Nick turned and looked at him, his regard stony. He wanted an actual, articulate answer.
“They cut out his eyes, tongue, and ears, laid them out on his back. Did the same to Caputo and Lenny.”
“Yes. Angie tells me you executed the plan today perfectly, that you worked out the way to do it and didn’t miss a beat.”
What was he supposed to answer? Explain the beats he’d missed? Take the victory lap? What?
“Keith died.”
“Yes. It’s a hard loss. Keith was with us a long time. He leaves people behind.”
Tony nodded, then remembered he was meant to speak. He said, “Yeah. He’s got a little boy.”
A flicker of emotion sparked in the don’s cold eyes. “I know. Angie.”
“Yeah, Nick?” Angie stood at Nick’s other side. The sleeves of his dress shirt were cuffed to his elbows, and the blue nitrile gloves on his hands were coated with blood, but there were few other signs on his person that he had tortured Bogdan Bondaruk for almost four hours.
The mark in question slumped naked from the heavy lifting hook. His toes barely skimmed the ground, but it didn’t matter; his legs wouldn’t have held him anyway. He’d lost consciousness some time ago. Blood still pumped weakly from his many wounds, the only sign of life left in him.
“I think we have all we need from this particular roach. Do you agree, Donnie?”
Donnie stood not far away. Like Nick, he was fully dressed and clean as a whistle. They could walk from here and head straight to Dominic’s for a late dinner. For all Tony knew, they would.
On the other hand, Tony could feel the dried blood cracking on his face and neck, and stiffening his hair. He hadn’t washed up yet, because he didn’t want to look in the mirror. Whatever had broken in his head while he stood frozen in that stairwell was rattling around, knocking against sore spots he hadn’t known he had.
“I agree,” Donnie answered. “He’s done.”
Nick turned again to Angie. “Buon lavoro, come sempre.” Without looking Tony’s way, he added, “Tony, I want you to finish this. I intend to send a message to Yuri Bondaruk in Ukraine. Do you know what I want?”
Tony understood that this was an important moment. The don was giving him this high-level kill, showing him his trust. Showing the others as well. Marking Tony to rise.
Ignoring the strange noise in his head, Tony thought through the conversation they’d just had, and the questions Bondaruk had been pressed with, the stilted answers he’d finally given.
“You want to send him to his father in pieces. Eyes, ears, tongue, for Bobbo and the others. His dick, for the photos they made of the women. His nose, for what they tried to pull today. Trigger finger, for what they planned to do in the future. And that ink on his chest, so Yuri knows for sure who it is.”
“Bene. But one more thing. None of that is lethal.”
“His heart.”
“Excellent. Take it all while he’s alive.” Nick looked across the room, where Mel stood at the ready. “Wake him up. I want him to feel it all.”
As Mel waved an ammonia ampule under Bondaruk’s swollen nose, Tony turned to the worktable. His legs stiff, but his hands somehow steady, he went to choose the tools that would give his don what he wanted.
~ 14 ~
Billy started her Monday the way she usually did: after a quick dawn surf, she showered and went to bed, sleeping until she woke naturally, a little after noon. She got some coffee and went to her office for about an hour to do some light paperwork—returned some emails, updated her calendar, reconciled some statements.
Even those simple tasks took longer than they should have. Her mind kept wandering to the weekend, and Tony. Her body, too—each thought of their encounter brought the powerful sensate recollection of his touch, his taste, his scent. The way their bodies collided and joined. A constant grapple between ferocity and calm, violence and gentleness.
Everything about him was wrong—he wasn’t merely a bad boy; he was a bad guy. A criminal, whose job it was to threaten and harm. And yet, that thought, that knowledge, had lost its fit in her mind. It floated, insubstantial, knocked this way and that by the emotions roiling through her memories of the weekend.
There was more to him. She saw it in the way he looked at her, felt it in his touch, even when he was controlling and aggressive. There was something real and compelling behind the imposing façade.
The line to the kitchen buzzed, kicking her out of her angsty fugue, and she answered. “Yep?”
