Sleeping dogs, p.7
Sleeping Dogs, page 7
Billy looked at Max. Max looked back at him. Billy left the room.
Like I said, Billy was actually pretty sharp.
16
She watched the men inside her house from the relative safety of the barn. She was cold and hungry, and she’d walked the mountain for hours before realizing she wasn’t going to be able to make it to town before she froze or before the men or the wolf got her. And so, she changed course and headed back to her home. She thought she might be able to hide from the men there. She knew every hiding place, and there was food—the chickens’ eggs, the goats’ milk. She thought the wolf would be too afraid to come for her there. And if he did, maybe one of the men would shoot it. Like the man had shot her father.
Irmgard fought back the tears. It was hard … even painful, but she was getting better at it.
She counted eleven men at her house and more out on the mountain. Her father’s binoculars were on his workbench in the barn, and with them, she could see pretty well through the windows. Irmgard kept the windows clean; it was one of her weekly chores. There were also knotholes in the old wood walls that she could watch through when men got close. One of the men she saw was the man who killed her father, and another was the man they’d taken from the trunk of the car.
The chicken coop was a good sprint toward the house and away from the mountain. The eggs would be waiting for her, but she was afraid to collect them yet, even though it was already later in the afternoon. There wasn’t much to hide behind or under. The goat pen was closer, but still, there was an open space before she could reach it.
The man from the car was tied to a chair and had a black hood over his face. He sat in the kitchen, by the table where she had refused to eat her peas.
Her father’s body had been moved, and though she searched with the binoculars, she couldn’t see where they had put him. She thought she might have to wait until night to go to the chickens and the goats. But she was so hungry, and the goats' udders would be swollen and painful for them.
Groups of men, three and four at a time, had come and gone all day—probably looking for her. One group had come back with an injured man. Blood soaked his clothes, and he could only stand with the other two supporting him. Both of those men kept looking about with their eyes, holding their rifles in a one-handed ready position, as though they were afraid they were about to be attacked.
Irmgard smiled. It must be the wolf.
She was afraid of the wolf, but so were the men. And that made her smile.
The workbench held an assortment of tools, and Irmgard found a rusty pocketknife in one of the cubbies. Dust, webs, and mouse droppings filled the cubby, but she ignored them and dug out the knife. If the men or the wolf tried to grab her, she would stab them or cut them. She’d sliced her thumb once on a kitchen knife, back before her mother had gotten sick, and it bled badly. Her mother had washed it and dabbed some ointment over it before tenderly wrapping her finger in white gauze. It had hurt so much. Even after the cleaning and bandaging, it throbbed like a hot ball of poison under her skin. The thought of hurting the men who’d killed her father felt good.
But the men were so big, and she was just little.
She wanted to be brave—like the princess in the movie who could make cold and snow and ice. She wished she could make a giant snowman that would fight for her, but all she had was this rusty old knife. Her mother was dead, and so was her father. The men wanted her, and so did the wolf. She didn’t know what to do.
Irmgard wanted to be strong, but she was only a skinny, eight-year-old girl. She was tired and hungry and scared.
Looking around the barn, she saw her father’s old truck. Irmgard didn’t know where the keys were. And she didn’t know how to drive.
Back at the workbench, she found other tools: a hammer, a wrench, some pliers, things she didn’t know. Under the bench were old boxes. One of them had a couple of sticks of dynamite that her father had used to blow out tree trunks after he cut them down. Irmgard thought about throwing them at the house and blowing the men up, but she didn’t know how the dynamite worked, and she couldn’t throw very far. She was much better at running. Besides, she didn’t want her house to be blown up.
She sat by the window and watched the men in the warm house that used to be hers. And though she tried not to, she cried.
Anthony Carlino was tied to a chair in the kitchen. His finger ached—so did his ribs and his face where the men had punched and kicked him—but his finger most of all.
He knew he was in a kitchen because he could see bits here and there from the bottom of the hood that covered his head and face. More than that, he knew because of the smells. After decades of cooking, the remnants of spices, savory meals, and the crusts on frying pans had soaked into the wood, leaving the unmistakable aroma of a well-loved kitchen.
Bella had been a wonderful cook.
The gag in his mouth—an old rag shoved in deep and tied with a bandana—made his mouth dry and threatened his gag reflex. His will alone kept him from choking. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
His hands and feet were zip-tied to the legs of the chair. If they had used handcuffs or zip-tied him in the front, he could have gotten free in seconds. But they knew what they were doing. Or at least their leader did. And sometimes, that was all it took—a good leader.
Anthony stretched as far as he could with his fingers, feeling for a weakness in the chair or the zip-tie itself.
There was always a way to escape.
Anthony had been in some tight scrapes, mostly in his youth, of course, before he became a made man and long before he was crowned as Boss. But he had always escaped, and more, he’d always gotten revenge. This would be no different. Well, that wasn’t exactly true, he thought, as his hands and fingers played their searching game. What he would do to the men that had cost him his finger and his ring would be far worse than anything he had ever before done to another human being.
