Gorcey nodded. “I heard you. But I’m thinking.”
“About what?”
“Blackmail.” His hand did a quick wave. “I know what you said about your code of ethics, but I’m sure Brady would pay almost anything to keep these out of the public eye.”
An alarm bell sounded in Richie’s head. What was going on here? Almost like this guy was reading his mind. A bowel-clenching thought wormed through his head: What if he was sitting next to the guy the nun had hired to fuck up his operation?
His hand crept toward the .38 in his shoulder holster…
Hey, wait. That didn’t make sense. Gorcey had just led him to a goose that was going to lay a steady stream of golden eggs. And besides, if Gorcey was carrying—and Richie was pretty damn sure he wasn’t—he’d had a million chances on the way upstate and back to do whatever damage he might have come to do.
No…Gorcey wasn’t Jack, wasn’t the guy from Julio’s the nun had told him about. He was just a fag with a hard-on for Luther Brady.
Soon he was going to be a dead fag.
“Blackmail’s illegal, Lou. Don’t tell me any more. I could lose my license for not reporting you.”
“You wouldn’t need a license with what we could squeeze out of Brady.”
“‘We’?”
“Well, blackmailing him would require a certain amount of toughness that I’m not sure I have. But you seem tough, Mr. Cordova.”
Richie wasn’t sure how to play this. Gorcey was proposing a partnership. It was tempting in a way. It meant he wouldn’t have to kill him. Disposing of a body was no easy thing—as the quick discovery of the dead nun proved. Forensic crime labs were getting better and better. Some simple little thing could fuck him up royally.
But bringing Gorcey in would mean splitting the milk from Brady, and Richie didn’t even want to think about that. But even so, he didn’t think a queer like Gorcey had the stuff to stay the course. And worse, he might spill to one of his lover boys, either while whispering sweet nothings or trying to impress some stud he was courting. That would queer—he hid a smile and thought, Oh, pardon me!—that would queer everything.
Okay. Let’s look at the situation. I’ve got a gun, he don’t. The shades are already pulled. My house is sealed up, and so are all the neighbors’. Nobody around here will be out on the street on a cold Sunday night like this. I can put a couple of quick ones into Gorcey’s chest and no one’ll be the wiser.
That would work. Then he’d wait till the dead dark hours of the morning and tote the body out to the car. He could dump Gorcey under an overpass or someplace like it and forget about him. There wasn’t no connection between the two of them.
But he had to go about this real careful like. Keep Gorcey nice and relaxed so he wouldn’t see nothing coming. Richie didn’t want no tussle—even a pansy man could get lucky. Just a quick, clean kill.
Sticking to the upright, uptight, ethical PI role seemed the best play.
“Yeah, I’m tough enough,” Richie said, “but I’m honest. I’ll give you the prints and negatives and then we’ll both forget we ever had this conversation.” He patted the area around his desk. “Oops. No envelopes. Have to get one out of the closet.”
Out of the closet…ha!
As he pushed up from the seat, he snaked one hand into his coat and pulled the .38 free of the holster. He held it chest-high. All he had to do now was make his turn and—
A gloved hand came out of nowhere and grabbed his wrist while another shoved a big shiny pistol against his cheek.
“Wha—?”
“What were you planning to do with that, Richie?” said a hard voice that didn’t sound at all like Louis Gorcey’s.
Moving only his eyes, Richie looked. It was Gorcey, all right. He looked the same, and yet everything about him was different. Gorcey wasn’t Gorcey no more.
Richie’s knees went soft as he realized he might have made a terrible mistake.
“I-I-nothing. I was just taking it out to lay it on my desk. It’s heavy and it, you know, gets in the way.”
Richie tried to twist his hand free but the grip on his wrist tightened, became crushing, and the muzzle pressed deeper into his face.
“Yeah, I know. Drop it on the floor.”
