Explosive (36 page)

Flash.

Joseph Carlisle staring at him coldly from behind his huge walnut desk.

Pity. You ended up being just like your father, in the end.

It happened in two quick blinks of an eye.

He started to rise on a small hill in the road and a midnight blue Buick was suddenly topping it, headed straight at him. Thomas jerked the wheel and struck loose gravel, careening over the rise in the road at a skid. He braked, lurching to a halt, just barely stopping himself from going into the ditch.

He could no longer see the Buick because of the bump in the road, but suddenly he could divide his life into before the moment he’d seen that speeding vehicle and everything that came after.

He shut his eyes and shook as memories slammed into his consciousness with the force of a locomotive.

The interior of Joseph Carlisle’s office was cool and dim. His father hadn’t been going into his office at the trucking company since Rick and Abel had died. Thomas sunk into one of the leather chairs in front of his father’s desk and briefly shut his eyes. They burned. He had slept maybe three or four hours in days. Ever since the funeral.

Ever since he’d finally done what Rick had asked and listened to the recording Rick had given him just days before he died.

He opened his eyes, and noticed Joseph had taken note of his haggard appearance, unshaven jaw, worn jeans, and an old T-shirt from his Navy EOD days.

Mighty are those that flirt with fate.

Mighty? Perhaps. Or maybe he’d just been lost. He’d been fearless as a kid, accepting almost any dare, because he figured deep down, he didn’t deserve the stability of a family. Now that he was beginning to experience the shakiness of what he’d assumed was a stable world, the idea of going down on a bomb seemed downright tame.

“You look like shit . . . and like you’ve been getting about as much sleep as your mother,” Joseph said as he sunk down into the chair behind his desk. The chair was a large, winged-back number. Joseph used to overfill it, not only with his large, once powerful body, but with his charisma. Presently, it looked like the chair had grown.

Or Joseph Carlisle had shrunk.

“You should contact your doctor and ask for sleeping pills,” his adoptive father continued in a toneless voice. When he clutched his side and winced, a large figure stepped into Thomas’s peripheral vision. He scowled as he watched Newt Garnier—Joseph’s longtime right-hand man—open up a drawer and take out a bottle of antacid.

“You’re the one who needs to see a doctor,” Thomas said. His irritation mounted when his father accepted the tablets from Garnier, washing them down with a swig of coffee.

“It’s just my damn acid reflux.”

“How do you know? Who diagnosed you? Has Garnier gone and got his medical degree in the past few months?” Thomas snapped. He ignored Garnier’s malevolent glare. He and Thomas had never gotten along. Thomas figured Garnier was jealous of anyone who shared a special relationship with Joseph Carlisle. He knew his mother and Garnier had never been on the best footing either, but his father refused to hear a word against the man.

“Don’t let your mother hear you saying stuff like that,” Joseph said wryly. “The last thing she needs at this moment is something else to worry about.”

Thomas went still, only his gaze moving over Joseph. Had what he said been a subtle threat? Had Joseph noticed the way Thomas had scrutinized him from across the crowded rooms at the wake and the funeral, as though he were trying to bring the sight of his adoptive father into focus? It disoriented him, this necessity for suspicion, this compulsion to try to consider the man he’d known and loved for most of his life in a different light.

When Garnier slammed the drawer shut and Joseph grimaced as he took another swig of his coffee, Thomas inhaled slowly, attempting to smooth over his confusion and a rising anger that he wasn’t quite sure how the hell to contain. He’d been having more and more trouble controlling his temper since Rick had died. Now that he’d listened to the tape, he found himself increasingly at the mercy of his fury.

His adoptive father looked old. The thought drained the rage and helplessness out of him. He sagged into the leather chair, suddenly feeling too weary to complete the task that had brought him to his father’s house in Lake Forest today.

But he
would
finish it. Too many questions were buzzing around his head. He needed answers.

He’d continue for Rick.

“I’d like to speak with you alone,” Thomas muttered.

Garnier opened his mouth as though to protest—the man was becoming increasingly proprietary over Joseph in the past several months—but Joseph waved his hand dismissively.

“I’ll be right outside if you need me,” Garnier rasped.

