Sinner (6 page)
I don't know, should I, Billy?
One look, baby. Only one.
Thunk, thunk, thunk
.
Darcy's eyes snapped open. The clock read 1:23 in bold red letters. She'd had a nightmare. They came and went every few months, not like they used to.
She flipped her pillow over so the cool side would rest against her cheek. Wouldn't really call them nightmares anymore. Just recurring dreams. They hardly botheredâ
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Darcy gasped and pushed herself up. Had she actually
heard
that?
Rat-a-tat-tat. Thunk, thunk.
Her heart slammed into her throat. Someone was beating on the house. The front door?
Thunk, thunk . . . crash
.
Darcy threw the sheets off and slid her feet to the floor. Someone or something was beating on the front door. She lived in a small two-bedroom house surrounded by three acres just outside of Lewiston. She'd chosen the place because it was affordable and private. Animals were known to come in now and then, but this sounded too . . . regular . . .
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!
The sound was now loud enough to wake the dead. Like a hammer.
She jumped from the bed and whirled, looking for . . . unsure of what to look for. A weapon, but she had no gun. A knife.
Slow down, Darcy. It's a deer or a raccoon. Just go out and take a look
.
Thunk, thunk, thunk
.
The sound had shifted. Darcy reached a trembling hand for the bed-room doorknob, turned it slowly, and eased the door open.
She crouched and hurried into the dark living room on the balls of her feet, eyes peeled and pointed toward the front door.
Bang
.
Just one, but it was loud and it was most definitely the sound of some-thing hitting the front door. Right there, not ten feet from where Darcy stood in the dark. Then another one.
Bang!
Move, move, go,
go
. Go where? She stood fixed to the floor with fear. Should she call out? What?
Hey you? What do you want?
No.
Should she call the police? Yes. Yes, the police. And tell them what? The thoughts crashing through her mind were chased off by another loud
bang
.
There was a window that looked out onto the front door from the breakfast nook on her left. Without allowing herself any more delay, Darcy crept to the window, carefully spread two of the blinds, and peered out into the night.
There was a large man at her door dressed in a black trench coat. He held a hammer the length of his arm and was sealing her in with planks and long nails through the door.
Thunk, thunk
.
Had
sealed her doorway.
The man stood back, lowered the huge hammer. Slowly, as if it were controlled by small electric motors, his head turned and looked in her direction.
Darcy's blood turned to ice.
NOT EVERYONE knew where in Atlantic City Ricardo Muness could be found, but Billy did. He knew because he'd been in the office at the back of the Lady Luck Hotel and Casino twice before. Once with Anthony Sacks, making a desperate and successful plea to double his credit from $150,000, and again three months later to be told that he would be defending that same scumbag, Anthony Sacks, who had vouched for his credit worthiness.
Tonight he went alone, knowing that his chances of leaving the Lady Luck with all four limbs intact were smaller than a blind throw of the dice at the craps table.
He hadn't changed his shirt or the black slacks since leaving the court-room. Personal hygiene, dress, foodânone of these rated high on his list of priorities today.
Survival went straight to the top spot. Self-preservation was the only thing on his mind, gnawing the edges of his brain into frayed pasta.
He walked down a dingy hall behind the casino, ducked into a stair-well, and descended to the underground level.
After a series of motions and objections thrown about by his own client and the prosecution, the judge had dismissed the jury and demanded counsel meet her in her chambers immediately.
She was curious as to Billy's tactics in the courtroom, even wondered if he hadn't pulled off a brilliant defense in what she thought had been a fore-gone trial. The jury would have seen through the last witness, she thought.
You could go places, Counselor. Get a grip on your life. And put on a clean
shirt the next time you stand before a judge.
But she didn't say any of it. She only expressed her dismay at his antics in her courtroom and demanded that prosecution and defense present closing arguments next. No more motions, no more surprise witnesses, this case was going to the jury room first thing Monday.
So agreed.
It no longer mattered. Billy wasn't going to be around Monday morning or any morning, for that matter.
“Can I help you?” A hand on his chest stopped him.
“Yes, counselor of Anthony Sacks. I have to see Ricardo Muness immediately.”
“He knows you're coming?” The man was dressed in a blue pinstripe suit that looked completely out of place in the dingy hall.
“If he's as smart as I think he is, he does.”
“Wait here.” He stepped back in the shadows, spoke softly into a cell phone, then emerged.
“No.”
“No? What do you mean, no?”
“It means you have about ten seconds before I break your face. Leave.”
“Tell Muness that I have $526,000 dollars for him. If he refuses it, I will assume he intends for me to have it. The choice is his.”
“You don't understand the word
no
, I take it.”
“And I take it that you're about as stupid as a sack of air. Have it your way.” Billy spun and headed back up the stairs.
He made it all the way into the main casino before the suited muscle caught him by the arm from behind.
“This way.”
A single look in the man's eyes told him that the guy's head really was about as empty as a sack of air.
Ricardo Muness sat behind the pale desk that had become synonymous with Billy's image of the man. Bleached maple. Like bone. Otherwise everything about the man was dark. Boots, goatee, slicked hair, tanned skin. Even the dark glasses that covered his eyes.
“Sit,” he said softly.
Billy sat in one of two black leather chairs and stared at Atlantic City's wealthiest underground financier.
Nothing. Not a whisper of the man's thoughts.
Glasses
.
Okay, well, that was new. So he needed to actually see a person's eye-balls to hear their thoughts. Billy crossed his legs and nonchalantly dried his palms on his thighs. Over the last six hours his focus had been split between the keys into cyberspace that Sacks had given him, and the phenomenon that was opening his mind to the world's thoughts.
Between the two he'd discovered just how badly one could sweat when truly freaked out.
