Gatekeeper (26 page)

In that way, if in no other, she had to envy Greta Novak.

She left the car after seeing the two buyers slip out of the house and disappear into the bushes lining the driveway. She walked up to the front door, rang the bell in the coded tattoo that she and Manuel had agreed upon, and then used her key in the lock.

As she closed the door behind her, she more sensed than saw Manuel standing just around the corner, watchful and waiting.

"Honey, I'm home," she announced to the empty entry-way.

He appeared silently, tucking a pistol away under his shirt, a smile on his face. "Yes, darling. And supper's almost ready." His eyes narrowed as he took her in more fully. "What happened to you? You okay?"

She was struck by the genuine concern in his voice. "Yeah. Long story with no damage. I just fell down and got messed up. Hooked an ally, though. At least I think so. If I play him a little more, it might mean a big jump in business."

But he didn't seem to be listening. He'd approached her and now cupped her chin in his hand, raising her face to the light to better see it. "You been doing more than falling down."

She gently removed his hand. "I had to do some dope with him to prove I wasn't a cop. It was a bit of the bad old days I could've lived without."

"What'd he give you?"

"Said it was Ecstasy, but who knows? Anyhow, it made him happy and I'm okay. Might've been worse with coke—that's where I had a problem. We have any beer?"

They went to the kitchen together, where, to her surprise, dinner was in fact simmering on the stove, something in a pot that smelled very rich and very good. When on her own, Sam subsisted on any variety of boring food, so long as it came in either a can or a box, but she had to admit she'd always been fond of home-cooked meals.

"Wow. That looks delicious," she said, glancing at the stove while removing a beer from the fridge.

"
Garbanzos con chorizos
," he said. "Nothing fancy. Beans and sausage, with attitude. Should be ready in another half hour."

She opened the bottle and took a deep swallow, enjoying the cold beer washing straight down into her stomach. She wiped her lips with her wrist and sighed. "That and a hot shower and I'll be ready to eat like a horse."

"Take your time," he said, picking up a long spoon with which to stir the pot.

She went upstairs, taking the beer with her, pondering the domesticity of it all. Narcotics and home cooking—American capitalism, alive and well. Was this what advocates of legalized drug dealing saw as the future? And who on which side of the debate was under the biggest delusion? The futility of it all made her happy she was just a line soldier, following orders—and all the more eager for that soul-cleansing shower.

* * *

After dinner, already late in the evening, Sam and Manuel prepared for the high-volume part of the day, a standard in a business that tended toward the nocturnal. While he got ready to sell his assortment, she, refreshed and fed, set out to duplicate her earlier visit to Ralph by tracking down Stuey Nichols, from George Backer's list, someone Ralph clearly considered a competitor.

Nichols lived in a section of Rutland nicknamed the Gut. In the industrial days of seventy-five years earlier, the Gut was an ethnic, working-class neighborhood, initially made up of Italians, Irish, and others, but finally consisting of Italians overall, after the Irish contingent had pulled up stakes and moved elsewhere in town. The handle is actually a misnomer, since it conjures up images of Upton Sinclair's steaming, fetid slaughterhouses of old Chicago. In fact, although the Gut is located on the far side of the railroad tracks, it is a bland residential area of neat, straight avenues, old, expansive trees, and weathered, modest homes so small and so lacking in traditional New England detail that the neighborhood is also known, if less generally, as Nebraska.

It is a poor section—and host to a large affordable housing complex—but again not as crime-infested as the name implies. For that matter, when the hunt was on to find a suitable location for Sam and Manuel, the logic was to go where some of the city's bigger flare-ups with bikers and gangs had already occurred. That turned out to be north of the Gut's upper boundary of West Street, around Baxter and Maple.

That having been said, however, when Sam found out where Stuey lived, it didn't come as a surprise. Hard times had visited Rutland for long enough that only a few neighborhoods remained immune from Stuey's form of self-employment, and the Gut was certainly not among them. In fact, one of the latest of Rutland's heroin overdoses had occurred right here.

She found the house with relative ease off of South Street, surrounded by darkness and quiet. At this time of night, the rest of Rutland, with its traffic and bright lights, seemed very far away.

