“We don’t know anything of the sort,” the voice said. “Sure we haven’t heard anything, but that don’t mean nothin’. When he’s done with the job, he’ll check in. Until then, you gotta sit tight and don’t do nothin’ stupid. If it’ll make you feel better, we’ll do some checking and see what gives.”
Do some checking? See what gives? Dante was furious now. To hell with the consequences. He was about to demand more, but the line clicked and went dead. He slammed the phone down on the receiver. He picked it up and slammed it down again. And then he did it again. Red chips of plastic splintered off the phone and skittered across his desk.
His door swung open after a cursory knock. The music from the club blared through the opening and Dante wondered what the hell the band was doing. His bar manager—he’d promoted Sully in the absence of his son—had a dark expression on his face.
“Boss, it ain’t goin’ so well out here,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “The customers are pissed that Cinnamon ain’t here. The band is … I don’t even know what the band is doin’. Oh, and we’re out of Corona.”
“Fix it,” Dante growled.
“Beg pardon?”
The old man stood, put his palms flat on the top of his desk. “I made you the manager so I wouldn’t have to deal with bullshit like this. Go do your job. Fix it.”
Sully’s face twisted into a mix of confusion and fear. He looked like a man about to jump out of an airplane for the first time unsure of what he was feeling. Could be excitement, could be fear, could be hysteria. He nodded and backed out of the office door.
When it closed, Dante turned his hands over. He had several sharp pieces of the shattered receiver sticking in the soft flesh of his palms. One had a trickle of blood oozing down from it toward his wrist. He brushed them away.
It had been a long time since he’d gotten blood on his hands in more ways than one. The owner of Woody’s before him had been reluctant to sell. That had been a few years ago and Dante was fairly sure that no one would ever find his remains behind the club, under the dumpster.
He leaned back in his chair, pulled a cigar from his suit pocket, and rolled it around in his lips. He slid open the file drawer and removed a small, snub nose revolver from the back. He spun the cylinder slowly checking for bullets. Three. More than enough to drop a cowboy in his tracks.
Dante tucked the gun into his suit pocket, made the sign of the cross touching his forehead, then his chest, then his shoulders, and only then did he stand to leave his office. He was a new man, a man on a mission, a man determined to find that cowboy and put a bullet or three in his head.
He straightened his coat that hung slightly lower on the side holding the pistol. After a quick two fingers of his prized Knappogue Castle Sherry that he picked up for just such an occasion, he opened his office door and stepped into the cacophony shaking the peeling wallpaper from behind the stage on the nearly empty stripper side of Woody’s. Sully was standing in front of the stage shouting at the shirtless drummer beating on the poor drum kit like it had stolen something from him.
Dante shook his head, put his hands over his ears, and lurched toward the front door trying to escape the dual crashing cymbals that were currently Rockin’ in the Free World. As he reached to push his way out, the door whooshed open. He lost his balance and tumbled into the parking lot, falling hard into the gravel. The jolt to his already tender palms sent him down to his chest, knocking the wind out of him.
He rolled over onto his back and took slow deep breaths until the pain subsided. The streetlight mingled with the yellowing bulbs lighting the ancient Woody’s sign above the front door blinding him. He squinted as a figure leaned over him, silhouetted in the glare.
“Howdy, partner,” the voice behind the shadow said. “You okay there?”
Dante raised a painful arm to block the light. To his shock, he was looking at the man with the straw hat, the dude who had killed Matty and probably the family’s fixer, the Cowboy Killer.
“Say,” the man said, holding a hand down to help Dante to his feet, “have you seen Cinnamon?”
Dante grinned with no mirth. “Yeah,” he said. “I got just what you’re looking for in the back.”
30
The Nose Knows
Troy could hear the muffled sounds coming through the dank darkness of the back room Dante had led him into. Whatever was happening on the other side of the wall was neither musical nor enjoyable in any way. It sounded more like Keith Moon had traded in his Ludwig Black Oyster Super Classics on a couple of upturned aluminum trash cans and was beating on them with a pair of pipe wrenches. The classic melody of My Generation was lost in the barrage of percussion, trying desperately to stick its head above the noise like a drowning swimmer being bowled over by wave after wave of water.
