Blood in the Water

by Michael Prescott

  No body, no murder—that was Frank’s motto. Without a corpse, a murder prosecution was nearly impossible. So unless you wanted to send somebody a message, the corpse had to disappear. A drum was the easiest way.

  Along one line of shelves in the warehouse stood a row of 55-gallon steel drums. Together he and Rocca had upended one of them and rolled it over to the chair, where Belletiere was busy cutting Chang’s body loose. They stuffed the kid inside, headfirst, and stood the drum upright. Chang’s bare feet stuck up like flowers in a vase. Frank pushed them down, bending the corpse’s knees.

  Rocca and Belletiere handled the rest, while Frank returned Virgil to the office and fed him some chopped liver as a treat. By the time he came back, the drum had been filled with five bags’ worth of Sakrete instant concrete and water from a hose. The hose also proved useful in washing down the blood-flecked floor.

  The concrete would take twenty-four hours to set. At some point down the line, the drum’s lid would be sealed, and the whole thing would be trucked to a landfill, where it would join a million tons of garbage. And Tommy Chang would never be found.

  They had locked up the warehouse, and Frank had dispatched Rocca and Belletiere to collect Alec’s Porsche, because he didn’t want the local cops asking questions about it. What had happened after that was a fucking mystery. And he had to admit, it unnerved him a little. He’d been sure to pay his respects to Santa Muerte at his bedroom shrine before leaving the house.

  Jersey City was mostly without power, and the waterfront was a flooded mess. Luckily, Alec hadn’t lived on the water. The gate to the building’s underground garage stood open, presumably because it wouldn’t operate without electricity. No one was guarding the garage, so Frank drove in and found a dry spot to park. He could have parked on the street, but he preferred to keep the Mercedes out of sight. There was no telling exactly what was about to go down, and he didn’t need an eyewitness placing him at the scene.

  Ever since interrogating Tommy Chang, Frank had been recalling his conversation with Harry the doorman. One detail in particular kept coming back: Alec had gotten into a dispute with his neighbors. At the time Frank hadn’t asked for details, but he wanted the details now. A pissed-off neighbor with surplus disposable income might be just the person to hire a PI with a reputation as a triggerman.

  Frank took the Ruger from the gym bag, along with a screw-on silencer, slipping both into a pocket of his raincoat, then pulled on black gloves. It paid to be careful when there was trouble afoot.

  He found Harry at his post. The doorman was surprised to see him back so soon, and clearly uneasy about the look in Frank’s eyes. Maybe he’d seen the news. Maybe not. Frank didn’t give much of a shit either way.

  “Hey, Mr. Lazzaro. You just can’t stay away.”

  “Got an inquiry for you, Harry.” No small talk this time. “You said my nephew, he got into a situation with his downstairs neighbors?”

  “Uh, yeah. This have anything to do with why the police were snooping around?”

  “The police were here?”

  Harry nodded. “I had to give them access to Alec’s unit. They had a warrant,” he added defensively. “They weren’t there too long, though.”

  “They’re gone now?”

  “Left about a half hour ago.”

  That was lucky. Frank didn’t want to waste time dealing with the police. “You tell them anything about the neighbors?”

  “No sir.”

  “Tell me. Tell it all.”

  “Well, it happened a couple months ago. I don’t really know the details.”

  “Just tell me what you do fucking know.” Frank was in no mood for bullshit.

  “Uh, okay. It was the Wallings in number 1008. Well, Dr. Walling, anyway. I saw him and Alec get into it in the lobby once.”

  “A fight?”

  “Nah, just the two of them getting in each other’s face. Dr. Walling says Alec’s been making a lot of noise in his place and it’s coming right through the ceiling. He’s pretty hot about it. Then Alec leans in close and says something real quiet, and Walling backs off.”

  “This Walling sounds like a goddamn pussy.”

  “You know it. Your boy scared the shit out of him. He must’ve crapped his cotton Dockers.”

  “Did it go any further?”

