Violet Darger (Book 4): Bad Blood

by Vargus, L. T.

  The man sitting in the passenger seat, Sal Lombino, was the smallest and the smartest of the three guests in the car, the only one with an upper management future in the Battaglia family, and the only one of the three who Jaworski outright feared. With silver streaks veining his tightly cropped black curls, he looked older than his 31 years. Distinguished. Worldly.

  Lombino was Rocco’s right-hand man, likely to become the underboss — second in command of the entire family — if they could find Vinny the Bull and complete the decapitation, installing Rocco as the new boss.

  Lombino liked Jaworski, was easily the most vocal of any of Rocco’s men about that fact. Saw “the big Polack” as a tool to be used, a secret weapon of sorts due to his heritage. On many a drunken night, he’d repeated roughly the same speech at the bar:

  “I’m telling you, Jaworski, if you weren’t a Polack — if you had even a drop of Sicilian blood in your veins — you’d be a captain in no time. Probably be running the family within a decade. You know why? Because you’re the coldest-blooded motherfucker I’ve ever met. You’re capable of any sick shit the made guys ask of you, any kind of violence, any kind of brutality, and you never lose your cool. Never let your emotions get the best of you. Never sweat at all from what I can tell. In this business, there’s nothing more valuable than that combination — the guts to do whatever is necessary, and the brains to stay rational, stay reasonable. Keep your mind right no matter what you’re faced with. That’s what takes real balls, my friend.”

  Lombino would pat Jaworski on the shoulder then.

  “You just stick with me, though, and you’ll keep getting paid. In that way, you’ll still make it to the top, yeah? Because me and Rocco? That’s where we’re headed. The very top of the Detroit shit heap.”

  The prediction seemed to be coming true. Lombino was playing chess while his enemies — be they law enforcement or mafia rivals — were playing checkers. He was unmatched as an earner. The smartest guy in the room.

  But there were things that even Lombino didn’t know, if only a few. Things about Jaworski. And things about Vinny the Bull. Missing puzzle pieces that made Jaworski very nervous whenever Lombino was around. This man about an arm’s-length to his right was perhaps the only man in the Battaglia family smart enough to figure it all out. Smart enough to see Jaworski for who he really was.

  And if that ever happened, all was lost.

  Silence settled over the car again, and Jaworski was thankful for the quiet. He himself had yet to utter a word in their time together this evening, communicating not at all beyond a couple of head nods in greeting. He didn’t think there was anything to say.

  Instead, he listened as they fought. Observed the mobsters occupying his car.

  Crude men. Even by the standards of a professional killer, this remained so. Something was off about them. All three of them.

  He’d worked with them on hits before. Watched how they went about their trade, how they conducted themselves. They were sadistic. Too emotional. Almost demonic as they committed violence, he thought.

  And though his work basically looked the same as theirs from afar, Jaworski didn’t quite understand these men.

  They took glee in the violence, in the torture. Beyond glee. Almost sexual pleasure. Faces all twisted up in grimacing half-smiles as they took a man’s life.

  Jaworski experienced nothing like this when he killed. No joy. No pleasure. He felt the vague heat of aggression flush his face, something animal overtaking him, but beyond that savage impulse, he felt no emotions at all.

  He was dead on the inside. Hot on the surface but cold at the core.

  Killing didn’t offend him, of course. It was his profession, though he found the idea of enjoying it a bit distasteful.

  No, killing was not a problem. Emotions elsewhere in life were what got Jaworski in trouble. Things that Sal Lombino thankfully didn’t know about. Things he hopefully never would.

  Because Lombino had it mostly right. For the most part, Jaworski was cold. But those moments when he wasn’t, the moments when the cool shell cracked and the molten emotions spewed forth to overtake him? Those had a way of making trouble for him and everyone around him.

  They had a way of turning to murder.

  Chapter 12

  In the waning light of the day, with the sun setting bright pink on the horizon, Darger and Luck rolled through the east side of Detroit.

