The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told (28 page)

One of the god-statues waved three tentacles at me. I'd had dealings with him before. For a dark god, he had a great sense of humor. I wiggle-waved back.

“Let's go,” Gareth said.

“Wait. Look in there with your witch eyes. See if there's anything you need to take.”

“What?”

“Look.”

Along the side walls of the room—any windows had been covered over—there were shelves full of magical aids and ingredients, and a small library of hide-bound books. Gareth stepped over the threshold into the room. A shudder went through him as he stood in the heart of his mother's power. “What am I looking for?” he asked.

“Something that belongs to you.”

“I've never seen any of this stuff before.”

I shrugged. He examined the shelves without touching anything. I wouldn't have touched, either. Everything looked dusty or dirty, even the ingredients I recognized.

After a tour of the room, Gareth stopped at the altar. He held his hand above the dagger, the bowl, the goblet, and finally the box. He lifted the box's latch and swung the lid up. Soft light glowed from inside. “Oh,” he cried. His hand hovered, then dipped in. He lifted a fist and pressed whatever he held against his breastbone. When his hand lowered, there was nothing in it, and nothing on his shirt, either. He turned toward me. His face was alive with confused excitement.

The front door slammed open. “Who are you, and what are you doing in my house?” cried Gareth's mother. She saw the open door to her secret room, and shrieked.

“I'm the girlfriend,” I said.

She stalked forward, her anger growing with every step, until her shadow towered above her, filled with lightning strikes in random directions.

“How dare you open that door?” she screamed, and then, when she saw that Gareth was in the room, she went silent, which was worse than the screams, though less ear-torturing.

At last she stepped forward, muttering words that hurt my ears. She slammed her left palm into my chest, sending a powerjolt through me that would have knocked me on my ass if I hadn't just processed a lot of her power. I was still humming with stolen strength, though, and her own power inside me shielded me from the new assault. She flicked her hand toward Gareth. A bolt of blue lightning shot out, sizzled through his shirt, scorched his chest. He staggered, straightened, planted his feet, and faced her.

“Okay,” he said.

She gasped.

“I got your eviction notice, Mom. I'm moving in with Terry.”

“What?” She stepped toward him. She laid her hand on his chest. “You—what?” Her voice was a whisper now.

“Good-bye.” He pushed past her, and her hand slid off of him.

She ran to the bench and opened the ebony box, gasped again.

By that time we had grabbed Gareth's things and were headed for the front door.

Mom made cocoa in the kitchen for us after Gareth had stowed his duffle and backpack in the guest room.

“He'll be able to pay rent and utilities,” I said. “I'm hiring him as my assistant, so he should make plenty of money.” Too bad his mother was so short-sighted. She hadn't known what a valuable asset she had. He was mine, now. Her mistake.

“Sure, sure,” said Mom.

“I better protect you, Mom. His mother's really scary. She might come after us.”

“Great,” Mom grumbled.

“Are you okay with me spelling you a shield against her? She almost killed us.”

“Terry!” Mom reached across the table and grabbed both my hands, clutched them tight. “Don't do dangerous things! How many times do I have to tell you?”

“I had to rescue him, Mom. You would have, if you saw what it was like at his house.”

She softened. She reached for Gareth's hand. He ducked her, then stilled and endured her touch.

“All right,” my mother said. “Protect me, Terry.”

Strange, almost scary happiness shot through me. Mom didn't trust me with magic; she knew my track record. She was giving me a new and precious chance.

I so didn't want to mess this up.

“Open your witch eyes,” I told Gareth, “and watch what I'm going to do. This isn't a spell I sell anywhere.”

I conjured magical armor for my mother, and she sat still for it.

After we washed dishes and cleaned the kitchen for the night, I followed Mom into her bedroom, leaving Gareth to settle himself in his new space.

“Lots of changes,” Mom said.

“Yeah. Thanks so much, Mom.” I sat on the bed. “Sorry I had to spring this on you without warning.”

“Do you actually like the boy, Terry?”

“I don't know yet. He's got a lot of garbage to get through before he'll be useful.”

She ruffled my hair. “There's my girl. I wondered where you went, honey. You've been way too nice all day.”

I laughed.

