“Don’t hurt me.” Aaron’s voice was small and pleading. It scared him because it was the voice of someone who had already lost, someone with no hope and no chance.
Frank put the gun and the silencer into a pocket of his raincoat, then kicked the doorman, rolling the body roughly off Aaron. It was sickening to see the boneless sprawl of the dead man’s limbs. Had Alec Dante flopped like that after Parker shot him, like a stuffed dummy, a rag doll …?
Another kick, this one directed at Aaron’s rib cage.
“Up.”
“Who are you?”
“Up.”
There was something awful in the calm implacability of the man. He seemed to be playing a part he had enacted many times before, always with the same outcome.
Aaron found the strength to struggle to his knees. The big man grabbed him by the collar and assisted him to a standing position.
“Bathroom,” he said.
Aaron didn’t understand. “You want to use the bathroom?”
“Go into the bathroom,” the man named Frank explained with frightening patience.
Aaron wanted to ask why, but he was afraid of the answer, and anyway his throat was seizing up on him and if he tried to force out any more words, he just might be sick.
He stumbled through the condo and found the bathroom. The room was windowless and, with the power off, nearly dark. Frank sat him down on the toilet and leaned over him, producing a flashlight from another pocket of his coat. The light burned into Aaron’s vision, dazzling, blinding, and even when it went away he could see nothing but a blue haze.
With a thump Frank set down the flashlight on the sink, where the glow painted the bathroom walls and reflected off the mirrored doors of the medicine cabinet. He still hadn’t removed his raincoat or even unbuttoned it.
“You had Alec Dante killed,” Frank said.
Aaron didn’t answer, merely shivered all over while the bile rose higher in his throat.
“Alec was my nephew.” The flashlight’s glare lit his face from below like a Halloween mask. “I take shit like this real serious.”
Aaron had to say something now, summon some kind of excuse or explanation or defense. He opened his mouth and tried to speak, and a rush of vertigo overcame him, dropping his head between his knees. He threw up.
When he raised his head, Frank was looking down at him and smiling.
“Figured you was gonna do that. That’s why you’re in the bathroom. No point messing up the carpet any more than it already is.”
Aaron wiped his mouth, tasting acid.
“Plus,” Frank added, “this room don’t share any walls with the neighbors. Just in case any of ’em are around.”
“They’re not,” Aaron whispered, then wondered why the hell he’d said that.
“Good to hear. You hired Parker.” It was not a question.
“You—you know about that?”
The big man smiled. “I know a lot of things.”
Aaron saw a chance. A small chance, a desperate chance, but a chance. “I hired her, but I didn’t know she would kill him. I only asked her to talk to him, that’s all. I swear.”
“Shut your yap.”
“It’s true. She’s a loose cannon. She’s crazy. She went off on her own. I had nothing to do with–”
Frank’s gloved hand caught him hard across the face. “Shut it.”
Aaron fell silent.
“Why’d you do it?” the man asked.
“He—he raped my wife.”
“Yeah? Harry said your beef was about noisy parties and property values.”
“No. No, it wasn’t that. He attacked her in an elevator. He held a knife to her throat.”
“Well, that’s the kind of thing a husband has a right to resent.”
Aaron experienced a moment of relief. This man understood. But the relief faded when he head Frank’s next words.
“It won’t help you, though.”
“But you said—”
“Fuck what I said. You killed a member of my family. He was my blood. You get that? My blood.”
Aaron didn’t like hearing that word. It seemed to speak to his future.
“Now you’re going to get in touch with Parker,” Frank said, “arrange a meeting.”
“I … I already did.”
“What?”
“I just called her. We agreed to meet at noon.”
“Where?”
Aaron knew it was a death sentence for Bonnie Parker if he told. But somehow he couldn’t let himself think about that.
“The Sheraton in Edison. They’re running on emergency power,” he added pointlessly.
“Where in the Sheraton?”
“The lobby.”
