The Reckoning (34 page)

One the other side of the door Delores Maranzano had
Pride and Prejudice
playing, but she wasn't watching it. She was sitting in a chair about fifteen feet from her bedroom door, holding a cell phone and Frankie Maranzano's Dan Wesson .44, resting it on her lap, because it weighed a fucking ton. Frankie Twice was watching her from her Bottega Veneta bag, blinking at her.

She could feel someone standing outside her door. She was reasonably sure it was Julie Spahn because Mario had an iPhone she had given him and Find My iPhone was telling her that Mario's iPhone was down in the alleyway behind the building. It could be Desi out there, but she had taken Desi's measure a long time back—literally and figuratively—and whatever else he was, he wasn't a lurker. Desi would be hammering on the door saying
Hey, babe, come on, I just want to knock off a piece of that righteous ass,
because to Desi this was courtship in the Continental Style.

What was outside the door was a lurker, and the only lurker she knew was Julie Spahn.

She had counted on them all buggering off as soon as they figured out the surveillance, but she had laid down some contingency plans, and one of them covered this, Julie Spahn at the door with that black knife in his hands. She had seen it in his eyes from the first day. So if he came through that door she'd blow his nuts off with Frankie's revolver, step over and give him three more in his head and chest. Then dial 911.

Self-defense, and she had an undercover FBI agent to back her up. Sooner or later he'd either come through the door and die or he'd give up and leave, because he didn't know how much time he had before the FBI came knocking at the front door.

She was golden.

All she had to do was wait.

The Picklers were clock watchers, and all they had been doing was
waiting
and it was thirty-three minutes to the end of their surveillance shift. They had the laser rigged up to the hard drive and set up to record, which meant they could spool up a good eight hours of whatever went on up there in the penthouse suite at the Memphis, which over the last hour and a half had amounted to zero.

Silent as the grave, except for somewhere in the distant recesses of the house maybe somebody was watching
Masterpiece Theatre
—was that still on?—because Pulaski, whose wife was addicted, had been forced to sit through so many of them that his subconscious mind had the theme music burned into it like tribal scars.

“Fuck this,” said Gerkin. “Where's Boonie?”

“Out looking for that Coker dude, along with everybody else. Office is empty. We're the only people here.”

“Typical mooks,” said Pulaski.

“Waddya think?” said Gerkin, fishing for it.

“I think,” said Pulaski, “that it's Miller Time. Set it up to record and we are out of here.”

And they did and they were.

And so they didn't find out until the next morning, when they were sitting in Boonie's office with their hands in their laps as Boonie, his voice reaching decibel levels approaching permanent ear damage, laid out for them what
precisely
had happened next, over there in the Pinnacle Suite at the Memphis.

Spahn had the key to the master suite in his hand. He figured Delores might be waiting for him on the other side, with a gun in her lap.

She was that kind of snaky bitch.

And any minute now the feds could come through the door. She could be calling them right now. But he wanted to cut her
so bad
.

What to do?

The carpeting in the hallway outside the master suite was as thick as polar bear fur. Coming down it, Spahn had not made a sound, as silent as mist on water, his bare feet gliding along, toes curled, feeling the air on his naked skin, cocaine pulsing like blue fire behind his eyes, his mind as cold and clear as a vodka martini.

So the voice came as a shock.

“Hey there, buttercup.”

Spahn pivoted, his face twisting into a grimace. He took a step, stopped himself—saw the tall silver-haired man in the hall, a harsh sharp-planed face, yellow eyes, a blue suit like the feds wore, a long blue coat over that, and a SIG pistol in his right hand, steady as a stone, the black hole of the muzzle lined up with Spahn's left eye, behind the pistol a killer's face, nothing in it but sudden death.

“The knife. Put it down.”

Spahn thought about throwing it.

“Don't even think that,” said the man.

Spahn looked at him, dropped the knife, kicked it away, cutting the sole of his foot on the point. Pain, but he ignored it. Now his blood was spilling out onto the white carpet.

The guy. Who was he?

Spahn
knew
him, that killer face, those yellow eyes, the Marine Corps haircut. “Fuck me. The
banker
.”

The man's expression didn't change, but something flickered behind his yellow eyes.

Spahn saw his death coming.
But not yet.

He had
information
this guy was going to need. He had some vig. Traction. He could
deal.

“You know who I am?”

“Yes. You're…
the name the name
…Sinclair. The money-changer guy. From Florida.”

