Big Money (Austin Carr Mystery)

by Jack Getze

  My jaw falls at the barnyard word. I can guess what Tony’s response will be...duh...and here it comes, Tony’s right fist leading his shoulder and hips out of his seat. His knuckles smash Shrimp Lips’ gooey mouth, and the sharp sound of breaking teeth and bone cracks the air like a whip.

  Gina’s molester tumbles backward into the neighboring table. A man there yells. Two women scream and cower, knocking over a plate, glasses and silverware. Shrimp Lips grabs a tablecloth on the way down. The rest of that table’s dishes and glasses bust onto the floor.

  Gina yanks on Tony’s sleeve as a thick arm encircles my neck, choking off my air. Jesus. My vision gets weird. Slow-motion. Everyone in the restaurant was watching. Now they are fighting. Honest to God, every single face in the previously subdued restaurant is now distorted in anger and frustration. Clenched teeth. Fierce eyes. Grunts and groans erupt around the room like steam jets of hissing bile.

  Way in the background, Frankie is singing “top of the heap.”

  Might have blacked out for a second there. I guess it’s Shrimp Lips’ partner choking me. I don’t know for certain because I can’t turn behind me, and even if I could, I probably couldn’t see because my eyes are halfway out of their sockets.

  If that makes any sense. I’m not sure. Weird vision was just the first sign, or symptom, that a lack of oxygen could be affecting my cognitive abilities.

  A fist hits me in the mouth, and the python around my neck rips over my ears. The punch has knocked me free of the headlock.

  Before I can regain my feet, a giant beast compresses me onto the floor. Must be a moose. Or a grizzly bear sitting on me. Destroying my urban illusion of being in control of nature.

  No. Wait. It’s human. Almost.

  It’s Max, the Creeper.

  Notice I said “destroying” my urban illusion, not “decimating?” TV newscasters and movie scriptwriters think the words are interchangeable, and they eventually will be, thanks to the word’s never-ending misuse.

  For the last two thousand years, decimate meant to reduce by ten percent. Comes from the same Latin word as decimal. It’s what Caesar used to do to his troops when food ran low or certain units performed poorly. Centurions would count off every tenth man and kill him. A scene of slaughter, yes, but hardly the same as destroy. Ninety percent survived a decimation.

  A shrieking lizard-brain alarm goes off when I realize what I’ve been thinking about. I’m definitely running short of air. Playing Jeopardy while my oxygen depletes. Caesar and his Centurions.

  I twist my face right, gasp a mouthful of air, then throw my shoulders to the left. I successfully almost break my neck.

  Fists punch my face. My head gets smacked against the floor. I hear a voice in my head begin to hum. Gina’s screams become a distant wailing, a spinning circle of smoky black sleep. The dark tornado sucks me inside.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Come on, get uppa.”

  The familiar, thickly accented voice cancels a nightmare about having my head crushed. What is Mama Bones doing here? Or, more to the point, where the hell am I? My head’s full of blood and mucous, ready to split like an overripe olive. My nose feels like a wad of prosciutto. Oh, yeah. Now I remember. I’m at the best little Italian restaurant in Little Italy. The joint right off Mulberry Street where Creeper beats up one lucky guest before the pasta. Keeps the customers in line.

  I roll to my hands and knees, the wood floor wet beneath me, and let Mama Bones’ sturdy two handed grip tow me onto my feet. Mr. Vic’s mother owns major grasping and pulling forearms. Like Caterpillar back-hoes. To develop that kind of hand strength, Mama Bones must have filled out thousands of phony bingo cards.

  Two young men I remember from Mr. Vic’s sailing-away party in Atlantic Highlands stand watchfully behind Mama Bones. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, both wear black chinos, black Nikes high tops and black T-shirts. Both of them buff and athletic. Mr. Trim and Mr. Fit.

  What’s up with them?

  “No time to answer questions,” Mama Bones says. “These are my nephews, Tomas and Gianni.”

  Gee. Suppose there’s anything to Mr. Vic’s claim his mother actually reads minds? Nah. It’s obvious and natural that I was thinking of asking that question, right?

  The restaurant is quiet and empty of customers now except for our little group, basically the two nephews, Gina and Mama Bones around me and Tony on the floor. How long was I out?

