by Brian Hodge
And then he knew.
That was the way it had always been.
Childhood friends, from the same neighborhood. Tony had always been the outgoing one, Lupo reserved, preferring the company of books to that of other kids. They were an escape from decay, the stink, the rats. He’d earned no small number of beatings and torment because of it. Until he began to grow. And grow. And beat the hell out of Tony Mendoza, who had made the mistake of picking on him one too many times.
But instead of now fearing him, like the rest, Tony had said he was impressed. Glad to see him standing up for himself for a change. Lupo still remembered looking down at him with those split lips, puffy eye, scraped forehead and cheekbones. Watching him laugh. Not believing it when this early teenage Tony Mendoza had said he’d been looking for someone with cojones like that.
Man, you gotta be crazy, Lupo had thought. His knuckles ached from Tony’s face, and here the bloodied kid was acting as if Lupo had passed an audition.
You had to listen to a guy like that.
Crazy — now that was par for the course. Seemed like every time he fought a little harder and higher up the powder heap, Tony got a little crazier for it. For that was the way to pull it off. The meek may have been penciled in to inherit the earth, but not in their time.
He had told himself more than once that whenever it appeared that Tony had finally twisted his mind to the point where it might snap for good, he would cut his losses and bail out. Maybe that time had come. Probably.
Yet here he was lapdogging same as before. No real intention of leaving, just curious as to how crazy Tony could get and hold it all together. He had talked a frightening kind of logic up in his bedroom — especially since taking that surprise phone call from the accountant.
So he’d hang tough with Tony awhile longer, see where it led. Had to know how it would all turn out. From a ringside seat. Face it — what else did he have going to fall back on?
So. Drive.
The Lincoln left land behind them as I-275 cut southwest from Tampa over the Old Bay toward St. Pete and Clearwater. The Howard Frankland Bridge spanned better than five miles of water, and once on, you could soon see neither the land you’d left nor the land you were heading for. Midway to the west you picked up a whiplike spur jutting from the mainland, just barely wide enough to provide bedrock for the bridge, but that was it for solid ground.
Lupo began slowing the Lincoln after the first couple of miles. Looking ahead, behind. Across the low concrete divider, in the two northeast lanes, a pair of cars passed in tandem, and the next headlights were hundreds of yards away. Behind them, beneath the pink ridge of dawning sky, the nearest headlights were pinpricks. The time was right.
“Let’s lose her,” Lupo said.
In the outside lane, he hit the brakes to bring the car to a halt just shy of a skid. Nothing but dawn and vast plains of water for company. BB had one hand on the door latch, dropped the other to the wrapped and weighted garbage bag.
Good thing this one was going to sink to the bottom with no chance of floating and discovery. Packing up the pieces had shown him some bizarre things about this particular corpse, things that would attract all manner of attention. Try getting fingerprints from paws, for one thing.
Dead stop. BB flung the door open and lugged out the bag of bones. Sent it whirling over the retaining wall, against the northern horizon, out of view.
As before BB hopped back into the car for quick takeoff, Lupo could barely hear the splash.
With every tick of the clock, Tony felt himself gaining momentum. A sluggish start in the wee hours of this morning, though, waking up wet and bloody with recollections of the night that seemed more like dreams than anything.
He had been sleeping underwater. Awoke when the change reversed and sent him back to reclaim full humanity. Gills sealed, and his sleeping body had no option other than to begin sucking water into his lungs. He erupted from the water in a choking flurry, coughed it back up.
Only then did he realize what he was sleeping with.
For a short while, tears had wanted to flow as memories settled into focus. No more Sasha and her horizontal dance of delights. No more Sasha, period. The death of an impending fatherhood he’d not even known about, nor she. Tears. Had he let them, they could’ve come.
But then came the resurgence of feelings more instinctual than emotional. Predators had no time to waste mourning dead mates they themselves have brought down.