“Hey—”
In the space of a second, the muzzle left his cheek, slammed against his nose, and then rammed into his cheek again.
Richie let out a yell as pain shot straight through his skull and bright flashes sparked in his vision. “All right! All right!”
He dropped the gun.
“Sit.”
He eased himself back into the chair. He looked up and saw Gorcey staring at him. He realized that the murderous look he’d thought was for Brady was for him.
“W-what’s going on, Lou?”
“Name isn’t Lou. It’s Jack.”
Jack? Oh-no-oh-God-oh-no! The nun’s Jack!
But he couldn’t let on that he knew.
“Jack, Lou, what difference does it make? You didn’t have to lie about your name. All secrets are safe with me.”
He saw Jack’s face twist with fury, noticed that he’d reversed his grip on the pistol and was holding it by the barrel. Richie watched it rise above him, then swing down, saw the nubs of the rear sights falling toward his scalp. Tried to duck but wasn’t fast enough.
Pain bloomed in his skull and the world swam around him as he heard an echoey voice say, “Shut up.”
The icy, matter-of-fact tone made his bladder clench.
Another blow wiped out all sight, all sound.
16
“Hey!” someone was saying. “Hey, wake up.” A foot nudged his leg. “Wake up, Fatso.”
Richie forced his eyes open. The room did a half spin, then settled, then spun again. His head felt like it had exploded and then been put back together by someone who’d never seen a human skull before.
He groaned and tried to raise his right hand to his aching head but it wouldn’t move. He looked and saw that it was wired to an arm of his chair. So was his left.
And then he saw that his chair had been wheeled away from the desk.
“Whuh…?”
Jack glanced at him. “Oh, good. You’re awake. About time.”
It looked like he’d divvied up the prints into a couple of piles. The negative strips lay tangled among them.
“What’re you doing?”
“Sorting.”
He stepped over to Richie’s chair and stood staring down at him. The room spun again as Richie looked up. He looked away real quick when he saw what was in the guy’s eyes.
“What’re you gonna do?”
“If I had the time and inclination, I’d like to do to you what you did to Sister Maggie. Remember her? You threatened to ruin her life, and you did.”
So here it was, right out in the open.
“You’re the one she hired to mess up my computer, right?”
The guy nodded. “And you’re the one who messed up Maggie.”
“You gotta lemme explain. It’s not how you think. I didn’t—”
A black-gloved hand backhanded him across the face. “Don’t waste my time.”
Richie spat blood. “Okay, okay.”
“How’d you find out?”
“About what?”
“About Maggie hiring me.”
“Why do you care?” Another backhand across the face made Richie’s head spin. “All right, all right. It was her boyfriend, Metcalf. He cracked wise about me being outfoxed by a nun. That’s when I knew.”
The guy sighed and said something under his breath that sounded like “Nobody listens.” But he looked like he was relieved or something. Maybe this was Richie’s chance.
“So it’s not all my fault. It’s Metcalf’s too. I shouldn’t take all—” He cringed as he saw that gloved hand wind up for another shot. “Don’t, please! Just answer one question, will you?”
“What?”
“You her brother or something?”
Please say no, he thought. Please say no.
The guy shook his head. “Never met her before she hired me.”
Relief flooded him. Maybe he could reason with him, operative to operative.
“Then why?”
“Why what?”
“Why come back? You got hired, you did the job—did it real good, I gotta tell you—and that’s it. You walk away. It’s over. Done. End of story. No reason to come back into the picture.”
The guy stared at him like he was looking down at a splash of fresh vomit. After too long a time he took a breath and pointed to Richie’s wired wrists.
“I wanted to use duct on you like you did on Maggie, but I couldn’t risk carrying a roll in case you searched my bag again. Wire takes up much less space.” He held up a silvery roll of duct tape. “But look what I came across in one of your drawers.”
With a single swift move he ripped off a piece and slapped it across Richie’s mouth.
