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Authors: Mark Arsenault

BOOK: Loot the Moon
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The goon on Billy's left smiled and spoke his first words of the evening, “This is your stop, Mr. Povich.” He opened the door and stepped out.
Billy swallowed a taste of his own blood. The bleeding had nearly stopped, but his tongue pulsed with dull pain. Outside, the driver panned the light around a moonscape of sand, revealing emptiness that stretched far longer than the flashlight beam.
The other goon nudged Billy toward the open door. “Out, Povich.”
“Are you guys going to tell me what the hell this is about?”
“Plenty of time for productive conversation.” He pointed and commanded sharply, “Out.”
Billy swung his bound feet onto the seat.
Fuck them and the upholstery
, he thought. From a sitting position, he walked on his ass bones until his feet could touch the ground. The other goon grabbed a handful of Billy's shirt and pulled him from the car. He dragged Billy a few steps from the Cadillac and then left him.
So what do I do? Just stand here?
He felt like the main event at a firing squad.
Without a word, the driver walked straight to Billy and slammed the flashlight into the crook of Billy's neck.
Billy crumpled, as much from shock as pain. He clenched his jaw so that he would not cry out with weakness that would disgust them and invite another blow. The sand felt cool against his face. The muscles in his neck tightened around the bruise and felt like they would pull themselves from the bone. A hand grabbed Billy's shirt and rolled him onto his back. Then the hand pinched Billy's Adam's apple, and the flashlight shone into his face. Billy shut his eyes and turned his head from the light, but the hand squeezed his throat until Billy turned back.
“You must have quite a phone bill,” said the bearded goon, from somewhere off to the side.
Shit, are these guys from the phone company? No wonder they're so rough.
“You made a lot of calls about Mr. Glanz,” the second goon said.
The bespectacled driver shouted in Billy's face, “What do you want with Mr. Glanz?”
Billy pushed a mouthful of spit and blood over his lip and felt it slither down his cheek
. Son of a bitch, these are Glanz 's goons
. Billy was accustomed to violent bill collectors, but these men were different in every way except tactics. They could not be appeased by promises to pay. And they did not care that dead men did not honor their gambling debts.
Billy cursed his former self, the Billy Povich of the past two days,
who had plumbed many crooked sources for information about Rhubarb Glanz. Billy should have known to be more careful, especially after Garafino had told him of the rumors on the street, about a former investigative reporter trolling for scraps about Glanz. Oh, God, how could he have been so reckless?
Of course
the news would have gotten back to Glanz, who was tapped deeper into underworld sources than anyone else in Providence.
So how to play it?
The truth was dangerous—once he told it, there would be nothing to fall back on. Billy thought about the chain of people who knew of Glanz's threat to Judge Harmony: Martin Smothers; Nelida, the judge's mistress; and Harmony's clerk, Kit Bass. If Billy sold them all out, what was to stop these goons from whacking all three in order, like killing a virus before it contaminated the population?
He could think of no lie they might believe, so Billy said nothing.
Two fingers roughly pried open Billy's eyelid. The flashlight blinded him. “Got a problem understanding the English language?” the bearded goon asked.
“What's wrong with your English?” the driver screamed in Billy's face.
They waited for Billy to answer. Billy's heart slammed in terror against his rib cage. He offered, “The paper wanted to do a profile of Rhubarb Glanz and they asked me to make a few calls.” Sweat had filled his ear canal, and his own voice sounded like he was speaking underwater. “But I didn't get anything so they dropped the project.”
For a second everything was quiet, except Billy's panting.
“Who's writing this project?” said the talkative goon.
“Why they writing 'bout my father?” the driver screamed.
His father … ?
Uh-oh.
Billy had assumed this encounter was just business, a little violence between people used to dishing it out and a client accustomed to
getting it. But this was about
family
, and a realm of emotion in which people often made rash and stupid decisions.
“Watch your mouth, Robbie,” warned the bearded goon.
Of course
, Billy thought, the driver was Robert Glanz, resident of Newport, the younger brother of David Glanz Jr., resident of the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institutions, courtesy of Judge Harmony.
The big goon squatted beside Billy, grabbed a handful of Billy's shirt, and pulled him close. “Who's writing this story?”
“Nobody. The editors dropped it. They gave up.”
“What gave them the idea in the first place?”
