Blood Rites (35 page)

Paul Stoddard calculated the losses of a lengthy slowdown. The financial ones hardly troubled him, but Stoddard Design had a reputation for always finishing buildings on schedule. The owners of the twin high-rise apartments had relied on this and started leasing one tower for January.

If the slowdown went on for any length of time, Paul would assure the owners that Stoddard Design would take responsibility for the tenants, even putting them up in hotels if necessary. That would appease everyone but himself.

Early that evening Elizabeth visited the site. She returned to the penthouse after midnight and discovered Paul and Judy waiting up for her. One shoulder of her red dress had been ripped, a fingernail was broken, and a thin streak of blood dirtied the back of her hand.

“The workers are being paid to stay away. The slowdown is related to the kidnapping,” she told them. “When that’s settled, this will be also. All the firm need do is wait a few days.”

“We can work around the men who don’t show. I’ll check the schedule tomorrow.”

“You were up at six, beloved. Stay home tomorrow and let someone else handle it.”

“No!” Paul began, then, recognizing her concern, added, “I’ll try to get home early, I promise.”

Try. Promise. Elizabeth turned her back to him and poured herself a glass of ice water from the wet bar. She wasn’t thirsty, she simply didn’t want to look at him and think about how easy it would be to make that small subtle push and force him to slow down. It would be such a little thing—and such an immense betrayal. When she turned back, he was standing at the hall door. “I’ll see you in bed, Elizabeth,” he said and left without saying good night.

Elizabeth sat in the white brocade chair across from Judy, kicking off her heels and folding her legs under her. “Did you hear from Dick today?” she asked.

“No. I don’t expect that I will any more than Paul will be home early tomorrow. Is he all right?”

“You’ve known him far longer than I have. Has he ever not taken things too seriously?”

“Is that all?”

“All? Judy, when he has these unforeseen setbacks, I feel the years pulling away from us. Tomorrow he’ll be washing down aspirins and vitamins with quarts of coffee and perhaps, because he made a promise, he’ll come home at five instead of six. No, his work habits aren’t all of the problem, only the worst of it.” She stared out the window at the city, then finished her glass. “I think I’ll scrub off today’s work and join Paul. There are other ways of relaxing,
oui
?”

“What happened to you tonight?”

“One of Vario’s hoods got pushy. He won’t try forcing himself on a woman again.” She watched Judy’s eyes widen and her lips turned up slightly as she added, “Not for a very long time.”

I

There were cops parked on Volpe’s street when he was ready to drive into Cleveland for his meeting with Austra. They were always there, watching him with the same avid interest they had devoted to Jason Halli before his disappearance and were still devoting to Jimmy Bova, the Paytons, Joey Kelley, and some others known to be high in Carrera’s organization. The cops drove Volpe crazy if only because their presence and the insults they called out when he passed them exposed him to questions from neighbors too naive to mind their own business. “I sell real estate,” he told a father of one of his son’s friends, trying to put just the right amount of indignant exasperation in his tone as he added, “This is the stupidity we get for our taxes.”

The cops’ presence made Volpe almost regret moving to Cleveland Heights. Almost, but not quite. He didn’t want his kids playing on the streets with boys who worshiped Dillinger and Capone and who supplemented their allowances running deliveries for the guys, getting slowly drawn into the neighborhood web. And he didn’t want either of them worshiping some future Carrera the way he had, seduced while still in grade school by the presence of so much power in a person lacking the strength or intelligence to truly wield it. Hell, Carrera had even supported his move, agreeing with him when Volpe had told him how good it looked for the real estate firm to have their chief agent living in a ranch in the suburbs.

Now, after weeks of overt surveillance, Volpe’s indignation wore thin though his skill at eluding the police had improved. It took him less than five minutes to ditch his tail and he managed to arrive at the terminal restaurant early. Though he noticed Davey Payton and his nephew sitting at the bar—sent, no doubt, for his protection—he didn’t speak to them as he waited for a booth near the back of the restaurant to be cleared and set.

