That, more than anything else, she thought, was why the infidels had brought the church down. They were all, as Reverend Billy Mark said, “jealous of the potency of a true Man of God.” They apparently weren’t very happy about the barn full of automatic weapons, grenade launchers, and shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, either. So the COTFFUG&TTL was disbanded, Reverend Billy Mark shipped off, screaming and in chains, to federal prison, and Amaryllis found herself left alone with two surly teenage boys to raise, her former husband having opted out of Ascending and left the Church a couple of years before.
Fortunately, she’d discovered that defiling was a marketable skill, one that had helped her provide for her boys, even if it didn’t do anything to improve their dispositions. They were good boys at heart, however, and as Amaryllis’s looks left and the demand for defiling had gone with them, the twins had stepped up to care for the mama who’d sacrificed so much for them. They seemed to have a particular facility for finding bargains on slightly damaged items which had, they explained, fallen off of trucks.
They had promised her that their latest job would be the most rewarding yet. She had a vision in her mind’s eye of goods falling off of trucks like snow. So when she heard a vehicle pull up outside the shabby house she shared with her boys, she ran to the screen door and looked out. Her brow creased with worry when she saw that it wasn’t the boys in their pickup, but a long black limousine. A pair of men got out of the vehicle, one from the front passenger side, one from the back. The driver stayed in the car.
Alarm bells began to ring in Amaryllis’s head. The men were well dressed, too well dressed for this neighborhood. As they got closer, she could see that one of the men was older, with graying hair, while the other was younger. She ran an appraising eye over the older one. She wouldn’t mind doing a little defiling with him. But the purposeful way in which they were moving toward the door said they weren’t coming on a social call. She reached up above the door to where a cut-down twelve-gauge shotgun rested on a pair of nails driven into the crumbling plaster. She hefted the weapon in her right hand, and opened the door with her left. She stood in the doorway, looking out of the screen door, as the men approached, using the half-opened door to hide the gun.
“Help you fellows?” she said as the older one came up the two steps of the low stoop.
“Afternoon, miss,” the older man said. “Is this the Lowman residence?”
She curled her finger on the trigger of the shotgun. “Maybe it is,” she said. “Depends on who wants to know?”
“We were wondering if maybe”—he stopped and looked at his phone—“E-lee-hew or Jah-peth was home.”
She shook her head. “Nobody here by that name.” It wasn’t a lie, after all.
The gray-haired man looked at the phone again. “Is this…” He rattled off the address.
“Says so on the door, don’t it?”
The man was beginning to look annoyed. He reached out and pulled at the screen door. It was latched from the inside. “We got a little business proposition for those fellows. Maybe we can come in and talk about it. Over a glass of that good iced tea you folks drink around here.”
“Got no tea,” she said. “Caffeine is the Devil’s drug.”
That got the man’s attention. “So you’re a church-going woman,” he said. “I hear the fellows we’re looking for are religious, too. You sure you don’t know E-lee-hew or Jah-peth Lowman?”
“Nope,” she said. “But I do know Elihu and Japeth,” she said, nodding toward the driveway, “and there they are.”
A beat-up pickup was pulling in behind the limousine. The gray-haired man turned to watch as two identical young men dressed in black jeans and leather jackets got out. When he turned back, Amaryllis was pointing the shotgun at his midsection.
“You want to talk business,” she said, “let’s talk.”
“WHAT I wanna know,” one of the twins said, “is why we shouldn’t just bust a cap in your Yankee asses right here and now and drop you in the Chattahoochee River.”
“Because, my young friend,” Paul Chirelli said without even a trace of fear or the slightest tremor in his voice, “I’m a captain in the Allegretti family. The guy you took out of the car,” he grimaced, “without a fight, I might add, is a soldier in that organization.” Moose, seated next to Chirelli at the chipped and scarred kitchen table in the Lowmans’ house, hung his head and didn’t speak. “And last but not least, that young fellow over there,” he pointed at Mario, “is the son of Silvio Allegretti. You may have heard of him.”
“Maybe,” the other twin, the one standing against the wall, said. He had the gun his mother had taken from Chirelli stuck in his waistband and he was holding a stubby little revolver of his own in his right hand. “But what the fuck has that got to do with us?”
Chirelli pursed his lips in disapproval. “This is the sort of language you use in front of your mother?” He looked across the table to where Amaryllis Lowman still had the sawed-off shotgun pointed at him. “These kids today, am I right?”
The gaze she gave him back was hard at first, but after a moment, it began to waver. “I talk to them about it,” she said, “but sometimes they forget.”
“I know,” Chirelli said. “Raising children is hard. Never had any of my own, sad to say, but this kid…” he pointed across the table again at Mario, “is like a nephew to me. That’s because his pop and I, we share a bond. Closer than brothers, in many ways.” His voice turned hard. “And I can tell you, gentlemen, you may not think the Allegretti family has a lot to do with you right now, but if something happens to either of us, or even,” he pointed at Moose, “this fuckup over here, then, well…” He folded his hands on the table and looked at the three Lowmans. “The Allegretti family will be taking a great deal of interest in you. And it’s not the kind of interest you want taken.”
