10
It didn’t take too many phone calls to find out Luna was missing from the deep freeze. The attendant on duty covered his ass by saying maybe he was picked up by a private mortuary. And it sounded good. But Tommy and I knew different: Johnny Luna had walked out of there. Only good thing was nobody saw him do it.
11
The next day, after a sleepless night in which gaunt shadows reached out for me in the darkness, I did some checking. I went about it real casually. I had a photograph of Marianne Portis and I started showing it around very selectively.
About three, four hours later I struck gold.
I struck it with Louie Penachek, a degenerate gambler who was always into the loansharks for three or four figures. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for a buck. He was obsessed with the ponies. Sports betting. Card games. Any possible way he could wager on the outcome of something, he was into.
Barely five feet, slick as an oiled weasel, I found him out at the track, betting on the Danes. He was jumping up and down and screaming at the top of his lungs. By the time I’d reached him, he was leaning up against the railing, defeated.
He saw me, said by way of greeting, “Sonofabitch should’ve been a winner, Vince. It had all the markings. I had an inside tip on this one. Damn! Twenty clams down the old pisser.”
I flashed the cabbage at him: a couple fifties. “I need some info,” I told him. “You tell me what I want to hear, you got em.”
He licked his lips, looked like a sailor finally coming into port, catching his first glimpse of a cathouse. “Sure, sure, sure, Vince,” he said. “Ain’t much I don’t know about.”
I showed him the picture of Marianne.
His face dropped like mercury on a cold day. “No, no, no.” He held his hands up. “I can’t get involved in that. How would it look?” Then he looked at the bills again. “That’s some rich gravy.” He licked his lips again. “All right, goddammit, you bastard, Vince, you asked for it.”
And he told me.
12
What I had to do had to be done at night.
So I waited.
And waited.
When the sun was down an hour, two, I was still waiting. Still thinking. I’d talked to Tommy, but I hadn’t told him what Louie told me. I was saving that until I was sure. I had to be sure this time. Tommy told me that Mikey Ryan had been undercover, following around bagmen who ran money for the Italians. The money was from gambling, prostitution, extortion. He was mapping out their haunts, their routes, how often they came and went. All in advance of a big raid by vice.
But now he was dead.
How did that factor in? I wasn’t sure just yet. I laid there in my rack, listening to the clock tick, traffic on the street below. I smoked and watched the neon from the bar downstairs light up my room, latticing me with sharp shadows.
That’s when I heard my door open.
Feet went pounding away. Very casually, I went for my. 45 on the nightstand. I didn’t know what to expect. The lights were off. Carefully, I turned the gooseneck lamp on the stand so when I clicked it on it would illuminate the intruder, temporarily blinding him. It would give me the edge.
Breath locked up tight in my lungs, I waited. A trickle of sweat ran down one temple like ants to a picnic. My finger was hot and damp against the trigger of my Browning. I caught a whiff of something sharp and pungent like spices, like age. I could hear the intruder moving through my living room, approaching my bedroom door.
The door swung in.
I saw a shadow…filmy, almost transparent.
I clicked on the light. And it could’ve been a lot of people standing there, arms outstretched. I could’ve given you a grocery list of sorry bastards who wanted me dead. But I never would have guessed this.
Helen was standing there.
Dead these two years, but shuffling forward all the same. She was a mummy. Nothing more. I still recognized the diamond choker around her withered throat. She was naked and her flesh was papery, shriveled, it clung to the skeleton beneath like wet decoupage. Except it wasn’t wet, but dry and rubbed with spices to keep it from crumbling away entirely. As she drifted towards me, stick arms extended and twig fingers clutching, she seemed to be disintegrating, flaking away. Motes of her danced in the shaft of light from the lamp.
Her skull-face attempted a grin but it was the grin of mortuaries and death houses, the grin of something long-buried beneath shifting Egyptian sands. Eyeless, her fine nose collapsed into the nasal channel of her skull, her teeth gone black, she attempted speech…but her vocal cords had long ago succumbed to worm and dust. What came out was a dry and hideous croaking.
My insides gone to sauce, funeral bells gonging in the drum of my skull, I sat forward and, letting out a piercing shriek, I put two slugs in her head. She folded up like a house of cards, shattering into dust and pitted bone and rags as she struck the floor.
My brain full of her stink, my mind full of an insane screeching, I fell next to her, sobbing.
This was their latest game.
But it hadn’t scared me off; it only made things personal.
13
It was a huge and rambling Tudor a mile outside the city lights. In a neighborhood where the yards sprawled half a city block and the driveways were circular and flanked by weeping willows. This is where I came. This is where it would end. The place was surrounded by a low stone wall.
I slid over it and dropped into the grass.
I waited for dogs, for guards, for worse things. But nothing or no one came. Surprised? I wasn’t. The egos of the people behind this ghastly little game couldn’t or wouldn’t accept defiance of any sort. The drive was choked with Rolls-Royces and Mercedes…but there were a few low-class sedans and wagons. I saw the car that had spirited away Marianne Portis and smiled. I also saw a delivery truck. I knew without a doubt that the dead ones arrived in that like troops.
I was glad she was there.
I wanted her to be part of this.
As I was casing the joint, some guy-an Outfit soldier-stumbled through the hedges probably in search of a place to relieve himself. He saw me and went for his gun, but never made it. I popped him three, four times in the face, dropping him. Then I punted him in the head and turned his lights out. I gagged him with his own hanky and tied him up in the hedges with his own belt.
I wasn’t careful going through that cellar window.
