“I paid for this fabulous room,” I said. “You can both have it when I’m finished.”
“You got something that belongs to me,” he repeated, no longer grinning. “I want it.”
“Really? What’s that?” I asked.
“You know what it is. We saw you take it.”
“So you’re the movie maker . . . you need the camera to go to Hollywood, right?”
“Keep it up, wiseass,” he said.
“I think I’ll just hold onto it until I find out why you put it there, Beauty.”
“What did you say, asshole?”
His right hand slowly dipped into the hip pocket of his pants.
I could feel my heart pumping against my chest and took a deep breath. In my mind’s eye, I saw the Colt .45 tucked in its hiding place next to the chimney in the cabin and silently cursed myself.
“You’re as pretty as a girl,” I said. “But I guess all the guys tell you that.”
His right hand swung back into the light holding a butterfly knife. With a flick of his wrist, the flashing blade whipped toward me.
“You can get hurt with one of those, Beauty.”
As I slipped my hand into my jeans pocket, I remembered that I had left my own knife on the table inside the room. Instead, I found the few coins I had taken in change after buying the sandwich and coffee.
“You’ll find out soon enough, asshole,” he said, taking a step toward the open doorway.
Big Jim Dickey had told me I was going to seed, and he was probably right. I wondered whether I still had anything left as he bent forward into a low wrestler’s stance and moved toward me, the knife extended in his right hand.
Beyond the walkway, I heard the light crunch of the other man’s shoes on the gravel parking lot as he headed toward the room. A moment later, the coach lamp that illuminated the doorway went out.
“Stay out of it, Angie . . . this prick’s mine,” said Beauty.
“Angie?” I asked. “You brought your girlfriend along to help?”
“I’m gonna cut your balls off,” he rasped.
He moved slowly toward me, keeping his left foot in front of the right just as I would have done. When he was three feet away, he feinted to the right and then lunged at me, thrusting the blade in a short upward arc and slitting the loose fold of my shirt as I stepped back and to the side.
I felt a sharp sting and then a warm stream of blood running down my chest. Palming the coins from my pocket in my right hand, I backed across the motel room. With his apelike arms, his reach was well beyond mine.
As he closed the distance again, I hurled the coins into his face and launched a kick with my right boot that caught his hand in midswing. The butterfly knife flew across the room.
Hearing sudden movement behind me, I remembered that Leila was still there and could be part of their action. Turning quickly, I saw she had pried open the back window. Already half-through, she looked back at me with terror-stricken eyes.
For a body builder, Beauty moved fast. A moment later, he was riding my back, his left elbow cutting off the air to my windpipe and the fingers of his right hand clawing for my eyes. When I tried to throw him off, he wrapped his legs around my thighs.
Knowing that the other man was still out there, I lugged him close enough to kick the door shut. It was the type that locked automatically. Two seconds later, a body slammed into it.
Angie wasn’t his girlfriend or kid sister. Thankfully, the door held.
Shielding my eyes with my right hand, I swung around in a full circle and then drove Beauty into the nearest wall, smashing the plate glass mirror. It didn’t loosen his hold. While I struggled to breathe, he kept clawing at me with his fingernails, his head just behind mine, his gnashing teeth trying to reach my left ear.
I was able to reach the side of his jaw with my right hand. Curling my index and middle finger into the rigid shape of a fishhook, I thrust them inside his cheek and ripped at his mouth with all my strength.
“Angie!” he screamed as the corner of his mouth split open and tore along the jawline.
In response, there was another booming slam against the door. It began to splinter as Beauty’s legs came free from my thighs. Pulling my fingers loose from his ruined mouth, I dipped my shoulder to the left and heaved him across my back. He landed on the bed and was back on his feet a moment later.
He was trying to scrabble back into a wrestler’s clinch when I grabbed his left wrist, levered his arm over my knee, and snapped it downward, dislocating his elbow.
He screamed again as the door shattered behind us. I chopped down hard on the back of Beauty’s neck and the screaming stopped.