Stu Nichols was clearly not into home maintenance. By the feeble glow of a distant streetlamp, Sam picked her way carefully through an odd and inexplicable assortment of holes, cinder blocks, and heaved-up chunks of stony earth, along with a scattering of seriously used children's toys.

The house itself looked perfectly suited to its battlefield yard.

Sam made it to the weather-beaten front porch, illuminated by a harsh yellow bulb hanging overhead from a wire, a corona of interested night bugs circling its orbit in tight, continuous flight. The front door was wide open, and she could see through the screen door a living room rigged like a stage set for a war movie. Seeing no buzzer and hearing children crying and adults shouting somewhere in the back, she pounded on the door frame hard enough to break it.

"Who the fuck's that?" an angry male voice demanded.

"Greta Novak," she shouted, figuring the female voice alone would draw him out.

She wasn't wrong. A skinny, balding man in his forties stumbled into the room, squinting to see through the screening. "Who're you?" he asked, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, no doubt to make himself doubly attractive.

"Are you Stuey Nichols?"

"That any of your business?"

"I'm a friend of Jimmy Hollowell's, picking up where he left off," she said. "I thought we should maybe talk, since Ralph Meiner called you a pissant when I told him that you and I combined could put him out of business."

Nichols straightened. "He called me a pissant? That little prick?"

There was an outburst of renewed crying from inside the house. Nichols swore, turned on his heel, and vanished from view Moments later, Sam heard him screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs, the slamming of a door, and then silence.

Stuey reappeared, showing his yellow teeth in a welcoming smile. "Come on in, lady," he said, swinging open the door on squealing hinges. "What'd you say your name was?"

"Greta Novak."

He stared at her in surprise, studying her face as if she'd sprouted a horn. "No shit," he said after a pause. "You a foreigner?"

"My parents saw too many old movies."

He gave her a blank expression. "Right. You want a drink?"

Sam stood in the middle of the room, wondering if anything might jump out and bite her ankle. "I'm all set. You got a lot of kids?"

He spat on the floor, to little effect. "Little bastards. You can have 'em if you want. I'll even wrap 'em up. So you're next in line to Jimmy, huh? That mean you're gonna get strung up, too?" He laughed uproariously before turning on his heel and beckoning to her to follow him. "Let's go to my office if we're gonna talk business."

She picked her way through the debris, noticing the smell of diapers and rotting food increasing the deeper she entered the building, making her feel she was progressing through the innards of some beast. Stuey Nichols turned left down a short hallway, proceeded through a door at its end, and stopped to usher her through before closing it behind her.

"Have a chair," he offered, pointing to a half-deflated beanbag propped against the wall.

She glanced around for something a little less absorbing. "That's okay."

He looked offended. "What? Not cushy enough? You don't want to catch somethin'? Nice start. You came to me, lady. I'm being polite here. Don't need to put on airs."

Sam shook her head and sat—actually half collapsed—into the low-slung beanbag, feeling like her butt had just been grabbed by mud. "Jesus, Stuey Don't make a federal case out of it, okay?"

Nichols himself perched on the edge of a debris-strewn table nearby, one leg up, the other still planted on the floor, all offense vaporized. "How'd you know Jimmy?"

"An ex-boyfriend and him were friends."

"Long time ago?"

She tilted her head slightly, looking up at him. "This twenty questions time?"

"Yeah. You got a problem with that?"

"No. About four years."

"Where?"

"Where what?" she asked. "Where did I meet Jimmy? Springfield. We were living there then. He came by to sell some stuff to the boyfriend."

"What was the boyfriend's name?"

"You wouldn't know. He was a flatlander-bum-jerk-off named Nicky Meadows. We split up and he went back to New York."

"How'd you meet him?"

"Nicky? What do you care?"

"Humor me," Nichols persisted.

"I work winters at Tucker Peak. You meet a lot of people in a place like that."

Stuey laughed. "And do a lot of dope. That what wet your whistle to get into the business?"

"That's where it started, yeah."

"So how'd you make the leap from meeting Jimmy to taking over after he got whacked? That's a big gap."

"Jimmy worked for Rivera. Now I do."