Cain’s drawl rumbled through the speaker. “I’m throwing a patty on the grill. You want a burger?”
The day before, Billy had decided to give her father a set of keys to the back entrance, so he could come and go when he needed to. She had no good place for him to sleep inside—plenty of room upstairs, but no privacy, and she wasn’t giving her space up like that—but she was giving him another chance, so he ought to at least be able to use the bathroom and kitchen at will.
She’d felt some trepidation, giving him access to everything that was hers in the world. He’d betrayed her trust many times over the years. But he’d never been clean before, and one thing he never had done, among all the various betrayals and disappointments: he’d never stolen from her.
And it was nice, not to be roused from sleep or whatever she was doing, so he could come in and use the bathroom, or make himself something to eat.
“Burger sounds great. I’ll be down in ten or so.”
~oOo~
Despite his eternally vagabond lifestyle, or possibly because of it, Cain was a good and versatile cook. Billy came into a kitchen redolent with the aroma of well-seasoned meat on the grill. He’d already sliced slabs of white cheddar cheese, and had buns browning beside the meat. There was a tomato and a head of red lettuce sitting on the chopping board, so Billy grabbed a knife and sliced the tomato.
“I didn’t see much for a side. No frozen fries or nothing.”
“Amir doesn’t do frozen anything. He makes steak fries from scratch, when he does them at all. I have chips in the pantry, though.” She went into the pantry—a room, not a closet as in a regular house’s kitchen—and grabbed a bag of salt and vinegar chips. While she was there, she selected a couple bottles from a local natural soda company: black cherry for herself, and ginger ale for Cain. When she came back into the kitchen, Cain was plating the burgers. She filled glasses with ice, and they sat together at the staff table and had lunch. It was the third meal they’d shared in less than three days, and in more than five years.
“So this is your day off,” Cain said, after washing a bite down with soda. “What you got goin’ on?”
Billy shrugged. “I try not to fill my Mondays with much. I’ve got an appointment at the salon for my hair and nails, and I thought I’d go by the bookstore and browse around.”
He chuckled. “You and your books. From the time you were tiny, you loved your books. You know, you slept with them like other kids sleep with teddy bears.”
Billy made a noncommittal smile. She didn’t want to turn this conversation sour, but she didn’t like Cain to talk about those few brief years when he was actually her father, and they were actually a family. Beyond stories Allie—and, rarely and unpleasantly, Cain—told her, she had no memory of having two parents. He’d been gone before she was three years old.
“What do you have planned?” she asked, detouring the subject to safer ground.
“I’m meetin’ with a band in Providence. They’re looking for a lead guitar.”
“That sounds good.” He’d had a couple of leads since he’d reappeared in her life, but they hadn’t panned out yet. The question of letting him play at West Egg remained open; either answer scared Billy in ways she had to understand before she could choose. To Cain’s credit, he hadn’t pushed the point since he’d first asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. They sound like college kids. I don’t want to play babysitter—and I’d suck at it, anyway.” His chuckle was bleak, b
ut retained a flavor of true self-deprecating humor. “I’ve always been the one that needs a minder.”
Truer words had rarely been spoken. “You haven’t been clean very long. Do you think you could stand the temptation, being around all that?” Where there were bars, and bands, there were drugs. The whole menu, at the reach of an arm.
Setting the last half of his burger back on its plate, Cain pushed it away. “Truth is, I don’t know, Wild Bill. I just don’t know. But I got nothin’ else I can do. I’ve been earning a living with a guitar in my hands since I was seventeen. Not much of a living, most times, but it’s gotten me this far.”
Billy stared at the ice in her glass, watched bubbles of carbonation roll along the sides of ice cubes, ease up to the surface and break apart.
Lately, whenever a stark choice presented itself to her, she was most strongly pulled toward the riskiest option. Fall for the professional criminal. Offer the deadbeat junkie father a job.
“Maybe you could work here. I’ve been thinking I need an assistant manager, to cover full shifts.” The words came from her mouth, in her voice, but she could scarcely believe they were hers.
