“Pelton’s stomach cancer took him six months ago,” Tony pointed out while taking a sip of his coffee. “If he’s suddenly interested in tidying things up, he’s got to do it from the grave.”
“Then how the hell do you explain this?” I held up the article once more.
“Coincidence,” he said. “Or bad timing.”
“Or a perfectly logical series of events,” I said.
Tony drinking coffee.
Me looking out over his shoulder, through the floor-to-ceiling tinted glass at the Hudson River on a bright clear, March morning.
“Look,” he said, breaking the silence. “I admit, there is one thing we should consider.”
I caught his brown eyes with my own, nodded.
“The black Buick could be intended as some kind of warning. A message from any number of drug bosses or their soldiers you once incarcerated. It doesn’t necessarily have to be someone like Pelton or even one of his alive apostles.” He took a quick breath. “But there is one thing that’s gnawing at me, though.” He picked up a number-two Ticonderoga pencil from off his desk, tapped the eraser against the furrowed skin of his brow. “If somebody does want to go after you —I mean if somebody is making a serious play—why not just get it over with?” He wrapped the index finger on his right hand around the pencil, held it over his desk, like an imitation pistol. “Bang, one shot to the head and you’re done. Quick, easy, effective. Least, that’s the way I’d do it.”
“Comforting,” I said.
“I mean, why go to all the trouble of sending out a car that matches a description of the one that killed Fran? Or if, on the other hand, it is the real car, why take a chance putting it back on the road?”
“Maybe just a warning, like you said.”
“Or maybe a way to torture you while they bide their time, wait for the right moment.”
“There is something you’re leaving out,” I said.
He set the pencil back down and picked up his coffee. “What would that be?”
“Why now?” I said, setting the article on his desk. “Why after two years of nothing do the Buick and this bald son of a bitch decide to show up at precisely the same time Barnes and his dilemma show up?”
“You saw the car on Saturday, one full day before Barnes inquired about hiring you. If you’re trying to connect this thing with my client, the timeline doesn’t jive, capisce?”
He was right. But that didn’t mean I had to believe in his logic.
“Besides,” Tony went on, “doesn’t make sense for a guy to hire you with a cash down payment only to knock your ass off in the end.”
“Or maybe it does.”
“Damnit, Keeper. If you think you can accept this job just because it’ll lead you to this bald guy, think again. It’s extremely dangerous. You’re going to have to concentrate on one thing, one thing only: getting Renata Barnes out, getting her home, getting two hundred Gs to start over with. After that you can do all the searching you want. Until then, stick to the job and nothing but the job, capisce?”
“You’re leaving me nothing to hang my hat on, Tone,” I said. “And a whole lot of nothing makes me real nervous.”
“I hear your concern, paisan,” Tony said, picking up the telephone receiver, bringing it to his ear. “And I feel for you. But I’ll say it one more time: in the end, it’s probably just someone fucking with your head. And that’s all.”
“And if it’s not just child’s play?”
“I’ve already got that one figured out.” He punched a button on the phone unit. “A little preventive maintenance,” he said, bringing the phone to his ear, hand cupped over the mouthpiece.
“Can’t wait to hear all about it,” I said.
“Get me Albany Medical Center,” Tony said into the phone. “The morgue.”
Chapter 14
She combs back her wet hair with open fingers. She is still groggy from the shot, barely aware of the whispering voices that seem to ooze from the cages that surround her. She sits up straight, her back against the hard wall.
“So what is it you want to talk about?” she says, looking down at the floor, watching what’s left of the water run down into the wire drain. Water that came from a metal bucket that they splashed in her face. To wake her up out of her enforced sleep.
“I want to know what you’re doing here,” says the mustached man.
She laughs, although nothing is funny.
“You brought me here,” she says. “Remember?”
“Don’t play games with me” he says, voice more strained now, impatient. “What business did you have in the desert with those Contreras sons of whores?”
“Getting at the truth.”
“What truth?”
“I’m a writer,” she says. “I write about the truth.”
The water, dripping down into the drain.
“I know what you are,” he says, reaching into the pocket of his suit jacket, pulling out a paperback copy of her novel, Godchild.
“I see you have good literary taste,” she says. “For a guy with a cheesy mustache.”
“You are Renata Barnes” he says, replacing the novel in his pocket. “The method writer.”
“Righto” she says.
“Now tell me” he says, bending at the knees, looking at her eye level, like he had done earlier before injecting her. “Who were you writing the story for, and for what purpose?”
“You asking me if I’m a spy?”
“I’m asking who you work for and why.”
“I work for myself, asshole.”
He stands up, crosses his arms. He calls out for a soldier named Juan. A man walks in. He’s the same soldier from before. He is carrying a tray with a syringe and vial on it, just like before.
“Great, you’re gonna put me to sleep again. That’s gonna get all your questions answered in a real hurry.”
The soldier begins preparing the syringe.
“Oh, no,” he says. “Nothing like that. This time we inject you with something quite different. Something to stimulate your memory?”
Heart valves pounding.
Mouth going dry as sand.
