The Vengeance of the Tau (17 page)

“Impossible! You know that’s impossible!”

“I only know that’s what you’ve always said. I always knew you were wrong. I knew what we unleashed would never retreat quietly; that kind of power never does.” The old woman tried to steady her breathing and failed. “And now it has returned,
they
have returned, and one way or another it is our fault, our responsibility.”

“That was forty years ago. My God, forty-five now …”

“And I’m supposed to believe such a responsibility fades over
any
time?”

Rothstein held the clippings before him as if they were burning his fingers. “Three incidents, Tovah …”

“There have already been others, and still more will follow, Ari, unless they are stopped.”

“Stopped?”

“By you. You are the only one who can do it.”

“How? The logistics would prove—”

“Enough!” She struggled to rise out of her wheelchair.

Arnold Rothstein saw that she could not straighten her spine. The sight made his eyes fill with tears. His throat felt heavy, and he unbuttoned his shirt collar.

“You and I, Ari, we remember the beginning.” The old woman raised both her arms to the sides. “We made all this happen, so much good and worthy of every grace God ever gave.” Her lips trembled. “You cannot let all our glorious work be marred by their return. You remember, we both remember …”

Rothstein came around the table to wrap an arm around the old woman’s shoulder to support her. He felt the bones beneath the thin shawl and the meager flesh.

“Yes,” he conceded, “yes …”

“You have power, Ari. You must do something. You
must
!”

“I will do … what I can, Tovah.”

“So long as it is enough, Ari.”

“For both our sakes.” He nodded.

“And the world’s.”

Chapter 16

“
THAT’LL BE SEVEN DOLLARS
.”

Wareagle handed the cabby a ten and climbed out of the back seat without saying a word. Joe Rainwater’s two-story house in Chicago’s Rogers Park on Touhy Avenue lay directly before him, and he found himself dreading every step that would bring him to it. It had a small yard and looked pretty much like every other house Johnny could see, except for a beautifully manicured front garden that was already starting to bloom.

Johnny would have known it was his friend’s house, even without the number over the front door.

It was Thursday morning, and Joe Rainwater had not called him at the hotel at six
A.M.
as promised. Johnny had waited until six-thirty to call him, but there was no answer. He tried the precinct next and found Rainwater had not yet arrived. Johnny heard the soft murmurs of the spirits and knew there was trouble. Halfway up the walk, the murmurs had given way to a nagging in his gut that tried to choke off his breath. On the porch of Joe Rainwater’s small house, Wareagle drew his knife.

The night before, Joe Rainwater and Johnny Wareagle were sitting in an empty office at the precinct when Sal Belamo called back. Rainwater answered the phone and handed the receiver to Wareagle.

“Who you got there with you, big fella?” Belamo asked him.

“A friend.”

“He one of us?”

Wareagle looked at Injun Joe. “Close enough.”

“Then put this on speaker so you both can hear.”

Wareagle hit the appropriate button.

“You guys hear me okay? … Good, here’s how it plays. You’re onto something with this Oliveras killing, something big. Right down McCrackenballs’s alley. Too bad he’s otherwise involved.”

“McCrackenballs?” Injun Joe wondered.

“Long story, Joe Rainwater.”

“Let me give you what I got in a nutshell,” Belamo continued. “Ruben Oliveras isn’t the only bad guy to get snuffed as of late. Far fucking from it. List reads like a veritable rogue’s gallery—and not just in the States, either. You guys hear about Javier Kelbonna?”

“It was on the news,” Joe Rainwater replied. “Last night, I think.”

“The man we couldn’t get to with our smart bombs got toasted big-time. Holes himself up on an island after we force him out of his little dipshit country. I mean, this guy was really holed up. Like he expected us to mount Desert Storm Part Two to get him. We didn’t, boys, but somebody else did. Twenty-seven guards and Kelbonna were all found torn apart. Sound familiar?”

“Oliveras,” Rainwater muttered.

“That’s not all. Sleazebag of a senator named Jim Duncan got whacked in a parking garage, five bodyguards along with him, earlier this very evening.”

Wareagle and Rainwater looked at each other.

“And I got more, boys. Try the entire complement of guards for one Heydan Larroux, lady boss of New Orleans, wiped out. Miss Larroux hasn’t been positively identified yet, but they’re still fitting the pieces together, you get my drift. What the fuck you boys stumble onto here?”