“Don't know.” Billy had answered without hesitation and was pleased with himself. If they could be taught to see Billy as just a bottom-rung plebe, who just made a few calls on the order of The Man, maybe he could slip out of this.
Robbie swung the light from goon to goon to check their expressions.
“We'll see,” the bearded one said. He pushed Billy back to the ground and then nodded toward Doe Eyes. “Fire up the Cat,” he commanded.
Without a word, the gloomy goon swung himself gracefully into the backhoe and wiggled onto the seat. The engine huffed to life, and then snarled at being woken in the middle of the night. Bug-eyed lamps mounted atop the cab threw harsh white light onto the ground. Bits of reflective minerals sparkled in the sand. The goon seemed like an expert at piloting such a machine. The Cat backed away from the party with a series of warning beeps, then turned a sharp semicircle and dropped the wide front bucket to the ground. The goon spun the seat around and worked a separate set of controls. The hydraulic limb at the back of the machine uncurled like a scorpion's tail, and the pail scooped a mouthful of earth. With jerky motions, the pail swung to the side and dumped the sand. It swung
back to scoop again. The sand from the hole was darker than that on the surface; it looked damp.
They are digging my grave.
Billy faced the revelation without emotion. He recalled his conversation with Brock Harmony, who had feared his kidnapper would force him to dig his own grave. Would Billy prefer that Glanz's goons did a good job? Did he want to be buried in a proper grave,
deep
under the soil, in a sandpit that soon would be a parking lot?
No …
To just disappear without leaving a body is to risk becoming a sad joke. A Jimmy Hoffa for the modern day. He preferred to be buried
shallow.
Snacked upon by coyotes, perhaps, but at least a fair chance to be discovered in time to head off an urban legend.
At least he would not have to endure that
conversation
with his father. The old man would have no choice but to continue his treatment. He would have to stay alive for the sake of the boy. They would need some kind of home health care service. How would the two of them manage? They would be indigent without Billy. Maybe Medicaid would pay.
Billy looked around in wonder. So
this
was what a murder scene looked like during the act. He had been to plenty of murder scenes—as a reporter, the day after the crimes. He had for a long time been struck by how an ordinary place, even a beautiful one, can leave a chill once it becomes the scene of a violent death. Like the orchard where a young drifter hanged himself in anonymity. Or the all-night restaurant where a gangster died in a shower of bullets. Or the rolling fields of Gettysburg, where Billy swore he could feel the breeze left behind by cannonballs. Haunted places, he had called them, though Billy never believed in doomed spirits that walked the earth. He enjoyed a deep breath, despite the diesel fumes. Maybe this would be a good time to believe in ghosts.
The backhoe tucked its pail against the cab and suddenly fell silent.
Billy felt pain in his wrists and realized he had unconsciously rubbed them raw against the tape, trying to break free.
“Good enough?” asked Doe Eyes.
“Fine,” said the Beard.
“You want me to square off the corners?”
“And be here all night?”
From the Cadillac's trunk, the driver gathered three short-handled shovels, like for moving coal in the old days. He javelined a shovel to each of the goons, then swung his own shovel by the handle, like a majorette, and cracked Billy across the thigh.
So sudden the blow, Billy howled and grasped for his leg. Robbie chuckled as he beat him. Billy pulled himself into a fetal tuck, understanding without irony that he was close to leaving the world in the position he was carried into it. The flat side of the spade punished Billy's shoulders and ribs and the backs of his legs. The blows struck with a
slap
on soft flesh, and with a ringing
plink
when they hit close to bone.
When Robbie had decided the beating was good enough, or maybe when he just got tired, he stopped, panting, and stabbed his shovel into the ground. He spat in the sand and commanded, “To the hole, okay, boys?”
The two goons pulled Billy to his feet, dragged his battered body to the edge of the trench. The hole was about six feet long and five feet deep. They had done a fine job digging, but Billy was not glad about it. He felt nothing. Such a deep hole. They leaned Billy over it.
I am Hoffa.
“For the last time,” the bearded goon said, with a beleaguered tone of disappointment, as if Billy were a child who had let him down. “Why were you calling around for dirt about our employer, Mr. Glanz?”
I will not sell out Martin.
Billy swallowed blood. “Told you guys already,” he croaked. “The whole truth.”
They spun him into the hole.
