Blood Rites (15 page)

They moved the twins’ crib out of the nursery into the main room so Dick and his son would have some privacy. After Alan had gone to sleep and Hillary retired to her loft above the kitchen, Dick sat on the sofa beside his niece, watching Stephen pace in front of the fire, waiting for the confession to be pulled from him.

Stephen sat in a chair beside Dick and looked at him sadly. “I do not pry into the minds of my friends, Richard. Whatever problem is troubling you is yours to keep. No, I wish to speak to you more about Alan.” He hesitated as if uncertain how to explain, then said, “For his sake, I did not tell the full truth this evening. As his father, you should know.”

“He’s not in any danger, is he?”

“No, if there were any physical problems stemming from his mother’s transfusion, they would have surfaced by now. But the sharing of our blood is forbidden and with good reason.”

“Go on.”

“When Alan accepted what I am so easily, it may have been his own inclination or it may have been because I wanted him to accept me.”

“I don’t understand the difference.”

“I didn’t try to control him but it may have happened anyway. Our blood in him binds him to us. It causes a subtle kind of slavery.‘’

Dick considered this, then commented, “I don’t like the idea of my son being controlled by anyone. On the other hand, I don’t understand why your customs prohibit it. I’d think slaves would come in handy sometimes.”

“We do share blood, but only with our victims, particularly those whose wills are troublesome and strong. It tightens our bond with them and enhances the pleasure of the kill so much so that a thousand years ago we had ritual bloodlettings and forced our victims to drink. But we prohibit sharings with friends and lovers for our own protection. Our minds are”—he hesitated, groping for words to describe concepts the family accepted as so natural they did not need names—“linked with our bodies. This allows us to move our minds out of them, to . . . extend as Helen calls it. . . and to return to them. We share our blood with one another to tighten the psychic bond between us. But now Alan is part of us as well. We will feel the loss when he dies; not as painfully as when one of our own is destroyed but enough that we will know. And because he shares this bond with us, we are responsible for him. Think of it as a form of . . . relationship.”

“We’re related anyway,” Helen reminded him.

“So we are,” Stephen agreed. “And, so you understand, we would never try to control him unless our own lives demanded it.” Stephen’s voice hardened as he added, “Now I wish to discuss your reason for being here. If you had told me the truth before you came I would have insisted that you stay away. I have children. I am concerned for their safety and I do not like the threat you bring with you.”

“Stephen!” Helen exclaimed.

“This needs to be said, my love, for all our sakes.”

“He’s right,” Dick cut in. “Everything happened so fast, I wasn’t thinking.”

“Yes, you were, Richard. You assumed that I am a killer and I will kill for you.”

Even that hint of anger in his friend brought back memories Dick wished he could forget. “You asked the same of me once,” he said.

“And now, as I did then, I will make our position completely clear. If Helen and I were using our own names, I would take you to the Dawson authorities and explain why you are here. But if I do that now, I risk too many questions. So understand that whatever happens, we will be completely on our own.”

“I understand. I’ll go in the morning,” Dick said stiffly.

“We want you to stay, Richard. Besides, if someone knows you are here, your leaving will not stop them from coming if only to find out where you have gone.”

“I suppose,” Dick admitted.

“So what must concern us is how soon your killers will act if they followed you.”

“They’ll make their move within a few days. Otherwise, they might lose my trail and Carrera would take it out on them.”

“And when they ‘make their move’ as you say, how will they do it?”

“They’ll send someone into Dawson first to ask a few questions about you. If you’re hiding as well as you were in Cleveland, you’ll look like an easy mark but one they’d just as soon avoid if they can. Is there any time you regularly go to town, maybe to drive Hillary in to school?”

“She studies at home but we do go into town every Tuesday afternoon. Either Hillary or Helen goes shopping while I take a course in auto mechanics at the Dawson high school. We’re away from the house about four hours.”

In spite of the seriousness of the discussion, Dick chuckled. “You don’t like having any gaps in your education, do you? Anyway, this tight a schedule is good. Tomorrow’s Friday. I’ll take your supplies list and drive into Dawson and make my presence known. Are you up to skipping a couple of classes?”

