Макс Коллинз - Hush Money

The phone rang.

Steve came in with newspapers and started spreading them down, saying, “There’s that damn scatterbrain Di bothering me after all I went through telling her not to. Get it for me, will you, Nolan?”

Nolan picked up the receiver.

And a voice that wasn’t Diane’s but a voice Nolan did recognize said, “If you want to see your sister and her little girl again, soldier boy, you’re going to have to come see me first.” The voice, which belonged to Frank DiPreta, repeated an East Side address twice, and the line clicked dead.

Nolan put the receiver back.

“What was that all about?” Steve said, getting the grenades out of the wardrobe. “That was Diane, wasn’t it?”

“No,” Nolan said. “Nothing. Just a crank.”

“What, an obscene phone call, you mean?”

“Yeah. That’s it exactly.”

Basking in a soft-focus halo of light, golden dome glowing, the Capitol building sat aloof, looking out over the East Side like a fat, wealthy, disinterested spectator out slumming for the evening. Down the street a few blocks was a rundown three-story building whose condemned sign was no surprise. The only surprising thing, really, was that none of the other buildings in this sleazy neighborhood had been similarly judged. Some of the East Side’s sleaziness was of a gaudy and garish sort: singles bars and porno movie houses and strip-joint nightclubs, entire blocks covered in cheap glitter like a quarter Christmas card; but this section was sleaziness at its dreary, poorly lit worst, with only the neons of the scattering of cheap bars to remind you this was a street and not a back alley. The buildings here ran mostly to third-rate secondhand stores; this building was no exception, though its storefront was empty now, showcase windows and all others broken out and boarded up. It stood next to a cinder parking lot, where another such building had been, apparently, ’til being torn down or burned down or otherwise eliminated, and now this building, the support of its neighbor gone, was going swayback, had cracked down its side several places and was in danger of falling on its ass like the winos tottering along the sidewalk out front.

Nolan leaned against the leaning building, waiting in the cinder lot for Jon to get there. Less than twenty minutes had passed since he’d accidentally intercepted Frank DiPreta’s phone call at McCracken’s. If he hadn’t been so pissed off by the turn of events he might have blessed his luck being the one to receive that call. His painstakingly careful handling of the boy this afternoon wouldn’t have counted for much had Steve been the one to answer the phone and get Frank’s unpleasant message. Nolan’s description of the DiPretas as businessmen, not gangsters, would have looked like a big fat fucking shuck to the boy, in the face of Frank grabbing Diane and her little girl and holding them under threat of death, and Steve would have reescalated his war immediately. The cease-fire would have ended. Nolan would have failed.

But Steve was safely away from the scene, thankfully, out in the country somewhere, dumping the disassembled guns and disarmed grenades. (The boy had asked Nolan if he could hang onto the two handguns, since neither had been used in his “war,” and Nolan had said okay.) Nolan had realized that if he tried to leave directly after that phone call, he’d raise Steve’s suspicions; so for fifteen agonizingly slow minutes Nolan sat and watched Steve empty the grenades, take apart the Weatherby and Thompson, and when Steve finally left to get rid of the weapons, Nolan (tapes and documents in tow) followed the boy out the door, saying he’d meet him back at the basement apartment at nine-thirty.

Nolan had taken time to stop at a pay phone and make two calls: first, to Jon, at the motel; and second, to Felix, long distance, collect, to inform him of the successful bargaining for the tapes but telling him nothing more. Then he’d driven to the address Frank had given him, and now here he was, standing by the Cadillac in a cinder lot on the East Side of Des Moines, waiting for Jon.

A white Mustang pulled in. The blonde girl, Francine, was behind the wheel. Jon hopped out of the car.

“What’s this all about?” he wanted to know.

“I don’t have time for explanations,” Nolan said. “Just listen and do exactly as I say.”

Two minutes later Nolan was behind the building, in the alley; earlier he’d tried all the doors and this one in back was the only nonboarded-up, unlocked entrance. A garage door was adjacent, and Nolan reflected that this dimly lit block and deserted building, whose garage had made simple the moving of hostages inconspicuously inside, could not have been more perfect for Frank’s purposes. There was an element of warped but careful planning here that bothered Nolan. Frank was out for blood, yes, out to milk the situation for all the sadistic satisfaction it was worth; otherwise he would have gone straight to McCracken’s apartment and killed the boy outright, since having managed to get the phone number out of Diane the address itself would be no trick. But DiPreta was not berserk, was rather in complete control, having devised a methodical scenario for the destruction of the murderer of his brothers. Like Steve McCracken, Frank DiPreta was a man who would go to elaborate lengths to settle a score.

He went in. Pitch-black. He felt the wall for a light switch, found one, flicked it. Nothing. He fumbled until he found the railing and then began his way up the stairs, his night vision coming to him gradually and making things a little easier. The railing was shaky, and Nolan tried not to depend on it, as it might be rigged to give way at some point. Nolan was more than aware that he was walking into a trap, and just because he wasn’t the man the trap was set for didn’t matter much. It was like walking through a minefield: a mine doesn’t ask what side you’re on, it just goes off when you step on it.

At the top of the second-floor landing was a door. He tried it. Locked. He knocked, got no answer. He went on, climbing slowly to the third, final landing, where an identical door waited for him. Identical except for one thing: it was not locked. It was, in fact, ajar.

No noise came from within, but Nolan could feel them in there; body heat, tension in the air, something. He didn’t know how, but Nolan knew. Frank was in there. So was Diane, and her daughter.

He pushed the door open.

It was a large room, the full floor of the building, a storage room or attic of sorts, empty now, except for three people down at the far end, by the boarded-up windows, where reddish glow pulsed in from the neons of the bars on the street below. Dust floated like smoke. Frank DiPreta, white shirt cut by the dark band of a shoulder holster, his coat wadded up and tossed on the floor, loomed over the other two people in the room, who had been wadded up and tossed there in much the same way, Nolan supposed. Diane was still in the white terry robe she’d been wearing when Nolan last saw her a few hours before, but the robe wasn’t really white any more, having been dirtied from her lying here on the filthy floor, hands tied behind her, legs tied at the ankles, white slash of tape across her lips. At first glance Nolan thought she was dead, but she was only unconscious, he guessed, doped or knocked out but not dead. The little girl, a small pathetic afterthought to this unfortunate tableau, huddled around her mother’s waist, not tied up, not even gagged, but frightened into silent submission, clinging to her mother’s robe in wide-eyed, uncomprehending fear, whimpering, face dirty, perhaps bruised. Nolan had never seen the child before and felt an uncustomary emotional surge. She was a delicate little reflection of her mother, the same white-blonde hair the whole family seemed to have, a pretty China doll of a child who deserved much better than the traumatic experience she was presently caught in the middle of. Nolan forced the emotional response out of himself, remembered, or tried to, anyway, that Frank DiPreta was a man driven to this point, that Frank was not an entirely rational person right now.