Quint responded first, greeting Hal with his usual gooey affection: beak open in a hiss, eyes pinned, crouched and ruffled and spoiling for a fight. Ming-hua blinked at Hal over her reading glasses. “He go.”
“When?”
Quint’s enthusiasm rubbed off on Dave, who treated them to muffled imprecations and leaping high kicks that served only to launch him in circles. Mick sniggered at the spectacle.
Ming-hua rolled her newspaper into a tube. “You no move, Dave. You listen Ming-hua.” She started to rise. Hal shoved her back down, causing Quint to lunge for his hand. Hal jerked it back just in time.
“When, Ming-hua?” he demanded. “When did Will leave?”
She gaped in startled outrage. Hal had never treated her with anything but gentlemanly respect.
He snatched the newspaper from her and tossed it aside. His voice was icily calm. “Answer me.”
Her expression shifted as fear edged out anger. “One, two hour.” Quint picked up on her distress. He swayed from side to side and screamed with renewed vigor.
“How long after I left?” Hal said.
“Right after. You go—he go right after. He take Irving’s car.”
Hal’s scalp prickled. “Where? Did he say?”
She shook her head. “I ask. He say, ‘Out.’”
Will had tailed him. Hal hadn’t thought his “cousin” was on to him, not yet, but the past couple of days he’d seemed a tad more vigilant, more attentive to Hal’s comings and goings. Gabby’s purple Viper must have been laughably easy for Will to keep in his sights.
Hal pictured Will finding Joe Silver’s corpse. Pictured him pulling out his cell phone and punching in 911.
Ming-hua’s expression turned mulish. “You go. Will no here. You go.”
The cousin act was officially over. Hal’s fingers slipped under the back of his windbreaker and touched the place where his .45 should have been. He cut his eyes to Mick’s jacket pocket. The kid had his blade, too. Hal wheeled on Ming-hua. “Can’t you shut that bird up?”
“He no like you.”
“No. Really? Where are the others? Gabby and Irving.”
“They pick up kids at school. Take them for ice cream.” Ming-hua glanced at Mick. “What that schmuck doing with a gun?”
Hal turned to see his son holding the .45 auto, the muzzle wobbling all over the place. “Put that thing away before you shoot me.”
Mick gave Hal a flat, defiant stare. “Ask her where the money is.”
“How the hell would she know where it is, you idiot? You want to shoot something, do me a favor and shoot the fucking bird.”
“No!” Ming-hua pulled Quint into her arms, shielding his body with hers. She cursed Hal in her native tongue and the parrot followed suit, the two of them shrieking in Mandarin at the top of their lungs. Dave was clearly enjoying the drama. No doubt the idiot thought it was being staged for his benefit.
Hal clamped his hands over his ears. “Do it, Mick. Shoot the fucking bird!”
Mick squinted one eye closed, struggling to get Quint in his sights. The kid had probably never even held a gun before today.
“You’ve gotta cock it, genius.” Hal went for the .45. “Give me that.”
Mick held it away, fumbling with the slide. “No. I’ll do it. You never let me do anything.”
“I said give it to me. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
The two struggled over the pistol, wrestling each other to the tiled floor. Hal had the advantage of raw strength, but his son had youth and dumb reflexes on his side. They rolled near Dave, only to have the grinning idiot and his Bruno Maglis join in the act. Hal finally managed to flip Mick onto his belly and twist his gun hand in a direction nature never intended. Mick howled and released the weapon. And howled again when the barrel ground into his ear.
Hal dug his knee hard into Mick’s kidney. “I should kill you right now.” He glanced toward Ming-hua, only to find her and the parrot gone. “Shit.”
He leapt up and raced out of the room. Ming-hua had made it to the end-hall vestibule, cradling the bird to her chest, her plump little legs churning with surprising speed. She’d just reached the outer door when Hal caught up with her and spun her around—and came eye-to-eye with Quint, who sprang at him in a flurry of feathers and pure, savage instinct.
