James Grippando - Last to die

“Rene?” he said in a voice loud enough to carry into the room below.

“Yes?”

“Your sister was definitely being stalked.”

At six o’clock Monday morning, Gerry Colletti was in his kitchen, dressed and ready to leave for work. He checked his reflection in the glass display cabinet and, as always, liked what he saw. A lot of lawyers had fallen into the casual dress mode, but not Gerry. The suit was Armani. The shoes, Ferragamo. His silk tie and socks-you could measure a man’s true net worth by the quality of his socks-both by Hermès. The shirt was custom made in Hong Kong, as were all his shirts, because there wasn’t a designer in the world that made shirts to fit a freak of nature with a nineteen-inch neck and a thirty-inch sleeve length. Gerry hadn’t worked out since he quit the wrestling team in college, unless you called banging your female clients a workout, so it was truly the clothes that made the man-clothes and a good tailor.

“Gabby, order more Hawaiian Gold,” he said into his Dictaphone. He kept a running list on audiotape of all the personal things his secretary needed to do for him, but he suddenly realized that with Gabby a general order for “Hawaiian Gold” might fetch him anything from a box of pineapples to a bag of premium pot. “That’s Hawaiian Gold coffee,” he said, then slipped the Dictaphone into his inside pocket.

He poured himself a cup for the road, tucked the Wall Street Journal under his arm, and headed for the door that connected the kitchen to the garage.

It had been a quiet weekend, and Gerry had wanted it that way.He was still smarting from the way Swyteck had embarrassed him at the court hearing on Friday afternoon. It wasn’t like him to make a stupid mistake like that with the photographs and the date on his wristwatch. That kind of slipup told him one thing: He wasn’t being patient enough. Brains and patience were all it took to win this contest, two things Tatum Knight and Miguel Rios didn’t have. That would be their downfall. They alone stood between him and forty-six million dollars. Well, them and Alan Sirap.

Whoever the hell that is.

Gerry entered the garage and hit the button on the wall that switched on the light and opened the garage door. His emerald-black BMW was ready for a ride, washed and polished, glistening beneath the hanging fluorescent tube. He paused to admire it as the garage door noisily lumbered upward. He’d always been a car guy. His father had been a car guy-a greasy coveralls, dirt-under-the-fingernails, minimum-wage auto mechanic who’d never in his life owned a new car. His father never had anything new. They never had anything new. His mother had left them when he was ten, came back for Gerry, filed for divorce, cleaned out the old man, waited for the divorce to become final-and then married her divorce lawyer. A smart divorce lawyer. She married that son of a bitch, and then sent Gerry back to live with the old man, flat broke, not a pot to piss in.

What goes around, comes around.

With the press of a button on his remote, the car alarm chirped and the doors unlocked. Gerry got inside, slid behind the wheel, and closed the door. He got himself situated-coffee cup in the holder, newspaper open on the seat beside him for easy reading in stopped traffic, loose change for the tolls in the dispenser. He checked himself one last time in the rearview mirror, then turned the key.

Nothing.

He turned it again, but there was just a click, and then nothing, a pathetic sound that was even more pathetic when you were used to hearing the glorious rumble of eight perfectly tuned cylinders.

The battery was his first thought, but then he thought again. The electronic keyless entry had responded to his remote, and the dome light had come on when he’d opened the door. The clock was working, too. Something was screwy with the starter.

Or somebody had screwed with it.

Another man might have been frightened, but Gerry only smiled. He prided himself on being fearless. In his line of work, many an ex-husband had threatened him, and a few had even come after him. You couldn’t do this work without balls as big as globes, and his were made of brass.

Somebody messing with his car-how beautiful was that? It was exactly the kind of additional evidence of intimidation he needed to box Tatum Knight into disqualification under the Slayer Statute. That idiot just couldn’t control himself, and Gerry was suddenly cock-sure that Tatum Knight had yanked the wires from his alternator in retaliation for his clever courtroom maneuvering. Swyteck may have scored a few points for style at Friday’s hearing, but Gerry had the long-term winning strategy. And if Knight kept doing stupid things like this, he’d reap the rewards sooner than expected.

He pulled the hood release, got out of the car, and walked around the front to check things out. If this was what he thought it was, he’d definitely file a police report. But he didn’t want to be crying wolf, either. He wanted to see those wires ripped from the starter, maybe even take a few more pictures.

The hood had risen up about four inches before it caught on the safety latch. He reached underneath to find the trip switch that would completely release it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d opened the hood, and wasn’t exactly sure where the release was. Both hands were under the hood, fiddling for the switch, when a black blur fell from above him, swooping down like Spider-Man from atop the opened garage door that lay directly overhead suspended from the ceiling. It was a huge blur that took the shape of a man who pounced on the hood of the car, his sheer weight slamming it shut on Gerry’s fingers. He felt the back-spray of blood against his belly, heard the sickening crush of bones that just a split second earlier had been his precious hands.

A cord closed tightly around his neck, silencing his screams, as the man reached up and manually pulled the garage door closed. Gerry’s head rolled back, and that’s when he saw it, right above him: The access panel to the attic had been pushed aside-a passageway that had been hidden by the opened garage door in its rolled-back position, an opening that hadn’t been there when he’d entered the garage with the door closed.

Gerry stood face-to-face with his attacker, unable to run away or raise his mangled hands in defense, unable to pry his fingers loose from beneath the crushing car hood that had trapped him like an animal. The pain was so intense that his entire body tightened with spasms. He tried to scream, but the wire noose around his neck drew tighter. He could barely see, his vision blurred by the trauma, but he could see well enough to know that his attacker was looking right at him, his face hidden behind a ski mask.

The tension on the cord eased. Gerry could breathe again, hear again. The man was saying something.

“Poor Gerry Colletti,” he said taunting him. “Tried to hard-nose negotiate his way to the prize.”

“Huh?” he tried to say, but it was only a grunt.

“If only he’d known all the deals had already been cut.”

“What are-” he started to say, but the cord tightened around his neck, and again he was fighting for air. His knees buckled, and he would have fallen to the ground if his attacker hadn’t held the cord high like a rope from a tree limb. He could feel his life slipping away as he heard the man say, “See you in hell, Gerry. I hear it’s one big gold mine.”

Homicide Detective Rick Larsen arrived at the home of Gerry Colletti just after dinnertime. It had been a comfortably cool autumn day, but temperatures were dropping with the setting sun. White short-sleeve shirts with a loosened necktie were the trademark Larsen attire, but tonight he broke down and pulled on a windbreaker, which was perfectly fine. His old buddies up in Buffalo were already trudging through eighteen inches of Thanksgiving snow.