Stuey shook his head as if confused. "Rivera . . . Johnny Rivera? He's a Holyoke nobody."

"He took over Torres's Vermont run."

"You hook up with him through Jimmy?"

Sam had hoped to avoid this part. "No. Bill Dancer from Bratt led me to Torres. That's how we found out about Rivera. Just my luck we walked in right after Jimmy died."

Stuey smiled sympathetically. "No shit. You sound like one lucky girl. A lot luckier than Dancer, from what I heard."

He held her gaze a little longer than was comfortable. Sam became even more aware of being wrapped in Styro-foam beams. "That supposed to mean something?"

He slid off the table and pretended to stretch, exposing his pale, soft, hairy stomach. "Well, you know . . . the boyfriend disappears where no one will find him, Jimmy dies right on cue, Dancer gets busted as soon as you meet Rivera. Almost too good to be true."

He lowered his arms, shifted his feet slightly, and stood facing her silently like a boxer, ready to start. Sam knew not only that she was in trouble but that she'd been there from the start. The beanbag was a trap. If she'd had a gun, she couldn't have reached it, and in any case, she was hard-pressed to move without real effort.

Nothing left to lose.

She pitched violently to her left, spilling out of the bag and scrambling to gain her footing. Simultaneously, Stuey Nichols snatched a baseball bat off the table beside him, swung neatly around on his heel in a windup, and came up like a golfer, hitting her in the upswing, right across the abdomen as she was still on all fours. The blow lifted her off the floor and sent her rolling against the wall, doubled over with pain.

She opened her eyes just enough to see him standing over her, the smile gone and the bat held ready. "Who do you think you're shitting, lady? Think I'm a fucking moron? You're a Brattleboro cop. I know you. You busted me five years ago, for Christ's sake. You must take me for a fucking idiot."

"I do," said a male voice behind him.

Nichols swung around. Sam saw Willy Kunkle smack the other man across the head with a heavy metal flashlight, dropping him like a cement bag at Sam's feet.

Willy knelt down next to her. "You okay?"

"Don't know yet," she said weakly. "He dead?"

Willy barely glanced at Nichols. "He's breathing. What the hell were you thinking? That he wouldn't recognize you?"

She rolled her eyes. "I didn't recognize him, for crying out loud. How did you know?"

He smiled slightly. "I been tailing you, just in case. Soon as I saw him through the screen door, I pegged him. I just couldn't figure out what your plan was. Pretty clever, getting yourself almost killed. Good way to gain his confidence."

"Up yours."

Willy sat back on his heels. "You must be feeling better. You want to try moving?"

He held out his hand to help her. Slowly, she straightened her legs, getting her stomach to relax, and palpated her abdomen. Other than feeling tender and nauseous, however, she sensed nothing vital was broken. Slowly, groaning with discomfort, she rolled onto her knees and used the wall to help her stand, Willy's strong right hand on her elbow for support.

She stood there a moment, the room spinning around, her throat constricted and her stomach in turmoil.

"You gonna puke?" Willy asked, the sensitive nursemaid.

She spoke through clenched teeth. "If I do, I'll make sure I hit you."

He didn't laugh as he might have normally, but steered her over to a nearby legitimate chair. "Sit. Looks like you'll live."

He returned to Nichols and checked his pulse. Apparently satisfied, he glanced down the hallway to make sure it was still empty and then sat on a small side table opposite Sam. "So what the hell went wrong?"

She gave him an exasperated glare. "I don't have your encyclopedia brain, Sherlock. Nothing triggered when I saw him."

Willy shook his head. "Well," he conceded, "he used to have a lot of hair and a mustache. Still . . . What about our flawless boss? Didn't he tell you the guy had a Brattleboro rap sheet? That might've been vaguely helpful."

Given all that Gunther had done over the years to ensure Willy's employment as a cop, Sam could never believe the latter's constant lack of gratitude. "Give it a rest. It was a screwup. Everyone survived."

"This time," Willy said disgustedly and stood up again. He began looking around the room. "But I knew this would happen. This whole thing's been half-cocked from the start. He never should've okayed it."

"I forced him to. I'd already signed on with Rivera before I told him."