“I don’t know,” Joe Rainwater told him.

“Well, here’s the way it plays from my end. In all the killings, there are no leads, no firm suspects, no witnesses, and no evidence. Several of the sites look like war zones with kills registered only by the assailants. I figure we got maybe a thousand rounds of retaliatory fire here all told that didn’t hit a
goddamn thing.
So come clean.” And, after neither of them did, “Look, boys, I want in. Somebody’s doing their best to clean up the world’s scum. My kind of guys, let me tell you. You ask me, we should all join up instead of trying to catch them. You want, I can catch the next flight to Chi-town.”

“Not yet,” Wareagle said.

“I just wanna have a little fun, big fella.”

“For now it must involve your computer, Sal Belamo. If there have been this many victims already, there will be more. I need you to generate a list of potential future targets.”

“Gonna be a long one.”

“A place to start, nothing more.”

“Whatever you say, big fella.”

Johnny broke the connection and found Joe Rainwater staring at him intensely.

“I put queries over the wire, John Wareagle. Nothing came back.”

“Sal Belamo has better access.”

Injun Joe stood up and stepped nearer to Wareagle. Though Johnny remained sitting, they were not that far from being eye to eye.

“Sounds like there’s plenty you’re not telling me, John Wareagle.”

“Only that which is not meaningful for you to know.”

“You told me you were out. You told me the woods gave you peace and you had no desire to leave them.”

“Perhaps not desire, Joe Rainwater, but need. I didn’t realize it myself until another came looking for me some years back.”

“This McCrackenballs …”

“Yes.”

“You knew him from the hellfire?”

“I never stopped knowing him, even after we parted.”

“How often?”

“When the need is there.”

Joe Rainwater moved away from the desk, spoke again while facing the wall. “So you could not help me with the cause of your people, but you could help the cause of this whiteface.”

“His causes are the causes of many.”

Rainwater spun and aimed a finger at Wareagle. “The cause of your people is the cause of many. You have abandoned them.”

If Wareagle was hurt, he didn’t show it. “I do what I must, Joe Rainwater.”

“Big battles, not little ones, in keeping with your style.”

Johnny shrugged. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Which scares me all the more, because I know now you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t feel this was something right in your ballpark. And it’s turning out that way, isn’t it? Jesus Christ,
something’s
killing criminals, something not from this world. It couldn’t be in so many places at the same time if it was. Right or wrong, John Wareagle?”

“I don’t know, Joe Rainwater.”

“I do.” Injun Joe paced back to the front of the lieutenant’s desk. “Somebody out there who was fed up, somebody who knows of the old ways, conjured these things up. And now they’re out there and they’re gonna keep on killing until somebody else sends them back to …”

“Where, Joe Rainwater?”

“Back to wherever they came from.”

“And you think I can send them back.”

“I know you, John Wareagle.”

“Perhaps not as well as you think.” Johnny stood up. “I should leave now, Joe Rainwater.”

Injun Joe reached up to place a hand on Wareagle’s shoulder. “No, I’m sorry. Listen to me. I was inside the Oliveras mansion two minutes after it happened. I had put the hellfire and Shadow One behind me, John Wareagle. But what I saw there, what I felt …” His eyes were pleading. “It all came back and it hurt more than it ever hurt before. I could call no one else because no one else could grasp all of what I was feeling.” Injun Joe swallowed hard. “I need you, John Wareagle. Let me go home and grab some sleep. Then tomorrow morning we’ll start over fresh.”

But now morning had come, with foreboding instead of hope.

The front door to Joe Rainwater’s house was locked, the windows all closed. Johnny breathed a little easier. He stepped down from the porch and made his way around to the rear of the house. Not surprisingly, the shrubbery and grounds were immaculate. He could feel Joe Rainwater in every flower and hedge piece. Meticulous, detailed. Joe Rainwater would not have trusted any part of his home to anyone else.

He reached the backyard and saw nothing out of place. All seemed just as it should have been. There was a Florida room Rainwater had built himself, a jalousied door leading into it.

The door was open.

Wareagle held his knife higher as he approached. The latch had been shattered, the door shredded in the area of the knob. Johnny climbed the three steps and entered the Florida room. He glided soundlessly forward, as if weightless, and entered the house. Just outside the kitchen, he smelled it:

Gunsmoke.

