by Lamar Giles
A vigorous nod. “That scared the crap out of me. I called Gavin and offered him a grand to put those cards in your locker.”
Anything beyond “a grand” was lost on me. To Gavin, I said, “A thousand dollars?”
He misunderstood my outburst, turned away shamefaced. I yelled because that amount was mind boggling. I might’ve done the deed myself for that much.
“He told me no. Then I offered him five,” Davis said.
Gavin got in his face. “I’ll give it back. I don’t have all of it. But I’ll work that off. Wasn’t worth it.”
Davis wilted, despite having shown that Gavin’s intimidation tactics were useless on him. “You’re right. It wasn’t.”
“Why now?” Molly asked. “You had to have known this might be related to your dad when you saw the pictures in Nikki’s room. You didn’t try to scare her then.”
“I wasn’t convinced anything led to my dad. Not until the lawyer.”
“You played along to get close to me?” I said, chewing my lip after. The physical pain was better than the other kind that seeped in with every one of his shady confessions.
“Yes, but I wasn’t being deceitful. I wanted to be there for you. I like you so much, Nikki.”
A confusing warmth spread through my chest. Traitor, I told myself. Out loud, “Do you still?”
“Of course.”
“Enough to help me bring my dad’s killer to justice?”
He froze. Finally, “My dad wouldn’t have killed yours.”
It didn’t sound like murder was beyond Big Bert. It sounded like murder was beneath him. The same way he might say “My dad doesn’t do laundry,” even though he always had clean clothes.
“Delano?”
He looked to the ceiling, beyond the ceiling, for some divine intervention. It didn’t come. “It wouldn’t matter. Whatever happened, it would’ve been done in a way where no one can find proof.”
“What if someone could? Would you help? Could you prove you liked me enough to let me take down the man who came into my home and threatened me?”
“You want to go after Delano? How?”
“Will you help?”
He glanced from me to Molly to Gavin and back to me. “For him. Yes. Tell me what you want me to do.”
“Leave.”
“Huh?”
“Walk into the school, go to your first class, and continue with the rest of your day.”
Confusion tugged his lip up like on a fishhook. “I thought you wanted my help.”
“I do. And I’ll get it when you take me to the football dinner tonight.”
I felt the postures of my friends change, their own confusion setting in. I’d explain soon enough.
Davis said, “That’s all you’re telling me? Something’s going down at the dinner?”
“There are two more things. One, make sure Delano is on the property. Two, be pretty. Now go.”
He hesitated and I stomped my foot, firing a cracking echo around the room. “Go!”
Quickly, he went, stopping at the door to say, “I really am sorry, Nikki.”
“Make it up tonight if you mean it.”
When he was gone, Gavin and Molly closed on me with obvious questions.
“What are you going to do at that dinner tonight?” Molly asked.
I pointed to Gavin. “Not as much as him. Davis showed you how to break into to the safety alert systems for Vista and Cardinal, right?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Phase Two.”
I explained my version of the Phase 2 plan. It did not go over well.
“No,” Molly said. “I won’t let you.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“Make a bet. I win, and you—”
“No.”
“Then I’ll—”
“No. I won’t force you in on this. But it’s my last shot to do something for my dad. It’s happening. Right?”
That question was for Gavin, who hadn’t resisted at all. His guilt was useful that way. “I got you.”
A flustered Molly said, “I still get a question.”
“A question?”
“Our previous bet. You owed me three questions. I have one left.”
I’d totally forgotten about that.
“Do you honestly, swear on a Bible, think what you just described will work?” she asked.
Gavin said, “It doesn’t matter. We have to try.”
Molly threw her hands high. “All the crazy is in here.”
“We have a better shot if you’re in on it,” I said. “That’s my honest, swear-on-a-Bible answer.”
“No pressure at all.”
“Give me Dad’s iPhone back.” I extended my hand. “I’ll need it.”
She rooted in her bag, gave it over. “Where are you going?”
“That’s a secret. You love me just enough to tell my mom.”
Her pinched face was not a convincing rebuttal. “I could fill her in on this Phase Two insanity.”
“Maybe. But you shouldn’t have reminded me of our bet. I never got my demand.”
“That doesn’t apply here.”
“No-strings freebie. You. Must. Comply.”
She was vibrating mad, unused to being outmaneuvered. “I’m putting you in a terrible position, right? Making you choose between my well-being and our friendship. I’m not heartless. Tell my mom whatever you want. My demand is you wait”—I checked the time on the phone—“eight hours.”
“Oh, like that’s helpful.”
“More than you know. See you tonight. Dress to impress. I’ve got errands to run.”
I left them to it and went about my next task. Not errands plural. Only one. It was overdue.
Freddy Spliff’s temporary residence was faded sandblasted brick and gnawed siding with iron bars set in the window frames. In the yard, a sign mounted on two wooden posts identified the place as Help House. A close grouping of punctures in the H and O of house might’ve been bullet holes. All together, it made the sign seem more like a plea than a title.
I climbed the rickety front steps onto a wraparound porch crowded with mismatched chairs. Mailboxes were mounted on a rack next to the door, each with a removable label. F. Spliff was third from the left.
