Killing The Rat (An Organized Crime Thriller) (16 page)

So they’d all been waiting.

And then he disappeared and they tracked him to Ann Arbor.

Why Ann Arbor?

The answer was simple: it wasn’t Detroit. Abrocci had wanted to get away from his “associates.” Ann Arbor was the place to do it.

Or it should have been.

How had they found him?

38.

When Jack Cleveland was unable to get through to Vincenzo Romano on his third try, he had a fairly good idea what was happening. Jack had once read an article about Hollywood, about struggling actors. The reporter said that Hollywood was a place where people starve to death while being told they’re wonderful.

The fact was, his job was sort of like that. It wasn’t the kind where you got a performance review after six months. Where you and your boss sat down and together worked out some long and short-term goals, talked about areas you could improve and perhaps received a small raise. They didn’t exactly kill you with kindness like they did in Hollywood, but they also didn’t let you know when you were on the way out.

No golden parachute, just a lead jacket. Or concrete shoes.

In this business, things happened quickly and without warning.

From his dingy hotel room on Detroit’s south side, Jack knew he was being given an involuntary warning.

The money was gone. Romano didn’t know who had it. The fact that he wasn’t returning Jack’s call meant that Jack was a suspect.

Jack felt no fear.

Romano had paid him; the money was in the numbered account. He’d decided to stay just to make sure things were okay before he blew out of town. He had a ticket to Seattle, then another ticket that would take him to New York.

But he was going to stay now.

He punched in Betty’s number on his cell phone.

But there was no answer. He was bounced to a pager, but he didn’t key in his number.

He’d already done that twice.

Jack weighed the options. She could have left town for a few days, although she probably would have told him that. She could be screening her calls. But then again, if she knew he was calling he was fairly confident she would have answered or called him back.

The last option, well, he didn’t want to think about. Jack had a rule about getting close to people. The rule was get close only if you plan to kill. If not, don’t get close at all.

But a few years back, on a job, Betty saved his life. One of the few oversights he’d ever made in his life. A drug dealer who’d cut into the Combination’s profits had been taken out, along with a few associates. Jack had checked the dealer’s pulse and it had stopped. But at some point, the pulse resumed, because moments later the dealer was sitting up with a gun pointed at Jack’s back. Betty stepped into the room at the same time and was a hair quicker.

Jack owed her.

He threw his few belongings and shaving kit into the small black duffel bag that served as his travelling bag. He walked out of the hotel and into the muggy Detroit afternoon. Jack’s rental car, a tan Ford Explorer, sat in the corner of the parking lot.

He threw the bag inside and fired up the big vehicle, then steered it out of the hotel parking lot.

Ferndale was ten minutes away.

Years back, Betty had showed him where she lived. It had been an act of trust, that normally, Jack would have frowned upon. But at the time, he took it for what it was. Betty knew Jack was indebted to her. Besides, they had become lovers over the few months they were together on a long job. And like most men, Jack considered himself an exception.

He took a right, went a few blocks, then took another right. He drove past Betty’s house without looking at it directly. Her garage door was shut. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Jack drove around the neighborhood for several minutes, looking for anything that might catch his eye. A man in a parked car. A curtain pulled aside surreptitiously.

But Jack saw nothing that raised an alarm.

Finally, he drove back and pulled into Betty’s driveway. Went to the door and rang the bell.

There was no answer. He slid the small leather case from the inside of his sportcoat and quickly found the right pick. Moments later, the door popped open and Jack stepped inside, shutting the door quickly behind him.

Jack remembered the layout of the house. He stood silently, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. His mind took him through the house, remembering the furniture, the places someone could wait for someone like him.

As it turned out, there was no need for the mental tour. Everything Jack needed was in the living room.

He stepped forward, his feet making no sound on the floor. Betty was on her back, tied to a tipped-over chair. Her feet, or what was left of them, were sticking straight up into the air. Against her brown skin, the trails of blood down her legs looked black.

