by Dan Simmons
“Fourteen,” said Kurtz.
“Jesus, that makes me even more of a pedophile. But you were a big fourteen.” She turned and smiled at that, but Kurtz kept his eyes on the road. It was more shadow than sunlight ahead.
“You liked the Catacombs,” said Rigby. “You wanted to keep exploring them, even with the rats and everything. I just wanted to get up into the Basilica. Remember that sort of secret passage in the wall and the narrow, winding staircase that went right up into the sacristy?”
Kurtz nodded and wondered what she was up to with this story.
“We found those other stairs and I took your hand and kept leading you up that other winding staircase, up past the organ loft where Father Majda was practicing on the organ for Saturday’s High Mass. Remember how dark it was? It must have been about ten o’clock at night and there was only the light of the votive candles down below, and Father Majda’s little lamp above the keyboard as we tiptoed past his loft and kept climbing—I don’t know why we were so frightened of being heard, he was playing Toccata in Fugue in D-minor and wouldn’t have heard us if we’d fired a gun at him.”
Kurtz remembered the smells—the heavy incense and the oiled wood scent of the pews and the scent of young Rigby’s clean sweat and skin as she pushed him down on the hard pew in the upper choir loft, knelt straddling him, unbuttoned her white blouse, and pulled it off. She’d worn a simple white bra and he’d watched with as much technical interest as teenaged lust as she reached behind her and easily undid the hooks and eyes. He remembered thinking I have to learn how to do that without looking.
“Do you know what the odds were against us having a simultaneous orgasm like that on our first try, Joe?”
Kurtz didn’t think she really wanted an answer to that, so he concentrated on driving.
“I think that was my first and last time,” Rigby said softly.
Kurtz looked over at her.
“For a simultaneous orgasm, I mean,” she said hurriedly. “Not for a fuck. I’ve had a few of those since. Though none in a choir loft since that night.”
Kurtz sighed. The pest control truck was falling farther behind, although Kurtz was driving under the speed limit. It was cloudy enough now that cars coming the other way had their headlights on.
“Want some music?” said Rigby.
“Sure.”
She turned the radio on. Scratchy jazz matched the buffeting wind and low-hurrying clouds. She poured the last of the Thermos coffee into the red mug and handed him the mug.
Kurtz looked at her, nodded, and sipped.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
Following the pathetic Pinto south on Highway 16, the Dodger ran through all the reasons he hated this playing-spy bullshit. He wasn’t a spy. He wasn’t some fucking dork private eye like this idiot he had watched all night and was tailing now. The Dodger knew very well what he was and what he was good at doing and what his goal was in life right now—the Resurrection—and it had nothing to do with following the clapped-out Pinto with this clapped-out man and the big-tit brunette south toward Neola and the bruised sky down there.
The two goombahs the night before had been no problem at all. Since they were bodyguards, they were arrogant and unobservant, sitting there in their Lincoln Town Car with all the doors unlocked. The Dodger had opened the back door and slipped into the backseat with his 9mm Beretta already raised, the suppressor attached. The Dodger had known that the man named Sheffield in the passenger seat up front would react the fastest—and he had, ducking and reaching for his gun the second the door opened—but the Dodger had put three slugs through the thick seat into the man and, when he reared up in pain, a fourth one through his forehead. The driver had just sat there, mouth open, staring, and the Dodger could have taken time to reload if he’d had to. He didn’t have to. The fifth shot caught the driver in the right eye, exited the back of the big man’s head, and punched a hole through the windshield. No one on Chippewa Street noticed.
The Dodger had removed the suppressor and slipped the Beretta back in its holster before grabbing first Sheffield and then the driver by their hair and pulling them up and back over the seats. Leaving the bodies sprawled on the floor and upholstery in the back, limbs intertwined, the Dodger had gone around front and driven the Lincoln a block, turning into a dark alley. He walked back, brought up the Mazda, dumped the bodies in the trunk, and then drove the Town Car a few more blocks to park it near a popular restaurant. He’d walked back to the Mazda whistling, gloved hands in his pockets.
