Brothers and Bones (16 page)

I stumbled backward over something else—a pair of sneakers—and decided to stop retreating. I needed to make my way toward the door again. Sure, Angel looked scary now, but I was getting angry. And, frankly, a dark suspicion took root in my mind.

“Angel,” I said, “what do you know about my brother? About what happened to him?”

He ignored my questions. “Look, Charlie, I can still be your friend, all right? Things were going along okay there for a while, weren’t they? No problems. You minded your own business and everybody was happy. But things changed, didn’t they? Your new pal changed everything. And they can’t wait anymore. So where is he?”

“They?” I said. “Who are
they
?”

He looked at me as if wondering how much I really knew. I kept circling, very slowly, while Angel followed just as slowly, though he seemed as though he might have inched a little closer. He was thinking, wrestling with something. Whether he wanted to hurt his friend? I doubted that was it. More likely he was considering how much he could hurt me without doing irreparable damage. He still wanted information and he needed me conscious to provide it.

“Angel,” I said. “Please, tell me…who are ‘they’?”

“You’re in trouble, Charlie,” he said as he walked directly toward me this time. He seemed to have made up his mind about something.

With relief I realized I had made my way around the room. The apartment door was just a few feet directly behind me. Maybe I could turn and run for it.

Angel’s expression changed suddenly, became almost sad. He shook his head. “Charlie, watch out behind you.” It wasn’t a panicked warning. He said it rather casually.

“I’m not gonna fall for—”

Then Angel’s expression changed again suddenly, to one of…fear?

“Aw, shit,” he said, “no, please—”

What the hell was happening?

Suddenly, he rushed at me, fury twisting his face. But he was looking over my shoulder. I jerked backward and bumped into something, or someone, directly behind me. Angel was coming fast, just three feet away, when his left eye disappeared—Jesus, his eye just
disappeared
—and I heard something like a muted handclap beside my left ear. I felt a spray of warm liquid—blood, I realized—spatter my face as Angel’s body stumbled into mine, then dropped to the carpet. My once crisp, white tuxedo shirt was smeared with blood. Angel’s blood. And Angel was dead at my feet. Holy shit, Angel’s eye was gone, replaced by a golf ball–sized hole, and he was dead, right there at my feet. I could barely look away but I knew I’d better turn around and see what I’d bumped into.

I spun and regretted it instantly.

SEVENTEEN

What I saw when I turned was possibly the most disturbing thing I’d ever seen, even more disturbing than seeing a hole blown through Angel’s face. An impossibly long gun barrel hovered six inches from my nose. I realized I was looking at a silencer, which I’d seen in the movies, of course. With tremendous effort I shifted my focus from the black hole at the end of the silencer to the person pointing it at me. He was several inches taller than me, maybe six-four, and he must have weighed two hundred and thirty pounds. It looked to me like all but ten or so of those pounds were pure muscle. He was dressed casually, in dark khaki pants and a windbreaker. I focused on the gun again, then shifted my gaze to the man’s face. He was an ugly cuss. His head was shaped like an inverted pyramid, wide at the top, narrowing as it tapered to his jawline. His skin was rough, pockmarked by long-gone adolescent acne. His eyes were black and hard and even scarier than Angel’s were before this guy shot one of them to jelly. Those eyes were the guy’s most striking feature. They were wide-set—freakishly so—perhaps due to the triangular shape of his head. I’d never seen anything quite like it. A fraction of an inch farther apart and he would have been a hammerhead shark. He was chewing gum with his mouth open. Aggressively. He was the most violent gum-chewer I’d ever seen. His jaw was in constant motion, snapping his teeth together with walnut-cracking force. Technically, this man was my savior, but for some reason I didn’t feel very safe in his presence.

I stood perfectly still with that big, shiny, silver gun inches from the bridge of my nose. I could smell the metal and what was probably gun oil. I thought I could feel heat coming from the barrel. Without the gun wavering even a fraction of an inch, the killer stretched one of his legs behind him and kicked the door closed.

“Aren’t you gonna thank me?” he asked, gnashing down on his gum. “Looks like he meant to hurt you.”

