JL04 - Mortal Sin (29 page)

Florio sat across from me at the table in his safari khakis, his dark face brooding at his wine. A cool breeze stirred through the slough, the air ripe with the pungent aroma of fermentation, of growth and death and renewal of life. Tiger silently poured from half a dozen bottles into two sets of glasses.

“Lassiter, do you understand what I’m doing?” Florio asked.

“Sure, you’re showing me just how much savoir-faire you’ve got. You want me to know you’re something I’m not. It all goes back to Gina, doesn’t it?”

“Does it?”

“Look, Nicky, she chose you. She’s your wife. You won. You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

“Quite right, quite right.” The French wine was making him sound like a phony European count. Florio sniffed again, then took a sip from one of the goblets. “Complex and opulent,” he opined, putting the glass down and savoring the taste, his eyes closed. “Tell me, Lassiter, how would you describe the Lynch-Bages?”

I studied the contents of a freshly poured goblet. “Red. It’s definitely red.” I took a dainty sip, then polished it off in a second try. “I don’t knowhow opulent it is, but it tastes damn good.”

“Let’s compare the Mouton, another Pauillac wine.”

Tiger, the homicidal sommelier, poured me a fresh one.

“By the way,” Florio said, “you may want to savor the wine a bit more and not…chug it.”

I stuck my nose into the goblet and sniffed with the earnest diligence of a Labrador retriever. “Rich,” I intoned judiciously. “And, of course, red, still red.”

He nodded. Maybe I was a natural at this. I drank up, finishing it off, letting him frown at my lack of couth.

“Next, perhaps a Château Petrus from the Pomerol region.”

I tried it and found a new word. “Fruity,” I told him.

Again, he nodded judiciously. “Spicy and fruity, to be sure.

Today it would go for twenty-five hundred dollars a bottle—if you could find it.”

I nearly squirted him with about a hundred bucks’ of the stuff. When I finished coughing, he was pouring more wine. We sipped along with each other for a while, running through a Lafite, which I agreed was delicate, a powerful Pichon-Lalande, and a sturdy, somewhat acidic Figeac. Over yet another bottle, we debated whether a Montrose was drying from age, but we agreed that some of the wines from Saint-Julien were past their peaks.

And so was I.

In the last sixty hours, I had watched a man decapitated, then helped dispose of the evidence. I got hooked into a bribery scheme and was framed for a million-dollar heist. I had been punched by two cops, one of them apparently honest, which is about the average in these parts. I had been zapped twice by a stun gun and shanghaied aboard an airboat. I’d read my own suicide note, insulted the guy who wanted to kill me, then drunk enough wine to drown a cat. I wanted to ponder the cosmic significance of these events, but at the moment my head was throbbing, my temples were in a vise, and my eyes were pressed shut. Somebody was saying something, but I wasn’t interested.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, shaking me. Apparently, I had found a comfortable spot to sleep, my face resting on the tabletop. I jolted to attention.

“Up and at ’em, Jake. We’ve got business to discuss.”

I pried my eyes open and ran my tongue across my teeth. I don’t care how much the wine cost. My mouth tasted like it had been stuffed with rags soaked in 10W-40 Quaker State. Nicky Florio still had his hand on my shoulder. Jim Tiger stood at the railing, watching us both, a pistol on his hip, the stun gun in his hand. “More vino,” I said. “Bring on the grapes.”

“I didn’t know you had an appreciation of the finer things in life,” Florio said.

“Oh, but I do. Wine, women, and…”

“Song,” Florio helped out.

With that, I broke into “Fight On, State,” giving the arms-up touchdown sign when I got to the part about rolling up the score, fighting on to victory ever-more.

“Have you enjoyed our little tasting?” Nicky Florio asked.

“Sure have. Now where are the women?”

“There are wine experts who would have killed to taste the 1961 French Bordeaux you’ve been guzzling.”

“But not you, Nicky. You wouldn’t kill for wine. Or for a woman, for that matter. You didn’t murder Gondolier because of Gina. If you had, I’d be dead, too. You kill for money. Maybe Gondolier cheated you, or maybe you didn’t want to share the casino with him. Either way, it was just for the dollars. Peter Tupton was going to cost you a bundle, so you aced him. And now, there’s me….”