“I understand you have a death wish,”Muness said.
“Is that what you heard? No, sir. I did what I knew you would want me to do given the information I was able to obtain.”
“Never assume to know my mind.”
The order struck Billy as a little too direct. Muness knew about his new talent?
“Then maybe I was mistaken,” he said. “I could leave now if you wish.”
“Or?”
“Or I could tell you about the money Anthony Sacks stole from you.”
“And?”
“And show you how to retrieve it.”
“How much?”
“Five hundred twenty-six thousand. And change.”
“You missed some.”
Billy felt his face flush. “What do you mean?”
“He's taken five hundred and thirty-seven thousand from me in the last twelve months. Eleven thousand of that was a loan he never paid back. The rest is in a bank in Belize, under my watch.”
The fact that Sacks probably didn't consider the eleven thousand as stolen accounted for the disparity. But Muness knew about the money anyway.
“So you've come all this way to return money that is already in my hands?” the man said.
“Evidently.”
The man stared at him through the dark glasses. It was almost as if he really did know about Billy's gift and was playing him.
“We have a problem, my friend.”
“We? Or me?”
“For the moment, we. There are those in my organization that know about our little arrangement. Which means I am obligated to follow through with the promises I made to you. If Tony goes down, so do you, it's that simple.”
“That's my problem,” Billy said. “What's yours?”
“The fact that you know about the money. I need to know how you found out.”
Leverage. But not much.
“And you expect me to tell you when? After you remove my left arm?”
The man smiled. “The thought had occurred to me. If you don't tell me, I'll assume Sacks told you, in which case I'll have to kill both of you. The choice is yours. So much power in your hands, Billy boy. To give or take a man's life. Power.”
“I tell you, you let me live but take my arms.”
“Correct.”
“I think I'd rather take a bullet in the head.”
The man's hand came up, snugged around a stainless nine-millimeter pistol. “If you insist.”
“You have to ask yourself, Ricardo, what else I might know about your organization. And whom I've told.”
It was hard to tell in the dim light, but Billy thought the man's cheek had twitched, so he pressed on with the slight advantage.
“Do you really think I would be stupid enough to hang your man out to dry and then waltz into this gamble without an ace up my sleeve? You kill me and you'll be taken down within the week, my friend.”
The fact that his voice held a slight tremor didn't help his cause, but he wasn't accustomed to looking death in the face.
“I think you're bluffing.”
“I may be a gambling addict, but I'm not a complete idiot.”He stood.
“The real question is, are you willing to gamble your life on a hunch that I'm bluffing?”
Muness seemed at a loss for words.
Billy knew he had the man on his heels, if only for a moment. He moved then, forcing himself to ignore the black hole of the pistol.
“What I'm about to tell you will determine if you live out the week, Mr.Muness.”
He slowly leaned forward, reached out his hand, and removed the man's glasses.
The room remained quiet. No gunshot.
He stared into Muness's eyes and let the man's thoughts stream into his mind.
“I hope you don't mind. It's important that we see things . . . eye to eye as it were.” He set the glasses down. “You wonder whom I've told about the nine million dollars you've socked away in the Dominican Republic, don't you? Or if I've left instructions with my attorney to mail a letter to your wife in the event of my death, explaining why Angela has accompanied you on so many business trips.”
He let the information settle in. Muness hadn't been wondering anything quite so detailed, naturally, but Billy had lifted enough information to make it clear he knew about both Angela and the money in the West Indies.
“Should I go on?”
“You've just sealed your fate.”
“And now your fate is directly tied to mine. If I go, you go. If I get hurt, you get hurt.”
Muness slammed a fist on the desk. “You have the audacity to even
think
you can blackmail me?”
“I do.”
For a long time, the man just stared at him. And in that time, Billy learned precisely how a man as filthy rich as Ricardo Muness got to be so filthy rich.
A grin slowly split the man's mouth. “Well, well, well, I guess I under-estimated you, didn't I?”
“So it seems. All I want is a week to prove to you that I will never use this information against you unless you exploit me. Just give me time.”
“Time.Yes, of course. Isn't that what we all want? More time. But you're not the only one who knows things they have no business knowing, Billy.”
Darcy.
The man's thoughts wrapped around the name with disturbing images that stopped Billy cold. He knew about Darcy? What possible connection could a loan secured in New Jersey have to Darcy, wherever she was?
Apart from scattered details,
Billy
didn't even know about Darcy. But now he did, because Muness knew where she lived, what she did for a living, other details that streamed into Billy's mind.
Clearly,Muness assumed that Billy cared.
“Only a fool loans a man three hundred thousand dollars without doing some homework,”Muness said. “Insurance. Not everyone is as concerned about their own arms as they are someone else's arms.”
“And you think that's me.”
“Does the name Darcy ring a bell?”
Billy searched the man's thoughts for a few seconds, finding nothing useful.
“You've dug deep,” he said.
Muness dipped his head. “You do anything I don't like, she pays.”
“Fine.”
“And your debt?”
Billy withdrew a slip of paper with the information he'd assembled on Sacks's theft and handed it to Muness. “My debt was three hundred thousand dollars. Now we're even.”
Muness hesitated, then took the paper. His mind was running through ways to eliminate Billy along with the threat as efficiently as a college graduate might run through single-digit addition tables.
“I don't like to be blackmailed, Mr. Rediger. I can't live with the pressure hanging over my head, you understand. You want a week; I'll give you three days. Then we settle this, one way or another.”
Billy took a deep breath, nodded once, and turned for the door.
“Agreed.”
But nothing could be further from the truth.Muness had already settled on his decision, one that made liberal use of force and torture within the hour of closing arguments in the case against Anthony Sacks.
