer, hit the headlights. High beams. Then I planted a bead on the windshield of Barnes’s black Mercedes with my .45.

  Two doors opened, driver and passenger side.

  Two men.

  Barnes, dressed in long wool overcoat, and the Bald Man, in jeans and a leather jacket, still wearing the round sunglasses even in the dark.

  “Did you come here to kill me?” Barnes shouted over the roar of the falls, right hand up against his brow, like a man saluting, only shielding his eyes from the Explorer’s high beams.

  “I’ll take my money,” I said.

  “You have a little something for me, I believe.”

  “First the money,” I said.

  Barnes, reaching into the car, pulling out a briefcase. He set the bag on the blacktop and kicked it toward me.

  “Now step away from the car,” I said.

  Barne
s, staring at the Bald Man.

  Me, thumbing back the hammer on the piece. “Do it,” I said.

  “The manuscript,” Barnes said. “Where is it?”

  “In a safe place,” I said.

  I knew he must have told the Bald Man they were making an exchange of cash for the manuscript. He certainly wouldn’t have told him the truth: that he was actually making the exchange in return for his life. Unless a double cross was in the works. Which was the more likely scenario.

  The mist from the falls made a slippery, wet film that coated everything and quickly turned to ice in the freezing night air. My hands felt detached from my arms, my brain having nothing to do with the actions and reactions of my trigger finger. Just a nice slow squeeze and the show would be over. Lights out.

  I knew I could just shoot them both in the face, put them back in the car, push the car over the cliff edge into the falls, and be done with it. As a former lawman I knew I could get away with it too. So long as the physical evidence was completely whitewashed.

  Heart beating inside my throat, breathing hard and heavy, body sweating even in the cold and the mist from the falls. I listened to the constant roar and I stared at the Bald Man and I ran through the hit-and-run a thousand times. The quick slam of the black Buick, the flying forward of Fran, the decapitation, the settling of the headless body back into the passenger seat, the vision of the Bald Man giving me a quick glance. Then the tearing away from the scene.

  Hit and run.

  The hit intended for me, not for Fran.

  And then the years that followed. The printed posters, the interviews with the cops, the composite sketches, the coming up with no leads whatsoever, the shaking of heads, the rolling of eyes, the “Don’t call us, Keeper, we’ll call you.”

  The living alone with the guilt.

  I felt like crying, but I felt more like laughing, because I was God now.

  Imagine me playing God?

  But I should have known better than to allow my emotions to get in the way. I should have played it straight like a reasonable person. A man who has all his marbles in order. Because I waited too long. In the waiting I gave Barnes the upper hand. Rather, I gave the Bald Man the upper hand. He had to be a trained killer. As much as I assumed I had him where I wanted him, I hadn’t scared him in the least. In the end, he had been waiting for the right moment to pull the pistol out from under his jacket, aim it at my chest, fire the cap that plugged my right shoulder.