He landed on his tailbone and slid to the bottom of the trench. Billy wiped sand from his face. Five feet below the surface the sand felt like an icebox. Above him, a thousand stars were out. He thought for a moment how there were more stars in the universe than grains of sand in this entire pit. The flashlight beam shot all over. The beating had left him numb, but Billy had the sense that no bones had been broken. Well, maybe a rib. He inhaled deeply and analyzed the pain. To be so analytical at such a time …
Shouldn't this bother me? Why am I not upset?
He heard a shovel bite into the earth. A clump of sand plummeted onto him and landed with a
whump
. He spit sand from his lips. Another clump struck his chest and splashed into his eyes. The three men worked in a rhythm, quickly shoveling sand into the hole. They were good at it. Like maybe they had filled a lot of graves.
They are fucking burying me alive.
Billy struggled feebly, but was knocked back by the rain of sand that fell faster and piled ever heavier on his body and his legs. His hands frantically cleared the sand from his face and he gasped for breath.
How will the old man break it to Bo?
At the thought of the boy, Billy screamed into the night, his cry hoarse and desperate.
“Something you'd like to say, Mr. Povich?” Billy recognized the bearded goon's voice. “We're happy to take a break.”
“This is tiring,” agreed Doe Eyes. “How about we rest while you talk?”
“Oh Jesus!” Billy cried out from beneath a mound of damp earth.
They had broken him.
Sobbing into the sand, struggling for air, Billy told them in fractured sentences of the judge's mistress in New York, and of Martin's meeting with her. He told them of the theory that Rackers was paid to
kill the judge, and he confessed that he knew Rhubarb Glanz had made a threat.
He sold out Martin, the mistress, and the clerk.
The sand fell no more. Billy never heard the three goons walk away. Just the pop of three doors and the crunch of the tires fading to nothingness in the night.
B
illy lay still as the silence swept up after the sound of the car. Glanz's goons had just left him in the pit, under what felt like several hundred pounds of sand. Did they leave him to escape? Or leave him to die? They probably didn't give a damn. They had not been ordered to kill Billy, or he would be dead. They had been ordered to get information in whatever manner proved effective. Turned out, a kidnapping, a beating, and a premature burial proved highly effective. Mission accomplished, so they went home.
They didn't care enough about Billy to free him or even to finish him off.
He was pinned on his back, twisted slightly toward his left side, under a cone of damp sand several feet high, the point of which looked to be about at his thighs. The sand sloped steeply toward his head and had begun to fill the bottom of the trench, where Billy had frantically cleared space to breathe. The other side of the pile sloped less sharply toward his feet. Billy realized they had intentionally spared his head the worst of the sand to allow him to talk. Had he been fresh, untenderized by a shovel, and not bound hand and foot,
he might have wormed his way out of the pile. But for the moment, he was trapped. His hands were near his mouth, and he used an index finger to brush sand from his eyes and to swab inside his nostrils.
Screaming for help would probably just waste energy, which his injured body would need to survive a cold night. The work crew building this project would arrive in a few hours. Then he could scream, assuming they didn't have a day off or a union strike.
The part of his brain that enjoyed torturing the rest of him created an image of Bo and the old man struggling in gray smoke. In this fantasy, Billy could smell charcoal and hear smoke alarms screech. He could see Bo tug at the old man's arm, but the boy could not move him and the smoke got thicker and their movements … slowed … down … .
Jesus Christ ! Enough!
He shook the image away. This scenario was one in a million. Maybe one in ten million. Why couldn't he stop thinking about it? He sighed. He obsessed, he figured, because the stakes were infinitely high.
My boy's life
. He would talk to Bo. Later today after he was rescued from the trench. Make the kid promise to save himself. Billy thrashed angrily against the prison of sand, and relished the pain that assured him he was alive and awake. He knew talking to Bo was no good—the boy would promise anything, but he'd never leave his grandpa.
Not while the old man was alive.
“You're a fucking burden!” he heard himself scream aloud. “You cheating son of a bitch!”
He screamed in his mind:
Die if you want.
Billy stopped his struggle and lay very still. He cursed the dark notion in his head.
Die if you want.
He denied it.
Not my thought. Not my thought.
The tears he could not deny, burning lightly like diluted acid in his eyes. He realized he was losing consciousness, blending dream and reality. He saw his son and his father in the apartment again.
