Dead Birmingham (6 page)

They had moved in together after one semester of dating, and that had also been their last semester in school. Part of loving Scott had been accepting his strange manifesto, the unique, underground code by which he lived. It also meant that Angel had to adopt its tenants herself.
 

Not that she had minded. She had always been the type of person who found rules confining. For her, most of society was an oppressive organization against which the only sane reaction was rebellion. She had disliked college for the same reason. Scott had introduced her to the others. Some of them had already joined his cause, dropouts from other universities and junior colleges. They had quickly formed an ersatz family, and had begun their strange cohabitation, and their meandering journey across the underbelly of society.

Scott had taught them that modern society was all a lie, that it was just a host of phantom images sold to the people by the big corporations, that none of it really mattered; that what mattered was you got yourself born and learned the real deal as quickly as possible and didn't buy into any of the corporate bullshit, because the corporations wanted to enslave humankind by having them live half their lives earning and the other half buying, and sooner or later the corporations would all be one big corporation, and they would own mankind, buy and sell his breed and kill him as it suited their soulless purpose. Scott was their prophet.

She reached out for him in the dark.

“Scott.”
 

“I'm here. Baby.”

“I'm scared.”

“Everything's all right,” he answered back. They kept their voices low, whispering together in their small secret part of the darkness.

“Where's Mule? Why haven't we heard from him?”

“Maybe he went back to school, or he's at his folks.” He felt a tightness in his chest when he said those words to her. He loved her, and he wasn't being straight. But, he reminded himself, he had his reasons.

“I don't know. Surely he would have told us, Scott. I'm worried that he's in jail.”

“Babe, if he is, his folks will get a call. They'll get him out, they have before. He might have to stay with them for a while, if his old man puts up bail. That might have happened, and it might be a while before we hear from him. You know that. But we don't know that's what's going on. We have to be patient.”

“Well . . . I can't help it. What if something else happened?”

“Mule's too smart for that, Angel. The most that happened is he got nabbed.”

“I wish we could be sure. I have . . . I don't want you to laugh . . . I have a bad feeling.”

“Well, I'm sure. If he has to cool his heels for a few days, those parents of his are loaded. They'll get him out after they think he's learned his lesson. Don't worry. Just sleep. It'll be all right.”

Angel hugged him, and he could tell now that she was reassured, somewhat at least.

Scott LaRue lay beside the girl until her felt her breathing deepen and grow more regular. Then, he rose and went and looked out over the night city, the downtown streets all seemingly vacant at this hour, the city sleeping like a giant corpse beneath them all, he and his friends, a vast mausoleum in which they were the only youthful vital spark.

He knew that something, in all likelihood, had happened to Mule. He didn't like lying, most of all to Angel, but . . . something was wrong. He just didn't know what to do about it yet. Taking the utmost caution, he walked quietly across the dark room and retrieved a flashlight from his backpack, which he had carefully placed in a corner where light fell at night. The key should have been his by now . . . what could have happened?

When he reached it, he stepped silently out into the hall, and made his way to his hiding place. Scott LaRue peered cautiously around in the darkness. He peeled aside wallpaper from the secret recess that he had made in the wall of the ruined hotel suite. Then he reached in and lifted a hefty object from the hole. It was wrapped in old newspaper He removed the paper, and ran his hands lightly over the object. His eyes were wide with awe. It was a blocky box, almost a foot long on the sides, and nine or so inches deep. It was made of red wood, embossed in brass and gold. An ornate bird dominated the lid, its chest a shield of many colors. A coat of arms from centuries past, he reasoned. Underneath it was inscribed a name; Medici.

He shifted the box slightly, felt the heavy weight of something inside.

What's inside you?

Scott examined the hasp of the box. There was an ingenious brass lock, set into it centuries ago by some long-dead craftsman. Through tiny greaves in the face of the lock, springs and catches tantalizingly showed through. It looked more like a complex clockwork than a modern, conventional lock of tumblers and springs. It was a piece of art, more than a security mechanism. But it was a lock, and Scott could not bring himself to smash the lock or break the box.

The lock itself might be the work of some craftsman that was worth thousands to someone, perhaps much more. Scott didn't dare touch it. One single intrusion, one single broken spring, and . . . the lock was a dilemma to Scott. What if what was inside was relatively worthless? He risked ruining the box, which was, itself, undoubtedly valuable, for contents that might not be worth very much in comparison. Then his treasure would be worthless. He frowned.

His instincts told him that whatever someone had put into such a valuable container had to also be valuable. More than likely, he sensed, the contents had been placed in the box not long after its manufacture. And this was a problem, because every fiber of his being told him that this was it, the big score, and he had violated his own code, his cardinal rule. He had acted alone and hadn't told the others. He wondered at his own actions. But what if it made them all rich? Was it worth it, then, to break your own biggest rule?
 

Scott remembered how it had all gone down. After they had taken the old man's shop down, everyone had run in different directions, per their standard operating procedure. The old man had run after one of the others. He had simply squatted down behind a heaped table and waited a second or two, and this was because he had seen something the rest of them hadn't. When they had come into the store, he had glimpsed the old man, in an office in the back, set something down from his desk onto the floor, with the shaky haste of the old.

When the others had run out, he had run back to the office and snatched it up, his thief's instincts not even allowing him a look until he was safely blocks away, squatting behind a dumpster, almost out of breath from running with such a heavy burden. And hoo, boy, had he been right. But now what to do? He slowly rewrapped the box, and slid it back into its hiding place.

