Empty Ever After (28 page)

Devo was already in the office waiting for me.

“I have it queued up for you, Moe.”

The lights in his office were dimmed and he had me sit in front of one of his computer monitors. He stood behind me to my right.

“The view, I am afraid, is far from sharp, but you can make out a face,” Devo said, then began explaining the mechanics of how he had coaxed the image from the gas station’s security video.

“Just show it to me.”

“What you will see is a continually sharpening image. When the image is at its highest resolution, the frame will freeze.” He touched the mouse.

There on the monitor was the image of a slightly tinted driver’s side window of a 2000 GMC Yukon.
Click.
I could barely make out the ghostly silhouette of someone in the driver’s seat.
Click. Click. Click.
In tiny increments the window tinting seemed to brighten and, as it did, the silhouette became less and less ghostly.
Click.
A human face began to emerge out of the darkness.
Click.
A few seconds later I could make out a black bulge over the left eye of the emerging face.
Click.
Then, just before the frame froze, I recognized the face of the mystery man. In that brief second before the fear and resignation set in, I smiled. For now I knew where a bullet I fired in Miami Beach in 1983 had landed. I’d shot out Ralphy Barto’s left eye.

Mira Mira had almost been right. While Ralph Barto wasn’t a cop, he had been a U.S. marshal and a PI. Bullet wound or not, this wasn’t about revenge for his missing left eye. After all, the prick was trying to kill me when I returned fire. No, Ralph Barto was a professional lackey, not a master of the universe. Dead roses, ghosts, and graves were not his franchise. If Barto had wanted revenge, he’d have sought me out long ago, stuck a gun in my mouth, and made like Jackson Pollock. This wasn’t about Ralph Barto, at least not directly, but about his boss, a man who had murdered a little boy and a political intern in coldest blood.

In 1983, Ralph Barto had two bosses: Joe Spivack and Steven Brightman. Spivack, another ex-U.S. marshal, had owned a security firm in the same building where Carmella and I now kept our offices. His firm had done the initial investigation attempting to clear Steven Brightman from any taint in connection to his intern’s disappearance. After I got involved and we cleared Brightman, Spivack went to his cabin upstate and blew
his brains out. Spivack’s suicide, along with some other nagging doubts, led me to question my own conclusions about Brightman’s innocence. At Spivack’s funeral, Ralph Barto offered his services to me. I had no way of knowing that he was Brightman’s boy, a mole meant to keep tabs on me. When I got too close to the truth, he tried to kill me.

I could understand Brightman wanting revenge as much or more as Martello, but why now? Why seventeen years later? Something had had to set him off and I wanted to know what that was before we crossed paths.

“Devo,” I said, “do me a favor and get on the internet.”

“Sure, Moe, but why?”

“Steven Brightman.”

“What about him?

“Everything, but especially about his ex-wife.”

CONNIE GEARY HAD
made it happen. I knew that without Devo having to look it up. She was in this. I just didn’t know how deeply. She had planted the idea of our date weeks ago. She made the call. She set the time. She made sure we were alone and I was unreachable. She arranged for the car. She picked the restaurant. She gave me the first kiss. Christ, even fucking was her idea. At least she let me choose the wine. Had she known what Brightman really had in mind? I’d like to think not. She had probably financed him. Financing Brightman’s campaigns seemed to be a Geary family habit.

For a little while there, I thought about heading to Crocus Valley and grabbing her ass for trade bait. It was a good thing her son wasn’t around, because I was in the kind of mood to have used him too. That’s how fucked up I was. But even if I had been far gone enough to have used them both, it wouldn’t have mattered. Bargaining requires that the parties value what the other party possesses, but Brightman wouldn’t care about Connie or her kid. Too bad Connie was blind to that. She wouldn’t be for much longer. If she had understood the end game and not involved herself, then maybe Brightman would’ve been forced to come directly at me instead of my family. That wasn’t his way.

I was pretty sure I had some time and that Katy was in no immediate danger. My guess, my
hope
was that Brightman needed my presence to bring down the final curtain. Was I certain? No. I’d been wrong about almost everything else, but I knew Brightman, the way his twisted mind worked. So before heading into town, I stopped at the cemetery to talk with Fallon. I don’t know why it had taken me so long to realize what was right in front of me from the first: that a man with a backhoe, a shed
full of pickaxes, shovels, and sledges, a man with unfettered access to the Maloney family gravesite, was a more obvious suspect than neighborhood kids, vandalous ghosts or avenging angels. That the sheriff had also neglected this point was of no comfort.