Cain studied her in silence, his features, his body, perfectly still. “You sure, baby girl?”
No. No, she was not. Not remotely. “Sure. We could try it. You’ve been around bars and nightclubs all your life. You know how they run. What you don’t know about West Egg, I can teach you. And I need help booking acts. That’s my chief weak spot, and I’m leaning too much on the same groups already. You have encyclopedic knowledge of the regional music scene and decades’ worth of contacts. You’d be a huge help in that regard.”
Was she honestly putting her entire future in the hands of a man who’d fucked up his own life spectacularly, and turned hers upside down over and over again?
What the hell had come over her?
Cain smiled. It started slowly and grew, the realization of her new trust breaking over him like a rising sun. “I won’t let you down, Billy. I promise you.”
One thing about Cain—he never made promises. He was, at least, self-aware, and honest about his shortcomings. Making this promise now meant he thought he could keep it.
“Okay. We’ll try.”
~oOo~
When Billy got back from her salon appointment, she spent the rest of the afternoon teaching her father about West Egg—the vibe she cultivated, the things she accepted and those she would not. He was already familiar with her staff, having spent time he’d been here buddying up with them all, and Billy was pleased to see that he’d already worked out how she scheduled shifts—who did what, who worked best with whom, who worked best when. At least that instinct had been right: Cain had spent a lifetime lurking at the margins of bars and clubs throughout a couple dozen states, one foot in the public spaces, one foot in the staff spaces, and he understood the key elements of how they ran.
For dinner, they walked down the boardwalk to get hot wieners. Billy loved the boardwalk. Childhood memories burst around her like fireworks. The scents of sun lotion—always Coppertone, though certainly other brands were in use—wafting over a panoply of carnival foods: burgers, pizza, hot wieners, stuffies, funnel cakes, cotton candy, kettle corn. The bells and whistles and electronic beeps of the arcade—and, a steady beat beneath those, the hollow clomp of Skee-Ball. Chatter and laughter. Tired children whining. The rattle and clatter of the rides. Neon lights and flashing bulbs. And just beyond it all, the steady, confident roar of the surf bringing in the tide, as if the ocean meant to remind the crush of people how insignificant they all truly were,. All of her best memories were of the Cove, of summers spent here.
But never before had she shared this with her father.
As they zigged and zagged through the throng of summer people, Cain caught her hand, tugging her out of the way of a cluster of rowdy teen boys, three of them running backward. She’d been watching kids in the arcade and hadn’t been watching where she was going any more than the boys had been.
It was strange, to have Cain’s hand around hers. When she glanced down to see, he let her go.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
They continued on to the hot wiener stand, walking side by side.
Once they had their meal and had carried their paper trays and bottles of water to a table recently vacated, Cain said, “You like it here.”
“I do. That shouldn’t be news.”
“It’s not. I never got it, I guess. I still don’t. To me, it’s just tacky tourist shit. But I see it now, how happy it makes you. You’ve had a smile on your face since we left the club.”
“Summers here were the only time I felt like I had a family. They all got along here, and I felt like I belonged.”
“Not everybody got along. They never let me belong. I was the bad seed that knocked up Elliott Bradford’s only daughter.”
“How hard did you really try, Cain? I don’t see you meeting the Bradfords halfway to anywhere.”
He grinned. “Nah, that’s true. I wanted Allie to cut ties. But your mom—”
“Stop right there. Don’t finish the thought.” Don’t talk about my mother. Tony’s voice rolled between her ears. She understood the protective impulse. Allie had been sort of a beautiful disaster, parenting-wise, but she’d been there, and she’d done her best. Moreover, Billy knew what Cain would have said. Her mother had always straddled two personalities, two competing versions of herself—the rebel who did what she wanted, and the trust-fund princess, Daddy’s little girl, who wanted the ease of wealth. Billy’s grandfather had given her mother just exactly enough leash to keep her balanced on that fence. Cain had tried to push her off.