  Mama Bones squats beside Gina and touches the younger woman’s shoulder. Her hand rubs Gina’s back. It’s a side of Mr. Vic’s mother I haven’t witnessed. Almost warm and caring. Maybe I’m dreaming.

  “We gotta go, honey,” Mama Bones says.

  Gina’s hands and gaze won’t leave Tony’s face, the dark-haired beauty no longer Queen of Anything, just a shocked and frightened woman. Kind of the way I felt when Creeper hauled me and Ryan around the Locust Tree Inn, Creeper with one arm for each of us, carrying us like broken lamps.

  “Tony’s hurt,” Gina says. “We have to get help.”

  Mama Bones leans across Gina and touches Tony’s neck. Her fingers don’t stay in contact more than three or four seconds. “We’ll take him to the hospital,” Mama says. She waves for Tomas and Gianni to lift him.

  “Come on. Get up,” she says to Gina.

  “I hear a siren,” Gina says. “I should stay and tell the police.”

  Mama shakes her head. “That’s not a good idea. This is Brooklyn. If the cops keep you overnight, Tony’s boss will have you killed in jail.”

  “Tony’s boss? Why would he hurt me?”

  Just what I was going to ask. We have a lot in common, Gina and me.

  “Who you think ordered this, huh?” Mama Bones says. “You think Bluefish sent his Jersey people to Brooklyn without permission?”

  Mama Bones leads our hurried, shuffling troop through an empty, dirty kitchen. Wonder why the chefs and waiters left in such a hurry?

  Outside, in an alley busy with delivery vans and trucks, a handful of the restaurant’s curious staff, Gina first tumbles in row two behind the driver’s seat of a very clean white Cadillac Escalade. But when Gianni and Tomas stretch Tony’s wounded frame out in the Caddy’s extended trunk, Gina changes her mind and wants to ride in back with her husband.

  Gina screams a few seconds after crawling close beside him.

  Mama Bones grips my arm. “Her husband is dead,” she whispers. “That animal Max broke Tony’s neck.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Travel directly into Manhattan after your flight lands in Newark-Liberty International Airport, the New Jersey you see and remember consists primarily of smoking oil refineries, fleets of garbage trucks and rusty iron bridges. Very urban Americana, of course. But decidedly unappealing.

  To snap another mental image of Jersey, drive south on the Turnpike to the Garden State Parkway, south again to watch the scenery slowly transform into forests of maple, pine and oak. Rivers, wooded hills and salt-water sloughs. Farms with horses and barns. The rural suburbs of central New Jersey equal anything you might see in Connecticut or Massachusetts.

  Another thirty minutes south on the Parkway and you’re in New Jersey’s pine barrens, a desert-like, endless brush of stunted, twisted, yellowish evergreen scrub that makes the night drive from L.A. to Las Vegas look scenic. The acidic land and dwarfed, sickly trees look slightly bleached.

  “Where are we going?” I ask. We’re about an hour out of Brooklyn.

  “Somewhere Bluefish won’t look for you.” Besides the accent, Mama Bones’ language and tone also carry a certain confidence I wish I could share. When Gina discovered Tony was dead, she went off like a hotel smoke detector, and it was Mama Bones who brought Gina around with a small but magic smack. The old woman’s bag of tricks definitely carries big mojo. But I just witnessed a murder, and I can identify at least three of the four guys sent to kill Tony. If I’m Bluefish, I not only look for me under every rock, I station a man at each one to wait.

  Gianni’s driving the Es
calade, a big SUV that rides much smoother than a Chevy Suburban. Tomas rides shotgun. Mama Bones, a nonverbal Gina and yours truly stack the next row. Tony is still in the back. Hard to believe the guy with German Shepherd eyes wound up dead searching for a plate of baked mac.

  “If Bluefish’s people wanted Gina and me dead, why didn’t they kill us tonight?” I ask.

  “Their orders were to kill Tony,” Mama Bones says. “Gina was supposed to get an emergency phone call, be out of the restaurant. You were even bigger surprise. But when Bluefish finds out you and Gina watch his men kill Tony...guess who’s gonna be next on his list.”

  Gina leans against me, her body loose from exhaustion. Despite all that’s happened and my shock over Tony’s murder, Gina’s weight warms me in places I shouldn’t be getting warm. Unbelievable. Down, boy. It’s rare, I admit, but sometimes even Austin Carr can show couth.