His wrists were zip-tied behind his back with another looped between them through the slats of an old wooden kitchen chair. He wrenched his hands back and forth but only succeeded in cutting his skin on the sharp edges of the narrow, but strong ties.
“Okay, cowboy,” Dante said, bringing Troy back to the interrogation the old man had begun more than thirty minutes ago. “Let me get this straight. You say you didn’t have anything to do with the disappearance of my son.”
Troy could see photographs over the old man’s shoulder. There were vintage, over-exposed pictures showing signs of yellowing at the edges with young men in suits standing around classic cars on crowded city streets. One picture showed a younger Dante holding a baby in his arms, a lit cigar between his teeth. Behind him, lying in a hospital bed, was the woman who had apparently given birth to the child. Next to that, a more modern pose in front of a typically mottled blue abstract studio backdrop showed a young man in a graduation gown. The student’s oily, pimply face betrayed that it was probably a high school graduation rather than a college one. On a single shelf below the pictures, two plastic bowling trophies stood watch like the Pillars of Hercules. Between them were a few paperback books, weathered, worn, and well read: For Whom The Bell Tolls, A Time To Kill, The Deep Blue Goodbye, Double Whammy, and—of course—a copy of a King James Bible.
“As God is my witness,” started Troy, “I don’t know nothin’ about your boy—a fine fellow, I’m sure.”
Dante chewed on the insides of his cheek, seeming to consider this carefully. “Uh huh.”
A sudden silence on the other side of the wall followed by random shouting gave the old man pause. He looked at the wall as if trying to see through it. He turned back to Troy. “And you haven’t had any run-ins with any other … men?”
Troy squinted his eyes. “I’m not sure I take your meanin’. If you’re asking if I’m partial to fellers, then the answer is no. I prefer the fairer sex.”
Dante’s mouth opened slightly, but no sound came out. “No, not that, you imbecile. I mean dealings with … bad men. Has anyone strange come around hustling you lately?”
Troy suddenly remembered the strange happenings with the cop and the attacker at the tennis club. He certainly figured the man the cop had put in the back of his SUV must’ve been a bad man. He was about to tell Dante the story when the old man’s cell phone began chirping inside his pocket.
“Yeah?” he growled into the phone. “Are you kidding me, Sully? What the frick am I payin’ you for? Fix it.”
Troy couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the line, but judging from Dante’s exasperation, he guessed the person was not delivering good news.
“Fine,” Dante said, pushing himself up out of his squeaky chair. “Stall ‘em. I’ll be around in a second.”
He shoved his phone into his pocket. “Can’t get good help these days. You got a job, Mr. uh …”
“Bodean. But you can call me Troy. And yes sir. I am gainfully employed as of the moment.”
“Yeah.”
The old man sniffed, straightened his wide, diagonally striped tie, and buttoned his jacket. He whisked open the door to the room and Troy could feel the
cool night air wafting in. Judging from the little he could see, he reckoned they were in some kind of room around the back of the building—a storeroom or an office of some kind.
The door slammed and he was alone in the dark, only a single amber bulb burning above him. He remembered back a few months ago—was it more than a month—on the long, monotonous bus ride down to the Keys, he’d gotten into almost the exact same situation with that kid who’d killed the liquor store owner. Something in his brain hung up on the memory of the murderer and their kidnapper. He could almost see his face, but it eluded him. It was the same feeling you got when you walked into a room and forgot why you’d gone there. It would come to him, but right now, he was blank, trying desperately to dig it out of the fog in his mind. He figured a psychologist might tell him he’d buried that along with the more shocking memories from Afghanistan.
He tried to jerk his hands free again, but this time only managed to cut himself. He could feel the warm trickle of blood dripping down on his fingers. He recalled that Cinnamon had told him she was certain these men were mafia or mob or something like that. He wondered if he was going to be thrown into the ocean wearing concrete shoes or maybe taken out into the Everglades and tossed into the swamp with a hunk of raw meat tied to his neck. Either way, he was sure he didn’t want to wait around to find out.
