Thomas Cook - Peril

“Me?”

“Everything,” Eddie said. “My aunt Edna needed a break. She ran off to Atlantic City, stayed two weeks, then come back. With three hundred dollars in nickels. She poured ’em out on the kitchen table. Right there, in front of my uncle. Told him to buy himself a new suit. That was the end of it. She never went nowhere after that.”

“I don’t think Sara went to Atlantic City,” Tony said despondently.

“But maybe somewhere just to get away,” Eddie said.

“Without telling anybody?”

“Without telling you,” Eddie offered cautiously. “ ’Cause she just wanted to, you know, be alone.”

“So who would she have told?”

“Maybe nobody,” Eddie answered. “Or maybe a friend. Somebody she talked to.”

“Della,” Tony answered. “She lives across the street. They go shopping sometimes, her and Della.”

“Then maybe Sara said something, you know? You should talk to that woman, Tony. That Della woman.”

Tony pondered Eddie’s suggestion, looking for a way to speak to Della DeLuria without actually revealing that Sara had left him, found no way to do it, then said, “Yeah, okay.”

Inside his office, safe from view, Tony stared at the picture of himself and Sara that he’d placed on his desk nine years before. It showed the happy couple on the steps of St. Mary’s, Sara in a flowing white dress, Tony in a black tuxedo, his father alone and off to the right, as if in bitter surmise of his new daughter-in-law.

He never liked her, Tony thought, remembering the evening a week before when he’d come home late to find the Old Man slumped in the living room, looking sullen. Sara had come in briefly, and his father had glared at her hatefully, then gotten to his feet and left with nothing beyond a mumbled That bitch don’t know her place, Tony.

He picked up the photograph and concentrated on Sara’s face. Even on her wedding day there’d been a curious sadness in her eyes, a distance he couldn’t bridge. Had it been that distance that had first attracted him, he wondered, the way she seemed to distrust love, life, everything? If so, he should have been wary of her, he told himself. But instead, that very distance had formed part of what he’d fallen for when he’d fallen for her. And he had fallen for her. That much was sure. He could see that even now, in the picture, the two of them on the church steps, rice flying in all directions. At that moment she had been the indisputable love of his life. The love of my life that day, he thought, then with a sudden aching clarity realized that she still was.

Labriola’s voice seemed to reach through the phone line and slap his face.

“Yeah?”

“I talked to Morty Dodge about the meeting you want with this guy he works for.”

“And?”

“He says his guy needs information.”

“About what?”

“Sara. Things about her.”

“What things?”

“For example, what she did for a living or-”

“She didn’t do a fucking thing.”

“Yeah, okay, but like, where she might have gone. Stuff to get the guy started, that’s what he means.”

To Caruso’s surprise, Labriola did not protest. “I got an idea who knows that shit.”

“Good,” Caruso said. “I’ll pass on whatever you find out.”

“ You’ll pass it on? What about me? What about the meeting?”

“That’s a problem, having a meeting.”

“Why is it a problem, Vinnie?”

“Because the guy, he won’t do it.”

“I’m laying out thirty grand and this fucker won’t meet with me?”

“He never shows.”

Caruso could hear the Old Man breathing raggedly, like the snorting of a bull. He waited for him to speak, and when he didn’t, added, “But Morty’ll meet with you. I told him if it was okay you could hook up at Columbus Circle, two-thirty.”

“But he’s nothing but a gofer,” the Old Man barked. “I don’t deal with no fucking gofers.”

“He’s a little more than that,” Caruso protested. “I mean, the guy trusts him is what I’m saying.”

“So he’s like a sidecar?”

“Sidekick. Yeah, something like that. But more. Loyal. A loyal friend.”

“A loyal friend. You know what a loyal friend is, Vinnie? He’s the other guy you toss into the fucking hole.”

A small, aching laugh broke from Caruso. “That’s good, Mr. Labriola. That’s a good one.”

“I want you to find out who this fucking guy is, Vinnie. I don’t have no ghosts working for me, you understand?”

“The guy, you want me to… what?”

“What I fucking said just now,” the Old Man screamed. “Who is he? I want to know.”

“Yes, sir,” Caruso said weakly.

“So, look, here’s what we do. You set up that fucking meet. Say to this sidecar shithead, sure I’ll have a meet. Then we meet, and we talk, and we shake hands like a couple of asshole buddies, see what I mean? Then I go my way, and the sidecar goes his. And you follow the little shithead all the way to this fucking guy he works for.”

“Yes, sir,” Caruso breathed.

“Understood, Vinnie?”

“I understand,” Caruso said, looking about the cramped office from which he ran the Old Man’s loan-sharking business.

“Okay, so, two-thirty,” the Old Man snapped.

“Yes, sir,” Caruso said, adding the time to a head already full of numbers, loans, payments, due dates, not one of which he had ever written down.

The Waverly theater was still in the same location, and Eighth Street had the same feel to it, and their familiarity brought small parts of her former life back to her. These parts were nothing she could put her finger on exactly, only the sense that she’d packed up her youth and now she could unpack at least a little of it. Maybe that was why she’d come back to the city. Because it was the closet where she’d first secreted herself, the hole she’d burrowed into, creating an identity to go with her new name.

For a moment she peered at the coffee shop across the street, watching silently as the patrons came and went. If they only knew, she thought. She felt the ghostly grip of Sheriff Caulfield’s hand on her bare shoulder, then other hands, no less ghostly but also no less palpable, the flesh of grasping fingers pressing into her flesh, sour breath in her face, the smell of drunken sweat, a man pushing her into the corn or down a narrow corridor, upright or weaving, dressed as a cop or barely dressed at all. With each memory she felt her own panic rise like a frenzied animal, trapped and panting, clawing its way out.

To keep it in, she raced to the corner, bought a paper, took it to the coffee shop and turned to the classifieds. The first order of business was to find a job, and so she looked for one among the long columns. As she searched, the paucity of her skills, how little she had to offer, grew ever more distressingly apparent. Finally, one job caught her eye. Receptionist. No experience necessary. She could answer a phone, she thought. She could take a message. She knew that thousands of others could do the same, but she hoped that somehow she’d come through the door at just the right moment, and this hope suggested to her just how depleted she was. Her only resource was now little more than a baseless grab for luck.

She’d seen the man several times before, been introduced, shaken his hand, but even now his dark eyes seemed so lethal she could easily imagine a deadly acid spewing from them, turning human beings into mounds of glistening flesh.

“Good morning, Mr. Labriola,” she said quietly.

A smile labored to form on Labriola’s mouth, then gave up and curled into a frown. “Mind if I come in?”