As he followed the maître d’ to the table, Stephen Austra caught up with him. Though Volpe should have expected it, he was surprised to see Dick Wells joining them. Though still as big a man as Volpe had been in his youth, Wells looked thinner than Volpe remembered with deep grey circles under his eyes. Probably not sleeping well, Volpe decided, and sympathized. This vendetta had been Carrera’s doing, not his, and he had never supported it.

At the booth, he somehow found himself with his back to the entrance. He never liked sitting where he couldn’t see who was approaching and now the two at the bar couldn’t see his face or get the signal if he was in trouble. Wells was probably more paranoid. He certainly seemed to be as he sat in the corner, shaded by Volpe, shielded by Austra, his eyes sweeping the bar with the instinctive skill of someone used to thinking of himself as a target.

“Are the Paytons with you?” Wells asked him.

“In a way,” Volpe admitted. “But I didn’t‘ask them to come.”

“Nice of your boss to watch out for you.”

“Yeah, he’s real thoughtful that way.” The waiter came by and they ordered. Wells had a drink with his meal. Austra only requested black coffee and as he sipped it, he stared at Volpe with curious intensity. Volpe couldn’t help himself. He kept thinking of everything he and Carrera had learned from Russ and stared back, trying to decide if any of it could be true.

Not human?

The idea was laughable, absolutely hilarious.

He actually chuckled at the thought, and as he tried to force himself back to a deadpan expression, he stopped breathing.

No pain in his chest warned him of a heart attack. He didn’t feel as if he were choking. He simply forgot how to inhale.

His hands clutched his throat as the room began to spin. He was dimly aware of Wells and Austra helping him to his feet and dragging him into the men’s room, of a loud knocking on the door and someone asking if he was all right. He managed to pull one deep breath but before he could call out the man went away and his throat closed again.

His heart began to race—from fear? Exertion? He leaned against the cold white tile wall and began to slide toward the floor when Austra straddled him and pulled him to his feet. Austra’s hands pressed him back against the wall and Volpe stared blankly into Austra’s eyes as if their dark centers were the only thing standing between him and death.

Then they pulled him down into the darkness of a closed coffin or a hasty makeshift grave, and for what seemed like eternity, only his nightmare was real.

He tried to pray but the words eluded him. He tried to feel remorse and discovered what he’d always suspected—salvation was not something he could buy from a priest on his deathbed. No, it had to be earned throughout his life.

And he had failed.

Hell opened for him. As he fell to a rush of heat, he tried to scream but the only sounds he heard were the echo of the agony rising to meet him and a distant, steady thumping like a hammer at the slaughterhouse coming down hard on the side of some doomed animal’s head.

He wanted to present his case, to protest the verdict and the sentence, but when he tried he had no way to speak.

No breath.

Then everything grew black again, and in the distance he heard someone calling his name, splashing water on his face, beating him on the back. His eyes opened to the glare of the white-walled lavatory and focused on Dick Wells. “You all right?” Wells asked, leaning over him.

Volpe nodded and, when he was able, said, “Thanks.”

“Thanks? Don’t bother. I was thinking that if anything happened to you, my son wouldn’t survive the night.”

Volpe dried his face with the towel on the roll, then looked at himself in the mirror. He had a scratch over one eye and he wasn’t surprised to see how flushed he’d become. “Where’s Austra?” he asked.

“Your friends from the bar were concerned about you. Stephen decided he’d better join them outside.”

Both guys were real hotheads. Volpe suspected that they probably didn’t know anything about what was going on which would make them all the more dangerous. “We better go sit down,” he said.

“You’re sure you’re OK?”

Volpe’s shirt had stuck to his back. He smelled like he hadn’t bathed in three days but he felt wonderful because his eyes were open and he had a brandy old-fashioned at the table waiting for him. “Yeah,” Volpe said.

“Hot peppers,” Wells commented.

“What?”

“You have hot peppers in your salad. My mother used to warn me, ‘Never eat hot peppers. They can close up your throat.’ Come on. Let’s go.”

The two men found Austra sitting at their booth with the Paytons. The pair looked far more cozy than they ever got with outsiders and Volpe wondered if they really gave a damn about him. After a few quick questions concerning Volpe’s condition, the two men returned to their places at the bar. Volpe pushed his salad aside and canceled the rest of his order.