Pressing the doorbell triggered a buzzer inside. The man who answered had long, streaky gray hair tied into a ponytail and looked like an old rock star except with thick glasses. His magnified eyes stared, blinked slow, like he was taking snapshots of my internal organs. “What do you want?”
“Is Freddy Spliff home?”
“He expecting you?”
“Not exactly.”
The man fidgeted, and I got it. What good could possibly come from a teen girl popping up for an afternoon visit with an ex-con? “I think he’s job-hunting. I’ll check, but you might have to come back later.”
It was far from convincing the way his eyes flicked to the left, like Freddy was in the next room. I took a deep breath, prepared to shout Freddy’s name. Freddy saved me the trouble by coming out from hiding voluntarily. “It’s okay, Malcolm. She’s the daughter of a friend.”
The old man—Malcolm—said, “Well, y’all talk on the porch. We don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea.”
Freddy nodded and joined me outside. Malcolm closed the door behind him, slammed the lock in place. If Freddy didn’t have a key, he’d have to ring the bell when he wanted back in. It didn’t seem to bother him.
“You shouldn’t have come here.” He wore the same pants and shirt he’d had on at the Cosmo, took a seat in a wobbly, varnished chair. “I already told you I was messed up when we talked before.”
So why sit? I opted for a dusty lawn chair. “I don’t know if you’ll tell me anything I want or need to hear. But there is a matter of you having what belongs to me.”
“You want the flash drive.”
“You said it was my dad’s. Which means it’s mine now. However messed up you were, that drive was real enough for those guys f
rom the Gaming Control Board to snatch you that day.”
Freddy twitched as if I’d tased him. “Nathan said you’re a smart girl. Everybody I know who got kids says the same thing. Me included. Nathan might be the only one who ain’t exaggerating.”
My purpose in coming here grayed. Dad thought that, even when I was being a jerk to him. “Were they—” I blinked my eyes dry and swiped nonexistent dust from my face. “Were there agents in the room when I called you? Did they tell you to get rid of me?”
He nodded. “It didn’t take much convincing, though. Girl your age shouldn’t be mixed up in this.”
This. Something so extreme they snatched him up like we live in a police-state. “Why’d they come for you like that?”
“Nathan was already stirring up trouble with Metro and attorney’s office. Imagine if Gaming Control got dragged into it. They didn’t want anything proving he’d been helping them when he died. He must’ve mentioned my name in one of his meetings. They tracked me down.”
All this CIA-style kidnapping and cover-up stuff upgraded them from annoying to frightening. “Do you know what Dad was helping them with?”
“Catching cheaters.”
If he’d said “catching gremlins,” it would’ve made as much sense. “Why would they recruit him for that?”
“They didn’t.” Shadows crested his brow. “Nathan went to them. There was loads of details on the drive.”
“The one they took.” I cursed.
“Sure.” Freddy pulled a different flash drive from his shirt pocket. “Good thing I made copies.”
I pulled my laptop from my bag and booted up right there and plugged in the drive. There were a few text files. All the photos I already had. A couple of numbered folders. The data on the drive took up a fraction of the device’s space. Good news. Easier to comb through with midday temps rising and my warming computer balanced on my knees.
“What’s relevant here, Freddy?”
“His notes talk about the crew he spotted working tables at the Nysos his first night back. Poker, blackjack.”
I’d skimmed that first text file and saw similar notes. The cheaters were a motley crew dressed in a manner that would prevent a casual onlooker from recognizing they knew each other. Corporate types paired with dreadlocked stoners. Vacationing grandpas and ditzy sorority girls. Communicating through discreet hand signals. Stuff that dealers, or gaming floor supervisors, or pit bosses should’ve easily caught … unless some of them were involved, too. Dad noticed because one of the crew had rigged a Hold’em game he’d sat in on. It was an eerie déjà vu for him.
Each new set of notes was in a different, dated file. I moved onto the next, where Dad returned to the Nysos and followed one of the dealers to an East Side apartment complex, then to a bar where that dealer met someone from the crew. It was then that he first contacted Gaming Control.
“Why do this? What was in it for him?”
“I asked him the same thing when he came to me for help organizing it all. He was skittish at first, didn’t want me in too deep. He broke after a while, though. Told me a story about Al Capone.”
That tore me from my laptop. “The gangster?”
I’d seen his picture in the Mob Museum, one of the city’s most popular attractions, down the street from Andromeda’s. What’d he have to do with Dad?
Freddy grunted a confirmation, then said, “He was a big-time Chicago mob boss. Never went to jail for all the people he killed or the lives he ruined. But he also didn’t pay his taxes and that’s how the government eventually got him. Nathan was obsessed with that story.”
“He wanted to get the person who killed John Reedy, by any means necessary.”
“Right you are.”
“He thought Big Bert Carlino was running a cheating ring?”
“Never said who. You’ll notice there are no names in those notes. Everything he wrote was cryptic.” Freddy tapped his temple. “Said it was safer for me.”
Not for me, though. Maybe before I started poking around, but I needed that information for leverage now. Cryptic could get me hurt. Or worse.