As the second man came through the door, I saw that he was close to my own height but twenty pounds heavier. Maybe forty-five years old, he was wearing a sleeveless tank top that revealed a blacksmith’s arms and big knobby hands. His left eye was milky white.
He came toward me in a fighter’s crouch, both fists protecting his face above the slab of his chest. From the flattened nose and scar tissue around his eyes, he had probably been a professional, but not a very good one. Moving counterclockwise, I began throwing quick jabs at his head to keep him away from me, hoping to throw a straight right as soon as he dropped his hands.
Blood was still running into my eyes from one of the gouges Beauty had carved in me. The guy ducked left and threw a solid hook that caught me on the temple, backing me toward the front window. Quickly following up, he threw a straight left with most of his weight behind it. The punch landed flush on my jaw, and I went down hard, instinctively rolling over as the toe of his boot glanced off my upper thigh.
It was Beauty who saved me, choosing that moment to try to shove himself up from the floor. As the old fighter stepped back to launch a kick at my groin, he tripped over Beauty, going down to one knee.
Even as I scrambled to my feet, I knew I had to end it or they would soon be filleting me with the butterfly knife. The big guy was smiling as he came on, sensing I was almost done. Flicking a hard jab in my face, he followed it with a left-right combination, driving me back toward the Formica table. I grabbed the chandelier to stay on my feet, and it swung me around far enough that his next roundhouse punch missed me completely. As he lunged past, I delivered a solid right hook to his Adam’s apple.
His good eye went blank for a moment, and he stumbled before turning to come back at me. He was moving slower now and having trouble breathing. Pivoting around to his blind side, I drove a hard punch to his kidneys, and he grunted out loud. It was the first noise he had made since battering his way into the room. He swung back wildly at me, but the punch missed as I ducked away.
Head down, he charged me, and I kicked him in the right knee. As he buckled toward me, I straightened him with an uppercut to the jaw, feeling the shock of it all the way up my shoulder. He reeled back several feet before dropping heavily to the floor. He was struggling to get up again when I kicked him in the head and he lay still.
For several seconds I stood there swaying back and forth, my left shoulder numb, both legs trembling. I felt a wave of gray nausea, but at least my head was still on my shoulders. That was a start. Glancing across the room, I saw that Beauty was trying to crawl across the floor. He was advancing a few inches at a time, whimpering softly as he tried to cradle the dislocated elbow in his right hand.
The splintered motel room door swung open, and I looked up to see a woman standing in the shattered doorframe. It was one of the Korean women from the reception area.
She was holding a fresh set of towels and two clean sheets in her arms. Apparently she did double duty on the maid staff. Her fathomless black eyes took in the wreckage of the room without any noticeable reaction.
“We’re still tidying up here . . . just a few more minutes,” I said, attempting to smile.
11
I went into the bathroom and soaked a towel in hot water. After washing the blood off my face, I broke a cardinal rule and glanced in the mirror. It
wasn’t as bad as I thought.
There were raw cuts and scratches around both eyes. I had a fairly deep gouge beneath the right one that was seeping blood. Beauty hadn’t succeeded in getting his fingernails into either eye.
Aside from the scratches, the left side of my jaw was swelling, and I could move one of my front teeth with my index finger. Lifting the lower edge of my bloody polo shirt, I saw that the cut on my chest was superficial. Rinsing the towel in hot water, I went back into the room.
Beauty was still inching along the floor on his quest to get to the doorway. Picking up one of the vinyl chairs, I trudged past him and shut the splintered door as far as I could, wedging the back of the chair against the knob to keep it closed against the wind and rain.
Gripping the back of his collar, I dragged him over to the other chair and sat down. Turning him over on his back, I gently wiped the bloody slime away from his mouth.
“You’re going to need stitches, Beauty,” I said. “But you’ll be as pretty as ever in a month or two.”
An odd whistling sound came from his torn mouth before he managed to snarl, “Fr . . . fr . . . frock . . . you.”