Panic ripped through him. He tried to kick out with his feet but his ankles were wired down as well. When he saw the guy pick up the pistol from the desk Richie began to scream, but nothing got through the tape and the noise coming through his nose sounded like baby pig squeals.
“Let me introduce you to Mr. Beretta.” He put the shiny barrel of the pistol against Richie’s palm. “Shake hands with him. You’re about to interface.”
Richie wrapped his fingers around the barrel. No way he could get it away, but if he could just keep a grip on it—
The guy twisted it free like he was taking a rattle from a baby. Then he stuck it in Richie’s other hand. “Feel that? Like it? You and Mr. Beretta are going to get real friendly.”
Richie screamed again as the guy picked up a beige cushion. Where’d that come from? Looked like one from the couch downstairs. What was he gonna—
Oh no! The cushion pressed against Richie’s stomach as the guy buried the muzzle in the fabric.
NO!
A slightly muffled BLAM! and then searing pain shot through his gut. He screamed against the tape and writhed in agony. He’d never imagined anything could hurt like this. Never. Vomit rose in his throat but he swallowed it back. If he puked he’d suffocate, though maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. At least it would stop the pain.
“I hear nothing hurts worse than being gut shot,” the guy said in a cold, dead voice. “I hope I heard right.”
Richie watched through eyes blurred with pain and tears as the guy turned back to the desk and began shoving all the photos into an envelope. The negatives as well.
The room got gray around the edges and he thought he was going to pass out—if only he would!—but then things came back into focus.
Richie began to sob from an excruciating spasm, the noise snuffling in and out through his nose. Felt like someone had a pitchfork in his gut and was twisting, twisting…
And now the guy was stuffing everything into his shoulder bag.
Richie wailed into the gag. He wasn’t going to leave him like this! He couldn’t!
Then the guy picked up the cushion and the gun again and stepped up in front of Richie.
“You don’t deserve this,” he said in that dead voice as he placed the cushion over Richie’s chest.
What? No! NO!
17
After putting two Hydra-Shoks into Fatso’s chest, Jack stepped back and watched him buck and spasm, then go still. His wide, bulging eyes lost focus and his lids dropped to half mast.
The only regret he felt was at not being able to leave Cordova alive. He’d heard it sometimes took three days to die of a gut shot. Three days of constant agony. Barely a tenth of what he deserved.
But sooner or later, when Cordova didn’t show up at his office tomorrow morning, and didn’t answer his home phone, his receptionist would call someone to check on him. And that might give the fat man a chance of surviving.
No survival for Cordova. Jack not only wanted him dead, he needed him dead.
He stared at the fat, bloody corpse a moment longer. Maggie…she hadn’t died because of some mistake on Jack’s part, she’d died because of her own good heart. Despite Jack’s warning, she must have felt a duty to let Metcalf know that he didn’t have to pay any more blackmail money. And Metcalf, not knowing the level of scum he was dealing with, had opened his yap.
All of this…so unnecessary…so goddamn unnecessary.
Jack reholstered the Beretta, then retrieved two of the three ejected shell casings from the floor. He kicked the third into the darkroom. He hefted his shoulder bag and did one more sweep of the area. All clean. Nothing to identify him.
All right.
He loped downstairs and headed for his car. On the way home he’d call 911 and report hearing what sounded like gunshots from Cordova’s house.
Monday
1
Jack paused outside the front entrance of the Dormentalist temple.
He’d stopped home and dropped off all the photos he’d taken from Cordova’s house. Then he’d changed into the third-hand clothing store rejects he’d picked up yesterday after his visit to Roselli. He’d used rubber cement to attach scruffy black hair to his face, then pulled a knit watch cap over his head down to the tops of his ears.
He wouldn’t fool anyone who knew Johnny Roselli; he doubted even a stranger would be fooled by the beard if he got close enough.
But he wasn’t planning on letting anyone that close.