Mom went to her closet. “I suppose you want to play with the pretties.” She pulled her jewelry box from behind a stack of shoeboxes on a shelf. Not a very secret hiding place. I had warded our house against burglars, though. She could have left the box in plain sight and it would have been safe.

I opened the box, touched the charm bracelet Mom's grandmother had left her, the pearls my father gave her on their twelfth wedding anniversary, the malachite earrings she had given to her mother, taken back after her mother died. Buried under a tangle of chains, pendants, and bracelets, some of them gifts my twin Tasha and I had given her for various birthdays and Christmases, I found my heart.

I gave Mom my heart for her forty-fifth birthday. I made it into a really ugly brooch, red enameled and gaudy, with rhinestones. It was heavy and awkward to wear. If she ever pinned it to anything, it would drag down the material.

She treasured it the way she treasured everything my twin and I ever gave her, but she never wore it, which was just as well.

I knew Mom would never break my heart the way Gareth's mother had treated his. She wouldn't use my heart as a tool to supplement her own desires. As long as I kept my heart safe and separate from my body, I could not be mortally wounded, though I could be hurt—a lot. Now that Gareth had reclaimed his heart, he would be vulnerable to kinds of assaults he had been immune to before. I could make that work for me.

I held my heart in my hand just long enough to warm it, then hid it among the rocks and metal in Mom's jewelry box. I closed the box and handed it to my mother. She tucked it away.

She kissed my cheek good night.

LAURA RESNICK

It wasn't no surprise that Skinny Vinny Vitelli got rubbed out. I mean, hey, I'd nearly whacked him myself a couple of times. So had most guys I know. Not to speak ill of the dead and all that, but he was an
irritating
bastard. Vinny could pick an argument with a plate of pasta. He could piss off the Virgin Mother. He could annoy the dead—so it wasn't exactly a big shock when he
became
one of them.

A couple of nuns taking a cigarette break found his body in an alley early one morning. He'd been done with four slugs straight to the chest. Which was a little strange, actually, because Vinny always wore the bulletproof vest he got the time he whacked that Fed.

It's not what you're thinking. It was personal, not business. Vinny caught the guy in bed with his underage daughter. The vest was lying right there on the floor, and after Vinny impulsively emptied a whole clip into the guy's torso, he decided the vest was A Sign. (Did I mention he was a pretty religious guy?) See, Vinny had always been afraid of dying exactly the way he'd just killed the Fed who'd been stupid enough to take off his bulletproof vest while humping a wiseguy's seventeen-year-old daughter right there in her father's house. (Feds. They breed 'em dumb.)

So Vinny picked the vest up off the floor, put it on, and never took it off since. I mean
never
. Just ask his wife. Well, if you can find her. She hot-tailed it straight down to Florida before the corpse was cold and ain't been seen since. She was making plans for her new life right there at Vinny's funeral, yakking on her cell phone with her real estate agent while the casket was being lowered into the ground.

“It's a funny thing,” I said to Joey (the Chin) Mannino while the grieving Mrs. Vitelli kicked some dirt into her late husband's open grave with the toe of her shoe while telling her real estate agent she expected to be in Florida by nightfall.

“Huh?” Joey didn't really hear me. He was stroking his scarred chin as he stared lovesick at the Widow Butera. She was glaring back at him. A very beautiful woman, even at forty-five, but bad news for any guy.

“Give it up, Joey,” I advised.

“I can't.” He shook his head. “I've asked her to marry me.”

I slapped my forehead. “Are you nuts?” One of the mourners frowned at me, so I lowered my voice. “She's had three husbands, and they're all dead. Don't that tell you something?”

“She's been unlucky.”

“Her
husbands
have been unlucky. All three of them. So I'll lay odds that number four is gonna be real unlucky, too.”

“It's not her fault, Vito.”

“No, but being married to her is so unlucky it crosses over into dumb.”

