Agnes and the Hitman

by Jennifer Crusie

  “You knew about Frankie Fortunato.”

  Wilson hesitated for a fraction of a second and then nodded.

  “It would have helped if you had informed me,” Shane said.

  “Doubtful,” Wilson said. “You had more than enough intelligence on Casey Dean to do your job. As you might learn, if you achieve my position, less information in the field is preferable most of the time.”

  “I don’t agree.”

  Wilson shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Given your recent failures, it will be difficult to convince my associates to have you replace me.”

  “It might be difficult to convince me.” Wilson looked at him, displeased.

  Shane stared back at him. “I took out Casey Dean’s girlfriend last night.”

  Wilson stared at him, startled. “Why didn’t you or Carpenter report this? And where is she?”

  “We were busy.”

  Wilson’s lip curled. “Breaking a suspected murderer out of jail.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have allowed you a great deal of latitude here,” Wilson began, “and-”

  Shane interrupted him. “You’ve been testing me.”

  “Very good,” Wilson said, practically patting him on the head. “And the girlfriend?”

  “We have her. You knew Casey Dean used a woman as his front.”

  Wilson shrugged. “There were suspicions to that effect.”

  “That was also part of the test.” Shane tried to keep the bitterness from his voice. Carpenter and Joey had almost died so that Wilson could test a job applicant.

  “Flexibility of thinking is critical for my job.”

  Shane sat silent for several moments, staring at the old man. Finally he looked away. He could see Joey on the back porch now, a mug of coffee in his hand, looking out at them. Frankie was moving chairs around in front of the gazebo, getting it ready for the ceremony. Agnes was at the kitchen window, at the kitchen sink, making breakfast for the crowd again. Upstairs, Lisa Livia walked past her bedroom window in her bra, talking a mile a minute, probably to Maria. Even the flamingos were honking as usual.

  “The test isn’t over, is it?” Shane asked, knowing that Wilson still held all the cards.

  “No.”

  “Yesterday I thought I might be Casey Dean’s target.”

  “Why is that?” Wilson asked.

  “Because my real name is Fortunato. My uncle Joey told me my father was the Don’s older brother, Roberto.”

  “You were not Casey Dean’s target,” Wilson said. “No.”

  “But your uncle told you only half the story.”

  There was something snakelike in the way Wilson said the words, almost as if his tongue were flicking in and out. He savored the words, and Shane realized he’d savored a lot of the information he’d been dropping recently.

  Behind that desiccated mask, Wilson was enjoying this.

  Shane made himself still. “And the other half?”

  “Torcelli told you that your parents died in a boating accident, correct?” Wilson’s lips twitched, almost imperceptibly, too little to notice unless you were watching for it.

  Shane was watching for it. He nodded.

  “Not true.” Wilson lifted his chin, watching Shane from under lizardlike eyelids. “They were murdered by Don Michael Fortunato.” Shane was perfectly still.

  “Your father, the eldest brother, stood in Michael’s way, so he rigged their boat to explode. They went out on the water, and he blew it up by remote control from a nearby cruiser.” Wilson watched Shane.

  Shane sat, unmoving.

  “They say your father tried to save your mother even though he was horribly wounded.”

  Shane looked past Wilson to the Blood, beautiful in the early morning.

  “They say he screamed her name as he died.”

  He was aware of the sound of the water lapping against the floating dock and the slight creak of metal on wood as it moved against the steel gangplank.

  “They say she cried out yours.”

  Shane turned back to Wilson. Look for what he wants.

  Wilson was sitting, looking impassive, but that light was behind his eyes. “I believe she drowned, according to intelligence. There was no coroner’s report. The Don let the bodies go down with the boat.”

  What does he want?

  “You don’t believe me? Ask your uncle Joey. Or your uncle Frankie. They’ve known for years.”

  Frankie and Joey at the table last night. Joey shaking his head. Shane felt heat now-it had been rising the entire time, filling his head, blanking out his brain, but now he could feel it-the old heat from when he’d been a kid, fists flailing. Don’t go there, that’s what Wilson wants, do not go there.

