“I know,” James said. “Honest to God, Chief, I know, but you’ve got to listen to this.” He was like a little boy with a secret, and until he got it off his chest, nothing else was going to get done.
“Is there a short version?” Barry asked.
James shook his head. “Not really, no.”
“Then I might as well be warm.” He walked around to the passenger side. Just before climbing in, he caught Jesse Tingle’s frustrated glare and acknowledged it with a sheepish grin. He slid into the passenger seat and closed the door. “Shoot.”
James riffled backward through what looked like a dozen pages of notes, stopping when he found the page he wanted. He could barely contain his grin. “What does the name Agostini mean to you?”
“Oh, God,” Barry groaned. “Please don’t turn this into a trivia game.”
“Okay, okay. Giovanni Agostini—otherwise known as Johnny Big Nose—”
Barry snapped his fingers. “He was a mob informer, right?”
“Exactly. His testimony broke up the Paroni family and sent a bunch of goombahs to jail for like a thousand years.”
“New York, right?”
“Chicago.”
“I meant Chicago. What about him?”
“Well, ever since he testified against his buddies, he’s been a protected witness, living wherever the hell he is with a huge price on his head. Hit men from all over the world are hunting for this guy, but no one can find him. His father, on the other hand, Giuseppe Agostini, has lived for years just outside of Concordia, Kansas.”
“Was he a mobster, too?”
“No, a plumber. Bear with me. You know we found about a million fingerprints in Hertzberger’s motel room after he turned up dead. That’s no surprise, of course, because, well, it’s a motel room. About a million people have slept there. Just for grins, though, I ran some prints on the booze bottle we found, on the off chance that we might find something interesting.” He paused, waiting out a rise from Barry.
“Will you get on with it?”
James’s smirk turned to a grin. “Okay, the FBI computer found a match between some latent prints on the bottle and other prints from Giuseppe Agostini’s house. They can’t tell me who the prints belong to, but they can tell me that they’re the same.” He paused. “Did I mention that the old man was found murdered?”
“The plumber?”
“Right. Well, the retired plumber. In Concordia. He was murdered after being tortured. Tied up, burned with cigarettes, that sort of thing.”
Barry winced. “Lovely. So, the fingerprints link Hertzberger to the plumber. The informer’s father.”
“Right. Now, stick with me here, because this is where it gets confusing.”
“God help me.”
“According to my FBI buddy, Giuseppe had terminal cancer when he was killed. Given Johnny Big Nose’s high profile, and the fact that there’s such a huge contract out on his head, the Bureau assumes that Giuseppe was tortured to reveal the whereabouts of his son.”
Barry still didn’t get it. “What does the cancer have to do with anything?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Some hit man figured that with the old man sick, the son might come by to pay his last respects. You know, say good-bye to the old guy. By all accounts, father and son were pretty tight.”
Barry tried to piece it together. “You’re not suggesting that Maurice Hertzberger was a hit man.”
James shook his head. “Different prints. I’m just suggesting that he might have been connected with the hit man. Or, better still, that the hit man might have killed him.”
“By giving him a heart attack?”
“We still don’t have the tox report back from Cooper.”
The chief turned it over in his head. “I don’t know, James. I mean, it’s certainly an interesting development, but does it make sense to you that a guy who’d torture one guy to death would gently poison another? That doesn’t seem right to me.”
“Different measures for different needs, maybe. My first thought was, maybe Hertzberger was really Johnny Big Nose, but that’s not looking so promising.”
“His fingerprints should tell that story, I’d think,” Barry said.
“You’re right. Or, you would be if they still had Giovanni Agostini’s fingerprints on file.”
“Where are they?”
James shrugged. “I don’t think anybody bothered to look for them until I asked to check it out. Turns out that Big Nose wields a pretty good computer. He must have gotten into the files and erased them. Anyway, I sent a post mortem photo of Maurice to the Bureau and they sent me a mug shot of Giovanni. No way are they the same guy. By process of elimination, then, the killer who did the plumber also did the truck driver.”
