Brothers and Bones (17 page)

“It’s not my gun!” I said.

“Really? It’s registered to you.”

I was about to disagree, then said, “Can you really do that?”

“You’d be surprised what we can do. Plus, somewhere in this apartment is a receipt for the gun—you paid with cash, by the way. There’s also extra ammo, gun-cleaning materials, rags with gun oil on them. There’s even a note, written in a damned good copy of your handwriting, with the name and address of a guy in Dorchester who makes illegal sound suppressors. You could look for it all but you’d never find it before the cops get here. I wonder how far away they are even now.” He cocked his head, as if listening for a distant siren. “And, of course, there’s gunshot residue on your hands. They’ll be able to tell you fired a gun recently.”

He was right about that. Even blanks leave GSR. I was starting to get very nervous about all this.

“And look at yourself, Charlie, your face and clothes covered in the stiff’s blood. Try explaining that away.”

“Angel and I were friends,” I said without conviction. “Everyone knew that.”

“Then why’d you threaten him tonight?”

“I
didn’t
threaten him!”

“A lot of people saw you fight with him tonight, didn’t they? And he said you threatened him, didn’t he? Everyone at that fancy charity dinner heard him. Then he knocked you down, embarrassed you. Adds up to a motive, don’t you think?”

I opened my mouth but realized I had nothing to say. I’d played right into his hands all along.

“Now, Charlie, you’re supposed to be a hot-shit prosecutor. What could
you
do with all this evidence?”

I sighed. I was totally screwed. “Why are you doing this?”

“Like I said, we want your help.”

“With what?”

“We need something your brother had, Charlie. We need you to find it for us.”

“That’s what Angel was doing here before I came home. He was looking for whatever it is you’re here for.”

The killer shook his head. “That’s what he thought he was doing. That was just to keep him busy until you got here. We told him what to look for but knew he wouldn’t find it. When you got here, he was supposed to see if he could get any info out of you, which we knew he couldn’t, then rough you up as a warning. Of course, his real mission, which he didn’t know about, was to die.”

My eyes flicked over to Angel, whose blood was soaking into the carpet around his head, like a blood-red halo.

“So what is it you’re looking for?” I asked.

“A tape.”

“Videotape?”

“Audio. Probably a cassette. And notes about it, if he had them.”

I looked at the gun in his hand. I looked at Angel again. He’d probably kill me anyway, but I had to at least try to give him what he wanted. If he made a mistake and let me live, I’d find him, somehow, and make him pay.

“I have a file of Jake’s,” I said.

The killer nodded and walked over to my desk, bent down and opened the bottom drawer, and held up manila folder. It was half an inch thick and secured with rubber bands around its length and width. Inside were Jake’s notes, the ones I’d taken from his apartment after he disappeared, notes about stories he was working on at the time, some phone numbers, a few other odds and ends.

“You mean these?” the killer said, tossing the file at me.

I caught it and said, “You knew about these?”

“We copied that file ten years ago.”

I was stunned. They’d been in my apartment. The question of who “they” were came to mind again. “Who are you?” I asked. “You work for Carmen Siracuse?”

“Shut the fuck up, Charlie. Now, you got anything else? Any more files? Any tapes you took from your brother’s apartment, maybe?”

“Didn’t you go through his place after he disappeared?”

“Course we did. Didn’t find anything. Thought maybe you beat us to it, but we’ve been through your apartment and didn’t find any tapes.”

“I switched to CDs.” I wondered when the cops were going to show up. I hoped they’d hurry and arrive while this sick son of a bitch was still here. I hoped I could stall long enough. “What’s on the tape?”

“None of your fucking business.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Find it.”

“If you won’t tell me what’s on it, how will I know if I find it?”

“You’ll know.”

“If I knew what it was, I might know where to look.”

“Bonzetti may lead you to it. It’s somewhere. Someone has it. Or your brother hid it. Something. And you may figure it out, which we haven’t been able to do. Or maybe even your friend Bonzetti already has it. We need you to get it for us.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Not our problem. Just do it.”

“I have no idea what it is. Tell me what it is.”

“You don’t need to know. My guess is, you’ll know it when you come across it.”

