“He probably deserved it,” Des said.
“Yeah, I think he did. But I haven’t told you what his deal was, so you don’t really know.”
“Okay. What was his deal?”
She wasn’t sure he really wanted to know. He didn’t sound too enthusiastic about it. But she wanted to tell him. Wanted to justify herself, she guessed.
“The client approached me about three weeks ago. Not too long after I came clean with you about what I really do. This was my first case since then. I mean, my first …”
“I got it.” He sounded tense. She wondered if sharing the story was a good idea. Oh hell, she was committed now.
“He had medical records and a police report. His wife had been raped. The police report said it happened on a PATH train, late at night. Some vagrant. But, he says, that’s not the real story. They made it up because they had to file a report when they got medical attention. The truth is, the wife was raped in the elevator of their condo building, and the rapist was their upstairs neighbor.”
“Why all the deception?” Des had turned his head away, but at least he was asking questions. She took that as a positive.
“Because they’re terrified of the guy. He’s a psycho. And the rumor is, he’s mobbed up. Everyone’s afraid of him.”
“Even so—”
“You haven’t heard it all. In the elevator the guy made threats. He told the wife that if anyone found out, his relatives would see to it that both her and her hubby stopped breathing. And the cops wouldn’t be able to protect them. Then he zipped up his pants and went on his way.”
She remembered how Aaron Walling’s voice shook as he delivered the details. Alec Dante had stopped the elevator between floors and raped Rachel Walling against the wall, then held a knife to her throat and whispered in her ear.
You know who my uncle is? Frank Lazzaro. Name mean anything to you? Look it up, bitch. He fucking owns this city. Talk to the cops, and he’ll know. Talk to the building management, he’ll know. Talk to anybody, and you’re dead. You and the good doctor. Dead.
He’d nicked her with the blade for emphasis, drawing a single teardrop of blood.
“Sounds like a real charmer.” Des’s voice was low and bitter.
“Yeah, he’s a regular Don Juan. He made it clear that if they went to the cops, they’d be asking for a mob hit. So the husband came to me.”
“How’d he even know about you?”
“That’s a question I never ask. It’s not like I can advertise on Craigslist. Somehow word gets around.”
“Could you be sure he was telling the truth? Maybe he was, you know, setting up this other guy for some reason.”
“You have a suspicious mind, Des. I like that. Truth is, I wasn’t completely convinced, even though I saw the medical file. And as you know, I won’t whack just anybody. I’ve got standards. So I looked into it, did my own research. It’s what they called due diligence.”
“And it checked out?”
“Oh yeah. The guy’s a loser from way back. His rap sheet could be a friggin’ miniseries. Bar fights, sexual assaults, reckless driving—drag racing or some shit. Drugs too. The works. He was a human hand grenade, and it didn’t take much to pull the pin.”
“Why wasn’t he in jail?”
“Good lawyers, supplied by his relatives.”
“He really was mob-connected?”
“Yeah. Not in the organization, but looked after, taken care of. I think this guy was too unstable for them to actually use. Think about that. Too unstable for La Cosa Nostra. Anyway, he did the deed, all right. It would be doing the world a solid to take him out. And I was in a charitable mood.”
“Did the wife know? About you, I mean?”
“No, hubby was keeping it on the down-low. He didn’t want his wife in on it. Which was fine by me. That’s one less person who might be tempted to blab.” She took a breath. “So … you still think he probably deserved it?”
He turned to her. She wasn’t sure, but she thought he was smiling. “There’s no ‘probably’ about it.”
It was what she’d needed to hear. Until this moment, she hadn’t realized just how badly she needed it.
“Hold me,” she whispered, surprised by the urgency of her voice. “Just hold me, Des.”
He held her in the dark, and the storm raged.
CHAPTER 13
Frank’s cell phone rang at ten o’clock, giving him the news he’d been waiting for. A couple of his guys had picked up one of the Long Fong Boyz. The young man in question was currently being detained in an industrial distribution warehouse in the Heights district at the north end of Jersey City.