Barry winced again. He didn’t like that conclusion at all. “Have you been able to link them in any other way?”
“Not yet, but—”
“I think you’re jumping too early, James. Maybe they just had a common friend.”
James looked at his boss as if he’d grown a new head. “Come on, Barry. Two people who just happened to turn up dead? That’s a strong link.”
“People die every day, James,” Barry said. This was where experience paid dividends. There wasn’t a cop on the streets in any city on earth who hadn’t learned the hard way the evils of jumping to conclusions before all the evidence was in. “You continue to assume that there was something wrong with the hooch in the bottle, but you haven’t given me evidence yet. You convince me that Hertzberger was murdered, and I’ll agree that we know what the killer’s fingers look like.”
25
THE LIGHT IN SCOTT’S EYES hurt almost as much as the grinding pain in his belly. He’d never been hit that hard by anything, and despite his attacker’s warning to be quiet, he could not stop gasping for air.
“Who the hell are you?” the man growled from behind the light.
Honest to God, Scott wanted to answer him, but his voice refused to work.
“Answer me, goddammit.”
“I…can’t…breathe.” Scott’s words came out as a harsh, gasping whisper.
The man growled, “Aw, shit, sit up.” Before Scott could do anything to help or resist, he felt himself being lifted by his shirt collar and placed against the tunnel wall. Next, he felt a hand grabbing the front of his pants at the belt line and pulling them away. “Just breathe normally,” the man said. “You got the wind knocked out of you.”
Scott shoved the man’s hand away from his pants. “Get away from me, you pervert.”
“I’m just trying to help you get your breath,” the man said. He repositioned himself and his light so that he was no longer blinding Scott. A flash of gold, and Scott could see an FBI badge six inches in front of his nose. “Special Agent Jerry Price, FBI,” the man said. “Now, who are you?”
Scott’s head swam with possibilities. “Scott O’Toole. And I think you broke one of my ribs.”
“It’ll heal. I want you to tell me—” He paused. “Wait a second. Scott O’Toole.” He said the name as if he were tasting it. “The plane crash?”
Scott nodded.
“Holy shit. What are you doing here?”
“Mostly getting the shit kicked out of me,” Scott said.
“Where does this tunnel go?”
Scott hesitated. Suppose this guy was the killer Isaac had been waiting for? “Where do you think it goes?” he hedged.
“You don’t want to toy with me, young man.”
“I don’t even want to know you.” Scott found himself surprised by his own bravado. If only this guy knew how totally petrified he was.
“Look, kid. Scott. If I’m not mistaken, this tunnel leads to an old bootlegger’s cabin, where a man named Thomas Powell lives. He’s a very dangerous man. A killer. I need to know—”
Scott heard a soft thump, and then Agent Price’s eyes grew huge. His jaw dropped, and for just a second, Scott wondered if he were trying to make funny faces. But there was fear in the
man’s eyes.
Instinctively, Scott reached out for him. “Are you—”
Before he could finish the question, Agent Price’s left eye exploded from his body, spraying the boy with a mist of hot gore. Scott screamed as the man collapsed forward onto him. The flashlight tumbled, and just like that, he was again bathed in total darkness. A horrible hot wetness flooded Scott’s shirt, hot as piss, and he knew without seeing that he was absorbing the man’s brains and blood.
He didn’t even hear himself screaming—that panicked, endless scream that was normally reserved for only his worst nightmares. The blood. The horror.
“Scott!”
The boy’s head whipped to the left at the sound of his name.
“Shut up, for Christ’s sake. You’re not hit, he is.” It was Isaac. Scott couldn’t see a thing, but he could hear the voice. Scott’s hand found the flashlight at his side and he picked it up. “No, don’t!”
But it was too late. Scott hit the switch, and there was Isaac coming at him, an odd-looking weapon cradled in his arms. The man yelled as his free hand raced to his face to pull off some kind of mask. In the instant that he saw it, Scott recognized the mask as night vision goggles.
“Jesus, Isaac, what did you do?”