Coker considered the man while he added it up. Twyla's cell phone not being answered, going to voice mail three different times. Nate Kellerman's ripped-up knee. Little Anthony and the Tony Torinetti connection. His chest went cold.

Things are one way.

Then they're the other.

“What have you done?”

“Not me,” said Spahn. “It was La Motta. Gotta talk to La Motta. Not me. Wasn't me.”

“La Motta's dead. Munoz is dead. There's nobody left to talk to but you.”

The door to the master suite opened, Delores Maranzano in the open door. Her hands were empty.

“I know what they did,” she said. “But I don't know how to stop it.”

“Who does?”

“He does.”

Spahn shot her a look of pure ninety-proof hate and she swatted it right back at him, with a thin smile.

“It was his idea,” she said.

Coker looked at her for a while and she felt something cold and slithery run up her back and curl itself around her throat.

“Don't try to handle me,” the guy said mildly, but in a way that left a lifelong impression deep down in her amygdala.

“No, sir,” she said, her eyes meek and her voice soft. Julie Spahn watched the exchange and decided that the guy was just a fucking banker after all, and his best defense was a good offense.

“Yeah, it was, my friend, I sent a guy down to your beach place, and the guy I sent is your worst fucking nightmare, so if you ever hope to see your little Puerto Rican girlfriend alive again I'm the only guy who can make that happen. What you need to do, banker boy, is sit down and listen up.”

Coker looked at him for about a minute without saying anything. Spahn tried to read the expression in his eyes and decided there
was
no expression in his eyes. It came to him that perhaps in this case a conciliatory approach might have been more appropriate.

What happened next was what the Picklers should have been around to hear, what they were treated to the next morning in Boonie's office. It went on for quite a while.

Because the Memphis was a very solid building and because the Penthouse Suite had no next-door neighbors, nobody but the participants knew what all the fuss was about.

At the end of it, Coker knew all there was to know and Julie Spahn went out the bathroom window and got about eleven seconds of free fall to come to a deeper understanding of the world and his place in it, which, when he finally hit bottom like a chicken-skin meteor packed full of guts, turned out to be right smack on top of a Porta-Potty in the loading alley behind the Memphis.

The impact utterly destroyed the Porta-Potty and would have killed the guy sitting in it at the time if the guy didn't already have a bullet hole in his forehead and two more in his chest. Together the two old friends, Julie Spahn and Mario La Motta, gave a whole new meaning to the term
inseparable
.

The ambulance was parked down by the 7-Eleven, just where the GPS said it would be. The same 7-Eleven where Reed had left his Mustang the last time he had come to Gracie. He and Nick and Kate looked at Candleford House as they cruised past it in Reed's patrol car.

It was a tall forbidding building made of gray stone blocks. It had two towerlike bays rising up on its wings, each tower topped with Norman turrets. Leaded casement windows, a center balcony with twisted pillars, an upper balcony under carved stone arches, a massive wooden front door under a stone portico, the whole building stained by time, as grim as an open grave.

It had been left to rot behind a chain-link fence. All the glass in the lower floors had been broken by neighborhood kids or their fathers or their grandfathers, long years before. On the top floor there were a few unbroken windows, stained-glass arches that reflected the streetlights. Massive live oaks crowded in all around it and loomed above it, casting it into the shadows.

Reed wasn't ready to leave his Interceptor stuck out by the side of the road, so he put it into the 7-Eleven lot beside the Niceville EMT truck. He called in his position and status to Dispatch, and said he'd be ten-seven at this location with Detective Nick Kavanaugh of the Belfair and Cullen CID and Kate Kavanaugh, a lawyer with Family Services.

“Roger that,” said Dispatch. “Reason for stop?”

Reed looked at Kate, who smiled back at him.

“Your call,” Nick said from the backseat, “unless you've got a radio code for ghost-hunting?”

“We're ten-seven for dinner,” said Reed. “We'll be on the portable.”

“Ten-four, Pursuit. Enjoy.”

Reed clicked off, tugged his belt into place, popped the door. He got out faster than Nick, who despite his meds was still moving like an old man. Kate waited by the curb as the two cops got themselves together. She was looking at the ambulance, which was locked up and dark. She put a hand on the engine cover. It was still warm.

“Reed, have you got a light?”

Nick, in civvies, a charcoal suit and a white shirt, his chest still wrapped tight, his Colt in a belt clip, pulled a Heider compact out of his inside pocket, handed it to Kate. Reed was unlocking his shotgun and checking the load.

