Oasis of Night (9 page)

“My cafe is open to anybody who can pay for the privilege of sitting at a table. I have no reason to keep her out.” Not strictly true, but I'd be damned if I'd let him know that.

“And your bartender?”

“Is none of your business.”

“Ah.” He smiled faintly and applied himself to his soda. “So it is as I suspected.” He shrugged. “I cannot fault his reasoning. The Fayre girl makes a wonderful screen, but I would caution you, Mr. Stoyles, against keeping dangerous pets.”

He was beginning to irritate me. “You got something to say, or did you just come in here to play word games?”

“The young policeman, Constable Picco.”

“Yeah.”

“He is much closer than you think.”

“So he's still alive.”

“Without a doubt, Mr. Stoyles. The… parties to whom he gave offense are merely keeping him out of circulation for a little while. For his own good, you might say.”

That made me laugh out loud. “The last time I checked, Bull Parsons couldn't lay hands on five hundred bucks even in his wildest dreams.”

“I never mentioned Mr. Parsons.” Octavian took a look at his watch. “As a newcomer to the city, you probably don't know about the caves that exist at various points in the Southside Hills. I can say nothing for certain, Mr. Stoyles, but if you chose to look there, it might lead you in an interesting direction.” He stood and put on his hat. “Good day.” He bowed once and was gone, weaving his way through the tables to the door.

A shadow fell over my table: Julie Fayre. “Mind if I join you, Jack?”

“By all means.”

She eased into the chair and spent several moments arranging herself, moving her chair so we were sitting at right angles to each other and close enough to touch. “I can't thank you enough for introducing me to Chris. He really is something, Jack.”

I pretended not to understand. “Yeah, he's a great bartender. I'm lucky to have found him. Most guys his age are overseas.”

“Mm.” She leaned close to me, her hair brushing my shoulder. “You're quite the fortress of solitude, aren't you?”

“I don't follow you.”

“Well….” She smiled faintly and stroked my forearm. It seemed to be her main party piece. “You work here in the cafe all day, you're alone all night. I just think it must get a little lonely.” She laid her hand over mine and interlaced our fingers. “I'm not so bad once you get to know me, Jack.”

“Is that so?” I pretended to scratch an imaginary itch on my neck—anything to get free of her.

“You don't like me very much, do you?”

“Oh, I wouldn't say that.”

Her hand began stroking my leg, smoothing the fabric of my pants, crawling up my thigh. “You and I should be friends, Jack. After all, we have the same objectives.”

“Do we—Miss Fayre, could you not do that?”

“Do what?” She tilted her head close to me, just as her hand closed around my balls, squeezing gently. Her tongue slid out to wet her lips. “Oh, Jack, I think we could be such close friends.” She was good with her mitts, I'd give her that. In seconds she had me completely unzipped and her hand was in my shorts. The tablecloth hid what she was doing, and it's not like I could have moved, anyway. Every molecule of blood I owned had gone straight to my cock. “It's important that we understand each other, you and I.” Her hand worked me, her thumb slipping over and under, spreading my body's moisture.

I ducked my head to hide my expression, the taut anticipation in my face. Come to think of it, I probably looked like Alphonsus Picco's crucifixion picture right about then. “I don't… mmm… follow you.”

“It would be a shame—” Her mouth was close to my ear, and her tongue flicked out, spreading heat. “—if something horrible happened to Chris DuBois.”

 

 

T
HE
ONE
question that kept going around and around in my mind had to do with Johnny Mahoney; why was he killed? It made sense that the Greeks would have knifed him in retaliation for the death of their shipmate, sure—but where did Bull Parsons fit into all of this? And what about Alphonsus Picco? It was likely the five hundred dollars was given to him as payment for letting Bull Parsons walk free, except that made no sense either. Picco was the kind of cop who would write a ticket if he saw you spitting on the sidewalk; it was highly unlikely he'd simply look the other way while Parsons walked. The only explanation was that Picco
hadn't
looked the other way—that Picco might have been in the lockup when Parsons was brought in, but that he wasn't there when Parsons escaped. I decided to pay a call on Billy Ricketts to get some further information.