There was a brief silence during which the twins looked uncomfortably at each other. Then Chirelli smiled. “On the other hand, the family’s begun exploring the possibilities of expanding our business into new markets. And we’re always on the lookout for new talent. Isn’t that right, Mario?”
“Yeah,” Mario said. “Talent.”
“And in that kind of situation, not trying to sound clichéd here, but your friends would become our friends. Your enemies would become our enemies.”
“We don’t have any enemies,” the brother on the wall said.
The brother at the table spoke up. “Except, maybe, you know, the Grant Street Crips.”
The brother on the wall grimaced. “Yeah, maybe those guys.”
“And that Russian guy,” the one at the table added. “He was pretty pissed about those AK-47s the last time I saw him.”
“And the Chan Sing Triad,” Amaryllis chimed in. “After the way you two…”
The brother on the wall interrupted. “Okay, Ma, we don’t need to bring that up again.”
There was a long uncomfortable silence. “So,” Amaryllis said finally, “yeah, we could use some friends. What’s your proposition?”
Chirelli smiled the smile of a salesman who knows he’s set the hook. “I know you fellows, and some others, recently came into possession of a certain item. Kind of unusual. Hard to sell.”
The brother leaning against the wall shrugged. “Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, sorry.”
Moose spoke up. “The Enigma Fantasy Bra, you dumb hillbilly.”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees in as many seconds. Chirelli closed his eyes and rubbed his temples as if they hurt. “Moose, would you mind not trying to help me?”
“What?” Moose said in an aggrieved tone.
“Moose,” Mario said. “I’m asking you this as a friend. Shut the fuck up.” He turned to Amaryllis. “Sorry.”
“Not a problem,” she answered.
“I don’t suppose it would be possible to ask my assistant here to wait in the car,” Chirelli asked the brothers.
“No,” Am
aryllis said.
The brother sitting down pulled out his pistol. “But we could just shoot him.”
“Sorry.” Chirelli shook his head. “Family discipline’s handled within the family. That’s not negotiable. But Moose will be quiet. Right, Moose?”
Moose just nodded, his jaw clenched.
“So, anyway,” Chirelli said. “This item. If you did know the people who had it, my people might be able to realize a much higher profit on it than the people you’re currently dealing with. And we’d be grateful to anyone who helped us get hold of it.” He looked around the room. “Very. Grateful. Over the long term, if you get what I mean.”
The brother on the wall spoke up. “We don’t have it.”
The one sitting down nodded. “We thought we did.”
“Funny story, actually,” the one on the wall said.
“We like funny stories,” Chirelli said. “Right, Mario?”
“We got a hell of a sense of humor.” Mario nodded.
“Okay,” the one on the wall said. “Here’s what happened…”
BRANSON ROLLED over and looked at the clock. Despite his exhaustion, he’d been asleep less than an hour, and his nap had been troubled by dreams of fear and vague shadowy figures chasing him. At one point, he’d stumbled out of a thicket through which he’d been struggling and out into a perfectly manicured park. Hank and Freddie, his roommates, had been sitting on a bench at the edge of the greenery. Freddie had been packing an enormous bong from a black valise overflowing with weed. They looked up at him, their eyes so bloodshot they seemed to glow.
“Bogus,” Hank had said. Branson didn’t know if he was talking about the situation or about him. He woke up before he had time to figure it out.
He sat up and rubbed his eyes. He still felt wretched. He decided to try Stephanie’s number again. He’d punched in the first nine numbers when his finger hesitated on the tenth. What was he going to say? he wondered. He didn’t really know. He just needed to hear her voice to remind him that there was still some kind of sanity in the world. He pushed down the tenth number without consciously deciding to do so. The phone on the other end began to ring. It had rung four times and Branson was about to disconnect when Stephanie picked up. “Hello?”
He hesitated.
“Hello?” her voice said again. He moved his finger to the phone cradle to disconnect. Just before he pressed it down, she whispered, “Branson?”
“Yeah,” he said almost involuntarily. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. It’s me.”
“Are you okay?” she asked.
The warmth and concern in her voice brought tears to his eyes. “No.” His voice trembled. “I’m not okay.”
“Bran, there are people looking for you.”
“I know,” he said. “The cops.”
“Not just the cops. That big guy from the security company was here. But not just him. Bran, that girl who was wearing the bra? She was dating some kind of mob guy. And he’s really pissed.”
He rubbed his forehead. “Great.”
“These mobsters think you’ve got the jewels. And Mr. McNeill…that’s the security guy…thinks you’ve got the girl.”
He laughed, a little hysterically. “We don’t have either one.”
“What?”
“Steph, the bra’s a fake. None of the jewels on it are real. Or at least none of them are valuable. That guy who was running the Enigma show…he stole them. Replaced them with fakes.”
“Oh. My. God,” she breathed.
He lay back on the bed and looked at the cracked and stained ceiling. “And my uncle Rafe and his partner are blackmailing him. They’re making him bring them the real jewels and any money he’s gotten from them, or they’ll expose what he did.”
“Serves him right,” she said.
