Authors: Nancy Martin
“They scare people? Or do they shoot people?”
“Both.”
“You mean … hit men?”
She grinned. “More like intimidation. They haven’t actually killed anyone yet.”
“It’s only a matter of time?”
“My money’s on one of them killing the other, probably by accident, probably when they’re drunk as skunks.” She pulled the Mustang’s keys from her pocket and dangled them in the air. “Until then, they’re free agents. I thought I’d go see them and ask a few questions. You game?”
“Depends. What are the chances these gentlemen are drunk as skunks today?”
“Pretty good, as a matter of fact.”
A moment later they were climbing into the Mustang. The dog sat down on the gravel, looking unhappy to be left behind. Henry enjoyed a moment of relief before he took the precaution of fastening his seat belt.
She drove fast, humming along with the radio. Within minutes, Henry’s faulty internal compass was thoroughly confused. He had no clue what part of the city they were in. But the farther she drove, the more dilapidated houses flashed by his window.
To make conversation, he said, “Did you take care of that problem you had yesterday?”
She stopped humming, which had been almost an unconscious accompaniment to the blaring radio. She turned down the volume. “Which one? Right now, I have a shitload.”
“The pizza delivery.”
“Oh, that.” She slipped through a red light to make a right turn, but a mail truck blew through the intersection, blasting his horn at her. Unruffled by the near-death collision, she put her foot down hard on the accelerator. She said, “Actually, that problem turned out to be a big one. One that could last a long time.”
“Anything requiring legal advice?”
“As long as it’s free. Can I kill the kid who got my daughter pregnant?”
Henry couldn’t hold his surprise. “You have a daughter?”
“Yep, seventeen years old. Yesterday she announced she thinks she’s going to make me a grandma.”
“Wow.” Henry tried to calculate Roxy’s age. “That news must have been a shock.”
“Yeah, a humdinger. I was having sex when I was fourteen, but the fact that she even talks to boys at her age makes me crazy. So, can I kill him? Maybe slow dismemberment? Starting with his dick?”
“You might get off if you draw a grandmother for a judge.”
“Those odds aren’t good.” She cracked her window and let the cool air rush into the car. “Of course, I was a pregnant teenager, too, but I figured her for smarter than me.”
“There’s nothing like hormones to lower SAT scores.”
“Exactly. But it’s not like the sex is even good at that age.”
“Sex is good at any age.”
She shook her head and laughed. “Then you haven’t learned enough, Paxton. Not nearly enough.”
The traffic thinned out, and she whipped down a street pocked with potholes the size of craters. She slowed down and began peering through the windshield at the house numbers.
“In general,” Henry said, “I think women who talk about sex are trying to decide if I’m worth going to bed with. They’re flirting, but they’re also making up their mind. Picturing the outcome. Will I pull on my pants and leave or want to spend the night? Make stupid small talk afterward or turn on the game? Fall madly in love and become an annoying stalker? Or leave them with nothing but good memories? But with you, I get the feeling that you’ve already decided what we’re going to do.”
A bigger laugh this time, very throaty. “Which way do you think I’ve decided to go?”
He was saved from answering when Roxy made a life-endangering right turn in front of some oncoming traffic. She seemed unfazed by the horns blown by other drivers and continued to concentrate on reading house numbers.
Henry said, “What about the big guy the police are interested in? What did you call him? Nooch?”
“What about him?”
“You seem to care what happens to him. What’s the relationship?”
“Relationship?” She seemed amused by the word. “A while back, he got into some trouble on my behalf, and I’d like to be sure he’s okay. He works for me. I keep him employed and out of trouble.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Ten years.”
“That must have been some trouble he got into.”
“Bad enough,” she acknowledged. “I was with a man, and it got out of hand. Nooch came to my rescue, I guess you could say. And he got into a lot of trouble for it. So I owe him.”
“And you want to keep him away from the police?”
“Far away,” she said.
Expertly, she squeezed the little Mustang into a tiny parking spot between a rusted car on cinder blocks and a van that looked as if it had been entered in a demolition derby and lost. Across the street sat a late-model Monte Carlo with a shredded roof.
Roxy cut the engine.
“Now what?” Henry asked.
She popped her door open. “Follow my lead.”
Henry climbed out of the car. “You have a plan?”
“It’s a little hazy at this point. How are you at improvising?”
“I’ve learned a few tricks over the years.”