The darkness of the hood and the stifling gag in his mouth were hard to endure. It felt like he was simultaneously drowning and choking. A lesser man might gag and throw up, but that could mean asphyxiating on his own vomit, and again, that was a satisfaction he would not allow them.
When this was all said and done, they would be the ones choking … on their own blood.
Anthony allowed his thoughts to go to the one man in all the world he truly admired. Chuck Norris. The actor was far more than an actor. He was the real deal. A true martial arts expert. Maybe the best, in his prime, the world had ever known.
The memes were no accident. They were pale reflections of the truth.
Chuck Norris hit 11 out of 10 targets with nine bullets.
Chuck Norris built the hospital he was born in.
Guns carry Chuck Norris for protection.
Chuck Norris doesn’t turn on the shower; he stares at it till it cries.
When Chuck Norris left for college, he told his father, you’re the man of the house now.
Chuck Norris once fought Superman; the loser had to wear his underwear on the outside.
Chuck Norris threw a hand grenade and killed fifty people, then it exploded.
Chuck Norris doesn’t dial the wrong number; you answered the wrong phone.
Anthony remembered the movie where Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris fought, The Way of the Dragon. In that movie, Bruce Lee wins. To Anthony, that pretty much summed up Hollyweird.
Phony.
In tough times, Anthony would often ask himself, What would Chuck Norris do? And when he came up with it, it always worked.
Anthony asked himself the question now, and almost immediately, the answer came to him.
He would have to forgo his pride, but that was okay because it would only be a ruse, a trap.
Anthony started to cough, to choke, to shake, and to moan. He acted like he couldn’t breathe. Anthony was no great actor, not like Chuck Norris, but he did pretty well. Good enough that someone yelled, in German, of course, that their captive was dying. They had to get the hood off and the gag out because they couldn’t afford for him to die on them—not yet anyway.
And then hands were grabbing for him. The hood was wrenched off, the bandanna jerked away, and the gag pulled free.
He sat looking at them. Three men, tough, big, and uncaring. But then their boss entered the room. He knew he was the boss by his bearing and by his voice. He’d heard the voice and seen the man the night before, standing by the man he’d just killed. He also knew he was the boss by the way he stared down at him. This man was the only one to show any fear. Anthony knew the man felt fear because only he understood the consequences of allowing Anthony to die before he was supposed to.
Shoving the men aside, he checked to make sure Anthony was breathing, then looked back at them.
“Fools,” he said. “Shoving the gag in like that could have killed him!”
One of the men shrugged and said, “You didn’t say how to gag him; you just said to keep him shut up.”
The leader shoved a gun into the man’s mouth.
“I didn’t tell you not to put a gun in his mouth to shut him up either, but you didn’t think of doing that, did you? Why not?” He backed the man against the wall, the gun grinding deeper. “Well, why?”
The man tried to garble out an answer, but it was impossible to make out.
“That’s right,” said the leader, “because it might kill him. And what happens if he dies? Well?”
The gun dug in. The man screamed.
“We don’t get paid, and we all die, that’s what. Do you want to not get paid? Do you want to die?”
The leader ripped the gun free of the man’s mouth, teeth chipping against the metal.
He strode over to Anthony, who did his best to look old, haggard, spent. The leader gripped his chin and forced his face up.
“Can you hear me, old man?”
Anthony acted as if he did not comprehend his words.
“No … non comprende…” he stuttered.
The leader of the men looked down at him with contempt, turning his face this way and that. Finally, he let him go, disgusted.
Anthony Carlino noted that the man had grabbed his chin with a lopsided grip, and he remembered the missing thumb and first two fingers.
The leader spoke again, this time in Italian.
“If I leave the gag out, will you keep your mouth shut?”
“Yes, yes,” said Anthony, acting exhausted and coughing weakly.
“Understand, if you start talking, to anyone, for any reason, the gag goes back in. And this time, I’ll have them use your underwear. You understand? Speak only when spoken to, like a child, and then only to answer. Nothing else. If you yell or scream or try to turn my men against me, I’ll break out your teeth.”
Anthony nodded, and the leader turned his back on him. He didn’t catch the look in Anthony’s eyes. Anthony had done well in feigning exhaustion and acting as though he’d been choking, but he was not a good enough actor to hide what was behind his eyes.
Still, he had achieved much. They left the gag out, the hood off, and he learned something that would be useful sooner or later—the deformity of the leader’s left hand.
Such a man would be easy to find.
17
The port was small, with only a few docks dotting the beach and a single shack at the top of a sizable area that had been plowed flat for parking. The beach itself was littered with fist-sized rocks and shells and thick, rubbery clumps of seaweed along with the occasional crushed plastic cup and scrap of waterlogged paper.
I had the Mafia boys, except for Billy, stay back at the cars while we went inside the shack. Three old men sat inside around a potbellied stove, smoking pipes and playing cards. They looked like ancient versions of Popeye the Sailor Man. They had thick forearms, but their shoulders and biceps were withered, and their backs bowed as if gravity had finally won the age-old battle.
