She watched the ceiling, trying to swallow and envisioning the footsteps seeping blood through the floor. The Mexicans, she thought. Christ. How’d they find out about this place? They must’ve captured Roy, or Snuff. Or Frank. This wasn’t part of the bargain, she thought. I didn’t come back for this.
Clambering into the crawl space, she scraped her elbows and knees against the concrete. She shoved the letters and snapshots back into the hatbox and stuffed it behind the steamer trunk where it wouldn’t be seen. Then she grabbed the black felt box and scrambled on, wanting the amethyst now more than ever. Reaching the far wall, she tucked her knees to her chest, pressed the felt box to her heart and prayed for luck.
The stairwell stood directly across from the crawl space opening, so Shel could watch as the cellar door eased open. Two men descended slowly in the harsh lamplight. Shel watched them appear, glistening black shoes, neat gray suits. The Tigers of Bacchus. The smaller one had a lithe, wiry, tap-dancer body. A birthmark erupted from his eyebrow like a smear. The other one was huge, dough-faced, cracking his neck as he walked, like a fighter. With the toes of their shoes they nudged the suitcases, boxes, scattered debris, moving it out of their path.
The large one spotted the cubbyhole first. He tugged at the little one’s sleeve and pointed. They eased apart. From different sides of the room they advanced warily. Each man held his weapon against his leg. Their faces in the light, the eyes in particular, glistened from the bare bulb. The eyes were stony and tense and a little afraid. It made Shel like them just a little, a tremble of hope, they were human after all, like her. Afraid.
“I’ve got no beef with you,” she shouted, trying to claw herself further back into the crawl space. Her voice echoed in the cramped surround. The two men stepped closer.
From his pocket, the larger one withdrew a Baggie filled with chalky crystal, lobbing it gently in one hand. Upstairs, to the tune of “Ave Maria,” one of the others crooned the epitaph Vaya con Dios, laughing as the syllables and the melodic line coincided. Shel inched back, pressing herself against the cold wall, staring at the bony disfigured man squinting at her as though wondering if he knew her. Under her breath, she heard herself tell him, “Be civilized.”
The little one reached into his coat pocket and removed a photograph. Studying it briefly, he murmured something then passed it to the larger one, who held the Baggie between his teeth in order to free his hand. He took the picture, studied it, nodded, and handed it back. The little one gestured for Shel to come nearer.
It occurred to her then what a merciful gesture it must have been: one moment, Amethyst fleeing in terror. The next, turned to stone.
CHAPTER
16
Abatangelo lay the Sirkis on the seat beside him as he drove out the Delta Highway. He couldn’t shake the feeling that having it there was a sign of weakness. An indication of how much, as Cohn put it, he’d changed. In the old days, he’d driven cross-country with a trunk full of product, put down beach crew mutinies, settled scores with wholesalers trying to rob him blind. He’d never felt the need for a weapon till now. He’d been a natural at talking people down from stupid moves and besides, he was blessed, he could walk away, it was only money. Such was the insanity of youth and luck.
He headed down the gravel access road with his lights off. As he broke the first hill and the ranch house came into view he killed the motor, shifted into neutral and let the car glide. When it came to a stop he slipped it into park and dropped the gun into his pocket. Crouching, he ran toward the house.
Something was wrong with the door. It stood crooked in the frame, listing slightly in the porchlight. Moving closer, he saw that the hinge leaves were shorn from the doorjamb.
He scurried down the sideyard, running low, hoisting himself up at the window ledges. Every room lay dark and still. The backdoor remained locked and he broke a small glass pane with his fist. He picked away the glass, feeling through for the lock. Edging the door open, he went to his knees in the dark and crept through the entry.
In the kitchen the refrigerator door stood open, emitting a yellow droning light. Abatangelo could make out two shapes, one large, one small. He clicked on the overhead and withstood a surge of nausea. Bound and gagged with duct tape, a freckled, brown-haired woman he didn’t recognize and a cinnamon-skinned boy knelt lifeless, heaped together side by side. Each had gunshot wounds at the temple and the base of the neck. The woman’s wounds were black and pulpy; the boy’s were worse. On exit, one of the rounds had exploded, shattering his skull into a mangled knit of bloody hair and fissured bone and brain tissue.
