Dan Simmons - Hard as Nails

Angelina stepped back and looked at him. Her eyes were very brown.

"The new Gonzaga," said Kurtz. "Emilio's boy up from Florida."

"No," said Angelina. "It's not Toma."

Kurtz raised his eyebrows at her use of the dead don's son's first name. She'd never been fond of the Gonzagas. Kurtz's well-honed private investigator instincts told him that that might have had something to do with old Emilio raping her and crippling her father years before.

"All right," he said, "I'll start looking into it as soon as I get my own little matter settled. You going to give me the details about the hits?"

"I'll send Colin around to your office on Chippewa this afternoon with the notes." She nodded toward the taller of the two bodyguards.

"Colin?" Kurtz raised his eyebrows again and decided he wouldn't do that anymore. It hurt. "All right My turn. Who shot me?"

"I don't know who shot you," said Angelina, "but I know who's been looking for you the last few days."

Kurtz had been out of town delivering Sweetheart-Search-dot-com letters most of that time. "Who?"

"Toma Gonzaga."

Kurtz felt the air cool around him. "Why?"

"I don't know for sure," said the woman. "But he's had a dozen of his new guys looking—some hanging around that dump you live in by the Cheerios factory. Others staking out your office on Chippewa. A couple hanging around Blues Franklin."

"All right," said Kurtz. "It's not much, but thanks."

Angelina zipped up her sweatshirt. "There's another thing, Kurtz."

"Yeah?"

"There's a rumor… just a street rumor so far… that Toma's sent for the Dane."

Through the pounding in his skull, Kurtz felt a slight lurch of nausea. The Dane was a legendary assassin from Europe who rarely came to Buffalo on business. Kurtz had seen him in action the last time he'd been here—the day that Don Byron Farino and his daughter, Sophia, and several others, had been shot in the presumed safety of the Farino compound.

"Well…" began Kurtz. He couldn't think of anything else to say. He knew, and he presumed that Angelina Farino Ferrara knew, that even if Toma Gonzaga wanted Joe Kurtz dead for some reason, he wouldn't have to bring in the Dane for that It was far more likely that Gonzaga would hire someone of the Dane's caliber and expense to eliminate his one real rival in Western New York—Angelina Farino Ferrara. "Well," he said again, "I'll look into it when I figure out who did this to me."

The acting female don of the Farino family nodded, zipped her sweatshirt up the rest of the way, and began jogging, first across the grass with its blowing yellow leaves, then onto the winding inner park road toward the rear of the zoo. The two bodyguards ran to their parked Lincoln Town Car and hurried to catch up.

Kurtz shifted the old man's fedora slightly trying to get the pressure off the bandages and his split skull. It didn't work. He looked around for a park bench, but luckily there was none in sight—he probably would have curled up in a fetal position on it and gone to sleep if there'd been one there.

The basketball players were letting new guys come into the game while the sweaty players leaving the court traded high-fives and clever insults. Kurtz brought his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and called for a cab.

Kurtz knew that Arlene was happy to finally have their office back on Chippewa Street. Their P.I. office before he'd gone to Attica had been on Chippewa, back when it was a rough area. Last year, after he'd been released from Attica, they'd found a cheap space in the basement of the last X-rated-video store in downtown Buffalo. Last spring, after that whole block had been condemned and demolished, Kurtz had considered an office in the Harbor Inn or one of the nearby abandoned grain elevators, but Arlene had come up with the money for Chippewa Street, so Chippewa Street it was.

Their P.I. business here thirteen years ago had consisted of just him, his partner Samantha Fielding, and Arlene as their secretary. The street had been run-down but recovering then—a lot of local coffeeshops, used bookstores, one gunshop—which was handy for Kurtz—and no fewer than four tattoo parlors. In the seventies, when Kurtz was growing up, Chippewa Street had been all X-rated bookstores, prostitutes and drug dealers. Kurtz had spent a lot of time there then.

Now Chippewa Street was the only happening place in the entire rotting corpus that was the greater Buffalo metropolitan area. If one never left this stretch of Chippewa Street one might be able to imagine that Buffalo, New York, was still a viable entity. For three entire, short city blocks, between Elmwood and Main, there was a heartbeat: lights, wine bars, nightclubs, limousines sliding to the curb, trendy restaurants, and pedestrians on the street after six P.M. After two A.M. as well, when the clubs let out. And a Starbucks. Kurtz thought that the locals were inordinately proud of their Starbucks.

When Arlene had found the money for this office, Kurtz had stipulated only that it not be above a Starbucks. He hated Starbucks. The coffee was all right—Kurtz didn't really pay attention to his coffee as long as it didn't have cockroaches or something worse floating in it—but whenever the Starbucks shops showed up, it meant that the neighborhood had gone to shit—admittedly, upscale to shit—until the area was just a Disney parody of itself.

Arlene had agreed to avoid that particular coffee haven, so here they were a block and a half east of and two stories higher than the Starbucks. But there were rumors that another one was coming in just across the street.

Now, as Kurtz went up the two flights of stairs to the third-floor office and in the door, he saw why Arlene had wanted to locate here. His secretary had first lost her teenage son to a traffic accident and then her husband to a heart attack while Kurtz had been in jail. Both of those males had been computer whizzes and Arlene was the best hacker—or whatever the hell you called them—in the family. She was still using access codes to files and funds for the Erie County District Attorney's office, and she hadn't worked there for five years.

But she worked too hard and smoked too much. Her only hobby was reading detective thrillers. This SweetheartSearch and WeddingBells-dot-com gig brought her into her office—even though she could just as easily access the servers from her suburban Cheektowaga home—at all hours of the day, night, and weekends. Even at two A.M., Kurtz realized, the view out the big south-facing window just beyond her desk was full of life—lights and people below and traffic sounds—just as if they lived in a real.

He paused in the doorway. He wasn't sure how she'd react to his head wound, bandages, raccoon blood-mask, road rash, and devil's eyes.

"Hey," he said, walking past his cluttered desk to her immaculate one.

"Hey, yourself," said Arlene, tapping the keyboard, her eyes intent on the screen even while a Marlboro dangled from her lip. Smoke curled around her head and then drifted through the small screened window next to the big glass window.

Kurtz perched on the edge of the desk and cleared his throat.

She paused in the typing, flicked ashes, and looked at him from less than three feet away. "You're looking good, Joe. Lose some weight?"

Kurtz sighed. "Gail called you?"

Gail DeMarco, Arlene's sister-in-law and good friend, was a nurse in the pediatric ward of Erie County Medical Center where Kurtz had been handcuffed mere hours earlier.

"Of course she did," said Arlene. "She's only working mornings now because of Rachel and saw your name on the admissions list when she came in at eight. But by the time she got up to see you, you'd flown the coop."

Kurtz nodded.

"Besides," said Arlene, typing again, "the cops have already been here this morning hunting for you."