Her first husband got hit just because he was having dinner with Big Bobby Gambone at Buon Appetito the night Little Jackie Bernini decided to kill Bobby and didn't feel too particular about who else he sprayed with his Uzi. That was the start of the first Gambone-Bernini war. Well, a beautiful woman like that couldn't stay widowed forever. So three years later, during the second Gambone-Bernini war, she married a hit man from Las Vegas who the Gambones brought into town to teach the Berninis a lesson. But then the Berninis brought in their own hit man from Boise to deal with him, and ain't
nobody
tougher than those Boise guys. So the Widow was widowed again. Then, maybe because she was tired of marrying Gambones who got whacked out, the Widow shocked everyone by marrying Bernini Butera, who was everybody's favorite pick to head the Bernini family next . . . until Joey clipped him last year. That hit pretty much ended the third Gambone-Bernini war. But from the way the Widow Butera was glaring at Joey across Skinny Vinny Vitelli's grave now, it didn't look like she had forgiven Joey for stuffing her third husband into a cement mixer in New Jersey.

“What'd she say when you asked her to marry you?” I asked Joey.

“She told me she'd rather fry in hell.” He shrugged. “She'll come 'round.”

I shook my head. “Joey, Joey, Joey . . .”

He gave a friendly little wave to the Widow Butera. She hissed at him. The priest, Father Michael, smiled vaguely at her and said, “Amen.”

So, to take Joey's mind off the Widow, I said, “Anyhow, like I was saying before, it's a funny thing.”

“What's a funny thing?”

“About Vinny.”

“No, no,” Connie Vitelli was saying into her cell phone as she shook Father Michael's hand, “the condo's got to have an ocean view, or no deal. Understand?”

“Funny?” Joey said. “Oh! You mean about the vest, right?”

“Yeah.” I shook my head when Father Michael gestured to me to throw some dirt onto the coffin. Hey, I didn't kill Vinny, so no way was I doing the work of deep-sixing him. Not my problem, after all. “Why'd Vinny take off that vest for the first time in five years? It ain't like him. He was a religious bastard.”

“I think you mean superstitious.” Joey's an educated guy. Almost read a book once.

“Okay, superstitious. Vinny always thought he'd get killed if he ever took that thing off. And, sure enough, look what happened. So why'd he take it off? It don't make sense.”

“You mean you didn't hear, Vito?”

“Hear what?”

Connie was shouting into her cell phone, “Speak up! Are you driving through a tunnel or something? I'm getting tons of static!”

Vinny's daughter, now twenty-two years old and reputedly still a virgin, stepped up to the grave, made a face at her father's coffin, and then spit on it.

“Poor Vinny,” said Father Michael, who looked like he'd taken a fistful of Prozac before coming here. “He will be missed.”

“Not by anybody I ever met,” muttered Joey.

I said to Joey, “What is it that I didn't hear?”

“Oh! The strange thing is, Vito, Vinny was still wearing his vest when they found his body.”

“Huh? So how'd four slugs wind up in his chest?”

Joey shrugged. “It's a mystery. No holes in the vest. No marks at all, like it was never even hit. But as for Vinny's chest . . . ” Joey grimaced.

While I thought about this, Connie Vitelli said, “But how big is the master bathroom?”

“So, Joey, you're saying that someone clipped Vinny, then put that vest back on him? For what? A joke?”

Joey shook his head. “That vest never came off him, Vito.”

“Of course it did. How else did four bull—”

“The cops said the fasteners on Vinny's vest were rusted and hadn't been disturbed for years.”

“Jesus. So it's true what Connie said. Vinny even
showered
in that thing!”

“Uh-huh.”

I frowned at Joey. “But what you're saying . . . I mean, how did the bullets get past the vest and into Vinny's chest?”

“That's what's got the cops stumped.”

“And why'd the cops tell
you
this?” Cops don't usually say nothing to guys like us besides, “I'll get you into the Witness Protection Program if you cooperate.”

“I don't think they meant to tell me,” Joey said. “It just sort of slipped out somewhere during the seven straight hours they spent interrogating me yesterday.”

“Oh,
that's
why you weren't at the wake.”

Joey nodded wearily. “I'm thinking of suing them for the emotional trauma caused by missing a dear friend's wake, as well as the stain they have placed on my good reputation.”

“How come they think you're the one who whacked him?”

“Well, you know, I had that argument with Vinny last week at Buon Appetito.”

“So what?”

