Authors: Mike Lawson
House Reckoning
House Reckoning
Also by Mike Lawson
The Inside Ring
The Second Perimeter
House Rules
House Secrets
House Justice
House Divided
House Blood
House Odds
Rosarito Beach
House Reckoning
M
IKE
L
AWSON
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © Mike Lawson 2014
Jacket art and design by MJC Design
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or
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.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2253-7
eISBN: 978-0-8021-9253-0
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
To Jamison Stoltz, senior editor at Grove Atlantic.
Thanks to his hard work, his astute comments, his attention
to detail, and his insights, the published version of my novels
is always significantly better than the original manuscript.
Part I
1
“We got a problem,” Enzo said.
Carmine Taliaferro was feeding his fish. He’d never figured himself for a fish guy, but he was in a pet store with his granddaughter one day, looking at the puppies, and saw the aquarium there. He didn’t know the names of the fish then; he just liked the colors: the bright yellows, the iridescent blues and greens. His favorite was a little black one about two inches long with a red stripe on each side, like the racing stripes on an Indy car. So he bought the aquarium and put it in his den and he’d sit there, watching the fish, thinking about nothing, just relaxing. It was like watching baseball on TV with the sound turned down.
“What kind of a problem?” Carmine asked, glancing over at Enzo.
When Enzo Marciano was younger, he’d looked like the hood he was. As he’d gotten older, hard muscle pooled into layers of fat, he lost most of his hair, and started wearing glasses. Now all he needed was a mustard-splattered apron and he could be the guy behind the counter at the corner deli—but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still a hood.
“It’s DeMarco,” Enzo said. “He identified the guy who killed Jerry Kennedy. He’s gonna kill him.”
“Goddamnit,” Carmine muttered. “I knew this was going to happen.”
“He came to ask permission but he wasn’t really asking, if you know what I mean. I told him I was gonna have to talk to you and he said he understood, but he’s not gonna let it go, no matter what you say. You know how he is.”
When Carmine shook his head, Enzo misinterpreted the gesture and said, “Yeah, I know. We can’t let him do it. We don’t need that kind of heat.”
Carmine laughed. “Heat? There won’t be any heat if DeMarco kills him. The kid will just disappear and nobody will have a clue what happened to him.”
“What are you saying? You’re gonna let him do it?”
Carmine lit a cigarette and started coughing as soon as he drew smoke into his throat. Fucking cigarettes were the thing that was going to kill
him
one day.
“No. That kid’s young, but he’s smart and he’s connected. What I’m saying is, I need him more than I need DeMarco.”
Carmine picked up a plastic bag sitting next to the aquarium. It was filled with water and contained about twenty small fish, each fish maybe a quarter of an inch long. The fish were almost transparent and if you looked closely you could see their tiny hearts beating. He took a switchblade out of his pocket—he’d killed a punk with the knife when he was sixteen—and split the bag and dumped the fish into the aquarium. Then he just watched, not realizing there was a little smile on his face, as the other fish attacked the new fish. They wiped them all out in about two minutes. Those brightly colored fish didn’t look like predators—but then neither did guys like him and Enzo.
“Damnit, Enzo,” Carmine said. “It’s really too bad about DeMarco. It just breaks my heart.”
2
Maureen DeMarco glanced into the living room. Again.
He was still sitting there in the big recliner they both thought of as
his
chair. He was probably, almost certainly, brooding over Jerry Kennedy. He’d been brooding about Jerry ever since the funeral. When he’d first sat down it was just starting to get dark outside and now it was completely dark, and he hadn’t even turned on the light next to his chair. He’d been sitting there for an hour.
She felt like screaming at him. She wanted to say, “You just forget about Jerry! He was a useless, drunken bum. You got your own family to think about.” But she knew screaming at him wouldn’t do any good. Screaming at Gino DeMarco was like screaming at a rock. He didn’t get mad. Well, he probably did get mad—but he never did anything. He’d never raised a hand to her in the twenty-seven years they’d been married. For that matter, she couldn’t remember him ever raising his voice to her. If she started yelling at him, he’d just leave the house and not come back until after he was sure she’d gone to bed. And in the end, he’d do what he wanted, no matter what she said.
She was making a pie because Joe was coming home from school for a visit tomorrow, and she was making as much noise as she could, banging dishes around, kneading the dough like she was hitting a punching bag. She knew she was just ruining the piecrust and would have to make another one. She also knew Gino could hear her and he knew, with all the noise she was making, that she was mad. But would he turn around and ask what was bothering her? No, not him. Not ever. He was a rock.
She was a junior in high school when she met him at a St. Patrick’s Day dance. Even now, when she was mad at him, she still smiled when she thought about that night. He was there with a bunch of other Italian boys who’d snuck into the gym and he kept looking at her, but then he’d look away as soon as she looked at him. She could tell he wanted to ask her to dance—and she knew he wouldn’t.
She still couldn’t believe it, all these years later, how she’d walked up to him, tapped him right on his big chest, and said, “I like this song. Why don’t we dance?” Her girlfriends had been mortified, but she didn’t care. She knew she had to make the first move because he never would have. Yeah, she knew what he was like before she even knew him at all.
He’d gotten a bit heavier as the years had passed but he wasn’t fat and he was still a handsome man: dark hair not thinning a bit, a big nose that fit his face, the cleft in his chin, the muscles in his arms. She’d always loved his arms. She always felt safe in them.
Her father had pretended not to like him at first. He’d say things like “You going out with that dago kid again?” Irish fathers felt obligated to say things like that back then. And she’d respond by saying, “Don’t you go calling him that. That’s prejudice. Plus, he’s Catholic. That should make you and ma happy.”
The fact was, her father had actually liked him right from the start. He had three daughters and had always wanted a son, and he and Gino used to go to Mets games together all the time before her father died. And when Joe got old enough to go with them . . . Her father had lived for those Sunday afternoons, sitting there in the cheap seats in the upper deck, telling his grandson what bums the Yankees were.
When they got married, her mother had basically told her to be subservient to him, although her mother had never used a word like
subservient
in her life. “Your job,” she said, “is to be a good wife and make a good home for him. You take care of his house and his children. You learn how to cook. And you don’t be a nag. I know you, Maureen. You got a mouth on you. Don’t you turn into one of those sharp-tongued harpies and drive him into another woman’s bed.”
She’d taken her mother’s advice for a while, for as long as she could. She’d been the sweet little wife, going along, not questioning things, but at some point she’d said to hell with it and began to assert herself. The only problem was she waited too long because by then he was already working for Carmine.
That was the worst thing about their marriage: it wasn’t just what he did, it was that he wouldn’t talk about what he did. When they first got married, he was working on the docks, over in Jersey. It was a union job, a good job, and she was proud to tell people her husband was a longshoreman. He didn’t make a lot of money, and the work wasn’t always steady, but he made enough—enough to make the down payment on the little house they still lived in. Then two things happened: she got pregnant and he got laid off—and that’s when he went to work for Carmine.
In those days the neighborhood in Queens where they lived was like a little village where everybody made it their business to know what was going on. Who was cheating on his wife; who’d been fired for drinking on the job; whose kid had just been expelled from school . . . The neighborhood, like a living organism, always knew. It was a vast network of gossiping wives, old ladies with nothing better to do than sit on the porch all day and watch, butchers and bartenders and waiters always listening as their customers talked. So the neighbors knew her husband was working for Carmine Taliaferro maybe even before she did.
