Quinn Gets His Kicks

by L H Thomson

  “Mikey, I figured at this time in the afternoon you’d be at Chubby Chicken filling your face.”

  “I heard you was on another case involving soccer. I still owe you for that last one.” A few months earlier I’d taken on a robbery file for Mike, which had the unfortunate side effect of introducing me to David Mince.

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “So listen, I got opening day tickets for the Phils...”

  Mike never went to Phillies games. He was a Yankees nut from way back. So it seemed like a sweet gesture.

  “You offering to take me to opening day? That’s a hell of a ...”

  He waved me off. “As if! I ain’t going near that shithole. Nah, I figured I could let you have ‘em cheap. Say, fifty bucks a piece.”

  For a second I stared through him. “That’s real generous of you Mike. Got anything else you don’t want for a quick buck....”

  He cocked his head. “Aw, is young Liam hurt? That’s how you learn the game, kid, from covering for old pros like me. I did you a favor. This way you know when someone tries to slough off their crappy assignments not to be the one who takes them.”

  Like I said, Mike’s from New York. To him, he was being positively generous.

  “You’re all heart, Mikey,” I said.

  He clicked his tongue and finger-point at me. “You know it, kid. Here endeth the lesson.”

  With no call from Alistair and no other cases pending, hanging around with Mike became unappealing quickly -- as opposed to when I was busy, and hanging out with Mike … became unappealing quickly.

  So I headed back into the late afternoon sun, which glinted off the office towers and shimmered off the cement as if it were July.

  I was twenty yards from the Firebird when the sedan pulled up between us and cut off my path. Four doors swung open in unison, followed by four men in dark suits climbing out.

  The front passenger didn’t even bother to hide his gun, instead using it to motion us towards his vehicle. “In, now!” he commanded. To punctuate the back his associates held back their coats, revealing 9mm pistols. That was more firepower than I could handle on my own, so I climbed in, both hands up.

  “Put your hands down, moron, you’re going to attract attention,” the older guy upfront said.

  After a couple of years as an investigator, I’d gotten a sixth sense for which guys were family connected, and this lot was about as likely as anyone, holdovers from the bad old days. “Your boss must want to talk to me pretty bad,” I said, gambling one of them would mention who that particular boss was.

  “Shut up,” the guy upfront suggested helpfully.

  “You know, I’m gettin’ real tired of people shoving me in the backs of cars,” I said.

  The guy beside me whacked the side of my head with the butt end of his pistol grip. It hurt like hell. “He said to shut the fuck, so shut the fuck up,” the thug said.

  We drove south again, and the neighborhood started to feel familiar. It was the same neighborhood I’d just been taken to a few days earlier. Only this time, instead of getting out at a greasy service station, we drove for a few more minutes until we were in a cul-de-sac neighborhood, the grime and chipped sandstone buildings giving way to manicured hedges and four-bedroom homes.

  Vin the Shin spent most of his time in a condo downtown; that meant we were going to visit Johnny T again -- or someone else I didn’t know yet, which wasn’t necessarily worse.

  Ten minutes later we were thoroughly into the suburbs. The car stopped outside an enormous black wrought iron gate for a few seconds before it was buzzed in by someone internally. The big stylized ‘T’ on the gate answered my earlier question.

  The sedan parked on the stylish gravel driveway and we got out, a man holding each of my arm. “Come on, get moving,” said the man upfront.

  At the front door, a butler answered in formal tux and tails. “Mr. Terrasini is waiting for you in the study, sir,” he said.

  We followed him inside. The home’s lobby had towering, 40-foot high marble ceilings and equally ornate floors. The elderly butler led us to gigantic double side doors, which he opened together before announcing us.

  At the end of the vast room, Johnny T was sitting behind a desk that made him look even smaller than his already tiny stature. I figured he must’ve been perched on a stack of atlases or something. The walls were lined with books.

  “Alright, you pain in the ass. I finally tracked you down.” He looked pleased with himself. “You know the mistake I made last go around was to let you waste time shooting off your mouth.”

  Untrue. He’d done almost all the talking. Again, it didn’t seem worthy of mentioning.

  “So we’re going to rectify that real quick. Put him in the chair, boys.”

  Terrasini’s men had set up a plush wooden chair with thin arms in the middle of the room, near his desk. They pushed me down into it, then strapped down my arms, before stuffing a ball gag in my mouth.

  He said, “I set this up today as an abject lesson for my men, so that they could understand that sometimes, when you got something dirty that really needs done.... “ he pulled a nine-millimetre with a silencer out of a shoulder holder, then walked over and pressed it to my temple, “... you just got to do it yourself.”

  Like most people these days, I don’t talk much about religion, or God, or any of that stuff. I go to church on Sunday and I get comfort from it, and from the other people who go. But with my arms pinned to the chair and his goons laughing, I was praying as hard as I ever had. I could hear the steely coil of the springs as he squeezed the trigg....”

  THWAP! And again. And another. Five unmistakable vacuum-pump tones of a silencer going off. Johnny T went down first, a small red dot appearing suddenly, right between his eyes. His gaze turned downward reflexively as he momentarily tried to watch the blood run down his own nose. Then his knees buckled and his nervous system gave out for the last time as he slumped to the ground.

