Headstone City (36 page)

And there she was.

Maria Monticelli.

With her insanely black hair coiling and twining to frame her dark and eternal eyes, the luscious angles of her body shown off to perfection. Her blouse open one button too far. The hem of her burgundy skirt caught over her knee to give an enticing view of what he'd dreamed about most of his life. If this wasn't love, it was the next best thing.

This is what you've always wanted.

She moved from the bottom of the staircase, looked at her murdered daddy in the chair. She said nothing, but took another step closer. He breathed her in. His chest was constricted with the insane excitement of being so close to her again.

Of course you would murder men for her. You'd have to be crazy not to.

He drew the bloodstained box from his pocket and opened it, held the diamond ring out to her.

“What's this?” she said. “You . . . you're asking me . . . ? You—?”

“Yeah.”

Those lips, drawing him in, as if he'd traveled a thousand miles but somehow the journey got easier with each step. Leading him to stand before her. The funny guy who wasn't so tough.

She said, “Everything you did today, Johnny. What they've been saying. About my brothers . . . and my father—my daddy?”

“Yes, Maria.”

Everybody just stared at him, maybe waiting for her to give the order to kill Dane.

Dane scowled at one of the toughs. Just another kid really, no more than twenty or so. Dane said, “You. You just got promoted. What's your name?”

“Nunzio.”

Jesus, all these old-world Italians and their names from the Olive Oil villages. “All right, Nunz, I want you to take the Don out of here. Use the Caddy out front. Vinny's in the trunk.”

“Holy fuck,” Big Tommy said.

“Bury them wherever you get rid of bodies, Big. The Meadowlands? Fresh Kills?”

“Yeah, Staten Island. There's no room behind Kennedy Airport anymore.”

“Go take them.” Gesturing to the muscle. “Both of you help him. Remember the spot though. In a couple of weeks we'll drop a call to the police, have them found and brought home. Give them a big funeral.” They deserved that, and both of them would've understood this had to come first. “Afterward, I'll have a list of more to do. And your salary's just been doubled.”

“Everybody in the organization?” Delmare asked.

“Everybody in this room. Get the troops together in the morning. I got a few things I can teach them.”

“Do you mean military tactics?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“To pay a visit to the Ventimiglias. We're going to take out Vito Grimaldi.”

“But why? They haven't done anything. By implicating them with all these recent crimes, they'll be smeared in the media and under continuous investigation for months. There's no reason to take a stand against them.”

Dane looked at him. “They're the last rough crew around.”

“Yes, that's right.”

“So that's the reason, Georgie.”

Everybody grateful now. The two thugs with the same expression on their stupid faces—giddy, sensing major changes ahead. They grabbed the Don's body and hustled him down the hallway and out the door. Big carried away the blood-smeared chair, and that was the only evidence that the Don had died in his own living room. Georgie nodded and left for his office.

Dane turned to Maria and saw real fright in her eyes.

He stepped closer and saw the lust there too, the reverence.

Rispetto.

She was looking at him as if noticing him for the first time since he was a child, and she was.

It made his pulse hammer and the sweat flood down his back. He took her gently but assuredly, encircling her waist and drawing her to him. She held her ground for an instant, then flowed against his body, squirming there, then yielding.

“Do you still want to be an actress?”

“I never really cared much about that,” she said. “It was something to dream about until something else better came along.”

He thought of her on the screen, sharing her with the world, ten thousand theaters filled with squirming men, guys at home with their VCRs all freeze-framed on her. “Good,” Dane told her. “I need you here.”

“You need me.” Her face softening even more, so beautiful that he could barely control himself.

“I always have.”

“I've been waiting for you, Johnny.”

JoJo had been right. We all got one thing in the world that we love more than anything else. That makes us do what we do and makes us who we are.

He led her upstairs, kicking in doors until he found her bedroom. As he kissed her throat he saw the photo of JoJo Tormino behind her, on the night table. He eased her down on the mattress, reached over, and slapped the frame to the floor.

She unbuckled his belt and he said, “JoJo loved you. I promised him I'd tell you that.”

“I don't give a shit,” she whispered, and Dane rolled her back on the bed and was on her.

The boy with the sick brain happily bounded forward from a corner of the room, perhaps finally ready to tell Dane whatever it was he'd been trying to say. An angel with golden wings as shiny as coins sat on the edge of the mattress, supplicant but silent, a burning sword in its right hand. Dane lay with his love and let out his first real laugh in thirty years against her throat as he waited for the kid so much like himself to again mutter all the grievous, joyous, secret languages of the profane and fitful dead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TOM PICCIRILLI is the author of fourteen novels, including
November Mourns, A Choir of Ill Children, The Night Class, A Lower Deep,
and
Coffin Blues
. He's had over 150 stories published, and his short fiction spans multiple genres and demonstrates his wide-ranging narrative skills. He has been a World Fantasy Award finalist and a three-time Bram Stoker Award winner. Visit Tom's official website, Epitaphs, at
www.tompiccirilli.com
. Tom welcomes email at
[email protected]
.