“What does she look like? Describe her.”
“Take me there, and I can point her out to you.”
The hand came up, and Aaron’s skull rang with another slap. “Tell me.”
“She’s blond. Pretty. In her twenties. Average height. Trim. She, uh, I don’t know. She wears a hat usually. She likes hats.”
Frank shut his eyes momentarily as if painting himself a picture. “Blond girl in a hat. Got it.”
The toilet seat was cold. The room smelled of disinfectant. Aaron didn’t want to die here, in the room where he came to take a crap. It was so … undignified.
“Please let me go,” he breathed. “I have a wife.”
“What the fuck do I care?”
“I never meant for any of this to happen. Really.”
“You’re a shitty liar, Dr. Walling. It’s doctor, right? You’re a, whatchamacallit, orthodontist.” He put the accent on the first syllable.
“Yes.”
“You work on teeth.”
Aaron nodded.
Frank reached into his coat pocket and brought out something small and metallic. Blinking in the flashlight’s glow, Aaron identified the thing as a pair of pliers.
Frank tapped the pliers slowly against his open palm.
“Me too,” he said.
CHAPTER 26
On Main Street in Brighton Cove, a pair of handymen were taking down plywood planks from the storefront windows of Luminaire. Bradley Walsh surveyed the gallery from outside and saw no obvious damage. But it wouldn’t hurt to check with the owner, and he knew the guy was there. His special van, the handicap-accessible kind, was parked out front.
He found Desmond Harris inside, taking photos of a large water stain that had discolored a corner of the showroom wall. Harris looked up from his wheelchair and gave Bradley a friendly nod.
“Hey,” Bradley said, “how’s it going?”
“Could be better. Of course, it could also be a whole lot worse.”
“I hear that.” Bradley pointed at the stain. “This the worst of it?”
“Far as I can tell.”
“You didn’t lose any of the art?”
“Nope.”
“Lucky.”
“Yeah.”
Bradley did his best not to stare at the guy. He’d never been up close to Harris before. He’d always had the idea that the guy was sort of a dweeb—you know, him being an artist and all. But the truth was, Harris was pretty damn cut, at least as far as his upper body was concerned. From the waist up, he could have passed for a goddamn Navy SEAL. Bradley wasn’t necessarily too happy about that.
He poked around the showroom, searching for something to say. “So, uh, what do you call this stuff anyway? Modernistic?”
Harris wheeled his chair after him. “Postmodern, actually. For my own work, I use the term semi-abstract magical realism. As for the rest, well, there’s some Stuckism, some neo-Expressionism, some massurrealism. And some that’s harder to categorize.”
The words meant exactly zero to Bradley. He was more interested in the price tags. Harris sure wasn’t giving this stuff away. Some of the paintings cost more than a small-town cop earned in a week.
“How much of it is your own stuff?” he asked.
“About half the piec
es.” Harris gestured to a rainbow-hued portrait of some freaking thing that seemed to be a cross between a caterpillar and a Chinese dragon. “Like this one here.”
Bradley studied it. “Huh.” He attempted to muster some enthusiasm, though to be honest his appreciation of art didn’t extend much beyond the latest X-Men comic. “Kinda looks like Frank Frazetta.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was going for.”
He wasn’t sure if this was sarcasm. He decided it was better not to find out.
“Mind if I ask a personal question?” Bradley said.
Harris shrugged. “Feel free.”
“How long you been in that chair?”
“Since I hoisted myself out of bed at seven AM.” He smiled at Bradley’s discomfort. “I know what you mean. Five years.”
“Accident?”
“No, I did it on purpose.” Another smile. “Got you again. You’re easy.”
“Sorry, I—”
“No, my bad. People get a little ill at ease talking about it. They never know what to say. For some reason I find that funny. Which, I think, speaks very poorly of me.”
Bradley wasn’t quite sure he followed all that. “Uh, okay.”
