Unfuckinbelievable, Billy thought. All that searching for Adam Rackers, and his address was a five-dollar cab ride from Billy’s apartment.
eighteen
A midnight mist slipped silently up the bay and followed the river into Providence. It spread invisibly, except in the glow of streetlights, where it looked like static. The cold mist landed on Billy’s skin as softly as frozen spider’s silk. The streets seemed especially quiet, as if the city were discouraged by the sudden chill that confirmed the death of summer and foretold another New England winter.
Billy stuck his hands in his pockets and listened to the city. Some unseen foot kicked a can that clanked and echoed. A passing car splashed through a deep puddle. Voices shouting over each other at a neighborhood bar momentarily grew louder whenever somebody opened the door. A church bell rang twice, the second dong coming before the first had died out. Billy’s shoes tapped unevenly on the sidewalk. He limped against the pain of a bruised hip.
Kit Bass walked in stride beside him. She made no sound at all. Kit wore old Nike racing flats—an outdated model the company had not made for years—loose cotton slacks, black fleece sweater, and a knit watchman’s cap. She had tucked every strand of her hair under the cap; if Billy had not known better, he might have guessed she was bald.
A car roared up suddenly from behind. A passenger laughed hideously at them out of the window, which startled Billy and flushed him with fear. “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!” the man added as the car sped on, to molest some other pedestrians.
“Fucking drunks,” Billy muttered. “A drive-by laughing.”
“Why are we going in the middle of the night?” Kit asked. She wrapped her arms around herself.
“If it’s locked, we’re breaking in,” Billy replied. “Not what you should do in broad daylight. And heck, I took a vacation day to do this.”
“Ever been convicted of B and E?”
“Never convicted of anything. Why?”
“Second offense is a four- to ten-year sentence. That’s in the General Laws, title eleven, chapter eight-dash-two.”
“What’s first offense?”
“Two-year minimum.”
Billy whistled and pretended to hike a fedora high on his head. “Working for the court, do you get an employee discount?”
She looked at her shoes. “I’m on a leave of absence until I learn who paid to kill the judge. I won’t quit until I know what happened.”
Billy noted that she no longer referred to Judge Harmony as “Gil.” He was The Judge. Her choice of language imposed distance between Kit and her former boss, though the intensity of her words still sounded like love. She grabbed Billy’s elbow and asked him, “Why did you bring me here tonight?”
There were so many reasons. He shared a few of them. “Because I owe you for saving me,” he said. “Because two people can search a house twice as fast as one. Because you worked for the judge, and you’re chasing the same truth that I am, and I thought you deserved to be here.” Left unsaid was that the encounter with Glanz’s goons had rattled Billy, and he did not want to go alone.
“What do we hope to find?”
“I have a little gambling hunch, the kind I’ve learned to pay attention to,” Billy admitted. “Rackers’s payment for shooting the judge didn’t come in cash. He was being paid with June Harmony’s diamonds, which he apparently believed would be in a wall safe in the judge’s house. He planned to shoot the judge, and collect his payment on the way out. Rackers had already arranged to sell the stones to a shady rock dealer over the Internet.”
Billy paused to let her process his theory, then added, “What I can’t get my mind around is why the hell didn’t he take the stones? They weren’t in a wall safe—the house didn’t even have one. They were lying in plain sight. He’d have to be as blind as Stu Tracy to miss them.”
“Who?”
“Not important. As a wild guess, I’d say the real killer, the one we’re looking for—”
“Like maybe Rhubarb Glanz?”
“Or maybe his kid, Robbie, or one of his goons, offered a deal for Rackers to kill the judge, in exchange for the combination to a wall safe.”
“But there was no safe.”
“Rackers didn’t know that. So he killed Judge Harmony first, then looked for a safe. Brock came running downstairs and scared the shit out of Rackers. So he put the kid to work checking for a safe, but in his panic didn’t see the stones in plain sight.”
“So he was calm enough to break in and kill the judge in cold blood, but too panicked to put a pair of diamonds in his pocket?” In a robotic voice, Kit said, “Does-not-com-pute.”
