Dead Six

“Yes,” the Fat Man answered on the other end of the line.

“I want to talk to Eddie.”

There was a pause. “Mr. Lorenzo, Big Eddie does not speak with the help. I am his intermediary and—”

“Put him on or I toss the scarab in the ocean,” I stated calmly.

“Think of your family before you make any rash decisions.”

Part of my family had been shot in the throat this afternoon. I was not in the mood to play games. “Do it.”

There was a moment’s hesitation. “Please hold.”

I rummaged through Carl’s bag while I waited. We had worked together for so long that it still hadn’t sunk in that he was really gone, corpse burned to ashes on a Saudi dune. Death was always a possibility in this business, but you never really got used to it. I found another folder in the bag. It had Carlo Gomes written on it in black marker. It was the information about his family that the Fat Man had originally given us in Thailand.

I opened Carl’s folder. The man had never talked about his people. There were a handful of photographs. They were marked Island of Terceira. The pictures were all very old. Beneath each person’s photo had been handwritten the word deceased.

Carl had no family left. Eddie had never held leverage on him . . .

Carl had done it for us.

“Ah, Mr. Lorenzo. Good to hear from you.” The oily sound of Eddie’s voice uncorked a clot of rage in my soul.

“Why did you do it, Eddie? Why’d you try to kill us?” I hissed.

“Just business. I’m sorry about that. I saw the opportunity at the meeting. I realized what you had done. Brilliant move, I must say, but with the cameras around the cars disabled, I sent one of my men to accompany you. I thought I would tie up some loose ends.”

I was a loose end. He did not even sound defensive. That was just what our lives were worth to him.

“I was going to give it to you.”

“It was a calculated risk.”

“I should just destroy this thing and walk away,” I said, trying to keep my voice as neutral as possible.

“Do so and you will have a much shorter Christmas card list. The original deal is still in place.” He laughed. This was amusing him. “See, Lorenzo, you’re a pawn.”

“I guess that makes you the queen.”

“Fair enough. But you will bring me that phylactery, or I give the order and your loved ones get fed to the sharks. Listen to me carefully, chap. You do not have any idea what you have. The contents of that thing are more important than you can even imagine. I’ve strangled children for far less, and I sleep very well at night. You will give it to me or you will have—”

I cut him off. “Now you listen to me. You harm any of my relatives and I’ll give this thing back to the prince and tell him who hired me to steal it.”

Eddie let out a long breath. “You bloody fool.”

“No, you’re the fool. You screwed up. I know who you are now,” I snapped. “Mr. Montalban.”

“I suppose that was a mistake. You know what they say about hubris,” Eddie said slowly. Whatever stupid bit of arrogance had caused Eddie to reveal himself to me at the meeting was going to be his downfall. “Let’s be reasonable, Lorenzo.”

“Reason went out the window when your boy crawled out the trunk. You’d better pray that none of my nieces falls down and scrapes a knee, because I’ll assume you were behind it.” I seized the moment. I was tired of being pushed around, and now it was time to push back. “We trade. You get your bug right after you transfer twenty million dollars into my Swiss accounts. Then you walk the fuck away. You ever contact me again, I call the prince. If I die of anything other than old age, I’ll have somebody else contact the prince. You ever look at my family cross- eyed again, I call the prince. If one of my brothers gets prostate cancer, I’m going to hold you responsible.”

“And call the prince, yes, yes, I get it. . . . You know, Lorenzo, I never took you for a tattletale. But that’s why you were always my favorite. You’ll do anything to get the job done. Very well, I can deal. Fair enough.” I could tell that he didn’t think it was fair at all. Fair was not a concept a man like Big Eddie understood. Someway, somehow, he would find a way to kill me. There was no turning back from this point. For this to end, one of us had to die. “When can I have it?”

“I’ll be in touch.” I hung up.

I awoke with a start. It was dark, and I lay there for a second, heart pounding. The house was quiet, but I snatched up my rifle and went to the window anyway. There was no movement outside. No dogs barking. All clear.

But I stayed there, watching, waiting, too wired to return to bed. I was letting this get to me, letting it affect my judgment. There was a cough from next door. Reaper. That’s what had startled me awake. I put down my rifle and went to check on him. Surprisingly enough, he was awake too. Sitting up in bed and looking out the window, white bandages reflecting the moonlight.

“How you feeling?” I asked.

“Carl’s gone, man,” Reaper said as he wiped one hand under his nose. “Holy shit, I didn’t think Carl could die. He was too angry to die. It’s dumb, but like if he got shot, he’d just get more pissed off . . . Shit . . . That sounds stupid. He wasn’t the Hulk.”

I pulled up a seat. “I know how you feel.”

He got really quiet for a while. This was hitting him worse than me. “Man, it’s been so long. . . . Carl was always there for me. I don’t know if I ever told you, but when I met you guys . . . I was really scared.” He said that as if it were some kind of revelation, and maybe to him it was. “I was all alone. I didn’t know where to go, and you gave me a job, gave me a mission. You know, I never fit in back home.”

I nodded, as if that were a surprise. “Me, either.”

“Okay, this might come as a shock, but I wasn’t as tough when I was a kid. I was kind of a nerd,” he said, like he was admitting something shocking. “I got picked on a lot. I was always the smartest kid, but I was so much younger than everybody else, so I was like a weirdo.”

“You were like Doogie Howser.”

“Except straight. Totally straight,” he corrected me. “Then my mom got remarried, and my stepdad was like this super tough-guy fucking lumberjack or something, and my step-brother was Johnny Football Hero, and he got all the chicks, and there I was, this little scared dork weakling. . . . I could never live up to their standards. I hated them.”

I wondered if this was how some of the genius super-villains from the comic books started out. I just kept nodding.

“So I showed them. I’d be way more bad-ass than they could ever be. It was time to Fear the Reaper, you know what I’m saying? I had skills, man.”

“Two hundred felony counts is pretty damn impressive for a teenager.”

“Well, I wasn’t as clever as I thought I was back then.” Reaper smiled sadly. “I scared the shit out of the government, though! I crashed a bank and turned off all the lights in Boston, just because I could. They wanted to make an example out of kids like me. Mom was heartbroken, and you know what the weirdest thing was? My stepdad, the asshole, he’s the one that helped me the most. He gave me a plane ticket to a place with no extradition and told me it was ‘time to be a man’ . . . that was the nicest thing anybody had ever done for me.”

Shit. If Reaper started crying, I wouldn’t know what to do.

He started crying. “You guys took me in after that. You were my family. Family . . . But now? First Train, now Carl. They were my brothers. We’re all that’s left, and look at me. They almost got me. I’ve never been shot before.” He blinked the tears away. “This shit just got real. Eddie’s going down. Eddie and that fat fucker in the white suit, both. I’m gonna kill them, Lorenzo, I swear to God, I’m gonna kill that fat bastard if it’s the last thing I do. I’m gonna wipe that smile off his fucking face.”