“But I don’t have a clue where to look for it. And what if Bonz does already have it?”

“They call him Bones, you idiot, not Bonz.”

“Whatever. What if he already has it?”

“Then you take it from him,” he said matter-of-factly.

I thought about Bonz, with his martial-arts quickness and his psychotic behavior. “Do you
know
Bonz?!”

A dark smile split the killer’s lips. “Oh, yeah, I know him.”

“And if he doesn’t have it and I can’t find it?”

“Then you forget about all of this. You go on your way and let us go on ours. We make your little Angel problem simply go away. The body, the evidence, everything. We don’t tell the authorities anything and neither do you. Sound fair?”

“And I’m supposed to believe you’ll just let me get on with my life?”

“Frankly, your brother didn’t leave us much choice on that.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You don’t need to know the details. But if you do come across the tape, you
won’t
pretend you don’t have it. We’ll know, and we’ll be pissed.
I’ll
be pissed. And you don’t want that. You do not fucking want that.”

I was silent, pretending to consider the offer. Of course, if I ever found whatever it was they were looking for, I’d never give it to them. Fuck them.

My attitude must have shown on my face because the killer smiled cruelly and said, “Just to keep you honest, why don’t I show you what I do to people who cross us…who cross me.”

My eyes dropped to the gun in his hand.

“This? No, I won’t be using this.” He dropped his gun into a pocket and reached inside his coat, which hung just below his waist. I saw a flash of metal on his hip and watched as he pulled a hammer from a carpenter’s hook attached to his belt. The hammer looked old. There appeared to be brown rust around the blunt end. Its black rubber grip was worn. Its claws looked sharp, though, like the killer worked hard to keep them that way. I didn’t like the look of that hammer at all, so I raised my gaze and looked the killer in his wide-set, black eyes. I didn’t like what I saw there either.

EIGHTEEN

“See,” the killer said, looking down at the hammer in his hand with the kind of fondness a person usually reserves for his children, or maybe a beloved pet, “what I do is, I tie you to a chair. Then I take out a nail.” He dipped his hand into the pocket of his windbreaker and extracted a few nails, some black, some gunmetal gray, some dull, some shiny. “I keep a few dozen in my pocket, of various kinds, various lengths. I never know what I’m gonna come up with.”

He walked up to me, real close. I smelled Old Spice aftershave and Doublemint gum. The gun was in his pocket. Maybe that was the time to make a move, knock him down and bolt for the door. But he still held that hammer. And the gun was right there, right in his pocket, close enough for him to grab in a heartbeat. He shifted the nails so most were curled into his palm, but one he held between his thumb and index finger. He looked appraisingly at my head.

“Then I pick a spot on your skull at random,” he said, “and I choose a nail—maybe this two-inch electro-galvanized roofing nail, for instance, right here.” He gently pushed the point against the center of my forehead. Then he flicked his hand, deftly switching the nail in his fingers for one from his palm, a practiced move. “Or maybe this inch-and-a-half common nail right here.” He touched the point of the nail against my left temple. He did the hand flick again, substituting a long, dark, mean nail for the shorter one. “Or maybe this baby, a hot galvanized spiral-shafted three-inch deck nail, right fucking here.” He tapped the nail lightly against the soft spot on the top of my skull. His face was just a foot from mine. His left eye was just in front of my right. His other eye was, it seemed, somewhere across the room.

He raised the hammer and held it between our faces, right in front of my nose. I started to suspect that what I had taken for old, brown rust might not have been rust at all.

“Then I take this and—
whack—
drive the nail into your fucking skull, just hard enough to sink the nail. I like to see what happens. Must hurt like hell, of course, but it can also have some interesting side effects. And they change, depending on the length of the nail and the spot I choose.”

He looked lost in thought for the briefest of moments, as if recalling a pleasant memory. He almost seemed to be smiling, chewing his gum less violently. But the reverie ended quickly.