But he had no idea how to get out of his current predicament, nor did he know where he would go when he did. He wondered if Cinnamon was safe or if she’d already met the fate she had feared. Between the low sounds of mayhem coming from the other side of the wall, he heard a low, buzzing sound on the old man’s desk. It was insistent and mocked him as he scooted his chair—one jarring bump at a time—over toward the metallic bumblebee hissing at him. With great effort that left sweat dripping down his nose like an Olympic ski jumper racing toward takeoff, he moved closer at a pace he thought of as slower than a snail riding on a turtle’s back. The noise stopped, but then started again, insisting that he was getting warmer.
He leaned down, and gave a silent apology to his dentist—who he hadn’t seen in many years, gripped the top drawer handle with his teeth and pulled. Thankfully, it wasn’t locked and slid open easily. Inside, he could see his cell phone lying among a few random papers, a dozen paper clips, a half-empty box of staples, and a small, snub nose revolver. A chill went through Troy’s spine as he considered all the bad things the gun had probably been used for, but before he could process them all, his phone buzzed again. Unfortunately, it was face down, so he couldn’t see who was calling. Without thinking, he slammed his head down, trying to grab it with his teeth—another silent prayer that he wasn’t going to lose any of his pearly whites. His hat bumped into the desk and fell from his head, toppling over onto the desk. He was able to get the edge of his phone into his mouth and flip it over. It wasn’t ringing anymore, but he did have a missed call from an unlisted number.
He jabbed at it with his nose, trying to open the screen, but the rivulets of sweat just smeared across the fingerprint scanner. Troy wondered if his nose would be sufficient to unlock the phone. He sat up and rubbed his face across his sleeve and prayed to the Gods of telecommunications that his nose did indeed have the necessary information to get him in.
He pressed his slightly dryer snout onto the fingerprint scanner. Predictably, it failed and asked him for his passcode. He tried desperately to tap it out with his proboscis. He raised up to see it had also failed. He tried once again only to see that the phone was locked for a minute and that he could try again after that.
After the longest sixty seconds he had ever experienced passed, he tried again. He could hear Winston Churchill reminding him that success consisted of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. He wasn’t sure where he’d read that, but it came to him just as his phone told him it was now locked for five minutes.
The screen lit up with a timer counting down and Troy watched it, alternating between the door and the phone as the seconds ticked at the pace of a snail riding on a turtle’s back through a field of frozen molasses on roller skates with rusty ball-bearings and wheels coated in grease.
31
A Dead Man’s Purse
Chad Harrison’s date for the extravagant night out at Robbie’s had apparently decided to leave after he’d been thrown from the bar in a fashion normally reserved for vagrants and overly intoxicated tourists. As such, she’d gotten into his car—an extraordinarily pretentious, and exorbitantly pricey Rosso (red) Competizione Tri-Coated Alfa Romeo 4C Spider—and driven it out of the parking lot, missing the exit and crunching it over the curb at high speed. Unfortunately, the yellow concrete curb was two inches higher than the exotic car’s undercarriage. The damage was extensive, but she never noticed over the eardrum bursting Van Halen blaring from the radio.
Chad picked the gravel shards thrown up by the knobby wheels on the white Jeep from his forearms and face. A thousand trickles of blood dripped down his cheeks painting him like a geisha girl or perhaps a member of the Walking Dead. He wasn’t sure if that show was still relevant, but decided he might try to watch a few episodes and write an article on them.
He sat for a few minutes on the pier, his feet dangling over the water where the tarpon feeding took place in the daytime. There were no fish there where they had swarmed around his phone earlier—he guessed maybe they were diurnal and only fed during the day. He wondered if that was their nature, or if they had been trained to the behavior like Pavlov’s dogs.