The Boss always called Gonzaga or the Farino woman to tell them about the hit and where to find the bodies—using one of his military-intelligence electronic voice distorters and location scramblers—so the Dodger e-mailed him that the job was done. But this night, the Boss had another job for him. He ordered the Dodger to go wait for the private eye whose office the Farino woman was in right then—not at the man’s office, but at someplace called The Harbor Inn way over in the mill area on the Island. The Boss e-mailed the address as the intersection of Ohio and Chicago Streets.
The Dodger was not pleased with this assignment. He was tired. It had been a long day, starting with that teacher he’d missed out in Orchard Park. He should be free now to go back to his hidey hole and get a good night’s sleep, transporting the corpses to the Resurrection Site the next morning. Now he had to go down past the black projects and spend the night…watching. That’s what the Boss had said. Just watch. Not even harvest this stupid private eye.
So the Dodger had driven south across the narrow steel bridge onto the Island, past the mills and half-empty projects, had driven by the dark Harbor Inn, checking it out, and then parked a block and a half southeast of the place, walking back to keep vigil in the shadows of an abandoned gas station half a block from the old hotel. The man—the Boss had said his name was Kurtz, as if the Dodger gave the slightest shit—showed up in a rusted-out Pinto about an hour later. There was a woman with him—the Farino woman, the Dodger realized as he stared through the binoculars. She seemed to be holding a .45 semiauto on Kurtz.
The Dodger almost laughed out loud in the shadows. He kills the female don’s two bodyguards and steals her car, and what does she do? It looks as if she hijacks the felon ex-private-eye she was visiting on Chippewa Street.
The two went in through the boarded-up front entrance of the abandoned hotel, and the Dodger watched lights come on on the second floor. Driving by twice, he’d cased the place—even noticed the subtle surveillance video cameras on the north and west sides—but he was sure that he could climb one of the rusting fire escapes or a drainpipe and get in one of the darkened windows without being heard or seen. He could even get up to the dark third story—probably empty was the Dodger’s guess, this Kurtz seemed like the only resident of the old Harbor Inn—and he could climb down to the second floor where three lights now burned behind shades. Whatever the female don and Kurtz were up to in there—and the Dodger could imagine what it was—he could be on them and finished with them and hauling the bodies out to the Mazda before they had a chance to look up.
The Dodger had gone back down the dark, rainy street to the Mazda only to find one black teenager jimmying open the car door and another one using a crowbar on the trunk. The trunk popped up first, the boy stared at the two bodies in it, had time to say, “Motherfuck,” and the Dodger shot him in the back of the head, not even bothering to use the silencer.
The second boy dropped his tool and ran like hell. Like a lot of these ghetto kids, he was fast. The Dodger—who had always liked to run—was faster. He caught up with the kid on an eyeless side street less than two blocks away.
The boy turned and flicked open a knife. “Jesus fuck man,” the kid said, crouching and dodging, “your face…”
The Dodger supped the pistol in its holster, took the knife away from the kid with three moves, kicked his legs out from under him, and crushed the boy’s larynx with his boot He left the body where it was, walked back to the Mazda—no on
e had responded to the shot—and loaded the first boy’s body in the backseat. There was no more room in the trunk.
The Dodger drove the two blocks, found that the second boy was still breathing in a rattling, rasping, twitching sort of way, so he cut his throat with the knife the boy had dropped. He tossed that corpse in the back as well—all the blood would make the Mazda unsalvageable for future use, but the Boss paid for these vehicles and he could afford it—and he drove back to the parking lot near Marina Towers, where he dumped the four bodies in the back, of the pest control truck and drove it back to the Harbor Inn area.
The Dodger kept Handi Wipes in the truck, and he had to use eight of them to clean himself up. He had a change of clothes in the truck as well.
Back on surveillance at the empty gas station, the Dodger e-mailed the Boss, described the situation at the Harbor Inn, and asked if he could knock off for the night. There was no need to tell the Boss about the two car thieves; they’d just be extra material for the Resurrection.