She knows they mean business. These crazy Mexicans. As the soldier sticks the syringe into the top of the vial, she begins backing up into the corner of the cell, as if it offers her some protection. Slowly at first, but then faster. “What the hell are you doing to me?”
“We’re going to have a nice chat,” the mustached man says.
“Please do what they tell you,” comes the voice of Roberto.
Chapter 15
Tony insisted I follow him in his Porsche while he drove my 4-Runner to the Albany Medical Center.
Rear entrance.
The morgue.
He gave me strict orders to wait in the car.
I did. No arguments from me.
From there we crossed the bridge into Rensselaer to reach the huge strip of no-man’s-land set between the north/south, high-speed Amtrak line and the Hudson River.
We crossed the tracks and parked along the barren river-bank. An exchange of keys was made. Then Tony asked me to get back into the 4-Runner and pull the front end up to the river’s edge where a concrete dike wall secured and protected the flood plain.
The task took only a few seconds to accomplish.
“What’s this all about?” I asked, as I stepped out of the 4-Runner. “Part of your preventive maintenance program?”
But Tony wouldn’t answer.
The Albany skyline loomed on the horizon, directly across the river. The city looked dead. The sky was heavy and gray.
So was the river.
With his navy blue fedora pulled over his eyes and his matching blue overcoat, Tony looked sorely out of place standing along the deserted stretch of shoreline in the cold damp air of midday with the piles of illegally discarded refrigerators, washers and dryers scattered about. He opened the trunk of the Porsche and came back out with an Uzi submachine gun. He reached inside again and pu
lled out a set of black ammo clips that had been taped together with gray duct tape. He popped the double clip into the gun and stepped away from the car, careful to rest the butt of the gun against his forearm, barrel aimed high toward the sky.
When he was about five feet away from the 4-Runner, he lowered the Uzi into position and started firing into it. He fired into the metal side panels, into the windows and windshield, blowing out most of the glass and plastic. He fired into the wheels so that the truck bucked and heaved when the rubber tires popped.
The rat-a-tat explosions of the multiple rounds bounced off the sides of the Albany skyscrapers just across the river. I just stood there staring. Feeling nothing. Other than the thunder of the gun and the small, rapid-fire shockwaves that passed through my chest. As though the 4-Runner meant nothing to me. And maybe it didn’t.
Sometimes, when the world appears to be slipping out from underneath your feet, you don’t ask questions. You just go with the flow, place your trust in gravity.
When the clip was empty and all you heard was the clíck-cl•íck-clìck dry-firing of the firing pin, he pulled it out, turned it over, and slapped in the adjoining fresh clip. Then he repeated the process again, shooting the hell out of the 4-Runner.
When that clip, too, was empty, he once again raised the barrel toward the sky. On his way back to the Porsche, he stopped for a moment, met me face to face, set his free hand on my shoulder.
“With the money you make on this job,” he said, “you can buy another.”
Don’t ask questions.
After he placed the Uzi into the trunk of the Porsche, he made his way back to the shot-up 4-Runner. He pulled up the tailgate (there was no use unlocking it, since the lock had been shot out) and began sliding out a black plastic body bag. He slid the body all the way out so that it plopped down on the ground, splattering the wet snow. When he unzipped the bag and exposed the cadaver’s nearly bald head, I wondered why he had chosen to do the dirty work himself. Why he hadn’t employed one of his henchmen or Guinea Pigs to do the job? But then it dawned on me that this must have been an intensely personal job. One that involved cadavers, Uzis, and plenty of bullets. If he wanted to handle the dirty work himself, there had to be a reason.
The odor of formaldehyde was intense, even in the open air.
It was a clean smell.
Tony proceeded to smash the dead man’s teeth in with the butt end of the Uzi.
“We don’t want them looking up dental records,” he said, straining to get out the words while he worked on the old man’s face.
A minute later, he stood up, took a deep breath, exhaled a white cloud that dissipated into the sky. He asked me to help him lift the body into the driver’s seat of the 4-Runner.
No questions.
As a final gesture he retrieved a can of gasoline from the trunk of the Porsche. He doused the body with the gas. The clear liquid just poured over the dead man’s bald, tight skin. It drained out onto his naked lap. There was some ritual to the process. Respect almost. I felt it even more when Tony folded the dead man’s hands in his lap, one carefully over the other, the fingers looking somehow gentle and thin. Like you could just snap them off the hand, like twigs off a dead branch. It never dawned on me until then that I had never touched the hands of a dead man before. One that had been dead that long, anyway.
Tony asked me for a match.
I handed him my Zippo.
The two of us stood side by side.
We watched the fire burn. Like those Indians used to do on the plains before we ruined their lives. Before America became one big Wal-Mart.
There was the smell of burning rubber. Of plastic and leather and human flesh. The smell was acrid and toxic and sometimes sweet. It depended upon where you were standing at the time. And the way the wind blew off the river.
The flames that touched the sky were beautiful. You could almost reach out and touch them, if they wouldn’t burn you all to hell.
When the fire was all burned out and all that remained was a sort of carbonized skeleton sitting inside the smoldering shell of the truck, Tony tossed me a brand-new pair of brown garden gloves. Like the kind they sell beside the register at the Mobil. He gave me a wave, and together we pushed what was left of the Toyota over the dike wall.