Billy grinned at Kit’s first show of whimsy since he had met her. Maybe she wasn’t completely hard-minded and in love with only the judge and the law. She had, he realized, punched clean through his theory. “That’s why we have to search his home,” Billy said, “whether or not we violate title eleven, chapter eight-dash-my-ass, of the General Laws.”
The apartment where the diamond dealer had sent the loupe was on the third floor of a triple-decker. In the vestibule, the doorbell for that apartment was listed under the name Gary Gleason.
“An alias?” Kit asked.
“A roommate, maybe,” Billy said. “It’s hard to carry off an alias. Fake driver’s license, fake credit cards—those things are hard to get, expensive to maintain over time, and a good way to get noticed by the IRS or the FBI or some other set of government initials.”
He checked the inner door of the vestibule.
Locked.
“So what do we do?” Kit asked. “We can’t just ring the bell.”
Billy crouched to examine the lock on the inner door. Very old. Poorly maintained. A wide crack between the door and the jamb. He stood and leaned a shoulder on the door. “Spare me the legal citation, okay?”
“What?”
Billy rocked back, then violently drove his shoulder into the door just above the lock. It burst open. Billy staggered into an inner hallway that smelled of piss and dust. He gathered himself, stood at attention, held the door for Kit, and swept his hand through the air like an overdramatic doorman.
“Billy!” she said in a stage whisper, cut with giggly laughter. “I’ve just witnessed my first real crime!” She hurried inside. Billy let the door wheeze shut. The corridor continued to the ground-level apartments. To the left, battered wooden stairs and a decorative banister led to the second floor.
Kit waved a hand in front of her nose. “Stinks in here,” she said. “What is that awful smell?”
“Poverty,” Billy replied.
She went on about the smell. Billy barely listened. His attention was on a string of small spots near the base of a banister post. The hallway light was no better than forty watts, so Billy could not be sure, but the dark streaks on the wood looked like dried blood. He scraped some away with a fingernail and sniffed it.
Crusty, sharp-smelling blood.
He hid the discovery from Kit, wiped his fingers on his pants, then leaned close and briefed her:
“We’re going to the third floor. If we run into anybody, we ignore them. We do not make eye contact. We do not strike up a conversation. We will look like we belong because we will believe that we do. If anyone questions us, we tell them to fuck off and we keep moving with absolute confidence.”
Without waiting for an answer, he started up the stairs. Thousands of footsteps over ten decades had pressed the creaks out of the old staircase. Billy was pleased to climb it without making a racket. Kit followed close behind.
At the second-floor landing, a black cat with a regal white shield on its chest watched them from a corner. The cat held its ground as they passed. It hissed once, not aggressively, just a friendly warning to tell Billy and Kit to keep moving, and to mind their own business.
More streaks of dried blood spotted the banister on the staircase to the third floor. The stairwell seemed colder than the outdoors. Billy blew into his hands. Someone had pilfered the lightbulb in t
he ceiling lamp at the top of the stairs. The landing was dark. Billy pulled a small hiker’s headlamp from his coat, turned it on, and panned the beam around. Under the white light, the bloodstains that speckled the floor were deep burgundy.
Kit took three loud, choppy breaths and pointed to a smear on the doorjamb. Billy put the light to it. More blood. He slipped on the flashlight’s elastic headband and wore the light like a coal miner.
He looked at Kit. She squinted and turned away from the brightness. Her cheeks and nose were red from the cold, or maybe from fear. Her nostrils shone wet. Tension had raised ripples in the skin over her brow. Billy slowly scanned her with the light. Her hands were steady. Her stomach rose and fell with each deep breath. He held the light on her shoelace, coming undone, until she reached down and tightened it. Should they have to run, he wanted Kit to have every advantage.
She nodded that she was ready. Billy winked, then turned to the door. It was dark wood, with a brass knob and deadbolt fixture. An index card taped to the jamb had a name in block letters: GLEASON, G.