“Get that thing out of my eyes,” he commanded, and the light moved to his feet. “I saved your life is what I did. This is the asshole they sent to kill us.”
“Us?” This was a new twist. Isaac had forgotten to mention that they were coming after Scott as well. Why would they do that?
“What, you think they’re gonna whack me and just leave you as a witness?”
“But he had a badge,” Scott said. “He showed it to me. It was FBI.”
Isaac slung his rifle over his shoulder by its strap, then lifted Price’s body with one hand while he snatched the light from Scott with the other. He shined it on the man’s face. “Look at that. Perfect. Behind the ear and out the eye.” Scott looked away, then returned his gaze as Isaac repositioned the beam to show a hole in the man’s coat. “That was to get him to sit up a little straighter,” Isaac explained. “I didn’t want to get you with the same bullet.”
Scott felt light-headed and his stomach churned. As he groaned against an urge to vomit, Isaac lashed out and grabbed him. “Look, Scott, I didn’t want this, okay? I didn’t start it, but I’m not going to wait for you to come apart. This man is dead, and if he wasn’t, you would be.”
“But he had a badge,” Scott repeated. “FBI.”
Isaac grabbed Scott’s cheeks in his fingers, smearing the blood. “Look at me. You want a badge? I can get you a dozen of them. What’ll it be? FBI? DEA? Hell, I can get you a New York City police department badge if you want one. You can pick ’em up by the dozen in novelty stores.”
Scott wanted to understand, he really did, but all of this was too much. Jesus, a man’s brains were on his shirt!
“Don’t you see?” Isaac said. He let the body fall to the dirt floor. “The badge is how he gathers information from people. That’s how he figures out where I’m staying. He says he’s an FBI agent and people tell him everything he wants to know.”
Scott nodded absently because it was the thing to do. Jesus, the blood.
Isaac interpreted the nod as assent. “Okay, then. Let’s get this guy buried.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“We need to call somebody,” Scott protested. “We can’t just—”
“I don’t have a phone, Scott! We’ve been over this once before.”
“What about—” he started to ask about the satellite phone, but stopped short. That was the second time on the same lie.
“What about what?”
“Nothing.” Scott needed to be very careful now. “Please get the light off him.”
“He’s a hired murderer, Scott!” This time, Isaac yelled, and it startled the hell out of the boy. “For chrissake, will you try to wrap your mind around that? He’s a professional killer hired to kill me for a suitcase full of cash. I got him first. Big fucking deal.”
Scott just stared.
“Look at me, kid. If I had a phone, I wouldn’t use it anyway. He’s vermin, a yard pest. Not worth the price of the call. You don’t report his death to the police, you just throw a damn party.” He shined his light again on the corpse. “God, what a mess. Go on back to the house and get me a garbage bag out of the closet next to the stove. Keep him from gooping up the floors.”
Gooping the floors? Jesus. Scott just stared.
“Today, kid. Now.”
Scott moved as if his body belonged to someone else, his arms and legs performing without commands from his head. His mind was in a thousand different places right now. Flashlight in hand, he sleep walked back to the ladder and up into the house. The bags were right where Isaac had said they’d be, and by the time Scott returned with one clutched in his hand, Isaac had already turned the sharp corner in the tunnel, and was on the final leg of the trip back to the trap door.
When they joined up again, Isaac unceremoniously yanked the bag over the dead man’s ruined head, twisted it tightly at the neck, then pulled it over a second time. When that was done he separated the two front corners of the bag, drew them tighter still around the base of Price’s skull and tied a double knot under his chin. The efficiency of it all sent a chill through Scott; it was as if Isaac had done this a thousand times before. Watching the man work, he saw not the slightest trace of revulsion. Not the slightest trace of emotion.
“Come on,” Isaac said when he was done. “Help me get him up the ladder.”
“You mean touch him?” Scott gasped.
Isaac shook his head with disgust. “Je-sus Christ. Get out of the way, then. I’ll do it myself.” He started to heft the body into a fire-man’s carry, then paused long enough to unsling his weapon. “Here,” he said, handing it to Scott, “carry this.”
