The Godfather's Revenge (42 page)

They put on gloves, got out, and pressed the car doors shut. The garage, a converted carport, was open. They hurried inside, but not so fast that a neighbor or a person driving by would think anything of it. The garage smelled of machine oil and pine cleaner. Its floor was painted. Hoses, cords, and well-maintained tools hung on pegboards, silhouetted by black Magic Marker. Al took a roll of duct tape and a coil of clothesline rope. They crouched on either side of the door to the backyard.

Even through the pebbled glass, Al could see that the girl was still swimming, and Fausto was still smoking and watching her. The sound of a whiny-voiced man with a guitar came from what must have been the girl’s tinny radio. Beatnik music, Al thought. Some guy singing about a clown crying in the alley. Al chuckled. Grow up, kid. Look around. Good luck finding an alley without some goddamned clown in it, crying about something.

Al jerked a thumb toward the interior of the house to indicate that they’d be taking Fausto and the girl inside to talk to them, and Tommy nodded. Al set the rope and the duct tape down, held up his index fingers side by side, then moved them apart: put them in separate parts of the house. Tommy nodded again.

Tommy stuffed his hat in his pocket and drew his gun. The look on his face was one of almost carnal relief.

Al hit him in the shoulder and shook his head. Not unless or until they needed it. This was an old man and a girl. Al had left his flashlight in the car. Overkill. He didn’t regret bringing it, though. For him, the flashlight was as much a good-luck charm as a weapon.

What’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son? What’ll you do now, my darling young one?

Al motioned with both palms out for Tommy to slow down, take it easy. Tommy put the gun away. Al picked up the rope and the tape, counted to three, and they strode through the door.

“Gentlemen,” Fausto said, as if he’d been expecting them. Though he did not stand up. “Can I get yuz coffee and a bun or some such? Cigarettes, I’m running low on. Food, coffee, we got. Kind of warm out for them gloves, don’t you think?”

“We need to talk,” Tommy said.

Bev was swimming laps, her head in a white rubber bathing cap with rubber flowers on the side.

“I bet you that’s right,” Fausto said. “Like I always say, life is short. Important men like you, come all this way just to see me, what you want to waste your time with the simple courtesies for, am I right?” He jerked a thumb at Al. “Who’s your ugly friend in the funny hat?” he asked Tommy. “He looks like a cop in a costume.”

“Get up,” Al said, resisting the temptation both to knock the old guy’s teeth out and to take off the tam. “I said, get up.”

“Fausto Geraci,” he said, finally and slowly standing.
Jair-AH-chee,
not
Juh-RAY-see.
He did not extend his hand. Fausto pointed at the rope and the tape. “Hey, y’know, in my garage there, I got some rope just like that, new roll of tape just like that, too. With all we got in common, we ought to be able to figure out how to be friends.”

Bev must have caught sight of something. She stopped in the middle of the deep end of the pool and, treading water, called to her grandfather. She was squinting. Her cat-eye glasses were upside down on the table beside her grandfather.

“It’s all right,
nipotina
.”

“We’re just friends of your grandpa, all right?” said Tommy Neri, walking toward her on the deck of the pool.

For a moment, the girl’s eyes widened, then she spun around in the water and sprinted for the opposite side of the pool. Her kicking feet made that thumping sound only good swimmers can make.

Tommy ran to the other side of the pool. He was not a speedy man.

Fausto thrust his hand into the pocket of his bathrobe.

As he did, the heel of Al Neri’s right hand slammed into Fausto’s breastbone.

The old man’s gun went flying, and he fell down into his lawn chair so hard it toppled over backward. His slippers sailed a good fifteen feet in the air.

Bev got to the side but saw Tommy coming. Before he could grab her, she pushed off the side and started sprinting the other way. Tommy, already winded, cursed and started running back around to where he’d started.

“She don’t know nothing,” Fausto muttered, then lapsed into what Al presumed was Sicilian dialect. All Al knew in that was how to ask for a kiss and how to cuss. Al hurried over and fished the gun out of the oleander bush where it landed. It was a Smith & Wesson .38, an old one but in good shape. The safety was still on. He tucked it in his jacket pocket. The old man was gasping for air a little but not moaning. Al had felt the soggy give of the old man’s chest, and he knew there were a few broken ribs. Broken ribs were good. They hurt like hell, but they weren’t usually serious. A person would suffer from pain like that but probably not pass out or die.

