by Robert Greer
What had his investigative senses heightened flowed from an altogether different wellspring. The very same thing that he knew kept Damion Madrid glued to the basketball court and Julie buried up to her eyebrows in a legal case. The persuasive force that pushed him to drive thousands of miles in search of a rare antique license plate to add to his collection or risk his life chasing a bond skipper across three states. In the end, what had him in dogged pursuit of Antoine Ducane’s murderer, in spite of the risks, was his competitive nature. Surprisingly, Mavis may have summed it up best, calling whatever it was that drove him and people like him to do what they did an “elixir,” the tenuous cure-all that made life worth living.
In many ways, he knew Mavis was right. Perhaps chasing down Antoine Ducane’s killer would be his last thrill ride. The one he was meant to take before he settled for good into a life of peddling antiques and collectibles on the Internet.
Weary of trying to analyze what made him tick, he spun his desk chair around, took a Coke out of the minirefrigerator behind his desk, popped the top, and looked up at the wall of photographs in front of him. The wall, a virtual rogue’s gallery, was filled with photos of more than a hundred bond skippers he’d brought back to face justice during his more than thirty years as a bounty hunter and bail bondsman. Staring at the photos, he nursed his Coke for a couple more minutes in silence. When he’d finished his drink, he called Mario to find out if he had any idea what might have happened to the conveniently missing Rollie Ornasetti and to see if Mario might have an inkling of how Ornasetti might have handled his Ducane problem years earlier.
Mario endorsed Pinkie Niedemeyer’s take, confirming that Ornasetti probably would have used his Teamsters connections to help him get rid of Ducane, just as Randall Maxie had suggested. He wasn’t certain that Rollie would have disposed of Ducane at the abandoned sugar-beet factory in Brighton, as was mob practice back then, he told CJ. But it was a safe bet. What neither man could figure out, however, was how Ducane’s body had ended up at the Eisenhower Tunnel.
They talked briefly about whether Ornasetti had been snatched by higher-ups in order to muzzle him or whether he’d been hit, agreeing in the end that he’d probably been abducted.
When CJ told Mario he was going to run out to the old sugar-beet factory and have a look around, Mario offered a stern warning: “Don’t go out there by yourself, CJ. It’s a special kind of dumpin’ ground, if you know what I mean. Special enough for you to have somebody ridin’ shotgun if you insist on takin’ your ass out there.”
Recalling the promise he’d made to Alden Grace about not putting Flora Jean in harm’s way, CJ asked, “Who am I gonna get to go out there with me on such short notice?”
Pinkie Niedemeyer, who’d been listening in on the conversation on Mario’s kitchen phone, spoke up: “Guess I’m it.”
“Pinkie?”
“Nobody else but.”
“How come you’re on the line?”
“’Cause I asked him,” said Mario. “Figured you mighta been the FBI callin’.”
“Wire tapping’s more up their alley,” CJ said, smiling. “I don’t think they’d call.”
“Well, if it’s tapped, I got somethin’ for the powder-puff-carryin’, sissified assholes. Kiss my ass!” Mario said loudly.
Clearing his throat, CJ said, “About as good an answer as any, I guess. Pinkie, you still there?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure you wanna go out to that sugar-beet factory with me?” CJ asked. “I’ve been told by Alden Grace, no less, that I’m cutting things too close to the bone with this Ducane thing already.”
“So what was your response?” asked Pinkie.
“Didn’t have one really.”
“Then we go out to the factory and have a look. What else you got to live for, your old-age pension?”
“Problem solved,” said CJ. “Meet me at my place, in twenty minutes. I wanna get to Brighton by sunset,” he added, thinking that he’d inadvertently left Pinkie Niedemeyer’s name off his list of diehard competitors.
“I’ll be there,” Pinkie said, cradling the phone and walking from the kitchen to where Mario sat in the TV room. “CJ’s got some serious business he needs help with, Dominico.”
Mario simply nodded. “There ain’t never been anything but serious business takin’ place out there where you two are headed. Don’t let it snap back and bite you.”
“Oh, we won’t,” Pinkie said with a grin. “In case you forgot, your government once paid both me and CJ to kill people.”