I'm no lock-picker; I'll just break the damned thing, and then maybe it won't be worth so much. I've got an idea, though, that just might work.

Scott carefully restored the wallpaper to its former place, and smoothed it over until there was apparently nothing amiss with the wall. As for the dilemma of the box, there had been one obvious solution. The old man had the box, and he therefore would have the key. No doubt, it was still somewhere in the office, and perhaps not so well guarded since now the thing of principal value, the box itself, was gone. The matter was settled. The little old man still had the key.
I'll just have to return to that little shop, and relieve him of it. But not tonight. I'll make sure the time is right, and then I'll make my move.

* * *

A few days passed while Scott waited for that “right time” to make his move. But Fate intervened—as Fate occasionally does. On the night Scott chose, when he thought all the other kids were asleep, Mule surprised him.
 

“Whoa, Scott, what're you doing? In the dark, I almost walked right over you.”

And then Mule had produced a light, a small key chain light, and he had given Scott and the box a quick scan. Not much, but just enough that he wanted details. Scott had no choice but to spill the whole story to him. Mule had listened, a bemused smile on his freckled face, because he no doubt realized Scott had broken every rule that he ever had set down for the rest of them.

In the end, to buy his silence, Scott had turned the quest for the key over to Mule. Mule had left in the wee hours of the next morning to hunt for the key to the box. Only Scott had known that he was going, and only Scott had known where. That secret, too, he now kept from the others. But now he was worried. He was also stuck with an antique box he couldn't risk opening. What to do?

There was a man across town that they fenced their stolen wares to, a man who, though older than Scott, had become another acolyte. He believed what Scott believed, and was in many ways a kindred spirit. Believer though he may have been, however, he had strict rules about what he fenced.
 

Reluctantly, Scott decided to bide his time to see what was within the box. He was smart and his mind was agile, with the quickness that comes from the uncertainty and danger of the life he had chosen. In the way the physical body stays fit from continued exertion and deprivation, his mind was junkyard-lean and street-corner fast. His native intelligence had been honed from years of living on the fringes of society. He knew the hustlers and their games, knew drug addicts and ex-cons, and had heard just about every scam and sob story ever invented, in all their endless variations. He was wise. He was confident. He knew in his gut that he'd do the right thing.

 

Chapter 12

 

Francis sat in the car and looked through the windshield. There were three other big men in the car with him. They had been there, waiting, for nearly an hour. In his pocket, Francis had a picture of a man named Johnny Sheehan, known to his friends as ‘Shakes.'
 

Francis glanced at his watch. It was noon. Across the street, gold leaf letters on a blacked-out front window proclaimed the building to be Finnegan's Bar.
 

“Remember,” Francis said to the other men in the car, “this isn't gonna be any shootout. We just give this guy a ride, ask him some questions. We find out what we want to know, and we cut him loose. Don Ganato don't want nothing on the news.”

“So, we just walk up and nab the guy?” one of the men in the back of the car asked Francis. “Give him the treatment ‘til he talks? That's it?”

“That's it. Easy as pie.”

“Good,” said the other man in the back. “I like easy.”

Francis Lorenzo was a tough but fairly bright man. He had risen fast in the life that he had chosen for himself, and he'd borne the bumps and bruises that went long with it, too. He was a hood, a crook, but he still had a code, and a sense of fairness of a kind, when he could afford to use it.
 

As he had gotten older, Francis had discovered that he really didn't like anybody to get hurt if they didn't have to. It was unnecessary, and because of the attention that such matters created, decidedly bad for business. This was a philosophy that Don Ganato fortunately shared, and their meeting of the minds had done a lot for Francis's standing with the Don. They still did whatever business was required of them—kill someone if they needed it, sure, but quietly so as to be not newsworthy.

This philosophy also landed Francis in charge of certain delicate operations, like the one he was heading up today. The Don knew that Francis would let small things slide, and devote his attention only to matters that were beneficial to the Ganato family's best interests. This prevalent attitude had prevented many headaches in the past, and while other mob leaders around the country went to prison, Don Ganato quietly consolidated his power, away from the power centers of the northern seaboard. The only heat that Don Ganato liked was from the Southern sun.

“I hear whispers,” Don Ganato had told Francis that morning, using one of his famously euphemistic expressions, “that our counterparts across the river have hired an outsider who has transgressed our quiet little neighborhood. Go and find someone in the know. I want the details. No killing.”

Francis and his guys had asked around. It turned out that there were certain loose associates of the O'Hearn mob who might be pressed. The name of Johnny “Shakes” Sheehan had come up more than once. It seemed that lately he had gotten very close to Longshot Lonny O'Malley—they were card playing and drinking buddies, some sources said. Finnegan's Bar, certain other sources indicated, was where he could usually be found. So here Francis and his cohorts were, and their wait was finally over.

The front doors of Finnegan's opened. Two men walked out into the noonday sun, smiling, laughing.

“That's him.” Francis pointed at the taller of the two, a man in an expensive blue suit. Francis opened his door and got out, casually as possible. The other guys in the car did likewise. They walked quickly across the street.
 

The two men they had been waiting for had stopped and were talking to one another. One had his back to them. The other stood looking in their direction, and his eyes went wide as he saw four very large and well-dressed Italians, approaching.

The four men stopped, and Francis called out. “You,” he said to the man who had his back to them, “Johnny Shakes.”