“We won’t.”

Garnier swung around his square jaw at Thomas’s pointed comment. Thomas held his stare until the big man stepped out of his vision.

“That guy’s an asshole,” Thomas said under his breath.

“He says the same about you,” Joseph Carlisle replied without rancor. “Maybe that’s why I like both of you.”

Thomas distractedly picked up the trophy sitting on his father’s desk.

“I can’t believe you still have this thing,” he mumbled as he flipped the cheap trophy in one hand so that he could read the inscribed plate. FIRST PLACE, DIVISION IA, THE LAKE FOREST PAN-THERS, 1985.

“The day you hit that winning homerun was one of the best days of my life,” Joseph said.

Thomas glanced up. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”

“I’m serious.”

Thomas shook his head, his brow wrinkled perplexedly. “It had to be one of the worst days of Ricky’s,” he mumbled, recalling how Rick had completely fallen apart in the outfield during the Little League championship game.

“The kid was a mess when it came to sports.”

“Yeah. He was,” Thomas said quietly. “And was brilliant at a lot of things that really counted.”

He set the trophy on his father’s desk carelessly.
Stupid, useless fucking thing
. Maybe it was the jolt of anger that went through him that gave him the will to proceed, despite Joseph’s vulnerable state and the subtle allusions to his mother’s condition, as well.

“You should have cut Rick more slack.”

“We all should have done a lot of things,” Joseph countered, his brusque tone belying his wasted appearance. “It’s easy to second-guess our actions when someone close to us passes.”

“Second-guessing yourself is a waste of time, right?” Thomas mused. “‘Regrets will only weigh you down?’ ‘You’ve gotta move on, never look back,’” he quoted a few of Joseph’s parental mantras.

Joseph shrugged. “Some of the best advice I ever gave my boys.”

Thomas just shook his head grimly.

“What’s wrong with you?” Joseph demanded.

Well, here it was. Best to just get it over with.

“Rick had been investigating the Chicago Outfit just before he died,” Thomas began. “He planned to write a book on the topic.”

Joseph’s face looked gray in the dim light . . . waxy, like he wore a mask. “And you’re bringing this up . . . Why? Because you know these FBI sons of bitches are nosing around, asking me stupid questions about my trucking company, about gambling operations and illegal bookkeeping . . . insinuating
I’m
a criminal. Those assholes are turning your mother into a walking zombie—”

“I’m just stating a fact,” Thomas interrupted, although he tried to keep his voice even. “And Mom’s in the state she’s in because her son and grandson are dead.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Joseph fired at him.

“I’m trying to talk to you about Rick’s investigations.”

“What has that got to do with me?”

Thomas met his father’s stare. His fierce eyes used to have the ability to make him quell in his Nikes, not that he’d let Joseph ever know that. At the moment, Joseph’s blue eyes looked watery and . . . washed out. Still, Thomas sensed the fight and toughness of an old bulldog in him.

“It’s got everything to do with you,” Thomas replied. “Rick found an informant, a man who had done small deals with the Outfit since he was practically a kid, who was willing to talk to Rick about what he knew—to detail operations. To name names.”

The silence that followed felt so thick that Thomas swore it pressed like a weight on his chest. He studied the face of the man that he’d known and trusted since he was a ten-year-old boy.

“I guess you already know who Rick’s informant fingered as the head man of the Outfit,” Thomas said.

Joseph’s indifferent shrug jarred through his consciousness.

“Me, right?”

Thomas nodded, his entire awareness . . . his entire world narrowing down into a surreally sharp focus on the man who sat behind the desk.

“Are you telling me that Ricky believed that liar?” Joseph barked.

“He didn’t, at first. I told him that this man—his source—must have known Rick’s real name. He must have been trying to con Rick, implicate you as a criminal so that he could later blackmail Rick for money.”

Joseph made a “well there you have it” gesture with his hand. Thomas just continued to pin him with his stare, however, and Joseph added bitterly, “Let me guess. My loving eldest son decided in the end that his ol’ dad was guilty. What . . . was he going to devote a whole chapter to me in his book? ‘My Dad, the Crime Boss?’”

