Блейз Клемент - Duplicity Dogged Тhe Dachshund

She gave me a look so fearful and young and lost that I was undone. This was a child raising a child, trying to make a nest for herself and her baby in an uncertain world. Life couldn’t have treated her well or she wouldn’t be here alone, living precariously on the charity of other people.

More gently, I said, “The person who drives that truck, is he your boyfriend?”

She nodded, big-eyed, and began to cry.

“The baby’s father?”

More nods, more tears. She collapsed on the bed and buried her face in a tiny shirt—I supposed it was hers although it was almost small enough for the baby.

I went over and sat beside her. “Why the snakes? Why did that convince you?”

“That’s what he does. He catches them and sells them. Alligators too. That’s why he has those big tires, so he can drive in ditches and things. He grabs them with hooks and puts them in boxes in the back of his truck. Not the alligators. I think he has to shoot drugs in the alligators and then tie them up.”

My heart did a little leap. “What kind of drugs?”

“Something to keep them from fighting so they don’t get bruised or cut. If they’re perfect, he gets about fifty dollars a foot for the skin. Not so much if they’ve got marks. He uses a dart gun to shoot them.”

“They don’t go to sleep?”

“Gabe said they watch him until he kills them, so I guess not.”

“His name is Gabe?”

“Gabe Marks.”

She raised her head and looked pleadingly at me, asking me for something I couldn’t give: to erase whatever had led to this moment, or at least to reassure her that she and her baby would be okay.

The baby snuffled in her sleep, and Priscilla was instantly alert. I was beginning to see why Josephine and Pete were so protective. She was a combination of loopy child and sensitive, caring woman.

“How in God’s name did you get mixed up with a man who traps venomous snakes and alligators for a living?”

Priscilla went back to stuffing clothes in the plastic bag. “I went to work at All-Call and Mr. Brossi introduced us. I wanted to be a clown, but I couldn’t make any money at it.”

“Gabe works at the call center too?”

“No, he does other work for Mr. Brossi, I’m not sure what. See, Gabe used to get the golf balls out of the water at the golf course. Nobody else would do it because of the snakes in there, but Gabe liked it, and that’s where he met Mr. Brossi.”

She held up a red knit sweater that I was almost sure was for the baby. “By the time it gets cold enough for her to wear this, it’ll be too little for her. Don’t you think?”

“Probably.”

She laid it on the floor next to the garbage bag. “Then I’m not taking it.”

“Where are you going?”

“Pete’s taking us someplace. I don’t know where, but I have to get away from Gabe.”

Seemed like a good idea to me.

“Priscilla, about that call center—”

“Oh, that’s an awful place, like a slave camp. They have these stupid rules about what you can wear, khaki pants or skirts with big ugly black knit shirts that are made for men but the women have to wear them too. Then they’ve got a blond bitch that sits on a tall stool and yells at you if you even speak to the person next to you. I hated that bitch so bad I used to have dreams about her. She had a basket by her stool for people to put presents in. If you gave her a present, you didn’t get yelled at.”

She might have trouble speaking until she felt comfortable with you, but Priscilla was really good at it once she got going. She had got so heated up over the blond bitch, she’d stopped getting clothes out of the trunk.

She said, “Mr. Ferrelli used to come there to see Mr. Brossi. Not the one that was killed, the one with the birthmark.”

“Denton?”

“Uh-hunh. He was the only one besides Mr. Brossi that went in this private room where some special people worked. They were up to something in there. Mr. Brossi and Mr. Ferrelli would go in there and then come out looking like the cat that chewed the canary.”

“Swallowed the canary.”

“Whatever.”

“Who else was in there?”

“I never knew their names, but there were five or six of them. They had keys to the door, and nobody knew who they were working for. The rest of us worked in groups, like everybody taking a company’s orders or its customer service calls were all in one group. They had big signs hanging over us with the names of the companies we worked for. But that locked room didn’t have any signs anywhere.”

Priscilla replaced the rejected things in the trunk and closed the lid. “Everybody thought they were stealing IDs.”

An electric jolt shot up my spine.

Priscilla said, “People call in to order something, they give you their name and address and phone number. Then they give you their credit card number. Lots of times, if you ask them for their social security number, they’ll give that to you too. They don’t have to, but they don’t know that. Out on the regular floor, they watch you real close to make sure you don’t keep notes when you’re taking calls, but they record everything.”

The transmitter Paco wore under his shirt was beginning to make sense. One call center processes thousands of calls a day. If crucial identifying information was being recorded and stored, a small group of protected thieves could use it to steal a staggering amount of money. And if Leo Brossi and Denton Ferrelli found out Paco was an undercover cop, they would kill him.

“How long ago was this, Priscilla?”

“I quit that place two months ago. That blond bitch yelled at me one time too many, and I left. That’s when Pete got me the job with Josephine. She doesn’t pay as much as All-Call, but she treats me like I’m a human being, not like a dog.”

Most dogs get treated a lot better than most humans, but I let it pass.

A car door slammed downstairs, and heavy footsteps pounded up the staircase. Priscilla froze, and I did too, both of us looking toward the door as if it might blow open from the force of the anger in the steps. A fist hammered on the door, and a man’s voice yelled, “I know you’re in there, cunt!”

I didn’t know which one of us he meant, but nobody calls me that and gets away with it. In her crib by the door, the baby raised her head and began to cry. Priscilla ran on tiptoe to pick her up. She stood swaying back and forth with the baby against her thin chest, looking at me over the baby’s head with big frightened eyes.

A key scraped in the lock, and I shot Priscilla an astonished glare. He has a key? She looked embarrassed, as if it had just struck her that locking the door against somebody with a key wasn’t a good way to keep him out. I sprang to my feet and pulled the gun from my pocket, holding it down and behind me. The doorknob turned and the door rammed forward, pulling the night latch from its mooring as if it were a hair.

The man who stomped through the doorway was a lot younger than I’d expected, maybe not even twenty, with a body big and hard as a refrigerator, a near-shaved head, and beady blue eyes lit with the fevered determination of a shallow mind. The floppy stuffed toy dangling from one hand was an incongruous touch, like a flower tucked behind a rhino’s ear.

“What the fuck, Priscilla? What’s this cunt doing here?”

This time I knew for sure he meant me.

Priscilla began to cry, curving over the baby like a turtle shell protecting its soft part.

He pivoted toward her with one arm raised, and she cowered like a whipped dog.

I yelled, “Don’t you touch her!”

He whirled to glower at me. “Priscilla knows better than to argue with me. She’s going to go get in the truck and wait. And then you and me are gonna have a little talk, and I’ll show you what I do when cunts mess with my family.”