CJ reacted with a start as his garage door swung open. “Damn it, Pinkie! You looking to get shot? Close that door.”
CJ was kneeling twenty feet across the garage from Pinkie in front of a workbench that ran the width of the garage. Standing, he dusted off his hands. The battered navy footlocker he’d carried through two tours of Vietnam sat with its top raised just in front of him.
“No way. You’re too damn old, and your aim’s too bad,” Pinkie said, smiling. He swung the garage door shut and walked across the uneven concrete floor that CJ’s Uncle Ike had laid fifty years earlier.
“When did you become a comedian?” CJ asked, glancing up from the footlocker.
“I didn’t.” Pinkie’s smile melted. “Just thought a little levity might help the situation. Here’s a heads-up. We’re headin’ across the DMZ and into hostile territory if we go out to Brighton, CJ. Take my word for it. You up for that?” The look on Pinkie’s face had turned deadly serious.
Surprised by Pinkie’s use of the term for the demilitarized zone that had separated North and South Vietnam during the war, CJ turned his attention to the contents of the footlocker. “You think we could run into that much resistance?” he asked, reaching into the footlocker and taking out the M-16 he’d brought back from Vietnam and Ike’s nickel-plated .45. He laid the two weapons on the floor.
“Depends,” said Pinkie.
“On what?”
“On whether or not there’s been any activity out at the old sugar-beet factory lately. Trust me, neither one of us wants to go muckin’ around out there if there has been.”
“Anybody able to clue us in on the activity level?” CJ asked as he stared down at the eyeglasses-sized box that contained the Navy Cross he’d earned during Vietnam.
“The half-senile, slope-headed old bag of bones who’s been de facto caretaker out there for years.”
“Caretaker? Who the hell owns the property?”
Pinkie smiled. “People, CJ, people. No worries, though. I already called the old cuss. Told him I’d be out there this evenin’.”
“You told somebody we’re coming?”
“Had to. Otherwise the old geezer woulda shot us, no question. Told him I was comin’ to check the place out—consider reusin’ his place after years of bein’ away.”
CJ shook his head. “Don’t think I really wanna know a lot more, Pinkie.” He took a half-dozen clips of ammo for the M-16 and a half-empty box of ammo for the .45 out of the footlocker.
Pinkie shook his head. “I’d take more firepower if I was you.”
“You’ve gotta be bullshitting.”
“Wish I was,” Pinkie said, frowning. “Here’s the deal, CJ. Ornasetti’s more than likely been snatched. Here we are stickin’ our noses into a couple of killin’s that trail back to the assassination of JFK. The FBI’s got their noses up our asses, yours more than mine, thank God, and some stutterin’ Denver homicide cop’s got his up theirs. I’ve even heard that people in certain kinds of business and ah … fraternal organizations as far away as New Orleans are gettin’ antsy. So if we go anywhere, stickin’ our noses where they don’t belong, we go prepared.”
CJ scooped up a handful of additional ammo clips and set them on the floor before teasing a Kevlar vest out from beneath a clear plastic box filled with marbles.
“Whatta you got there?” asked Pinkie, staring at the box of marbles.
“My collection of jumbo shooters. Started collecting ’
em when I was six. Every one’s a proven sticker.”
Pinkie smiled. “You know, I had a few of them once myself. How come you keep ’em out here?”
“Because I don’t want them to mistakenly get mixed in with the antique store’s inventory and sold.”
“They’re that valuable?”
“Nope. Just that important.”
“That why you keep your Navy Cross out here too?” Pinkie asked, eyeing the box that contained the medal.
“Nope. I keep it and the M-16 out here to remind me that life can always turn more insane than it is.”
Pinkie shrugged. “Everybody’s gotta dance to their demons, I guess.”
CJ nodded, closed the top of the footlocker, snapped the combination lock shut, and slipped the footlocker back beneath the workbench. Looking at Pinkie, he asked, “What about the old guy out at the plant? Can we trust him?”
“Have for years.”
“But what about now?”
“We’ll just have to see.”
“You got a vest?” CJ asked, tucking his Kevlar vest under his arm.
“Got it on,” said Pinkie. “And an Uzi and a .44 Mag out in the car. The only thing we’ll need to pick up on our way out there are some potatoes.”