“Hi,” I said in English.
The closest gave me squint eye, pipe smoke dancing a murky waltz past his toothless gums. He turned back to his crewmates.
“American,” he said. And they all chortled quietly.
I let it go.
“Do you speak English?” I tried.
Squint Eye played a card.
“Do you?” he responded, without turning back to me. The other two completely ignored my presence. “Because it doesn’t sound anything like English to me.” He took another card, slapped it down, and sat back. He adjusted his pipe with one hand, settling the stem against the pulp of his gums. “Not English. Maybe it’s that Spanglish I heard tell of a few years back. Is that your language, Spanglish?”
“No,” I said. “You were right the first time. American.”
He took a couple of puffs on the pipe.
“What is it you want, American?”
I showed him the photos I’d had printed from the videos Mr. Universe sent me of the cars and the men.
“Did you deal with these men yesterday or the day before?”
Old Squint didn’t even glance at the pictures.
“You some kind of cop? Landespolizei.”
He puffed on the pipe. The odor was not pleasing like some pipe tobacco. This smelled old and tough and cloying … as wrinkled as he was.
I looked back at Billy. He stood by the counter next to the door, nonchalant like, waiting to see how I played it.
“No, I’m a private investigator.”
The squinted eye opened wide with the other one. His two companions gave me their attention as well.
“Private investigator?” He wagged a thick finger at me. “Like Magnum PI?” He turned to his friends and hooked a thumb at me. “Magnum PI,” he said. They both stared at me. Squint Eye turned back. “You don’t look like him.” He gave me the once over. “Tom Selleck. You don’t look like him.” He turned to his mates. “Doesn’t look like him.”
“Not as tall,” said one of the men.
“No mustache,” said the other.
“More stocky,” said Squint Eye.
“Where’s your Ferrari?” asked the first man.
“And the women in bikinis,” said the other.
Squint Eye head checked Billy. “He don’t look like Higgins.”
“Doesn’t look like TC either,” said the first man. “TC’s black. He’s not black.”
“Where’s his helicopter?” Asked the second man.
“I’m not Tom Selleck,” I said. “But I am a private investigator.” I flipped out my badge and let them all examine it. They smoked their pipes while they passed my badge and wallet, the card game momentarily set aside.
Squint Eye handed it back to me.
“Tom Selleck’s better looking. Probably why he gets the girls in bikinis.”
Couldn’t argue with that.
I held the pictures out to him again.
“Did you see them?”
This time he took them and gave them a once over before handing them to the next man down the line.
“Ja,” he said. “I seen them dock and get in their cars and drive away.” He stood and went to the window. I followed.
He pointed toward the farthest dock. “One of the cars backed down close to the dock there. They waited till everyone else got off, then two men carried something off the boat and to the trunk of the car. I couldn’t tell what it was because it was covered up. A blanket, maybe a big rug.”
“Did they come in?” I asked. “Get directions, ask about food, gas, or lodging? Use the restroom?”
Squint Eye squinted the one eye even harder, smiling and pointing the stem of his pipe at me.
“You ask questions like Magnum,” he said. “But nein, none of them came inside. They met the men in the cars, put whatever it was in the trunk, and drove off.”
“Did you recognize any of the men?”
He shook his head.
“Anything stand out about any of the men?”
“Stand out?” he asked. And then his squint un-squinted again. “Oh … you mean the hand?” He looked back at his friends. “He means the hand.” Both of the old men around the stove nodded like they knew it all along.
“What about the hand?” I asked.
“The man with the fingers,” he said. “Two, only two fingers on the one hand. Is that what you mean?”
And then it hit me like a coconut falling from a Hawaiian palm tree. The last time I had been to Germany was when I found Max. Max was being held by a criminal type that ran a dogfighting ring. He seemed like small potatoes to me back then, but maybe he’d moved up in the criminal ranks. The room almost tilted as I realized I wasn’t that far from where I rescued Max from them. And the one outstanding feature of the man I had rescued Max from was that he had only two fingers on his left hand.
I learned later that Max had eaten the other three.
Wow, Magnum PI would be proud.
Max waited in the car, smelling the air.
The Alpha came out of the shack and got into the car along with Billy.
Billy drove while the Alpha instructed. They took winding paths that led up and up, the woods growing thicker on either side and the air growing thin. Minutes turned into hours, but with each kilometer, Max grew more excited.
It all felt so wonderfully familiar.
The air, the scents, the taste.
Max knew where he was.
He was home.
And the Great Gray Wolf was close.
Max would have his revenge, and neither the man sitting in the car next to the Alpha nor the Alpha himself would stop him.
18
The wolf had become the hunted. It wasn’t the first time. Over the years, he had learned there were two ways to handle being hunted. He could run, move to another territory, stake a new claim. Or he could turn on his attackers, making the hunters the hunted. It would be easy to run—safer. And it was the course he usually took when humans came for him. But …