  “How do you know all this, Mama Bones?” I ask.

  Mama Bones leans forward to touch the driver Gianni’s shoulder. “It’s the next exit.”

  It’s not an easy movement to pick up, the dark-haired, black-shirted young man presenting only minimum outlines, but Gianni nods.

  “How do you think I know, smarty pants?” Mama Bones says. “Maybe me and Bluefish in the same business, you think? Maybe I work for Bluefish?”

  “And he told you they were planning to kill—”

  “Bluefish told me nothing,” she says. “But me being there probably saved you and Gina, at least for a day or two. We have to move fast.”

  Gianni guides the Escalade off the Parkway. We roll through a stop sign at the end of the short off-ramp, turn right onto a ribbon of blacktop running into New Jersey’s scrub pine forest. A full grown female deer bounds into the SUV’s headlights, and then is gone. Planets stare and stars blink at us from a narrow strip of sky, an overhead source of vague light between the trees.

  “But you heard what was going to happen,” I say, “and so you tried to help Vic’s friend Tony? I’m trying to understand why you were there.”

  The SUV’s tires hum against the soles of my feet through the floorboard. Another deer watches us from the tree line, this one’s eyes glowing neon yellow. Or do those night-vision lenses belong to some other kind of animal? A hunter, perhaps. Sharp beaks or a mouth with fangs.

  “I mean, I know you didn’t come to save me,” I say.

  Mama, Gianni and Tomas laugh on cue like a warmed-up TV taping audience. Johnny Carson never had a crowd so well prepped.

  Gina touches my arm. “Mama Bones came for me,” she says. “She’s my aunt. My mother’s sister. I’m named after her.”

  Gina. Angelina. Right. I knew that.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Mama Bones keys the entrance to what looks like a giant log cabin. The scrub-pine forest has been cleared to within a hundred yards of the roofed, plank board porch we stand on, a boardwalk that encircles the two-story, all-log building. Behind us, a dirt clearing offers parking space for a Boeing 747 beside our white Escalade. An owl hoots. The Jersey night air smells of rain and dry pine needles.

  Inside, Mama Bones flips a light switch. A thirty by thirty foot lobby greets my eyes—a four leather lounge chairs, two overstuffed sofas, a green felt card table, brass lamps and two televisions. Pine floors. Pine walls with animal heads.

  “Some joint,” I say.

  “Don’t get comfortable,” Mama Bones says. “You’ll only be safe here a day or two.”

  “Then what?”

  She shrugs. “It’s up to you. I bring you here, make you safe for a while because you’re with Gina. The rest of your life is up to you.”

  Nice. Mama Bones would make a great Shore Securities sales manager. “You’re leaving me here all alone?”

  Mama Bones shakes her head no. “Gianni is going to give you his bug-out bag.”

  “Oh, boy. Whatever the hell that is. What about Gina?”

  “I’m taking her somewhere else.”

  I sigh. Mama Bones has that conversation-over tone in her voice, not to mention the upper hand. Gina’s her family. Guess I’m lucky to be alive, actually. But I’ll have to be even luckier to stay above ground. Every time I think my situation can’t get worse, it does. At least Ryan and Beth are safe.

  “The bedrooms are upstairs,” Mama Bones says.

  I glance toward the stairway. The hand-carved log railing and banister is a sculpture. Twisted tree branches, bull horns, cowboys and horse heads grow from the wood, living images of the Wild West.

  “Who owns this place?”

  “Bluefish,” Mama Bones says. “Gotta be the last place he’ll look for you.”

  Gina steps out of the Escalade to hug me. It’s a halfhearted embrace. Indeed, the way Tony’s dark-haired widow dabs back tears with a tissue reminds me of a silent movie. Over-acted. Standing beside the Escalade with me, Gina looks at her aunt, says, “Did you tell him, Mama Bones?”

  “He knows plenty,” the older woman says.

  “Mama Bones? We discussed this. Austin needs to know the story on Ann Marie. To protect the business...for himself, yes, but also for your son and your granddaughter Carmela.”

  Mama Bones shifts her gaze outside the Caddy SUV to stare at me. Like she’s trying to decide if she wants to turn me into a frog. Why did I think that? Who put that in my mind? Think happy thoughts, Austin. Happy thoughts.