  As quickly as he collapsed, the four heavies were following suit. Five guys, five shots.

  A figure stepped out of the shadows of the full-length curtains, which hung across the rear windows of the study, next to a side door.

  “Don’t say I never did nothing nice for you, Quinn,” said David Mince, smiling, smoking gun in hand.

  I couldn’t say anything back thanks to the gag, but the shock of the moment probably wouldn’t have let me anyhow. I looked at Johnny T’s lifeless form, the bloody draining out of his head wound into a black-red puddle.

  Mince walked over to me, talking throughout. “In case you ain’t figured it out yet, a mutual friend of ours figured you needed looking out for. Who you think called the cavalry in the last time you fucked up?”

  Vin the Shin. He’d told me he was going to take care of the problem; I guess I should have figured on something so direct.

  He unstrapped my arms, and I rubbed my wrists to get the circulation back. But before I could pull the ball gag out of my mouth, he said “Catch!”, and tossed me his gun ... which, like a complete dope, I caught.

  “Tsk, tsk, Quinn. Leaving your prints all over the murder weapon at a gang slaying. You in the shit now.”

  And with that, he turned and walked out through the side door, pausing to look back at me and smile icily one more time.

  I wondered whether he’d told Terrasini what he planned for his weapon; probably not. Like most sociopaths, Mince’s biggest challenge seemed to be poor impulse control.

  I looked down at the gun; I figured I could wipe it clean and leave it behind, but there was always the risk of some of my DNA showing up on it. Skin cells are pretty small, for example. Instead, I shoved it inside my coat. Mince had probably tipped someone to the shooting by now, and Johnny Terrasini’s study was not the safe place to be.

  I got the hell out of there as fast as my feet would carry me.

  Nora was waiting up for me when I got back to the De Soria’s, sitting alone on the living room couch, but leaning
forward with her hands clasped, pensive and strained.

  There was no point trying to avoid it. She obviously wanted us to have words. “I heard David Mince called you.”

  She nodded quietly.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Are you going to leave me in suspense about what he told you?”

  “I don’t want to believe what he told me.”

  That wasn’t good. I couldn’t remember doing anything that bad. Recently.

  “Nora, David is a….”

  “He said you got him a job as a hired killer for Vincent Terrasini.”

  I know she was serious but I couldn’t help myself, and I laughed. “You got to be kidding me. You take that serious?”

  “He said you’d deny it. He said you’d claim you only introduced the two of them …”

  “That’s true.”

  She chewed her lower lip; I couldn’t read whether she was nervous, irritated or both. “David Mince admitted what he is to me, Liam. He said he enjoys killing, and that you knew that when you introduced them.”

  The kid was clever, I had to give him that. Everything he’d told her was technically true. Still, she and I went way back, and she wasn’t going to shut me out without hearing my side. I walked over and perched myself next to her on the black leather couch.

  “Nora, David Mince is a manipulative sociopath. I didn’t introduce him to Terrasini to get him a job, I made the mistake of asking Terrasini to scare him away from some of his young co-workers, back when I was working that beer theft case.”

  Aside from being devastatingly beautiful, Nora always was one bright candle. I could see her putting the pieces together immediately. “So Terrasini sees the kid for what he is and changes the arrangement on the fly?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You’re still an idiot for getting them together in the first place. It’s like trying to take care of a shark at a public beach by introducing a bigger shark, then hoping one will eat the other.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “That was really, really dumb, Liam.”

  “Pretty much. Look, it’s done. I can’t fix it.” I couldn’t see any scenario in which telling her about his five executions an hour earlier would help. Then I thought twice about it; a stone cold sociopath like Mince would look for a way to toy with us. “He killed Johnny Terrasini about an hour ago, right in front of me.”

  Her mouth hung open in shock.

  I said, “I was tied to a chair at the time.”

  “Liam... geez, what are you involved in?”

  “Then after he untied me, he tossed me his gun, and like an idiot, I caught it. So now my prints are all over it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I do? I kept it. I couldn’t leave it there; DNA forensics are too good these days. All they need to find are some skin cells, and with my record, I’d be pinched for it in no time.”

  She held my forearm, and her earlier anger had turned to deep concern. I couldn’t stand her looking like that.

  “Look, don’t worry kid, it’s my problem to deal with,” I said. “I’ll ....”

  “You’re going to call your brother, right?” she insisted. “I mean, you’re the only witness to a gangland slaying.”

  That wasn’t the half of it. With what Vin the Shin had told me about his plans for David Mince, and about taking care of Johnny, I could tie him to it, too.

  It didn’t seem a high-percentage move, however, if I wanted to keep breathing past next Tuesday.

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  She took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling in frustration. “Liam... with all the problems you’ve had....”

  “Look, that isn’t what I mean, okay? I’m going to talk to my father instead of Davy. He’s less hot-headed, he’ll know the best way to deal with this.”

  She thought about that for a few seconds. “You better. This isn’t something to handle alone.”