I turned him over to the side to search his pockets. The first one yielded a pair of engraved brass knuckles. They were studded with sharpened conical points that extended a half inch from the frame.
“You get these in your Christmas stocking?” I asked.
In his back pocket, I found a key to room fourteen at the Wonderland and a black leather wallet.
“Goin’ . . . kill you,” he snarled into the chair leg as I rolled him over on his back again.
He had five hundred dollars in fifties and twenties, along with two credit cards and a business card that read, “Devane Investigations Unlimited,” with a Syracuse mailing address. The wallet also contained a faded two-inch-square photograph of a naked blonde girl with enormous breasts. She was staring bleakly into the camera and looked to be about fifteen.
The driver’s license identified him as Salvatore Scalise, 16 Windsor Court, Liverpool, New York. I seemed to remember Liverpool being near Syracuse, which was about sixty miles back down the thruway.
“Listen, Sal . . . we don’t have a lot of time here,” I said, expecting to hear sirens any minute and not wanting to spend the rest of the night filling out police reports. “I need to know who you work for. It’s important.”
“Frock . . . you . . . bastid,” he said.
I knew I could track the girl down pretty quickly. There couldn’t be too many juniors at St. Andrews from Uzbekistan. But I doubted I would find her in her dorm room or sorority when I got back to Groton.
She would almost certainly go to ground for the rest of the weekend, if not longer, and Jordan was facing the blackmailer’s deadline. That left Sal as my only lead to who was blackmailing Jordan and had possibly murdered Dennis Wheatley.
“Sal . . . I don’t want to hurt you,” I said. “Tell me who you work for and we can both be on our way.”
He raised his head off the floor and tried to spit at me, but only ended up with bloody drool on his ruined mouth. Reaching down, I slowly pulled his dislocated elbow toward me. When he screamed out again, I covered his mouth.
“I really don’t want to do this, Sal,” I said and meant it. “Now, is taping the customers one of your regular duties here at the Wonderland or were you hired just to film the man who was supposed to be in this room tonight?”
I took my hand away from his mouth.
“Goin’ kill you, man . . . frist chance,” was his next answer. The eyes looking up at me were snake-hard.
Lifting his dislocated arm, I dug my boot into his armpit and pinioned his wrist with my left hand. With my right, I bent his pinky finger back until it was nearly ready to snap.
As soon as the scream subsided, he threw up on himself.
“Now I’ll ask you once more. Do you do this for the Wonderland or were you hired to film just the man in this room?”
He slowly shook his head back and forth, his eyes closed.
“You’ve got guts, Sal, but if you don’t tell me what I need to know, I’ll have to snap this finger like a lobster claw. Then we’ll have only nine more to go,” I said.
I never would have done it, but after digesting that thought for several seconds, he grunted, “Jess the nigger. Only the nigger.”
“And how did you know the man was going to be here?” I demanded, continuing the pressure on his finger.
“Don’t know . . . we was told to be here at six and set up the camera like we done before.”
“Who told you?”
He shook his head back and forth.
“Who told you?” I repeated, bending the same finger back to the breaking point.
“Bobby Devane!” he shouted up at me from the floor.
“Doesn’t help me . . . I don’t know him,” I said, not letting up on the pressure.
“Oh, God, man . . . he works for the Razzano brothers,” he cried, the words coming now in a rush.
“Who are they?”
“Lawyers . . . the guys on TV.”
“As in, ‘If you’ve swallowed asbestos, call us’?” I asked.
When he nodded, I eased up on his finger again and he drew in a long breath. Even I had heard of the Razzano brothers. Their two conniving faces were plastered everywhere from roadside billboards to the back cover of the Groton telephone book. Theirs was the law firm that had agreed to represent Kelly in her age discrimination lawsuit against Hustlers.
“Where can I find Bobby Devane?” I asked, getting up from the bed.
“Devane . . . Investigashons,” he said, struggling to pronounce the second word. “Shiracuse.”