“What’s this all about, Frank?” the caller, a none-too-bright goombah named Belletiere, inquired in a wheedling tone.
“Never mind about that. It’s something personal. Just hold him there and wait for me.”
Frank left Victoria sitting up with the twins, who were restless tonight, disturbed by the storm. He made it from his home to the warehouse in twenty minutes, shooting through rainswept intersections with dead traffic signals, laying his fist on the horn.
Belletiere’s partner, Jimmy Rocca—known to all as Firehose, an only slightly exaggerated tribute to a portion of his anatomy—stood in the doorway of the big brick building, partly shielded from the hard downpour. Frank took a moment to confirm that no one had seen his guys make the snatch.
“Nah, we did it clean. You know the alley, runs behind Golden Duck?” Golden Duck was a Chinese restaurant that doubled as a gang hangout. “We was watching it. Hour ago, one of the assholes comes out to take a piss. They do that when the toilet backs up.”
“Remind me never to eat there.”
“The kid was tweaking on something, all fucked up. We grab him with his dick in his hand before he can say boo. Bundle him into the Caddy’s trunk and bring him here.”
Rocca was smarter than his partner, and he didn’t ask what was up. He knew Frank would tell him if he needed to know.
Before long, it might be necessary. The Long Fong Boyz, having hit Alec, would be expecting retaliation. But Frank didn’t want to escalate the situation any sooner than he had to.
He’d spent the past few hours mapping strategies for a gang war. Going to the mattresses, the old-timers would call it. Like in The Godfather.
Frank hadn’t seen street combat in years. He was looking forward to it. But there was no need to rush into things. First he had to have a little talk with a kid who’d chosen the worst possible place and time to take a pee.
He and Rocca went in the front way, through a security door—bullet-resistant, fabricated of 16-gauge steel with a 10-gauge armor plate welded inside. The door opened onto a small lobby with an office at the far end. Right before the office there was a doorway to the main room of the warehouse, a single windowless space two stories high. The place was fucking huge. What was the word? Cavernous. It was also pretty empty just now. The storm had indefinitely delayed Frank’s latest shipments, leaving the rows of shelves and yards of poured concrete floor ominously bare.
At the far end, Belletiere loitered by the Cadillac, parked near the freight door. He and Rocca had driven inside and shut themselves in before hauling their prisoner out of the trunk.
The power was out, of course. It was out almost everywhere. The two goombahs must have raised and lowered the freight door by hand. Around the warehouse they’d set up a few kerosene lanterns, which threw big wavering shadows on the towering ladders that ran on rails along the shelves. Outside, the rain hammered and the wind made ghost-story sounds.
In the center of the room sat a small, solitary figure, a solo actor on a giant stage.
Tommy Chang had been stripped naked and duct-taped to a straightback chair, his arms secured to the armrests. Tattoos crawled all over his body. Columns of Chinese characters ran down his neck. Dragons growled from his chest and thighs. Buddha scowled out of Tommy’s six-pack abs, frowning harder whenever the kid sucked in a breath. Gang tats, spel
l tats—powerful mojo. Every drop of ink was black, without a touch of color, except for the blood red face of an evil chink sorcerer riding Tommy’s shoulder like a bearded gnome.
Ugly shit. Fucking primitive, tribal. Sometimes Frank felt like civilization was being overrun by zoo animals.
The kid was scared, obviously. Whatever he’d huffed, snorted, or mainlined had lost its effect, and he was lucid enough to know he was in some real pretty shit. His skin, oiled with sweat, glistened in the overhead light. His bare feet bumped restlessly on the floor.
But he tried playing it cool as Frank walked up to him. “So here he is, the big fuckin’ man. What you gonna do to me, Guido? Gonna fuck me up, pizza boy?”
“Something like that,” Frank said quietly.
“Bring it. Play your fuckin’ games. I got nothin’ to say, so fuck you.”
Frank had heard it all before. He leaned over Tommy, studying his hands. Even the kid’s fingers were tattooed; miniature skulls glared up from his knuckles.