Stephen agreed and Dick went on, “Then for the next two weeks, start into town like always, drive about halfway, then turn around and come back. If the killers don’t show up by then, they never will.”

“Good. I’d like you to enjoy at least part of your stay here. You need it, yes?”

Dick sighed. “God, yes.” He stared into the dying fire. He wanted to tell Stephen why he had almost stayed away this year and why he had really brought his son but this was a time for strength and confidence, not confessions of weakness.

—When you’re ready, Richard, you will tell me, yes?—

Dick looked across the table at Stephen and nodded slowly. “Before I leave,” he said. He owed Stephen that much. He watched the flames consume the rest of the wood, so lost in his own problems that he didn’t notice Stephen and his niece leaving the house until he felt the cold draft circling his feet, saw the flames grow and die as the door opened and shut.

As he got undressed and slipped into a sleeping bag, he heard a distant familiar screech answered by the howling of a wolf. His son rolled over and grabbed his hand. “Is Stephen here?” Alan asked in a frightened whisper.

“Yeah,” Dick lied.

“Good.”

Alan slid closer to his father, his breathing growing deeper and more even as he went back to sleep. Once his son’s admitting more faith in the strength of someone other than himself would have gnawed at Dick. Not anymore. If Stephen had asked him to go, he would have tried to leave Alan behind.

I

If ever sons could claim to have been molded by their fathers, it was the Carreras.

Raymond Carrera’s father had been a fisherman on Sardinia. He had hobbied at politics, eventually becoming elected mayor of Bosa. His only progressive move had been to give his oldest son a large sum of money and send him to America a few years before the First World War. When the village discovered they’d been robbed, they hung Carrera’s father in the town square. After Raymond learned of this, he stopped writing his family, quit college, and took a job managing a restaurant. In two years he had saved enough to send back every penny his father had stolen. He went to law school, finishing in the year Prohibition started. His legal career was short but remarkable. He represented the most powerful Mafia family in Ohio, marrying the boss’s only child when he was twenty-seven, taking over the family’s operation when his father-in-law died five years later.

That same year, a series of murders stunned the quiet fishing town of Bosa. When they ended, everyone responsible for Joseph Carrera’s killing had died.

Dominic’s mother died soon after he was born. His father remarried within months and Dominic was raised by his stepmother. In her care, Dominic grew into a pudgy, sullen child, ignored by his father. Raymond’s second wife had three daughters before Raymond bought an annulment so he could marry again. His third wife gave birth to a son when Dominic was fifteen. A healthy baby, it died in its sleep when it was five weeks old.

That night, Raymond Carrera almost killed his firstborn but Dominic admitted and denied nothing. Even when his jaw was shattered and his arm hung useless at his side, Dominic stared dry-eyed at his father, refusing to say a single word.

One of Raymond’s men took Dominic to the hospital. Raymond Carrera never mentioned the incident to his son but Dominic’s defiance must have earned him some measure of respect because, soon afterward, Dominic started learning the family business.

Their main sources of income then had been real estate and alcohol. When Prohibition ended, the family moved into other legitimate enterprises financed by income from prostitution, gambling, and loan-sharking. Though Raymond would have preferred to keep his son out of the illegitimate enterprises, he had no choice but to expose Dominic to all of it and hope the young man had intelligence and caution to balance his temper. He needn’t have worried. Dominic Carrera’s life was directed by expediency and his guiding principal was to never question the necessity of doing what worked. Had he been born to a more respectable family he might have become a lawyer or a politician, one of the conscienceless community leaders who might never commit illegal acts nor support good ones unless their careers dictated they do so. As Raymond Carrera gradually gave up control of his enterprises, Dominic added drug importing to the line of family businesses. The Carreras prospered, and by the time Dominic Carrera moved into his father’s office, it was more powerful than it had been at the height of Prohibition. Among his wealth, Dominic Carrera could include a number of union leaders, two precinct captains in the Cleveland police, a state representative, and a U.S. Senator with his eyes on the presidency. Not a bad deck of cards, and Dominic knew, if he used them sparingly, he could play them for years.