Gary Gleason, same as the mailbox downstairs.
Billy pressed an ear to the wood. Two sounds competed to be heard: the rush of water through old pipes and the heavy drone of a refrigerator, right on the other side of the door.
He drew a handkerchief from his pocket, wrapped the doorknob to keep it free of his fingerprints—no sense giving any detectives the wrong idea—and turned the knob. It resisted a moment, then smoothly rotated a half turn and clicked when the bolt snapped into the door. Holy shit, unlocked. Who would leave his door open in this neighborhood?
Now what. Should they knock?
Oh, well, what the hell.
Billy pushed open the door.
What he saw brought a flash of horror that broiled his skin and raised a sweat.
A thick stripe of blood, like from a housepainter’s brush, slashed across the side of a white refrigerator to the left of the door. The refrigerator was wide open; it cast a dim yellow glow that cut the room into triangles of shadow and light. Bottles of beer lay scattered across a floor stained deep red.
Footprints and scuff marks in the blood marked the scene of a savage fight.
Chairs and a table had been tipped over. What looked for a moment like a human arm lay across a counter, a bright glob of congealed blood where the wrist would be.
Billy’s eyes widened at a human form across the room. He aimed his flashlight at it. A male mannequin, missing an arm, stood over the scene like a wounded survivor, shell-shocked to silence.
Billy stepped toward the door. Kit grabbed a handful of his shirt and pulled him back. He turned to her and whispered, “This is what we came for.”
“We have to call the authorities,” she pleaded.
“As soon as we’re done, we’ll drop the dime, anonymously.”
He turned away before she could argue, and stepped into the room, taking long strides onto islands of white linoleum between the bloodstains. Several identical women’s business suits were piled in a heap at the feet of the mannequin. The security tags were still attached, so he guessed these suits had been boosted from some local department store. That seemed more like Rackers’s style than shooting a judge.
He glanced back to Kit, who was still in the hallway, looking pensively at the carnage across the kitchen. Billy waved her inside. She came haltingly, then quietly closed the door behind her. With the door shut, Billy felt free to speak.
“I’m going to explore,” he said. “Look around in here but don’t touch anything.”
“Look around for what?” she asked, but Billy did not answer, for he had noticed a blood trail leading down a wide hallway. The drops were spaced a few feet apart, and he imagined they had been left by a wounded man running at top speed. But running where? Into the bathroom?
No, he decided.
Running for the door.
The deduction calmed Billy’s roiling stomach. With so much blood, he would not have been surprised to find a body splayed on the floor. But if the bleeder had been wounded in the bathroom … he must have escaped the apartment, down the stairs to the street.
He walked silently past a battered sofa and a storage chest, which sat across from a small bathroom. Shards of broken mirror on the bathroom floor reflected his headlamp, and scattered light around the room like a poor man’s disco ball.
This is where the fight began.
The light switch was just inside the bathroom door. He couldn’t think of a reason to stumble around with a flashlight in an apartment with perfectly good utilities, and he clicked on the light.
No dead body. Whew. He stepped inside.
The top half of a broken mirror hung above the sink, reflecting the blue shower curtain across the tiny room. He noted a toothbrush in a glass on the vanity. He watched a soap bubble pop on a glistening wet bar of Ivory. On the floor, blood had spattered the chips of broken mirror. The ten-inch shaft of an ice pick stuck out from the wall at shoulder height, like a giant nail. The tool’s wooden handle lay splintered on the floor.
Billy swallowed hard and closely examined the ice pick, until his imagination began to guess how it might feel to have that metal slide through his guts, and he had to turn away.
The toilet lid was up, the water inside clear, and the old porcelain bowl stained with rust. A few magazines were scattered.
He walked back to the hall and turned toward the bedroom.
Wait …
He froze, thinking …
Holyfuckingshit.
Gooseflesh erupted over his body. He looked desperately at Kit, who was in the kitchen, grimly leaning over the counter for a closer inspection of the mannequin arm. Billy tried to warn her but the words never left his thoughts.