The Boss e-mailed back ordering the Dodger to phone on a secure line. It took the Dodger fifteen minutes to find a pay phone that was working. The Boss was curt, pulling rank, and told the Dodger to sleep in the bug van and to keep his eye on the Harbor Inn and to follow Kurtz whenever he left.
“What about the Farino woman?”
“Ignore her. Stay with Kurtz. Call me when he moves and I’ll tell you what to do next.”
So here he was, the Dodger, exhausted from sleeping in the front seat of the pest control truck, red-eyed from trying to keep watch between naps, still smelling of blood, with four rigor-mortised corpses under tarps in the back, driving south toward Neola, New York.
The Dodger had grown accustomed to taking orders from the Boss, but that was because the Boss had been giving him orders he enjoyed carrying out. He wasn’t enjoying this playing-spy shit. If the Boss didn’t call him off this joke of an assignment soon, he’d kill Kurtz and this new woman with him and add them to the Resurrection. It was better to apologize to the Boss later, the Dodger had learned decades ago, than to ask permission before doing something you really wanted to do.
And the Dodger really wanted to kill this man who’d kept him awake in the rainy ghetto all night.
But as they approached Neola, he dutifully used his cell phone to call the Boss.
“Sir, I’m not going into Neola with them for Chrissakes,” he told him. “Either let me deal with this Kurtz now or let me go about my business.”
“Go do what you have to do,” said the Boss.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Neola is about sixty miles south-southeast of Buffalo, but the narrow, two-lane road slowed them enough that they’d been driving almost an hour and a half before they saw signs saying they were close to the little city. The clouds had moved in now, the hills had gotten steeper and the valleys deeper, the October wind had come up stronger and the trees were mostly bare. The few cars that passed going the opposite direction did so with their headlights on and sometimes with their windshield wipers flicking.
Kurtz pulled the Pinto to the side of the road on a cinder apron in front of an abandoned fruit stand and got out of the car.
“What is it, Joe?” said Rigby. “You want me to drive?”
Kurtz shook his head. He watched the traffic going south pass for several silent minutes. Finally, Rigby said, “What is it? You think we’re being followed?”
“No,” said Kurtz. The pest control truck had fallen back in the gloom and rain some miles ago, and must have turned off somewhere.
Rigby got out of the car and came around, lighting a cigarette. She offered one to Kurtz. He shook his head.
“That’s right, you gave up smoking in Bangkok, didn’t you? I always thought it was because of that girl’s act at Pussies Galore.”
Kurtz said nothing. It wasn’t raining, but the highway was wet and a passing truck sent up a hiss and spray.
“What are you going to do about the little girl, Joe?”
He turned a blank stare on her. “What little girl?”
“Your little girl,” said Rigby. “Yours and Samantha’s. The fourteen-year-old who’s living with your secretary’s sister-in-law. What’s your daughter’s name? Rachel.”
Kurtz stared a second and then took a step toward her. Rigby King’s cop instincts reacted to the look in his eyes and her hand came up halfway toward the 9mm dock on her hip before she froze. She had to lean back over the Pinto’s hood to avoid physical contact with Kurtz.
“Get in the car,” he said. And turned away from her.
Fifteen miles before they reached the Pennsylvania line, Highway 16 passed under Interstate 86—the Southern Tier Expressway they called it down here—and ran another seven miles into Neola. The town had absurdly wide streets—more like some small place out west where land had been cheap at its settling than in a village in New York State—and it was nestled amid high hills just north of the Allegheny River. Kurtz noticed the variations in spelling—Allegany State Park was a few miles to the west of them, the town of Allegany was just down the road to the west, but the river that marked the southern boundary of Neola was the Allegheny. He didn’t think it was worth investigating.
They drove the twelve-block length of Main Street, crossed the broad but shallow river, turned around before the road ran into the hills south into Pennsylvania, and drove back up the length of town again, making two detours to explore the side streets where Highway 305 ran into Highway 16 near the downtown. When he reached the north edge of town again, Kurtz made a U-turn through a gas station and said, “Notice anything?”