Bev Geraci dove underwater and turned around again and went a different direction.

“I may need your help here,” Tommy said.

“I’m busy.” Al heaved Fausto into a nearby undamaged lawn chair. “Dive in and get her.”

“I can’t swim.”

“You what?”

Al picked up the tape, started it with his teeth so he wouldn’t have to take off the gloves, and ripped off a long strip. Fausto flinched. The terrible ripping noise duct tape made was always good for jobs like this, too.

“I can swim a little,” Tommy said, “but not like this here. Fucking Aquagirl or something—what’s-her-face, with those water movies.” He circled the pool yet again with his hand on his gun. “I should have brought the silencer.”

At this, Fausto perked up.

Al Neri slapped the tape on his face and bound it tightly around his head. The old man’s hands rose to fend him off, but Al was already done. He pushed the old man against the back of the house, his knee in the small of Fausto’s back, and grabbed his hands and lashed them together at the wrists with clothesline rope.

“Get her inside before you use the piece,” Al called, but bluffing. The last thing in the world he was going to OK was shooting that girl.

Al considered tying or duct-taping Fausto to the chair as well, but the questioning needed to be done inside, and he didn’t want to have to carry him. If Al marched him inside now and tied him up or taped him to something in there, he’d have to trust Tommy not to shoot the girl and also to keep the girl from eluding him and running away. Tommy was red-faced from the exertion of trotting around the pool. If she did get out now and wasn’t totally gassed herself, she could probably outrun him. Tommy would shoot her then for sure.

“C’mere,” Al said. “Hurry up. Watch this one, see to it he don’t move.”

Relieved, Tommy did as he was told. Al ran over and grabbed the leaf skimmer. The pole was about eight feet long. He pulled it back, the way a person would a sledgehammer. He hit her in the head with it, hard.

Harder than he’d meant to. He’d misjudged it, maybe because she was swimming so fast. He’d only been trying to make a point.

She went under.

Al Neri cursed and flung the skimmer aside. Fucking Scootch. Al had managed to go this long without ever hitting a woman, not even a whore. Even when he’d been ordered to kill one, at one of the legal cathouses Fredo used to have, out in the desert near Vegas, he’d given the job to a younger associate.

She was at the bottom of the pool and didn’t seem to be moving. If he killed her, he reasoned, she’d float. He waited her out.

Sure enough, the girl suddenly shot to the surface, dead-bang in the middle of the pool, bleeding from her temple but apparently all right otherwise. She stared at him, treading water and terrified, then she put her bleeding head down and again started sprinting to the farthest corner of the pool.

“Maybe you should dive in and get her,” Tommy said.

Al ran to the other side. He ran three miles almost every day, so, unlike Tommy, he wasn’t going to wear down before the poor girl did. He would deal later with his nephew’s show of disrespect. Tommy Neri was a made guy, which meant that even his uncle couldn’t lay a hand on him, but there were always other things that could be done.

On her next trip across the pool, Bev Geraci got to the wall and pulled herself out of the pool in one smooth motion. She made a run toward the back of the yard, wailing in what could only be called hysterics. There was a fence. Al Neri grabbed her as she was almost over it.

She was awfully strong for a girl. He managed to hold on to her, wrapping his arms around her in a bear hug, dragging her back across the deck of the pool, past her madly grunting grandfather, and into the house through the patio door. In the first bedroom he found, the master, he threw her down on the bed.

All the roadwork, all the time he spent at the weight bench he had at home: people made jokes about it, but in a line of work that sometimes got physical, what sense did it make to let yourself go?

One of the straps on Bev Geraci’s bathing suit had broken. Al caught a glimpse of her breast and averted his eyes, looking for a towel for her. On the wall there was a three-foot-wide jigsaw puzzle of
The Last Supper
, assembled, glued down, framed, and hung over the bed. The bathroom door was across the room and he didn’t want to leave her even for a moment. He was soaked himself, he realized. And his shirt was smeared with her blood. He grabbed a pink bathrobe from a hook on the back of the bedroom door and wiped himself with it.