Abatangelo lunged back through the entry and out the door, making it to the gravel before retching on his knees. Above him, the moon shone brief and clear through passing clouds. Dogs barked in the distance. He wiped his face with his hands, regained his feet and shambled back into the house.
The blood formed a common pool around the woman and boy. Ants caravanned from the wall to the bodies, scavenging through bone and hair. A coarse white powder, like cottonseed, glittered the bodies. Granules flecked their hair, their skin, their half-open eyes. Abatangelo moistened his finger and caught a taste from the bag crumpled at the dead woman’s side. It was acrid, chemical. Mix of some sort. They wanted it to look like a burn, whoever they were.
Looking elsewhere around the room he noticed a pair of shoes, the ones Shel had been wearing, beneath the breakfast nook table.
He pushed at the swinging door, made the hall and checked the rest of the house. He found a bedroom he thought might be hers: Wadded Kleenex dotted the floor; a pyramid of shoes in the closet. There was no recent sign of her.
In another bedroom he found a third body, this one a man. He moved closer, the bolt of sickness rising again. He wondered for a moment if it was Frank, then realized the man was too old. Overweight, graying hair, facedown on bloody sheets. Blood had congealed at his ears and nostrils. Blood spattered the wall behind. He’d probably been sleeping, Abatangelo thought, one shot to the small of the back, the other to the head. Wakened by one, killed by the other. There was mix scattered here, too, another discarded bag, flung against the man’s back.
A suit jacket lay flung in the corner. Abatangelo searched the pockets and found a wallet containing business cards: Roger C. Quenelle, Vice President, Acquisitions, Founders Financial. He had snapshots of two glaringly dissimilar teenage daughters and a wife whose face shot out like a sunflower from the ruffled neck of her blouse.
In the living room, a breeze rustled the bedsheet curtain, filling the house with cold air smelling of rain and manure and acacia blossom. On his way back through the kitchen Abatangelo spotted the cellar door ajar. The light was on.
He took the gun from his pocket and crabbed down the plank stair, back to the wall. A mindless debris cluttered the floor: faded clothes, twine, crumpled newspaper. Nothing was smashed or destroyed, there were no obvious signs of struggle, more like a search. He called Shel’s name, sifting through the litter. Moonlight through the window well angled across the far wall. Spotting the crawl space ledge, he edged toward it. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he detected, far back against the wall, a small felt box.
He tucked the gun in his waistband, pushed off from the floor, folded his body into the opening and crawled back across the concrete toward the wall. He recognized the box. The amethyst was gone. She’d crawled back here, he thought, trying to hide.
He checked the immediate vicinity for something else, a scrap of clothing, a blood smear, anything. He found only an empty prescription bottle and several mismatched capsules gluey to the touch; someone had spat them out instead of swallowing them. He gathered up the capsules, capped them inside the prescription bottle, pocketed it and the jewel box then crawled back to the cellar floor and returned to the kitchen upstairs, searching for the phone.
He found it on the wall beside the refrigerator. Above it, using a red felt-tip pen, someone had written among the penciled phone numbers: Francisco, The Lad
y Waits. Come See. Sunday At Three. Same Spot On The River.
It was like finding someone there, someone to tell him what happened. And yet reading the words over again, he told himself: It doesn’t mean she’s alive.
Using his handkerchief, he lifted the receiver and dialed Waxman’s number. A dozen rings, then Waxman picked up and hung up in one move. Abatangelo dialed again and pounded his fist against the door frame, counting. This time Waxman bit on the fourth ring, growling, “Who in God’s name …?”
“Shut up, Wax,” Abatangelo shouted. “Shut up and listen. I got home and she was gone, Wax. I went out to her place in east county and there’s three people dead. Get over here, Wax. Get out of bed, get your car and get your fat ass over here.”