  “I’m pretty sure the Wallings reported the noise situation to the condo board. A formal complaint, that kind of thing. You know, violation of the rules, lowering their unit’s resale value, blah blah blah.”

  “The board take action?”

  “They might have sent Alec a letter. No big deal.”

  “Other neighbors complain?”

  “Not that I know. Most of them—well, they know who Alec is. They’re smart enough not to make trouble.”

  “Yeah. But this Walling, he’s not so smart. What kind of doc is he, anyway?”

  “Aaron Walling? He’s an orthodontist. Married. No kids.”

  “They around now?”

  “The wife’s not. She went to Philly to get away from the storm. Hubby’s still in town. I saw him this morning … Um, why d’you ask?”

  “Not important.”

  Harry didn’t seem to like where this was going. He tried to pull in the reins. “I don’t think it amounted to anything, Mr. Lazzaro. You know, just a little dustup between neighbors. Happens every day.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  Frank returned to the garage, thinking hard. It seemed incredible that anybody would put Alec out of commission on account of a fucking noise complaint. But there could have been more to it. Who knew what Alec had said to this clown Walling, what kind of threats he’d made? Anything was possible.

  Walling could have hired Parker—or the whole scenario could be wrong. Frank still didn’t know. But there might be a way to find out.

  From his time as owner of Alec’s condo, he knew that residents garaged their vehicles in assigned spaces, and the numbers of the spaces corresponded to the unit numbers. Walling would park in space 1008. Frank checked it out. A black BMW was sitting there.

  Okay, it was a safe bet Walling was home, which made sense, since who would be out and about on the day after a hurricane? The whole Eastern Seaboard was a fucking disaster area.

  Back in his Mercedes, Frank found the SIM card he’d salvaged from Alec’s cell phone. He took a throwaway cell from his glovebox, tossed the SIM card that came with it, and installed Alec’s. Now the throwaway was a clone of his nephew’s phone, and when he made a call, Alec’s name would show up on caller ID.

  From an online directory he obtained Aaron Walling’s home number. Smiling fiercely, he punched it in.

  Walling’s phone rang five times—long enough, Frank estimated, for Walling to have lifted the handset and seen the caller’s name.

  Six rings, seven. It would go to voicemail if the son of a bitch didn’t pick up soon. If the guy had been really spooked by Alec, there was a chance he would be too much of a wuss to take the call.

  Frank had almost resigned himself to failure when he heard a click and a strangely hesitant, rather throaty, “Hello?”

  Though he was no mimic, Frank believed he could match his nephew’s voice well enough for a word or two.

  “This is Alec Dante,” he said, pitching his voice an octave higher than normal. Alec had been a tenor, a pretty good one. Frank had heard him do “Ave Maria.”

  Walling’s response was deeply satisfying. There was a sibilant intake of breath, then the beginning of a reply—just one stammered syllable: “Wha—wha …”

  It was all Frank needed to hear. He ended the call.

  The guy’s reaction was as good as a confession. He should have had no way of knowing that Alec was dead, yet he’d sounded just like a man who’d been tapped on the shoulder by a ghost.

  The little ass-suck was behind it, all right. He’d had Alec killed—because of the loud parties, or for some other reason.

  And he hadn’t even had the stones to do it himself. He
’d hired Parker. A woman, for Christ’s sake. What kind of man hired a fucking cooch to do his dirty work? What the hell was he made of?

  Frank intended to get an answer to that question. He intended to open up Aaron Walling and see just what was inside. After which, he would pay a visit to the crazy bitch gunslinger who’d offed his nephew.

  Then things would get really interesting.

  CHAPTER 24

  “He’s alive.”

  The voice on the line belonged to Aaron Walling, but fear had made it almost unrecognizable.

  “Aaron?” Bonnie pushed aside the pile of photocopies Bradley Walsh had given her, and pressed her cell closer to her ear. “What are you talking about?”

  The phone—the special burner she’d used exclusively on the Dante case, a phone that couldn’t be traced to her—had started chiming just seconds ago as she sat at her desk, reviewing the early portions of Dan Maguire’s investigation.

