The Last Whisper in the Dark: A Novel (19 page)

Kimmy shook and the baby giggled and my mother tightened her hold gently. Ma kissed Scooter on the forehead and the baby went, “Aye-haa!”

My mother glowered at me over Kimmy’s shoulder.

Finally Kimmy pulled away and said, “I’m sorry,” grinning with embarrassment.

“Sowwy!”

“Nonsense,” mng three decad

“You can’t, Mrs. Rand. It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, but I don’t know what’s happened.”

Her voice broke and my ma reached out and massaged her arm. She glanced at the baby and smiled. My mother put her index finger on Scooter’s nose and the kid went, “Ding-dong!”

You will help this
girl. She was going to be your wife. You’ll do anything and everything for her.

I nodded once.

I stood outside of Chub’s garage watching and
waiting, the same way I had for months, knowing murder was creeping nearby in the night. I could feel it in my guts. It might be Chub’s murder. It could be mine.

Now that I’d found out my old man had been following me I was attuned to other creepers. Somebody was here, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were already on to me. It didn’t matter. I had to get inside and see what I could find out.

I’d retrieved my phone. I did the obvious and clichéd thing of replaying Kimmy’s messages. She sounded warm and engaging with only a hint of alarm. She sounded a little sheepish at having to phone me at all. It must’ve been horrible for her.

I went through Chub’s phone too. There were no messages, no names that stood out as being potentially dangerous. If anybody managed to track it they were going to discover me. Maybe that would be good enough.

The four bays in the garage were each filled, one with an SUV, one with a van, two with early-seventies Chevies. I checked for blood. Chub could’ve been taken down already. It wasn’t a thought I wanted to dwell on. I had to creep the area as carefully as possible.

Nothing seemed out of place. It didn’t appear that there’d been a fight. Nobody had tossed the joint. It didn’t look like anyone had gotten his hands on Chub this many times before with VPhere.

The feds would be by soon enough. The minutes were burning off one by one.

I was still going with the idea that he’d made a run for it. If he was smart, and he was, he’d have diversified and invested so that Kimmy
and Scooter would be set up for life if he ever went in the bin or got clipped. He’d have bought real estate. We used to talk about retiring south to North Carolina or Florida. Neither of us had ever been farther than Jersey at the time, but the discussions helped us to believe, at least for a while, that it was possible to do something else, to be something else. That had seemed important then.

He’d have land, a house. Maybe more than one. Maybe out of state, maybe upstate. Maybe an apartment in Manhattan. A place he could go to ground if he ever needed it.

I hunted through his office cabinets and desk drawers and came up empty. Nothing showed me where he might’ve gone. I booted up his computer. It wasn’t password protected or encrypted. It wouldn’t be his real computer. He’d have a ; I agreed.

By definition a burglar has poor social skills. I
didn’t like to ring a doorbell and wait for entrance. I felt uncomfortable bringing something into a house rather than snatching something away. I didn’t go through many doors in the daylight. I preferred kicking in a window to knocking.

I wanted to talk to Wes before I braced Danny Thompson. I needed to know if anybody on the street had stepped up with any information.

I prowled the neighborhood and kept an eye on the Fifth Amendment. It never closed. There was always something happening at the bar. Either drunken gatherings, business dealings, major poker games, mooks counting their book, drug deals going down, or hookers keeping the wiseguys happy.

The security was for shit, like most security on mob-owned places. They thought muscle and guns would scare off anybody from juking the joint.

I watched who came and went, but I wanted a closer look. I parked around the block, climbed over back fences, hopped up onto the Dumpster, and hit the roof. I perched on an overhang just below the rain gutters, staring through a partially opened window.

Like Perry Crowe, Big Dan Thompson had had a brag wall of himself with sports stars, singers, and Hollywood idols. Then Danny had taken most of his old man’s photos down and stuck up a few of himself with B-list coked-out models, actresses, and bureaucrats. He sank a lot of money into political campaigns for the wrong reasons. It wasn’t so he could get a handle on the rich and powerful and turn them to his best use. It was because he wanted to be a part of a world
he didn’t understand and that didn’t want him in the first place. He smiled with senators who would never take his call no matter how big a check he cut. I bet Danny didn’t mind so much just so long as he could get a nice eight-by-ten to hang in front of the other syndicate guys. He cared more about playing the part than being the real thing.