I took the business card out of Sal’s wallet. There was a cell phone number for Devane that someone had handwritten on the back of the card. I dropped the wallet and his money on the floor next to him. As I was heading for the door, the house phone began ringing and I picked it up. It was Buntid calling from the front desk.
“Maid came back and said you was still in the room,” he said firmly. “That’s another fifty bucks like I told you.”
Apparently, she hadn’t told him the condition of the room. It was probably because she didn’t speak anything but Korean and the other, more universal language. It also struck me that maybe the Wonderland was used to this kind of stuff. I looked over at Angie. He was still out cold on the floor. Sal was trying for the door again, like a baby turtle in the Galapagos yearning to reach the sea.
“Yeah, I’ve got guests here that might want to stay awhile. You probably want to send someone down to collect it.”
“I’m on my way,” he said.
I removed the chair from the back of the door and swung it open.
“Goin’ to kill you, man . . . frist chance,” honked Sal from the floor as I walked out of the room.
12
The rain had stopped as I made my way down to room fourteen. Inside, I found Sal’s recording equipment along with a large metal case stuffed with several thousand dollars’ worth of surveillance toys. In a separate zipped compartment, I found two more video recordings in plastic sleeves. I took it all with me and stowed everything in the tool compartment behind the cab of the pickup.
As soon as Bug smelled the blood on me, she began whimpering. It took me a minute to quiet her down as we headed back toward Groton. Still feeling like someone had tried to split my skull with an ax blade, I rummaged in the glove compartment and came up with a bottle of Ibuprofen. I dry swallowed four of them.
The deeper cuts were continuing to seep blood, and I stopped at the same Quik Mart where I had bought a sandwich on the way up. While I was paying for Band Aids and another twenty ounces of coffee, the woman behind the counter noticed my torn and bloody polo shirt. When her eyes drifted upward, she stared at my face as if trying to match it to a wanted poster.
Another rain squall began drubbing the windshield as I got on the road again. While driving back, I replayed the encounter at the
Wonderland over and over in my mind.
You stupid asshole, I thought. At Ranger school, I had been trained to dismantle idiots like Sal and Angie without working up a sweat. I could imagine my old training instructor, First Sergeant Jim Bombard, looking over my shoulder during the brawl at the motel room.
“You’re fightin’ like a goddamn cherry, Cantrell,” he would have shouted at me.
And he would have been right. Maybe it was a good thing, I decided. This wasn’t Afghanistan, and they weren’t my country’s enemies. They were only two scum-balls who worked for blackmailers.
I tried to concentrate on what it all meant.
Someone had hired a private detective named Bobby Devane to spy on Jordan. The request could have come from the Razzano law firm, or it might have been a freelance job. Either way, I had to find out, and very soon.
Whoever had hired Devane also knew exactly when Jordan was going to be at the Wonderland, with enough advance notice to send Sal there to set up the surveillance equipment. That information could only have come indirectly from Jordan himself or from the call-girl service. Jordan had told me in his office that he had made some enemies, but he hadn’t said who they were.
It was a little past nine when I arrived back home. The wet spruce trees around the cabin were glistening in the headlights as I pulled up to the back door. Turning off the engine, I saw that the windows were dark.
I thought I had left a light on in the living room. It was possible that the storm had knocked out the electricity. Switching the headlights back on, I walked to the cabin door. Bug stayed by my side. After turning the knob, I swung the door open and waited. Bug stepped over the threshold, stopped, and sniffed the air. She turned her head to look back up at me with a bemused expression that said everything was fine.
I went to the table lamp in the living room and discovered that the bulb had burned out. I wondered whether I was losing my nerve as I went to turn off the truck lights.
Inside, I went to the bathroom and took a quick glance in the mirror. My face looked worse. Thankfully, the Ibuprofen had blunted my headache. Using my index finger, I tried to move my front lower tooth again. I hoped I wouldn’t lose it.
Dead Man's Bridge Page 10