OTHER BOOKS BY TOM PICCIRILLI

NOVELS

November Mourns

A Choir of Ill Children

Coffin Blues

Grave Men

A Lower Deep

The Night Class

The Deceased

Hexes

Sorrow's Crown

The Dead Past

Shards

Dark Father

COLLECTIONS

Mean Sheep

Waiting My Turn to Go Under the Knife
(Poetry)

This Cape Is Red Because I've Been Bleeding
(Poetry)

A Student of Hell
(Poetry)

Deep Into That Darkness Peering

The Dog Syndrome & Other Sick Puppies

Pentacle

NONFICTION

Welcome to Hell

Don't miss

Tom Piccirilli's

exciting next novel
coming from
Bantam Books
in Fall 2006.

Read on for an exclusive sneak peek
and pick up your copy at
your favorite bookseller

On sale fall 2006

Killjoy wrote:

Words are not as adequate as teeth.

Incisors are incapable of lying. If I pressed them into wax or paper or fish or flesh you would know my meaning, the constraints of form, and every trivial fact there is to be found. Words are deficient, even impractical, when attempting to convey the substance of true (modest) self. Deed is definition. We are restricted by mind and voice but not in action, wouldn't you agree? That we can never completely express that which is within. That sometimes the very act of feeling isn't enough to encompass all there is to feel. Frenzy is trying to explain your behaviors to yourself. I suspect I have yet a long way to go at the art of becoming human.

Remember Schlagelford's great treatise on the fear of non-existence. He spent some thirty-seven years of his adult life with his left hand clamped to his left thigh (trouserless, of course). Despite his grip cutting off all circulation in that leg until it withered, blackened, and eventually had to be amputated (and the hand, no more than a frozen talon, had grown useless, and continued to squeeze the phantom limb), at which point he gripped his right thigh with his right hand and had to write his last major work,
The Season of Femoral,
with quill champed between teeth, still he was content.

Satisfied in his knowledge of personal existence in a world without enough promise or structure.

Do you ever feel that way, Whitt?

Do your hands shake?

T
he mama cultist told Whitt about the dead ballerina, a god named Mucus Thorn-in-Brain, and the starving baby that had been stolen out of the back room.

She and her two lumbering middle-aged sons smiled at him. Whitt tried to smile back but the muscles in his jaw were so tight that he barely managed a grimace. It got like that sometimes, when he was forced to hold himself in check. Luckily these people were so caught up in their own mania that they hardly even noticed him while they prattled on incessantly. They gave him a cup of herbal tea that smelled like turpentine and he left it on the scratched table in front of him.

Except for the murders, they were about the same as any other cult members he'd met. Considering his narrow range of interests and social obligations, he'd actually met more than his share. Whatever the hell a man's share of cultists should be in this world.

The woman, Mrs. Prott, who introduced herself as the High Priestess of the Cosmic Knot, spoke with near hysterical excitement about a new god being born in the back of her son Merwin's heart. Merwin, who had awful surgical scars covering his forehead, grinned stupidly and petted his chest like he was stroking a luscious woman's hair.

The other son, Franklin, was blind and kept flexing his hands like he wanted to leap out of his chair and tear something to pieces.

Whitt feigned interest in Mrs. Prott's continuing sermon and looked at her star charts, notes, magazine articles, and photographs of the multitude of people who played some role in her ever widening tale of religion, murder, and secret government experiments. She kept tapping a spot between her eyes, saying they'd shot her there and her brain had leaked out, which was why she sometimes got mixed up. Whenever she said the word “government,” Merwin would stop stroking his invisible lover's hair and thump his head.

The house had been the dumping ground for members of the group for years. Whitt got up and wandered around while the woman talked, rifling through stacks of newspapers dating back three, four years. He saw himself on the front page of more than one, laid out mostly in the open, as if waiting for him.

A metal shelf unit held two dozen upside-down mason jars, each sealed with contact cement, and sprinkled with a handful of salt. Words, possibly names, were scrawled in black marker on old yellow masking tape:
Hogarth. Pedantry. Airsiez. Colby. Terminus. Kinnick. Insensate. Testament of Ya'al. Ussel. Dr. Dispensations. O'Mundanity.

She kept on preaching. It threw him off a bit, this lady's willingness to discuss such matters so openly, in her strange manner, as though she were telling only basic, incontrovertible truths. Speaking in a happily lilting voice, like she was overjoyed to find someone who actually had interest in her life, no matter why. Whitt nodded like an idiot, and she nodded back. Was it only loneliness that drove people to such extreme acts?

“And she came to you for help,” he said, sitting back down, trying to keep mama on topic. “The ballerina.”

“For the truth, yes. And for love. Everyone, always in such need of love. You see, she also had quite the nervous disposition. Emotionally she'd been tormented by her parents, who never responded to her with affection of any kind. They merely drove her ever more forcefully toward the perfection of her dancing. Into the arms of boys. That's what the child was. A symbol of her desperation.”

“And you murdered her,” Whitt said.

Telling it while fluttering her hand at him as if he were absurd, so silly. “What do you mean? Who?”

Whitt forced his breath out in a stream that blew ripples across the stinking tea. He remembered to make the effort to smile again. “The ballerina.”

Head eased back, Franklin rolled his blank eyes up and let out a guffaw. It came from down low in his belly and the depths of his hate. Whitt wanted to hear what the guy's voice sounded like, but so far Franklin refused to make any comment beyond that sick laughter. If any trouble started, Whitt would take out the blind guy before anybody else.