My little speech had made me thirsty. I picked up a bottle of Châteaux Latour and put it to my lips. Hey, it tasted good this way, too. “Powerful yet still youthful,” I said, licking my lips. “And red. Red as blood.”

“Why do you think I invited you to join me in this special event?” He gestured across the table at the half-empty bottles. My gaze followed his hand, but my eyes were unfocused. My head was swimming in an ocean of wine.

“You’re trying to impress me, but I’m not impressed. Next, you’re going to tell me about some trip to France where you bought all the wine from Château LaDouche at double what it’s worth. That’s your style. You married Gina because she looks good on your arm, so people would say, ‘Oh, that Nicky Florio’s got great taste.’ But what Nicky Florio’s got is a major case of self-deception. Or do you really know? Maybe deep inside, you know that you’re a chickenshit small-timer who hasn’t done anything straight since the sixth grade.”

“I see that wine loosens your tongue.”

Actually, it was my brain that seemed loose. I looked at Nicky Florio, and there were two of him.

“Sure, Lassiter, I bought the wine in France. But I didn’t pay double. I paid next to nothing, because I recognized early just how-special the 1961 Bordeaux was. I have always been able to recognize quality. It is why I am where I am today, and why you are…”

He held up both hands as if to indicate the utter insignificance of me. I took a healthy swig of the Latour.

“At any rate, it is time to discuss our business,” Nicky Florio said. “We have a matter to conclude.”

“I’m not shining any note,” I slurred. “Wait a she-cond.” I tested my numb lips with my tongue. Was that wine or Novocain?

“You probably wonder why I haven’t had you killed already,” Nicky Florio said, matter-of-factly.

From somewhere in the darkened swamp, a bird cawed, and another one ca-cawed right back. I looked at my watch. The big hand was on the nine, and the little hand was spinning around. “Yesh. You’ve been tardy, naughty boy. And what kind of a host are you, anyway? Wine, wine, wine, but no munchies. Where are the chips and onion dip?”

I grabbed another bottle. Something from Saint-Julien.

“Like it says in the Bible, Lassiter, it all comes around. Ashes to ashes…”

I took a gulp from the bottle.

“…dust to dust,” he said.

I gagged. “Wine to vinegar!”

Nicky Florio tugged the bottle from my hand and sniffed. He-wrinkled his nose with displeasure. “It happens,” he said, almost apologetically. “A defect in the cork, improper storage. Pity.”

“Ah, what one has to put up with,” I said sympathetically.

“All right, that’s enough.” Florio’s mood had changed. “I want to know some things.”

“Me, too. What really happened to the dinosaurs? Charlie Riggs says it was a big asteroid, but some people think it was a bunch of volcanoes. And how does Dan Marino release the ball so quickly?”

“Who have you told?”

“Told what?”

“What you know.”

I squinted at him. “I don’t know. What you know?”

“No, what
you
know!”

“I know plenty. What you know?”

He tilted his head and looked at me, trying to figure out if I was drunk or just jerking him around. Even I wasn’t sure. My eyelids were as heavy as theater curtains.

“Look, Lassiter, I know you told Socolow, and I know you told Osceola. Who else did you tell about the casino?”

“Mike Wal-lash. That is, Mike Wallace. There’ll be a camera crew here soon.”

“Did you tell Doc Riggs?”

“If I say yes, are you going to give him some of the vino, too?”

“You did, didn’t you?”

“It isn’t just the casino, though, is it Nicky? The casino’s secondary. That’s what Osceola said. There’s something even bigger, right?”

“What would that be?”

“I know, but I’m not telling. I’ve got a secret.”

He looked skeptical. “Osceola says you don’t know anything about it.”

I sang it out. “That’s because it’s my seeeeee-cret! And I told only people I trust.”

“You’re trying too hard, Jake. It isn’t going to work. You don’t know shit. There’s no way you could know.”