  “The real question,” Wilson was saying, “is what do you intend to do about it? Because you have a job to do, Mr. Fortunato. One that does not allow for distraction because of personal issues. Can you still do your job and protect the Don?”

  He sat back and allowed himself a small complacent smile.

  Shane got up and began the long walk down the dock to Joey.

  Agnes tipped a pan of pineapple-orange muffins out onto the counter, wiped her hands on her Cranky Agnes apron, and then stepped back beside Carpenter to look out the kitchen window toward the dock, where Shane was meeting with his boss. She felt a little ridiculous baking muffins in a cherry pink halter dress covered with a promo apron, until she saw the man she loved standing like the Grim Reaper, staring down the wizened old goat he worked for. Then she forgot the dress. There was something definitely wrong down on that dock.

  “He said something about getting a better job.”

  Carpenter nodded. “He’s in line for a promotion.”

  Agnes’s heart sank. So much for hoping for a new line of work. “So that would be good?”

  Carpenter turned his head and looked down at her. “Not for Shane. Shane has been finding his way to the light this week.”

  “Oh, hell,” Agnes said, watching Shane stride back from the dock. He looked tense. As he got closer, she realized that was too tame a description: He looked white with rage, something she’d never seen before.

  Carpenter went rigid beside her, as if he, too, knew something was very wrong, beyond the kind of wrong he’d seen before.

  Lisa Livia ambled into the kitchen in her pink halter dress and said, “What’s new?” She threw an arm around Carpenter’s waist and then stopped smiling to look up at him. “What?”

  “I don’t know,” Agnes said, but Carpenter walked away from both of them, as if neither of them were there, out through the porch and down the steps to meet Shane.

  “What the hell?” Lisa Livia said, and Agnes went out onto the porch, where Joey was standing, also watching Shane, who was striding toward Frankie in the gazebo.

  “This is bad,” Joey muttered.

  “What?” Agnes asked, but she didn’t wait for an answer as she went down the back stairs and across the lawn to meet Shane. She was vaguely aware that Joey was right behind her, but all she cared about was Shane.

  Frankie had climbed down and was waiting for him.

  “My parents.” Shane said it with a fury Agnes had never heard. He was glaring at Frankie, who said nothing, and, as they came up, he burned Joey with the same look.

  “That bum Wilson tell you?” Joey asked.

  “It’s true?” Shane said.

  Joey nodded.

  “What?” Agnes asked.

  Shane met her eyes, the cold, controlled man she’d met five days before obliterated by rage. “We’ll be back.” He looked at Carpenter. “You take care of things here.”

  Carpenter nodded once.

  “What’s going on?” Agnes said, but Shane was already crossing the lawn to the van, Joey and Frankie following him, their shoulders squared with the same determination. “What the hell-” she began, but Lisa Livia touched her arm.

  “Let it go,” she said, and Carpenter nodded, too, and Agnes swallowed and thought, Well, he di
dn’t lie to me, and said, “Pineapple-orange muffins for breakfast,” and went back to the house, praying that nobody was going to die, especially Shane.

  “Do you know where the Don is staying?” Shane asked, working hard to keep a cap on his anger. He was driving Carpenter’s van, Frankie and Joey in the captain’s chairs behind him, looking like two old extras for some mob movie. Except they were the real deal.

  Joey nodded. “Yeah. The Rice Plantation B-and-B. The Don likes quiet, classy joints. The rest of his men are at the Victory Motel with the hookers.”

  Shane looked back at Joey. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “If I’d of told you, you’d have gone after the Don and gotten yourself killed.”

  “I’d rather have heard it from you than Wilson,” Shane said.

  “I was more worried about keeping you alive,” Joey said. “Wilson tells you stuff to control you.”

  “Give me the short version,” Shane said as they turned onto the main road out of Agnes’s driveway.

  Frankie had been talking into his cell phone, and he turned it off before saying, “I just talked to the broad who runs the B-and-B. She says the Don and another guy, most likely his consigliere, are just wrapping up breakfast. So that’s good. They gotta come this way for the wedding.”