  She’d known it was Aaron calling; no one else had the number. But she couldn’t imagine what he wanted, and she wasn’t prepared for what she heard now.

  “Dante,” Walling said, the word crackling with terror. “He’s alive.”

  She flashed on a memory of a body adrift in a widening circle of blood.

  “He’s not,” she said. “Trust me.”

  “He just called. He called me on the fucking phone.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Don’t tell me what’s not fucking possible. The phone rang, and caller ID showed his name. His name. And when I picked up, it was him. ‘This is Alec Dante’—that’s what he said.”

  Without thinking, she spun her desk chair to face the window. It was an automatic reaction. Suddenly the room was too small, the walls too close. She felt confined. She couldn’t breathe.

  “It wasn’t him,” Bonnie said slowly. “Someone’s playing games.”

  “Games? You call this a fucking game?”

  “Aaron, calm down. You’re okay. You’re in Philly, right? At a hotel or something? No one can find you there.”

  “I’m not at a hotel. I’m not in Philly. I never got away.”

  “Oh.” Definitely not what she’d wanted to hear. “What happened?”

  “I had to stay late at work. Last-minute stuff. By the time I closed up, it was too late to start for Philadelphia. The weather was already bad. So I decided to ride out the storm at the condo.”

  “How about Rachel?”

  “She got away. I told her to go without me.”

  “All right, Aaron. I want you to listen to me.”

  Lazzaro must have put it together. It was the only explanation. How he’d done it, she couldn’t imagine. It almost gave credence to Victoria’s claim that her husband had supernatural powers.

  Whether by black magic or by other means, Frank had made the connection to Walling and used his nephew’s phone to place a call to Walling.

  “Aaron, did he call your cell or your landline?”

  “Landline. The phones are still working, even with the power out.”

  That was bad. It meant Frank knew Walling was at home.

  “Okay. Here’s what I want you to do. Leave your condo and get out of town. Do it now. Don’t stop to pack. Take the back stairs to the garage. Try not to let anyone see you—”

  “What the hell is this? What do you think is going on?”

  “I don’t know. But if somebody’s on to us, you need to get to Philly and hole up there.”

  He was hyperventilating into the phone like a prank caller, his breath fast and shallow. “What I need to do is call the police.”

  “That’s not an option, Aaron. You know that.”

  “It’s all gone to shit, Christ, all gone to shit …”

  He would pass out if this went on. Or he would call 911 or do something equally stupid.

  “Aaron,” Bonnie snapped. “For fuck’s sake, get it together.”

  She might not be much good at giving comfort, but she knew how to slap somebody out of a panic attack.

  She heard him rein in his breath. “Right. Right.”

  “Now listen. The two of us need to get together face to face so we can talk things out. I’ll fill you in on what’s happening. You know any place where we can meet halfway?”

  She could have suggested a location, but she needed to get him thinking. Fear was funny that way; if you could distract yourself, you’d forget you were afraid.

  “Umm … there’s a hotel in Edison that’s running on a generator. A friend of mine called last night to tell me about it.”

  “Good. What hotel?”

  “The Sheraton. At Raritan Center. You know it?”

  “Sure,” she said. She didn’t, but she could find it. “Go there. Wait in the lobby. I’ll get to you as soon as I can. Hopefully by noon. Got it?”

  “Right. Okay,” his voice was starting to break up again as fear crept back in. “Shit, this was a mistake, such a big mistake. I never should’ve done this—”

  She didn’t have time for regrets, and neither did he. “Quit dicking around and get out of there. And don’t stop for anything. You hear me? Aaron?”

  No answer. He wasn’t there.

  She couldn’t be sure if he’d hung up or if the call had been dropped. It didn’t matter. He knew what he had to do. And so did she.

  And so, apparently, did Frank Lazzaro. That was the thing that had her scared.

  CHAPTER 25

  Aaron Walling was in his bedroom, a suitcase open on the bed, a mess of clothes and toiletries scattered everywhere. Bonnie Parker had told him not to take the time to pack, but he couldn’t go without a change of clothes and his laptop and other essentials. There was no telling how long he would be away.

