Jack said nothing. He continued his flat gaze at David Carson.

  “It was you, wasn’t it? You were wearing a baseball cap and I couldn’t see your face but it was you.”

  “That’s why I’m here, kid. I want to know who tried to send me away for life for a murder I didn’t commit.”

  “How the hell did you—”

  “Let’s stay on track. We’re talking about you.”

  “But if you’re the guy, then you were there to murder Spinelli.”

  “Except you beat me to it. And in this country, people don’t go to prison for their intentions, they go to prison for their actions. You tried to frame me, and I don’t appreciate that.”

  Carson lowered his head into his hands and moaned. “So you are going to kill me.”

  “I haven’t decided yet. I’m not finished asking questions.”

  “What else do you want to know?” The words came out partially muffled as Carson spoke without lifting his head from his hands.

  “How did you hear about The Organization?” Jack said.

  “How did I hear about what?”

  “The Organization.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” Carson said.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying!” Carson insisted. “I know better than to lie to a guy holding a gun on me. But I’ve never heard of any organization called…well…The Organization.”

  “Then how did you go about taking out a contract on Spinelli?”

  Carson shrugged and shook his head. “I…I just…”

  “Tell me.” Jack took one step forward and Carson flinched as it he’d been struck with a hammer.

  “I know some people who know some people,” he said. “I put the word out in a few bars that I was looking for a hitter, and within a week one of my connections had gotten back to me with a name I could contact to hire someone.”

  Jack shook his head. He almost couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Rocco Spinelli may have been a world-class slimeball, but he’d been right about Carson. This kid was dumb as a stump.

  He finally cleared his throat and said, “Do you have any idea how lucky you were?”

  “I don’t feel very lucky,” Carson said.

  “I’m sure you don’t. But do you know what happens to ninety-nine percent of the people who blab in bars about looking for a hit man?”

  Carson shrugged. “I’m guessing they don’t end up getting killed by the very hit man they hired.”

  “No,” Jack said. “They end up hiring an undercover cop posing as a hitter instead, and then they go to jail for a very long time.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad right now.”

  Jack ignored the comment. “So you put the word out in a few bars and then what?”

  “Like I said, about a week later I heard back from one of my buddies. He told me he knew of a guy that could handle the job. I gave him the details, including exactly when I wanted Spinelli killed in order to make my plan work. I paid him the money and that was that.”

  “You never met with anyone besides your buddy?”

  “No. Should I have?”

  Jack raised his eyebrows in disbelief over David Carson’s words. This kid was in so far over his head it was a minor miracle he was still alive.

  He shook his head with a smile and said, “Get up.”

  Carson’s eyes widened again in alarm. “Get up? Why? Don’t you have more questions for me?”

  “You’ve told me everything I need to know.”

  “But why do I have to get up? What’s going to happen? Please don’t shoot me, please, I don’t want to die.”

  “I don’t have to shoot you,” Jack said. “There’s going to be a long line of Palermo assholes looking to get even with you for taking out Spinelli.”

  “But I was just—”

  “I know,” Jack said. “You were just showing them how smart you are. That worked out well for you, didn’t it?”

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “I’m going to march you into the kitchen, then we’re going to pick out a chair, bring it into the living room, and I’m going to secure you to it.”

  “Why are you going to—”

  “Just shut up and do as I say, kid.”

  David Carson stood slowly. Tears were welling up in his eyes and he looked like he was ready to puke, but he turned toward the tiny kitchen. “What’s going to happen to me?”

  Jack ignored the question and followed him into the kitchen. There were only two chairs to pick from, and they were both exactly the same: sturdy but armless utilitarian wooden kitchen chairs.

  Jack pointed to the closest chair and said, “Sit your ass down and don’t move. If you move, you die.”

  Carson swallowed heavily but did as he was told as Jack began opening and closing drawers, one after the other, looking for what every house featured somewhere: the junk drawer. He found it on the third try and smiled. A ball of twine had been tossed into the drawer along with pens, pencils, paper clips, scissors, rulers, erasers and other assorted items that everyone used but no one ever knew where to store.

  He lifted the twine and the scissors out of the drawer and used the scissors to cut four two-foot lengths of twine. Then he tossed the scissors and the rest of the twine back in the drawer.

  “Now stand up and carry your chair into the living room.”

  Carson shook his head mutely, terrified little jiggles side to side.

  “Do it,” Jack said firmly, and the kid blew out a shaky breath and picked up the chair. Jack pointed to the living room and Carson trudged out of the kitchen carrying his cargo.

  When he’d reached roughly the midpoint of the room, Jack said, “Far enough,” and the kid stopped. He was breathing heavily, like an out of shape man forced to run a long distance.

  “Put it down and sit.”

  Carson dropped into the chair and Jack held the twine up for the kid’s inspection. “I’m going to use these to secure your wrists and ankles to the chair. If you so much as twitch while I’m tying you up, I’ll blow your brains all over this room and your mother will find nothing but glop where your skull used to be when she comes home from work tonight. Do you understand me?”