In the eerie light of the flashlights, the gun felt exotic; lighter than he’d expected, and invisible in the darkness. He was staring at it when Isaac brushed past him, the dead visitor doubled over his right shoulder.
When he was halfway up the ladder, Isaac said, “Come on, Scott. And don’t touch the trigger. I don’t remember if I put the safety on or not.”
Just like that, the gun felt fifty times more dangerous. Like a bomb, maybe, or a beehive; a terrible thing that was ready to hurt him at any moment.
When Isaac cleared the entryway, it was Scott’s turn. He had some difficulty navigating the ladder with the weapon in his hands, but he did all right. By the time his head poked through the opening in the floor, the dead man’s feet were disappearing into the kitchen as Isaac dragged him across the polished wood.
In the kitchen now, in the light, Scott could finally see the gun he carried. It looked like something you’d see Arnold Schwarzenegger use in a movie, barely bigger than a pistol, but made twice as long by the fat silencer on its snout.
Isaac arrived at the front door and pulled it open. “Let’s move now, Scott. Grab a coat and come help.”
Scott told himself, Run! Run fast! Get out of here! But where would he go? Running away made no sense unless you knew where you were running to.
Shoot him. Shoot Isaac. All of this was terribly wrong. The world had somehow shifted, knocking him down the rabbit hole where Alice and the Mad Hatter lived.
“Scott!”
Shoot him now, while you’ve got the gun. Why? Why did he feel so strongly that he needed to kill this man? Why did he feel as if it were the one last chance he’d have to save himself from the fate met by Agent Price, at the hands of the same nut case?
“Scott!” Isaac reappeared in the doorway, his face looking oddly parental. He raised his eyebrows and nodded to the weapon in the boy’s hands, the muzzle of which was pointed directly at him. “You planning to shoot me?”
Scott jumped, startled that he could so accurately read his thoughts. Then he understood. “Oh. No, sorry.” He pivoted the muzzle away
.
Isaac smiled and nodded. He looked so ordinary with his navy blue jacket with its forest green shoulder patches. He could be anybody’s neighborhood dad, maybe an insurance salesman. The last thing in the world he looked like was a killer. “Put the gun on the table and get your coat,” he said. “I need you outside.” He started out the door again, then paused to pluck a big fur hat off the shelf over the coatrack—something right out of Doctor Zhivago. “Don’t forget your hat. It’s cold out here.” And then he was gone.
Moving with mechanical stiffness, Scott did exactly as he was told. Even if he’d had the balls to shoot the man, why would he have done it? Because he lied about a telephone? As Isaac had said, if he’d wanted Scott to die, he’d be dead already. Sometimes you find solace in the oddest thoughts.
The coats hung from hooks just inside the front door, and as Scott lifted his to put it on, he caught the first glimpse of his face in the mirror. He saw the blood smears and he quickly looked away. His wet shirt and jeans stuck to him.
“Scott!”
“I’m coming!” He hurried out onto the wooden porch that led to the work yard separating the main house from some squatty outbuildings across the way. He froze. There in the middle of the work yard lay another body—a man in a winter coat, his arms and legs splayed oddly in the crimson snow. Isaac stood over the man, Price once again slung over his shoulder, waiting for Scott’s reaction. “There were two of them,” Isaac explained. “I thought I’d heard movement outside when you were still in bed. I was waiting for this one.”
“Jesus,” Scott breathed.
“Don’t think so.” Isaac smiled. “Satan maybe, but definitely not Jesus. Now, come and help me before they start attracting varmints.”
THEY DIDN’T BURY THE BODIES so much as they dumped them into a hole between the outbuildings. Isaac called it a dry well, whatever that was. Scott said nothing, and he made a point to look away as the corpses disappeared over the edge of the well. He didn’t want to see them as they impacted the bottom. The dull, fleshy thump was bad enough.
For his part, Isaac was downright chatty, talking about his strategy for stalking his prey, but Scott wanted none of it. He just kept replaying the image of that exploding eye.
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