  The sheer weight of what had happened, the magnitude of what he had set in motion, pressed down on him like an avalanche. He was a murderer. Maybe not personally, maybe he hadn’t pulled the trigger himself, but he’d ordered it done and paid for it. He had violated one of the Ten Commandments; he could never remember which one. If there was a hell, he was going to it. Probably there wasn’t. Even so, the rest of his life would be different now. He had a secret, and he would have to carry it to the end of his days.

  Weird how his strongest impulse right now was to tell somebody. To drive straight to the nearest police station and confess all. He felt an almost irresistible compulsion to talk and talk and talk until everything had been said and it was out in the open and he could feel clean again.

  He wouldn’t, of course. He would be betraying Parker, who had only done what he’d asked. More important, he was a coward. He knew that about himself. Long ago he had come to terms with it. He even took a certain perverse pride in it. He understood his limitations. He was not going to consign himself to prison merely to clear his conscience. Guilt was an abstraction, and a steel cage was very real.

  He wouldn’t talk. But he would know. For the rest of his life, he would know.

  Strange how things had worked out. He’d considered every possible consequence of his choice to hire an assassin, except the one that mattered most.

  An insistent knocking sound interrupted his thoughts. It came from the front of the apartment. Someone was at the door.

  He wouldn’t answer. He would just sit tight until whoever it was went away. That was the intelligent move.

  But suppose the person picked the lock, or had a master key, or just broke down the door. What then?

  He had to know who was there. A remote, superstitious part of him actually pictured Alec Dante, dead but alive, standing at the door with a decomposing face and a red grin like a smear of blood.

  He left the bedroom, approached the front door, and dared a look through the peephole. The face that greeted him in the fisheye lens belonged to Harry the doorman.

  Aaron let out a slow breath. He trusted Harry.

  Still, he wasn’t ready to open up. The man didn’t look quite right. He seemed nervous, flushed.

  “What is it?” Aaron called o
ut.

  “Dr. Walling? It’s Harry. We—we have a situation here.”

  “What sort of situation?”

  “The police caught a man breaking into your car in the garage. He had the keys to your upstairs neighbor’s unit. Now he’s making some pretty wild accusations against you.”

  “Accusations?”

  “You’d better come with me, sir. The cops want to talk to you.”

  Oh Christ. This was the worst possible development. Whoever had called him was in police custody, and there was no telling how much he knew or what he could prove.

  These thoughts crowded his mind in the two seconds it took him to open the door. His hands were shaking, and he found it difficult to get a grip on the knob. With effort he pulled the door wide, and Harry was there.

  Behind him stood another man. A big man, a stranger, in a buttoned-up raincoat and black gloves.

  Aaron just had time to take in the possible implications of this fact, and then the stranger bulled his way forward, ramrodding Harry through the doorway. The doorman blundered into Aaron, and both of them went down in a pile. The door slammed, and the big man was standing over them, and Harry was begging.

  “I did what you said, Frank. I did what you said.”

  “You sure did, Harry.”

  The man named Frank raised his arm, and Aaron saw a long-barreled gun in his hand. It was the first time in his life that he’d seen an actual gun—not an image on a screen, but the genuine article.

  “You and me, we’re friends, Frank.” Harry’s voice broke with a sob. “Friends.”

  Frank nodded. “That’s why I’m making it easy on you.”

  There was a pop like a champagne cork bursting free, and sudden hot stickiness everywhere.

  Harry the doorman slumped across Aaron’s chest, a dead weight. His head was an exploded melon. Aaron heard a hiss that was a strangled scream begin to claw its way out of his throat.

  The man called Frank swatted him with the gun, as casually as he might have swatted a bug. “Shut the fuck up.”

  The gun lowered, and the man slowly unscrewed the barrel, which was not a barrel after all, but a silencer or something. The kind of thing a professional killer used. And a professional would leave no witnesses.