Grinder (13 page)

“Figlio,
don't you lie to me. What happened?”

“Everything is working like clockwork. I just don't want anyone to have the chance to start talking to one another and compare notes. Time has a way of ruining things.”

Paolo seemed to buy my story. “What do you want?”

“I need you to call Luca's number two.”

“Marco? Why?”

“Tell him something happened at Bombedieri's and you need eyes and ears at his place. Tell him you can't get a hold of Perino, and you need someone you trust over there to investigate.”

“Then I'm involved. I told you I can't be involved. What the hell is wrong with you,
figlio?”

“Nothing you say will hurt you. You're the top guy in the city. You have eyes everywhere, so you easily found out something was wrong at Bombedieri's. You don't know all the details and you need to find out. All true so far.”

“Stunad! When you grab him, he'll figure it out. You're not thinking.”

“He won't tell anyone anything. In ten minutes you'll call his cell phone again, and he won't answer. Then you send someone else in his place. Marco will get there eventually, but he'll never mention a word about why he was late — not even when you punish him for slacking off.”

“Punish him? Why would I want to —”

“If anyone didn't do what you said right away, what would you normally do?”

Paolo was silent on the phone. His silence was like the sound of a basketball swish. I had scored a point on the old man. I was thinking ahead of him.

“You just do what you would do to any disrespectful hood. Even when you come down on him like a head-on collision, he won't say a word.”

“Why not?”

“I'll make sure it's in his best interest to not say a thing.” I hung up the phone, forcing Paolo to act, because there was no other alternative on the table. He wanted to know who was behind Army and Nicky's disappearance and he had no one else he could use to find out. Paolo had to work with me until he got what he wanted.

Minutes later, the back door opened, and Marco Monaco ran out with his keys in his hands. He was going so fast that he almost missed me leaning on the wall beside the back door. He ran two steps ahead of me before he looked over his shoulder to confirm what he must have thought he saw. He had a hard time seeing me behind the rubber bone swinging at his face.

I arced the bone high over my head and brought it down like a volleyball spike. Monaco, a small man with ratlike features, didn't make a sound in the split second it took him to notice the bad situation he was in. His mouth formed a small O just as the blow connected above his ear. Then his eyes crossed and closed. His knees went next — all at once.

The keys Marco was carrying were on the pavement beside his body. I bent at the knees, to save my back, and picked up the keys and Marco's wrists. I dragged Marco to the passenger side of his car and opened the door. I bent and lifted the little man's unconscious frame into the car, but it was next to impossible with the shape my back was in. I left gangster on the ground while I went around to the other side of the Mercedes. I lay across the seats and used my upper body to pull Marco's torso into the car. When he was half inside, I got out, went around to the passenger door, and bent to lift his feet in. For a second I thought I wouldn't be able to straighten, but I managed to climb my way to a vertical position using the car as support. With Marco's feet inside the car, I quickly pulled his laces from his leather shoes. I knotted both laces together and used them to tie Marco's wrists behind his back. The rope was thin, but it looped the bony wrists enough times to make a solid binding.

Once Marco's wrists were tied, I got in the front seat beside him. I freed the gun from the holster on his hip and glanced at the Glock 9mm before putting it under my thigh on the seat. The Glock was something I knew. It wasn't flashy and it wasn't the most powerful handgun out there; it was just accurate, reliable, and dangerous.

I started the car and clicked the cigarette lighter down. I leaned in the seat and breathed deep. I tried to relax my back with each breath, but it was slow going. The metallic click of the lighter brought me back to the here and now.

Riding out another spasm, I looked over at the man beside me. His skin was tinged olive and his hair grew straight up from his scalp in a finger-in-the-light-socket sort of way. I looked from the welt on his temple to the acne scars on his face. This little man was part of the puzzle. He was either innocent or guilty, but either way he knew something that I needed to find out, and I was going to grind it out of him.

I clicked the lighter down again and reached over to Marco. I grabbed his bony nose between my thumb and forefinger like grandfathers do when they say, “Got your nose.” In my case, I actually tried to rip it off by twisting it and pulling it away from his face.

