When the Devil Comes to Call (A Lars and Shaine Novel Book 2) (4 page)

As Lars spoke, lost in his own tale, Shaine watched his face go softer, like asphalt on a hot day. She knew he probably left out details, keeping a few nuggets for himself. She knew Lars well enough to know he would never tell her everything. And yet, even with pieces missing, a courtship not fully explained, she hurt for him.

Lars had suffered a broken heart.

Shaine knew he had one, she wouldn’t be alive if he didn’t, but she always thought of his heart as solid, like polished marble. She didn’t consider it had a warm, gooey center. And this Lenore, she turned his heart hard, calcified and carved with her initials.

He never talked about women, never dated anyone in Hawaii. To Shaine, Lars was sort of asexual and aromantic as well. It gave her faith to see his human side.

Then they turned off the highway and she remembered where they were going.

Lars followed the GPS and got off I-95 in Greenwich. They wound around quaint streets for another twenty minutes before they found the house. Lars parked on the street across from the mansion.

Eight foot hedges formed a barrier to the street. White pillars framed the entry to the circular driveway. Leo Ramoni knew how to live well. Anyone would be hard pressed to distinguish the home of the notorious mobster from the CEOs next door. Lars doubted they knew.

Lars left the engine running, the vents pushing heated air into the car to hold off the creeping cold outside. They sat and watched the house.

“I’m not going to tell you what we’re going to do,” Lars said. “Because things can change. I will tell you what we’re not going to do. You’re not going to shoot anyone. You’re there as a gun who happens to have a person attached to it. I want you to keep the safety on. I want you to stay silent. If anyone starts shooting at us, you hit the ground and find the nearest exit. Just like an airplane, you evacuate as fast as you can.”

Shaine nodded along. “Okay.”

“I’m not going in there with guns blazing. If he’s got people in the house working for him, that’s not my concern. I’m here for one target and that’s all we’re getting.”

“Got it.”

“Okay.” Lars looked at Shaine, deep into her eyes. “You ready for this?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“I knew you were, just needed to hear you say it.”

Lars breathed in, then out with a slow, practiced precision, opened the door and let in a blast of cold air. He didn’t react at all, while Shaine tensed every muscle in her body when the cold needled her skin. She followed Lars out to the street.

They stopped on Ramoni’s front stoop. A wide black door stood framed by two smaller white pillars. A large brass lion’s head door knocker started back at them. Lars lifted the lion’s head twice to knock, then stepped away, half behind a tall potted pine tree trimmed into a spiral shape.

“Whoever answers,” he said to Shaine, “Tell them your car broke down.”

She nodded to him, but he could see the nervousness in the chugging clouds of breath coming from her sharp breathing.

The door opened and, as Lars suspected, a bodyguard stood there, gun in his right hand down around his thigh.

“What do you want?” he said, eyeing Shaine.

“Sorry to bother you so late, but my car broke down and—”

Lars moved quickly as he shot in from the side and took the man’s middle finger in his left hand and bent it back to touch the back of his hand, while putting his other hand on the gun.

“Get his mouth,” Lars said. Before the man could let loose a scream, Shaine slapped a gloved hand over his mouth. They pushed him back inside.

Lars had total control over the man with his one finger hold. He pushed the finger back again and the man went to his knees, his gun hand struggling against Lars, but his muscles were otherwise distracted. The finger gave a loud pop of ligaments separating and then a sharp crack of the socket disengaging. The man went to his knees and Lars slid the gun from his hand, tucking it behind his own back. Shaine had to let go of his mouth when he went down, but she slipped off a glove and stuffed it in his open mouth.

Lars put two hands behind the bodyguard’s head and forced the man’s head forward as he brought up his knee. Blood seeped from his nose as Lars moved his hands to the forehead and drove his skull into the solid marble floor of the entryway. The doorman went out cold.

“Hand me that scarf,” he said. Shaine pulled a wool scarf down from a hat rack near the front door. Lars tore it down the middle making two thinner scarves. He handed Shaine back her glove and tied one scarf around his head to wedge in his mouth, and tied his arms behind his back with the other. Lars dragged the sleeping man out to the front porch, took off the man’s shoes and socks, then locked him outside.

He could tell Shaine had questions so he explained as he gathered himself to continue.

“If we need to run I don’t want him chasing us too fast. It’s like slashing a guy’s tires if he’s in a car.”

Shaine took the lesson and filed it away.

The house displayed all the fake class money could buy. A miniature Roman palace decorated by a gold and mirror enthusiast. White marble spread out across the entryway in front of a curving staircase. A sunken living room with white shag carpet dipped to their left. To the right a formal dining room with fake flowers in a fake Grecian urn under a fake Botticelli painting.

Lars headed for the staircase. Shaine followed.

Leo Ramoni was awake when they got to his bedroom. He wore silk pajamas and sat, uncharacteristically, beside his wife. His bald head was flaky and peeling, leaving fine shavings of dead skin on his pillow. The long droops of skin hanging below his chin waved at the intruders when he talked.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Lars checked, but he didn’t see any gun in Ramoni’s hand. His wife clutched the sheet around her neck, as if any intruder would have certainly come to rape her.

Lars pointed the gun at Ramoni. Shaine took her cue to raise her gun and aim it at the wife.

“Get up,” he said to the wife. “Go stand with her.” He waved the tip of his gun toward Shaine. The wife obliged and stood, revealing a sheer nighty that didn’t cover much and showed off her aging, but still tight, body. Like all good mobsters, Ramoni married about twenty years his junior.

“Take her to the next room and keep her quiet,” Lars said to Shaine. “Mr. Ramoni and I need to talk.”