He was panting, his head felt cold. After a moment Waxman said uneasily, “There is no need to insult me.”
In the same breath Abatangelo apologized and gave Waxman directions to the house. “Another thing, Wax, call Tony Cohn. Hear me? Tell him, get over here now, not later, now. You getting this?”
Waxman said, “What do you intend to tell the police?”
“I’m not telling them anything, Wax. You are.”
He hung up. With his handkerchief he wiped the phone clean, his mind rabid with defensive impulses. Sooner or later, he thought, somehow, they’ll get around to pinning this on me. It seemed an utterly chickenshit preoccupation, then he told himself he’d be doing Shel no good in custody. He needed to stay free. He couldn’t help her unless he was free.
Taking one last look at the woman and boy on the floor, he felt an urge to kneel down and brush the ants away.
The entire hollow teemed with squad cars, paddy wagons, evidence vans, ambulances. Cruiser lights spun in all directions, bouncing off the walls of the buildings, the hills, each other. The chaos of swirling light created an odd illusion, in which things appeared and disappeared in circus color. It seemed like both the middle of the day and the middle of the night.
Obscured by the same patch of laurels and scrub oaks he’d used for camouflage before, Abatangelo watched from the hilltop above the ranch house as the police went about the time-consuming business of scratching up evidence. Spotlights brightened the dooryard, flaring through the branchwork of the elm trees and acacias surrounding the house. A pair of officers manned each doorway while another patrolled the yard. A phalanx of officers marched shoulder to shoulder along the road, flashlights trained on the ground. Other units had been sent off to search the barn, the outbuildings, the compound at the back from which three scared, hungry dogs barked manically in the night.
A crowd of curiosity seekers were being held back at the county road. Some parked their cars or trucks out there and stood on top of their vehicles, training binoculars or simply craning their necks, trying for a glimpse of the dingy white ranch house with the stone cladding beyond the first hill, all lit up like a carnival. Ranch houses perched atop hills miles away had lights burning, and even from a distance silhouettes could be spotted at the windows.
Abatangelo checked his watch. Well over an hour had passed since he’d left Waxman alone inside the house. The reporter was sitting with the guys from Homicide now. Abatangelo knew the detectives would pound on him. Something was bound to eke out. Waxman was an easy man to play upon, as Abatangelo himself could testify.
He’d pointed out to Waxman the notation above the phone, addressed to “Francisco.” He’d told him, “If there’s anything you do, make sure they see this.” Given what Shel had said about a botched ambush and the war brewing with Felix Randall, the only reasonable candidates for killer were the Mexicans. He’d obsessed on the phrase “The Lady Waits” for the past hour, managing finally to squeeze from it at least a token optimism. Shel had been taken, not killed, he thought. If the point was simply to kill her, they’d have left her with the others. A deal was being struck, a trade arranged. The ones left behind, they were for show.
Shortly a black Lexus turned off the county road, negotiated entrance to the property with the officers manning the roadblock, and made its way toward the house. It parked beside the coroner’s wagon, and Abatangelo recognized Tony Cohn as he belted his overcoat and stepped from the car. Cohn spoke to an officer outside the house and handed the cop his business card. At that same moment, a second officer rapped on the side of the coroner’s wagon and it pulled away, bearing three bodies.
The fact Cohn showed up on Waxman’s behalf would tie Abatangelo to the killings no doubt. He knew that. But Waxman would need a lawyer to lean on, someone to back him up and get him out of there, and no attorney they could trust would’ve responded to the call as mindfully as Cohn under the circumstances. Besides, tying Abatangelo to Shel would take any cop with a pulse five minutes. Fingers were most likely already tapping on computer keys. If it took till dawn to drag Abatangelo into this, they’d be way behind schedule.