“Nice art,” Frank said. “But mine’s got more power.”
Loosening his necktie, he withdrew a necklace from inside his shirt and let it dangle like a hypnotist’s watch before Tommy’s face. Hanging from the chain was a small gold ring engraved with the image of Santa Muerte.
Tommy seemed to know that image, or maybe he merely sensed its meaning. A shudder moved through him. But his voice was steady when he said, “Eat shit.”
Frank smiled. “I already had dinner. But I know somebody who hasn’t.” He nodded to his guys. “Bring out Virgil.”
Belletiere went through a side door into the office. He didn’t look happy. Him and Virgil, they didn’t get along so good. And like most people, he hated rats.
Rats had a bad rep, in Frank’s opinion. It was because of that plague shit. Hell, everybody was diseased in the fucking Dark Ages. There was no reason to single out rodents for abuse.
Frank liked rats, and he liked them mean. There was nothing meaner than a damn wharf rat. Every so often, he set traps down by the docks, cages that would snare the greedy creatures without harming them. They were good and frantic by the time he picked them up—he always did the job personally—and his practiced eye could judge right away which ones had the true killer spirit. The weaklings and layabouts he drowned. The fighters went into the ring.
The ring was an arena of sorts, an oval of sand fenced in by chicken wire, in the cellar of a dry-cleaning establishment in which Frank had a half interest. The ring was where Frank sicced his rats on each other in paired match-ups, fights to the death.
As a kid he’d gotten his start with rat fights. The venue was a shuttered bowling alley on 16th Street near the projects where he grew up. On a nightly basis he attracted a respectable crowd—respectable in size, if not in other in any other way. Wagering was done. Frank charged an admission fee; later he garnered greater profits by participating in the betting, typically with the help of a proxy who placed bets for him. He improved his odds by rigging the matches, dosing a long-shot contestant with PCP to make him especially savage, or weakening the favorite with a nonlethal swallow of warfarin. It was his first business venture and, in terms of his percentage of profit, still one of his most lucrative; outlay was minimal, and there was no limit on the return.
Frank didn’t arrange rat fights for spectators anymore. It was too small-time. But he still enjoyed watching the animals go at it, so he staged fights for himself. The contrasts were a Darwinian competition, a vivid illustration of survival of the fittest. Frank knew about that stuff. He’d made it through the eighth grade, even if at sixteen he’d been the oldest kid in his class. When he wasn’t busy sneaking blow jobs from whores in training in the girls’ bathroom, or running a numbers game in the neighborhood, or catching and exhibiting his rats, he learned about electron shells and George Washington, isosceles triangles and The Catcher in the Rye, and Darwin. A lot of that shit didn’t stick with him any longer than the next test, if even that long, but Darwin made an impression. It felt true. It matched what he’d seen for himself. The earth belonged to those who would claw and tear and kill and never fucking quit. That old line about the meek inheriting the earth was just a con, a way to soften up the marks so they’d offer their throats to the knife. The meek inherited nothing. They didn’t even merit respect, and without respect, a man was so much garbage. And respect was always grounded in fear.
Frank might not have been exactly an A student, but that was one lesson he’d learned well.
In the rat fights, the weaker and more cowardly specimens were inevitably weeded out, until only the strongest were left. The survivors of many fights were something akin to super-rats, small miracles of ferocity and cunning. They made your average rat, even your average wharf rat, look like a fucking Chihuahua. And at the moment, the best of them was Virgil.
Belletiere brought out Virgil from the office, where he lived in regal isolation from the other rodents. Being a superstar had its perks. Virgil dined on raw ribeye steak and liver pâté. After each victory, he was allowed a sip of champagne.
But for all that, he wasn’t going soft. He was huge, nearly two feet long from nose to tail, a giant among rats, weighing in at a hefty two pounds. His coarse brown fur was streaked with gray, and his evil eyes always spoiling for a fight. Even now he was scrabbling at the bars of his cage as Belletiere carried it by its handle. Belletiere looked nervous. So did Tommy Chang.