“So it turns out there were three undercover Feds in the place at the time, and they took it the wrong way when I held a steak knife to Vinny's throat and said I'd kill him if I ever saw him again.”

“Man,” I said, sick at how unfair it all was. “You just have to be so careful these days. Watch every damn little word.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Whatever happened to the First Arraignment?” I said.

“Amendment.”

“Whatever.”

“I admit,” Joey said, “I thought about whacking Vinny.”

“Sure.”

“Who didn't?”

“You said it.”

“But it's not like he didn't deserve it,” Joey said.

“Absolutely,” I said as Vinny's son opened his fly and pissed on his father's grave.

“So I don't see why the cops have to get so bent out of shape just because someone finally
did
whack Vinny.”

“Me neither.”

“And just because I'm the last guy anyone saw threatening to kill him, the cops ruin my whole day. Now is that fair? Is that the American way?”

“It really stinks.” I patted Joey on the back. “Just out of curiosity,
did
you kill him?”

“No. I was proposing to the Widow Butera at the estimated time of death.”

“Did she alibi you to the cops?”

“No.”

Women
.

“So I wonder who did it?” I said.

“Could've been any one of a hundred guys,” Joey said.

“More,” I said.

“Yeah.”

The Widow Butera stepped up to Vinny's grave and looked down at it for a long moment. Then she crossed herself, glared once more at Joey, and started walking to her car.

When Connie Vitelli got off the phone for a split second, Joey and I paid our respects so we could get the hell out of there.

“Such a shame,” Joey said politely to Vinny's widow. “Him being so young and all.”

“Not that young.” Connie shook her head. “And I think dementia was setting in already. He was seeing things.”

“Seeing things?” Joey said. “Then ‘dementia' probably isn't the right word, because that's when—”

“Oops! I gotta take this,” Connie said as her cell phone rang.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What things was Vinny seeing? Feds stalking him? Hitters from the Bernini family coming after him?” If we knew, we might be able to figure out who'd whacked him.

Connie rolled her eyes. “Himself, if you can believe it.”

“Huh?”

“The day before Vinny died, he came home in a cold sweat, babbling about how he had just bumped into the spitting image of himself on the street outside Buon Appetito. The guy was even dressed like Vinny. Right down to the bulletproof vest. Go figure.” Connie shrugged off the idea that her husband's perfect double was out there somewhere and added, “Now I've really got to take this call. Thanks for coming, fellas.” She turned away and said into her cell phone, “Hello? Oh, good! Thanks for getting back to me today. Yes, I'll be out of the house by tonight, so put it on the market right away.”

“So Vinny was losing his mind,” I said.

Joey nodded towards Connie and the kids. “And you're surprised by this?”

“No, I guess not.”

Which is why I didn't think any more about it. Not then, anyhow. Not until three days later, which was when a dinner-and-dance cruise accidentally found Johnny Be Good Gambone's body floating in the Hudson River.

“But it can't be Johnny,” I said to Joey Mannino when he told me about it.

“It is. Positive ID, no doubt about it.”

“No, it can't be, because—”

“Vito, pull yourself together,” Joey said. “Two of our guys dead in one week. We're going to the mattresses.”

“It can't be Johnny, because I saw him alive at the same time they were fishing that corpse out of the river.”

“It must be the Berninis doing these hits. Who else would have the nerve? Those bastards! Well, if they want another war, we'll give them another w—”

“Joey, are you listening to me? I'm telling you, whoever they found in the Hudson, it wasn't Johnny Gambone, because I had dinner with him last night!”

Joey stared at me. “Are you losing your mind, too?”

“No! They're just putting the wrong name on the corpse.”

But when we showed up at the mortician's to inspect the body, I saw there'd been no mistake. That was Johnny Gambone lying on that slab, no doubt about it. Who else in the world had a purple tattoo of a naked broad on his shoulder with the word “Mom” written across it?

“So you're not still denying that's Johnny?” Joey prodded.

“Couldn't be anyone else, but . . .”

“But?”

“But, I'm telling you, I was having dinner with him that evening. We talked about Vinny's death. Johnny told me that, no matter how much we hated Vinny, it was our job to find out who'd clipped him, because we can't just let people go around killing made guys without even asking first. Especially not
our
made guys.”