  Rows of cultivated land bordered by a patch of sunflowers on one side caught Darger’s eye as they passed an urban farming operation. In the distance, the empty eye sockets of a windowless apartment building kept watch over the pastoral scene.

  Suddenly the claustrophobic cityscape seemed to open up, and all Darger saw for some time was green space with mature trees and grass so long it looked like they were in the middle of some kind of urban prairie.

  “What is this? Some kind of park or nature preserve or something?”

  Luck chuckled at that.

  “This used to be a neighborhood. Houses packed together, forty to a block.”

  “No way,” Darger said, but even as the words came out of her mouth, she saw the evidence in the crumbling sidewalk still embedded in the earth.

  Here and there she saw where the driveways had been. There was the occasional abandoned ruin, but in many stretches, there was not a single house in view.

  Luck slowed at a crossroad.

  “This is the street.”

  He turned left.

  Darger tried to count the individual lots, but it was just an uninterrupted expanse of greenery, and she quickly lost track of where one ended and another began. They passed a cluster of three broken homes with sagging roofs and trash left in piles in the yards.

  Another tenth of a mile down the street, alone in the middle of this barren landscape, came a well-kept little bungalow. The grass was freshly cut, the siding clean. An American flag waved over the small yard that was shaded by a large oak tree.

  Luck pulled in behind a minivan with a Detroit Tigers bumper sticker.

  The little scrap of sidewalk in front of the house was perfectly preserved. Darger thought it looked odd, set there all by itself. Like a single incisor in an otherwise toothless mouth.

  An older black man sat on the porch. He stood up as they parked and came down to greet them.

  Darger held out her hand as he approached.

  “Hello, sir. I’m Agent Darger, this is Agent Luck. We’re from the FBI. Are you Stanley Gerard?”

  “I am,” he said, a mixture of concern and confusion in his eyes. “What is this about?”

  Through the open windows, Darger could hear music. It was something instrumental and synthesized, like the kind of thing you’d hear when playing an arcade game.

  “We’re looking for a boy named Lijah Ingram.”

  His brow furrowed. “What for?”

  “Are you his guardian?”

  The man nodded. “Lijah is my grand-nephew. And he’s a good boy, so whatever it is you think he did, you have the wrong kid.”

  “It’s not anything he did, but something he might have seen. Did Lijah used to live on Porter Street, near the old Ravenwood Estates building?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Why?”

  “We think Lijah might have witnessed a murder.”

  Mr. Gerard let out a long sigh and glanced back over his shoulder. When he turned back to them, he seemed to come to some sort of decision.

  “Might as well come inside. Lijah’s in the living room playing one of his games,” he said, propping the screen door open for them.

  The kitchen was small and neat with all the original dated-but-charming 1960s details: brightly patterned linoleum floor, toile wallpaper, and pale yellow cabinets. The electronic music was louder here, and Darger also heard the telltale rumbles and explosions of a video game battle.

  “Has Lijah ever mentioned seeing something like that to you?” Darger asked.

  “No, but… Hold on one second.”

  Mr. Gerard cal
led further into the house.

  “Lijah, could you turn the TV down?”

  No response. The volume remained the same.

  He turned back to the agents.

  “There are a few things you should know before you talk to Lijah. He’s on the spectrum.”

  “Autism?” Darger asked.

  Mr. Gerard nodded.

  “He’s categorized as high-functioning — something they used to call Asperger’s syndrome until a few years ago. We only recently got the diagnosis. That would be myself and my daughter, Bernice, who helps me with him now and then, but she’s got herself a family of her own to care for. Anyway, I bring this up because I don’t know how he’ll respond to your questions, or if he’ll respond at all, given the subject matter.”

  “How are his verbal skills?”