In the slough, the blackness began to fade to gray, and pink slivers of light appeared at the eastern horizon. Florio stood and headed toward the front door of the cabin. With a shrug of his head, he motioned to Jim Tiger, who was leaning against the rail.

“Gina told me,” I said. “Gina knows a seeeeee-cret.”

Nicky Florio stopped in his tracks. He turned to face me. “Either you’re lying, or you’re trying to get her killed. Which is it?”

He had pushed the right button. I looked at his face, dark with concern. He was dead serious. I had underestimated Florio. He knew me better than I knew me. He knew I cared more about Gina than he did.

“I was lying,” I said.

“Were you, or are you lying now to protect her?” He thought about it a moment. “Either way, you’re through.” Florio turned back to Tiger. “Close the transaction.”

Florio went into the house, letting the door bang behind him. A moment later, Guillermo Diaz came out the door, carrying the briefcase to the picnic table. Tiger opened the latch and pulled out the same paper I had looked at last night, or was it a thousand years ago? “Sign it, shithead.”

“Whatever you say?”

He handed me a fat Mont Blanc fountain pen. I made a couple of exaggerated arm motions, found the signature line, and wrote a single word.

Tiger picked up the document and drew it close to his face. He may have been nearsighted. “What the fuck! What the fuck is this?”

“You said to sign it ‘Shithead,’”I explained calmly.

“Why don’t we just feed him to the gators?” Guillermo Diaz suggested. His chubby face was pinched in a frown. Maybe his cowboy boots hurt his feet.

“Look,” Tiger said, “let me tell you where you’re at. In a few hours, you’re going to be hanging by the neck from the ceiling fan in your living room. Somebody will find you the first day that’s hot enough to carry your stink to the neighbors’ yard. Now we can do this easy or hard, it’s up to you. You want to spare yourself some pain, just sign the paper.”

Die easy or die hard. I was hoping for a third alternative.

Tiger reached into the briefcase and pulled out another copy and slammed it down in front of me. Then he lifted the stun gun and tapped me on the side of the head with it, just above the ear. “Sign!”

I held the expensive pen, and this time, in my best penmanship, wrote three words:

Tiger bent close to look at it, his index finger tracing under the words. I shifted the pen from my fingers into my fist, fourteen-karat gold tip pointed toward the sky.

He squinted at the words. “The fuck is this?”

When his face was a foot above the table, I brought the fist up. Straight and hard.

The dagger-sharp tip sank into his right eye, and I jammed it home. I pushed it through lens and iris and cornea and the orbital bones and the optic nerve, and judging from the gush of blood that spurted like a garden hose, I’d pushed it straight through the internal carotid artery, too. Then, with a final shove with the palm of my hand, I rammed it straight into the frontal lobe of the brain.

The scream was the wail of a dying beast. Blood gushed from his eye socket over his face, down onto the table and over the papers. The lens and iris popped out and hung, suspended from his face, dripping a jellylike fluid. Tiger staggered backward, his hands groping for the pen, which had vanished inside his eye socket. He whipped his head back and forth like a horse trying to toss its bit, spraying blood in every direction. He opened the other eye, then screamed that he was blind, which he would have been from the severed nerves. Finally, he fell, his body twitching, his screams silenced.

Jim Tiger was stone-cold dead, and I was stone-cold sober.

Guillermo Diaz stood, frozen. By the time he reached inside his nylon jacket, I had picked up the stun gun and aimed it at his chest. The first electric zap buckled his knees and opened his mouth. The second sat him down. The third drove a palsy through his arms and legs.

I heard the door bang open behind me and turned in time to see Florio, a twelve-gauge shotgun cradled in his arms, coming toward me. I dived to the deck and rolled just as a blast tore out a chunk of the railing, the noise ringing in my ears. The shotgun barrel followed me to the floor, and I kept moving, scrambling hand over hand. I looked over my shoulder to see Florio pump and raise the gun once more. I took two steps and dived over the railing, a blast of pellets tearing at my coattail.

Into the blackness.

The fall took forever.

I expected to be shot out of the air, like a clay pigeon.