But Dominic did not have an heir he could trust. He’d vowed not to repeat the mistakes of his father and raised his only son, Peter, with all the attention limited time allowed him to give. When he realized his attention should have included stronger discipline, he sent the teenager to a military school. Peter was expelled three months later for drinking in his dormitory and, while intoxicated, breaking his roommate’s nose with a chair. When he came home, Dominic forced him to dry out, then got him a job at one of the family’s legitimate businesses, a spaghetti house on the near east side. Close enough to downtown to be respectable, the restaurant also catered to a walk-in crowd that bought their drinks at the bar and picked up their supplies from a drug distributor running a quasi-independent operation out of Carrera’s storeroom. When Peter learned of the underground system, he demanded a cut in goods. By the time Dominic discovered the shortages, Peter was hooked on heroin and codeine and had returned to the most dangerous drug of all—alcohol.

The distributor who hadn’t had the guts to stand up to the boss’s son disappeared. Peter was forced to go cold turkey.

Nobody assumed he’d be desperate enough to die for a fix.

A small, wiry man, Dominic Carrera made up for his size with a voice that could be heard in neighboring houses. The men around him learned to ignore his volume and listen instead for his whisper.

He had whispered when he’d ordered the deaths of two of his father’s closest advisers because he heard they planned on challenging his control. He didn’t bother to substantiate the rumors before he set his killer loose. Truth wasn’t the point. Dominic Carrera had to earn respect and earn it fast or his hold on the Cleveland underworld would crumble.

The job was done by a lone gunman while the victims ate lunch in one of Carrera’s restaurants. Dominic made a point of being on the premises that day, watching the shooting from the adjoining bar, and immediately calling the police.

Then he sent his killer on two final jobs. The man blew up Carrera’s yacht along with the boat of a small-time smuggler who’d begun handling a significant volume of heroin on the east side. Then the gunman waited, hidden near the dock, for Dominic Carrera and the federal investigators to arrive at the scene. A Carrera-owned warehouse exploded at the same moment he fired two shots. The first wounded Carrera. The second killed the chief investigator. Carrera, who spent a week in the hospital recovering from the near-fatal wound, was never implicated in either crime. Even so, he acquired a reputation as a ruthless voyeur who had to be present to verify every hit.

And the murderer, the target of a full-scale hunt by both FBI and local police, disappeared.

As a result of the shooting, a plan the gunman had devised, the investigation moved in a different direction, seeking the independent gang trying to move in on the Carreras. Their new focus gave Carrera time to consolidate his authority, beef up security, and ferret out the weak links in his organization. Now, one desperate act by his son and Carrera’s own deadly reputation had undone years of careful work.

But his legal problems took second place now. The first was occupied with the man who killed his son. Soon his best assassin would be on Wells’s trail. Nobody could hunt so well. Nobody could shoot as accurately. Nobody else could be trusted to do what must be done.

II

Donna Harper never believed she could live with anyone more vicious than her father until she met Russ.

Not that he hadn’t been nice enough in the beginning. As a matter of fact, she’d been damn thankful to run into him.

She’d been hitchhiking west to her grandmother’s and had gotten dropped off in a tiny town near Rapid City. She’d gone into a restaurant and ordered eggs and a glass of milk with her last bit of change. Her arithmetic had never been good and she found herself a dime short. Donna laid what she had by her plate and started to leave when the waitress called after her.

Donna would have run if there was anyplace to go. The cops would catch her easy in a town this small. If she told the truth about her age, they’d send her home. If she lied, well, they probably had vagrancy laws. She decided to bluff it. “That’s all I got,” she admitted to the waitress.

“Look, if I’m short at the till, I got to pay for it. You’ll have to see the manager. Lou!” the waitress called into the back room.

A man walked up beside Donna, moving so softly she didn’t hear him coming until he slammed a quarter down on the counter. “Keep the change,” he said, and winking at Donna as if they’d planned this scene together, he followed her outside and grabbed her arm. “You with somebody?” he asked.