“But we don’t have Clarissa. The model. We dropped her off.” His voice broke with fatigue and fear. “I’m afraid something happened to her.”
“Wait, you call her by her first name?” Her voice became tinged with frost. “What’s that all about?”
“I met her. Upstairs at the hotel. I was taking her her dinner…Stephanie, can we just concentrate on the important stuff right now?”
There was a pause. “Okay. So when is this thing supposed to happen, where you get the jewels and the money?”
“Midnight. At this abandoned factory building.” He gave her the address.
Her voice became decisive. “Here’s what you do. Call that security guy. His name’s McNeill. His friends call him Chunk.”
“Chuck?”
“No, Chunk. You got a pencil?”
He opened the drawer and scrabbled around until he found a broken stub of one. “Yeah. But there’s no paper.”
“There’s a Gideon Bible, right?”
Bran spotted the familiar cover. “Yeah, but…”
“Write it down, Bran. If God hasn’t struck you dead for stealing, he won’t kill you for writing a phone number in the Bible.”
“Okay.” He wrote down the number she gave him in the flyleaf. “Should I call the cops?”
“No,” she said. “That’s too risky. They’ll just try and bring you in. I think you can make a deal with this McNeill guy. He says he wants to help you. He even left a message. Check your voice mail.”
“I don’t have my phone anymore. I gave it to Clarissa…I mean, Ms. Cartwright.”
There was silence at the other end of the line. “We were leaving her alone in the middle of the night,” he said defensively. “She needed to be able to call for help.”
“So if she’s alive,” Stephanie said, “she still has your phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Same phone you showed me back at the hotel? The one you just got?”
“Yeah.”
“Bran, do you trust me?”
“I…yeah, yeah, I do.”
“Then give me your username and password for your account.”
“What? Why?”
“Because if that phone is on, anywhere, we can find it.”
“We can?”
“Yeah. You can go online and locate your lost phone through the GPS. Didn’t the guy at the phone store tell you that?”
“I didn’t get it from a store. My uncle gave it to me.”
“Hmmm. How old is he? Your uncle, I mean?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“How old, Bran?”
“I don’t know. Sixty? Sixty-five maybe?”
“Then the odds are he doesn’t know how to turn off the gizmo that lets you locate your phone. So give me the username and password.”
He told her. There was another long pause.
“So your username is ‘Branson’ and your password is really ‘one two three four five’?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Is that a problem?”
She sighed. “Yeah. I’ll explain why later. Make the call, Bran.” She hung up.
He stared at the phone for a moment, amazed. He knew what he was about to do was risky, but he was actually feeling better. He started to dial the number when there was a sharp pounding on the door. His heart seemed to freeze solid in his chest and he nearly dropped the phone. He heard L.B.’s voice though the door. “Naptime’s over, kid. Quit pullin’ on your pecker and get over to the other room. The Lowmans are back, an’ we gotta make plans.”
And just like that, his opportunity to make things right went away.
“SO WHAT’S the plan?” Moose said from behind the wheel as they drove away from the Lowman house.
“The plan is, you drive back to that girl’s house and keep your trap shut for once,” Chirelli growled from the back.
Mario was sitting across from him in the back of the limo. “We do need a plan,” he said. “We’re gonna take these crackers down, right?”
“Right,” Chirelli said.
“The nutless wonders, too. I’m not forgetting they put their hands on my woman.”
“For Christ’s sake, Mario,” Chirelli sn
apped, “will you get that shit out of your mind? They’re eunuchs, kid. They couldn’t put the moves on your woman if they wanted to. Which they don’t, considering that they’re, you know, eunuchs.”
“Still,” Mario said, his jaw set stubbornly. He wasn’t about to just let something like that slide.
Chirelli sighed. “Okay, okay, whatever. But you’ve got a date with a few million bucks in jewels. Let’s concentrate on that.” He leaned back and gave Mario an appraising look. “Why don’t you come up with a plan?”
Mario thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “The thing goes down at midnight. Valentine and his partner and the kid are supposed to meet Gane at this abandoned factory. I told the Lowmans to arrange it so they’re standing guard. When the time comes, Tommy and Carlo take their place.”
Chirelli arched an inquisitive eyebrow. “And take them out?”
Mario could tell he was being tested. “Not right away. We don’t want gunshots. We just take their guns and tie them up. When we’ve got the jewels, we cap ’em on the way out.”
Chirelli nodded. “Good so far. How do we get the rocks themselves?”
“That part should be easy. This Gane asshole sounds like he’s scared shitless anyway. The other two are a couple of dumb-ass crackers. Amateurs. And when we have the girl, the kid…” He stopped, thought for a moment.
Chirelli’s face was the calm inscrutable mask of a teacher testing a student and not wanting to give away the answer. “Question is, do we really need the girl? We know pretty much what we need to know. We don’t need to ask her anything. And the kid’s even more useless than the other two.”
“She’s…” Mario’s brow furrowed. “Our insurance,” he said at last. “We use her to keep that ugly-ass rent-a-cop off our backs, and away from the cops.”
“Couldn’t we do the same thing with Clarissa?”
Mario shook his head. “No. She comes with us. On the plane.”
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