He eased back into the shadows then made his way downhill to his car. He drove along the now familiar, winding county road to Oakley, past the sprawling ranches, the recent subdivisions, circling a strip mall twice, making absolutely certain no one trailed behind. Pulling down a narrow side street with parallel fences towering on either side, he eased halfway down then stopped, waiting for the headlights of a trail car to appear behind him. None did. He listened as the streetlight hummed overhead, noticing a cat perched atop a nearby garage, cleaning itself. Putting the Dart in gear again, he drove to the alley’s end, turned right and pulled into the lot of the same all-night grocery he’d come to that first night out, the one named Cheaper.
The place was lit up like an emergency room. Insomniac shoppers, many obese, all of them white, milled in and out. Within fifteen minutes Cohn’s Lexus arrived, pulling up next to the Dart. Abatangelo waited, again to check for anyone following, then stepped from his car into the backseat of Cohn’s.
The car smelled new, with a hint of pipe tobacco thickening the air. Cohn turned sideways behind the wheel, offering a pained look that, combined with the play of shadows across his face, accentuated its angles and made him look almost skeletal. Waxman sat in the passenger seat, gripping his elbows, arms folded across his midriff as though to contain an upsurge of bile. He was wearing the same shabby tweed jacket and Oxford button-down shirt as earlier, the collar frayed and hanging open; apparently he’d lacked the time to knot a proper bow tie. He looked strangely naked without it.
Neither man looked directly at Abatangelo, preferring instead to acknowledge his arrival with sidelong glances and thin smiles. The tension compressed the space inside the car, making it feel as though their faces were pushed together. Abatangelo nodded to Cohn, then turned to Waxman. “Good to see you in one piece,” he offered. “Things go like you thought?”
Waxman hesitated, glancing out the window at the bright storefront. “They gave me a little tour first, walked me through the rooms, showed me the bodies. The mother and child in particular. I watched as some technician inserted a needle in their eyes, withdrawing ocular fluid. The detectives, they asked me how I felt about it—the murders, I mean, not the bit with the needle.”
Abatangelo flashed on what he’d overheard a cop say once about a witness. Shaken well, ready to use. “It’s part of the process, Wax,” he said gently. “Messing with your head.”
“Well, yes,” Waxman said, waving off the show of concern. “They were remarkably well informed, by the way.”
“About?”
“You,” Waxman said.
Abatangelo chuckled. “I assume you’re not surprised by that. I’m not. This they, who are we talking about exactly?”
“There were three of them,” Waxman said. “The lead detective’s very sharp. Older guy, tall, thin, homely. Could play Ichabod Crane in the local repertory. His partner is a little chunkier; you can smell the coffee on him from across the room. Holds an unlit cigarette the whole time, tells you he’s trying to quit. It’s a very clever distraction.”
“Wax—”
“There was a narc there, too,
young guy—suede jacket, sharkskin boots—natty little goon. Said he worked on some sort of task force out here. An absolute, unmitigated asshole.”
“He threatened you.”
“He kicked me,” Waxman admitted. “In the leg.” He glanced at Cohn and Abatangelo sheepishly, then shrugged. “He threw a tantrum, called me names.”
“Let’s get back to well informed,” Abatangelo suggested.
Waxman nodded. “They brought up your name almost instantly.”
Cohn seemed indifferent to this news, which was hardly a surprise. Or maybe it’s his game face, Abatangelo thought, at the same time wondering what the lawyer and the reporter had found to talk about on the ride from the murder site.
“You showed them the message above the phone,” Abatangelo said.
“Of course I did.”
“And they said?”
“If you’ll wait, I’ll tell you.” Waxman, irked, adjusted his glasses. “Apparently they knew Ms. Beaudry lived out there. They tied you two together from the start. They knew about your recent release.”
“Gee, there goes another secret.”
“I told them about the story that’s running tomorrow, gave them a draft. It’s going to be published within hours. I could hardly withhold it.”
“I never suggested you should.”
“I don’t expose sources,” Waxman said, his voice rising. There was a disagreeable edge in it, too. He looked out at the market again.
“Wax, what—”
“You protect a source,” Waxman continued, “because the target of your story might retaliate. Whistle-blowers, insiders, they take a great risk coming forward.”
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