what
Leon Binks had said to me the night I identified Stephen
Gaines's body in the medical examiner's office.
'The killer was using a silenced weapon. Now, very few guns have those kinds of professional silencers you see in movies, that screw on like a lightbulb. Usually they're homemade, a length of aluminum tubing filled with steel wool or fiberglass.'
'It was you,' I said. 'You killed Stephen.'
Kyle went over to where Scott Callahan was lying on the ground. He was still holding his knee, but smiled when he saw his friend approach. Kyle knelt down, put his hand on his friend's shoulder. Scotty tried to prop himself up, but he was too weak. I stood there, my body rigid with anger and dread.
Kyle looked back at me. Then he said, 'You gotta do what you gotta do to survive.'
Then he placed the gun under Scott Callahan's chin and pulled the trigger.
'What the fuck!' I shouted. The gun blast was more of a meek pfft, like compressed air escaping from a puncture. Gore sprayed out the top of Scott Callahan's head. His body twitched once, then fell to the ground and lay still.
My hands wouldn't work. I stared slack-jawed at
Kyle. He was still on the ground, the gun loose in his hand. He looked at his friend, a sorrow etching across his face for an instant. Then his eyes turned cold and his gaze came to me.
'You have no idea,' Kyle said, 'how surprised I was to get to Stephen's house and find a gun already there.
I had this one all ready. Instead, all I needed was the capper.' He pointed to the silencer.
'You used my brother's own gun to kill him,' I said.
'But he wasn't the last one to use it.'
'No, I really should have bought a lotto ticket that night. When I heard that Stephen's dad got popped for it? I nearly pissed myself laughing. See, that night I wore gloves, figured it would slow the cops down, but
I had no idea about your dad's shenanigans. I was there to take out Stephen, but I kind of took out the whole family. As long as they had someone else pinned for the murder, we were in the clear.'
'We?' I said.
'Scotty was supposed to do it. He knew Stephen better than I did. They were pals, man.'
I thought back to our conversation in the deli. Scotty pretending to barely know my brother. That's how they got so close to him.
'When your dad got popped, we were in the clear.
We even took the casings just in case. Turns out we didn't even need to. Now, though, Scotty here's gotta take the fall. Can't have anyone thinking the killer's still out there.'
'You son of a bitch.'
'On a normal day, I'd get pissed at you for talking about my mom like that, but I'll let it slide. Besides, when I meant nobody could know, I meant it.' Kyle turned the gun to me. He had me less than five feet away, dead to rights. There was no tremor in his hand.
By the time I even thought about running, he could pull the trigger.
'Why?' I said. 'Why did he have to die?'
'You said it yourself,' Kyle replied. 'The man just had to. When you're the top dog in anything, you're gonna get bitten.'
'But Stephen was so young.'
'There's no one guy,' Kyle said. 'It's like Ronald
McDonald. Every now and then someone new steps up to the plate. Call it a coup d'etat, call it whatever you want, but every company needs a regime change. Some new blood at the top. Now it's my turn.'
Curt Sheffield had told me that five people connected to 718 Enterprises had been killed recently. Add to that number my brother and now Scott Callahan. Helen
Gaines told me that Stephen had wanted to leave the country, that he feared something terrible. Clearly he'd gotten wind that there were rivals who wanted to take him out. So, was Stephen systematically wiping out his competition? Is that why Kyle killed him-just to beat him to the punch?
If what Kyle said was true, and Stephen and Scotty had been friends, Stephen trusted them both. That's how Scotty and Kyle talked their way into my brother's apartment. They were couriers for him, yet he didn't fear them. My brother had been betrayed by his own friends.
When Stephen came to the Gazette that night, he'd wanted to come clean. He knew the chances of getting enough money to hide were slim. So my guess was that he was going to spill on the whole operation. He didn't fully trust the cops to protect him, but he figured if it made the papers first he couldn't be killed without the public being aware of it. His only hope was to cause a big enough story that he would be forgotten. That he could disappear in the maelstrom.
But he was killed before he could ever come clean.
And his story was about to die as well.
Kyle then took the gun and placed it in Scotty's dead hand. He wrapped his own finger around Scotty's in the trigger guard and aimed it at me.
Just then a car sped onto the block. It was a black
CrownVictoria. Kyle's attention turned from me to the car.
The door opened. And out got Detective Sevi Makhoulian.
'Freeze, police!' the officer yelled. Kyle couldn't turn away from Makhoulian. A strange look crossed his face, and I swear the gun began to lower. He was going to give up.
And then three successive explosions turned the air into a thunderstorm, and Kyle Evans's body was flung backward onto the street. He landed next to Scotty, his friend, Kyle's eyes and mouth open.
I turned to Makhoulian, hands covering my ringing ears. He was saying something to me, but I couldn't hear the words.
He walked closer, gun at his side, the flashing lights now on our block. I felt the detective's large hand on my elbow. He was mouthing, Henry, are you all right?
I knew instinctively that my voice wouldn't work, so
I nodded. Then I turned back to see the dead littering the street.
33
One week later
LaGuardiaAirport was surprisingly empty. We bought a couple of coffees at a java stand in the food court. I waited while he came back from the newsstand, carrying a bag with a paperback book and a copy of the
Gazette.
My father was thinner than I'd ever seen him. His eyes were sunken and his skin wrinkled. Gray hair taking up most of whatever was left. My father no longer looked angry; he just looked old.
Prior to a few weeks ago, I hadn't seen James Parker in years. My family was a memory, one I'd longed to forget. If you leave a person, your memory retains your last image of them. My last image of my father was an angry middle-aged man. Now he sat here, one step from broken, waiting for a flight back home.
'Mom's picking you up in Portland?' I said.
'That's what she said,' my father answered, as though not believing her.
'If she says she'll be there she'll be there.' He nodded, thinking more about it and agreeing with me.
I popped the top off my coffee and took a sip. Strong and sweet. 'At least you've got a great story for your bowling league.'
'I missed three league tournaments,' he said, resent ment in his voice. 'I'm sure they replaced me by now.'
'Didn't you once tell me you had a 187 average? I'm sure they'll want that back in the rotation.'
'One-eighty-seven, huh?' he said, thinking. 'That seems a tad high. Maybe one-forty.'