Marco came to just after I heard a wet snap.

“Oh my God! My nose! Stop it! Stop it!”

I stopped and watched as Marco tried to cup his nose only to realize that his hands were not responding. He leaned forward, head against the dash, and strained against the bonds. I pulled the lighter and pushed it behind Marco's ear. The circle of metal burned through the hair growing on the side of his neck and sent his body reeling back off the dashboard.

“What the fuck was that? What did you just do?”

He finally looked at me, and then at his gun. He stopped talking when he saw his Glock pointed at him. His ratty buck teeth bit his lower lip, and his eyes watered. “Wh — what do you want?”

I clicked the lighter back in its space. “Marco, you need to fill in the blanks for me.”

“Blanks? What blanks?” He was already calm. The blow to the head and the burn already seemed distant as he clearly spoke to me.

“I want to know about Armando and Nicola.”

Marco looked at me for a few seconds, then he smiled. “That's why Paolo called me. I thought it was weird that he called me to check on Bombedieri. I said to myself he's probably got dozens of people he could send, but he tells me to go. Why me? But who says no to the boss's boss? Man, I shoulda known. So, how'd you figure out it was Luca P. who did it?”

I didn't let the surprise I felt show on my face. “Every-body talks,” I said. “I just found the right people.”

“You're lying.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because people don't talk about this. Luca P. did it, but he didn't talk about it to anybody. He doesn't even know that I know.”

“If people don't talk, then how did you find out?”

Marco let out a sigh and looked around.

“No one's coming,” I said. “If they do, I'll just drive us away, so spill it. All of it.”

When he said nothing I pulled the lighter again and showed it to his eye — up close.

“All right, all right, shit. I was just thinking, but I'm done. Okay? I'm gonna tell you everything, okay? So knock it off with the lighter.”

I sheathed the lighter. “Why so co-operative? Shouldn't you put up a fight?”

“That's what I was thinking about. Way I see it, Luca did something on his own — without me. I'd stick with him on that if it was a job. I ain't no rat, but what he was into . . . He killed Paolo Donati's family. That's a death sentence. I'm not dying for something I had no part in.”

“How do you know it was Perino who took the boys?”

“I saw them the night they disappeared.”

“With Perino?”

“No, I saw them here. Luca gave me and the other boys the day off. That never happens. But hey, who says no to a day off? I slept in and spent the day playing soccer. At dinner, my mother tells me she lost her rosary.”

“You live with your mother?”

Marco looked annoyed. “Don't judge me. Just listen. She lost her rosary and she tells me she needs a new one so she can pray to the Virgin for my Nona, who's in the hospital. So we get into this big fight 'cause I tell her I'll get her one tomorrow when I go to work, but she says, ‘What if Nona dies tonight?' So I finally cave in and I go down to the store to get a rosary. I got a key and I know the security code. It's no big deal. But when I pull in, I see the parking lot is full. Luca's car is there with two others. The BMW that was there was Army and Nicky's.”

“How do you know?”

“They had a personalized licence plate on the car so everyone knew who owned it. No one else is riding around with donati on their bumper.”

“Who owned the other car?” I asked.

“I don't know. It was a big van, blue, and the bumper was rusty. I knew what those kids said about the boss online. Add that to my day off and there was no way I was going in there. I got the hell away.”

“What about the rosary?”

“I got a friend to loan me his mother's.”

“You ever ask Perino about what you saw?”

“I know what I saw. What good would asking about it be?”

I nodded my head as I pulled the tape recorder out of the cupholder and turned it off.

“Oh shit. You were taping me? You were taping me. I told you everything. You don't need a tape. Come on, you don't need that. I'm dead if that gets out.”

He stared at the electronic device as though it were a black widow spider. The recorder was much deadlier than any arachnid. There was no anti-venom that could save Marco from the tape; it was a death sentence pure and simple. The rat-faced gangster watched me put the recorder in my pocket. He knew his only chance of survival hinged on what I did with the recording in my pocket.

“Where were you going just now?” I asked.

“I was told to go check on Bombedieri. That's where I was going.”