The kid squirmed like crazy when Belletiere and Rocca pulled up a crate and set the cage on top, directly abutting the left armrest. Virgil shifted restlessly inside. A low metallic clanking could be heard, the sound of a chain that ran from a harness around his neck to a spindle at the back of the cage, controlled by a hand crank outside the bars.
Tommy Chang was taking in all this, but the bewildered expression on his face suggested he didn’t quite get the picture. Frank could have explained, but he’d never been real big on speeches. Anyway, a demonstration would be more effective.
“Do it,” he said.
Rocca lifted the cage door. Belletiere turned the crank, unspooling the chain.
Virgil, straining at his leash, emerged from the cage. The rat’s black-button eyes were fixed on Tommy’s hand, trapped on the armrest, secured with multiple turns of duct tape. Another creature might have hesitated to attack larger prey. Virgil would never have survived his many bouts in the ring if he’d been capable of fear. For him, there was no hesitation.
He set to work on Tommy’s fingers, biting and gnawing voraciously, reducing the tattooed knuckles to knobs of bleeding flesh.
CHAPTER 14
Shortly after ten at night, Bonnie woke up with a plan.
Alec Dante’s Porsche was an awfully expensive set of wheels to park in a crime-ridden shit hole like Greenville. He had done his best to minimize the chances of having the car stripped or swiped by leaving it in the same multistory parking structure where Bonnie had parked. On her way out, she’d tossed her ticket stub into the backseat with the rest of the litter.
This simple fact gave her an idea.
The ticket was stamped with the time and date. She could plant the stub in Dante’s car, then hope the police checked out the cottage to see why the owner’s vehicle had remained there during the storm. They would find Dante’s body in the cellar and the ticket stub in the Porsche; the ticket would place him near Crossgate Gardens on the night of Joey Huang’s murder. With any luck they would make the connection and pin Dante’s murder on the Long Fong Boyz.
Bonnie didn’t care about that. What mattered was that word about Dante was sure to get out, either officially or through backchannels. With any luck, the Boyz would learn that he looked good for the hit on Huang, and maybe, just maybe, a certain small-town PI would be off the hook.
It could work. She only had to hope the police would be smart enough to put it together. She didn’t have much confidence in the investigative smarts of the authorities, but if she laid it out nice and obvious, even the dumbest law
man ought to catch on.
She was throwing on her clothes when Des opened his eyes, squinting in the dark.
“Running out on me?” he asked. She couldn’t tell if it was a joke.
“Something I need to do. I may be gone awhile.”
“Gone where?”
“Devil’s Hook.” She adjusted the cloche on her head.
“You can’t go out in this weather.”
“Sure I can. I’m crazy, Des. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
“You’ll never make it. The roads are a mess, and according to the radio the island’s been sealed off to traffic. Half of it’s probably underwater by now.”
“Hey, if it was easy, women ’n’ children would be doing it.” She’d picked up that expression somewhere, and kinda liked it.
She leaned over and kissed him, noticing a faint stubble on his cheek. Never before had she seen him less than perfectly groomed.
“Keep the bed warm,” she said in what she hoped was a voice of seduction. “I’ll be back.”
His voice stopped her at the bedroom door. “Why Devil’s Hook?”
“I’m dropping in on a friend. He won’t know it, though.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause he’s the one I killed.”
Rain was falling heavily as she left the house and ran to the Jeep. Des’s one-car garage was occupied by his handicap van, so she’d had to park in the driveway, leaving the Jeep exposed to the elements. She was relieved to see that no debris had landed on it, though a couple of walnut trees had come down across the street.
Climbing in, she rooted around in the backseat litter until she found the ticket stub, half hidden among fast food cartons and empty water bottles. At least it hadn’t gone into a trashcan. Sometimes being a slob paid off.
She settled into the driver’s seat. The Jeep’s fuel gauge showed more than half a tank—a good thing, since finding a working gas station might be tricky for a while. The power outage was predicted to last a week or more. People always said they wanted to go back to nature. It seemed like nature was taking them at their word.
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