He found him in back of his house, beating two little tables with a chain. He had the tables out in the hot sun of his courtyard working them over to age them. He hit the captain's desk about a dozen times, not hard shots, but just enough to bite a little wood out each time, and he was going to start on the honey pine chest when he heard Spain walking across the courtyard toward him.
Spain could tell his reflexes were good the way he turned with a graceful, balanced half-spin still holding the chain down by his right leg, and nodding to Spain as Spain said, 'Excuse me, sir. I was wondering if you could tell me how to get to this address,' as he pulled a folded up piece of paper from his shirt pocket.
Spain looked at the paper as he got closer and shook his head as if perplexed. But he could see Belmonte shift his weight a little. He was moving back as Spain moved forward. Spain read off a fake address and held the note in an outstretched hand but J.B. wasn't having any of it.
He shook his head politely and said, 'Sorry, bud, but I haven't lived around here long myself,' moving a little as he spoke, wary and experienced, keeping the piece of chain beside him as he stayed a chain-length away from the stranger with the outstretched arm.
Spain read the situation and clocked the guy for a pro, shrugging as he folded the note back up and smiled, saying, 'No problem, pal, I'll ask back at the gas station,' turning as if to leave as he dropped his sport coat around the .25 Browning and turned firing low. The shot made a loud
He had the man bound and gagged and the blood flow stopped within a couple of minutes, and was backing into the garage and loading him into the trunk. He went in the back door of the house and checked it fast, racing through the house with the gun ready, but it was empty. He got in the car and drove out of town until he found some country roads that didn't look like they had much traffic on them.
Juan La Bellamonde came to with his hands wired behind him, bound to a tree. Spain reached down on the grass beside where he'd been sitting and got a straight razor and a small bottle of smoky-looking liquid. Dr. Spain pulled on his rubber gloves, which he'd picked up at the hardware store, and bent to his task. Spain's rubber- covered fingers ever so gently blotted the watering eyes and removed the glass stopper from the acid.
'Do you believe in an eye for an eye?' he asked the man, rhetorically.
The man's eyes teared again, lidless, as he soaked the front of his trousers with urine.
'You've got one chance. And goodness gracious, stop pissing all over yourself — you've got to learn to control your emotions a little.' He picked up the wadded tissue and held it in front of the screaming man. 'Know what these are?' La Bellamonde knew before he looked into the bloody tissue. 'These are your
'And this' — showing him the smoking stuff —'is your acid, you see.' The man tried to bite through the gag and began to choke. Spain pulled the gag out for a moment, and when his choking had subsided he told him, 'One chance. I want everything about the Kriegal operation. Every name in the mob you can think of. Every address. Every method of contact. Take me through the whole thing by the numbers, from what Blue does with the little boys and girls to who he buys 'em from to what brand of rat poison you put on your cornflakes in the morning. All the dirt. You miss a comma in there. You even ACT like you're getting tired. You leave out one fact and I catch you . . . ' He holds up the acid.
La Bellamonde was voluble and forthcoming. He told him all the nitty 'n' every bit of the gritty, but in the end it didn't help. Spain was getting bored with him and he sighed, picked up the acid, and removed the stopper, smiling, holding it real close and saying liltingly, 'Murine time . . . ' as the man fainted.
Spain was in a great mood by the time he'd taken up temporary residence in a motel a week later. He was doing several things at once, constructing his cover, cultivating a cutout, building a mail-drop legend, all the things he'd done a score of times before, but doing it with a difference now. For the first time he wasn't working for pay. He was working for revenge and it filled him with something akin to glee. The singer was wrong. Living well wasn't the best revenge. REVENGE was the best bloody, fucking revenge there was, and anything less was just kidding yourself.
When a worker wants to insulate himself — or for that matter, when a dealer wants to protect himself — an innocent party is used. Mules, mokes, they're called different things. Square johns who can be spotted, isolated, cut from the pack, cultivated, and put into play without their knowing it. Spain had newspaper ads set to hit the next day at a motel he was using only for fake screening of job applicants. A girl-Friday executive assistant for a mail entrepreneur. He would set some turkey up with a cheap storefront office first. Have her depositing real checks, opening a mail drawer, all that shit. Then he'd use her to take care of details like dealing with realtors — all the things he'd be needing where he didn't want personal contact.
Meanwhile, he did something very tricky. He carefully scripted a meticulously worded scenario and when he had it just right he phoned the cop who'd been out to his house that last time to see 'what they'd heard' if anything. They had an odd, linear conversation that had been laid out like a script so that later — if necessary — Spain could always say he had called the police like the concerned father he was to ask if the cops had learned anything about who was responsible for the death of his daughter. In tandem with the Troxell report it wouldn't fly too far but the conversation had been sufficiently ambiguous that it would be something. A card to play just in case. It might be enough to buy him some time when he needed it.
The good part was that it told him Mel Troxell hadn't talked. That was what he had to know. He took the first steps of his plan through the painful motions of calling Pat. He wanted to talk to her like he wanted to chew on broken glass but he was going to lay down whatever cover he could. It was cheap at this price — a few telephone calls.
'Pat,' he heard himself saying, 'Have you heard anything from Tiff?' wanting to tell his child's mother, his murdered baby's mother, wanting to tell her that he hoped she was happy now. Wanting to rub it in. Wanting to ask her if Buddy's big cock was worth losing her little girl. But number one, he had to play this one straight as an arrow, and number two . . . Shit, that bitch, it probably wouldn't get to her that badly. The cold cunt.
He got through the phone call on automatic and prepared to go into action. He felt the excitement inside him. The knowledge that he was going to bring those sons of bitches down. He was going to start a fucking war.
Part Three
The fact that Eichord had detected a wise guy or an ex-con or whatever breed of felonious monk the non- existent Mr. Streicher might or might not prove to be, would have been insufficient to pull Jack to St. Louis. The gangland type action might not have reached out for him. It was a thing of one too many coincidences. Bad vibes. Rankling hunches. The St. Louis kills were firebombings. Some shootings. But no EYEBALL M. O. No ballistics, forensics, or any other hard information linked the California assassinations and the St. Louis murders.
The randomness of the kills were, however, a factor in themselves. The St. Louis homicide reports told of brutal and what appeared to be unconnected slayings. They could be strictly gangland stuff. But like the L.A. area murders the media attention was noteworthy. When you add to this factoring the coincidental sighting of a definite wise guy leaving the Coast for St. Louis, Eichord thought it might be worth a look.
He was coming in superficially just as he had in L.A., at a summons from the Task Force. But this time he would not be a cherry to be picked, chewed, pitted, and spit out. He'd not be manipulated again by 'liaison' smoothies. He'd come in quietly. Unannounced to all but the local honcho. No VIP stuff. He'd ease on in and look around. Check it out his own way.
Jack had fond memories of the St. Louis he could recall from the couple of good years he'd lived there a quarter-century ago. But from the second the cab left Lambert he might as well have been on Mars.
Similarly he found himself unprepared for the Special Division, a compact unit working out of the Homicide Bureau at Twelfth and Clark downtown, now Twelfth and Tucker Boulevard. He found the burg largely unrecognizable, this town he'd called home in the 60s, in Plaza Square, not two blocks from the Division HQ.