I pulled the knife from behind my back and watched Marco's eyes open wide. I used the barrel of his Glock to force his head against the dash while I cut the shoelaces and put away my knife. When he sat up, I patted the pocket holding the tape recorder.

“In about two minutes, people are going to hear what you told me. Understand?”

He nodded.

“If you were lying, you just did it to the wrong people. If you were telling the truth, you might have just earned yourself a promotion.”

Marco actually smiled at me, letting me know he told the truth.

“Get yourself to Bombedieri's and do whatever you were told to do.”

“I can go?”

“In a minute. Get out of the car.”

I took the keys out of the ignition and got out while Marco stared at me with a puzzled look on his face. When his door finally opened, I closed mine and walked around to the back of the car. Marco closed his door with his foot while he rubbed his wrists. “Fucking shoelaces hurt, man,” he said as he came to meet me behind the car. He shut his mouth when he saw the gun in my left hand, away from the street, pointed at his belly.

I threw him the keys. “Open your trunk,” I said.

“Why?”

“I'm going to give you your gun back. Then you're going to get moving. The gun is going in the trunk. You can get it out when you're gone.” I turned the gun around and held the barrel in my right hand.

He nodded, accepting what I said.

“You're really just gonna let me go?”

“Marco, you're set to inherit this whole place. The boss needs to keep the system working. He needs someone who knows the ins and outs. You and me are done. You got a job to do now, and so do I. By tomorrow your paycheque will be much better; so will your parking spot.”

He popped the trunk with the key fob and lifted the lid straight up with his right arm. He turned his head to me and laughed, still holding the lid. “I hate this fucking spot. I had to get this car 'cause it was one of the only ones that would fit. If that ain't bad enough, I gotta put up with the boys always asking me if my girlfriend loaned me her car for work.”

I looked inside the trunk and was happy with what I saw. “You won't have to worry anymore, Marco.” He started to laugh until my left hand grabbed a handful of his shirt. I swung the Glock by the barrel and the butt hit Marco in the centre of forehead like a hammer. He stiffened and began to fall back like a hewn tree. My handful of shirt guided his falling body into the trunk. The open cavity sucked him in head-first.

“You won't be taking over, Marco. You're just at the start of a long night. Some people are going to want to talk to you, so you just need to sit tight.” If Marco heard me, his limp body didn't show it. I pulled his keys off the pavement and fished the wallet and cell phone he was carrying out of his coat. My pockets were full enough, so I threw the phone and wallet in the back seat. Marco didn't move while I opened and shut the door. He didn't even stir when I pulled his hands out of the trunk. I laid his wrists across the edge of the trunk twice, the second time pulling more of Marco out of the trunk so that his weight wouldn't drag his hands back into the trunk again. Once the small hands were resting on the lip of the trunk, I checked the parking lot. No one had come out since I put Marco inside his own car. No one was watching, so no one saw me slam the lid down on the small, limp wrists protruding from the trunk. No one saw me hammer the screaming gangster back into the trunk it erupted from, either.

Marco was alive but broken in his trunk. His right wrist, still visible on top of his again unconscious body, was dented. The bone ruptured the skin in a sharp point showing signs of a compound fracture. His chest rose and fell evenly as I leaned in and used my fishing knife to cut the glowing plastic seat release cord at the back of the trunk. The shoelaces would not have held anyone in the trunk for long. Two broken wrists and no seat release would hold him there until someone decided to let him out.

I closed the lid and moved Marco's car out of the small spot into the larger one. There was three feet of space on either side of the car. The little Mercedes would almost be able to open both of its doors all the way without touching another car. The white Escalade would not be able to boast the same feat. It would also not be able to fit into Marco's little space.

I left the two-door in the parking lot and got behind the wheel of my car. I turned the key and backed up twenty metres to a new parking spot concealed by shadows. It was invisible from Ave Maria, but it would allow me to see the Escalade pull in from either direction.