It was a replay of twenty-five years ago, round two in the man-versus-beast Mega Death Match. Hal stumbled backward, lashing out blindly as the creature went for his eyes. They fell against the U-shaped costume rack, which promptly collapsed, half burying them under an avalanche of clothing, accessories, and props. Through it all, Quint maintained his relentless claw-hold, landing punishing blows to Hal’s head and arms with that hatchet of a beak. In such close hand-to-talon combat, Hal’s .45 was useless. Ming-hua meanwhile had begun flogging him with an authentic World War I entrenching tool. Where the hell was Mick?
Hal rolled onto his stomach, squinting through a haze of blood, taking wild shots at his attackers. He heard the entrenching tool clatter to the floor and thought he’d hit Ming-hua, but her hysterical shrieks only increased in volume. Mick had gotten the old woman in a sloppy half nelson and was gingerly poking at Quint with a plastic Star Wars light saber.
“Do it, Mick.” Hal wagged the pistol, offering it. “Shoot the fucking bird!”
Taking the gun would have required Mick to get within striking distance of The Beak. Instead, he shoved Ming-hua away, got a two-fisted grip on the light saber, and whacked Quint with enough force to send him flapping into a pile of wigs. Hal came shakily to his feet, swiping at the blood dripping from gashes in his scalp and face.
Mick stood gawking at Hal’s injuries while Ming-hua made a beeline for the door. “Get her,” Hal barked. “Bring her back in there.” He pointed to Room A. In the end, it took both men and an entire roll of duct tape to restrain and muzzle the furious woman. Dave looked on with gleeful anticipation, no doubt wondering what other little diversions his captors had in store for him.
“We gotta get outta here now,” Mick said. “The cops are prob’ly—”
“Not without my money. Or a hostage.” Hal formulated the plan as he spoke.
“So take her.” Mick pointed to Ming-hua.
“What, and hope Kitchen will cough up two mil to save her ass?” Hal shook his head. “It has to be someone he really cares about.”
Ming-hua was the picture of mute indignation.
“Too bad Tom’s not here,” Mick said, echoing Hal’s thoughts.
Sticky blood plastered Hal’s hair to his skull. He felt it drying on his face and neck. His arms and hands had taken their share of abuse as well; his windbreaker was in shreds. He wiped his bloody palms on his jeans, grabbed the .45, and stalked out of the room.
“Where ya going?” Mick asked.
“Hunting.”
Hal had expected to find Quint amid the heaps of costumes, where he’d left him. He should have known the bird wouldn’t make it easy for him. Something on the floor caught his attention. He squatted to inspect a series of delicate red brushstrokes. Bird tracks, in Hal’s own blood. The tracks led into the living room and trailed off through the open door of the game room.
Hal stood just inside the threshold of the onetime church sanctuary, alert for the slightest sound or movement. The only light in the room was a weak splash of watercolors through the abstract stained glass. Suddenly Hal was back at Holy Resurrection with his mother and brothers, his pale hair slicked back with Brylcreem, his face scrubbed raw with Ma’s spit and a rough handkerchief. He was ten years old again, genuflecting, watching the censer swing. “Your Harold is so handsome.” His mother’s friends cooed over him as they milled about after mass. “He looks like a little angel.”
Hal dragged in a lungful of air and swore he smelled churchy incense. His fingers tightened on the pistol grip. The cuts on his face and arms burned. “Where are you, you son of a bitch?” he whispered, advancing into the room. If Ma and Father Anthony could see him now,
smeared with blood and stalking someone’s pet with a powerful semiautomatic—in God’s house. For the first time in decades, Hal felt an urge to cross himself.
He sensed movement out of the corner of his eye near the old-fashioned pinball machines. He swung his gun hand, squinting through the gloom. “You can’t hide from me,” he swore, turning his back just long enough to flip the wall switches. Light flooded the room, chasing Holy Resurrection and his ten-year-old self back to whatever mossy corner of his psyche they’d slithered out of. He looked under and around the pinball machines. Nothing. He should have killed that bird all those years ago, the first time it took a chunk out of him.
Hal heard a rustle near the model train on the opposite side of the room. He spun toward the sound, fingers cramping on the gun grip. The trains ran on an intricately constructed layout, an eclectic hodgepodge of mismatched landforms and historical eras crafted on twenty-four square feet of plywood bolted to an old dining table.