There was no smoke. They were eating breakfast in the middle of the night and watching an infomercial on television about that mechanical bed that rose up and down at the touch of a button.
Operators are standing by … .
Side by side they sat. His father and his son. Two old pals with the same blue eyes. The true source of Billy's anger suddenly revealed itself. He was not afraid of losing his son in a fire, not really. He was enraged by the knowledge that the boy would never abandon the old man
who had abandoned Billy.
He bit hard and crunched sand between his molars, and thought about the three decades after the old man had left the family. And then he seethed at the irony, which seemed at the moment the product of a god with a sick sense of humor—after the old man's bad health had finally broken him and brought him to Billy's door to claim the unearned love that was his by blood, he wanted to stop his treatments, and leave Billy again.
Billy imagined footsteps, dashing lightly in the sand.
He pictured Bo running toward him, but the footsteps were too quick and rhythmic to be those of a little boy, and the fantasy dissolved.
He withdrew from his dreamworld and felt the snap of reality in the stabbing pain in his rib.
He listened.
The footsteps grew louder, too loud not to be real. Nearly on top of him, they stopped. He held his breath and stared out from the hole.
The dark outline of a human figure eclipsed the stars.
Billy did not flinch. He breathed silent, shallow breaths. Should he call out, or stay invisible, buried under shadows? Trapped and beaten, barely conscious, he had never been so vulnerable. Fear throttled him and he said nothing.
The figure wavered over the hole for what seemed a long time. Its feet sent tiny avalanches of pebbles down the side of the trench.
Then a woman's voice softly and urgently called, “Povich?”
Billy gasped. A familiar voice he could not place. But the voice was real; he was sure of it. Tears flooded his eyes again; he had never heard such beauty in his own name.
“I'm—I'm here. I'm in the sand.”
“Are they gone? All of them?”
Billy did not know for sure, but he could not take the chance she might become afraid and leave him. “Yes,” he ventured. “We're alone.” He wondered who she was, and she read his mind—
“It's Kit Bass,” she said. “I was Judge Harmony's clerk. I saw you the day they opened his will, though we were not formally introduced.”
After a half beat of silence, Billy offered, “Well, how do you do?”
She chuckled softly. Billy recalled her face: narrow and a little mousy; two dozen freckles, heavier on one side than the other; small upturned nose; eyes that looked sleepy when she smiled, as if she had just woken to something—or someone—who made her very happy.
“Those three men work for Rhubarb Glanz,” she said. “The little one is Robbie—he's Glanz's son. Ain't he a son of a bitch? The day will come when I kick his ass. According to my research, the other two used to be cellmates, if that tells you anything. I've been following them since my own run-in at Glanz's nightclub. Tonight, I saw them drive behind your office.”
“They sent me a fax. Maybe from a laptop, I don't know. Got me to run out the back door, into a trap.”
“I ducked down in my car when they drove away. They passed under a streetlight and I recognized you riding with them.” She paused. “Forgive me, Mr. Povich—”
“It's Billy, please.”
“—but I didn't know if you were mixed up with them. So I followed you. Robbie Glanz always drives at exactly the speed limit so it's easy to keep a safe distance without losing them.” She paused. “You're not really Martin Smothers's law clerk, are you?”
“His clerk makes a lot more money than I do.”
“You're his investigator.” She didn't bother to wait for confirmation. Dropping to her knees at the edge of the hole, she said, “How bad are you hurt?”
“I'm trapped in here, buried.” He thought about the question and realized he had not answered it. “I'm fading out.”
“It's so dark … . I have a flare in my trunk.”
Billy shuddered; she was asking permission to leave his side.
“My car is hidden up the road about a mile, as close as I dared to leave it.”
A mile?
“That's gonna take nearly an hour to hike up and back,” Billy said. “I don't know if I can stay awake.”
She stood and dusted off, chuckling as if she had just heard something cute and naive, like from the mouth of a child. “See you in twelve minutes, Billy,” she promised. “Five and a half minutes to the car, five and a halfback. Sixty seconds to open the trunk.”
With that, she dashed off.
 
 
The flare's fluttering red glow turned a small circle of the moonscape into Mars. Like an enormous firecracker, the flare hissed dangerously and reminded Billy of what Garafino, the shark, had told him about messing with Rhubarb Glanz.
Do you puff dynamite like a big red cigar?
