This time I grunted as I heard his shoes scuff over the pavement and crunch on the glass shards while approaching me. I froze stock-still, giving him my back.
"You got a smoke, Butterfingers?"
"Piss off."
"Hey, apologies if I offended you. Not my intention."
Obliging him, I patted down the pockets to the loose suit jacket, frisked out an unsealed pack, and flipped it over my shoulder. "Think fast." I didn't trouble myself to turn for a face-to-face with him. "Keep 'em."
"Ah, Blue Castles. Excellent. Thanks."
I'd nothing to say on that, only hoped that he did piss off. He didn't.
"You got a red cunt hair lodged in your tonsils, Butterfingers? You don't sound too good." He torched the
Blue
Castle
, and I next inhaled a mellow whiff of its aromatic tobacco. "You gotta watch that kind of trouble."
Watchful not to trip on the oversized trouser cuffs, I drifted toward the sedan's front bumper, intending to lure the schmuck away from the other dark suits’ lines of vision. For my reply, I used an indifferent mumble as I halted just off from the hood ornament, my back again to him. Gauging his cloddish tread, I tracked his proximity. If my hands could lash out and seize his skull, I'd screw it in a wrong jerk as I'd done to the late Butterfingers.
"No shit, have you been getting any? You're awfully touchy."
My shoulders hoisted by a perceptible inch.
"Now me, I've got more hot and spicy than I can ever eat." He guffawed. "Closer to the bone, the sweeter the meat turns."
I nodded under the fedora as if I agreed with the pervert who I spoiled to gun down.
"You're a real chatterbox, Butterfingers."
"Piss off."
"Hey, go piss off yourself." He sounded angry. Good. "Here I'm trying to be civil, and I get nothing but shit. You think you're better than me."
"No contest, asshole."
"Huh? Listen you, I sport fancier suits, hit swankier clubs, and drive classier cars than you ever will. You got that? You're nothing but less than a zero. Matter of fact, name me one thing—just one—you've got that I don't?"
"Your sister's cunt hair."
Hearing that quip threw him into a lather, but he didn't charge close enough for me reach out and break his neck. "I'll pop you now, and the hell with Mr. Ogg. This shit ain't done, not by a long shot."
I jacked up my hand protruding from the suit's tent-like cuff and flipped him the bird.
Then he surprised me by chuckling. "I'm going to dig breaking you. Any day now. Yes sir, you can take that to the bank."
Smug to get in the last word, he left me, trudging over the sidewalk, moving in the other direction. I stayed put, telling my heart to dial it down. I scratched my collarbone, mulling over how I could blend in with his pals, whack Mr. Ogg, and slip away like a ghost. My glance up the way revealed I was the only dark suit not seated in his sedan. The dark suit now with a vendetta against Butterfingers—me—fumed inside his sedan. I hesitated. Me seated and trapped inside the sedan spelled disaster if this caper went south.
Leaning against the driver door, I palmed out my own crumpled pack of Blue Castles and indulged one. Five dark suits now stood between me and Mr. Ogg. I eyed the distant bungalow through my expelled cigarette smoke, this time less awed by his brilliant genius to live and thus avoid official scrutiny here. If he knew what I did, he'd've pulled up stakes and moved on way back. The cop Bang had said Mr. Ogg had long been a "person of interest," but their evidence would never stick enough in court to arrest him. Yet. Pretty soon I set flame to another
Blue
Castle
and inhaled with gusto. My court didn’t need evidence to mete out a death sentence.
Every now and then, I heard the tossed out empty glass flasks and bottles smash on the pavement and sidewalk. The dark suits had brought along a brewery. By the time I smoked and butted my third
Blue
Castle
, I had it all noodled out. The solution lay right under my nose. So, I went on enjoying my Blue Castles and biding my time.
As I expected, one by one, the alcohol-hazed dark suits slumped over, their foreheads propped on the upper arcs to their steering wheels, or they slumped back against their head rests. Their fedoras spilled off their hat racks for heads. Passed out or fallen asleep removed them from the equation. I smiled like a skull grins. It was high time for my final tête-à-tête with Mr. Ogg, who lay slumbering inside his unguarded castle.
Chapter 31
I
regripped the stolen 11-mm, chambered its fresh round, and traversed Mr. Ogg's lawn, the April lush grass muffling my rapid footfall. I knew where to go and not set off his infrared motion detector chimes or barking watch-dog alarms. I didn't mess with the front door since he kept it dead-bolted, brass-chained, and floor-anchored shut. He'd also installed security cameras and a door alarm he'd been so kind as to also point out to me during one of his arrogant boasts. The rear door provided a better entry point for me.
He placed his faith there in booby traps. The unwary intruder snapped a tripwire—a span of olive drab copper wire stretched taut a couple of hand-widths above the porch step—and detonated a Claymore anti-personnel mine. An inch-a-half smaller than a Frisbee, a Claymore charged by 1.5 lbs. of C4 plastic explosive threw out a rough kiss of 700 steel ball bearings, an effective widow-maker up to fifty meters away.
Intruder vaporized, Mr. Ogg had crowed. Any personal injury lawsuit wasn't a concern. Meth lab fiends loved to use the same type of booby traps, where he'd learned of its nasty lethality since the GIs weren't issued Claymores anymore in our civilized war on terror. So, I tiptoed over the tripwire, avoiding the outlawed Claymore mine—FRONT TOWARD ENEMY—tilted on its scissor-like legs and grinning up like a venomous toad at me.
After turning the knob, I cracked open the rear door.
