Dreamwalker (13 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

As jobs went, this one was a breeze. She'd completed assignments with more targets, tighter security, a higher profile. This was as routine as an oil change. The whole job was kind of a joke. A hit in Jersey. What a cliché.

However, like a desperate actor, she learned long ago to never turn down work. If you got out of practice, or your name stopped being current, assignments soon passed you by, picked up by younger, cheaper talent. So, Varushka Zenig took every job offered.

She did have an edge over some of the other hitters. She was knockout gorgeous, even by American standards. She had shoulder-length black hair; high, haughty Eastern European cheekbones; and the perfect figure for a woman five-foot-seven. She could she pass unobserved into venues most hitters couldn't, often with an invitation. There were times when that kind of access sealed the deal.

This time, appearance didn't matter. The current criteria seemed to be availability and an out of town address. No matter. The pay was half again the rate for a no-name hit. It wouldn't polish her reputation, but a fat wad of cash for an evening's work was reason enough.

From the front seat of a worn out Ford, she watched the rear of the restaurant at the alley's far end. Her target had been in and out the back door a few times, hauling trash to the dumpster, big white apron glowing in the shadows.

He made another trip with an armload of cardboard boxes. She unfolded the paper with the target's picture on it, St. Croix's drawing of Peter Holm. She watched the busboy's face as he passed under the restaurant's rear light. That was her man.

The busboy made a run about every hour to the dumpster. The last two trips had been at forty-minute intervals as business picked up. In the hours Varushka had observed the alley, only a stray dog passed behind the restaurant. A nice isolated location. She could be back in her car with a quick sprint, then over the causeway and Baltimore-bound by the time someone realized the kid was missing.

She pinned her hair up on the back of her head and put on a black knit cap, topping off a non-descript ensemble of jeans and a, black wool seaman's coat. Any unlikely witness would assume she was male.

With a gloved hand, she took a black .45 automatic from her right pocket. This was the kind of big showy weapon that street losers liked to flash as a substitute for courage. She wouldn't be caught dead on a job with something so clumsy. But assassinating a busboy with a high-powered rifle from a rooftop would raise some suspicions. The bulky .45 would be a natural in this neighborhood, another clue she'd planted to point to locals.

From her left pocket, she pulled a silencer and spun it into the barrel with a sharp twist. No knives this time. Too much gurgling. Too much screaming. Too messy. She had no intention of stopping at the Maryland Welcome Center to rinse her bloodstained clothes. A buried muzzle in the dishwasher's body would leave all exit wound.

She slid a clip from her left pocket and double-checked the full clip. It clicked into place in the handgrip. She chambered a round and checked her watch. The busboy had been gone thirty minutes.

Showtime.

She folded up the target's picture and put it in her left pocket. She checked her right pocket and felt the two small baggies inside. Ready to go. She put the .45 back in her coat, took a deep breath, and left the car.

With each step she watched and listened for the slightest movement. Her footsteps echoed in the empty alley.

She stopped in the darkness behind the dumpster and leaned her back against the cold metal. She smelled rotting food and cat piss.

No more hits in Jersey,
she thought.

This was the tough part of the job. Not the planning, not the killing, but the waiting. The last few moments before the target slipped into your sights or the seconds he dallied before entering the booby-trapped car, they all passed like hours. Her breathing seemed as loud as a surfacing whale and her pulse beat like jungle drums.

She slid the .45 from her pocket and silently flipped off the safety. She took deep, slow, measured breaths to slow her heart rate. She wondered if the next job would be in Europe. She liked being closer to home.

The kitchen door creaked open and bounced off the back wall with a bang. The sound of clinking glasses and plates on metal cascaded into the alley. The door swung shut with a thump. Plastic scraped concrete as a garbage can dragged across concrete. She raised the .45 so the silencer pointed skyward. Her thumb confirmed the safety was off. The sound of the scraping trash barrel drew closer and stopped. With a soft groan and a thump, the barrel upended into the dumpster.

Varushka struck.

With feline stealth, she rounded the corner in a crouch and moved unnoticed behind the busboy. She wrapped her left hand over his mouth. She buried the silencer under his left shoulder blade. The .45 recoiled twice.

The twin bullets tore through the dishwasher's chest and made two light pings as they hit the dumpster's heavy metal sides. The dishwasher slumped, limp.

She dropped the body to the ground. He landed on his side. A rich red stain spread on the shredded front of his white apron.

She pulled the two baggies from her pocket. The rocks of meth sparkled in the light from the restaurant. She dropped them next to the body. An assassination was now a back alley drug deal gone bad. Any investigation would go nowhere.

Varushka saw the dishwasher's face. Something did not click. She slid the .45 back into her pocket and pulled out the ID drawing. She unfolded it and compared it to the body.

It didn't match.