I wasn’t so sure Angel was rushing at
me
at the end there, but why split hairs? I cleared my throat. I was afraid that if I tried to say anything it would come out as an undignified, unmanly squeak, but the guy with the gun seemed to want a reply, so I managed to say, “Should I thank you?”

“No. You know why I’m here?”

“Not really.”

“But you have some idea?”

“Just from what Angel told me.”

“So?” he asked.

“I don’t have what you want.”

“But you
know
what we want.”

We? This guy obviously was part of the “they” Angel referred to.

“Something of my brother’s,” I said.

He nodded. “That’s right. I’m gonna ask you this one time and one time only. You know where it is?”

The gun was still six inches from my face, aimed right between my eyes. That was really starting to bother me. “
Where
it is? I don’t even know
what
it is!”

He studied my face with his strangely wide-set eyes, snapping his jaws on his chewing gum. The fact that I still had a face indicated that he must have believed me.

“Gonna ask my next question only once, too,” he said. “Don’t fucking play games with me. Don’t play dumb. Don’t try to lie. Got it?”

I assumed that wasn’t the question he was referring to. I nodded, watching the dark hole at the end of the gun barrel bob up and down in my vision as I did.

“Where’s Bonzetti?” he asked.

I had no idea, of course, but would he believe me or would he kill me?

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know how to contact him?”

I shook my head again.

“How’d you find him before?”

“He found me.”

“Why?”

“He knew I was looking for him.”

“Why were you looking for him?”

That damn gun was unnerving. It was making it hard for me to think. “I thought he might know something about my brother’s disappearance.”

“Why’d you think that?”

“The first time I ran into him he called me by a nickname only my brother knew.”

The killer stared at me for several seconds. I held my breath. “You’re fucking lying,” he said.

Oh, God.
“I’m not.”

“You just lied again. You’re a dead man.”

It was hard to hear him over the thunder rush of blood pumping in my ears, but I knew that whatever he’d said meant big trouble for me.

“I swear, every word I said is true!”

He moved the gun closer to my face until the hard metal rested against my forehead. I thought I saw his trigger finger twitch. I backed away a step and stumbled, nearly falling on my ass. I looked down at Angel’s body under my feet. The hole in the back of his head, where the bullet had exited, was three times the size of the hole in his face. I looked up and the gun was advancing on me again. I kept backing away. As I retreated, I bumped against the far wall of my living room. There was nowhere else to go. I was out of room, out of time, and out of options. “Please,” I said.

“Sorry, shithead. Nothing personal.”

And I
knew
he was about to pull the trigger. I was dead. Suddenly, a Dalmatian started barking in my kitchen, signaling that midnight had arrived. The killer, apparently unaware of my novelty clock, snapped his head a few degrees to his left and flicked his eyes toward the kitchen, perhaps worried that a dog would come tearing around the corner, fangs flashing. I seized the moment, leaping through that tiny window of opportunity. I lashed out and grabbed the barrel of the gun. Amazingly, I managed to get my fingers wrapped around it and twist the gun so it was pointing off to my right. Then there I was, struggling for my life over a gun with a murderer who outweighed me by fifty pounds. My bruised ribs felt like ground glass in my side. We thrashed around, knocking over a lamp, scattering a few knickknacks off a shelf. I was terrified out of my mind. If the killer got control of the gun, I was a dead man. And I was tiring. My arms were shaking. Adrenaline, which had served me so well these past few seconds, seemed to be draining from my body along with my sweat. I was running out of time fast. I had to end this now. I kept a white-knuckled grip on the gun with my left hand while I let go with my right and threw a punch powered by flat-out desperation. Remarkably, the killer staggered back a step. More importantly, he lost his hold on the gun. Being right-handed, I shifted the gun to that hand, then almost dropped it because my right hand had nearly gone numb from the punch, so I quickly transferred it back to my left hand, pointed it the killer’s way, and struggled to get my finger inside the trigger guard just as the bastard was tensing for a lunge at me.

“No, asshole,” I said, panting. “I don’t think so. Now get your hands up.”

He did, slowly. He looked like he was considering rushing me in spite of my significant edge in firepower.