  “If you don’t tell him, I will,” Gina says.

  Mama Bones grunts and slides her face out the window. “Ann Marie Talbot is not just any accountant for the AASD. She does favors for Bluefish and others before him. She was being paid to put the squeeze on you, help Bluefish take over Shore Securities.”

  The owl hoots again and a chill climbs the skin on my back. There’s more. There has to be.

  “And...” Gina says.

  “And that’s why my son Vittorio go to Italy, why he leaves you in charge of Shore,” Mama Bones says. “Vic knows Rags can’t pay his debt to Bluefish, so Bluefish will come after Vic. Vic also knows the AASD investigation is rigged against him.”

  “Mr. Vic left me to take the heat? He was willing to risk my family’s lives, as well as Carmela’s?”

  Mama Bones nods.

  That son-of-a-bitch. I’m going to drive a full set of MacGregor golf irons up his spaghetti-eating ass. Plus the leather bag and cart.

  But below my surprise and anger—I always figured Mr. Vic for a worm, not a snake—another more logical jewel of thought blossoms and bubbles to the top. “Do you know who killed Ann Marie Talbot?” I ask.

  Mama Bones glances at Gina. Mrs. Farascio nods.

  “Brooklyn believes Tony did it for the hundred thousand,” Mama Bones says. “That’s what Bluefish told them, anyway. Said he had a video recording of the murder that the Branchtown cops took. A DVD. Brooklyn believed him and must have okayed a hit on Tony.”

  “Nunzio’s been jealous of Tony for years,” Gina says.

  “Where did Bluefish get a video of Talbot’s murder?” I say.

  “Don’t know. It’s only rumor I heard.”

  “But you don’t think Tony really did it?”

  She looks at Gina. “No.”

  Why do I feel her answer might be different if Tony’s wife wasn’t here? Wasn’t it Mama Bones who told me Tony was “a bad, bad man?”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I am so pissed at Mr. Vic, I can’t sleep. By leaving me here to deal with his problems, knowing the space involved serious danger, that son-of-a-bitch con man Bonacelli might as well have stenciled bull’s eyes on my children.

  Some anger must be self-directed as well, as I certainly have to question my ability to choose business associates. First Walter, now Mr. Vic. And that does not even account for wacko Rags. I couldn’t have done any worse picking co-workers if, as a source pool, I’d used Seaside County’s special holding cell for violent suspects.

  Hard to believe my golfing-buddy boss, Vic Bonacelli, would do this. Except, thinking semi-objectively for unbroken hours,
enough moonlight to see only gray through Bluefish’s second-story window, I figure putting my family up as a target must have been the only way Mr. Vic could think of to protect his family.

  Not that I forgive the dickface.

  My body heaves and pitches, my molars grind all night, imagining what I’m going to do the next time I see him. Scream in his face? Punch his classic Roman nose? Use a thirty-four-ounce baseball bat to adjust the worst golf swing in Seaside County?

  Just before dawn, I’m glad for the Vic-hating insomnia. As the northeastern New Jersey sky finally lightens to blue steel in the bedroom window, the quiet hiss of slow-moving automobile tires announces someone’s arrival.

  The approaching tire sounds roll me off Bluefish’s California king. I know Branchtown’s Godfather Wannabe sleeps here because above this swimming pool sized, feather-soft bed rests a twenty-three pound specimen of his namesake fish.

  I slept—no—rested on top of the blue satin bedcovers because I didn’t want to worry how clean his sheets were, what dried body fluids or particulate remnants I might be touching. Yuk. I can’t believe I even thought of that.

  Two long strides put me at the window. This is the only bedroom with a view of the driveway and front door parking area. That’s why I picked it.

  Crows squawk somewhere close as I carefully inch back the curtain. A Lincoln Town Car glides to a perfectly silent stop. The driver door pops open and Max the Creeper squeezes out like toothpaste.

  Oh, joy. The sight of him kicks my heart rate up two notches. My legs want to flee down the stairs, race out the back, run through the forest until I’m safe and hidden.

  Maybe later. Instead, I remain frozen by the window while Creeper thunders up the steps and rattles keys unlocking the split-log front door. Doesn’t he have to huff and puff or something? Blow my house down?