A Reason to Kill
Page 36
“What do you mean? Heard what?”
“He...he’s dead, Harry. He turned up on a beach, somewhere in Florida. He’d been shot.”
“Are you all right?” Harry asked after a long pause.
“What do you think? I thought he was some kind of trouble-shooter in the oil business. Then he gets lifted, and I’m told he’s a fucking hitman for people like Eddie Moscone. Did you know what he did?”
“No,” Harry said. “I haven’t seen Steve for over three years. We talked on the phone regularly, but not about work. Last call I got, he said he wanted to bring you out here to see the sights and the big game.”
“He never told me,” Marcy said, turning her head as the doorbell rang. “Someone’s at the door, Harry.”
“Okay. I’ll try to find out what’s happening, and arrange for Steve to be flown home for burial. I’ll call you when I know anything.”
After saying good-bye, Marcy went to the door. “Who is it?” she called.
“Police, love. We need to talk to you about Steve Taylor.”
Christ, not again. They were hounding her. She would not let them in. Just tell them to leave her the hell alone. She wrenched open the door, ready to call them fascist pigs who got off on intimidating law-abiding citizens, but was confronted by a giant of a man, who gripped her by the throat, lifted her off the floor and entered the apartment, to walk through to the lounge and throw her on to the settee.
Coughing and spluttering, her throat a mass of pain, Marcy pushed herself up into a sitting position to face the man who had hurt her, and a much smaller, older man, who appeared from behind the bulk of her attacker.
“Let me introduce us, Marcy,” Nick said, removing a gun from the inside of his jacket and pointing it at her chest. “I’m Nick, and my young associate here is Tommaso. I understand that you are aware of what happened to that piece of shit boyfriend of yours. He got capped for grassing up our employer, Mr. Moscone. And certain incriminating tapes that we believed to be in his possession, were not. Do you get my drift?”
“No,” Marcy wheezed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s what I hoped you’d say,” Nick said, smiling, to show small, yellow teeth. “You might just be telling the truth, but you’ll appreciate that we have to be absolutely sure.”
Tommaso stepped forward and almost casually clipped her on the point of the chin with his clenched fist.
They searched the apartment thoroughly, and came to the conclusion that the tapes, if they existed, were not hidden there.
Marcy came round and panicked. She had been stripped, and was now laying in the bath, her wrists and ankles bound with silver duct tape. And her mouth was sealed with it. She breathed through her nose and began to cry, in part because of the pain in her head and jaw, but in the main because she knew that the two men were going to kill her.
“You ready to join lover boy?” Nick said, entering the bathroom, now wearing navy-blue overalls buttoned up to the neck over his mohair suit, and latex gloves on his small, slender hands. He was wielding a broad-bladed knife he’d taken from the wood block on the kitchen counter. “Give Taylor hell when you see him. If he’d kept his mouth shut, you wouldn’t be about to get sliced and diced.”
It was forty-five minutes later when Nick and Tommaso left the apartment. They were now positive that the woman had not been holding out on them. Nick had removed the tape from her mouth and given her a lot of incentive to answer his questions.
Tommaso felt sick to his stomach, but did not show it. Nick was humming Volare, and was in fine mood. What he had just done seemed to relieve a pressure that only visiting extreme violence on someone could alleviate. He opened the boot of the car and deposited a Harrods bag – containing the now sodden overalls and gloves – into a cardboard box. He would feed them to the furnace in the club’s basement when they got back.
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