Besides, she was still with him in a sense. You are what you eat, and all. He could feel bits of her essence within, food completely unrelated to physical sustenance. He had eaten bits of her soul and felt all the stronger for it. Fragments of silently screaming distress that fueled him like a battery. He would drain them until there was nothing left but anemic flickers.
Meanwhile, the future beckoned. Its possibilities to be plucked like ripe fruit from swollen trees. Now that he had unlocked this green Pandora’s box of secrets, he was limitless. Not the least of which had begun with that early-morning phone call.
It led them downtown around noon to pick up their rider, a guy named Santos. A thin, nervous sort of twit, one little speck among the glass and steel towers. The Lincoln swallowed him whole, then cruised back into traffic.
Tony was wearing one of his finest white suits, but even that didn’t stave off a sense of coming in second on a comparative basis. Santos wore Wall Street gray, via Savile Row. Looked as if he’d been born in that suit. Tony smirked to himself, though. Above the neck, seemed like nine out of every ten accountants looked alike. Some kind of international law, maybe.
They shared the back seat, stretched out on the leather with plenty of legroom. Tony fixed him a drink out of a portable bar, which Santos accepted gratefully. Not once did he move toward doffing his sunglasses. He was fooling no one. The rich bruises around the left eye socket needed more than shades to screen them from sight.
“You’re doing the right thing,” Tony said. “I personally guarantee you will never have cause to regret it. Never.”
Santos nodded his battered head. “I swore to myself, this is the last time that hijo de puta does this to me. Thinks I’m skimming off the top? If I’d done that, he’d never know. Paranoid cabrón.”
Tony nodded, sympathetic. You bet, pal, life’s tough enough, and you’ve already been dished out more than your share of shit. “That’s what happens to a man when he mixes business and pleasure.”
On the outside he was calm, easy diplomacy. Inside, he was turning cartwheels. The timing on this was incredible. Life was grand, life was charmed. He had been subtly working this guy for nearly a year. Agualar’s primary accountant, increasingly dissatisfied in his present position. The money was prime, but even that wore thin after a while when Agualar put you on the brunt end of his greaseball temper. Bounce you around the office with his fists, no matter how much he was paying, you still felt like some kind of kinky whore. Pride rebelled eventually.
Santos could take him places. The man was a money-laundering wizard, all kinds of connections with cooperative Bahamian and Panamanian banks, plus a network of bogus brokerage houses and furriers and jewelers acting as legit fronts nationwide. As it was, Tony already belonged to a loose financial coalition that pooled resources for laundering purposes and doled out eight percent cuts of the gross as commission. Santos had promised he need never pay anything more than six-and-a-half ever again.
So long as he was successful in his bid for coup d’état. Tony was willing to take that risk. Now more than ever.
He snapped his fingers. “Let’s see what you got.”
Santos unlocked his briefcase and flipped through an immaculate array of files, folders, and sheafs of paper. He withdrew a sealed envelope, passed it over. Tony ripped it open and unfolded papers that appeared to be overhead maps of a sprawling upscale residence.
“The electronic security is based in a second-floor room in this part of the house.” Santos aimed one manicured fingernail. “Tw
o men are on the console, eight monitors in all. The cameras are programmed into the monitors on a rotational basis, with each one changing images every five seconds. Any one of which they can lock-in permanently.”
Tony nodded, watched as the fingernail began to tap various little blue dots labeled with Cs.
“Cameras here, and here,” Santos said, “and here, and here…”
And on he went, that most dangerous of spies: the one with a personal grudge. Tony loved it. He watched, listened. Learned. The seeds of revolution already sprouting in his mind.
Midafternoon.
Santos had long since been deposited back where they’d found him. An hour later, they linked up with the Barrington brothers, who followed in a second car as they drove to Kennedy, turned off onto Magnolia.
