Mad Dog Justice (28 page)

“Here we are,” says the driver. “How long you think you’re gonna be?”

“I’m not sure.”

Danny reaches for the door handle but hesitates. He wonders if this is the right thing to do. He knows he’s betraying Roddy by going to the police. But there’s the danger to Angie and the kids. He could be jeopardizing them by letting this go on for even one more day.

Dan closes his eyes and finds himself praying.

Dear Jesus, what should I do? And, Ma, I know you can hear me. Guide me. Tell me what’s right, because I’m lost. I’ve sinned terribly, and I know I’ll pay for what I’ve done. What’s the best thing to do to save our families? They’re all I care about now
.

Time passes. He doesn’t know how long he sits there. He feels a stream of tears on his cheeks. A lump forms in his throat, and he keeps praying. Slowly, from deep inside, he feels calmness spread through him.

A thought—actually, an inspiration—comes to him:
Trust your hunch. Give it one last shot before going to the police. Don’t betray Roddy now
.

He looks up and says to the driver, “Take me back to Arrowwood.”

D
anny points to the syringe and needle lying on the kitchenette counter. His finger looks ludicrous poking from the cast engulfing his right hand. “You think Harris’ll go for this?”

“It’s worth a try. After all, the guy loves truffles, right?”

“And your friend gave you the needle and syringe?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want to risk going back to the office in Bronxville. So I made a trip to the Bronx, to a friend’s clinic.”

“Your friend—the guy who found out about Grange? Or should I say Gargano?”

“That’s the one.”

“Anything new about our fat friend?”

“Nothing.”

Roddy looks at the bottle of Dulcolax and the package of Exlax Ultra. “You sure you wanna do this? I don’t see how this leads to anything.”

“I gotta check it out,” says Dan.

“We’re wasting time.”

“I just have a feeling.”

“And truffles are gonna do it?”

“Every time I’ve been there, he gobbles at least three of them.”

Danny picks up the Dulcolax. “How’s this stuff work?”

“It’s called bisacodyl. It’s a laxative that stimulates the nerves in the colon. At the recommended dose, it works within six to
eight hours.”

“I’m not gonna have
nearly
that long, Roddy.”

“At the hospital, we use an extra-strong preparation to clean patients out before surgery. When I combine this with the Ex-lax, it’ll bring on a massive purge.”

“Ex-lax,” Dan muses. “I remember my father taking it when I was a kid.”

“It’s been around for centuries. Each Ex-lax has fifteen milligrams of sennosides, which is a laxative that comes from senna leaves—a tropical plant. South American natives used it for centuries. And the combination of sennosides and bisacodyl should do the trick.”

Danny picks up the box of Teuscher truffles. “How much this set you back?”

“Twenty-seven bucks, plus the FedEx charge to have it overnighted from the city. You can’t buy this crap just anywhere, you know. I had to call the store and use my credit card.”

“Twenty-seven dollars? For nine lousy truffles?” Dan says, reading the box.

“Your friend’s got fancy taste.”

“Jesus. That’s three bucks a truffle.”

“This should be easy,” Roddy says. “These champagne truffles have a semisoft inside.”

Danny holds the box up and reads aloud. “Our house specialty, world-famous Champagne Truffle made with a champagne cream center surrounded by dark chocolate ganache, covered with milk chocolate and dusted with confectioner’s sugar.”

“Okay,” says Roddy. “I’m ready. You mixed it up real well?”

“Yeah. This place supplies everything. I could cook full meals in this room if I wanted to.”

The Dulcolax was crushed up and dissolved in water; Roddy added a small amount of sugar to mask any lingering chemical taste. The Ex-lax was melted in a small pot. It’s all been mixed
together.

“Now for the injection.”

Roddy sucks the solution into the syringe and injects the liquid into the center of each truffle.

“This remind you of anything?” Danny asks.

“Yeah. Slipping that Mickey Finn to Grange.”

“How long you think this’ll take before Harris is running for the toilet?”

“Each truffle has at least three times the dose you’d need to bring on a movement. If he downs two or three, it’ll take maybe half an hour.”

“And I’ll be able to get into his computer.”

“Dan, what if Harris
is
involved in some money scheme … playing a rich man’s money game? So what? What could it have to do with us? And what’s the connection to
me
?”