  Shane nodded and drove to the B amp;B, following Joey’s terse directions. Half a mile from the place, he pulled the van off the road, then backed into a narrow dirt trail.

  “We’re gonna stop the Don’s car and I talk to him.” He climbed between the seats, opened one of the lockers, and grabbed a platter-shaped device and a remote that went with it. Then he opened the side panel and climbed out. “You guys stay here,” he told Joey and Frankie.

  He went out to the narrow road and lay the platter down in the center, then grabbed a piece of Spanish moss and covered it.

  When he was back in the van, he pulled out his Glock and checked the round in the chamber. Then he said, “Tell me what happened.”

  “We came down here for vacations every year,” Frankie said. “Roberto, Michael, me, and Joey. And the families. Your parents went out fishing one day on a small boat, never came back. We got the call from the rental place that the boat hadn’t come back; we went out looking, nothing. No one ever found your parents or the boat.”

  “But we know Michael did it,” Joey said with loathing. “He was supposed to be in Savannah when they went missing, but when he showed up again he was different. Confident. Cocky. The son of a bitch.”

  “You let him get away with it?” Shane said, disbelief in his voice.

  “What was we gonna do?” Joey said. “We had no proof. Everyone suspected, but nobody could say for certain, ‘cause nobody knew nothin’ about it. And I mean, nothin’. And where would a guy like Mikey get that kind of bomb on his own? He had to have help, smart help. And not just that snake of a consigliere of his, although he was down here then, too. We couldn’t figure it out. And we couldn’t whack Michael, or Don Carlo would be all over us. And you were in danger, you were his next hit. So we made a deal.”

  “To stay in Keyes,” Shane said. “And keep me in the dark. Give me a different name. Tell me you didn’t know who my father was.”

  Frankie and Joey nodded once more, two grim, bobblehead old goombahs.

  “That’s how we ended up staying down here,” Frankie said. “Brenda was pissed as hell about that. But I always thought she knew. She offered to babysit you that day, and she never did that before.”

  Joey jerked his head up.

  Frankie nodded. “Yeah. I never said nothin’ because she was my wife, but that bothered the hell out of me. We fought about it, and she cried, big hysterics, but you gotta wonder why she wanted to take care of a baby just that one day. She didn’t like babies much. But just that one day, she said, ‘Give me the baby,’ and they handed you over and went off for a big romantic day on the water.”

  Shane could see them, his dad and his mom on the boat, both of them laughing, probably the first day they’d had alone since he’d been born, a day on the water-

  The heat in his head made him dizzy for a minute and then he heard Joey say, “Jesus, she knew. Why-?”

  “I think she thought it was gonna move me up in the Family,” Frankie said. “She was gonna be Our Lady of the Fortunatos, open the doors in a big house and invite everybody in, sit at the head of the table, queen of New Jersey.”

  The scene played again, but this time it was him, taking Agnes aboard a boat, her laughing up at him… What if I couldn’t get to her? What if she was screaming, in agony, and I couldn’t get to her?

  “Maybe we don’t leave her to Xavier,” Joey said.

  “No,” Shane said, and Joey shut up. He took a deep breath. “You told me you never saw the consigliere before.”

  Joey shrugged. “I was just trying to protect you.”

  Thirty-five years ago, Joey was a thirty-year-old widowed mobster looking at a baby he was going to have take care of. Considering his limitations and what he was up against, he’d done a pretty damn good job. The fact that he couldn’t stop now was possibly understandable.

  “Okay,” Shane asked. “Wilson. How does he play into all this? How does he know?”

  Joey frowned. “I don’t know. But he’s a spook, and spooks and the Organization have worked together before, ever since the big war when the government needed help in Italy. So you’re talking over sixty years. Wilson’s probably got people wired in.”

  Literally, Shane thought, remembering the transcript of Don Fortunato’s phone call with Casey Dean. Sixty years. About as long as Wilson headed the Organization.

  He heard a car coming and slid out of the van into the shade on the side of the road.

  A black Lincoln Town Car came rumbling down the road. Shane waited until it was over the platter, then pressed the remote. The platter sent out a massive electromagnetic pulse that fried all the electronics in the car. The engine died and the car rolled by, slowing to a halt about forty feet down the road.

