by Dani Amore
In three days, Jack had tracked him down. Croghley had moved in with a group of swingers high in the Hollywood Hills. The problem was that Croghley, as crazy as he was to think he could get away from Vincenzo Romano, was also extremely paranoid. Naturally, he had every right to be. But Croghley never left the house of the swingers. It was a commune really, with no fewer than a dozen people there at any given time.
So Jack had subcontracted Betty and they’d taken the only recourse they were given: they posed as swingers, got in and Betty took their target into a special S & M room where the swingers found him the next morning, strung up like an obscene pińata.
Jack was glad he’d brought Betty in on this job, to take out Tommy Abrocci. It wasn’t his preferred method of working, but the job had come on such short notice that he’d decided he’d needed help. Normally, he would have taken several days, scoped everything out, then come up with a plan. But orders had been clear. This was an immediate disposal. NTTFA. No time to fool around.
Getting into Abrocci’s room would have been difficult. Phony room service, maid service, the usual tactics wouldn’t have worked. Abrocci was a wiseguy. He knew the usual drill. So they’d gotten creative.
Jack zipped up, put on his shoes and crossed the room quickly. He went through Abrocci’s pockets. Keys. A wallet. A room key. Jack grabbed the room key. And then he heard something.
He stood stock still, listening.
Across the room, Betty was wiping off fingerprints. She looked up at him, sensed his sudden tension.
“What?” she said.
It had come from the stairwell, Jack thought. He paused, closed his eyes so his brain could focus on what he was hearing. Was it footsteps? Maybe. And maybe, faintly, the sound of another door closing.
Jack quietly opened the door and stepped into the hall. It was empty. How much time had passed since he’d drilled Abrocci? A minute? Minute and a half? Somewhere around there, he figured.
He took out the first key. Tried it in Room 914. It was the room from which Abrocci had just come.
Jack turned the key and the lock slid back.
Jack looked down the hallway. No one in sight. His gun was in his hand, held tightly against his leg.
He quickly opened the door and stepped inside, his back flat against the wall.
He moved without making a sound past the bathroom and peeked around the corner.
The room was empty.
In five short seconds, he’d already seen what he needed to see: the closet was empty. The messed up bed, the empty bathroom. There were several glasses on one of the night tables. The room service books had been opened and were askew on the small writing desk in the corner. From the bathroom, he could hear the faucet dripping.
Jack took a quick peek under each bed, already knowing he wouldn’t find anything.
His nose detected the scent of Abrocci’s cologne, and a lighter, sweeter smell. He savored the smell like a fine wine. Was it fresh? Was it the smell of the room? Of the sheets? Of the maids?
It was a woman’s perfume, Jack was convinced of that.
Had Abrocci gotten a woman into his room?
“Shit,” Jack said. Had something been going on in Room 914? He would have liked to have staked it out for longer than he did, but it was a rush job. Jack cursed again. He should never take rush jobs, as tempting as they are and as lucrative as they are.
Jack went back to the door and stood inside the room, listening. From down the hall came footsteps. He listened, heard the footsteps stop, then someone fumbling for keys. The next sound was a key being inserted and moments later, a door opening and closing. As soon as the door closed, Jack opened his.
He stepped into the hallway, then went to 912. Betty was waiting, her gun drawn, pointing at Jack’s chest. When she saw him, she slowly lowered it.
Jack shook his head.
He went to the window and tried to get a glimpse of the parking lot, but he was on the wrong side. He took out his key card, wiped it down and tossed it on the bed, then looked up at Betty.
“He isn’t going to be happy,” he said.
26.
Loreli drove the Camry down Second Street, four cars behind was the Taurus she had noticed minutes before. She’d even gotten a glimpse of the Taurus’ driver: a curly-haired man with glasses.
“Goddamnit!” Loreli said. Her voice was choked. She was crying. Her hands shook as she wiped the tears from her face. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” She looked in the rearview mirror again. The Taurus was still there. Loreli slammed on the brakes, nearly rear-ending the car in front of her. She swerved around the offending vehicle, almost clipping its bumper in the process.