“Then let’s see what you’ve got, champ.”
She led the way to the front door of a two-story frame house that should have been condemned long ago. The paint had blistered off. The roof was missing shingles. The concrete steps looked as if they’d been broken by a madman with a sledgehammer.
The yard was a mound of weeds. Henry looked closer and thought he recognized marijuana plants among the desiccated stalks.
A skinny cat bolted off the porch, leaving behind a lot of junk. An overturned plastic garbage can, a broken chair, and a baseball bat.
Roxy picked up the bat. She didn’t bother knocking. She reached through a broken pane on the front door and released the lock, then barged into the house, shouting, “Hey, Delaneys! Anybody awake in here?”
Two thugs were sprawled side by side on a lumpy sofa in the living room, watching ESPN on a brand-new television with the WalMart stickers still pasted on the side. It was balanced on top of another, ancient television, presumably broken. In a large, filthy aquarium next to the TV coiled a gigantic sleeping snake.
The door crashing back on its hinges made both men jump.
One thug had been eating SpaghettiOs from the can. He was a skinny, weasel-eyed man with a pulsating sore on his upper lip.
He dropped his spoon and reached under the sofa cushions.
Roxy pointed the tip of her baseball bat at his nose. “Don’t do it, Jimmy.”
Jimmy swallowed his mouthful of SpaghettiOs and eased his hand out from inside the cushion.
His brother—swinelike down to the stubble on his double chin—sat still on the sofa. He had a guttural whine. “Did you have to bust down my door?”
“It was already busted, Vincent.” She jerked her head at Henry. “This is a guy from the DA’s office, Henry Whatsit. He wants to know about the bribe you paid me.”
Henry endeavored to look official and tried to remember if state statutes included a mandatory sentence for such an offense.
Vincent sat up straight, and the bulge of his hairy belly popped out from under the bottom of his sweatshirt. “That wasn’t no bribe,” he said to Henry. “She tricked me. She pretended she worked for the city, that’s all.”
Roxy said, “And you’re in the habit of bribing city officials?”
“In the habit—? Hey, no, man, that’s not what I meant. She’s doing it again, see?”
“Take it easy,” Henry said. “Nobody’s accusing anybody.”
“The hell I’m not,” Roxy said. “I want him arrested.”
“For what?” Vincent demanded.
“Influence peddling,” Roxy shot back. “It’s a felony, right? And you’re already on probation, Vincent. This could land you in jail.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Jimmy asked.
“I’d like a little clarification myself,” Henry said.
“Here’s the deal.” Roxy bulldozed them all. “You tell us what the story is with Kaylee Falcone, and we let the whole matter slide.”
“Who?”
“The chick,” Jimmy clarified. “Hyde’s girlfriend.”
“You took some shots at her yesterday,” Roxy said. “Remember? Down in the Strip. Only you missed. Or did you just plan on scaring her?”
“We don’t know nothing about that,” Jimmy said, trying to bluff.
“And afterward, you tried to shoot me and Henry here. We were in the car in the cemetery.”
“We didn’t!”
“Where’d the new TV come from? You win the lottery? No, somebody paid you to shoot at Kaylee Falcone.”
“It wasn’t me,” Vincent insisted. “I had nothing to do with it. All I did was drive the car.”
“Jesus,” Jimmy said. “Do you have to be such a moron?”
He hurled his can of SpaghettiOs at his brother’s head. The glancing blow prompted Vincent to throw a punch, connecting with Jimmy’s upper lip, splitting open the sore. In an instant, the two were pounding each other. Vincent wrestled Jimmy off the sofa onto the floor in a splatter of tomato sauce.
Grunting and punching, they rolled clear of the sofa, whereupon Roxy stepped over the two brothers and dug under the cushions until she came up with a handgun. She picked it up by the barrel and smoothly handed it off to Henry.
Before he knew what was happening, he was standing there holding a gun on the two brothers.
Roxy started kicking them and yelling. “Cut it out, you idiots! Stop it! I’m gonna bash both your heads in!”
Eventually, Vincent sat up, dazed and rubbing his ribs where Roxy’s boots had done some damage. Jimmy clutched his bleeding lip and cursed. His eyes streamed tears of pain. Then they both noticed that Henry had a gun on them, and they fell silent.
“That’s better,” Roxy said. “Now come clean, the two of you. I know you do work for hire. You’ve been auditioning for Carmine for years. It was the two of you who tried to cap Duke Slansky two years ago. Everybody knows that.”