Jack’s .38 materialized in his hand, but he instinctively knew the killer was gone.

He knelt beside Betty. Put his index finger against her neck. But he knew she was dead. At least half a day. He gently untied her right arm and tried to raise it. It hadn’t stiffened. Probably late last night, Jack thought.

Jack looked down at Betty. He remained objective. His mind swiftly processed the variables, the circumstances, the most likely occurrence of events that could have resulted in this event.

His fingers tightened on the gun.

With his left hand, he gently closed her eyes.

And then he left, wiping away any of his prints, erasing any signs of his presence.

39.

The Spook stood before the full-length mirror in his suite at the Fox Hotel. His Fender Telecaster was slung over his shoulder, its cable trailing out behind him to the small Pignose amplifier propped up on the bed. He had the guitar’s distortion on a medium setting, the juice turned to the first pickup. The settings were designed to create a dense, fuzzy sound that was tight enough to sound like a raucous bouncing romp when he pounded down a blues shuffle.

The Spook put an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth and looked at himself in the mirror again. He saw a pale man in his late thirties, early forties with thick black hair and a slightly pockmarked face. He was thin and his face was pinched. He had on dirty blue jeans, cowboy boots, a long-sleeved untucked blue shirt and a bone necklace.

On his right ring finger was a large skull ring.

The Spook had two loves in the world: the ecstasy of a perfect kill and Keith Richards.

In fact, he longed to be like Keith. Keith’s riffs spoke to the Spook. The sexy wail of “Honky Tonk Women,” the anthemic call of “Satisfaction.” They all kindled a flame in the Spook’s soul. He could relate to those riffs. To those sudden bursts of inspiration.

Keith Richards was a god to the Spook.

Now, in his hotel room, he slid the fingertips of his left hand slowly up the fretboard of his Fender. The little Pignose responded smoothly and quietly. As much as the Spook would have loved to crank it up, it wasn’t the time nor the place. In his apartment in London, he had a soundproof studio in which he would sit for hours and play Keith’s riffs,
his
riffs, over and over again, until he had a welt on his chest from the Fender digging in.

What a thing, the Spook thought. To be born to do something. That was the ticket. Keith had been born to write and play music. God had opened his brain and poured in all the ability he could handle.

The Spook had a born talent. Killing people was his reason for existence. Each and every one had been a virtuoso performance. He knew this instinctively. It wasn’t arrogance or boastfulness. He was the best there was. He knew it. And those who were in the know, knew it, too.

That’s what had pissed him off so much about the black woman. “We’re both professionals,” she had said. The Spook had an ego. It wasn’t huge, but it was there. In his profession, you had to have one. You had to believe you were better than the other guy. You were there to kill him, after all. If there were even the tiniest smidgen of doubt that you might not be better, how could you go through with anything?

So it had pissed him off when the little ebony femme had put herself in his league. It hadn’t been that brutal, though. Once, he’d sharpened an eight foot tent stake and put it up a fat Israeli banker’s ass until it came out the side of the man’s neck, then hung the stake lengthwise in the bastard’s living room. The banker had died a slow, humiliating death.

The press said it took him several hours to die and that when the cops had come, they initially thought someone had skewered a pig in their living room.

 It was the executionary equivalent of Keith’s incredible bridge on “Sympathy for the Devil.”

The Spook bowed his head and slipped into the rhythmic chords of “Beast of Burden.”

As he played, his boots tapped the thick carpet of his hotel room. He paced around the room, lost in the beauty of the evocation. In his mind, he was on stage at Wembly. Mick was in front, strutting across the stage. Ronnie was to his right, smiling, strolling. Wyman was in the back, trying to not be noticed. And Charlie was playing with intensity, his face a mask of indifference.

The Spook’s fingers slid carelessly along the strings. His right hand tamped the strings, creating a playful syncopation.

His mind slowly turned to the problem of Jack Cleveland. The Spook had been given two targets, the second unnecessary if the first panned out.