I found him standing near the water cooler in the Constabulary headquarters, refilling paper cups and downing the contents as quickly as he could. All the windows in the place were open, but there was hardly a breeze to stir the blinds, and the several electric fans in evidence were trying and failing to stem the heat.

“I don't know why people think this is a cold place.” Ricketts waved me ahead of him into his office.

“Maybe because they've been here in February?” I couldn't help grinning.

“It's hot enough to split the goddamn rocks out there today.” He mopped his forehead with his sleeve and collapsed into his chair with palpable relief. “What can I do for you?”

I explained what I knew about Picco and the money, and I asked Ricketts point-blank, did Picco seem the sort of officer to take a bribe in return for letting someone walk?

“No. Don't get me wrong, Stoyles. On his good days Picco would try the patience of a saint. He's snotty, arrogant, and he thinks he knows better than anybody else. But he's a good cop, and I don't believe for a minute that he'd take money to let someone like Bull Parsons walk.”

“So someone is trying to make us think that Picco is crooked.”

“Might be.” Stoyles reached behind him and took down a thick ledger, which he spread open on the desk and turned so I could see it. “Picco has been on the force for five years. He's had a fair few arrests. He keeps his nose clean and he's always on time. Never misses a day, not for sickness nor nothing else.” Stoyles pointed to a ledger entry, his thick finger underlining where he wanted me to look. “July 24th of last year, we had an incident. Young fellow off one of the boats had too much liquor and climbed up on top of the courthouse with a loaded rifle. How he got up there, God only knows.”

I'd seen the courthouse and I had to agree. “What happened?”

“Few of my men spent the afternoon and a good part of the night staked out, waiting for him to come down. Must have gone on like that for hours. It was Picco who finally did what nobody else had the balls to do.” Ricketts shook his head. “He climbed up and talked the fellow down. I don't know what he said. I asked him and he wouldn't tell me. Went up and got him down, not even a shot fired. I offered him a commendation for that, but he didn't want it.” Ricketts closed the ledger, and for a moment, perhaps not even that, I had the strange sense that he was close to tears, and it was weird. Ricketts wasn't the kind who went in for theatrics, and the whole thing had that kind of feel for me, like he was putting it on. “He's hard to get along with. He's as stubborn as a mule. There's times when I'd like to knock him arse over teakettle just for being such a bloody pain in my backside, and if he's got a goddamn friend in the world, I've yet to meet him.” Ricketts sighed deeply. “He's a good cop, Stoyles. I'd hate for anything to happen to him.”

“Do you have any idea where he might be?” I told him what Octavian had said, about the caves in the Southside Hills. “Could he be there? Is there anywhere in the city where someone would hide him, if they wanted to keep him on ice?”

“Oh, there's lots of places.” Ricketts leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “Stoyles, there are houses up there on Temperance Street that have tunnels leading out of the basement and down to the waterfront. There's old buildings down on Water Street with false walls and ceilings in them, and crawl spaces underground. Picco could be anywhere. I certainly wouldn't take the word of Jonah Octavian as gospel—but it wouldn't hurt to take a look.”

A constable knocked at Ricketts's door, then stuck his head inside the office. “Someone here to see you, Sergeant. Picco's sister. She says someone broke into their house overnight and stole some money.”

 

 

I
FIGURED
it would be best to wait for cover of darkness before venturing over to the south side of town. The last thing I needed was for some overzealous neighbor to come snooping around before I got a decent chance to check things out. I didn't necessarily trust Octavian any more than I trusted anyone, really, but I didn't see the harm in having a look around.

I got lucky with more than just the dark, because as soon as the sun went down, a thick, fishy-smelling fog, the likes of which is legendary in these parts, dropped to the ground like a big wet curtain. You couldn't see a hand in front of your face—let alone an ex-pat American poking around the waterfront.