The hair was right. So was the height and weight. But the nose was wrong. The target had a prominent Roman special, unlike the guy in the sketch. She was told that her target was under twenty. The target was at least five years past that.

She'd screwed up.

“Goddamn it,” she seethed. “How many black-haired dishwashers does this place have?”

Her safety clock ticked. Every extra second she spent standing here was a second closer to being caught. She balled up the drawing and shoved it in her pocket. She started for the car at a brisk walk.

Hitting the wrong mark was amateur hour stuff that made work dry up like pee in the desert. The only job this disaster would generate would be a retribution contract on herself.

Varushka got in the car and fired it up. She drove a block before using the lights. She turned right to get the hell out of Atlantic City.

She rationalized that it could be worse. Who was going to miss a dishwasher anyway?

Chapter Twenty-Five

Pete's early bus out of Philly did not arrive early in Atlantic City. A mechanical calamity sidelined it in the Jersey hinterlands. The passengers sat by the side of the road for two hours breathing in the sweet aroma of steaming antifreeze. By the time the replacement bus delivered them to the station, night had long since fallen, and the DiStephano's world had forever changed.

As soon as Pete saw the circus outside of the restaurant, his heart leapt into his throat. Two police cars parked outside. Banks of flashing lights cast a surreal pulsing glow over the street. Yellow crime tape blocked the front of the building. An ambulance idled out front, its open doors waiting to accept an injured victim. A small crowd clotted around the scene's edges.

Before Pete could dash across the street, two paramedics rushed a loaded gurney from behind the restaurant to the ambulance. The victim's chest was soaked in blood. They rammed the gurney into the ambulance and scrambled in behind it.

As the doors closed, Mama D burst out of the restaurant. A police officer was in her wake. Two black streaks of eyeliner ran down her cheeks. She screamed hysterically.

“Tommy! Where are you taking my Tommy?”

Pete froze. That was Tommy on the way to the hospital. Healthy, happy Tommy had paramedics fighting to save his life. He must have been attacked out behind the restaurant. Why? He wasn't even supposed to be there tonight…

Pete bit his lip.

No, I was supposed to be out there
, he thought. Prosperidad's warning about his safety replayed in his head.

A killer stalking Pete had found Tommy instead. Cauquemere hunted him on the streets of Philly. St. Croix hunted him here.

The police officer restrained Mama D and shepherded her back into the restaurant. She sobbed inconsolably. The sound tore at Pete's heart.

He brought this disaster to their door with his VPD-induced arrival. He wanted to rush over and apologize. But he couldn't do it. He could never face them. They took a chance on him and now their son was dead. What could he ever say to make that all right?

A more selfish thought crept in. The killer would know by now that he missed the mark. He'd be waiting for Pete to return so he could get it done right. He was probably watching the crowd right now, none too worried if some more collateral damage took place, as long as Pete stopped breathing. Pete slipped back and away from DiStephano's.

He had nowhere to go. At this point, he was worse off than when he got off the bus in Atlantic City. He had no clothes, less money, and people trying to kill him. He had left behind a comfortable college life and jumped into the deep end of a very large pool. He needed a life jacket.

“Whassup, dude?”

Tyrone walked toward him down the sidewalk.

“Tyrone! What are you doing out here?” Pete asked.

“Checkin' out the commotion,” Tyrone said. “Blue lights in this neighborhood means something big went down. The small stuff don't attract nobody. What happened?”

“Someone attacked Tommy DiStephano,” Pete said, hoping he masked the guilt in his voice. “The ambulance just took him away.”

“Then watchoo doin' here?” Tyrone sounded incredulous.

“It's a mess over there,” Pete said. “They don't need me getting in the way. Besides, they look so upset, I wouldn't know what to say to them. I don't want to go back there tonight.”

“So where you goin'?” Tyrone asked.

“I don't know,” Pete sighed.

Tyrone's face shifted from thoughtful to pensive, then to resolute.

“You stayin' with me then,” Tyrone announced.

“Thanks, but I couldn't.” Pete wasn't putting anyone else in the crossfire, especially two kids who already had the deck stacked against them.

“You help my sister and me out, so it's payback time,” Tyrone said. “I pays all my debts.”

“You don't owe me anything.”

“No, man,” Tyrone said. “In that basement, was the first time I was gonna steal. I justified that it was for a good cause and all, but it was still gonna be wrong. You showed me that someone, even a stranger, could be out there to help. I might have been startin' down a path like my mother took. Now that ain't gonna happen. You stayin' with me tonight.”

Tyrone's appeal touched him. He'd encountered the boy at a real personal crossroads.

The wind rose. The temperature was falling fast. Pete shivered in his thin fall jacket. His options were few. He also realized that if he just drifted off to sleep accidentally somewhere, without the right protection, he was ripe for another visitation by Cauquemere.

“Just one night,” Pete said.