Vinnie stared at the muzzle of the gun. “It wasn’t—”
“Shut up. Everybody but the cops knows you did it, so don’t bother lying. Who else is stupid enough to use Duke’s credit card at a gas station with security cameras—except you, Jimmy? You were just lucky everybody in your family covered for you when the TV stations ran the tape. Tell us who hired you to shoot Kaylee Falcone.”
Jimmy was mesmerized by the gun, too. “I didn’t—”
Roxy kicked him again, then put both hands on the grip of the baseball bat and prepared to hit a line drive.
“We weren’t supposed to shoot her,” Vincent quickly confessed. “Just scare her.”
“Who bought your new TV?”
Vincent shook his head stubbornly and didn’t answer.
Lightly, Roxy tapped Jimmy upside his head. “How about it, Jimbo? You want to know what it feels like to have your brains all over the floor?”
Henry raised the muzzle of the gun a little higher. “Tell the lady a good story, okay?”
Sullen, Jimmy said, “It was Hyde himself.”
“What?” Roxy said, “You mean Trey?”
“No.” Jimmy cut his eyes at Henry. “The old man.”
“Are you lying? Because I’ll bash—”
“I’m not lying, bitch. It was the dead guy.”
“Why would he want to intimidate his own girlfriend?”
Jimmy was pouting. “How should we know?”
“And if he hired you, why did you wait until he was dead to follow through?”
“He paid us a grand to shoot at her, that’s all. We took the money, so we figured we better do the job.”
Roxy laughed. “A grand? That’s it? What are you, discount hit men?”
“Roxy,” Henry said. Taunting seemed pointless at the moment, and he could see her getting out of control. The circumstances had pumped her up. Even her voice was different—harsher, louder. Any minute she was going to splatter somebody’s brains all over the room.
“Yeah, okay.” She held the bat loosely at her side. “When were you hired? The night Julius Hyde was killed?”
“We had nothing to do with that,” Jimmy said quickly. “He hired us before. I dunno—a couple of weeks ago, maybe We met him down on the river, and he said—”
“Along the river?” Roxy asked. “Where?”
“An old steel mill.” Jimmy looked at his fingers to see how badly he was bleeding. “Down off Butler Street. He said he owned the place. My uncle worked there twenty years.”
Vincent said, “Who’s the blabbermouth now?”
“Shut up,” Jimmy said. “You got us into this in the first place.”
“Did not.”
“Did, too.”
“Moron!”
“Asshole!”
Suddenly they were beating up each other again. Rolling on the floor, kicking and throwing punches, gouging at each other’s eyes.
“Oh, hell,” Roxy said.
She swung the baseball bat and hit the aquarium. Glass smashed, and then the huge snake began to uncoil into the room.
She dropped the bat and walked out of the house. Henry bolted after her, hearing the screams of the Delaney brothers as they scrambled to escape their pet.
In the car, Roxy was breathing hard, as if trying to get her temper under control. “Jesus, I hate snakes. But you did good work in there, Paxton. I’m impressed.”
“Thanks. You’re no slouch, either. Setting the snake loose was a nice touch. They’ll be busy for a while.” As his heartbeat returned to normal, Henry fastened his seat belt. “But are you sure it was wise to take their gun?”
“I figure removing guns from the possession of idiots is a public service.” She started the car. “It should happen more often. Got a handkerchief? Use it to wipe off your fingerprints. Mine, too. Then put it under the seat for now.”
“A wise precaution.” Henry did a thorough job of erasing his participation and stowed the gun as she requested. “What was that business about the steel mill?”
She frowned as she pulled out into the street. “I dunno. Something rang a bell. Kaylee mentioned a building. She said Julius gave her one.”
Caught off guard, Henry said, “He did? Officially? With a deed and everything?”
“I don’t know the details. But she claims he showed her a building and said he was giving it to her. I assume she means the old steel mill the Hydes used to operate. You know anything about that, being the family retainer?”
“The family did own a steel mill down on the Allegheny. It went out of business years ago.”
“Believe me, I know that part. A lot of people in my neighborhood were put out of work back then. You want to see mass exodus? A spike in domestic violence? Drinking? Drugs? Fire everybody at the same time.” She darted between a school bus and a slow-moving Buick, driving the car like a jet fighter.