I know less than squat about guns. I didn’t know what the hell I was holding. Revolver…automatic…was there a difference? The important things I knew, though. Point and shoot. Also, some guns have safeties, maybe they all do, but if this one did, it was switched off because the killer had just used this weapon to remove Angel’s eye and, I was sure, a lot of his brain.

“I’ll shoot you,” I huffed, “I swear to God.” I looked over his shoulder at the door to my apartment. “Back up.”

He retreated a few paces, hands still raised, until he was about a dozen feet away. I noticed a small hitch in his steps, a slight limp. Then he stopped.

“Keep going,” I said, trying to inject as much menace as I could into it.

He dropped his hands. “No.”

My menacing definitely needed work.

“Goddamn it,” I said. “I don’t want to have to shoot you.”

The killer lowered his hands, reached behind his back, and pulled out another gun. This one was dull black, as opposed to my nice, shiny silver one. He began to raise the barrel toward me and I realized I had no choice. I was going to have to shoot him. I’d defend myself, shoot if I had to, but I really didn’t want to kill him. It looks so easy to do in the movies, and it can be entertaining in video games, but it’s a lot harder to do when there’s an actual person standing in front of you. Someone of flesh and blood—flesh you’re going to blow a ragged hole through, blood you’re going to make gush from his body. I’d have much preferred that the killer just drop his gun and wait politely while I called the police.

“Please,” I said, “don’t make me kill you.”

He smiled, the crazy bastard, he smiled and pointed the gun right at me. It was kill or be killed. I held my breath, closed my eyes, and pulled the trigger twice. The gun made its handclap sound again, twice, and it bucked in my hand, though not as hard as I expected it to. I opened my eyes to see my intended target just standing there, still smiling at me.

As I noted, I’m not the most experienced person when it comes to guns, but I knew that if I’d hit the guy, there would be holes in him. Didn’t happen. And if I’d missed him, something across the room would have a hole in it, right? That didn’t happen either. I blinked. I fired the gun again and got another little muffled
bang
out of it, but nothing else. The killer shook his head and chuckled. I pulled the trigger yet again and this time heard just an impotent, empty little click. I looked at the black gun in the killer’s hand, then closed my eyes.

“God, I thought you were never gonna show any balls and go for my gun,” he said. “But did you really think you were that good, Charlie? Or that lucky?” I opened my eyes again, just because I could, thankful that he hadn’t shot them out the back of my skull yet. “Did you really think I was that stupid? That I’d keep my gun within your reach, then let you wrestle it out of my hands? That you could sucker punch me if I didn’t let you? That I’d just stand there while you fumbled with the gun before finally managing to point it at me?”

I actually had thought all those things, but wisely kept that to myself.

“See, Charlie, there was only one real bullet in that gun you’re holding. Your friend there took that one in the face. The rest were blanks. Now toss me that gun.”

I did. “But what was the point?” I asked.

He looked at me, disappointed, I thought, as he slipped the empty gun into his windbreaker pocket. “Maybe you aren’t as bright as they told me. Let’s recap here. You don’t know where, or even what, we’re looking for of your brother’s. You don’t know where Bonzetti is or how to contact him. I’m thinking maybe you’re a useless waste of time and I should put you out of your fucking misery. But we might still need you. And
that’s
the point of all this. You’re gonna do exactly what we tell you to do. Now take off your shirt and throw it to me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ll kill you if you don’t.”

I removed the onyx cuff links, took off the bloodstained shirt, and tossed it to him. “You want the cuff links, too?”

“Keep them.”

Without lowering his gun, the killer stepped sideways over to the telephone on my desk. I noticed his slight limp again. He picked up the receiver and dialed three digits, then stuck the receiver into a desk drawer and closed it tight.

“That was nine-one-one,” he said.

“You didn’t say a word,” I noted.

“You must know that when a nine-one-one call comes in, they automatically record the caller’s address. Even if no one speaks, they have to check it out. So what will they find when they get here, Charlie? Your dead friend Angel, for one.”

“And an innocent man.”

“Well, let’s talk about that. There will be a gun with only your fingerprints on it.” He patted his pocket, where he’d put the gun he’d used to kill Angel. Only then did I notice the killer’s black gloves.