Hard as Nails

by Dan Simmons

  Not if Gonzaga or your brother Little Skag paid them more, thought Kurtz.

  She was squinting at Kurtz and he could read her mind—What if Gonzaga paid Joe Kurtz more?

  "If I wanted you dead, lady, I would have done it upstairs," he said.

  She shook her head. Her hair was black and slick with rain. "I have to… we have to…" She seemed to be mentally running through her options and rejecting all of them.

  "We need to get off the street," said Kurtz. Part of his mind was shouting—What is this we shit, Kemo Sabe?

  He led her across the street and into the alley alongside his building. Neither would go ahead of the other, so they walked side by side, him carrying the .38 in his palm, her with her hand on the Compact Witness in her pocket. If a cat had jumped out at that moment, all three of them would have probably ended up shot full of lead.

  The small parking area off the alley where Kurtz and Arlene had reserved spaces held only his Pinto. "Get in," said Kurtz. "I'll take you back to Marina Towers."

  "No." She stared at him across the wet, rusted roof of the Pinto. "Not there. Let's look for the Lincoln."

  "All right, get in."

  They found it within ten minutes, parked in a dark lot near Hemingway's Café. The doors were unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. The overhead light didn't come on when they opened the doors. Both Kurtz and Angelina were wearing gloves. He'd brought his flashlight from the Pinto and now they leaned in from opposite sides as he played the beam over the bloody seats and carpets. Gray matter and tiny, hard white shards glistened in the folds of the dark upholstery.

  "Jesus," whispered Angelina. "It looks like a massacre. Even the backseats are bloody."

  "I think the shooter just opened the back door, stepped in, and shot both of them in the head," said Kurtz. "Then he dragged the bodies into the backseat, walked around, got behind the wheel, and drove off."

  "On Chippewa Street?" whispered the female don. She was blinking rapidly. "It was busy there tonight."

  "Yeah," said Kurtz. "So far, this guy's been hitting junkies and dealers. Either of your bodyguards fit that description?"

  Angelina hesitated a second. "Not really," she said at last. "Well, Sheffield has been coordinating deliveries."

  "Sheffield is Colin?" said Kurtz. "The fop I dealt with the night we said good-bye to Big Bore?"

  "Yes."

  Kurtz ran the flashlight around the interior a final time, let the beam move across the driver's seat where the blood had been smeared, let it dwell on a starred fracture on the blood-spattered windshield for a second, and then flicked off the light. Traffic passed on Pearl Street. They walked away from the Lincoln and paused on the sidewalk. Angelina pulled out her cell phone.

  "What are you doing?" said Kurtz.

  "Getting in touch with the guys I called, telling them to bring cleanup stuff."

  Kurtz reached over and closed the phone. "Why not leave the Lincoln as it is for the cops?"

  She wheeled on him. "Are you crazy? It's my car. It's registered to me. I'll have every cop in Western New York on my ass."

  Kurtz shrugged. "Look, you and Gonzaga—if you believe Gonzaga—have been doing it the other way for weeks now. This killer whacks your people, you rush out with buckets and mops and clean up after him. You're sitting on twenty-four murders, if Gonzaga is to be believed. Maybe that's just what the killer and whoever's sending the killer wants you to do."

  Angelina bit her lip but said nothing.

  "I mean, you're so crazy to find him that you're both trying to hire me, for Christ's sake," continued Kurtz. "Why not let the Buffalo P.D. deal with this?"

  "But the attention…" began Angelina.

  "Is going to be intense," said Kurtz. "But you won't be a suspect. They're your people who were hit. Let the cops do their fingerprint and ballistics stuff and put out an A.P.B. on someone walking around with blood on the seat of their pants."

  "The media will go apeshit," said Angelina. "It'll be national news about a gang war."

  Kurtz shrugged again. "You keep wondering if Gonzaga is behind this. Maybe the attention will smoke him out. Or rule him out."

  Angelina turned and looked at the Lincoln in the back of the lot. A Saab pulled off Pearl and parked only two spaces away from it. Three college-age kids got out, laughing, and walked to Hemingway's. When the Saab's headlight beams had moved across the Lincoln, both Kurtz and Angelina had seen the bullet-fractured windshield. It was only a matter of time before someone noticed the gore.

  She hesitated another few seconds. Then she brushed strands of wet hair away from her forehead and said, "I think you're right. For once the cops could be some help. At the very least, we won't be playing the murderer's game."

  They got back in the Pinto and Kurtz drove down Pearl and cut over to Main. "Where do you want to go if not back to your penthouse?" asked Kurtz.

  "Your place."

  "Back to the office? Why?"

  "Not back to the office," said Angelina Farino Ferrara. "Your place. That Harbor Inn hovel that nobody's supposed to know about."

  "That's nuts," said Kurtz, shaking his head. "When the cops call, you have to be home with someone there as an alibi so…" He turned his head and froze.

  Angelina was holding the .45 caliber Compact Witness in her right hand, bracing it on her left forearm, the black circle of the muzzle steady on Kurtz's heart. "Your place," she said. "Not mine."

  "A penny for your thoughts, Joe," said Rigby King.

  "What?" The Rigby King he'd known didn't say things like A penny for your thoughts. Not unless she was being really sarcastic.

  "You've been driving for twenty minutes without saying a word," said Rigby. "And you didn't stop in East Aurora for coffee. You want some from the Thermos? It's still hot."

  "No thanks," said Kurtz. He thought. What are you up to, woman?

  "I didn't mean what I said yesterday," said the cop.

  "What's that?"

  "About you… you know… going to Iran with me and killing my ex-husband."

  Does she think I'm wearing a wire?

  "I'd like the son of a bitch dead," continued Rigby, "but all I really want is my son back."

  "Uh-huh," said Kurtz. She's not going to give me any department information. This ride with her is for nothing.

  They rode in silence again for a few minutes. The sunlight ignited the color in the hills, where about half the trees still showed bright foliage. The grass was still green, the woods very thick. The four-lane highway had ended not far past East Aurora, and now they were headed south on Highway 16, a winding old two-lane road that slowed for such ten-house towns as Holland and Yorkshire and Lime Lake. The hills on either side were getting steeper and clouds covered the southern horizon. A constant wind was blowing from the west, and Kurtz had to concentrate on keeping the Pinto from wandering.

  "Do you remember the night in the choir loft?" said Rigby. She wasn't looking at him, but was staring out her window at the passing, empty fruit stands and dilapidated old farms with their broad yards and big satellite dishes.

  Kurtz said nothing.

  "You were the only boy at Father Baker's who didn't tease me about my big tits when I was seventeen," continued Rigby, still looking away. "So that night I brought the flashlights and walked through the Catacombs over from the Girl's Hall—it was almost two blocks away, you remember?—I knew it was you I was coming to find in the Boy's Hall."

  Shadows of clouds were moving across the hills and valley now. Leaves skittered across the road. There was little traffic except for a pest control truck that had been behind them for quite a while.

  "You weren't sure you wanted to follow me into the Catacombs," continued Rigby. "You were tough as nails, even when you were… what?… fifteen that year? But you were nervous that night. They would have beat the hell out of you if you'd been found AWOL from bunk check again."

  "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 one 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 b
oy 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.