Hal bent to peer under the layout. Nothing. He circled the table, stared unblinkingly at it, though logically he knew a bird of that size couldn’t possibly find cover behind one of Tom’s plaster hills, much less inside a Lilliputian train tunnel.
A feral growl rumbled up Hal’s throat. “Where are you?” he bellowed, and pumped four shots into the layout—BAM BAM BAM BAM!—taking out the water tower, the downtown shopping district, a string of Cotton Belt freight cars, and the electronic control panel, which exploded in a spray of sparks.
“You have fucking lost it, man.”
Hal whipped around and trained the gun on Mick, who flinched and stumbled back, knocking over a card table and two folding chairs. The Scrabble board did a triple somersault. Dozens of little wooden tiles scattered. And Quint emitted a startled squawk.
The bird had taken refuge under the card table. Now he was out in the open, stranded by his bum wing, exposed but defiant.
Hal grinned. He took careful aim at Quint’s feathered cranium. Mick snickered in anticipation. Hal fired the pistol, which responded with an anemic click. “Shit. Don’t let him go anywhere, Mick.” He ejected the spent magazine and replaced it with the spare from his jacket pocket. “Now. Where were we?” He aimed, started to squeeze the trigger—
“Anybody home? Will?” a female voice called from the vestibule. “The door was open. What happened here?”
Hal gritted his teeth and eased his finger off the trigger. At least it wasn’t the cops. He turned to Mick and mouthed, Get rid of her.
Mick stared goggle-eyed at the gun. He pointed to his chest. Me?
Hal smacked the side of his son’s head. He whispered, “Send her away, you idiot.”
Hal and Quint glared at each other while Mick dealt with whoever had come calling. After a few moments he shambled back into the room. “You said I could get back at her. You promised. No way that’s gonna happen now.”
“What are you talking about? Who?”
“That Narby bitch. The one that did this to me.” He indicated his nose. “You said—”
“That was Lucy?” Hal shoved the gun into his back waistband. He’d seen how Will behaved around her. It has to be someone he cares about. “You sent her away?”
“You told me to.”
Hal bolted out of the Goo. Lucy was behind the wheel of her silver Volvo, backing down the driveway. “Lucy!” He sprinted across the lawn. “Lucy, wait!”
She slammed on the brakes just as he reached her. She stared at him openmouthed through the windshield, then leapt out of the car. “Oh my God, Keith, what happened to you?”
Hal feigned wooziness. Lucy was at his side in a heartbeat, supporting him, opening the back door of her car.
“You can tell me on the way to the hospital,” she said. “Lie down in back.”
Mick strolled across the lawn toward them. Lucy called out, “Why didn’t you tell me Keith’s hurt?” She ducked her head into the car and asked quietly, “Was it Mick? Did he do this to you?”
“No.” Hal shook his head. “It was an accident. Fixing . . . something.”
“I’m taking him to the emergency room,” she told Mick, who slid into the front passenger seat uninvited. Lucy got behind the wheel and backed down the drive. “Thank God I showed up when I did.”
Behind her, Hal smiled. “You read my mind.”
Chapter 26
AN ANVIL SAT on Wesley’s chest, robbing his air, crushing him. He wanted to push it off, but every time he tried to raise his arms, someone pressed them back down. The pain was startling. He could barely breathe. He opened his eyes. He was on his back, in a moving vehicle. Somewhere nearby, a siren whooped. A face hovered above him, a handsome, young blond fellow with rimless glasses and an unfortunate mustache.
Wesley’s voice was a rasp. “Wha—wha—wha—?”
“Take it easy, pal.” The paramedic laid his hand on Wesley’s bare shoulder. Wesley tried to raise his head to see what was compressing his chest, but the man wouldn’t let him. He strapped Wesley down and gave him oxygen. “You’ve got a cracked sternum, for sure. You gotta lie still.”
“Cra—cra—cra—?” The last thing he remembered was verbally sparring with Hal.
“Coulda been a lot worse. That vest saved your life.”
Vest? It started to come together in Wesley’s mind. He’d taken the precaution of donning personal armor under his trench coat before the meeting with Hal. He cleared his throat. Every breath was agony. “Sh—sh—shot?”
The paramedic nodded. “At close range.”
