Archie’s file is a good one, and if he makes it out of this alive, it’ll be at least partly due to his meticulous work. Bacino sleeps in a second-story corner bedroom that faces away from the street. He usually stays up late, hitting the pillow around midnight and then sleeping through the morning.
“I’m going to get to him at two a.m., wake him up from sugarplum dreams by tapping my Glock to his forehead. And Risina?”
She raises her head, expectantly.
“You’re coming with me.”
Outside, the moon is down and the sky is starless, as black as tar. We parked ten blocks away and hoofed the distance, both wearing dark shirts and pants. We stand in the expansive back yard of Bacino’s neighbor, a Persian oil billionaire who is only in this country two months of the year. He pays a man to check on his property twice a day, but the caretaker cut that down to twice a week when he realized no one reported to the Persian about his performance. Risina and I have the yard to ourselves.
“Are you sure?” she whispers at about ten minutes to two.
I make certain she can see my eyes, even in the darkness. “You were in it with me, even before you knew you were in it. And if something should happen to me, you’re still in it. You understand?”
“I understand. You told me it was your choice to have me here, but it is my choice as well. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“The more prepared you are, the better I’ll feel.”
“Then let’s go wake up Bacino.”
We scale the brick wall separating the two yards as easily as steeplechase horses and stick to the shadows as we approach the back of the house. Archie’s file is accurate: the night-shift bodyguards have joined up on the front patio to have a twenty-minute smoke. I imagine they’ve spent the last four years smoking together like this without incident, swapping stories about their lives away from this house, catching each other up on their wives or children or what the Cubs did the day before. I have a feeling they won’t have these jobs much longer.
The alarm is a standard 10-zone system from a generic manufacturer, and since Bacino has a pair of golden retrievers who have free rein of the house, I’m confident he doesn’t turn on the motion detectors. The sensor makers always say pets under forty pounds won’t set ’em off, but they’re full of shit. I’ll know in a moment if I’m right.
We enter through a small rectangular pane of glass embedded in a set of French doors that lead from a den out to the pool. I don’t break the pane-some alarms trigger just from the sound of glass shattering-so instead I use needlenose pliers to scrape away the wood putty and take out the glazier’s points, starting at the center of the frame and working towards the edges. I only have a few minutes and have to move quickly. Once I pull the bottom of the wood apart, I gently slide the glass panel out and place it against the house. After we shimmy through the opening, I replace the wooden frame so to the casual eye, it looks like nothing is missing, though the pane is no longer there. The air is still, so I’m not worried about a breeze giving away our entry-point.
We sneak through an entertainment room, then a foyer, where we can just make out the soft voices of the two guards jawing away, and then we take a set of stairs to the top of the house before heading for the corner bedroom.
I feel Risina freeze even before I understand why, and then I hear the panting of a dog’s breath, or two dogs’ breaths, as I now make out their silhouettes in the doorframe of the nearby guest bedroom. They move forward, toward us, cautiously, their tails down, their ears pricked. If Bacino thought he owned guard dogs, thought they might bark a warning against intruders, he should have raised a different breed. Risina turns her hand palm upward and I do the same, holding it out toward the timid retrievers. Grateful for the acknowledgement, they mosey over and start licking our hands. A few quick pats to the head and they trot back to the guest room, mollified. Risina’s grin is unmistakable, even in the dim light of the corridor.
As promised, I tap the barrel of my Glock on to Bacino’s forehead. “Tap” is probably the wrong word; I pop him hard. He bolts up like a snake bit his face and the first thing he sees is Risina at the foot of his bed. I wanted to disorient him and she does a hell of a job at that. He blinks a few times like he’s still trying to swim to the surface, and then I slap him between the eyebrows again so he jumps, clamps his hand over his head and barks a sharp, “No!” Not “stop” or “don’t,” but “no.” Under the circumstances, I think it’s a decent reaction.
I rack the Glock so he knows there is a bullet in the chamber and a second “no” dies in his throat. He starts to open his mouth, but I interrupt. “We have what you want… you need to give us back what we want.”
“Who are you?”
“Columbus. Now where is Archie Grant?”
His eyes do that unmistakable thing where they squint as he searches his memory.
“I don’t…”
I smack the hard polymer of the gun down on his nose. “Ow, goddammit…” he manages as his hands flock to the spot.
“A bit harder and your nose breaks. And I’ll pop it right through your fingers if you don’t start talking.”
“Let me finish my goddamn sentence then,” he croaks, his voice muffled by his hands. I don’t look over at Risina to see if she’s startled by my aggression. She hangs in my periphery, immobile.
I nod and Bacino continues, his eyes watering. I gotta give him credit for keeping the tough-guy act going under the circumstances. Hell, maybe he is a tough guy. “Mrs. Hauser. Kindergarten teacher. Craig Captain. Father’s friend from college. Met him one time, when I was seven. John Mayfield. First man to ever cut my hair.”
He dabs his hands near his nostrils to check for blood, but his fingers are clean, and then he scrunches his nose a few times. His voice remains pinched. “I have a thing for names. I remember names from before I could read or write. Guys I met only once. Guys my father brought around for a beer after work. Some people never forget a face… I never forget a name. Now you said this name, Archie Grant, like I should know it but I don’t. You can pound on my nose until there’s nothing left, but I don’t know that name.”
He’s telling the truth; it’s unmistakable. How does he not know the name of the guy he kidnapped? There is only one answer. Bacino’s a lot of things, but he’s not the guy I’m looking for.
An idea starts to form in my mind. Maybe I got the end of this story right, but misread the beginning.
“You missing a skull?”
His eyes flash. “Missing?”
“No one’s stolen one of your skulls?”
“I…”
“You made a deal with a contract killer named Flagler.” It’s not a question.
He looks back and forth from Risina to me. “I…”
“He came to kill you, and you bought him off with a skull from your collection.”
Now he doesn’t protest or stammer, just lets me continue my train of thought.
“He doesn’t put a bullet in you, and you promise to give him one of your most expensive, rarest items. That’s how it went down, right?”
Bacino folds his arms across his chest and pouts. “I knew it wouldn’t end there.”
I reach into my pack and pull out the skull, the one I thought was swiped by Flagler but was actually traded to him by Bacino. A skull for a life. Bacino looks at it with the eye of a practiced collector.
“Do you know how much that’s worth?”
I shake my head.
“More than the contract on my life, I can assure you. You got it, you keep it. I know I’m not in a position to bargain, but I’ll make the same deal with you I made with the other guy. Don’t kill me and that skull’s yours. You can make a fortune off of it. It’s the head of-”
And right then, his brother opens the door holding a leather collar and wearing only a bathrobe. “What talent you got up in here, bro?”
He’s wearing a dopey grin and it takes a moment for his eyes to move from Risina to me. I can see the slow calculations take place in his head. He moves from lustfulness to confusion to understanding in the span of five seconds.
Good fences can get into a lot of places, discover a wealth of personal information, chronicle a life to a surprising degree. A pay-off to a talkative employee, a search through police records, a disguised visit to relatives or friends can prove indispensable in fleshing out a mark’s file. And in areas that are off-limits, behind closed doors, an experienced fence will make educated assumptions.