“Sometimes when I put the nail in,” he said, “the guy’s leg shoots out straight and locks there. He can’t bend it for the life of him. Or sometimes he’ll just drool uncontrollably, spit pouring down his chin. Or maybe he’ll start muttering gibberish, or he shits himself.” He laughed and continued, “Listen to this one now. I was questioning this guy once and he was fucking stubborn, so I got tired of his shit, thought maybe he didn’t know anything after all, and I put a two-and-a-half-inch roofing nail into his head, somewhere on the top, toward the side, I think it was. Well, the right half of the guy’s face twisted up and froze that way. The left half looked normal. It was freaky. But he could still talk. And talk he did. Cried and talked. I couldn’t stop him. Told me everything I wanted to know. So I pulled the nail out and let him go. And get this. I see the guy on the street a year later and guess what. He’s fucking fine. Not a thing wrong with him. You’d never know someone had driven a big fucking nail into his skull. Go figure, right?” He laughed again. “But you can’t count on that, Charlie. That almost never happens. Not usually such a happy ending, you get me?”

He stepped back and narrowed his eyes.

“I said, you get me?”

I nodded.

“Good. Now, you don’t want to fuck with me, right?”

He wanted an answer again so I shook my head.

“That’s right,” he said. “So, I assume we got a deal.”

I started to speak and my voice broke. The killer chuckled to himself. I cleared my throat and said, “Remind me what it was again.”

“You find the tape and give it to us and we make your little problem here go away.” He tilted his head toward Angel’s corpse on the floor. “If Bonzetti has it, you take it from him and give it to us and, as I said, we make your problem go away.”

“And if I don’t find it and Bonz doesn’t have it?”

“You forget you ever heard of it, go on with your life, and we still make your little problem go away—don’t forget, though, we can make it come back any time we want.”

Sounded like a decent deal to me. Pretend to find the tape, fail miserably—I mean, what did I care?—and then get my life back.

“Oh, and there’s one more thing,” he said.

I waited for him to ask for my soul or my firstborn child.

“You give us Bonzetti.”

“I don’t understand.”

The killer sighed with impatience and scissored his jaws on his chewing gum. “We want Bonzetti. You deliver him to us. We need him, whether or not we get the tape.”

“What do you want with him?”

“Don’t fucking worry about it. Besides, you don’t want to know. But no matter what happens, you deliver him to us, preferably alive, but we’ll take him dead. We don’t care how you do it. Drug him, hit him with a brick, whatever, just deliver him. You understand?”

The killer slipped his hammer into his jacket and back onto its spot on his belt. I hesitated before answering, then stammered something noncommittal. The killer took the gun from his pocket again, raised it to arm level, and pointed it at my face.

“Look,” I said, “even if I give you what you want, I’m still in deep shit. The gun, my prints, everything you said. The police will be here soon.”

“I didn’t call the cops, you idiot. But I could at any second.” Jesus, I fell for that twice within a half hour. “You leave here and do what you have to do, get us the tape, give us that shithead Bonzetti, and the cops will never even know about this. Nobody heard the gunshots, not with the silencer I used. I’ll get rid of the body and the gun and tell you where to find all the evidence we planted here. You’ll probably wanna replace your bloody carpet, but that’s your call. Anyway, no one will be the wiser. But you screw with us, and we make an anonymous call to the cops telling them that you killed your pal and where you dumped his body. They’ll find this shirt there, too,” he said, holding up my shirt covered with Angel’s blood, “and on it will be all sorts of your DNA—body hair, skin flakes, your blood—along with Angel’s blood, of course.”

“My blood? There’s no blood of mine on—”

Without the slightest warning, he shot out a fist and caught me square in the nose. I staggered back a step. A moment later the blood started to flow. He tossed me my bloody shirt.

“My mistake. Wipe your nose.”

I looked down at the shirt in my hands.

“No,” I said.

“Do it, you dumb shit, or I’ll keep making you bleed.”

I looked at his face, then at the gun, then back at his face. I wiped the blood from nose on the shirt. The killer held out his hand and I tossed it to him.

“Okay,” he said, “as I was saying, when the cops find your buddy’s body, they’ll also find this shirt with both of your blood on it and a bunch more of your DNA. And when they come here, they’ll find everything else. Pretty airtight case, wouldn’t you say, Counselor? Wouldn’t you just love to have evidence like this when you walk into court?”