The crunch of the gravel beneath my tires brought it full circle. I once again thought of that long-ago winter’s day in the cemetery with Mr. Roth. God, how I missed that man, but the love I felt for him was always tainted with guilt over my father. We’re funny creatures, us humans. We live in hope that even the dead will change. I know I did. My dad loved us. We loved him, but he had cut himself off from us. He could never bring himself to meet us halfway.
So far, no further.
He was a failure at business. Even his failures were unspectacular. I don’t think Aaron, Miriam, or I cared about that, but he did. We saw him as a failure because he saw himself that way, because he failed us that way. Israel Roth came with none of that baggage. That baggage was reserved for his son. He was the father I chose. I was the son he wished he had. It was a cruel bargain for everyone but the both of us.

I parked in front of Fallon’s neat little bungalow, but I didn’t make it up the front steps. The shed door was open, creaking as it swung lazily in the early evening breeze. I reached around for my .38. Something was wrong. I could feel it in my bones. Besides, cemeteries just tend to throw me off my game. No one likes confronting the inevitable. When your life spreads out before you, there are countless possibilities. Not in the end. In the end, it’s all the same. Death is the most egalitarian of things. Cemeteries, like a constant whisper in the ear, had a nasty way of reminding you of that fact.

“Fallon!” I called out. “Mr. Fallon. It’s Moe Prager, Katy Maloney’s ex.”

The only answer was the whine of mosquito wings. They’d come out for a light supper. In the distance I heard a faint
clink, clink, clink
-ing. When I grabbed hold of the door and peeked around, I saw why it refused to close. Mr. Fallon’s work boots were doorstops. The caretaker lay face down, one end of a pickaxe stuck so completely through his left shoulder blade that the handle nearly rested on his back. There wasn’t much blood, not on his back anyway. His head was pretty well smashed up. The little blood that had pooled around the wound was thick with mosquitos.

I looked up at the door header and ceiling of the shed as I backed out. Fallon hadn’t been killed in the shed. No way an assailant could have swung the pickaxe high enough to gather the momentum it would have taken to gouge through the body that way. I took a look around. On the far side of the equipment barn, I found the source of that faint
clink, clink, clink
-ing. Fallon’s abandoned backhoe was still running, the exhaust cap
popping up and down in rhythm to the puffing of diesel fumes. The blood missing from the shed was all here, but not pooled all in one place. The caretaker had received quite a beating before dying.

My cell phone buzzed even as I grabbed it to call the sheriff. It was Brian Doyle.

“You were right, boss,” he said. “The tattoo babe confirmed it.”

“Thanks.”

I clicked off and called the sheriff.

“Pete.”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Have you seen my daughter?”

“Sarah? She was just in here with Robby, why?”

I let out a big sigh of relief. “Keep an eye on her.”

“Why? What’s up?”

I didn’t bother explaining. “Listen, Fallon’s dead.”

“Fallon, the guy from the cemetery?”

“Yeah. I’m at the cemetery now. Fallon’s in the tool shed, a pickaxe sticking halfway out his back. My guess is—”

I never finished the sentence because a baseball bat had, at that instant, introduced itself to my right kidney.
It’s way back. The leftfielder’s on the warning track … at the fence … looking up. That ball is … outta here!
I’ll be pissing blood for a month, I thought, crumpling to the ground, if I live that long. My cell phone seemed free of the bonds of gravity and flew off somewhere, far far away. The involuntary tears and choking mucus that filled my eyes, throat, and sinuses was the least of it. The nausea, the puking, that was the bad part. It made everything else that much worse, especially the pain. When I was done puking, someone slipped a pillowcase over my head, taped it closed around my neck, and cuffed my hands behind me. Two men—I guessed there were two and that they were men—dragged me by my elbows along the dirt and gravel. I was shoved into the back of a car—my car, by the sound of it—and driven away. Someone spoke. The voice was familiar, but it wasn’t Brightman’s or Barto’s.