The Barringtons parked first. Bruce’s brother, Ivan, was no slouch when it came to locks. He and BB headed for April’s second-story loft while Lupo circled the block an extra time. Wait until Ivan was in and things looked kosher. After the first lap of the holding pattern, Tony saw that BB was leaning against the building, and gave them a slight nod. Lupo parked, and up they went.
Tony didn’t know what he was looking for. Something, anything, to give them a clue as to where he might find Justin and April. One solitary fact they were overlooking or were not yet privileged to know.
“Look,” said Lupo, just past the threshold. He pointed with one shoetip toward the wall beside the inner door. A bullet hole. Angled downward, as if it had come from someone firing down from the outer doorway.
“The Weatherman,” Tony said flatly. “Fuck. I’d give just about anything to know the story behind that.”
He wandered in, Lupo and the Barringtons in tow, stood at this end of the loft and stared down its length. Stuffy and stale and overbearingly warm in here, closed up for days. Dim, too, all the blinds drawn. Shafts of sunlight slanted through the narrow gaps between the Levolors. Dust motes swam in the air.
Tony had had people continuing the phone campaign to area motels and hotels, still hoping to uncover a likely registration. About ready to give that tactic up. If they were taking the motel route, they weren’t using their own names. Of course, they couldn’t manage that indefinitely; April wasn’t rich, and he was willing to bet that Justin wasn’t either. Plus, April worked right here at home and couldn’t survive away for very long. He could wait them out, let them deplete their cash reserves, but that could take too long.
Had to be another way to smoke them out.
“Start running this place through a fine-tooth comb,” he told his men. “Go through everything. Every drawer, every cabinet, every shelf.”
The guys divided it up by room assignments, or what passed for rooms in her home. Lupo took the kitchen and dining area. BB the living room, Ivan her bedroom. All wore skintight latex gloves to avoid fingerprints.
Tony began in the bathroom. He went through the medicine cabinet, then the vanity, then the narrow linen closet. Didn’t take long; not much he could learn from soap and towels and Tampax.
Gleefully, then, he emptied the nooks and crannies of their contents. Jars and bottles he hurled into the tub, where they shattered, contents mingling into sickly splashes of color. He jammed the toilet full of tampons and sanitary napkins, gave it a flush, then had all her towels strewn across the floor to soak up the overflow. Lastly, he found a curling iron and fired it into the mirror, watched his sneering reflection burst into a radius of a thousand fragments.
It was a slim fraction of the rage boiling inside over his piranha. He’d let it all out, in time.
While combing her belongings, the boys eyed him surreptitiously as he stalked through the loft with a mounting sense of vengeance. He slipped a butcher knife from the cutlery block and reduced the cushions and backrest of her sofa to ribbons. Carried the knife with him into her walk-in closet and slashed every dress, every blouse, every pair of slacks and jeans. Men’s clothing hung in here, too, from one bar, and he took unbridled delight in ripping it and pretending that Justin was wearing each piece.
Of course, when the real time came, their hides would not be cleaved by anything so mundane as a simple knife.
An address book turned up in a living room end table, and this Tony perused, found a few names to check into. Nothing so ripe with possibility as a map for a remote family cabin, but a valuable find nonetheless.
Tony bulldozed along toward her office, pausing in the bedroom to slash her mattress and bedsheets, then smash a freestanding antique full-length mirror and overturn it in a clamor of shattering fragments. Into its rubble he added a ceramic bowl and pitcher from atop her dresser. Framed pictures hanging on the loft’s inner wall and brick pillars he plucked from their supports and clashed together like cymbals. Everywhere, broken glass and torn fabric.
Her office.
Drafting table, desk, file cabinets, desktop copier — he could have boundless fun in here once it was searched. He could cripple her business as effectively as a torpedo in the hull of a ship. Maybe let her live after all, let her come home from a dead lover to find this place in shambles. Let her die a slow death of business strangulation. Let her sit amid the sackcloth of shredded financial documents and contracts, the ashes of all her files. Let her know what it feels like to come home and find a piece of your life ripped out by the roots.
