Killing The Rat (An Organized Crime Thriller) (20 page)

Casually, as if reaching for his wallet or swatting at a fly, he slapped her across the face. Her head snapped back. Her face felt numb. Loreli slowly felt the sting fade, but the shock of it remained. She couldn’t remember the last time a man had hit her. Liam’s father. But then, she’d hit back. Loreli felt a surge of anger wash over her. She strained against the chair. Tried to raise her arms to hit back.

But it was no use.

The man slapped her again.

The pain was white-hot. The stinging sensation remained. Loreli tasted blood in her mouth. Her teeth had sunk into the inside of her mouth. She wanted to spit, but the duct tape was across her mouth. She swallowed the blood.

Right now, she had to use her wits to get her out of here. To get upstairs. To get Liam. She focused. Braced herself against the next slap.

The man’s hand came forward and Loreli turned her face, hoping to take some of the force off the blow. Instead, the man’s hand stopped at her face, grabbed the duct tape, and ripped it from her face. The tape stung as it pulled against her skin, but the pain was minimal. She tried to spit, but her mouth was dry.

“Where is it?” the younger man asked.

“In the trunk of my car,” she said. Her voice sounded weak and feeble. The words clumped together. She realized her lips were swollen. Her tongue felt thick.

This time, the slap was harder. Her head rocked back. She felt blood flow freely from her mouth.

“Try again,” the man said.

“I haven’t taken a dime. I put it in the trunk of my car and drove to Carl Ryson’s house.”

The younger man stepped back into the darkened gloom of the basement and spoke in hushed tones for a moment with the heavyset man. The younger man climbed the stairs. He closed the door. She listened intently as the floorboards above her creaked. She heard distant voices, but couldn’t make out who they belonged to. She heard the older man’s heavy breathing from the other side of the basement.

“Mr. Romano?” she asked hesitantly. She thought she heard the breathing catch for a brief second. But then it resumed.

“Look, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know it was your money. I heard the man get shot in the next room and I ran. I took the money. My boyfriend owed a drug dealer some money so I took it. It was stupid. Stupid. But I haven’t taken a single dollar. It was all right there in my trunk. I swear to God.”

Silence.

And then the basement door opened and the younger man walked down the stairs. He moved slowly, as if he was tired. But as he emerged, Loreli saw that he was carrying something on his back. A chair. A toy chair. With a teddy bear on it.

Loreli realized with horror that it wasn’t a teddy bear.

It was Liam.

The younger man set the chair down directly in front of Loreli. She saw that Liam was duct taped in the same manner as she was. Except he had on a blindfold.

The man in the silk T-shirt stood, pulled a gun with a silencer on it from behind his waistband. He casually put it against Liam’s head.

“Now,” he said. “Let’s try this again.”

54.

“Hello, Tommy,” Amanda Rierdon said. “This just hasn’t been a good week for the Abrocci family, has it?” She looked down at the dead man. The resemblance was truly amazing. It was like the same guy had been killed twice— in two different locations.

She stood in the middle of Loreli Karstens’ living room. The scene was your typical shoot-out mess: furniture turned over. Broken glass. Blood everywhere. Tommy Abrocci’s body sprawled on the ground, surrounding by blood. The body of an unidentified black male nearby. Blood around him, too. A third man, a white male, nearby. He’d been shot in the chest.

Amanda was beginning to admire the hell out of this Loreli Karstens woman. Jesus, she came out of a mob hit in Ann Arbor, and now a virtual blood bath in her own home. And she was gone. Not a trace of her.

Amanda looked around the house. One step up from trailer trash, she thought. A shitty little house in shitty little Warren. The furniture, what was left of it, was strictly JCPenney- wood veneer over flimsy fiberboard. The kind of stuff that looks decent new and a year later it’s sitting out on the curb. Amanda idly wondered if the home at least been neat and clean. The kitchen was. As were the two back bedrooms. So at least she wasn’t a slob. But something told her that this woman had a lot more going for her than it looked. She was a secretary at a good a law firm. She had a son. And she did some part-time hooking.