  “How do you know when my mother—”

  “Do you understand what I’m telling you? Yes or no, it’s a simple question.”

  Carson swallowed heavily. “I understand,” he said.

  “Good,” Jack answered. “Let’s not have any lapses of memory, because I won’t tell you again.”

  “Are you going to kill me after you tie me up?”

  “If I wanted to kill you, I wouldn’t waste my time with twine. I’d pop you where you sit and that would be then end of it.”

  Tears spilled out of Carson’s eyes and began rolling down his cheeks as Jack began restraining the killer. He wasn’t thrilled with the thickness of the twine, but he doubled it up on each ankle and wrist, hoping it would be enough to prevent Carson’s escape. He should only need to keep the kid restrained for a couple of hours.

  When he’d finished, he stood and regarded David Carson. The young man who’d nearly gotten Jack put away on a murder rap looked less than dangerous, with a steady stream of tears dripping off his jawline onto his jeans and a snot bubble making a break for freedom out one nostril.

  Jack shook his head one last time and walked out of the house.

  25

  David Carson couldn’t believe he was still alive. When the guy came up from behind and forced him into his own house at gunpoint, he’d assumed he would be dead within minutes.

  His plan—insinuate himself into a prime position in the Palermo crime family by offing one of their top guys and framing another assassin for the murder—had seemed like a good one when he cooked it up. Hell, he still thought it was a good plan. Eliminate that asshole Rocco Spinelli, who had mocked David multiple times and come right out and called him too stupid to work for the mob—the mob!—and at the same time prove his intelligence to the people who really mattered.

  It was better than a good plan; it was fucking genius.

  And things had started off okay. Not perfectly, but okay. He’d expected killing Spinelli to be easier and to go more smoothly than it had. David had figured that by sneaking into the man’s bedroom as he slept he would be able to make a few well-aimed thrusts into the guy’s chest, stab him through the heart, and ensure Spinelli knew goddamned well who had killed him before he croaked.

  But damned if the old bastard hadn’t fought like a tiger, and now David knew why. His security system had tipped him off to the fact that an intruder was inside his home.

  David realized he was lucky as hell the man hadn’t had the time or the good sense to go for a gun.

  To make matters worse, that same fucking alarm system had included cameras that filmed the whole attack.

  David supposed he should have expected Spinelli to have a home security system, but no plan was perfect. And given the fact that this was his first home invasion, he thought he could be forgiven for not foreseeing every eventuality.

  Besides, he’d still managed to finish Spinelli off, even if it had taken more time, and a hell of a lot more effort, than he had expected it to.

  At the point of Spinelli’s death, even with the bumps in the road, his plan had still pretty much been on track.

  But things went to shit in a hurry when the fucking hit man showed up a couple of hours later. David still couldn’t begin to imagine how the guy managed to escape capture when he’d been trapped inside a damned house for six hours with something like twenty cops. Between the EMTs, the uniformed officers and the investigators, Spinelli’s house had been busier than Grand Central Station and it was just impossible to believe one of those idiots hadn’t stumbled over the guy hiding in a closet, or behind a shower curtain, or clinging to the ceiling like fucking Spider Man.

  When David saw the hired gun leaving the house after all the cops had departed, it was like watching his life go up in smoke. Despite the personal satisfaction he’d gotten from killing Spinelli, and he had to admit it had been fucking sweet, his entire plan to hook on with the Palermo family had hinged on him framing the hired killer for the murder.

  Without that result to demonstrate his cleverness, David recognized that rather than of welcoming him into the fold, they would simply be pissed off that he’d killed their guy.

  And his life would come to a sudden and undoubtedly violent end.

  So when the guy pulled the gun on him and followed him into the house, he’d naturally thought he would be forced to his knees on the living room floor before taking a couple of slugs to the back of the head. He would be left in a pool of blood and that would be the end of David Carson.

  The Palermo family was not known to be forgiving.

  David’s assessment of his likely fate had not changed once he realized the guy he’d set up as a patsy was the one holding him at gunpoint. If anyone was likely to be even angrier than the Palermo goons, it would be presumptive sucker in his plan.

  But to David’s utter astonishment, despite threatening him with a deadly weapon the hit man had seemed satisfied with just talking.

  Now that the hitter had left, though, David wasn’t taking any chances. Maybe by going out the front door the guy was just fucking with him, giving him hope that he would escape with his life, and would return at any moment and squeeze off a couple of rounds.

  Or maybe he had initially planned to let David live but was even now stewing about his decision and would change his mind and come back.

  David forced his racing brain off his terror and worked on controlling his breathing. The first order of business was to stop crying. The second was to escape.

  The attacker had used twine to tie David to one of his mother’s kitchen chairs. None of the chairs included arms, so he had bound David’s wrists to the sides of the chair-back. This meant David’s hands were down by his ass next to his hipbones.