“I don’t know, Roddy.”

“S
o how was Sheepshead Bay?” Danny asks as they sit in lounge chairs.

“Leo’s is gone and so’s the Johnny Fell Inn.”

“Figures.”

“There’s a much bigger mix of ethnics now—Latinos, Greeks, Russians, Asians.”

“Are our houses still there?”

“Yup. I saw them both. It felt lousy. I have only bad memories of my place.”

“You didn’t have a home, Roddy.”

“
You
did. I always felt at home at your place.”

Danny swallows hard. “We were Ma’s
best boys
,” he says. His eyes grow wet, and he blinks away tears.

“You know where it felt good?” Roddy asks. “I went back to that rock on the esplanade where we took our oath.”

“The same one?”

“The very same one. It’s still there … solid. Like our friendship.”

Danny’s eyes redden. Tears form at the corners. He says nothing.

Roddy feels a lump form in his throat. He lets his thoughts stream back to Tracy and the kids and the life they’ve had.

“Roddy, we’re so over.”

He peers at Dan, who sits on a recliner and looks out the window at the bare trees swaying in a winter wind.

A minute later, Roddy says, “We’re just wasting time with this Harris thing.”

“What can we lose?”

R
oddy glances to his right.

Danny looks ghostly sitting in the passenger’s seat as they head north on 684. Though they’re on a highway with three lanes going in each direction, there are no overhead lights. The dark landscape on each side of the road reminds Roddy of the night they drove on the Taconic State Parkway with Kenny and Grange in the backseat.

There’s something so strange about riding to where they’re now going. Roddy once again hears the words of Bravo Company’s Sergeant Dawson: “
Once a man’s jumped from an airplane, there ain’t nothin’ in the world can scare him, nothin’ at all.”

If Roddy ever believed it, he doesn’t anymore. They might be words a young man could live by, words he could place abiding faith in so many years ago, but not now that he’s lived forty-six years. There was a time when he could eat snakes and tree bark to survive, but those days are long gone. No mercy and no fear was the mantra back then, but not now. Roddy doesn’t believe any of it.

Not when he’s close to losing Tracy and the kids, his only reason for living.

Not when this whole mess made him mistrust Danny, his lifelong and closest friend.

Not after killing two men a short distance from where he,
Tracy, Sandy, and Tom spend their summers swimming, fishing, and hiking.

Not after living through the fear of thinking the police would discover the grave and lost cartridge at Snapper Pond. And he and Dan would be tracked down.

Not after he’s been running for his life.

Roddy knows one thing is certain in this life: you live with the consequences of your choices.

He recalls when he spoke with Tom after the kid hot-wired a car. “
Tom, there’s a little voice inside your head. It tells you what’s right or wrong. Without anyone lecturing you—me, Mom, anyone. You’ve gotta listen to that voice because it’ll tell you the truth.”

And there’s a voice inside Roddy’s head at this moment. It’s crying out to be heard, and Roddy can no longer ignore it. Glancing again at Danny, he says, “Dan …”

“Yeah?”

“I have a confession.”

“What’s that?” Dan peers at him; his lips are twisted and his forehead is furrowed.

“I’m ashamed to say it, but for a while, I didn’t trust you. I thought maybe you might’ve been in on all this. I can’t explain why I thought that way. I was confused and scared and saw everything falling apart, and I blamed you.” He feels he’s choking on his words. “And I’m sorry to say there were times when I wondered if you had a hand in what was going on. I just want you to know that.”

“I know it, Roddy.”

“More than that, I wanna apologize.”

Danny sighs. “Remember that argument we had at St. Joe’s that morning, before Morgan popped in?”

“Yeah.”

“I blamed you for getting us in this mess. I was wrong, dead wrong. You were right. We had no way out with Grange and
Kenny. I was trying, I guess, to clear myself of any responsibility. I was laying it all on you. I’m sorry I said what I did.”

“Forget it.”

“I can’t, Roddy. And there’s another thing. Since that argument, even before that morning, I had the feeling I’d fucked up. No, even more than that. I felt like I’d betrayed you.”

“
What
?”