“You didn’t think you was gonna blow up our kitchen and get away with it, did ya?”

It was Crank.

 

THE RIDE WAS a fairly short one. That much I could say, but I was still disoriented from the whack in the kidney and the growing pain in my head. The tape, tight around my neck, wasn’t helping my respiration
any, and the buildup of my own vomit-sour fumes in the pillowcase was hard to take. When we stopped, I was yanked out of the car and dragged along some new dirt and stone. A door opened. I was bent into a sitting position with my legs and ass on a cool, damp floor and my back against a rough wooden wall. Something tore open the linen cocoon around my head. The rush of fresh air made me swoon. If there had been anything left in my guts, I would have puked again. As it was, I dry-retched until my head nearly exploded. Someone kicked me in the ribs and the dry heaves stopped. I wish I had known that trick in college.

“Okay, Prager,” Crank said, straddling my legs, twisting my shirt in his hands. “Who are you working with?”

“The KGB.”

“Funny man.” He backslapped my face, but not as hard as I supposed he could have. There was also something in his eyes that belied his angry demeanor. “We know there’s someone working for the Feds inside this organization and you’re the outside contact.”

I didn’t answer right away. Instead, I looked around the room. We were in a cabin not unlike the one Crank and I had been in the last time. For all I knew, it might have been the same cabin. Standing behind Crank were four bikers from central casting. Behind them was a suit. The bikers wore black leather and greasy cut denim, beards, big boots, belt buckles, and bandannas. The suit had cop written all over him, but he wasn’t local. No, Suit’s brown eyes had the requisite sheen of condescension found primarily in Feds.

“ATF or DEA?” I asked the suit.

He smiled. I didn’t. Suit opened his mouth to speak.

“Come on, Prager,” Crank interrupted, “talk to me now and we’ll skip the blowtorch and pliers bullshit. Gimme a name.”

“Make some suggestions and I’ll give you a name. I’m not joking here. I just don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Get the barbed wire,” said Suit to the bikers. “We’ll rearrange his face a little and when he sees how much blood pours out, then maybe he’ll—”

“Wait a second!” Crank barked. “This is my thing. The lab blew on my watch. I’ll handle this shit.”

“Yeah,” Suit said, “like how you let him slip away the same night you let a few million dollars of potential income go up like a Roman candle? I don’t think so.”

Crank jumped up, pulled a hunting knife out of the sheath on his belt, and stuck it right under Suit’s chin. For a barrel-bellied guy, Crank moved more like a ballerina.

“Listen, Swanson, you dickless motherfucker, don’t start giving me fucking orders. You get your cut from us, not the other way around. Remember that.”

“And I fucking protect you guys,” said Agent Swanson.

“And we’re paying for your retirement, asshole.”

“Gee, and I thought cops were the only ones who hated Feds.”

Crank back-kicked his leg and hit me square in the belly with his heavy boot. “Who the fuck asked you? Unless you got a name for me, shut the fuck up.”

That one hurt, but the damage could have been much worse had he got me in the jaw. Probably would’ve broken it. As it was, I couldn’t catch my breath.

Crank refocused on Swanson. “Back the fuck off, you suited prick. I don’t take orders from nobody. Just ask my Desert Storm commander. I broke his arm in three places, one place at a time.”

Swanson tried to look cool, but there was real fear in his eyes. “Okay, okay, but we need that name.”

Crank pulled the knife away from the agent’s neck and put the blade back in its sheath. He turned his attention back my way, lifted me off the ground and shoved me into a chair. He spoke softly to me, almost cooing, trying to cajole an answer out of me.

Wouldn’t I feel better getting it off my chest? Wouldn’t I rather avoid the torture, which would surely come? Wouldn’t I like a chance to live until morning? Wouldn’t I…

I would have been happy to give him an answer had I any notion of what he was going on about. I felt like a character from one novel who had fallen through the looking glass into another book:
Alice in Fatherland
, maybe. My mind drifted, I wondered if this was all part of Brightman’s grand scheme. But when I retraced my steps to my original contact with Crank, I rejected the idea. This was wrong place, wrong time at its worst. Yet in spite of the threat and bluster, not much was happening. Crank even got me a drink and cloth to clean me up some. More than an hour must have passed since I was first brought into the cabin. I got the sense that he was playing for time.