Now she had Tommy. But she didn’t have the tapes. The tapes that Tommy had made of Vincenzo Romano. The stuff that would lock up the bastard and throw away the key. The stuff that would tack on a few extra consonants after Rierdon’s name.

A promotion. More money.

And a fringe benefit or two.

Amanda turned back and surveyed the damage on display in the living room. What a thing, she thought.

She knelt down by Tommy.

“So what’d you do with the tapes asshole?”

She looked up to find Rupert staring at her.

“What?”

Rupert looked at her nervously. “We talked to her boss, Carl Ryson, he says he hasn’t seen or heard from her since work on Friday.”

“You spoke to Ryson?”

Rupert said he did.

“And he claims Loreli never called him. Never made any kind of contact with him?”

“That’s right.”

“Bullshit. She’s scared. She’s running around, not sure where to go. She would want a lawyer and a good one.”

“Ryson’s one of the city’s best criminal defense attorneys.”

“Believe me, I know who he is.”

***

They rode in silence. The night was still, traffic light. Amanda watched the cars pass them by as Rupert expertly drove the car. At last, he asked the question that no one had brought up in some time.

“Still no word from Macaleer?”

Rierdon looked out the car window. It had been a long day. A long week. A long road.

And to think that despite her best efforts, her best work, it could all be undone by a lackey she had been ragging on for more than a year.

It was probably that karma bullshit.

Macaleer, she thought. If I ever get a hold of you, I’ll wring your neck.

“Shut up and drive,” she said to Rupert.

55.

Jack circled the Romano compound in silence. His black jeans and black long-sleeved shirt blended into the surrounding darkness. It was a cool night, with a full moon and a few hundred stars. The wind whipped off of Lake St. Claire and the occasional car heading down Lakeshore Drive illuminated the carefully landscaped grounds of Romano’s estate.

Jack knew that the security was intense. The perimeter would be guarded by several laser trip beams, maybe even some heat sensors and certainly plenty of video cameras, some equipped with infrared technology.

The job at hand didn’t require stealth, though, in fact, quite the opposite. It was important, however, for Jack to cross the grounds and get back to the groundskeeping cabin at the back of the estate. Now, he ran, low, across the grass and slid behind a low rock wall. Here, he was blocked from view and the probing sensors of Romano’s security system.

The Romano estate was laid out parallel to the waterfront.

Jack was now on the northern side of the property, crawling on his belly toward the lake.

In less than a minute, he was there. He peeked over the low wall and looked at the house. Because it looked out onto the lake, Romano had no window treatments, at least none that Jack could see. Anyone with a boat and a good pair of binoculars could see the front rooms of Romano’s estate. Now, at night, Jack could look right in.

He saw no one.

He picked the flimsy lock on the groundskeeping shed and slipped inside. His eyes took in the shed’s contents: several riding mowers, two pushmowers, several gas-powered trimmers and edgers. There were pruning shears as well as bags of fertilizer, bags of seed and mulch.

With a small penlight, he carefully made his way to the back of the shed, where he found what he was looking for.

The gas cans were lined up from right to left. There were five smaller ones, then one large can that most likely held at least twenty gallons. Jack carried the smaller cans to the front of the shed and then peeked out.

There was still no movement. There should have been at least one guard outside, but Jack had watched him go in the house a minute ago. They usually went in to take a leak, but sometimes they went up to the kitchen and got a beer or smoked a cigar before making their way back outside. When Jack had kept an eye on the house earlier, he’d seen the guard pretty much get drunk by the end of his shift. He hoped that’s what this one was doing, too.

Jack pulled out his silenced .38 and trained it on the two videocameras mounted at the corner of the house. One pointed to the south, one to the north. But Jack figured that both were motion-activated.

He would have no more than sixty seconds to pull it off.

Jack casually lifted the gun and fired, shattering the lenses of both cameras. The sound itself of the bullets hitting the cameras was minimal, as was the tinkling of glass on the patio bricks.