Wesley scoured his memory. Bits of his conversation with Hal made it through the mental haze. Hal thought Wesley knew too much. He pulled a gun. “Th—th—th—” He fought the straps.
“Relax, buddy. You don’t want to pierce a lung.”
“The sh—shooter.”
“High-caliber, for sure,” the paramedic said. “You’re lucky to be—”
“The shooter.” Wesley forced out the words, each one detonating a little explosion in his chest. “H—His name—”
“Don’t worry about that. The cops got the guy.” The paramedic adjusted Wesley’s IV bag. “Caught him standing over you, still holding the gun. Fucker’s not going anywhere, believe me.”
Thank God. Wesley collapsed against the stretcher as a wave of relief washed over him. So he got himself a cracked sternum. So what? They had the psycho that kidnapped Ricky Baines. Nothing else mattered.
______
“LISTEN TO ME!” Will’s fingers cramped around the bars of the holding cell. He glared at the surveillance camera mounted four feet away, trying to make his voice carry down the corridor to the nearby squad room. “Detective Cullen, will you just listen to me? The man that did that shooting, he’ll be coming after my family next. After my son!”
He didn’t know who Keith really was, or what he was after, but one thing was agonizingly clear: Will had screwed up big-time the day he’d welcomed him into his household. Keith had shot that man, he was certain. As repugnant as Mick was, Will couldn’t picture him pulling the trigger. Instinct told him Tom would be Keith’s next target.
The officers had thoughtfully provided company for him. His cellmate squatted in a corner, scratching inside his clothing and examining his fingers. Will struggled not to gag on the man’s stench, a piquant mélange of stale booze, Dumpster, and hazmat BO.
Detective Paul Cullen had tried to interrogate Will but had given up when his obviously guilty suspect remained uncooperative. Will kept insisting the real culprit was on the loose and that he had happened upon the scene just in time to be found with the proverbial smoking gun. Even to his own ears, it sounded like a desperate, spur-of-the-moment fabrication. The more Cullen rolled his eyes, the louder and more insistent Will became, until finally the detective had tossed him in this cage to cool his heels until he was ready to explain why he’d killed Wesley McIntyre.
Wesley McIntyre, a local private investigator. Not Archie Esterhaus, hair-care salesman from St. Louis. The PI had pretended to b
e a former resident of Will’s house; he’d spent hours snooping around. But why? What was he looking for?
All the yelling had turned Will’s voice into a painful croak, but he managed to crank up the volume. “I told you, Cullen, I had nothing to do with that shooting. It was Keith Kitchen. That’s what he calls himself. He’s been living at my place, pretending to be my cousin. Just go there and check it out.”
Will’s cellmate had begun peeling off the many layers of his dirt-stiffened clothing, starting with three pairs of institutional pajama bottoms, which he proceeded to stuff into the steel toilet. His stink grew fangs and claws, like something out of a B horror flick.
Will dropped his forehead to the cool bars, but only for an instant. He had no time to waste, not with Tom’s safety at stake. “I want my lawyer. Do you hear me?” He waited a few moments, straining for the sound of footsteps, a door opening, anything.
“You’ve checked me out, I’m not in your damn system. I don’t shoot people!” Will stalked across his cell, only to spin back around and slam his shoulder into the bars. Pain lanced his arm, but he paid it no mind. “If anything happens to my boy,” he hollered, “you’d better find a way to keep me in here, Cullen, ’cause I will come after you, I promise you that!”
______
“WHERE’S THE NEAREST HOSPITAL?” Lucy asked again. Maybe Keith and Mick hadn’t heard her the first time. She glanced in the rearview. Keith was looking over his shoulder at the sparse traffic behind them. They were on a residential two-lane headed for the highway. She had to know which direction to go. “Mick?”
“Huh?” He was looking at her a little strangely. She hadn’t seen him since her “kidnapping” ten days earlier. His nose was still swollen and bruised, and now he had a splinted finger as well. From another less-than-satisfied client?
“Which way do I go?” she asked. “To get to the hospital?”
“Fuck if I know.” Mick turned toward the backseat. He gave Keith the kind of look that said, What are you waiting for?
Keith told him to turn on the radio. He added, “A news station, you idiot,” when Mick started blasting hip-hop.
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