They discussed Carrera’s case for a while. Wells and Austra seemed less interested in asking questions than in giving Volpe reassurance that a postponement would be announced, possibly as early as the next day, and in setting up a face-to-face between Austra and Carrera to discuss specifics of the trade.

As Volpe headed up the long white-walled tunnel from the train station to the sunlit Public Square, he began to walk faster. He felt younger, more alive than he had in years. And if he had been aware that his future had been ordered—compulsion and inclination perfectly matched—he might not have even cared.

Volpe rushed through his meeting with Carrera, managing to grin when he gave Carrera the news that destroyed every chance he had of leaving Carrera’s grip in the foreseeable future. Carrera pulled a bottle out of the drawer along with two shot glasses and poured Volpe a drink. The schnapps went down easily, the mint soothing Volpe’s sore throat, the alcohol making him oddly light-headed.

He supposed he had his own reason to celebrate. After all, this was his day of expiation.

As he turned onto his street, he drove close to the plain-clothes officers staking out his house, softly calling a single request, “Arrest me.”

“What?” the nearest officer said, not certain if Volpe had made a request or issued a challenge.

“Take me in. Do it now,” Volpe responded. “I don’t want my family to see me go.”

The officers had enough sense to put on a good show, waving what looked like a warrant before they took Volpe away.

He wouldn’t speak to any of them, waiting instead for Jacob Hamlyn, the special prosecutor assigned to Carrera’s case. Then, along with insisting on immunity as Hamlyn had expected, Volpe made a stranger request. “They’ll be other guys coming in, don’t ask me how I know, I just do. But we’re dead men, all of us, if Domie gets suspicious. Take the heat off of him. Postpone the trial and don’t set a new date.”

“I’ll consider it. Want to talk?”

“Yeah. But not about your case. Other things.”

The next morning, Davey Payton made overtures to another plainclothes officer, not the kind of self-incriminating revelations Volpe had made but enough to convince Hamlyn that he should take Volpe’s request seriously.

II

By noon, a pair of plainclothes policemen disguised as fishermen were combing a wooded area along the Black River near Lagrange looking for a gun that had been used to wipe out a government witness in the Carrera case, a gun Volpe told them had been dumped there just a week before. When they found it, Hamlyn decided he’d seen enough. Following a few quick calls, he made the announcement—Carrera’s trial had been put off. No, he wouldn’t comment on when it would be rescheduled.

As insurance that Hamlyn wouldn’t do an abrupt about-face, Stephen sent him one more compulsive confessor. When the news hit the evening paper, he and Dick phoned the number Volpe had given them.

As they expected, Carrera would not meet with Stephen again. But they had assumed Carrera would want to make the exchange of Wells for their sons in a private place, one where they’d have the advantage of the deadly Austra strength and speed.

But Stephen would be denied the slaughter, at least for a while. Carrera was too well informed to make so obvious a mistake.

“We do the switch tomorrow afternoon at three-thirty on the southeast corner of the Public Square,” Carrera told Stephen. “You come as far as the Arcade just off the square, then send Wells on foot alone from there. The boys will start walking as soon as Wells does. Anybody crosses us, we’ll shoot Wells and both kids.”

Dick, who had been listening in on the conversation, took the phone from Stephen. “How do we know you’ll let them go?” he demanded.

Carrera chuckled. “Of course I’ll let them go. I have no use for them anymore. As for their silence, given the circumstances I don’t think they’ll talk to anyone. And tell Austra not to bother with another midnight visit. I won’t know where your boys are until four-thirty tomorrow, Captain Wells.”

“Now hold on. . . .” Dick began, but Carrera had already hung up.

Dick slowly lowered the receiver, his face rigid with shock. “Well, that takes care of any thoughts you might have had about taking on Carrera. Mass slaughter during rush hour is no way to keep your name out of the papers.”

“I will find him tonight and learn where he intends to take you.”

“Don’t. If somebody sees you, Carrera will call off the trade. We can’t put our kids in that kind of risk. We’ll have to think of something else.”

Stephen paced. Dick wasn’t sure if it was affection for him that made Stephen so furious or the fact that he was being denied his victim, at least for the moment. Most likely, Dick thought with a trace of gallow’s humor, Stephen felt a bit of both.