“I felt like … I just felt like I’d undone everything in our lives. I was too hot to trot—to get into the restaurant business. I wasn’t careful. I let my ego get in the way of common sense. It clouded my thinking. I should have lived by my own financial philosophy—the numbers never lie. I should’ve looked into Kenny’s finances more carefully, and I didn’t.”

Danny sighs and shakes his head.

“What it really boiled down to was simple and stupid: I let my ambition, some greedy idea that I wanted
more
in my life … I let
that
make the decision for me, for both of us. So we ended up in McLaughlin’s, in that goddamned snake pit, and here we are. It was
my
fault.”

“So, Dan, what can we say? Right or wrong, we made our choices and live with them.”

They fall silent. Roddy drives on for a few minutes.

“You used cash for this heap?” Danny asks.

“Yup. Nothing but Ben Franklins.”

“Not easy to do these days. Everyone wants credit cards.”

“Not this guy in Rye Brook. He’s rinky-dink … completely off the books. He rents out a few old models. I gave him two hundred for this junk pile. No questions asked. I said I’d have it back tomorrow.”

“You have dinner?” Danny asks.

“Yeah.”

“In the atrium?”

“You got it.”

“People see you there?”

“Uh-huh. And I made sure to charge it to my room.”

“And then what?”

“I went back and waited for your call.”

“So there’s a record,” says Danny.

“Right. And you?”

“I ordered a couple of burgers in my room.”

More silence. The parkway is dark and lightly traveled.

“It’s funny how you called it with Harris,” says Roddy.

“He’s a greedy fuck. It’s his character.”

“The scorpion and the frog thing, huh?”

“It’s his nature,” Danny says.

Roddy veers into the right lane, still driving at a steady fifty-five. Not a chance of getting pulled over for speeding.

“So here we go again,” Dan says.

“Yeah, but we’re not gonna do murder.”

“Jesus, don’t put it like that.”

“Can’t kid ourselves, Dan. We did what we did and we gotta live with it.” Roddy pauses and then says, “Funny, isn’t it, how the Continental Towers thing tells the story?”

“Yeah, but it all came out because you went to Omar and Crystal.”

Roddy shakes his head. “I keep thinking about her. I can’t get her out of my mind. She’d still be alive if I hadn’t visited her.”

Roddy drives on. It isn’t far until they reach the exit.

“You confident about the numbers?”

“One hundred percent.”

“It looked like hieroglyphics to me. All that debit and credit crap drives me up a wall.”

“We all have our areas of expertise. For you, it’s the human body. For me, it’s bank records and balance sheets.”

“You sure he’s home?”

“I called on my disposable and he picked up. Then I hung up.”

“And he has no idea we’re coming?”

“None.”

“What if someone else is there?”

“We turn around and come back another night. His wife winters in Palm Beach, so she won’t be there. He likes to work alone, especially at night. And the help doesn’t work on Wednesdays.”

“How do you know all this?”

“He told me when I dropped by—unannounced, of course—to thank him for his kindness when I was in the hospital. And we talked about my getting back to doing some more work for him. That’s when he ate the truffles.”

“How many times’ve you been there?”

“Since I’ve known him, at least four. He likes working at home rather than going to the city. He has an office upstairs in the house.”

“Anything else I should know?”

“Just that he thinks I’m gonna invest money in one of his projects. That’s what I told him when I showed up with the truffles.”

“Greed’s an amazing thing, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s an insatiable appetite,” Dan says. “Like you said, it’s his nature.”

“Reminds me of Grange,” Roddy says, picturing the loan shark’s protruding lower lip, his hangdog dewlaps, heavy-lidded eyes, rotund belly, and sausage-like fingers. And the huge star sapphire ring he wore, now sitting at the bottom of Snapper Pond, along with three .45 caliber brass casings and the gun.

But there’s that one missing shell casing
.

“Don’t remind me of the fat bastard, Roddy. Or of Kenny, either.”

“Greed amazes me, Dan. It drives people to incredible lengths.”

“I know. I see it every day with clients. People making tons of money, who’ll never have a financial worry, even if they live to be a hundred, and they risk it all trying to cheat the government out
of a few bucks.”

“Greed’s the most powerful force in human nature.”

“Even more than sex?”

“It’s right up there. For some people, money’s an aphrodisiac.”