Shaine opened the door, let her go in first, told her to turn on the light. When the light went on she found a tastefully decorated guest room, and Shaine knew she should have swept the room first in case there were more bodyguards—the still conscious kind.

“Sit down and shut up and you’ll be fine,” Shaine said.

Mrs. Ramoni sat on the edge of the bed, watching this little girl who held her at gunpoint.

***

“You know who I am?” Lars asked.

“I know you’re a fucking dead man. That much I know.”

“You remember a girl named Lenore?”

“What are you, some kind of jealous husband? You don’t know who you’re fucking with, pal. And it wasn’t me anyway. My age, the old pecker ain’t doing what it used to. And I don’t take them blue pills.”

“Lenore wouldn’t stoop so low as to fuck you. She did stoop so low as to fuck your son, though.”

Leo squinted his eyes, trying to see back through time. A vague memory flashed over his face. “Oh, yeah. About twenty years ago.”

Lars nodded.

“What the fuck has that got to do with me?” Leo asked.

“She’s dead.”

“From twenty years ago? Frank Sinatra’s dead from twenty years ago. Now who the fuck are you?”

Lars could see another question in the way Leo’s eyes kept darting toward the door. Where the fuck is my protection?

***

Shaine shifted on her feet, her legs growing tired. Her thick down coat made her torso an oven. A floor vent blew hot air into the room and Shaine felt the first beads of sweat on her forehead.

“What’s he going to do to him?” Mrs. Ramoni asked.

“If he wanted us to know we would have stayed in there.”

Shaine knew why they were there, and yet still got a chill when Lars asked them to leave. What didn’t he want her to see? What could be so bad?

Shaine knew what Lars was capable of, though she hadn’t seen it up close. For all the madness of their escape from danger two years ago, Lars kept her sheltered, same as she was right then. To Shaine, Lars was a tiger at the zoo. A dangerous creature, but on the other side of the bars. From the safety of where she stood she could admire him and want to make friends. Until the bars came down. Then she felt a fear, same as everyone else, only hoping the familiarity would keep her safe from his natural instincts.

Goddamn
she was hot. How long was Lars going to take?

***

Leo leaned back on his pillows propped up against the headboard, settling in. Lars kept a steady aim at him.

“Tell me what happened.”

“What happened with what?”

“With Lenore.”

“Fuck if I remember.”

Lars stepped over to the old man, pushed the gun up under his nose and dug in. “You better start to remember.”

Lars didn’t look down when he pushed forward with his knee, slamming the nightstand drawer shut on Leo’s hand. He could feel the old man reaching, a move he’d been waiting for. Leo grunted and tears pooled in his eyes as he stared up at Lars.

Lars moved back, pulled open the drawer, removed the tiny snubnose revolver, and tossed it to the carpet.

“All right,” Leo said. “She was fucking my boy, Bruno. You got that part right. Then she comes up pregnant.”

Lars set the barrel of the gun against one of Leo’s knees. “Tell the truth.”

“That is the fucking truth!” Leo’s confidence faded by the second, along with his hope of a rescue.

“Keep talking.”

“Bruno doesn’t want nothing to do with it so he gives her the brush off. Only she’s not having any of it. She keeps coming around.”

Lars knew how the story ended and was anxious to get to it. “And then?”

“She was becoming a problem. In my family, we handle problems.”

“So you killed her?”

“Look, pal, I know you ain’t her husband because she was carrying on with Bruno, and you couldn’t have cared very much or it wouldn’t have taken you twenty years to get to this. So, let me ask you again, who the fuck are you?”

***

Shaine had to take off her coat. She also needed a drink of water. The dry air blowing into the room took every new drop of sweat off her face instantly. She already dreaded going back outside to have the sheen of moisture on her skin freeze in the night air.

The thick parka constricted her, squeezed her like it suddenly shrank three sizes smaller. She had to get out.

Shaine lowered the gun, used her gun hand to pull the sleeve of the parka off her left wrist. Mrs. Ramoni used the springs of the bed to launch herself at the momentarily defenseless girl. Shaine was caught with one arm midway down the sleeve of her coat, her gun aiming at the floor.

The woman moved with surprising speed for her age
, thought Shaine. She raked a claw hand of nails across Shaine’s face. Shaine reversed and tried to shake off her parka to take aim. Lars said don’t shoot anyone, but he’d understand once he saw the scars on her face.

Mrs. Ramoni bodychecked Shaine and bolted for the door. Shaine reeled back, bounced off a chest of drawers and sent a half dozen crystal figurines to the floor. The older woman had the door open by the time Shaine raised the gun. She didn’t want to shoot her first person in the back, but necessity won out. She pulled the trigger—then remembered the safety.

Mrs. Ramoni was gone.

***

Lars heard Shaine yell his name, heard footsteps hammering down the hall for the stairs. He threw a look over his shoulder but the door to the bedroom remained closed. He looked back to Leo. His slightly hurt face read: the bitch left me behind.

Lars knew they had a runner, but he wasn’t finished. He thought for a second, hesitated. He could put a quick bullet in Ramoni and then help Shaine chase down the wife, but would Ramoni understand why Lars was there? Did it matter for a man who would be dead a few seconds after he understood?

The door opened, Shaine leaned it.

“She got away!”

“Go get her.”

She seemed to Lars on the verge of tears, but she kept it together enough to turn and dash away. Lars turned back to Leo. He had to get things over with. Mrs. Ramoni might be going for another gun in the house. They had to have more. Lars should have told Shaine to stay put.

“Shit,” he said.

“I don’t know which I should say I told you so about, having a kid for a partner or having a girl.”