“I don’t know, Joseph.” The old man’s chin shot up at Thomas’s usage of his given name. “Is that what you were worried would happen?”

An unhealthy-looking pink flush stained his father’s gray cheeks. Thomas realized with a distant sense of amazement that now that he’d crossed the line, he was starting to see his adoptive father in a shockingly clear focus. The vision was slowly, inexorably turning his world upside-down.

“Rick gave me a tape of his interviews with his informant several days before he died. I refused to listen to it,” Thomas rasped.

“You always were loyal. More like my own flesh and blood than my own son.” Joseph’s voice sounded proud and sure, but Thomas saw how his hands shook.

“Rick was ten times the man I am.
Ten times
,” Thomas enunciated slowly.

“He was weak and ungrateful—”

“He was
your son
.”

Joseph didn’t flinch when Thomas stood abruptly and reached for the wooden box sitting on his father’s desk. Ricky and he had known what was inside that box since Thomas was fifteen years old. The two of them had been bored one Saturday afternoon and Rick had dared his brother to smoke one of their father’s strong, pungent cigars. They’d snuck into Joseph’s office—forbidden territory.

That was when they’d found the gun.

Thomas removed the Glock automatic, quickly checked to see that it was loaded and then slammed it down on the desk between them. His breathing came raggedly now.

“But after Rick and Abel were incinerated in that
boat accident
, I decided . . . why not? Give the tape a listen. It’s what Rick wanted, wasn’t it? Do you know what that man told Rick on those tapes, Joseph?”

Joseph’s nostrils flared but he didn’t reply.

“He told Rick that you had given the order for dozens of murders over the years.
You
,” Thomas repeated, half in fury and half in incredulity. “The same man who coached our Little League team, who invited half the city to our house on Christmas Eve, and made the biggest donations to the children’s hospital every year.
You
.”

Thomas leaned down over the desk until his face was less than two feet away from Joseph’s and spoke in a low, gravelly voice.

“The informant told Rick that two of the people you had murdered were my parents because my father had noticed some inconsistencies in your books, Joseph. What do you say to that?”

For a stretched moment in which Thomas thought his fury was going to erupt through the top of his head, Joseph said nothing. Finally Joseph nodded at the Glock that lay between them.

“If you believe that I had James Nicasio killed, what are you just standing there for? Why don’t you shoot me, Thomas? Why don’t you shoot your old man?” he asked roughly.

“Maybe I just wanted to see if you’d pick up that gun and kill
me
in cold blood just like you did your son and grandson,” Thomas hissed. “But no . . . that’s not your style is it,
Dad
? You wouldn’t just blast a son’s brain out in your own house, would you? No, it’s much more your style to have one of your hoods cut my brake lines, or maybe arrange for another explosion? A gas leak, maybe. Yeah, that sounds more up your alley, doesn’t it?”

Joseph’s taut leer struck him as obscene.

“At least I taught you something after all these years. But not enough, apparently,” he said, shaking his head. “I should have known, in the end, that blood was thicker than water. You’re just like him. You’re just like your father. He was so indignant at the idea of someone making a little extra money on the side. ‘Not on
my
truck; not on
my
runs.’ That’s what James Nicasio said when he came to me with his great discoveries about the jacked up invoices all those years ago. As if that stupid dago even owned that truck; as if
he
had the right to say what would happen in my company. You’re just like
both
of them—your nosy father and your self-righteous, holier-than-thou brother.” He shoved the gun toward Thomas. “
Go on
. Prove me wrong. Neither of
them
would have had the guts to pick up that gun and shoot me.”

Fury blinded him. Thomas wasn’t aware of having picked up the weapon, but he suddenly trained it on Joseph’s face. Hatred raced through his veins like a poison, the strength of it amplified exponentially by the presence of a lifetime of love and respect.

“You’re admitting it? You had them killed? My parents . . . Ricky?”

Joseph gave him a disdainful glance. “I won’t deny it. I might have done so for a son, but I see I don’t have one anymore.”

His finger twitched on the trigger, but something stilled it. He lowered the weapon.

“You’re right,” he rasped. “I
am
like my father. I’m not such an animal that I’d shoot a pitiful, helpless old man.”