me, “that you and I have gotten ourselves into, I’ve never called my grandfather. This”-she raised her tank top and exposed the puckered scar of a bullet that had torn through her small intestines-“and I never called.”
“Sure,” Bubba said, “but this is important.”
She hummed her empty Coke can off his forehead.
She looked over at me. “How serious was Stevie?”
“As the plague,” I said. “He’ll kill us both.” I jerked a thumb at Bubba. “Him first.”
Bubba snorted.
Angie stared at us both for a long time and her face gradually softened.
“Well, I don’t have a job anymore. Which means I probably can’t afford this apartment much longer. Can’t hold on to a boyfriend, and I don’t like pets. So, I guess you two morons are all I got.”
“Stop it,” Bubba said. “I’m getting all choked up and shit.”
She dropped off the counter. “All right, who’s driving me to a safe phone?”
She used one off the lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel and I gave her plenty of room, wandered around the marble floors, admired the old elevators with their brass doors and the brass ashtrays standing to the left of the doors, wished it was still cool to wear fedoras and knock back scotch for lunch, light wooden matches with your thumbnail, and call people “mugs.”
Where have you gone, Burt Lancaster, and why’d you take most of the cool shit with you?
She hung up the phone, walked toward me, completely out of place among the brass fixtures and red Orientals, marble floors and people in silks and linens and Malaysian cotton, in her faded white tank top, gray shorts, and Nike thongs, no makeup, smelling like Murphy’s Oil Soap, and all she had to do was give me that loopy grin she was giving me now, and I was pretty certain I’d never seen anyone look half as tremendous.
“Looks like you’ll live,” she said. “He said to give him the weekend, steer clear of Stevie till then.”
“What’d it cost you?”
She shrugged, started heading for the exit. “I got to make him a plate of chicken piccata next time he’s up this way and, oh yeah, make sure Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.”
“Every time you think you’re out,” I said.
“They pull me back in.”
24
On Monday we went to work in earnest. Angie planned to spend the day trying to contact a friend at the IRS in Pittsburgh, see if she could get any hits on Wesley Dawe’s revenue info for the years before he disappeared, and Bubba promised he’d try the same with a guy he knew at the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, though he seemed to remember something shady happened concerning his friend but couldn’t recall what that was.
I used the computer in the office to search the Net’s national phone books and any other databases I could think of. Typing in
Angie’s friend at the IRS kept her hanging all afternoon, and Bubba never called to report on his progress, and finally, sick of brick walls, I drove downtown to check out Naomi Dawe at the Hall of Records.
There was nothing out of the ordinary in either her birth or death records, but I copied all the info down in a notepad anyway and stuck it in my back pocket as I left City Hall.
I stepped out onto the rear of City Hall Plaza and two beefy guys, both balding, both wearing aviator glasses and thin Hawaiian shirts untucked over jeans, fell into step beside me.
“We’re going to take a little walk,” the guy on my right said.
“Cool,” I said. “If we go to the park, will you buy me an ice cream?”
“Guy’s a comedian,” the one on my left said.
“Sure,” the other guy said. “He’s fucking Jay Leno over here.”
We crossed the plaza toward Cambridge Street and a small gang of pigeons took flight in front of us. I could hear both guys breathing a little heavy, a daily constitutional apparently not something they worked into their schedules.
It was hot, but a colder than normal sweat broke out on my forehead as I noticed the dark pink Lincoln double-parked on Cambridge. I’d seen the same Lincoln parked in Stevie Zambuca’s driveway on Saturday.
“Stevie felt like chatting,” I said. “How nice.”
“You notice his delivery was a little shaky on that one?” the guy on my right side said.
“Maybe this ain’t so funny no more,” the other guy said, and with an amazingly smooth and swift move for a guy his size, his hand slipped under my own shirt and removed my gun.
“Don’t worry,” he told me, “I’ll keep it in a safe place.”
The back door of the Lincoln opened as we approached and a thin young guy got out of the car and held the door open for me.
I could make a scene, and the two guys beside me would kneecap me and shove me in anyway, broad daylight or not.
I decided to proceed with grace.
I climbed in the car beside Stevie Zambuca and they shut the door behind me.
The front seats were empty. Apparently my beefy handlers did the driving.
Stevie Zambuca said, “Someday that old guy? He’s gonna die. He’s, what, eighty-four now, right?”
I nodded.
“So he dies someday, I’ll fly out to his funeral, pay my respects, and come back and take a pipe to your fucking elbows, Kenzie. You just be ready for that day, because I will be.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?” He smiled. “Think you’re pretty fucking cool, don’t you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Well, you ain’t. But for now, I’ll play ball.” He tossed a brown paper bag on my lap. “There’s eight thou in there. This guy, he paid me ten to back you off.”
“So you’ve done business with him?”
“No. It was a straight job. Ten grand to keep you off his back. Never met the guy until Friday night. He approached one of my people, made his pitch.”
“Did he tell you to threaten Bubba to get to me?”
Stevie stroked his chin. “Matter of fact, yeah. He knows a lot about you, Kenzie. A lot. And he don’t like you. At all, motherfucker. At all.”
“You know anything about where he lives, works, that sort of thing?”
Stevie shook his head. “No. Guy I know in K.C. vouched for him. Heard he was stand-up.”
“K.C.?”
Stevie’s eyes met my own. “K.C. Why’s that bother you?”
I shrugged. “It just doesn’t seem to fit.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. When you see him, give him the eight Gs, tell him the other two Gs are for my aggravation.”
“How do you know I’ll see him?”
“He’s got a real hard-on for you, Kenzie. Like diamond-cutter hard. He kept saying you ‘interfered.’ And Vincent Patriso might be able to back me off, but he can’t back this guy off. He wants you dead.”
“No. He wants me to wish I were.”
Stevie chuckled. “Maybe you got something there. This guy? He’s smart, speaks real well, but in there with all that brain power, there’s disease, Kenzie. Personally, I think he’s got rocks in his head, and the rocks got little birds flying around in ’em.” He laughed, brought his hand down on my knee. “And you pissed him off. Ain’t that great?” He pressed a button on his door console and the locks popped up. “See you later, Kenzie.”
“See you, Stevie.”
I opened the door, blinked in the sun.