  “He has an excellent vocabulary and can be insightful, especially if you’re speaking about a topic he’s interested in. Like video games. You might ask a yes or no question and get a tremendously complicated answer in return. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like an actual answer to the question you asked at all. People think he’s being difficult or evasive on purpose. I’ve realized over the last few months that what’s often happening is that he’s answering the literal question I asked versus the question I intended to ask.”

  Mr. Gerard crossed his arms over his chest.

  “I’ve had some difficulty with a few of Lijah’s teachers. When they don’t get the answers they want, some of them seem to think the only way to deal with him is to keep pushing, which usually results in him shutting down completely.”

  Darger thought she understood why Mr. Gerard was explaining all of this to them.

  “We’ll be gentle with him. He doesn’t have to answer anything he doesn’t want to.”

  “I also hope you’ll understand that if Lijah did see something, he may not have understood it entirely. The black and white facts of it may be clear to him — someone was alive, and now they’re dead — but the idea that he should have reported something like that to the authorities is the kind of thing he can be quite naïve about.”

  “I understand,” Darger said. “Like we said before, he’s not in any trouble. We’re more curious to know if there are any particular details he might remember that could help us.”

  “Well, when it comes to details, Lijah doesn’t miss much.”

  He gestured that they should follow him further into the house. The living room was a cozy space with a leather recliner in one corner and a striped couch pushed against the far wall. A boy of about ten or eleven sat on the floor, legs crossed, mind consumed by the images on the TV that cast a flickering glow on his face.

  “Lijah, did you hear me ask you to turn the television down?”

  “Yeah, but Uncle Stan, I was just exploring the Great Plateau, and then I ran past this group of boulders, and suddenly they started moving and turned into a boss,” the boy said, unblinking eyes fixed on the screen.

  Mr. Gerard raised his eyebrows at the agents. “Multitasking is something we’ve been working on.”

  The man plucked a remote from the arm of a recliner and turned the volume down.

  “Lijah, you need to pause your game. This lady and gentleman have something they need to talk to you about.”

  “OK, but I’m right in the middle of the boss fight!”

  “Eyes and ears on me, Lijah. Right now, please.”

  The game went on unpaused for a few seconds, and Darger worried they wouldn’t be able to pull the kid away from it. But eventually, his thumb hit a button and the screen froze.

  Mr. Gerard directed the boy’s attention to the two agents with a sweeping hand.

  “This is Agent Darger and Agent Luck. They’d like to talk to you for a few moments.”

  The boy studied them for a moment, not quite allowing his eyes to rise high enough to meet theirs.

  Darger knelt down on the floor a comfortable distance away in case Lijah was particular about his personal space.

  “Hi, Lijah. My name is Violet.”

  His head bobbed slightly, which she took as a greeting, though he still avoided eye contact.

  “Do you know the Chalmers boys? Tyrell, Damon, and Ray-Ray?”

  “I used to live down the street from them, with Grandma Opal. But then she got sick and had to go to the old folks’ home. Damon and Ray-Ray used to play games with me sometimes. They usually wanted to play the one where we pretend we’re assassins from Assassin’s Creed. I like to play all different pretending games, though. Tyrell wouldn’t play. He says pretending games are for babies.”

  He spoke with a halting speech pattern, but the words were clear and precise.

  “That’s probably his loss then. I think pretending games are for everyone,” Darger said.

  Lijah grinned, showing off a smile with the adult canines only half grown in.

  “Do you remember telling Damon and Ray-Ray about something you saw in the Ravenwood Estates building?”

  Lijah frowned, deep in thought. He ran the palms of his hands over the tops of his thighs while he spoke, a repetitive back-and-forth motion.

  “It was the abandoned apartment building down the street from your Grandma Opal’s house. Do you remember that place?”

  “Oh!” His eyes lit up as he said it. “You mean Olympus Heights!”

  “Is that what you called it?”

  “Yes. It reminded me of the buildings in Rapture.”

  “What’s Rapture?”