He pretended to be interested in a painting called Vortex. It was a series of green swirls spattered with thick crusty globs of yellow paint. It cost $950 and looked like something a monkey might vomit up after eating a bad banana.
“To answer your question,” Harris said, “assuming you’re still interested—it was a car accident. I flipped my Vette on Nighthorse Road. And yes, Officer, I was exceeding the posted speed limit.”
“Guess you learned your lesson.”
“So you’d think. But I still speed sometimes.” He held up a hand in mock defense. “Never within borough limits.”
“Okay,” Bradley said again. He was feeling a little flustered. He just didn’t know what to make of this guy. “Was there another vehicle involved?”
The question seemed to catch Harris up short. For a second he hesitated. “No. I was alone on the road. Spun out, flipped over, and barreled into a power pole. They say I was lucky not to be electrocuted.”
“Yeah. No one else in the car with you?”
“Thank God, no.” No hesitation that time.
“Where on Nighthorse was this?”
“Just north of the intersection with Route 329.”
Bradley knew that stretch of road. It was treacherous as hell. Ran straight as a shot for a couple miles, and then a curve came up fast.
“Lot of accidents out there,” he said. “Kids, mainly. Drag racing.”
“Yeah.”
“You ever talk at schools? You know, the dangers of reckless driving?”
“I don’t relish being put on display,” Harris said tersely.
“Okay.”
“I’m not an object lesson.”
“Right. Sure. Sorry.” Bradley moved for the door. “Well, gotta get moving. Tell Bonnie I said hi.”
“You know her?”
“Slightly.” Bradley decided to test him just a little. “Not as good as you, I guess.”
“We’ve been friends a long time,” Harris said neutrally. “Six years now.”
“That’s good. I, uh, I don’t think she has all that many friends.”
“How many does she need?” The words were spoken lightly, but the undercurrent was cold.
Bradley summoned a smile. “That sounds like something she would say. Hang in there, Mr. Harris.”
“You too,” Harris said, but he didn’t return the smile.
CHAPTER 27
Frank steered his Mercedes into the vast outdoor parking lot sprawling around the Sheraton and hunted for a space. He was in no hurry. He had arrived well before Bonnie Parker could possibly get here, assuming she was driving up from Brighton Cove.
It was good that he’d had extra time; it had allowed him to clean himself up in the Wallings’ condo before leaving. He’d even had a bite to eat from the fridge. Even without power, the food was still cold. He’d enjoyed a roast beef sandwich on rye. And a pickle.
That was after he’d killed Dr. Aaron Walling, of course. The procedure had not lasted quite as long as he’d hoped, but he’d made it memorable.
He remembered the doctor’s pleading terror when the pliers were produced. “What more do you want me to tell you?” the guy whispered.
That was funny. Frank actually laughed. “If I wanted you to talk, asshole, I wouldn’t do this.”
Quick as a snake, the pliers were thrust into Walling’s mouth, closing over his tongue. Frank gave a hard yank, and the tongue came out by its roots, a long, slithery, slimy thing, followed by a spectacular gout of blood. He shoved a hand towel into the doc’s mouth to stanch the flow.
Walling did a lot of moaning after that, and a lot of crying, and a lot of kicking and flailing. None of it did him any good. Frank found it easy to hold him down as the pliers went to work on his teeth. He excised them one at a time, leaving bloody gaps in the gums. Dentistry, gangland style.
The noise Walling made wasn’t too bad, though his shoes did beat like the dickens on the tiled floor. Still, he’d said there was no one around. And even if there was, the black beast didn’t give a shit.
At some point Walling stopped struggling and the blood stopped jetting. That was when Frank knew the man was dead. Heart failure, stroke, some fucking thing. Too bad. He’d suffered, but not enough.
Though he was now working on a corpse, Frank removed the last of the teeth. There was no point in doing the job halfway.
