Bad Radio (23 page)

“That’s not really your business, is it?”

He gestured to his office, and the injured men on the floor. “I do seem to be involved.”

I had to smile a little at that. I learned in the war that the ability of someone to earn your respect had very little to do with whether they were your enemy or not. “Let’s just say that something happened to me the first and only time we ever met, and I’m still figuring out the extent of it.”

I suddenly had a sense of what this conversation must look like to an outsider. Here I was, having a pleasant chat with the guy who had paid men to kill me and my friends, while his henchmen writhed in pain on the floor not ten feet away. I guess I’d been away from life for so long, I’d forgotten how relentlessly strange it was.

Dominic continued, “So Peter was right, then. You have no choice but to find him.”

“There are two options, kill him or keep him away from those altar pieces. I didn’t do so well on B, so I guess I’d better start working on A. If I don’t, it’ll be bad. For everyone.”

“You believe that?”

I shrugged. “Feels right.”

“Alright, I’ll give you directions, but it’s a drive of several hours to get there. You moving out tonight?”

“We need to sleep for a few hours first, but yeah.”

“I’m leaving town myself. Tell you what. You and your lady friend come back to my place, get rested up, and then we’ll both leave and go our separate ways.”

He broke eye contact with me and looked around his wrecked office.

“I’ve never felt like the things I’ve done in my life were wrong, you know? You don’t want your knees broken, you pay what you owe. You want a night with a good looking girl, and you can pay for it, who am I to judge, right? But doing work for that crazy son of a bitch in Belmont? It makes me feel dirty. First time for everything, huh? Come back to my place, let me fix you up, and I’ll feel like I’ve made up for it. What do you say?”

And that’s how we ended up staying at Dominic Tesso’s place like we were old friends.

Dominic called someone over to help his injured men, and then we followed his gleaming black Range Rover with our rental across the city.

His house had all the earmarks of purchased respectability: swanky part of town, wealthy neighbors, enormous manicured lawn with a circular drive and columns bracketing a fifteen-foot-tall set of artfully carved wood and glass doors.

Or, as I noticed when we passed through, steel doors painted to look like wood, inset with bulletproof glass. I guess there’s a fine line between fitting in with the society crowd and sleeping well at night.

The entryway opened into a vast living room, airy and bright, in which the entire back wall could be opened to the patio. With a touch, Dominic caused a sliding cascade of glass partitions to sweep aside, opening the house to the great Colorado outdoors. I tried not to look impressed, but I don’t think I did a very good job of it.

Dominic ushered us outside to sit in the sunning chairs which were artfully arranged on the wide patio and urged us to enjoy the spectacular view of the lake that graced his back acreage, its surface mirror-flat and serene. He went back inside to fetch us something to drink.

Anne grabbed my arm and whispered at me. “So, what, you pull the guy’s arm out of its socket and now he’s your best friend? You know he’s going to come back out here with a gun and just shoot us, right?”

“I’m supposed to be the jaded cynical one, remember?”

“Not cynical enough. Why are we trusting him?”

“We’re not, we’re trusting human nature.”

“For the record, just because you’re a million years old doesn’t make you wise. It just makes you old.”

“Don’t talk to your elders that way. And it’s true. As loose ends, we’re expendable. But as allies against something that he doesn’t understand, we’re precious assets.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely. But keep a sharp eye out, just in case.”

“I don’t think you know what the word absolutely means.”

Dominic strolled out onto the patio and handed us each a cold beer, something foreign and no doubt excellent. He pulled up a chair and we all sat and drank like civilized people, looking out at the endless blue morning sky and its darker twin reflected in the lake below.

“I’m going to miss this place. Dream house sounds pretty hokey, huh? But I think the dream of this house on this lake is what pushed me to the top. Funny to think that I’m just going to leave it all behind without a fight.”

“You could always stay,” said Anne. “When we’re done, Peter won’t be looking you up for any more work.”

Dominic shook his head and smiled, not without pity, I think. “You and your boyfriend here are a long shot, sweetheart. A hundred to one. A thousand to one. You seem pretty smart, and he’s a hard guy to take in a fight, sure. But Peter has a whole world to himself in that town. And he has something you don’t. There’s something almost like … fate, I guess, hanging off him.

“I’m happy to see you two take a run at it, that’s all to the good for me, but the truth is, I’m just throwing a couple of cats in a wood chipper hoping that their bones will jam the thing up. Odds are, you guys aren’t coming out. At least not the same way you went in. No offense, but the last thing I want to see is one of you knocking on my door with worms falling out your face. Tell you what. You win, I’ll come back and we can all sit together on the patio and have another beer.” He smiled at her and turned his bottle up to the sun, draining the last of it.

I smiled and raised my own bottle in salute. “Thanks for the beer and the confidence.”

“Any time.”

“I hate to be a bad guest, but we’re wiped out. Do you mind if we get some sleep here before we move out?”

“How about breakfast first?”

“I could live with that. I think the last thing I ate was in another time zone.”

“I’ll whip something up, and then you can get some rest while I pack my things. We’ll leave here together.”