  “Rapture is the city in Bioshock. That was what I usually pretended when I went in there. I’d pretend I was looking for the Little Sisters, so I could help them escape. But I had to be careful in case a Big Daddy ever showed up. Then I’d have to use my Plasmids and Gene Tonics to do battle with them. I didn’t actually have real Plasmids or Tonics. I would take the snacks Grandma Opal gave me, and I’d pretend my Capri-sun was really Electro Bolt and that my packet of Scooby-Doo fruit snacks was Insect Swarm.”

  Darger was lost. She glanced over at Luck, who looked decidedly less confused.

  “It’s a video game,” Luck explained. “Isn’t that kind of before your time, though?”

  The kid shrugged.

  “I play all the old games on PS Now,” he said, his eyes drifting up to the ceiling. “Around here I usually pretend play Fallout, because this neighborhood is more like being in the wastes. Gotta watch out for Radroaches. I made myself a Pip-boy out of cardboard, but it got all soggy and wet in the rain.”

  This time Darger figured it out on her own.

  “More video games, right?”

  “Right.”

  They’d gotten off track, and Darger steered them back. She decided that using Lijah’s video game jargon might be to her benefit.

  “Can you tell me about when you saw the Striga?”

  Lijah stopped fidgeting and hugged his legs to his chest. He looked Darger straight in the eye and nodded.

  Chapter 13

  Lijah was on the third floor of the building, playing Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon — the real game, not the pretend version — on his Nintendo 3DS. He had been pretend-playing Bioshock, but he’d run out of snacks during a boss fight with a Big Daddy and had been defeated. That happened sometimes. Lijah noticed that when some people played pretending games, they made it so they always won. Lijah didn’t like that. It wasn’t realistic. Sometimes you won, but sometimes you lost. And losing some of the time made winning feel that much better.

  So Lijah had lost his battle with the Big Daddy, and now he needed to recharge before trying again. Sometimes that meant going home for more snacks. Other times, like today, it meant he had to beat a Pokémon dungeon, and then his health would be fully recharged.

  Voices echoed from somewhere else in the building. Lijah froze.

  He’d only encountered other people inside the building once before. He walked inside one day and found two homeless men sitting on the steps of the main staircase. He was afraid at first because Tyrell had told them all a
story once about an evil bum that would cut off your pecker if he caught you alone in the city. But the men on the stairs only asked if they could have his Sprite can when he was done with it, for the return deposit. Lijah chugged the rest of the drink and handed it over. Then he gave them his sandwich baggie of Cheez-Its, even though he was pretty hungry. He figured they were probably hungrier than him.

  Lijah’s feet padded silently to the open door of the apartment. He peeked out and saw three white men walking down the hallway. By how they were dressed, he knew they were not homeless. One of them wore a suit, so he thought maybe they were businessmen. Maybe they owned the building.

  That worried him, because he knew he was not supposed to be inside the building. And now he was trapped, because they were in between him and the stairs. There was a fire escape, but he knew the ladder on this floor was rusted through. He didn’t like heights anyway.

  His heart started to thump in his chest. If the men caught him in here, he was going to be in big trouble. They would send him to that place that Dante had to go. Joobie? Something like that. He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew it was a bad place. Granny would be so mad.

  The men were coming closer to the apartment. He had no choice. He had to hide. Lijah ducked back into the gloom of the apartment, eyes searching for a hiding place.

  The coat closet. He dove for it, the door already standing part of the way open.

  He stepped inside and pulled the door closed, but something was wrong with the latch, and it wouldn’t catch. He had to keep his hand on the knob to keep it shut.

  It smelled real bad in the closet. Like maybe someone had used it as a toilet at some point. But there was nothing he could do now. And it had those slats so there was at least some fresh air getting in, and also a little light. He was glad for that. He didn’t like being by himself in the dark.

  The voices were even louder now, and then Lijah saw shadows stretch out across the entryway of the apartment, and the three men entered the room, one after another: a medium one, a little one, and Lijah almost gasped when he saw the last man come in. He was huge. And scary.