Tyrone stuck out his hand for Pete to shake, an action that must have connoted manhood to the young boy. Pete took it.

“A man pays his debts,” Tyrone said.

They walked the few blocks to Tyrone's. The few people they passed were on the way to the commotion at DiStephano's. Pete kept an eye on each one. No one took notice of him, no one followed.

Tyrone's narrow, wooden, two-story house stood wedged between similar structures. Each floor had a street-facing bay window. A set of makeshift brick steps, functioning without the assistance of mortar, replaced the long-vanished porch. Strips of white paint peeled from the corners.

Pete stepped into a house decimated by a mother's drug abuse. A threadbare living room rug curled up away from the walls. A mismatched couch and loveseat faced a barren particleboard entertainment center, its residents no doubt sacrificed to appease addiction. The thin window drapes half-heartedly separated the room from the rest of Atlantic City. The lone shelf on the wall held cheaply framed pictures, family snapshots of varying vintages. Pete guessed that the one of the small boy standing by the boardwalk was Tyrone about eight years ago. He assumed another was of Tyrone's mother. She was a tall, strikingly beautiful, black woman with shoulder-length hair. She wore a tight-fitting brown and tan print dress, and flashed a dazzling smile. The background looked like an upscale nightclub. The picture was too narrow to fit the frame, but was still centered, leaving blank strips of brown cardboard on either side. The shoulder of her date for the evening was barely visible, though it was clear that a chop of the scissors had excised as much of him as possible. The remaining pictures were of a little girl in a white christening dress and a few of an older couple, he guessed Tyrone's grandparents.

“Is this your mother?”

Tyrone looked a shade embarrassed, like a boy claiming his ratty coat from the schoolroom closet.

“Yeah, that's her,” he said, looking down at the floor. “She clean up good when she got it together.”

“You don't think she'll be back tonight?” Pete asked.

“Nah,” Tyrone said. “Ain't gonna break her streak tonight.”

Small footsteps pattered down the hallway staircase. A flash of red flannel hurtled into the living room and stopped.

Tyrone's sister stood about four feet tall and rail thin. Her red, oversized pajamas hung loose on her tiny body. Her short, kinked hair framed brown eyes wide with surprise.

She sprinted to Tyrone and tucked herself behind him, his body a bulwark against whatever the stranger might deliver. She squeezed Tyrone's hand.

“Who's he?” she whispered, her eyes trained on Pete.

“He's cool,” Tyrone answered. He released his sister's hand and, reaching back, curled his arm around her shoulders and herded her in front of him.

“Keisha, this is Pete.”

“Hey, Keisha,” Pete said. He tried to sound genuine and harmless. He was sure he came across as neither.

Keisha gave Pete a slight, wary nod.

“Whatchoo doin' up so late?” Tyrone said to his sister. “You should be in bed and asleep. You gotta go to school in the mornin'.”

Keisha looked up at Tyrone.

“I was waiting for you to get back,” she said. Her response didn't sound like an excuse.

“Well, I'm back,” Tyrone said. “So get your sorry self back into bed. I don't want to be dragging you outta there in the mornin'.” He grabbed her shoulder and rotated her toward the doorway. He gave her a push in the spine with his index finger.

“Go!”

Keisha gave Pete one last suspicious glance and launched herself out of the room and up the staircase. Tyrone followed to the base of the stairs and watched her as she disappeared at the top.

“That girl needs to listen better,” he muttered under his breath. “The couch is all yours.” Tyrone pointed at the sagging furniture in the living room. “You want a blanket?”

“Hey dude, I'll be fine,” Pete said. “You shouldn't even be doing this.”

“No problem,” Tyrone said. He pointed his thumb upstairs. “I gotta go. See you in the AM.”

Pete looked over his temporary lodgings. A trickle of worry began to flow. His presence here was a secret, for now. Nevertheless, St. Croix would soon learn that his murderers had missed their mark, and the tentacles of his organization would search for Pete again. He swore to be gone well before that happened.

Pete felt spent. He wanted about ten hours of sleep, but on his terms.

He went into the kitchen and found the silverware drawer. He rummaged through the collection of mismatched tableware and pulled out a steak knife. On the way back to the living room, he slid the half-spool of copper wire from his pocket. On his hands and knees, he threaded the increasingly familiar wire and blade protection around the legs of the couch. He tightened the final knot and then turned out the lights. The streetlight's soft glow backlit the gauzy curtains. Twin Moon City appeared in a quick flashback. He sat on the couch. “Lumpy” was a descriptive understatement.

He kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the cushions. His eyelids weighed a thousand pounds as they closed. He wondered again if he would tell Rayna of her coma. But he couldn't hold the thought. Fatigue spread across him like a warm, thick blanket. He slipped away from the substantive world and into the realm where lately, nightmares outnumbered dreams.