  The driver’s door opened and the consigliere got out, cursing. Shane’s jaw tightened as the passenger door opened and Don Michael stepped out, dapper as all hell. The years had been damn good to him. The consigliere popped the hood and both men disappeared around the front of the car as they tried to figure out what had happened. Shane stepped onto the road, Glock at the ready. He walked to car, then edged around to where he could see the two men. “Don’t move,” Shane said.

  They both swiveled their heads and stared at him. Then the Don smiled. “Shane,” he said. “Am I correct?” Shane nodded. “Uncle Michael.” The Don and his consigliere exchanged a glance. “Who told ya?” the Don asked. “Joey?”

  “You killed my parents.”

  The Don laughed, and Shane’s hand tightened so much on the gun, he realized the barrel was shaking. Not good, he thought.

  “You ain’t gonna shoot me,” the Don said. “Not in cold blood. Your father wouldn’t, and you can’t.”

  “I want the truth,” Shane said. “About how they died.”

  “Wasn’t me,” the Don said. “I was in Savannah. Got witnesses to that.”

  “Then who was it?” Shane asked. “Him?” He nodded at the consigliere.

  The consigliere’s eyes slid left, almost a twitch.

  “Better yet,” Shane said. “Where did you get the bomb? Remote detonated, right? Who gave it to you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Don said, his face smooth.

  “And why did he give it to you?” Shane said. “Did he think you were such a dumb fuck, you’d be easier to manipulate than my father?”

  “What?” the Don said, looking rattled for the first time.

  “Did he figure that since you are the dumbest fucking Fortunato to ever draw breath, he wanted you in charge of the Family so he could use you like a two-dollar whore, something he knew my father would never allow?”

  “Hey,” the Don said, his face darkening, “nobody use
s me, I use him-”

  “And did he know my mother was on that boat when he blew it up? Did you tell him that, you murdering bastard? Or did you tell him it was just another mob hit?” Shane heard his own breathing, saw the landscape in a red mist, and some small part of him said, Walk away now. “He still thinks you’re a dumb fuck, you know. That’s why he just told me. He thinks I’m going to kill you, which is good with him because he’s finished with you. He wants me to take your place. Consolidation. Government hitman and mob boss in one person. Easier. And then he thinks he can control me. All I have to do is kill you and I get it all.”

  The Don’s eyes widened.

  Shane shook his head. “But I’m not going to.”

  The Don let out his breath and nodded. “You’re a good boy, Shane. You’re a good Fortunato. My heir. Next in line. You can put the gun down now.”

  “I’m not going to kill you because I don’t have to,” Shane said, and turned and walked away as Frankie and Joey walked past him, their faces like stone.

  The last thing he heard was the Don saying, “Frankie?” and then a fusillade of shots ripping apart the Saturday morning as he began the long walk back to Two Rivers.

  He never looked back.

  Agnes had fed Carpenter and Lisa Livia and Maria and the bridesmaids and a dazzled Garth-all that beauty in bathrobes and curlers stunned him-and then sent Garth off to help that floozy Maisie double-check the flowers, and to make sure everything for the wedding was in place, including the flamingo pen place cards, and to keep an eye out for Butch, who was late to pick up Cerise and Hot Pink. She also cleaned raspberry sauce off the pantry door, which had been locked the night before to prevent anybody getting at the cakes, Downer and his damn practical jokes, in particular. The raspberry sauce there made no sense, but then it was hardly the only incomprehensible thing in her life, so she let it go to step over Rhett, clean up the rest of the kitchen with Lisa Livia and Carpenter, and try not to wonder if Shane was lying in a pool of blood somewhere with two old mobsters dying beside him.

  It was about nine when they heard Maria scream. Again.

  “If she thinks Palmer is having sex with another stripper somewhere, I’m going to be annoyed,” Agnes said, but Lisa Livia shook her head and headed for the hallway calling, “What’s wrong, baby?” as Carpenter took the dish towel from her hands and said, “Go upstairs and do the bride stuff. I’ll hold the fort down here.”