Jack trotted out from the shed with three of the gas cans. He opened the first one, splashed gasoline on the edge of the house as well as the wooden patio furniture. He started to turn back toward the shed, but then spotted the outdoor grill and its twin propane tanks underneath. He debated for a moment whether or not he had time, then decided that he did. He worked quickly, unhooking both cables from the propane tanks and opening both valves. The propane gushed from the tanks with twin hisses. He opened the second and third cans and sloshed gasoline onto the propane tanks, then in a trail back to the shed. He opened the fourth and splashed the 20 gallon can with the rest of the gas. He also opened its top.

Jack heard voices outside and figured that the preliminary investigation into the disabling of the videocameras was about to begin. He double-checked to make sure that he hadn’t spilled any gas on himself or his clothes then made his way to the low wall which had given him shelter before.

He took out the rag he’d found in the shed and that he’d dabbed in the first gas can. He took out a lighter, lit the edge and tossed it into the middle of the gasoline trail. One rolling flame went toward the house, the other deeper into the shed.

Jack was halfway across the lawn when he heard two small explosions followed by one that was much, much louder.

He figured he had another sixty seconds.

56.

The first thing she noticed was the checkerboard, its edge poking out from the lower shelf of an end table in Carl Ryson’s impressive living room. Ryson himself sat on the center cushion of the leather couch, Amanda in the club chair across from him. Rupert stood silently behind both of them, his hands crossed in front of him, like a defensive back ready to plug a hole should a running back break through the line.

“So, Detroit’s premiere power attorney,” Amanda said, “Linked behind closed doors to Vincenzo Romano’s Gibraltar Enterprises-” Ryson’s face twitched every so slightly, and Amanda caught it. “-likes to play checkers in his spare time?”

Ryson, having recovered, said, “My nephews were over earlier. They beat me eight out of ten games.”

“Eight out of ten?” Amanda asked. “I would have thought with your strategic ability, your penchant for slick maneuvering that you would have done better.”

“It was just a game and they are kids, after all,” Ryson said, an easy smile on his face.

“What a coincidence,” Amanda said. “Loreli Karstens and her son Liam are missing, and her boss just happens to have had a nephew or two over. Too bad they weren’t here at the same time, they could’ve played together. It would have been a regular kid party in Carl Ryson’s stately home.”

“I love children,” Ryson said, shrugging his shoulders. “They’re so much more honest and trustworthy than adults.”

Amanda said nothing, her eyes boring into Ryson. They had dug around Ryson’s background as best they could in the limited time they had, and she was playing a hunch.

Ryson stood. “Speaking of children, it’s way past my bedtime. Are you planning on charging me with anything Special Agent Rierdon?”

“I’m planning on charging you with racketeering, conspiracy to commit fraud, perjury and murder. Just not tonight.”

“In that case—”

Amanda’s cell phone chirped and she snatched it to her ear. She held it there as she listened, then raced from Ryson’s home, leaving the giant oak door wide open.

“Where to?” Rupert asked, crashing in behind the wheel.

“Vincenzo Romano’s house. He’s having a party and didn’t invite us. We’ll just have to crash it.”

57.

The blast rattled the windows throughout the Romano mansion. Even the three foot by two foot basement windows. Someone had spray painted them with white paint and installed security bars. But now, the blast shook them so badly that one of them cracked.

Loreli heard Liam whimper and started to say something to calm him down but just then, the big man in the corner rose from his seat and thundered up the stairs. The other man, the one in the T-shirt, followed him.

Loreli didn’t know how long she’d have. She had to get out. She had to get Liam free.

She tipped the chair over and squirmed on her side toward the window that had cracked. She moved like a spastic snake, herking and jerking the chair, moving it a few inches at a time. She cut her fingers and legs on the glass until she managed to get a fairly good sized chunk of glass in her hands. She turned it, but too quickly and it sliced a furrow in her index finger. The glass became slippery with blood and Loreli almost dropped it, but she got a better hold and slowly pressed it against the duct tape.

She yelped as she cut her forearm. The blood was everywhere now, but she kept sawing at the duct tape. The man had wrapped it several times, so she had at least three, four, maybe even five layers to get through. It was slow going.