Kate shone the light into the driver's side window. “Keys are still here. There's blood on the dashboard. And I see a bullet hole,” she said.

She went around to the back gates.

One of the rear windows had been shot out, and she put the light into the open frame, saw a human shape under a red blanket, strapped down on the stretcher. And a Gary Fisher mountain bike up against the other side of the cabin.

“Nick…come here,” she said, and he caught the tone in her voice. “There's a body.”

Nick and Reed were right there, Reed pulling out his Maglite.

“Not Rainey,” said Nick. “Look at the shoes. Those are paramedic boots. And too small. Rainey's got feet like the Sasquatch.”

“Stand clear,” said Reed, reaching in through the broken window and popping the inside lever. The gates swung back and Reed stepped up into the cabin.

“It's Barb Fillion. Throat's gone. Looks like a grazing wound, hit her carotid and she bled out.”

Kate moved back.

“That's Rainey's bike,” she said, a slight tremble in her voice. “He was here. I can feel it.”

“Not now,” said Reed, looking at Nick.

“I should call this in,” he said.

“We have to get inside Candleford House,” said Nick. “We can't have state troopers all over us when we're doing it.”

“That's a dead body—”

“We'll take care of her. Just not yet. We have to do this thing.”

Reed closed the ambulance up, got the keys out of the ignition, locked the truck up. Nick was looking at a big gray Lexus SUV that was parked beside it. There was a pattern of tiny droplets on the driver's window; in the fluorescent glare from the 7-Eleven, they looked coppery and wet.

He put his Heider light on the driver's window and saw blood spatter on the dashboard. He moved to the rear window and saw two bodies, a young man and a little girl half stuffed into the backseat like a couple of bags full of bones.

“Two more bodies,” he said to Reed.

“We already decided,” Reed said. “Let's go do this. We'll call it in as soon as we're done here.”

The three of them walked back up the block toward Candleford House. The street was deserted, most of the lamps were out, and garbage littered the empty lots on either side of the building. The neighborhood had long ago come to a verdict about the old asylum. Leave it alone, keep your distance.

“Last time I was here I popped the lock on the chain-link. It's around the back.”

The lock was still popped, the chain hanging down. The gate was slightly open and it groaned like a dying thing when Reed shoved it back.

“There's a summer kitchen in the back. That pile of bricks up against the wall.”

They found it, moving carefully over the litter and junk that had gathered inside the fence. The summer kitchen was now just a sagging ruin made of bricks and tin and rotting boards.

Inside a rusted steel door, a flight of stairs rose up into the gloom of the interior. The stairs were marble, worn smooth by time, and they led up to a main floor landing.

Nick, first up the stairs, stood in the doorway at the top of the staircase, thinking that the interior of Candleford House looked exactly the way Reed had described it.

Like walking onto the deck of the
Titanic
after a hundred years at the bottom of the ocean.

There was a huge central hallway with a checkered tile floor. The ceiling far above them was lined with decorative tin tiles, and a large chandelier, rusted and ruined, dominated the air space.

The atrium went all the way up to a domed skylight made of stained glass, the bowl of it illuminated with city glow bouncing off the cloud cover, sending a pale blue shaft down the atrium, dust motes drifting inside the column. The atrium was lined with galleries on all four sides, buried deep in purple shadows, supported by carved wooden pillars. There were four levels of galleries. They receded into the dimness far above.

The three of them stood there, oppressed by the weight of all the emptiness, the pounding silence.

And there was an odor in the air, not just rot and mold and dead things.

Something else, something strange.

Cordite. Gunpowder. Fresh and acrid.

“Somebody's been firing a weapon in here,” said Reed. “Not long ago.”

“Yeah,” said Nick. “I can smell it.”

“What now?” said Reed.

“Your call,” said Nick. “You know the place.”

“Abel Teague had private rooms on the top floor. If Rainey's anywhere, he'll be up there.”

Kate was looking at the staircase. “Can we trust the stairs?”

Reed gave her a smile.

“How do you feel about waiting down here alone while Nick and I check them out?”

Nick sensed a figure standing in the shadows on the far side of the main floor, pulled his Colt out and heard Reed rack a shell into his shotgun, the sound bouncing around the atrium and fading into the upper dark. He felt Kate move in close to him, heard her rapid breathing.

“Rainey?” she said. “Rainey, is that you?”