He was about to seize her business telephone and plunge it through the glass of her copier when he froze. Stared at where it sat on a deskside tabletop, beside an answering machine. With both its ON and CALLS status lights glowing red.
It had the calming effect of a sedative.
Tony rewound the tape counter down to zero, hit PLAYBACK to listen. Several calls, clients yammering for one thing and another like petulant children. He shook his head, thought he’d likely go bugnuts having to spend his life answering to people like that.
“April, this is Marian again,” came one voice near the end of the string of messages. “In regards to our conversation earlier this morning, I decided we can probably wait until the middle of next week on those proofsheets. No later than that though. Call me if you get this message before five-thirty today, okay? This is Wednesday, by the way, that I’m calling. Um … I really do hope you get your family problems ironed out soon. We need you here.”
Another message followed, but Tony scarcely registered it. His mind was racing, trying puzzle pieces together and finding that some were starting to fit. Smart girl, she was keeping tabs on business by checking calls. Daily, at the very least.
Tony set the machine back to ANSWER CALLS. Looked at her business line long enough to commit its number to very short-term memory.
And walked to the other end of the loft to her personal line hanging on the kitchen wall.
Chapter 26
SETBACK
The bubble, fragile as it was, burst on Thursday morning.
Justin had tried phoning Rene Espinoza a few times on Wednesday afternoon and evening, hoping to get news of the lab results and how they would subsequently proceed. She was always out, though, and he would talk to no one else, wouldn’t leave his name. He finally caught her Thursday morning.
As soon as he heard the shift in her voice when he identified himself, his heart stuttered with a downward lurch. Hers was not the voice of triumph.
“The stuff you gave me?” she said. “It tests out as a hallucinogen, really potent. The lab said they’d never seen anything like it.”
“And?”
“And it’s legal.”
His heart deflated. Every hope nailed on using the skullflush against Tony blew away in the breeze.
“Legal?” he whispered. “How can that be?”
“Because it’s not illegal. The law’s clear-cut when it comes to things like this, the chemical makeup of the drug.” He heard papers rustling over the phone. “I’ve got a full readout here that looks like a chemistry textbook. It probably wouldn’t mean any more to you than it does to me. But the fact is, it’s never been seen he
re before, nobody even knew it existed. So it’s just one of those drugs that manages to slip through the cracks in the law, like some of the designer synthetics managed to do.” She sighed, a wearisome sound. The sound of someone who’d climbed too many paper mountains. “Mendoza could be sitting on a dump truck full of the stuff, and there’s nothing anybody could do about it.”
Justin had been slumped onto the bed, and now he lay back a moment to stare at the ceiling. I suppose I could tell her he’s killed somebody else, he thought. Of course, she would wonder how he knew. I saw it in a vision induced by another tribal drug, he could tell her. That would go over big. Ironclad testimony. Despite all the benefits from his experience with ebene, he still felt heartsick over what it had ultimately shown him.
“So where does this leave us?” he finally asked.
“Did you have any backup ideas?”
A frantic mental scramble, then, “No.” Barely a word, barely a noise.
“Then my advice from two days ago still holds. Lie as low as you possibly can until something blows over.”
He barked an embittered little laugh. “For how long? You said something could break any day, but be honest. You don’t know, do you? You don’t honestly know. It could take another month, or six months, for all you know. Couldn’t it?”
Another weary sigh. “I’d be lying if I said that was out of the question.” They shared silence for a few moments, and when she spoke again, her voice was lower. An almost conspiratorial hush meant for his ears only. “I’m not going to tell you what to do, one way or another. Just what I’d do, if it was me. And if you ever tell anyone I said this, I’ll deny it. To your face, in court, in church, wherever — I’ll deny it.”
“Let’s hear it.” Although he suspected what it would be.
“I’d kill him. Flat out kill him. I don’t know if you’re up to something like that.”
“I — I don’t either.”