  He swiveled as much as possible and examined the twine, his neck twisted to the left. His captor had wound the twine twice around his wrists and ankles, which meant there was no way David would be strong enough to break his bindings by pulling against them. Even if the twine hadn’t been doubled up, he doubted he could simply have snapped it.

  He stretched his right thumb up and to the rear, trying to grab hold of one of the dual strands circling his wrist. No luck.

  Tried the same thing with his left thumb and got the same unsatisfactory result.

  He felt the tears threatening to break the dam again. This time they were tears of frustration rather than hopelessness, but in any event they were just as unproductive. He concentrated hard and forced them back. There had to be a way to escape; he just needed to find it.

  He turned again in the chair and took a closer look at the twine. The action made the tendons in his neck throb in pain but he did it anyway. He didn’t know where his mother had gotten the fucking string or what she used it for, but it was relatively thin and didn’t look particularly strong. Strands of hemp or whatever stuck out of the cord like little hairs, and David thought if he could just rub something sharp against the edge of the twine he might be able to fleck the hairs away and gradually weaken the whole damn thing.

  And eventually it would break.

  Maybe.

  There was one problem with his big escape plan, and it was a potential deal breaker. He didn’t have anything sharp to rub against the fucking twine. The hit man hadn’t been thoughtful enough to leave a steak knife in David’s hand.

  But what David did have on his hand were fingernails. They weren’t long nails like his girlfriend had, but they weren’t quite stubs, either. He thought if he could somehow reach the twine with one of them, he might have a chance at escape.

  He bent his right wrist and extended his fingers upward along the inside of his arm and felt a rush of excitement when the tip of his middle finger—his fuck-you finger—brushed the twine.

  Just brushing the twine with his finger wouldn’t be enough to break out of his bindings, obviously, but if nothing else it gave him hope, something that had been in woefully short supply ever since the guy with the gun forced David inside his mother’s house. He bent to his task, literally, pushing the back of his hand against his hip and forcing his wrist to bend farther than it was supposed to.

  The whole thing hurt like a bitch, and David whined in agony but kept trying. A sore wrist would be a small price to pay for avoiding a couple of bullets to the skull, and despite the pain he smiled in grim satisfaction when the fingernail of his fuck-you finger made solid contact with one of the strands of twine.

  He started rubbing, scraping his fingernail against the edge of the cord.

  And it was working.

  David knew it was working because he could feel the strands of twine being forced into the tender skin beneath his fingernails, piling up under there like dozens of little bamboo shoots being hammered under his nail by a particularly sadistic torturer.

  Something a Palermo guy would do.

  He shuddered and worked at filing the twine away for as long as he could stand it, and when the agony became unbearable he allowed himself a break. He leaned forward in the chair, glassy-eyed from pain and sweating like a man working outside in ninety-five degree heat. Or at least what he assumed it would be like to work outside in extreme heat; David had never actually done it.

  His wrist screamed a complaint at him as he straightened it out and he wondered whether his decision to take a break had been a bad idea. It hurt so badly he might not be able to force it back into the unnatural position required to work on breaking himself free.

  But then he did it.

  And he screamed from the pain. He actually screamed, all alone in the kitchen of his mother’s house, but he forced his hand into position anyway, reminding himself of what was at stake. The sweat began pouring off him again and now he cried in earnest, but he rubbed those fucking strands of twine under his fucking fingernail for all he was worth, questioning his life choices all the while.

  26

  It took Jack all of three seconds to decide on his next move. He wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for his ties to The Organization, and Mr. Stanton had indicated his willingness to help in any way possible. So while Jack knew he could dig up the information he needed on his own with a little bit of effort, he elected to take the easier and faster route.

  Mr. Stanton answered after one ring. “Hello?”

  “Lately,” Jack said without preamble, “I feel like I talk to you more than I talk to my dog.”

  “I’m honored. I know how you feel about your dog. The feeling is even sweeter since it appeared for awhile as though we were destined never to speak again.”

  Jack laughed. “Yeah, life has a way of changing even the best-intentioned plans.”

  “For the better, in this case.”

  “If you say so.”

  “What can I do for you, my friend?”

  “I need something from whatever source provided you with your bootleg copy of Spinelli’s home surveillance video.”

  “You know I’ll get it to you if I can. What do you need?”

  “The lead investigator on the Spinelli murder—”

  “Matt Burke,” Mr. Stanton interrupted. “Yes, we talked about him in your truck.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And?”

  “And I need his cell number.”

  “Keeping your friends close and your enemies closer?”

  “We’re not enemies,” Jack said. “Not exactly, anyway. Not at this very moment.”

  “I doubt Burke would share that sentiment, especially after seeing you on that video inside Spinelli’s house following the murder.”

  “Probably not,” Jack agreed, “although the video clearly shows me not murdering anyone.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18