Loreli gunned the Camry and she shot down a side street before spilling out into the heavy traffic of Adams Street. She gave the Camry gas, but the car’s little engine was no match for the Taurus’. From the look of it, her tail was having no trouble staying with her.
Loreli’s stomach was in knots. She passed a pick-up truck, raced past a minivan and ran a red light. With the traffic clear around her, she leaned over and vomited into the footspace of the passenger seat. The hot acid burned her throat and she coughed, some of the liquid shot into her nasal passages and she gagged.
Between retches, she sobbed. The images from the hotel room ricocheted around her brain. The sound of the angry spits from the next room reverberated in her head. She had blocked the images of sex, of the big Italian pounding into her. Now he was dead. And she was running.
“Get it together!” she shouted at herself. The Camry swerved toward oncoming traffic and Loreli brought it back into her lane, amid a chorus of honking car horns.
The last thing she needed was to get pulled over now. That thought calmed her, forced her to concentrate. She looked into the rearview mirror. The Taurus was still there.
If he was after her, why wasn’t he racing up to her? Slamming into her? Running her off the road?
They passed quickly through the downtown area of Ann Arbor, and into the outskirts. Here, the sense of the university was gone, and it was mostly suburban homes and small strip malls. Soon, signs for I-94 began to appear, pointing the way back to Detroit. Detroit, which was about a thirty-five minute drive. Shorter if she ignored the speed limit.
The last sign for I-94 East came up and Loreli took it. Loreli saw in her rearview mirror a pickup blaze past the Taurus and cut in front of him. There were now four cars between the Taurus and the Camry.
The entrance ramp to the freeway was clogged with traffic. A hundred yards up, the ramp curved severely, and as the cars ahead rounded the curve, they were briefly blocked from view of the cars behind.
Loreli gritted her teeth. Up until now, she’d felt paralyzed with fear. Absolutely dumbstruck by the mess she’d gotten herself into. But now, now there was a chance for her to actually do something.
With a grunt, she jerked the wheel sharply to the left and the Camry jumped over the curb of the entrance ramp. A low ditch ran alongside it, then back up again to a service road. Her heart was in her throat. The ditch was deep and angled. If she got stuck in there she’d be a sitting duck for the man in the Taurus.
She pushed the thought from her mind, recognized it as a thing not to think about, an image not to entertain.
Instead, she stomped her foot on the gas.
Her rear wheels hopped the curb and she immediately began to go down the steep ditch of the incline. She turned the wheel hard to the left, to put the Camry at an angle and avoid hitting the other side of the ditch head-on. For a brief second, Loreli had the urge to slam on the brakes, but instinctively she knew that if she did that, she would become mired in the mucky grass at the bottom of the ditch.
With her right foot, she kept the accelerator flattened to the floor. Her left foot hovered over the brake. The Camry jumped, plowed through the thick, mucky grass and hit the opposite bank of the ditch. Loreli held onto the steering wheel in a death grip. The phrase cigarette smokers use, “when they pry my cold dead fingers fro
m it” came to her mind. The car’s front end rose and for a brief instant, Loreli nearly screamed, convinced that the little car was going to flip right over and turtle. But it didn’t. Suddenly, she was climbing the embankment, accelerating rather than slowing. She flew over the curb and bounced onto the service drive. The Camry groaned. Loreli thought she heard metal popping, imagined all kinds of horrible damage being done to the underbelly of the car. But then she straightened out and caught up to the traffic ahead, blended the Camry into the middle of the pack. Only then did she take a quick look over her shoulder.
The Taurus was nowhere in sight.
27.
“He’s dead and I’m still not happy!” Vincenzo Romano’s voice thundered through the great room of his Grosse Pointe mansion.
“Easy Vincent,” said Gloria. “You’re not supposed to get so upset after...” She stopped short, but it was too late.
“After what?’
“Nothing.”