Anticipating wet work, he’d worn an old nylon raincoat and buttoned it up to his chin. As expected, the coat and his gloves had taken most of the spatter. He stripped off those garments and stuffed them into a plastic garbage bag retrieved from Walling’s kitchen cabinet. His suit and tie were unspotted. His shoes had sustained minor damage, but he scrubbed them clean. Then he washed his face, drying himself with a hand towel, and disposed of the towel in the same trash bag. A sensible precaution. Who knew what clues the CSI weenies could recover from a cloth that had touched his face?
Frank ate his lunch, thinking about what he’d done to Harry. He felt a little bad about that, but it couldn’t be helped. Casualty of war.
He considered what the police would make of the crime scene. There would be a record of a call from Alec’s cell to Walling’s apartment. At that point, the homicide squad would be thinking it was a murder spree. Their guess would be that Alec Dante, a young man with a history of impulsive violence, had finally snapped. He’d killed Rocca and Belletiere at the cottage, killed his downstairs neighbor and the doorman at his condo building. Why he’d done it, no one would ever know. It was just one of those things.
The authorities would search for Alec—he might even make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted—but Frank wasn’t concerned about that. His nephew would never be found. The few parts of him that hadn’t burned had already been scattered by the storm.
Anyway, he didn’t care about Alec. He cared about Bonnie Parker.
A blond girl in a hat. Soon she would be a blond girl in a drum. Then a blond girl in a landfill.
For it to work out the way he wanted, he had to take her alive. It shouldn’t be hard. She would be looking for Walling, not him. She might not even know what he looked like. Frank had never been too keen on having his picture taken. Not many photos of him were in circulation.
He would come up behind her in the hotel lobby and stick the gun in her back. Escort her to his car. Knock her out, stuff her in the trunk, and take her somewhere for a nice quiet talk. Like the kind of talk he’d had with Dr. Walling.
Finished with his meal, Frank added the plate and napkin to the trash bag. He was worried about saliva.
Regrettably, Aaron Walling was considerably smaller than Frank, and none of his coats was likely to fit. Frank would have to proceed without a raincoat. Well, a little moisture wouldn’t kill him.
He returned to his car, stowed the trash bag in th
e trunk, and drove south to Edison, bypassing a section of the turnpike that had been washed out by the storm.
At the hotel he found a parking space and took it, beating out some asshole in a Ford minivan. The .22, salvaged from the pocket of his raincoat, rode in the inside vest pocket of his jacket, close to his heart. He did not take the silencer; its bulk made the gun too difficult to carry concealed.
He crossed the parking lot in a patter of rain. At the lobby door, a valet was offloading luggage from a steady stream of arriving cars. As Walling had said, the hotel was running on emergency power. The surrounding neighborhood was still blacked out, along with much of the tri-state area. People were decamping here to escape lightless, heatless homes, or taking shelter in the hotel because all flights out of town had been indefinitely delayed.
The lobby was crowded. A restive queue faced the check-in desk. More people huddled in the hallway waiting for an elevator; a sign said that only one of the three elevators was running in an effort to conserve power. About half the lights were on. The restaurant was serving some kind of hotplate stir-fry meals; no electricity in the kitchen. The bar was open and doing a brisk business. Frank was tempted by the prospect of a scotch, but he needed to keep his head clear.
He chose a seat in the lobby near a window. From there he could scan the entrance and lobby itself. The time was 11:32, and Parker wasn’t expected to arrive before noon.
In his jacket he had a copy of People Magazine that he’d purloined from the Wallings’ apartment, having taken the precaution of peeling off the subscription label. He opened it. Celebrity bullshit. He didn’t care about that crap, but it provided him with cover.
Truth was, nobody in America was more invisible than a middle-aged white guy. Plop him down in a chair, stick a newspaper or magazine in his hands, and he just ceased to exist.
He sat there, reading about the Kardashians. In a strange way he admired those girls. They were talentless bimbos, yet they’d conned the public into following their every move. They were richer and more famous than cancer doctors or astronauts. It was one hell of a scam.
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