Well, the first hadn’t panned out.

Onto the next, the Spook thought. His laptop computer caught his eye. All he needed to do was log on to several networks which he still had access to although he was no longer employed by the CIA. With a few well-placed bribes and a few more veiled threats, his contacts had remained, and so had his access.

It wouldn’t take him long to track down the target.

In the meantime, the fans were clamoring for an encore.

40.

“How’s the ravioli?” she asked Liam as she came into the kitchen. When she’d picked him up at her Mom’s, she found out he’d been eating nothing but Frosted Flakes and Pop-Tarts. It was time to get him back on some kind of routine. “Routine” seeming like a terribly strange word to her at the moment.

Liam sat at the end of the table. His fork was in his little hand, an orange plastic cup full of milk next to his plate. There was tomato sauce on his chin, milk on his upper lip.

The All-American boy, she thought.

With the Totally-Messed-Up mother.

She’d had enough, though. It was time to get her shit together. In the short time that this life crisis had started, she’d started doing some serious thinking. And it was time for a drastic overhaul. Loreli watched her son eating his ravioli and she had a heart swoon kind of moment.

She was wasting her time as a legal secretary. She was smart, capable and confident. It was time to do better.

She was going to start taking classes again. She was going to be a lawyer.

But more importantly, she was done with losers forever.No more drinkers. No more drug users. No more losers. Period.

She was going to find the world’s most boring man and marry him. What she really needed, she thought, was an impotent handyman. A guy with a tool belt who would fix everything in her house and then have no desire to get her into the sack.

Yes, that was perfect, she thought.

She turned and went into the bedroom where she’d put the suitcase. She undid the zipper and pulled back the nylon cover.

Her breath momentarily left her.

The money was packed in tightly. Loreli couldn’t believe how much there was. She ran a hand over it and felt the paper lightly scratch the palm of her hand, the rubberbands catching on her palm.

Suddenly, a shaft of fear drove itself into her stomach. She drew her hand back as if it had brushed against a flame. This money was dangerous. But she’d been desperate. What to do now? Take it to the cops? She couldn’t do that. Someone had been shot at the hotel room. She still needed to find out what had happened. Maybe it would be in the papers or on the news. She checked her watch. It was almost five o’clock. She reached across her bed and grabbed the remote control, turned on the television to channel 62. CBS.

She looked back at the money. So much was here. Loreli wracked her brain, trying to think what she should do.

There were really only two options.

One. Keep the money. In that case, it seemed the safest thing would be to rent a bunch of safety deposit boxes and stash the money there. She would have a key and the bank would have a key. That seemed like something that was done in the movies. Not in real life.

But if she did that, she could just go in and grab some money here and there when she needed. She would have to keep it in small enough increments so as to not draw the attention of the IRS. It would be enough to where if she wanted to start her own firm, there would at least be enough there to keep her and Liam from starving.

The second option was to give the money back.

But this option, unbelievably, had even more pitfalls than the first. Number one, to whom was she exactly supposed to return the money?

Was it the mob?

And if it was, how do you go about giving money back to the Mafia, if that’s what it was? You can’t exactly look them up in the yellow pages.

She was kidding herself if she thought this money was come by honestly. It was bad, tainted, dirty money.

And it was in a suitcase on her bed. In her bedroom. In her house.

With a chill, she realized that someone was going to be coming for it sooner or later.

But no, she stopped herself. How could they? She’d been to the hotel room as a hooker. A part-time hooker, granted, but still, a hooker. She hadn’t checked into the room. No one knew who she was.

Someone had possibly been following her but she’d ditched him on the ramp to the freeway. And unless it had been the cops, they wouldn’t be able to trace her license plates or anything like that. And she was sure no one had followed her home from Ann Arbor.

But she still couldn’t shake the fact this was wrong. Here she was talking about turning over a new leaf and in the meantime, she had a suitcase full of stolen money.