He glanced over his shoulder at the highway, wondering where the heck the police were … they should’ve been here by now. He glanced at his watch. It had been over an hour since he’d called. He gritted his teeth and spat into the water. A single, tiny fish came up, nibbled at the drop, and disappeared into the darkness below.
No one was coming. The police didn’t care. His girlfriend didn’t care. His boss at the paper didn’t care. Nobody cared and no one was going to do anything about his kayak. No one but him. He pulled himself up and looked around. He’d need a cab or—no, no way to call one. His phone was in bits at the bottom of the ocean, and they sure as hell weren’t going to let him use the phone inside.
He needed transportation and fast. The Jeep was long gone, but he’d seen which direction they’d gone and thought maybe he could catch up with them if they were still on the island. His eyes landed on an old green bicycle propped up against the ice machine beside the restaurant. Probably one of the staff’s primary modes of transportation. He didn’t give two flips less about that and held no remorse as he pushed the bike up to the highway and got on. It had been a long time since he’d ridden a bike and it took him more than a mile to get comfortable with the rusty rhythm of the thing. But it wasn’t long before he was cruising at a decent speed, his head swiveling back and forth looking for the thieves in the white Daisy Duke Jeep.
Gary John Suskind and Cinnamon Starr screeched into the deserted parking lot at Dion’s Quik Mart just minutes after leaving Robbie’s.
“What are we doing here?” Cinnamon asked, her eyes dancing around the convenience store searching for meaning.
She thought maybe Gary was meeting someone here, or perhaps purchasing something like duct tape or rope. When she’d gotten into the Jeep with him earlier tonight, she hadn’t considered him dangerous, but the longer she was with him, the more she saw the signs—subtle and muted, but most definitely there—that he was coming unhinged. His face was the screwed up mask of a man who was watching his pants catch on fire, but insisted that everything was fine and that he preferred to be warm. The real answer was far less significant than she imagined.
“Gotta use the little boy’s room,” he said, “And grab a Fresca. You want one?”
She shook her head as he unbuckled his seat belt and jogged past the two sentinel fuel pumps watching guard under the aging, sodium bulb wash of light.
One of the bulbs was flickering, threatening to die giving the whole place a horror-movie ambiance. Cinnamon was beg
inning to wonder if she was living in one. She punched the door lock down on her side and reached across to do the same to Gary’s wondering why that made her feel safer. The upper portion of the Jeep’s windows were basic vinyl coated fabric with floppy clear windows. Jason or Freddie would slice through them without hesitation and be on her in a second.
She pulled down the visor, looking for a mirror and found, to her surprise there wasn’t one. She grabbed the rear view mirror and torqued it around to face her.
For the first time she could remember in a very long time, she looked rough. Her eyes were ringed with red and bloodshot from the stress. Fine lines were beginning to show at the creases of her eyes and cheeks. Her makeup had given up and her nose was shiny.
“Oh, hell no,” she said to her reflection. “Girl, you’re not going to be laying on a coroner’s table looking like death.”
She dug around in her purse and found a bottle of Visine. She squirted a heavy dose into each eye and blinked the extra away. Streaks of tetrahydrozoline hydrochloride traced lines down her cheeks making her look like she’d been crying. She tossed the drops back into the purse and raked her hands back and forth looking for her powder. A little on the nose to freshen up … but between the folded dollar bills, the unopened package of tissues, the flesh-colored bandages for the backs of her heels, the keys to her apartment and car, and the other random junk she told herself she was going to clean out on a daily basis, there was no powder. She remembered that she had applied it back at Woody’s before going on stage. Crap. Had she left it there? Probably.
She snapped the purse closed with a frown. She leaned closer to the mirror and rubbed her face. Nope, this wouldn’t do at all. She slumped back into the seat and folded her arms over her chest. She tried to cross her legs in defiance as well, but her heel got stuck on another purse on the floorboard. Must be Gary’s. She grabbed it and pulled it into her lap. The heavy pink patent leather bag was stuffed to the brim with even more random junk than she had in hers. She was secretly pleased to discover that she wasn’t the only hoarder on the planet.
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