His main concern was whether Roselli had skipped his camping trip and returned to the temple since Jack had left him. If so, his entry card wouldn’t have worked and he’d have been issued a new one. Using his old card now could raise an alarm and wreck Jack’s plans.
His other concern was Brady. Jack had no idea how long he usually carried on with his hired boys, or if he came home when he was through. The later the better, as far as Jack was concerned. Best case would be if he slept over till morning, which would be the wise thing to do after a night of Scotch and ganja.
But it was all guesswork at this point. He hated it when a fix depended on something he couldn’t control, and could be sent off track by someone’s whim.
Only one way to find out…
Jack took a breath and opened the door. As he stepped into the unmanned security atrium, he bore right, away from the metal detector and toward the members-only turnstile. The deep-shadowed lobby was deserted. A few bulbs in sconces lit the periphery and the elevator area where one set of doors stood open, waiting. A dozen feet beyond the turnstile a lone burgundy-uniformed TP sat in a pool of light behind his marble kiosk.
Jack gave the guard a friendly wave as he made a show of fishing the card from a pocket. The TP gave a wary, noncommittal nod, watching him.
Jack kept the EC in his left hand, leaving the right free to go for the pistol nestled in the small of his back. After positioning it at the end of the slot, he trained his eyes on the guard and swiped the card through.
He waited as the TP checked the computer. Hopefully a photo of Johnny Roselli was popping onto the screen with the message that he was a lapser—thus explaining his scruffy attire. If the guard’s expression changed or he reached for the phone, Jack was out of here. He did not want to be placed in a situation where he’d have to use his weapon.
But the TP’s expression didn’t change. He looked up from the screen and gave Jack a perfunctory smile and a wave. The turnstile’s mechanism clicked, allowing Jack to push through.
Jack released the breath he’d been holding as he waved back and headed straight for the elevators. He kept his head down as he stepped into the open car. Before pressing 21 with a knuckle, he glanced back at the guard and saw him reading from a tabloid newspaper. Probably not The Light.
Okay, he thought as the doors pincered closed, I’m in.
Now came the tough part.
He looked at the unlit 22 button and wished he could make the elevator take him there without leaving a record of the trip in the computers. That was something he needed to avoid at
all cost.
Still…it would be so much easier than what he had planned.
Jack figured he was pretty much in control from here on in. Success or failure depended on him, not chance or circumstance. Even so, he knew he had a hairy hour or so ahead of him.
2
Jensen sat in his third-floor office gazing over Tony Margiotta’s shoulder. The only light in the room came from the computer screen. These things were a pain in the ass but in the right hands, they were amazing. Margiotta had been doing an online search for anything—anything—about John Robertson. Even though the guy had been dead two years and retired for years before that, this Google thing had come up with almost a thousand hits. But the hits, a thousand or not, weren’t proving very useful.
“This is all shit,” Margiotta said.
“Maybe, but keep at it. I want every one of them looked into.
“But what am I looking for?”
Margiotta hadn’t been told any more than he needed to know. He already knew that Jason Amurri had been an impostor, and Jensen had told him that an outside investigation had linked him to Robertson. Any connection or reference to the missing Jamie Grant had been left out of the story.
“Find me something, anything that connects Robertson to New York City—and I don’t mean just Manhattan—or to our Church or to any other church or organization that might have it in for us.”
Margiotta looked up at him with an anguished expression. “This could take me all night.”
Poor baby, Jensen wanted to say, but resisted. “It’s already taken half the night. Consider yourself on the homestretch. Besides, you’re getting time and a half.”
“Yeah, but I’ve got a wife and a kid—”
“Who’ll be glad for the bigger paycheck. Now keep at it.”
Margiotta grumbled something unintelligible as he returned to the keyboard.
Jensen gave him a comradely clap on the shoulder as he rose.
“Good man. I’m going to take a stroll around to stretch my legs, maybe get a coffee. You want one?”