“What?” CJ asked, looking puzzled.
“Taters,” Pinkie said with a grin. “I’ll explain on the way.”
“Okay,” said CJ. “And by the way, I never figured you for a Boy Scout, Pinkie.”
It was Pinkie’s turn to look puzzled. “I wasn’t.”
“Well, if you weren’t, you sure as hell usurped their motto.” Smiling, he eyed the bulge of Pinkie’s protective vest.
“Oh, yeah? So what’s their motto?”
“‘Be prepared.’”
“Good one. Bein’ prepared is a damn sight better than bein’ dead. Let’s get the hell outta here,” said Pinkie, wondering what CJ would have to say about his preparation when he explained the reason for the potatoes.
As they headed for the door, CJ glanced back at the footlocker, hoping things weren’t about to turn Vietnam-style insane.
Chapter 30
Napper enjoyed sitting on a park bench and feeding the geese along the lakeshore in Denver’s City Park. It gave him the opportunity to enjoy a part of the Queen City he rarely had the chance to—and, of course, to play his special game with the geese. He’d watched the sun slow-dance its way west for better than an hour, and he’d almost emptied the bag of croutons he’d brought along to feed the geese.
He’d dealt with Ornasetti, who’d reluctantly, after twelve long hours, taken him up on his offer to start a new life, the only option the small-time Denver don had aside from a bullet to the head or a lethal injection. As soon as he was finished with the geese, Napper planned to drop in on Mario Satoni and offer him a similar deal. Pleased that he was set to tie up so many loose ends in less than thirty-six hours, it galled him, nonetheless, that he hadn’t been able to settle up with Satoni’s friend, the bail bondsman. When he’d asked for some additional time to deal with Floyd, however, he’d been told to stick with his primary objectives, Ornasetti and Satoni.
Disappointed that his respite in the park would soon end, he glanced around at the half-dozen geese that remained from what had once been a gaggle of close to twenty. He checked his stash of croutons and tried to determine which of the geese was the fattest and the least deserving of a snack. He’d just made his choice when his cell phone rang.
“Napper?” the caller asked hesitantly.
“Yeah.”
“It’s Arnie. I got a problem out here at the plant.”
“Spell it out, Arnie.”
“You know Pinkie Niedemeyer?”
“No, but I’ve heard of him.”
“He’s headed out here to take a look around.”
“He got a dump?”
“Nope. That’s why I called. He ain’t used us in years.”
Napper watched the geese start to walk away toward a boy who was tossing a Frisbee. “Wait a second, Arnie.” He flung all but the very last of his croutons at the geese, who made a U-turn and headed back toward him. “Okay.”
“So what should I do?”
“Let him look around. He knows the place, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah. But he’s got no reason to come out, and he’s gonna have somebody with him. I don’t like the idea of him bringin’ no guest out here, Napper.”
“Who’s he bringin’?” Napper’s eyes narrowed to a determined squint.
“He didn’t say.”
“How soon’s he comin’?”
“He said he’d be out before dark.”
Aware that no matter what the reason for Niedemeyer’s visit, it was more than likely Mario Satoni’s interest the skinny hit man truly had at heart, Napper said, “Wanna make a quick five hundred, Arnie?”
“How?”
“Help me set up Niedemeyer and that guest of his. Things are a little scrambled for me at the moment, and I don’t need anybody scramblin’ them up any more.”
“I don’t know, Napper. On whose orders?”
“Mine.”
“I might need clearance.”
“Then get it and call me right back.” Napper snapped his cell phone closed and mumbled, “Shit.” He hated waiting for clearance. It magnified the fact that he had to answer to someone. Clearances were for bureaucrats—courage for soldiers, he thought as he watched the boy who had distracted the geese walk away. Relieved that he’d be able to finish his game, he sprinkled his final half-dozen croutons down at his feet. As the geese encircled him, he shooed all but the fattest goose away. When that goose lumbered into range, he glanced around to make certain no one was looking, grabbed the goose by the neck, and wrung the forty-five-pound bird around so fast that anyone spotting the move would have realized it wasn’t a first-time maneuver. The goose kicked a few times before going limp.
