Thomas Perry - Blood Money

“Does anybody else know you’re his father?”

Bernie winced. “I’m not his father. The one who was there every day was his father—Mickey Ogliaro. I’m a man he never met. The one who took his mother’s virginity in a hotel in Miami when she was too young to know any better, and got her to kill herself when she was old.”

Jane said, “Bernie, what do you want?”

“He’s all I have left. I have to provide for him. If I could give him all the mob’s money, I would do it. But how can I? If a man like Vincent suddenly appears on the horizon with more money than most states have, what happens? There’s no good way to have that kind of money all at once. He would set off all the trip wires the government has set up to catch untaxed money. And what would he do if he had it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do, because he’s no different from the others. He’d try to make himself boss of bosses. He would get himself killed.”

“What do you want?”

“Save my son.”

“What does saving him mean?”

The old man stood up and went to the door. “It means figuring something out.”

Jane watched him disappear, then heard his footsteps receding down the hallway. She sat still for ten minutes, thinking about what she had heard, her eyes turned, unfocused, toward the clock beside the bed. Slowly, she remembered that the red numbers on the digital display meant something. It was late, and she had to sleep. She turned off the lights and lay on the bed.

For a few minutes, her mind was agitated with strange images, things that had been waiting in the back of her memory to jar and clash and keep her from sleep. She fought them by concentrating on Carey. She pictured him in the living room of the house, just going off to work. This time he was a little late—the digital clock said so—and his long legs took the distance across the carpet in fewer steps than he could have in real life, when she was awake. He stopped and smiled at her, then closed the door, and Jane passed into deeper sleep.

Suddenly, her breath caught in her throat. The water. She had left the bathtub running. How could she have been so stupid? Jane ran up the stairs to the second-floor landing. She could feel the smooth, curved wood of the railing on the palm of her hand as she grasped it to make the turn up the hallway. She rushed into the bathroom and reached for the faucet, but it was already turned off. The water was high in the tub, but it was still and glassy.

She gazed down into it, and she realized that the white she was seeing wasn’t the bottom of the tub. The water was cloudy, and it seemed to extend downward for a long distance. She touched it with her hand, and she found she could make a swirl in it, like smoke, but it was still not clear. She reached deeper to dispel the illusion, but she couldn’t feel the bottom of the tub. Jane sank to her knees and leaned downward. She submerged her arm to the elbow, then the bicep, and finally to the shoulder, but the bottom wasn’t there.

Her fingers brushed against something, and she jerked back and withdrew her arm. She rose to her feet and backed away. She could tell that the thing she had touched had been coming up, and that it was big. In a moment she could make out the shape rising from the depths. It wasn’t merely floating to the surface, but somehow forming, coalescing as it rose closer, the chalky white particles adhering into the body of a man.

First the nose, then the forehead and cheekbones, the eye sockets still filled with the milky liquid came up, and then the head tilted and the shoulders emerged. His hair was blackening, the long strands on the sides slicked back by moisture and gravity, and he blinked to clear his eyes. He stood up, the white water pouring out of the sleeves and down from the bottom of his sport coat.

“Danny?” said Jane. “Why?”

His shoulders gave a twitch, and he reached to tug at his cuffs, the left one first, just as he had when he had put on his coat in the hotel room. He reached up to his collar and lifted his chin to adjust the necktie. She could see the four ugly holes in his shirt, where the bullets had hit. He stared at her. “You saw me die. I’m part of you now.”

Jane’s eyes stung with sadness and regret. She had not been able to do anything but watch, and hide. “I’m so sorry, Danny. I’ve been telling you that at least once an hour since it happened. Did you hear me?”

He shrugged. “Who was listening? When you’re dead it doesn’t matter what anybody says about it. You’re just dead. I don’t feel anymore. I slipped up, so I’m meat. You know that’s the way it works. You live until you make a mistake.”

“Why are you here, Danny?” asked Jane.

“It’s your turn now,” Danny said.

“I’m going to die?”

Danny shrugged. “Maybe. It’s what you’re for.”

“That’s it?”

“Somebody falls, and somebody else steps into the line to take his place. I’m down, and your turn has started already.” His dark eyes assumed a concerned look. “Don’t let them make their move before you’re ready.”

“But I don’t even know what’s going on.”

He scowled. “Don’t give me that crap. You know the only thing that matters. The world is a place where good and evil fight. It’s no different from what your father and his father taught you: Hawenneyu the right-handed twin creates, and Hanegoategeh the left-handed twin destroys. Everything that happens is part of their fighting.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Better than you’ve been doing,” he said contemptuously. “Until now you’ve been running these little errands—taking some loser to a safe place. Just moving pieces around on the board. Tonight you’re close to something very big.”

“What is it?”

He sighed. “What is this? Have you been asleep all day? Does the name ‘Bernie’ ring a bell? You know—the old man in the room down the hall from you with a brain full of money?” As he spoke, Danny took his index finger and poked at one of the holes in his shirt. “Tomorrow he could look like this, and Frank Delfina will already be putting the money into play.”

“Money? That’s what’s important?”

“Everything is important to the brothers because they use it as a weapon. Hawenneyu makes a little boy. Hanegoategeh gives him a virus. Hawenneyu strengthens his body to give him immunity, and Hanegoategeh makes the virus mutate into a plague and sends the boy off to kill eighty thousand people. Hawenneyu has made sure one of the eighty thousand is a man who would have started a war and killed eighty million.”

“But you haven’t told me what I’m supposed to do.”

“Look at the configurations and make a choice.” His voice was quick and urgent. “Do something before things change again.”

“I don’t know enough, can’t see enough all at once to know what’s happening,” she said. She hit on a simple strategy, a way of sorting it out. “Is Bernie telling the truth?”

Danny looked at her without appearing to have heard. “Money is a weapon,” he repeated, and Jane awoke.

6

At dawn, Bernie Lupus opened his eyes. A ray of sunlight had entered the dark hotel room. He knew that much. It took him a moment to see the figure standing beside the curtain. “What? What’s going on?” he whispered.

“I came to talk while Rita is still asleep,” Jane said. “I don’t think it would do her much good to hear us talk.”

Bernie put on his glasses, looked around the room, then took them off again. He eased himself out of bed, wearing a pair of boxer shorts and an undershirt. He picked up his clothes and walked stiffly into the bathroom.

When he emerged, he said, “Let’s go for a walk.”