She sat up, tugging at the strap, sobbing quietly now, blood and tears streaming down her already wet face.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” Al said, tossing her the robe. “I swear on my mother’s grave, all we want is information.”

Bev flung the robe to the floor. She pulled off her swimming cap and let her matted hair fall. She looked up at him, squinting, then balled the cap up and held it in front of her face.

Al thought of her glasses, upside down on the patio table. It broke his heart. He didn’t want to be here. He wanted to go get her glasses and tell her this was all a big mistake. Al had an image of those two girls in Harlem that pimp Wax Baines had cut up with a razor, right before Al had caved in Baines’s skull with the flashlight, which had gotten him kicked off the force. He thought again of that hooker in Fredo’s cathouse, blue and tangled up in cheap blood-soaked sheets, as Senator Geary sat on the edge of the bed, blubbering and bewildered, just as this poor girl was now. Baines, Geary: fair fucks to ’em. But never again, Al promised himself, was he going to come anywhere near a job where he’d have to watch an innocent girl bleed.

“I’m sorry,” Al said, “about the…the pole. I didn’t want to hurt you. You didn’t do what I said, though, and you got hurt. Listen to me, sweetheart. Just do what we tell you, and you’ll be fine.” He tossed her his handkerchief for the blood. “You understand me?”

Still blubbering, she looked up at him, squinting again, and nodded.

“Your grandfather,” Al said, “I unfortunately can’t make promises about.”

She dabbed at her head and kept crying. The blood was everywhere now, but the cut didn’t look too bad. With head wounds, you couldn’t go by how much blood you saw.

“He’s just an old man,” Bev said to him. “Please.”

“He’s done bad things,” Al said. “Which is unfortunate.”

Bev Geraci wailed.

“My associate is an animal,” Al said, though this was just for show. “He’s not as patient as I am, and I’m not always all that patient, as you’ve just unfortunately seen.”

“I don’t know anything you can use,” she said. “I get calls from pay phones. I never know where they’re from. I just—”

“Time out,” Al said. “Tell your story to my friend, all right?”

“I will,” she said. “I want you to know, I’d never go to the police unless I had to.”

Al closed the bedroom windows, though she had stopped screaming. He smiled. “I know that, sweetheart,” he said.

Because what was she going to do? Give up information about her father, then give it up again to police? No. Lie to them, and then lie to the police about what she’d told him and Tommy? Maybe, but that caused her as many problems as it solved for her. The likeliest path was that she’d hear her grandfather’s screams and say what she knew to save him, then—if she did talk to the police, leave out the details about her father, to save him. Whether she went to the police or not wouldn’t matter anyway. Nothing she could tell the police could prove that he and Tommy had ever been here.

“OK, Sport!” Al called to his nephew. “You’re all set. Bring me the old man.”

He did, gun drawn, naturally, marching Fausto into his own house at the point of a pistol.

As Al left Tommy with the girl, he bent toward his nephew and put his mouth flush against his ear. “Touch her and I’ll kill you,” Al whispered.

Tommy Neri smirked. Al had, after all, just brained the young woman with a pool skimmer, but he still didn’t have to accept an attitude like this.

Tommy handed his uncle the tam he’d left in the backyard.

EVEN WHEN A PERSON HAS DUCT TAPE WRAPPED
snugly around his head, when he says
fuck you
, over and over, it’s surprisingly easy to understand.

Al pushed Fausto Geraci down into an orange chair in the guest bedroom and lashed him to it with the duct tape. He used the rest of the roll. Fausto’s arms were pinned to his sides now. He was fighting back tears, possibly tears of rage, possibly from the broken ribs. The bedroom walls were covered with pictures of Bev and Barb Geraci and various Mexicans who were presumably the wife’s people. There were none of Nick, Nick’s wife, or Nick’s sister, a dyke gym teacher who lived in Phoenix now. Another jigsaw puzzle hung over the bed, this one of Jesus on a straining donkey. Palm Sunday.