“Reed, you put that shotgun away,” said a voice out of the dark, a man's voice, a familiar deep voice with a cowboy tone. “I'm too pretty to die.”

The figure stepped out of the shadows and into the faint pool of light from the glass dome, boots grinding on broken plaster and rotting wood, a tall man in jeans and a range jacket, boots, long silvery hair down to his shoulders. Reed lowered the shotgun. Kate took a step forward, stopped.

“Charlie?”

Danziger moved farther into the light. There was something in his hands, a long heavy rifle. His face looked haggard and weary and he had a bloody wound on the side of his head.

“Yeah, it's me. You folks try not to get all spooked about this, okay?”

“Charlie,” said Nick, not surprised by much of anything these days. “I heard you were in town.”

“Yeah? From who?”

“Frank Barbetta.”

“Yeah, me and Frank sorta got into it Friday night, ended up at Blue Eddie's. He here with you?”

“No,” said Nick. “He's not.”

Danziger caught Nick's tone. “What happened?”

Nick told him.

Danziger listened and was quiet for a while. “That's too damn bad. That bitch gets into everybody eventually, doesn't she?”

“No offense, Charlie,” said Reed, “but what the
hell
are you?”

Danziger looked at Nick, shook his head.

“Gotta love the young,” he said. “They don't tap-dance around the main question, do they?”

“It's a good question,” said Kate.

“Yeah. I've been giving it some thought for a few days now.”

“Come up with anything?” asked Nick.

“Yeah. You know the expression
one foot in the grave
? I think that's the position I'm in. Can I ask you a question back, Kate?”

“Please.”

“You look around you right now, what do you see?”

Kate looked. “I see the inside of a prison, a terrible place, an abomination that ought to be burned down to the ground and the ruins sown with rock salt.”

Danziger looked around the main floor and then came back to her.

“You don't see eight dead things? One of them about a foot from where you're standing?”

Kate stepped back. “No, I don't.”

“Look harder.”

She stared down at the floor and saw…something. A man-shaped stain on the wooden slats.

“I see…what is it?”

“Well, before you three got here, that's what I was doing. With this.”

He held up the BAR. “They're Abel Teague's…guardians. The last of them, I think. I tried to clear them out. I've been killing them all day, ever since I left the Ruelle place. I think I got them all. I hope so, anyway. I guess you found the ambulance and the SUV beside it?”

“Yes,” said Reed. “And three dead bodies.”

“Yeah. Why I turned on the GPS. I figured somebody would come. I'm glad it was you. I feel bad about the EMT tech. She came for Teague down by the Belfair store. No idea why. In that ambulance. I tried to stop them, put a round through the back window, got her and not him. I figure Teague hijacked the SUV so he could get up here. So I took the wagon and came on up. I figured—”

They heard a sound, a kind of low whispering sigh that turned into a hissing slither like air rushing in through an open window. It got bigger and louder until it seemed to fill up the atrium, float down from the roof, pour out of the walls, rise up from the floorboards all around them, invisible, a pressure wave, a vibrating
presence
.

Reed knew what it was because he'd felt it once before. He tried hard not to run for the stairs, the street, the cruiser, the highway, another state.

“Don't run,” said Danziger. “She's not here for us. She's here for the boy.”

“Rainey?” said Kate.

“Yeah,” said Danziger, his voice low and soft, watching the dust motes in the light column, seeing them move and drift as something invisible passed upward into the dark. It got easier to breathe.

“Is Rainey here?”

“I haven't gone upstairs yet. I had to deal with his helpers. But he's nowhere else, and he sure as hell heard me shooting up his people.”

“He'd be in his rooms,” said Reed. “Top floor.” Danziger looked at him.

“You've been here before?”

“Yeah. Once. I left by an upstairs window.”

“Well,” said Danziger. “I got to go up there.”

“I know,” said Reed. “Clara Mercer told me.”

Danziger's smile went away. “Then you know what we have to do? Kate, are you up to this? I know you were on the kid's side.”

“I still am, if we can get
her
out of his head. Maybe there's still some way to do that?”

“You think there is, Charlie?” said Nick.

“Tell you the truth, Nick, I don't think we've got a chance in hell. I think we're all gonna die here or maybe worse. And now that I've given you my pep talk, who's dumb enough to come with me?”

Nick looked at Kate, and she gave it right back.

Not one word, Nick. Not one word.

“I think we all are,” she said.

Danziger gave Kate his best smile.

“I wish Coker were here. He'd love this part.”