  What was I going to do, argue with her? I learned better in the can. One thing about prison: it’ll make you humble awful fast if you can’t back it up. And there was no argument to counter the basic logic of not teaming two sociopaths up.

  Truth was, I’d lost sight a little of who Vincent Terrasini really was. The guy liked me; didn’t mean he wouldn’t put a bullet in the back of my head without losing sleep.

  “Well, if you’re going to go talk to your father, you’d better do it now. Tomorrow morning the news will be out and things will look more complicated to the authorities,” she said.

  I got up and grabbed my jacket off the end of the couch. “Yeah, I know. I can’t put it off. Hell, it’s only nine-thirty -- chances are he’ll still be at the Druid.”

  I headed down to the parking garage and started the Firebird, its big block engine shaking with age or fear, or a bit of both. A few minutes later, I was heading towards Fishtown.

  Before I could reach the bar, my brother Davy called me. His timing couldn’t have been worse, and the second I heard his voice, I started dreading how much I was going to have to lie to him if he asked me anything about the prior twelve hours. I pulled over.

  But instead, he was calling with a tip. “Look, I know you ain’t sure Davidson is the guy, but I can put one thing to rest for you: the boyfriend, Francois? He didn’t do it.”

  Shit. What? “How you figure?”

  “We got a security tape image off a webcam on the property next door. It’s faint, but our forensic identification guys put it through an image enhancer. It’s a shot of the wing mirror of Junior’s car, and you can see Francois sitting in his SUV, waiting for the kid. He don’t ever go inside the building before the kid leaves. He just sits there, talks on the phone a couple of times. But he couldn’t have killed Junior if he didn’t go in the building. That leaves the guy we already got, with the murder weapon, and a motive.”

  The motive was weaker than the tail end of a light beer, but I wasn’t going to get into it with him. For once lately, I wanted Davy off the phone as quickly as possible. “Okay, okay. Good to know,” I said.

  He was quiet for a moment then said, “What, just like that? You don’t want to argue about it for an hour or nothin’?”

  “Very funny.”

  “I try,” he said.

  “See you Sunday, smartass,” I said, grateful to have avoided awkward questions, but puzzled over my main suspect’s sudden alibi.

  The Druid was busy on Friday evening, full of college students who’d discovered it over the prior six months. Marty the bartender was up to his ears, and waved when he saw me from behind the bar, but didn’t pause to stop pouring draught.

  My father’s spot by the bar had been taken over by a crowd of students, and he and three of his former squad buddies were seated in a corner booth, instead. “You four look happy as a hooker in docket court,” I said.

  Pa took a swallow of Straub and shifted in place like an anxious kid. “Would you look around this place, Liam? I swear, I’m going to stop coming in Thursdays and Fridays, this crap continues.”

  “Look, Dad, I got to talk private for a minute.”

  He looked sternly nervous, and shuffled past Fred Kellar. “Sorry boys, Give me a minute would you?”

  We headed out to the “patio,” where it was getting tough to keep everyone within the masking tape square. My father looked at it with disdain, like someone rendering harsh judgment on a bad fishing worm. “Would you look at what’s happening to my bar, Liam? Jaysus, next thing you know, they’ll be turning the game over to “Dancing With the Stars” or some garbage. I might as well just go home and be with your mother.”

  I said, “Look, I got a big problem.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Freakin’ shock, that is.”

  “No, real trouble.”

  He didn’t say anything, so I continued, filling him in on David Mince and the gun, and the five dead wise guys in the southside mansion.

  He rubbed his temples then pulled out a pa
cket of Winston, the one vice he refused to let my mother rein in. “You know, Liam, you really are...”

  “An idiot sometimes, I know. Look, I need some advice, Pa. I need to know what to ...”

  He cut me off. “You got the piece?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Let me see it.”

  I looked around. “What ... right here?”

  He nodded. “Just slip it me for a second.”

  I scanned the area again nervously, then pulled the nine mil from my inside pocket and passed it to him.

  “Stay here,” he said, before putting the gun into his pocket and walking away.

  “Pa, what are you...”

  “Just shush,” he said. “Defer to my expertise, okay?”

  He strolled down the street, then around the corner of the building. I waited there nervously in the warm evening, traffic rolling by oblivious to the whole thing. After about five minutes, he came back. “Done. Taken care of.”

  “Pa....”

  “Don’t ask.”

  A notoriously seedy pool hall was about a block away in that general direction. “Look, I don’t want you getting in trouble...”

  He shushed me again, emphasizing by waving both palms towards the ground. “Enough! Leave this one. It’s dealt with. You think this is the first time I ever had to make a piece disappear? No gun, no problem.”

  The implication was crystal clear. There would be no statement about witnessing a gangland slaying, no testifying against Vin the Shin, or David Mince. I wondered for a split second whether the kid had thought that far ahead when he tossed me the gun. He probably figured it would go down something like this.

  “Pa, this ain’t...”

  “This ain’t right. No, it ain’t,” he said. “But the other way, nobody wins, least of all the guy who testifies against Vincent Terrasini. And from what you told me, even then there ain’t no guarantee they could pin the shootings on him, instead of this Mince kid. One thing I learned on the force, Liam, is sometimes you got to be realistic.”