Romano poured a glass of sherry from the bottle on the mantle. He was breathing heavily, the air leaving his nose in cottony gushes. He filled the glass, put the bottle back on the shelf, leaned his head back and took a long drink. He looked around the room, attempting to find solace, but seeing none. Gloria was sitting in one of the living rooms’ easy chairs. She was wearing black slacks and a white sweater that clung to her sculpted body. Her head was cocked to one side and she seemed to be observing him with feigned interest.
Romano paced around the great room. It was big, nearly four hundred square feet. More so than his study, the great room was his room. A big space for big ideas. It was here that he hatched the thrillingly devious plan to whack a young, eager D.A. by having his guys dress up like hunters and follow the attorney into the woods on opening day of deer season. The 30-.06 had blown a hole in the Yale grad big enough to hold the 400 page deposition he was planning against Romano.
A deposition that never got filed after the “accident.”
Romano stood before the seven-foot fireplace, a roaring fire throwing flickering orange light on his thick face. He glanced up at the room’s thick ceiling beams, the elaborate crown molding. Through the living room’s floor-to-ceiling picture windows, Lake St. Clair could be seen. The water was rough today, he could see the whitecaps, could almost hear the pounding of waves on the beach a mere hundred yards away.
He shook his head. It just wasn’t turning out to be a good week.
“You’re not supposed to drink so much,” Gloria said. Romano turned, ready to bite her head off, but she was there, with the sherry and refilled his glass. “But the circumstances seem to call for it, no?”
Romano sighed heavily. Gloria produced a glass for herself and filled it to the halfway point. She returned the bottle to the shelf and came back to Romano’s side. They stood side-by-side in front of the window. Though the glass was bulletproof and three inches thick, the quality of the view was excellent, breathtaking at dawn and sunset.
Before them, on the lake, a freight ship slowly made its way across the vista. Vincent watched the outline of the ship, sketched in by its bow and stern lights. He felt a small satisfaction registering with him. He got a small cut on all Detroit harbor traffic, and there was a lot of it with ships having to go through the small stretch of water to navigate between Lake Huron and Lake Erie. Every ship that went by was a little bit of money in his pocket. It made the view a little bit more pretty for him, a factor he’d taken into consideration when he bought the mansion several years ago.
Romano took a small sip of sherry. He let the amber liquid roll on his tongue before swallowing.
“Why don’t you go powder your nose?”
Gloria left.
Romano needed to think. He crossed the room and took Gloria’s place on the chair. It was still warm from her body, but Romano didn’t notice.
He looked into the fire and wondered, had Jack Cleveland crossed him? Or had it been the black woman Jack had checked into the hotel with? He hoped it wasn’t Jack. Jack was a pro, and not someone Romano ever wanted to tangle with. Had to be the bitch.
Romano put his glass on the small table next to his Stickley club chair, picked up the phone. We’ll start with her, he thought. If she doesn’t have it....
Romano thought back to the phone call. Jack had said it went off without a hitch, that he’d whacked Abrocci but there was no suitcase. No sign of the cash or the supposed evidence that Abrocci had gotten on Romano.
He wondered if Jack had ever let the black bitch out of his sight. It was doubtful. Jack was just too careful, too smart.
So did that mean Jack had taken the money?
Romano didn’t think so.
Still, he thought, people have been known to change.
He thought about it some more, wrestling with the sequence of events, visualizing the moves and countermoves, determining the end result he wished for then planning the best route to arrive there.
Ten minutes later, Romano punched in the numbers on the cell phone from memory. A dark blossom of fear had begun to burgeon in his belly. He didn’t like what he was about to do, but he’d arrived at the only means of attack that would give him the results he wanted.
Romano remembered the last time he used the Spook. It had been like a tornado tearing through a small town. Romano was surprised they didn’t find livestock in trees, or someone’s couch a mile from their home. It hadn’t been a blood bath, it’d been a goddamned blood whirlpool. Afterward, Romano had spent a week going to funerals. He shook his head at the memory of the Spook’s handiwork. The man just didn’t have one single goddamned ounce of restraint.