“Yeah,” said Rigby, still watching Kurtz carefully as if he might get violent at any moment. “There was a Lexus and a Mercedes dealership along the main drag. Not bad for a town of…what did the sign say?”
“Twenty-one thousand four hundred and twelve,” said Kurtz.
“Yeah. And there’s something else about the old downtown…” She paused.
“No empty stores,” said Kurtz. “No boarded-up buildings. No ‘for lease’ signs. No state employment and unemployment offices in empty buildings.” The economy in Buffalo and around Western New York had been hurting long before the recent recession, and residents just got used to defunct businesses, empty buildings, and the omnipresent state unemployment outlets. Downtown Neola had looked prosperous and scrubbed.
“What the hell is the economy here?” said Rigby.
“As far as I know, the Major’s South-East Asia Trading Company is the biggest employer with about two thousand people working for them,” said Kurtz. “But not only the old Victorian homes off Main here were all spruced up and painted, fresh trim colors, but that trailer park down by the river had new F-150 pickups and Silverados parked by the mobile homes. Even the poor people in Neola seem to be doing all right.”
“You don’t miss much,” said Rigby.
He glanced at her. “You don’t either. Did you notice a place we could grab an early lunch or late breakfast?”
“There was that fancy Victorian house called The Library on the hill before the river,” said Rigby. “Families in church clothes and ladies in hats going in.”
“I was thinking a greasy spoon where people might talk to us,” said Kurtz. “Or a bar.”
Rigby sighed. “It’s Sunday, so the bars are closed. But there was a diner next to the train tracks back there.”
The locals didn’t rush over to talk to them, or even seem to take notice of them, during their late-breakfast, early-lunch diner meal—except for some kids in a nearby booth who kept staring at Kurtz’s bruised eyes and bandaged head and giggling—but the coffee and food helped his headache and Rigby quit looking at him as if worried he was about to strangle her.
“Why did you really want to come to Neola?” the detective said at last. She was eating lunch; Kurtz was eating a big breakfast. “Are you planning to visit Major O’Toole at his home here? You want me along to make sure it doesn’t get out of control?
He used to be Special Forces in Vietnam, you know. He may be almost seventy and in a wheelchair, but he probably could still kick your ass.”
“I don’t even know where he lives,” said Kurtz. It was true. He hadn’t taken time to look it up.
“I do,” said Rigby. “But I’m not going to tell you, and I doubt if any of these good people would either.” She nodded toward the people eating in the loud diner and others hurrying by outside. The wind was blowing light rain. “Most of them probably get their paychecks from the Major’s and Colonel’s SEATCO in one way or the other.”
Kurtz shrugged. “The Major isn’t why I’m here. At least not directly.” He told her about Peg O’Toole’s question about amusement parks, described the photographs of the abandoned park on a hilltop, and shared Arlene’s information about Cloud Nine, and about the Major’s kid shooting up the local high school thirty years earlier.
“Yeah, when I learned about the kid dying in the Rochester asylum fire, I had some people look into it,” said Rigby. “I thought that might be why you’re down here. Do you seriously think the Major might have had someone shoot his own niece?”
Kurtz shrugged again.
“What would the motive be?” asked Rigby. Her brown eyes held a steady gaze on him over her coffee cup. “Drugs? Heroin?”
Kurtz worked hard not to react, even by so much as a blink. “Why do you say that? What do drugs have to do with anything here?”
It was Rigby King’s turn to shrug. “Parole Officer O’Toole’s old man, the cop, was killed in a drug bust a few years ago, you know.”
“Yeah. So?”
“And Major O’Toole’s company, SEATCO, has been under suspicion from the Feds for several years as being a Southern New York, western Pennsylvania heroin supplier. The DEA and FBI think that he and his old Vietnamese buddies have been shipping more than Buddha statues and objects of art from Vietnam and Thailand and Cambodia the last twenty-five years or so.”