I waited, watching the back door of the store. I wondered when the woman behind the counter, who drove the Dodge Shadow, would leave, and if she would hear Marco alive in his trunk when she left. As the hours clicked by, it was a question that came to be all I could think about. I was debating going back to the Mercedes to help Marco sleep again, or sleep deeper, when the whole idea stopped mattering. A white Escalade took up my entire rearview. The driver's side mirror that showed objects larger than they appeared made the huge Cadillac look like a rolling iceberg. The car drove past me over the curb aiming directly at the huge spot now fifty percent full of Mercedes. The Escalade was so large that it hid both parking spots in front of it. I couldn't see through tinted glass, but I knew who was inside the behemoth.

The white door opened at the same time as my own. The doors closed in stereo as well. I was jogging towards the tall, thin, olive-skinned man as he shook his head and rifled through a pocket in his coat. As I closed the distance between us, I estimated Luca Perino's height at six and a half feet. He wasn't big — just tall and thin, the kind of thin that mothers everywhere tried to kill with food. His bony shoulders his tented jacket as though the hanger was still inside the fine tailored suit, and his short hair did little to conceal the jutting bones of his skull. His metabolism had probably outrun many plates of food when he was a child.

When I was less than twenty-five feet away, I stopped running and hit the panic button on Marco's key fob. The Mercedes went haywire, and Luca Perino took his phone away from his ear. He walked around his huge SUV to the Mercedes as I clicked the panic button on and off. I could see him five feet from the car as I got closer to the lot. My approach was concealed from view by the huge car, but that wouldn't last. Perino would see me coming unless I gave him something to look at. I popped the trunk using the keys and watched Perino walk slowly towards it. I rounded the bumper of the SUV trailing in Perino's wake to see him bending at the waist to closer examine the contents of the trunk. There was a moment of realization about what was in the trunk, and then the tall man was accelerating to his full height with the phone in his hand meeting his ear at six and a half feet.

“Don't do that,” I said, pointing Marco's Glock at the narrow chest of Luca Perino. He had a perfectly trimmed mustache and a vertical strip of hair below his lip. His face had small eyes and a small nose that made him appear childlike. His giant bony fingers, holding the phone next to his ear, ruined the facade. They looked like aquatic predators — all bone and tendon.

“Put the phone down in the trunk.”

Luca Perino did not move; instead he spoke. “I remember you. You used to work around here. You didn't have the beard, but the rest of you looks the same.” He pointed at me with a sinewy finger. “You look like shit. Little Marco do all that to you?”

I felt my back repaying me for the jog. I extended the gun towards Luca's centre using a hand on the SUV to hold me up. “Put the phone down in the trunk.”

Luca held his ground, and his phone. “A lot has changed in the last few years. I've changed. I'm not some nobody thug anymore. I run this neighbourhood for a big name. Maybe you didn't know that. Maybe you should reconsider what you are doing.”

He looked confident in front of my gun, towering over the body in the trunk.

“Say the name,” I said.

“Who?”

“The big name. Say it.”

Luca looked a little unsure.

“Say it,” I said.

Luca didn't say a word.

“You don't know me,” I said. “The fact that you saw me around doesn't mean anything. Things haven't changed that much from where I stand. The city is still run by one man, and I still have to do what he says. Just like it was before, I'm chained to the old man. He's still the same, and I'm back to being what I was. You, you're new but you're not different. I met people like you before. You're taller, but you're the same.”

“Tell me what I am, tough guy.”

“You're a big shot running your own turf. You've been doing it a little while now and you're starting to believe the hype. You think you're a big-time player and you're being held back by people with less vision than you. So you, like most before you, did something stupid because you thought it would work out. But it didn't. Just like before, he sent me to find someone like you, and here we are.”

“You are really fucking far gone. I have no idea what you are talking about. None.”

“Say his name,” I said, and I took my hand off the bumper. I stepped towards the tall man towering over the trunk like a scarecrow. His bony hands still clutched his cell phone, but his fingers were whiter.

“Donati,” he said.

“Now tell me what you think that old man is going to say when he finds out you took his nephews. Do you think all of those changes you went through will save you? Or will it be just like old times?”

Luca Perino didn't get a chance to answer. A vehicle coming towards the parking lot interrupted us. Headlights shone through the dim evening murk just before the sound of music over a harsh engine caught up with them.