The front end hit the river hard, making a hollow sounding splash. It bobbed for a second or two in the chop, before finally disappearing below the surface.
Tony took his gloves off.
I did too.
We tossed them into the river. They floated away like dead leaves.
The wind coming off the river was razor-sharp cold. I hadn’t really noticed it until then.
Tony stuck out his hand. I took it in mine. We shook, like old pals. It was all very strange.
He congratulated me.
“Why?” I said.
“You have to ask?” he said. He laughed then, and walked away, whistling a tune to no song in particular.
PART TWO
LIFE GOES ON AROUND AREA OF GRIM SEARCH!
MONTERREY, Mexico (AP)-Lena Fuentes clutches her infant daughter in her arms, stares directly at the masked men in black with automatic weapons dangling at their sides. Not far beyond them, masked forensics experts dressed in yellow rain gear and black rubber boots wade through the decaying bodies trapped in an unearthed mass grave.
“This is so hard to believe,” Lena says, in broken English, verging on tears. “Imagine all this death occurring in such a peaceful place.”
Chapter 16
I understood more when I was on the plane, cruising at thirty thousand feet. Flying will do that to a person. Give them a whole new perspective on life (or in my case death) impossible to achieve on the relative safety of solid ground. Or maybe it was because I was never much for flying. Or, more accurately, was never much for crashing.
The man sitting next to me wore cotton pants, a blue blazer, and a blue-and-white shirt unbuttoned at the collar. On his right wrist a gold chain, on his left a gold Rolex. He wore pink-shaded horn-rimmed glasses. He wasn’t strapped into his seat for more than five minutes in Albany when he pulled out some papers from his briefcase and began working on them, using a gold-plated ballpoint. He said nothing to me. Didn’t even look at me. I could tell it would be that way through the entire flight. Him just looking at his papers, crossing things off, not saying a word, as if I didn’t exist. I wondered if he sensed my fear of flying. Maybe he could smell it. Like some people swear they can smell death the minute she walks into the room. Maybe I scared the hell out of him.
As soon as we were airborne I reached under my seat, pulled out the morning edition of the Albany Times-Union. All around me, Mexicans and South Texans on their way home, along with a scattering of tourists. There was a man dressed in a bright, Hawaiian print shirt. He was swigging whiskey from one of those miniature bottles they pass around. I looked at his face. If the face glowed or gave off some kind of angelic aura, I knew we’d be doomed. But the face was just that. Nothing special. I felt safer suddenly.
Until I read the headline.
FORMER WARDEN FEARED VICTIM OF HOMICIDE!
The headline dwarfed the one not far below it. The one that read, LIFE GOES ON AROUND AREA OF GRIM SEARCH!
The two-column article began by stating that a burned-out, fire-engine red 1996 Toyota 4-Runner registered under the name Jack Harrison Marconi of Stormville (Dutchess County) had been discovered washed up along the banks of the Hudson River, just south of the Port of Albany.
While the body recovered from behind the driver’s seat had been burned beyond recognition, DNA tests would be scheduled for later that afternoon to aid in the determination of the victim’s identity. The 4-Runner, which DMV records indicated had been in my possession for nearly three years, had been riddled with dozens of 9-millimeter hollow-point rounds, the type consistent with that typically fired from a semiautomatic assault weapon.
“It is our suspicion,” Detective Mike Ryan of the APD, South Pearl
Street Division, was quoted as saying, “that Mr. Marconi died as a result of the intense barrage of bullets. Until the body is properly identified, however, we cannot be certain of anything.”
When asked the nature of the foul play involved, Ryan commented that Marconi, who had not shown up for his own wedding on the Saturday past, had been seen drinking at Bill’s Bar and Grill on Watervliet Avenue up until the late hours of that same afternoon, when suddenly, all traces of him seemed to just disappear.
“Why he hadn’t shown up for his own wedding, we can only speculate,” Ryan added.
When pressed by reporters, Marconi’s longtime fiancée, Valerie Antonelli of Albany, refused comment.
I put the paper down, for now. No photograph of me. No mention of the black Buick. No mention of the walk Ryan and I took through the cemetery that same snowy afternoon. And I had no idea why. Other than the fact that Tony may have requested a little favor of Ryan. To keep his mouth shut. To put a lid on this thing. Maybe to protect me from the black Buick. But if he wanted to protect me from the Buick, he had to believe my story about seeing the battered car on Saturday inside the Albany Rural Cemetery. Or maybe he simply wasn’t taking any chances. In the interest of saving Renata. In the interest of two hundred thousand dollars. Cash.
I pictured the wiry Ryan talking to reporters outside on the concrete steps of the South Pearl Street APD headquarters. I didn’t know if his testimony had come from the evidence at hand or from a script prepared and delivered by Tony. But since the staging of a mock murder in the State of New York was considered a felony, the payoff would have to have been pretty huge.
My Colt, it had been locked away in a safe belowdecks.
FAA rules are FAA rules.
I felt naked without those two-and-one-half pounds of pressure against my rib cage.
Godchild Page 7