Whoa. Freeze
. If I hadn't chanced a look down at the spot just beyond my shoe tops, I'd've shredded my ass into fleshy confetti. My eyebrows knitted over what I saw there. How did you like that? The shifty Mr. Ogg had strung up the
second
tripwire to his redundant Claymore, the one he'd never divulged to me.
I encored my catlike tiptoe act before I gained safe entry into his bright kitchen. Nervous sweat caked my shirt's fabric to my armpits and shoulders. I panted to catch my breath while I rechoked my slippery clasp on the 11-mm's handle. I was so riveted by my self-preservation that I suffered no allergic skin reaction from holding it.
Studying my immediate front didn't pick out any other tripwires. I felt reassured enough to skulk down the dim short corridor where Mr. Ogg's bedroom door sat ajar. My squint inside the bright room surveyed him. He lay flaked out on a military tubular bed next to the Army locker. As I edged through the doorway, I noted the protective steel plates reinforcing the bedroom's wall facing the kitchen and the back-blast area to the detonating Claymore meat-grinders.
Burnt red PJs clad him, and he made these drooling infant noises.
Weird,
I thought
. He even wears the aviator shades to bed
. His chest vapor rub exuded eye-stinging mentholated fumes. His white cane with the gold skull knob leaned against the ladder-back chair, and a deck of playing cards was left on the nightstand. A lank shadow, I towered over his bed.
"
Et tu
, Tommy Mack?"
His raspy oath didn't unnerve me. I'd half-suspected the bloodsucker never slept a wink anyway. I flipped off the fedora to land on the chair bottom.
"Skip the drama."
"I smelled your tobacco. Mind if I sit up?"
"Okay, but if you twitch wrong, I'll plant you. I've had a few years to perfect my aim."
"I seem to recall that." He craned upright to turn and sit on the edge of the bed, his bony feet dangling below the PJs' cuffs. "How did you elude the dark suits and penetrate my pair of Claymores?"
"Because I'm just that damn good."
"No, you've gone rogue."
I shrugged. Clichéd labels bored me.
"You brought a list of beefs. Otherwise we'd rap at a decent hour with no hardware drawn out."
I echoed his famous mantra. "Just taking care of business, sir. It's nothing personal."
"So be easy, Tommy Mack." He lowered his patented Dutch uncle smile on me. "We can iron this out and clear the air."
"No more with the mind games. All that is done."
I fixed the 11-mm’s bore on the slot between his aviator shades. He tensed as if he knew how close he sat to his corpse. The endorphins danced through my brain, and my thoughts streamed out with the fierce clarity I'd never experienced until this chilling interval. An awing sense of power embraced me.
"Buckle up, Mr. Ogg. We're traveling back in time."
He nodded. "All aboard then. Where to, kiddo?"
"
Champagne
's Folly,
Texas
."
He cocked his goggled head at me. "I've never had the pleasure."
"Little pleasure exists there, believe me. I ought to know. My life ended before it really began there."
"Ancient history, isn't it?"
"Not to me, it isn't. Most of it I've sussed out. Now you can verify it or deny it."
"Ah, you're the deep thinker. Didn't I warn you what that does to you?"
"Shut up and listen for once. First I did your dirty work for a few shekels."
"From day one, that was our deal. You agreed to do it."
"Tonight our deal is null and void."
"Look it, before you go any further, you can still back off, Tommy Mack. Nothing will change. We forget this. It was a misunderstanding or just a dream. That's all."
"This is no dream. I'll tell you what's real. Real is a kid who lost both of his parents. The father Bradford blasted out his heart by crooking his big toe to trigger off a 12-gauge. A week later to the day, the mother Nella broke her neck by hanging on her pantyhose. That's a lot of dark freight for any kid to carry through his life."
"I've never heard you talk of it. Condolences for your losses."
"Condolences rejected, Mr. Ogg. For the sake of brevity, I'll summarize what actually happened. A young crime boss in the outfit dispatched his ablest enforcer to
Champagne
's Folly. He staged two suicides, one for my father's death and the other for my mother's.
"When the kid went up for adoption, the young boss strong-armed the Zanes of Old Yvor City, Virginia, to take in the kid and raise him as one of their own. Except he never was. Over time, the young boss aged while the kid grew up. Then he gave the kid a job, and he performed it with quiet efficiency, soon a killing machine."
Mr. Ogg's laugh froze men's spines, but mine came already frigid. "So I'm the young crime boss in your wild-eyed tale. Enlighten me on why I had your folks killed."
I shrugged. "The police and juries like to hear a motive, but me? I don't give a rat's fart. The truth is all I need to know from you."
"You say I groomed you to be a hit man. That's farfetched since any psychopath with a better than par intelligence and a mediocre aim can ace it."
"Maybe so but I made Tommy Mack a ghost who breezes on and off the death scenes leaving no trace. That's why you've kept me on. I'm the top dog at doing the most grisly deed your enterprise requires."
"You're one slick killer, I'll grant you, but that's the extent of our association. I never knew the Zanes, and I'd nothing to do with your boyhood in the
Lone
Star
State
."
I smiled. "Denials aren't your smartest angle here."
"All right, Phil and Amanda Zane did some low-level grift for me back in the early days. They were newlyweds and needed the money, and I had the work. But they retired, and we've since lost all touch."
"Bullshit. I've been with the outfit long enough to know once you're in the cesspit, there's no crawling out of it."
He canted his expressive eyebrows at me. "I'm tired. Do you have more?"
"I do. Gwen's murder. We know
Baltimore
would look in askance if you killed a member of your family, so you arranged it to look as if I was her shooter. Who did actually whack her?"