Thirty minutes later, Joe drove the tow truck out of the garage. To my immense relief, my car was not hooked up to the back.
“Ignition coil was burned out,” he told me. “Put in a new one and she started up fine.”
“A new one or a brand new reconditioned one?” I asked.
Joe sighed. “Bad enough I had to come here in prime time. I also got to listen to your jokes?”
“Sorry, Joe. What do I owe you?”
“You know I don’t like to take your money, Jonah, what you did for me and all, but I need a hundred bucks for the coil and I could use another hundred to make up for all the calls I missed.”
Two hundred. Imagine if he did like to take my money. “Cheque okay?”
Joe looked at me like I’d suggested he pierce his nipples.
“There’s an ATM at the corner,” I said. “Drive me up.”
I stopped at a deli on the way home to pick up some rare roast beef and sharp cheddar; nothing fancy but both would go well with the wine I had opened. It was nearly seven-thirty by the time I got home. I put the food containers down on the counter and got a wineglass down from the shelf.
And froze.
On the counter next to the bottle were three drops of wine that hadn’t been there before. Three fat drops like blood on the white Formica. Then I heard a light footfall behind me and I knew whoever had broken in was still there, between me and the only way out. I closed my right hand around the corkscrew so the spiral end extended out between my middle and ring fingers. The little blade at the end, which I’d used to strip off the foil cap, was still open. It wasn’t much as weapons go but an improvement over cartilage and bone. I took a deep breath and spun around and came face to face with a dark-haired, dark-eyed man.
Dante Ryan, Marco Di Pietra’s feared enforcer and hired gun, was standing not ten feet from me, holding a glass of my wine.
He looked at the corkscrew in my hand and said, “You’re not going to need that.”
“What the fuck?” was the best response I could manage. My heart was hammering my chest like it wanted to crack it open from the inside.
“If I wanted you dead,” he said casually, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’d have taken two in the head the minute you walked in and I’d be drinking alone.”
I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say to that.
“Pour yourself a glass,” he said, nodding at the bottle of wine on the counter. “You and I need to talk.”
CHAPTER 6
The last time I’d seen Dante Ryan was outside the University Avenue courthouse, right after Mr. Justice Hugh Kelly finished ripping a nervous young Crown attorney a new one for trying to indict Marco Di Pietra and his alleged associates on the flimsy evidence presented. Ryan, Marco and a sizable entourage were lighting up cigarettes when I exited. Marco had to put on a big show, of course, calling me Jewboy, pointing his thumb and forefinger at my head like a gun, cocking the thumb and making silencer noises in his cheeks. Ryan didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. The look he gave me was enough.
Now he sat in my living room, legs crossed, sunglasses up in his hair, swirling wine in his glass, watching drops slide lazily down its side. His clothes were all black, as they’d been that day outside court: an expensive linen jacket, a silk crewneck top, pleated slacks, thin dress socks, soft leather loafers. A white scar ran up through his right eyebrow and a livid purple one snaked along the right side of his jaw. His hands had knots of scar tissue on some of the knuckles but the nails had been recently manicured. His eyes were dark but not as dark as you’d expect of a man who hurt or killed people for a living. They were not without humour.
“You got a piece of cheese to go with this?” he asked.
I managed to get the cheddar I had bought from the kitchen to the living room table, along with a cutting board, two knives, crackers and a bunch of red grapes.
Wine and cheese with Dante Ryan. What next? Champagne with Karla Homolka?
Ryan sipped his wine slowly. I held my glass so tightly I thought the stem might crack in my hand.
“Mind if I ask how you got in?”
“The building or the apartment?”
“Start with the building.”
“You got a lot of old ladies here,” he said.
“It’s rent-controlled. Some of them have been here since it was built.”
“They do their shopping at the Loblaws across the street, they come back loaded with bags or pulling their little carts. A young man in decent clothes comes over to hold the door for them, they don’t ask questions.”
“And the apartment?”
“Please. You want to keep people out, shell out for a decent lock, not the cheap shit that came with the place.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?”
At least it wasn’t an Ensign brand. “No.”
“Mind?”
I never let anyone smoke in my apartment but I figured a cigarette pack was the least deadly thing Dante Ryan could pull on me. I told him to go ahead and found an ashtray in the cupboard under the sink. It had been used precisely once since I’d moved in, when Kenny Aber came by with a joint of West Coast weed as his housewarming gift.
Ryan lit up with a slim gold lighter and exhaled. “I came to see you in a professional capacity,” he said.
“Mine, I hope.”
“Don’t worry, I told you.”
“It’s hereditary.”
“Whatever. You know who I am and who I work for. You know what I do. So before we go any further, let’s agree that what gets said tonight never leaves this room. Whatever you decide. We clear?”
“Decide what?”
“Are we clear?”
“I’m not like a lawyer when it comes to confidentiality.”
“I’m not talking rules and regs. If what I say to you gets back to the man I work for, his family or his crew, it will get me killed. I’m here because I got nowhere else to go. And because you owe me.”
“Owe you how?”
He dragged on his cigarette and blew two perfect smoke rings, one through the other. “You cost my boss a ton of money on the tobacco job-at least a million-and he had to make a court appearance, which is down low on his list of favourite things.”
“Then again, he walked because I fucked up. So maybe he owes me.”
“You want to tell him that?”
Point taken.
“Anyway,” Ryan said, “after the judge threw it out, we had a meeting to talk about what to do about you. Marco, as you know, is a hothead. He was all for having you killed. But there’s an unwritten rule in our thing that you don’t kill cops unless you have to. The heat is too intense. You’re not a real cop, but your boss was and he could have called in favours. In the end, cooler heads prevailed, and that’s the only reason you’re still here.”
“You were one of the cooler heads?”
Ryan smiled again. “I could say I was or wasn’t and you’d never know the difference. So let’s say I was and leave it at that.” He butted his cigarette. I reached for my wine and drank a third of it down. Red wine is supposed to benefit the cardiovascular system, at least over the long run. Short term, I just wanted my heart rate to decelerate into the low 200s, as I prepared to hear what this killer wanted from me.
It’s not like I had no blood at all on my hands. But his were soaked to the elbows by comparison.
An Ontario Provincial Police intelligence officer named Chris Cook once told me that Dante Ryan was believed to be responsible for as many as a dozen gangland murders over the years, but had never been convicted of anything worse than assault.