I’d ha">“Now youre couple of d my first drink of hard liquor, seen my first thousand-dollar bill, and had my first woman here at the Fifth Amendment, all on the same day. The waitresses and pretty bartenders earned extra cash by taking the chief players back to the private lounge. When I turned fourteen Big Dan invited me in and showed me the delights of that back room, all on his ticket, the same way he’d shown Danny a few weeks earlier on his birthday.

Back then, Danny and I had been buddies, the two of us having come up in our fathers’ footsteps. We’d gravitated toward each other because we understood one another. Our families did business together while we watched and waited for our turn at bat.

Big Dan had broad tastes and used to put in requests to my family for particular pieces of jewelry, watches, diamonds, sports collectibles. My old man would show up and Dan would personally go through boosted items, a jeweler’s eyepiece always on hand.

The past and present continued to collide. I watched Danny holding court with the usual thugs and mutts and out-of-town mobsters. I didn’t recognize anyone. Some of Danny’s stooges wandered in and out from the back room, whispering in Danny’s ear. Wes stood at Danny’s right hand looking strained, but he always looked that way. I wondered if what Em had said could be true, that Wes was really trying to work up the nerve to quit the Thompson family. I didn’t even know if it was possible to quit the mob or what would happen if he tried. I imagined it might involve blowtorches.

I sat poised there for over an hour. The temperature continued to drop. I listened to Kimmy’s messages again. My ribs started to fuss and I took one of my few remaining Percs. I sank my fists deep into
my pockets and tightened my arms to my sides to control the trembling. I kept waiting for something to happen. Wes took call after call, played some poker with the others, and popped antacids when nobody was looking.

Finally it looked like Danny told him he wasn’t needed anymore and said he could take off early. It was almost eleven.

Wes got in his car and drove home. I climbed down from the roof, ran through the alley back to the Challenger, and followed Wes. I stopped at a liquor store first and got a good bottle of wine.

Ten minutes later I stood at Wes’s front door, listening to the heaving wind blow whitecaps across the bay, hugging the bottle to my chest.

Em answered. She saw the look on my face and it made her smile. “Terrier Rand, waiting patiently on the stoop. I’m guessing that goes a bit against your grain?”

“Not at all,” I said, trying to turn up the wattage on my smile. “I voluntarily enter the social contract and accept all its rules.”

“Right. You look like an eight-year-old who’s had to sit through a two-hour Sunday mass in a suit and tie.” She stood straight and aimed her chest at me. “I’ll try not to take this as an insult to my tits. I think they’re well worth breaking into the house to check out.”

“Agreed,” I said, holding out the wine.

Wes stepped up behind her. He didn’t smile. A hint of doubt clouded his face, but that was all. He took the wine and handed it to her without a word. He gazed behind me at the darkness of his yard.

She said, “I’ll go … get some glasses,” and retreated down the hall.

The keel of his boat rose and dipped and slapped around the canal hard">“Why not?”tp. The dock groaned. It sounded like a dying woman trying to make it to shore.

“Why didn’t you just crawl through a window at four in the morning?” he asked.

“Because you’ve got a girlfriend now.”

“That stopped you?”

“That stopped me, yes.”

He didn’t know what to do with me. Ask me in for a glass of the wine and a plate of cheese or chase me off. He knew what I wanted. I could only bring him more trouble.

I followed him to the living room. I sat heavily on the comfortable couch and practically melted there. The cold cramping began to leave my muscles. Em handed me a glass and served the wine. She sat beside Wes and they both took turns sipping from the same glass. She was hoping that maybe we could have a quaint conversation like normal people. I hated like hell to disappoint her again.

“I can’t help you with Chub,” Wes said. “That was one of his cars, right?”

“Right.”

“I already told you that Mr. Thompson keeps me out of that end of the business now.”

“I know. I want to know who Danny has running that part of the show. I couldn’t tell from who he had around him tonight.”