I didn't want to risk my car being seen and identified, so I packed a few things into a rucksack and made the journey on foot, heading west on Water Street toward the South Side. What Octavian had called caves were actually storage bunkers for ammunition to feed the great guns at Fort Amherst, located at the harbor's mouth. Each bunker was equipped with a set of double doors, and each had a full complement of locks. In short, it was the perfect place to hide someone, at least in the short term. Nobody ever went in there unless the city was under direct attack. These days, the threat was much more likely to come from the roving U-boat packs that roamed the coastline, looking for a gap in the island's defenses, but the
Kriegsmarine
rarely came too close to the harbor, at least not since the installation of an antisubmarine net across the Narrows.

Ricketts had provided me with a rough, hand-drawn map showing the approximate location of the caves. I knew Picco could be in any one of them, or somewhere else entirely. The best thing to do under the circumstances was to check each one in turn, so I did, while the fog turned into a kind of misting drizzle that soon soaked me to the skin. The doors gave me surprisingly little trouble, especially given the lock-picking skills I'd learned from Packy Burns back in Philadelphia. I held my breath in hopes that the military police wouldn't take a sudden interest, and prayed the beam of my tiny flashlight wasn't visible beyond a couple feet. The last thing I needed was a full military escort, arriving with sirens roaring and guns blazing, just as I was breaking into a munitions bunker. I'd be out of Newfoundland so fast my head would spin.

The first three bunkers yielded nothing but the smell of mold and gun grease; the fourth bunker had been sealed some time ago, the entranceway bricked over. I hit luck on the fifth. The door was wooden and, thanks to the rivulet of water cascading down the cliff face, had rotted nicely. I popped open the padlock with a screwdriver and kicked a hole in the door big enough to get my fist in. There was some business with deadbolts, and I swore a blue streak for a couple minutes while I fiddled around with that, but finally I was in.

The place was as dark as the proverbial tomb, so I had no idea how far back it went. I reached out my arms, but I couldn't feel the walls, and I couldn't feel anything else either—clearly it was empty of munitions. I shuffled my feet along the floor, but it was slow going. My small flashlight didn't penetrate very far into the darkness ahead, and the absence of sound was disorienting.

I stopped and looked at my watch, and then I heard it: a small noise, a sound like someone clearing their throat. “Hello?” There was a scuffling noise to the rear of the cave, and I moved toward it. “Picco, is that you? It's Stoyles, Jack Stoyles. Where are you?” No one answered, but I heard that same sound again, deep and guttural. On a hunch I shone my flashlight toward the back of the cave, and that's when I saw him, Alphonsus Picco, bound hand and foot and gagged, lying slumped against the damp rock wall. His uniform was gone, and he was wearing civilian-style trousers and a long-sleeved shirt. When I reached to undo his gag he scooted backward on his heels, the fear in his eyes unmistakable. “I'm not going to hurt you, I swear.” I reached out for him and untied the knot at the back of his head, then moved to undo the bonds holding his hands and feet. His wrists were raw from the pressure of the ropes; he yelped in pain when he tried to stretch his legs out to their normal extension. “How long have you been here?” I handed him my canteen full of cold water, and he drank thirstily.

“Is my sister all right? She doesn't know where I am. She needs to know I'm all right.”

I assured him she was fine and got busy tending to his wounds. The weals on his wrists weren't as deep as they'd initially appeared, and I was able to clean them with a little water and apply a dressing. I filled Picco in on the situation, and when he was finished, I asked the question I'd be dreading: who had given him the money?

“I don't know nothing about no money. If that was dropped off at the house, it's got nothing to do with me.”

“Your sister said that your mother was dead, but could the money have come from your father?”

Picco stared at me like I was insane. “My father's dead, boy. There's just me and Norma.” And, when I told him what his sister had said, he explained, “Yes, well—my father was a drunk. He worked down there at the rail yard. He went to work drunk, and he came home drunk. One day he stepped in front of a locomotive that never had time to stop.” Picco's gaze slid away from mine. “We told Norma he went overseas in the war.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't know.”