He moved through the first floor and climbed the stairs toward the second.

Another smell alerted him even before the feel. Joe Rainwater’s bedroom door was open. Blood trailed out into the hallway. Johnny Wareagle moved to the threshold and stopped.

Joe Rainwater’s head looked up at him from the floor, its tongue protruding grotesquely outward, a puddle of blood still wet beneath it. The rest of his mangled corpse lay near the bed, left arm nearly severed and right hand missing. Johnny’s feet grew heavy. The knife grasped in his hand felt suddenly ineffectual. He tried to feel from the room what had happened,
how
it had happened. There was nothing, as if the walls themselves had closed their eyes to the killing.

Resting against a wall, not far from Joe Rainwater’s severed hand, was a .357 Magnum snub-nosed revolver. Johnny lowered his nose to it.

It had been fired recently. The empty cylinders told him at least six times.

But Joe Rainwater’s weapon of choice these days was a Smith & Wesson 9mm. Johnny’s eyes began to search anew. There it was, on the floor next to the rest of his corpse. Again he lowered his head, touched the steel of the barrel this time.

The clip was empty, all fourteen shots fired, the heat of the barrel told Johnny within the last hour and a half, just before dawn. Joe Rainwater had not gone without a fight. He had gotten off twenty shots.

Twenty shots and he had hit nothing.

Johnny gazed about the bedroom. Bullets had punctured a mirror and a pair of pictures, one showing Joe Rainwater in full police dress getting a commendation from the mayor. The other showed him receiving his Purple Heart after returning from the hellfire. The walls, too, had small chasms where bullets had ripped home. Wareagle stepped into the corridor and found similar chasms in the wall immediately opposite the door to the bedroom. Joe Rainwater had been ready for whatever was coming, then, and it hadn’t mattered.

Johnny gazed at the phone still sitting on Joe’s night table. Joe Rainwater could have called for help in the end, but he hadn’t. He had been a warrior, and a warrior knows his time to fight. Johnny suddenly felt very empty. Joe Rainwater had been more like him than Rainwater had ever cared to admit.

Wareagle’s eyes drifted to the wall once again. A photo that had been miraculously untouched by blood or bullets pictured Rainwater in the center of what Johnny assumed was a good portion of Shadow One. Arms around each other’s shoulders. Happy. Confident. Johnny wondered if he belonged in that picture. He felt strangely calm now. His grip slackened on the knife in his hand. Whatever had killed Joe Rainwater was long gone.

But it had broken its own rules. Joe Rainwater wasn’t a murderer, criminal, or drug lord. He had been killed simply because he had gotten too close, asked too many questions. Up till now Wareagle had felt a certain reluctance to interfere with a force that was ridding the world of its vermin. But all that had changed. Only a force as dark as those that it aspired to eradicate would have done this to a man like Joe Rainwater. Wareagle felt the familiar fires beginning to stoke deep within.

Another great battle loomed. He could feel the spirits around him, dressing his soul with a warbonnet. Johnny imagined he could smell the feathers.

He was halfway back to the stairway when the first of the policemen charged up the stairs.

“Freeze!” the man screamed his way, gun drawn and leveled with both hands. “Keep your hands where I can see them!”

A second policeman slid by the first and passed Wareagle en route to the second floor.

“Against the wall!” the first one ordered. “Move it!
Now!
I said—”

“Jesus Christ,” the second officer said when he neared the doorway to Joe Rainwater’s bedroom. “Oh, my sweet Jesus …”

Wareagle heard him retching. The other officer was fidgeting with his handcuffs. He had trouble fitting them around Johnny’s wrists.

“You’re under arrest,” Wareagle heard.

“Look,” the captain of Joe Rainwater’s precinct was saying, “I’m sorry about the arrest. Nosy neighbor saw you enter the house and called 911. Since it was a cop’s house, we … Well, you get the picture.”

Johnny Wareagle looked at Captain Eberling from across the desk. “Yes.”

“But I got this problem, see: one of my best men is dead. And I got you, who I never laid eyes on in my life before today, called in as some sort of consultant and you’re the one who finds Injun Joe chewed up the same way Oliveras and his men were. You mind telling me how you two knew each other?”