“Sorry,” he conceded. “I just mean, I never got the appeal of this place, but I see how you love it, and it makes me like it, too.”
Billy smiled but didn’t answer. They ate in quiet for a few bites, letting the clamor of the boardwalk fill the space between them.
As Cain finished his wiener, he wadded up the paper and tossed the ball into his empty tray. “Can I ask you something, Billy?”
“Yeah.”
“You think you might sing with me sometime? Like we used to?”
Billy shook her head. “No. I don’t do that anymore.”
“You know, that video has almost a hundred thousand views. It’s only been up a couple weeks. You were great. Your voice is even better than it was. You’ve grown into it.”
She dropped the rest of her food and pushed the tray away. “Cain, no.”
He stared at her discarded meal. “Is it me? You don’t want to sing with me?”
“I don’t want to sing, period. I didn’t want to sing that night, and I damn sure don’t want to make a habit of it. I’m not the talent. I’m the owner.”
In truth, she hadn’t hated singing that night. It was a secret she’d keep to herself, but for most of the song, she’d been into it. What she did hate was how being on stage brought back a host of sour memories, things that had seemed good then, but were tainted by drugs and parental disappointments. Those memories needed to stay in the past.
Cain didn’t respond. Billy had nothing more to say. They sat at a rickety round picnic table near the beach end of the boardwalk, surrounded by flash and clamor, and sank into silence.
~oOo~
Cain took his leave of her when they got to club. He said good night and headed to his van, and Billy let him go. She went up to her loft, changed into comfy knit shorts and an old t-shirt, and spent the rest of the night reading Indiana, by George Sand.
Near midnight, the back door buzzer sounded, and Billy turned and glared at her desk, where the sound emanated. Cain had a key now. Had he forgotten?
Normally, the monitor showed the camera view as soon as the buzzer was pressed, but it sat there dark. She’d turned the monitor off earlier, moving things around on her desk, and obviously hadn’t turned it back on. She marked her place and set the book down. Before she could get up from her chair,
the buzzer sounded again. And again before she could cross the room and turn the monitor on.
Tony stood there, staring straight at the camera. The night-vision lens showed a distorted, dull, greenish-grey image, but something was odd in his look. She sensed it more than really saw it.
She activated the speaker. “Hi.”
“Let me in.”
Alarm bells pinged in her brain, but she didn’t know why. It wasn’t the first time he’d shown up just like this, and the last time he’d done so, they’d made a real connection. He hadn’t hurt her. In fact, he’d never hurt her. She’d stabbed him, but he had never actually hurt her.
Still, she stared at the screen, her finger on the key that kept the mic and speaker active, and felt fear. Or concern, at least.
“Are you okay?”
“Let me in, Billy. Let me in.”
Something was wrong. Or she was being paranoid. In any case, Tony was at her door, wanting in, and she wanted to let him. She was glad to see him. “I’m coming down.”
~oOo~
She hadn’t been paranoid. It was wrong at once.
As soon as she turned the last lock, Tony shoved the door open, making Billy stumble backward. He caught her in both hands and yanked her close, slamming her body to his, crashing his mouth onto hers, using her shocked gasp to shove his tongue into her mouth. His hands on her hurt, his fingers digging into her upper arms. His mouth on her hurt, his teeth grinding against her lips. And he smelled ... wrong, in some way. Foul, but not bad breath or body odor. Something beyond him, outside his body. He smelled ... like death.
She tried to get free, to push him off or writhe away, but he was pure force and fury, and she couldn’t even turn her head. When she tried, he bit down on her lip.
He walked forward, forcing her backward, until they crashed into the island. Now she was pinned, too, but then he changed his grip, going for her shorts—shit, he meant to fuck her like this, right now—and she used the brief moment of loosening to shove him back a little and bring her knee up. She didn’t have enough room for a good move, and he twisted out of her way before she could do more than drag her knee a few inches up his leg, but it at least caught a piece of his attention, and he released her mouth from the vise of his.
Accidental Evils Page 17