The soap on the vanity … why is it wet?
Somebody else was there.
Billy looked again toward the bedroom, dark and unexplored. The line of sight from the kitchen door went straight down the hall. If Kit and Billy had surprised somebody using the bathroom, Billy would have seen him duck into the bedroom.
But he was convinced he had heard water running when he listened at the apartment door. Distracted by the gore in the kitchen, he had forgotten about the noise. So they had surprised someone … someone who was washing his hands … who had heard the door … and killed the light … .
So where did he run?
Or … did he run at all? Billy’s head slowly turned, more slowly than the red second hand of a clock, until he stared straight at the shower stall.
The curtain hung motionless.
He shivered against another wave of goose bumps.
nineteen
Of all the fucking no good luck!
Scratch shrank in his shower stall into an uncomfortable squatting position, with his tailbone against the tiled wall and his ass on his heels, coiled like a spring—the position should provide the best leverage to explode from the shower and make a run for his life. Except that he had squatted there so long, afraid to move, barely breathing, hardly blinking, he could not be sure his legs had not gone numb.
He listened to the footsteps coming closer. Oh, Jesus Christ, is he coming back? Scratch screamed orders to the intruder in his mind: You’ve already searched the bathroom. Remember? Two minutes ago. Are you thick or something? Nobody is here so go the hell away!
Scratch had been positive he had not been followed to his apartment. Not after riding a cab from the airport to the train station downtown, and then hopping a second cab from the train station to the city park, through which Scratch had shadow-hiked along strolling trails that circled the duck ponds. Not to mention the ten-minute ride on a rickety three-speed bicycle he had liberated from a backyard on the Cranston city line. No way he could have been followed; his trail was scrubbed.
Had they been waiting for him? This was his first time home since the attack. He only wanted some spare cash, fresh clothing, his favorite marked deck of poker cards, and a shoe box stuffed with resalable PDA cell phones, w
hich Adam had pilfered from Radio World before he died in the wreck. Eh, maybe a few beers, too. Just some necessities to make life on the lam more bearable.
And then to be caught at home with his pants down. Not down, actually—but unzipped. Either way, big trouble. He hadn’t heard them at the door until it was too late to run. He practically had to drag himself by the collar into the shower stall, from which the masked attacker had plotted Scratch’s murder.
But there he squatted, hiding from an intruder in the place an intruder had hidden from him.
Scratch was beginning to detest irony.
To be murdered in his bathroom after escaping a murder in the same damn bathroom would be too much.
A woman called softly from the kitchen, “Billy? Have you found anything? Billy?”
No, Scratch answered silently. There’s nothing to find. Now split.
The woman’s voice had a nasally thickness. Something about her pronunciations suggested she was well educated. Who was she? Did hit men bring their wives along? Were they on a date? Hang on, babe. We’ll get to Phantom of the Opera, soon as I waste this guy.
Scratch’s left leg began to quiver. From fear? From the stress of squatting? He couldn’t be sure. He clutched his knee with both hands, as if to choke it to death if it didn’t calm down.
A sliver of broken mirror crunched underfoot on the other side of the curtain.
Whoever this guy was—Billy, the woman had called him—he was standing directly in front of the shower stall.
Scratch waited, waited … . His eyeballs stung, and he realized they had dried out from not blinking. He blinked the pain away and wondered, how long was this guy going to stand there?
“Billy?” the woman called again, more urgently. She was coming down the hall. “I’ve checked in the kitchen—” She stopped suddenly. “What? What’s wrong with you?”
With a ferocious grunt, the man suddenly punched the shower curtain. It bulged where Scratch’s head would have been, had he been standing.
The woman shouted, “Billy!”
Scratch sprang into the curtain like a bull into the matador’s cape. The man said, “Oomph,” hurtled backward, and skidded on broken glass. Scratch tore past the curtain, raced to the door. He stiff-armed the woman square on the forehead and crushed her out of his way.
Loot the Moon Page 16