He nudged the dead bird under the bench, retrieved a black trash-can liner bag from his pocket, snapped it open with a flip of his wrist, knelt, and rolled the goose into the bag. He looked around once again to make certain no one had seen him and smiled. As he tightened the drawstring on the trash bag, his cell phone rang. “Napper here,” he said, knotting the drawstring.
“We’ve got clearance,” Arnie said, his voice wavering.
“Good. I’m headed your way. I’m just finishing up with somethin’ right now. I’ll call you back to work out the logistics on my way there.”
“And don’t forget my money,” said Arnie, taking a swig from the bottle of Jim Beam in his quivering right hand.
“No chance.” Napper gripped the trash bag with one hand and snapped his cell phone closed with the other. As he walked toward his vehicle, he broke into a satisfied smile. He loved playing games that ended in death. Always had, even as a kid. It invariably gave him an erection, and sometimes his skin tingled for as long as five minutes after a kill. At that very second, in fact, he had the sense that hundreds of feathers were tickling every inch of his skin.
The goose felt a lot heavier to him than was typical, but it wasn’t until he weighed it on the scale in the bed of his truck that he realized it was seven pounds heavier than he’d guessed. As he left the park and headed for Brighton, he had the sense that he would be rewarded with another kill or two that evening. The human kind—and that kind of kill always elevated his excitement to the ejaculatory level.
Uncomfortable with the fact that Pinkie Niedemeyer had brought someone along with him, and even more upset that the man was black, Arnie DeVentis, following Napper’s directive, took fifteen minutes longer than was his custom in getting the particulars on CJ, whom Pinkie described as a “settlement agent” out of LA. He finally waved Pinkie’s SUV onto the abandoned sugar-beet factory’s thirty-acre grounds and closed the entry gate a half hour before twilight.
The abandoned plant had once been the largest and most productive of the Great Western Sugar Company’s Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana su
gar-beet factories. During the 1920s, the plants were said to have produced more sugar during their annual eighty-five-day fall refining season than the cane fields of Louisiana. The Brighton, Colorado, plant, originally built in 1916, just twenty-nine miles from downtown Denver, had ceased operations in 1967. In the years since, its once impressive six-story-tall red-brick main manufacturing building and adjacent massive filtering annex had gone to seed. All that remained behind the crumbling shell of the main building and annex, where ten cold-storage sugar-beet sheds with a storage capacity of eighty thousand tons, six pulp silos, and a mill pond fed by natural springs had once stood, was a four-story-tall silo, the dilapidated remains of three cold-storage sheds, and a dried-up pond.
Pinkie and CJ followed Arnie from the abandoned plant’s entry off state Highway 7 along the rutted road that led to what was left of the remaining structures in the burnt-orange glow of the impending sunset. As they pulled to a stop a mile from the highway in front of the four-foot-high remains of the brick-walled northeast corner of the main building, CJ leaned toward Pinkie and said, “Reminds you of what we left behind in ’Nam, don’t you think?”
“Does at that,” said Pinkie, drinking in the isolated landscape. He waited for Arnie, who’d parked his pickup five yards or so behind them, to walk up to his SUV before he rolled down his window.
“What do you wanna see?” Arnie asked, bending down and peering into the SUV to get a better look at CJ. His right arm shook as if he were a little bit nervous, and the smell of alcohol was evident on his breath.
“Thought we’d just take a look around the place,” said Pinkie. “Wanna introduce my friend to its possibilities.”
“Might as well start right here at the main building,” said Arnie. “Not much to it, as you can see. Then we can have a look at the silo, the storage sheds, and finally the slicer, if you’re up for it.” Arnie turned to CJ and smiled. “It’s a beet slicer left over from the factory’s production days. Got it set up in one of the sheds.”
“What do you use it for now?” asked CJ.
“For cuttin’ through anything the consistency of a sugar beet—taters, fruit—that sorta thing. Guess you could even get it to slice up human flesh, if you had a mind to.” Arnie snickered. The snicker quickly escalated to a raucous laugh. Taking a deep breath and exhaling a stale alcoholic fog in CJ’s face, Arnie said, “So do we take a look at things the way I suggested?”