The notes were obscure and the pictures I’d seen before. None of this was helping. “I don’t get it. If Big Bert’s Al Capone, why would Dad think this was the way to get him? He wouldn’t cheat his own casino.”
“I don’t know what to say. I wish I’d asked more questions.” His voice took on the quality of an old dog’s growl; he turned away from me, hiding his face. His shame. “That last night, I should have.”
“You saw him?”
“One last time, I did. He wasn’t making sense. He’d just met with his Gaming Control contact. Whatever they talked about had him upset. He kept saying, ‘I never asked what it was. I never asked.’”
Freddy was right. Nonsense. “That’s all? He didn’t say or do anything else?”
He pointed a crooked finger at my computer. “Created that last text file. I’ve looked at it a bunch of times but don’t know what it means.”
“Cryptic.” I felt deflated clicking on a file I expected to be as comprehensible to me as ancient Sanskrit.
The opposite was true. I understood it too well.
Dad’s note read: bludgeon = bat.
I knew it all.
That headline from so long ago—“Local Man Bludgeoned to Death; Casino Owner Charged”—slammed into my conscious thoughts with enough force to make me dizzy.
Bludgeon, a vague descriptor the media ran with in the absence of a murder weapon. John Reedy could’ve been beaten with a crowbar or a frozen leg of lamb for all anyone knew. When the “real killer” was found with the bludgeon in his possession, we only cared about big-picture stuff, Dad coming home. The details escaped us.
All the research I’d done in my grief-stricken haze. All the hot rage and confusion and uncertainty and anxiety. All the nights staring at the ceiling, obsessing over who would, and how did, and what now? All of that, and I’d missed the same, obvious question Dad had.
What, exactly, was a bludgeon?
The recorded security footage from Andromeda’s was still in my computer. A couple of touchpad swipes set the disc drive spinning, and opened a window into a frozen past. I didn’t play it, didn’t need to see ghosts fighting again. Neither of them was the cardplayer that required my attention.
The young man in the baseball cap, the bent brim obscuring most of his face. I knew what I was looking for now, and that familiar jawline jumped at me like 3-D. He was more muscular these days. The facial hair was new. There was a reason I felt I’d known Davis Carlino on his first day at Vista and had such an intense reaction. Call it a trace memory of the night things went so wrong for my family. But it wasn’t really Davis I remembered.
It was Cedric.
First in line for the Carlino empire. A slick, always-on hustler. Former baseball star.
bludgeon = bat
Cedric’s bat.
He’d killed my dad. And John Reedy. Probably Dan Harris, too.
“Dad was after the wrong Al Capone.” We both were. I closed my laptop without shutting it down, and I pocketed the flash drive. “Freddy, I gotta go.”
Phase 2, my grand plan, based on the same wrong assumptions that drove my father until the night he discovered the truth and died because of it, wasn’t going to work.
The world rang. A sharp trilling triggered my reflexes, so I stomped the brake, inspiring angry honks from the car behind me. It shot by on my right, the driver giving me the traffic finger in passing.
Back in motion, I recognized the sputtering tone as an incoming call on the car’s hands-free system. Molly’s number flashed on the dashboard display. I thumbed a button on the steering wheel to open the line. “Yeah?”
“Got your text,” she said.
I’d sent the message an hour ago, keyed it while idling at the first red light I hit after leaving Freddy’s. I knew classes were in session and didn’t expect a quick call. Which was fine. I needed the time to process all I k
new. To let the fixer in me work on the problems with Phase 2.
“I’m in bathroom stall, and it’s gross,” she said. “Can you tell me what it meant?”
“Exactly what it said. Change of plans.”
“I never agreed to the first plan,” she reminded me.
“If you’re not going to help, you could always hang up.” I waited. “Hello?”
“I’m here.”
And I kept going.
The Doolittle Community Center was one of my favorite places in the city, always my intended safe house until it was time to execute “all the crazy” I’d plotted. This place was where I’d met Molly and Gavin on a Friday Funday during citywide summer camp. Where I’d learned to swim and got in trouble for betting M&M’S in unsanctioned card games with other kids. I entered like I always had, checking in at the front desk with a bag containing none of the athletic wear or equipment most patrons carried.
I entered the women’s locker room frumpy, in denim and sneakers. When I emerged an hour and a half later, the clothes I’d come in now stuffed in my duffel, I knew everyone in the place would remember I’d been there. That was okay. All the hiding was done now.
A half hour later, I entered the cavernous Nysos parking deck, veering away from the valet line and descending deeper underground for self-park options. I chose a space in a sparsely populated corner, and sat. My A/C on and my radio off. I could do this. For him.
I sent the first text.
Me: are you good to go? any problems?
Gavin: it’s working. i can send on your signal.
Me: do it!
Minutes passed and nothing happened. I started to worry.
Then the phone buzzed in my hand, the screen lighting with the image and message I’d requested. Gavin came through for me.
Now the rest.
Me: decision time. in or out?
Molly: already in the lobby.
Thank. God.
Me: you know what to do. feel free to tell my mom anything you want. and make sure your phone’s charged.
Molly: i’m sitting on 98% battery. worry about your end.