Anne and I stayed on the patio while Dominic went inside and began clattering and bustling in the kitchen. We sat for a long time in companionable silence, sipping cold beer and enjoying the early morning sunshine. Deep weariness muffled the tension and fear of the last few days, granting us a comfortable lassitude as we basked.

I nudged her with my beer. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Thanks for helping me get here.”

“I told you I would.”

“You sure you want to follow me into Belmont? You promised to help me find Piotr, and now we have. Job over.”

She smiled a slow, lazy smile. “Again with this? You are so stupid.”

“Ouch, right in the feelings.”

She turned to face me. “Pay attention. I’m not helping you get to this Peter guy, you’re helping me. He killed my grandfather. I’m going to make him pay. End of story.” She relaxed back into her chair, face turned up to the sky. “You of all people should understand that.”

“You have the right, I won’t argue that. But the odds are that this is a one-way trip. No amount of talking and explaining can make you understand what Piotr is like. Patrick would never want you throwing your life away, especially not for him.”

“And you think he’d want you to go in there?”

“That’s different. I think he’d understand why I have to go.”

She patted me on the arm, not ruffled in the slightest. “So do I.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I drank my beer and watched geese touch down amid the silver glitter of the lake’s surface down below. If the silence bothered her, Anne didn’t show it.

Half an hour later, Dominic called us back into the house for a breakfast of pan seared trout, wild rice mixed with tart cranberries, and roasted new potatoes dusted with chipotle powder.

He served us himself, setting plates down in front of us with a flourish. “I know fish isn’t your typical breakfast food, but I just caught these and I figured there was no sense in just letting them go to waste.”

Even if I hadn’t been starving from long hours on the road, it would have been fantastic and we said so. Dominic was self-effacing but obviously pleased at our praise.

We all have different faces that we show to the world, but we often don’t realize just how little control we have over which one we wear at any given time. It made me wonder what Dom saw in us that brought out the genial host in him. Knowing where we were headed, I suspected it was pity.

After we ate he showed us to one of the many guestrooms, and neither one of us corrected his notion that we were a couple. We simply thanked him and went inside.

As soon as the door closed, Anne threw herself onto the bed, fully clothed and on top of the comforter. She didn’t even take her shoes off. She stretched and groaned with pleasure.

“Oh, that feels good. I am so tired of sleeping in the car all the time.” She rolled over on her back and claimed a pillow. “You haven’t even been able to do that. You must be exhausted.”

I kicked off my shoes and lay down next to her. “I’m pretty beat.”

We stared quietly at the ceiling together, contemplating the ornate wooden trim and elaborate ceiling fan as if we were on a blanket at a picnic watching the clouds.

When Anne spoke, her words came out slow and drowsy. “You still trust him?”

“I shouldn’t. But I think we’re safe enough.”

“Okay.”

After a moment of silence, I turned my head to look at her. She was sound asleep. With her eyes closed and her face relaxed there was no sign of the fierce determination that drove her. She looked small and vulnerable.

I brushed a few strands of hair from where they lay against her cheek and thought about the first time I saw her, too bright and lively on my front step, and realized how dead to the world I had been then. For all of her vibrant beauty I had just stood there, unable to see it.

I could see it now.

I wanted to protect her, especially that innocent and fragile part of her that laughed at my terrible jokes and turned up the radio and sang out loud without the slightest bit of embarrassment.

There are some things whose loss you can only feel when you get them back. Being able to stand between something precious and those that would destroy it made me feel alive. Like I mattered. There was a time when doing that was the biggest part of my life.

I joined the Army after Pearl Harbor because we were under attack. The idea of fighting to defend my country drew me like nothing ever had before. I found a sense of purpose that had a rightness to it that changed my life. It was like a key turning in a lock.

Looking back now it was easy to see how that purpose and sense of worth had dwindled away as I slowly outlived everyone that mattered to me.

Before now I had been going through the motions of confronting Piotr out of a sense of duty. I knew in my head that I had to stop him, but I hadn’t felt it in my heart. I just knew that I had to try and that I would likely die in the attempt.

But now I knew that I was going to do more than try. Anne would survive. The world that she loved would survive. I would stand between her and all of the horrors that Piotr could bring to bear, and I would not be moved.

I held that sense of purpose close and slept.

25

M
y sense of well-being didn’t last long. I had formless, churning dreams of clenched hunger and wet fetid smells in darkness, and always the sense of endless movement in all directions.

There was also watchfulness. A singular intense scrutiny that seemed to come from everywhere at once prickled at the back of my neck, a savage bite just a second away. I was moving, eeling my way through the unseen thickness of the terrain with sleek muscular purpose, searching for I don’t know what.

The hunt was forever, I knew, but I also felt in my guts that it could end any second, and I couldn’t pull my fevered attention away from the possibility, not even to rest. Rage and hunger and maddening frustration drove me unceasingly, one eternal second of pushing and searching stretched out to infinity.

Then there was a change, a break that suddenly split my undifferentiated existence into a before and after. I could sense something. My body juddered and my nerves silvered and electrified. My teeth and jaws ached to sink through it. It was here, close.