He punched in the rest of the numbers, waited for a beep, then left the message that would be passed along to an anonymous intermediary before being delivered to the Spook. Romano guessed that’s how it worked, the Spook was as mysterious as they came.
After he left the message, he hung up the phone, poured another small glass of sherry and adjusted his bandage, wincing in pain.
He imagined the message going to the Spook. Wondered at what kind of mess was about to explode.
“Hold on,” he said to the empty room. “We’re about to dance with the Devil himself.”
28.
Amanda Rierdon stood over the corpse in Room 912 of the Prescott Hotel. She gripped the cell phone in her hand with bone-crushing strength. Her face was red, her eyes blazing at full wattage. “Damn it, Macaleer!” she shouted into her cell phone. Her fingers wrapped even tighter around the phone, the plastic casing gave a slight pop at the pressure. Her knuckles were stark white, their seams a crin red. “I’m tired of your pathetic excuses!”
She bent her head to listen to the response coming from the other end of the phone, her shoulders stooped, her neck straining, as if she were directing every ounce of her energy into the phone’s tiny mouthpiece.
Agent Daniels handed a fax to Rierdon. He did it like a zookeeper sliding a T-Bone into the hyena cage. She snatched it from his hands and he turned, unconsciously counting his fingers.
“Listen,” she continued. “Her name is Loreli Karstens. Here’s her address in Warren.” She read the information to him. “Drive there and wait.”
She thumbed the disconnect button and started to slam the phone down on the room’s desk, but stopped herself in time. The people from the lab would be here soon and they would comb every inch of this place to get any kind of clue as to who had whacked Abrocci.
Her hands went to her temples and she rubbed. Her face was red, but as she rubbed, it slowly turned pink. She heaved a deep sigh and turned to the slim black man waiting quietly with more printouts.
“What do you have, Rupert? Please let it be good.”
“Loreli Karstens.” He read her address and social security number. “She works for Ryson, Butters & Mahoney, a local law firm. Makes $28,000 a year. Has a son named Liam. He was born eight years ago. She drives a 1986 Toyota Camry.”
“Drugs?”
Rupert shook his head. “No record of an
y recent criminal activity.”
“What about not-so-recent?”
“Five years ago, she was brought in for questioning regarding a prostitution ring.”
Rupert hurried on. “She was simply questioned and released. No charges were brought against her. She was married seven years ago, divorced six years ago.”
“Where’s her ex-husband?”
Rierdon looked over the papers in his hand. “We don’t have anything on him yet.”
Rierdon paced around the room. She cursed her luck. She had an image of Vawter leering at her, holding up the newspaper featuring her exploits in huge block type.
“She’s a part-timer,” Amanda said.
“Part-timer?” Rupert asked.
“She hooked in the past, quit, and now she needs money, or she got bored, so she went back to hooking. That’s what she was doing here.”
“But-”
“But why did she leave with the man who must have been the hitter?” She mulled it over in her mind. “Why didn’t he just whack her, too? And why did she run? Because she was hooking?”
The room was silent. The three of them looked down at the dead man. The blood had pooled around his head. The hole was in the middle of his forehead like smudge from Ash Wednesday.
“Tommy you are an idiot,” Rierdon said.
29.
Hamtramck is a small Polish community northeast of the city of Detroit, featuring small homes and dark taverns. It is a tightly knit community, united by the bonds of shared heritage. It sits in between the city of Detroit and the rapidly growing northeastern suburbs. A blue collar fiefdom wedged between savage violent crime to the south and elaborate sprinkler systems with professional landscaping to the north.
Tommy took I-94 toward the city, then exited and drove West until he saw the collection of taverns and small grocery stores that functioned as Hamtramck’s downtown. He kept driving until he came to Elm Street, then took a left followed by another left and slowed to a crawl. There weren’t many pimps in Hamtramck, and Rhonda was known to the wiseguys in Detroit. Tommy had gotten her name from a buddy who’d told him if he wanted to score young, fresh college girls, this was the woman to see. Tommy had met her, but it had been a few years ago.