“You were at the Fifth?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean you were casing the Fifth.”

“Yeah.”

“You never learn, do you? You just don’t learn.”

“I’ve learned a few things.”

He glanced at Em, a touch abashed. I realized I’d embarrassed him again. Nobody likes to admit that they’ve been replaced in the company, whether they’re selling insurance or aluminum siding or running mob matters. He sipped the wine. I hoped it wouldn’t aggravate his ulcer.

She said, “I suppose that’s my cue to get lost because the menfolk want to discuss diabolical acts and the business of being wicked.”

“You make it sound a lot more fun than it is,” Wes said.

“That’s my natural gift, honey bear.”

Em gave his ear a lick that brought out a glowing flush across his forehead. She gave me a little toodle wave and walked from the room. I hoped one of these days we’d actually be able to talk for more than a minute or two.

Wes ran a hand over his face as if he could wipe some of the red away. He burned brightly. I remembered the time when Kimmy could do that to me. Hit a pose or say a word, make a particular sound that clung to her bottom lip and made me change colors, hop from one foot to the other, break into a sweat. I envied him these early days of love.

“Terry, don’t you dare say any—”

“Honey bear?”

He sighed. “A guy named after a dog shouldn’t act high-and-mighty.”

“I think it’s quite sweet, Mr. Bear.”

He didn’t have many friends to break his balls. “Look, so I bought her this gold locket with a little bear on it. It’s got a little pot of honey and—” have to think about it. at the Q He checked to see if I was laughing. I wasn’t. I wasn’t making fun of him at all. He was my friend, maybe the only one I had left in the world. He saw it there in my eyes. The happiness I had for him. He grinned a bit.

“Well,” he said. “You know how it goes.”

The dock moaned loudly. He’d had new windows put in his house, but they’d been installed improperly. A slight draft played along my neck hairs.

“I need to find Chub,” I said.

Wes nodded. He looked grief-stricken but resolved, like a father set to tell his kid that there’s no Santa. “You can’t do anything for him, Terry. He’s either dead by now or he will be the minute anybody spots him. If the cops find out he was helping that crew they’ll pop him on principle.” He finished his glass, poured himself another. “A
bank job. And a bank job pulled when the armored car guards are there, no less. What were they thinking?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Does Danny have hitters going after Chub?”

“Of course he does. Chub and the others. And anybody else who might snitch when the feds come kicking ass. He knows that crew will blow the whistle on every job they ever pulled or heard about to keep the death penalty off the table. And if they’re professionals they’ve got info on something Mr. Thompson doesn’t want made public. He’s got to cover his ass. And you said the guys in the crew were very tight. That means they’re going to ace anybody who can finger them. Chub might catch a bullet coming or going, but he’s going to catch one. You might too, if you get in the way. You need to stay out of sight.”

Wes used a lot of euphemisms instead of saying the word kill. Each one set my teeth further on edge. He took another sip of wine and licked his lips. He looked at me over the rim of the glass.

“Maybe I can talk Danny out of it,” I said.

“You never learn.”

“I’ve learned a few things.”

“If you try to talk to him you’ll wind up with a bullet in your ear. He doesn’t like you to begin with. And now you’re someone very close to someone with a bull’s-eye on his ass. I’m serious, Terry, do not shake things up further.”

“I need to know which of Danny’s guys is going after Chub and where I can find him.”

The wine was lubricating his wheels. He kept pouring it down. He was scared and this new twist in the biz wasn’t sitting well with him. He wasn’t on firm ground with the wiseguys anymore.

He looked at me coldly for a moment. “Maybe you shouldn’t bother, Terry. If Chub does get clipped then—”

“Shut up, Wes.”

“—maybe you’ll get Kimmy back.”

“Shut the fuck up, Wes.”

“Isn’t that what you want?”

The draft was beginning to annoy the hell out of me. It was like a tongue flicking against my skin. I shifted six inches to the left and rubbed at the back of my neck.

Wes was still waiting for an answer. He wanted a gut-wrench response. I gave it to him. “Yeah. It’s what I want. But I’m not go He saw the look on my face h Ming to let him die because I’m a bitter screwed-up asshole.”