Kit had found a long-handled shovel at the construction site. She wore loose-fitting shorts and a tight half tank. Her skin glistened in the red light. Her thighs were braids of muscle. Her thin arms, hanging from squared-off swimmer's shoulders, were deceptively strong, and she filled the shovel with big helpings of sand. She worked to free him as rhythmically as the goons had to bury him.
Twelve minutes, she had said. Billy doubted she had been gone even that long. This woman was
built for speed
, he marveled. He
watched her dig for a few minutes. He thought about Gil Harmony. How did the judge inspire so much loyalty from one law clerk?
Billy said, “The day they opened the will, I left before the judge came to you on the video. I'm curious. What did he leave you?”
She smiled sadly and kept digging, though a little more slowly. “His Bible, that's all. No money, which he knew I wouldn't have taken. Just his mother's old family Bible, which stayed in his desk when he served in the state senate, to remind him that Somebody was looking down on him. When he was appointed to the bench, he used that Bible to swear his oath of office.”
“I didn't know he was a religious man.”
“Not outwardly pious. Congregationalist. Liked the social aspect of church. But I know that he prayed.”
“Why do you think he left you the Bible?”
She stopped for a moment, leaned on the shovel. “Because he wanted me to know that he'd be looking down on me.” She smiled sadly at Billy, and then went back to work. “We should call the cops when I get you out of here. What they did violates chapter eleven of the criminal code, sections five and twenty-six dash one, felonious assault and kidnapping. With their criminal records, they could each get up to forty years.”
“They won't.”
“Well, even if they pleaded down to get concurrent sentences, they're looking at hard time.”
“We're not calling the cops.”
“What—? That's ridiculous. They nearly killed you.”
“My word against theirs. They have better lawyers than the state. They'll never do any time.”
“The grand jury can make their lives miserable. Maybe an indictment would put a scare into them?”
Billy sighed. Kit knew the General Laws of Rhode Island by heart. But she never studied under a professor like Rhubarb Glanz. He told
her, “One hour after Robbie Glanz gets a subpoena on a pissy little charge like this, I will accidentally fall down a flight of stairs to my death. Maybe more than once.”
“They can't—I'm a witness.”
“They'll kill you, too.”
She heaved a shovel of dirt with a grunt and said, “So what are we supposed to do? Cower in fear of these assholes? Let them do whatever they want to us? What about
the law
?”
“If you're going to take down the king, you better aim for the heart. We have to nail Rhubarb Glanz.”
“Rhubarb Glanz wasn't here tonight,” she said. “We can't prove he told those men to leave you buried, where you would have died of exposure.”
“The sand is now quite warm, thank you, like a five-hundred-pound blanket.”
“Billy!”
Sharply, he informed her, “We're going to take down Rhubarb Glanz for hiring a street punk to shoot Judge Harmony in cold blood.”
He had stunned her. Kit's hand covered her throat. “I was there,” she whispered, “when Glanz made the threat.”
“I know. Tell me what happened.”
She explained softly, “Glanz came in with those two big goons and demanded Gil reduce the sentence he had imposed on David Glanz Jr., the son.” She closed her eyes. Sweat droplets raked her cheek. “I'll never forget it. Gil and I were at lunch, talking about some decision he was writing. I remember clearly that after Glanz made his demand, Gil took his napkin from his lap and dabbed the corners of his mouth, staring through Glanz the whole time, before he slowly stood and told that old mobster where he could get off—not in those terms, of course—”
“Of course.”
“—because Gil,
the judge
, I mean, was a gentleman. Glanz didn't even blink. He had to know a man of Gil Harmony's moral stature would never bend to a threat like that.”
She looked at Billy and seemed to be waiting for him to agree. “Naturally,” Billy said, absentmindedly. Her face distracted him; he noted how her dark eyes and her hard jawline softened when she spoke of the judge.
She shoveled in silence for a minute, sending tiny shock waves through the sand and into Billy's body.
Then suddenly, as if the thought just struck her, she blurted, “You just said you knew? You knew about the threat? How could you? I wanted to report it to the cops afterward, but Gil persuaded me not to. He said it wasn't a serious threat, and that Glanz was just protecting his standing with his crooked employees. ‘All for show,' Gil said to me, before we both swore an oath of secrecy. Nobody knows about the threat, not even … his wife.”

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