“Why do you need me-isn’t that a job for the cops?” After my brother had broken into his father’s house and now his family business, I couldn’t imagine Adam Lombardi would be itching to see me any more than I would him.
“Normally,” Pat said, drawling his words. “Except Adam requested that I bring you along.”
“He did?”
“Adam’s a good guy. He doesn’t want to press charges against your brother. Like the rest of us, he’s concerned. We got to put a stop to this, Jay, or someone’s going to get hurt. Real soon. Real bad.”
I turned to Charlie. “Go home. I’ll call you when we’re done.” Then added, quietly, “Why don’t you give Fisher a buzz?”
“Okay,” I said to Pat. “I’ll meet you there. You got an address?”
“Yup. Site of the new condos they’re building. Up by the old Armory. Archer and Black Spring.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Five portable trailers crowned the hilltop behind a tall, chain-link fence that walled in the construction zone like the borders of a miniature military city. Thick, intersecting black tubes ran from each trailer to a clump of bulky power generators that thrummed relentlessly at the middle of the site. Bobcats and bulldozers, perched at odd angles on the slopes, tore off tundra and ripped up roots, dumping mounds of frozen earth, stone, and wood into towering piles for other big, bucketed machines to scoop up and haul away.
The scope of activity was surprising, since I’d known plenty of guys who’d worked construction, and the chief knock against the gig was how work dried up in the winter. Not unlike estate clearing, the coldest months usually spelled layoffs, leaving employees scrambling to pay bills until the thaw of spring. Yet here was this site, kicking it in high gear. Appeared to be a massive project too. Must’ve been three dozen workers toiling about.
The wind kicked up as Pat and I trudged up the hillside. Loosened snow clods fell from evergreen branches arched high above the footpath and exploded at our feet, unleashing the pungent aroma of pine needles. For as aggravated as Turley could make me, I was sorry he hadn’t made the trip. I found it easier talking to him than I did Pat. And I had more questions than ever.
Like we’d entered a war zone, felled trees and blasted shale spread outward in concentric waves from points of detonation, big bombs dropped from the sky. Not all was laid to waste, however; lingering traces of the man-made remained. Chewed-up sidewalk. Crumbled brown-stone. Telephone lines threading the grove. Over the ridge, I spotted the shell of a pay phone booth. The Armory Building hadn’t been functional in years; it was more a memento, a piece of history harkening back to the Revolutionary War. Didn’t matter now. The Ashton landmark was gone-blown up, bulldozed, and buried to make way for some shiny new luxury condominiums.
Droves of soldier ants in hard hats scurried, lugging and lifting, toppling and tugging, shouting at one another in Spanish. Drilling jack-hammers bore straight through the base of my brain, sneaking up behind my eyeballs, and kicking optic nerves with furious sonic force. The closer we drew, the louder, and more painful, it became.
Sturdy steel beams, sprung from the four corners, speared the leaden sky with statements of progress. Too late to turn back now.
Adam Lombardi-whom I probably hadn’t seen in at least two and a half years, not since Jenny and I had run into him at Applebee’s while she was still pregnant with Aiden-stood a grim field general amidst the rumble, barking orders at subordinates over the thunder and grind of retreating tanks. From that far away, I couldn’t see his face, but I knew it was him. Like his brother Michael, Adam had always towered larger than life. Big fish. Little pond. Even when we were kids, he possessed a commanding presence.
As we approached the gate, Adam glanced from atop his mountain, then motioned for someone to go down and let us through, before turning and trudging toward a trailer.
A few moments later, a stocky, dark-skinned man swung open the gate, passing along foam earplugs and orange hard hats, gesturing for us to follow, as jackhammers continued their unyielding assault.
When we got to the office door, you could hear yelling inside, though, because of the elevated noise in the yard, obviously not the specifics. As soon as we entered, the shouting stopped. Adam, dressed in what I could only call blue-collar casual-tucked oxford, tan khakis-stood stern-faced and flush, looming over a college-age girl, who clutched a sheet of paper in trembling hands. Upon seeing us, Adam instantly changed tack, washing away all hostility, expression transforming into welcome and warmth. He politely dismissed the girl. When she walked past, I could see her eyes were red and rimmed with tears.
Once the door closed, the office was surprisingly quiet, considering the sonic battlefield we’d just navigated.
Noting my surprise at this, Adam pointed at the roof. “Sound-proofing,” he said. “Had it done in all the trailers. Cost an arm and a leg, but worth every penny. Need to be able to get away and think.” He smiled wide.
We all shook hands, and Adam made sure to look me in the eyes and say my name. The hello felt less organic and more calculated strategy, a sales tip he’d picked up from a Dale Carnegie workshop or one of those Landmark seminars.
You certainly got your fill of the Lombardi brothers growing up in Ashton. They were easily our greatest success story. They played the part well. Black hair, blue eyes, athletically built, with sharp, dark, Italian features. They sported the quintessential all-American look, and both possessed the genial, dignified manner of the self-assured. It occurred to me more than once that Michael and Adam could’ve swapped professions, and each would’ve been equally at home in the other’s shoes.
“How’s Jenny?” Adam asked. “Aiden?” The earnestness was palpable.
“They’re okay.”
“I was sorry to hear it didn’t work out with you two.” Adam acted a little uncomfortable when he said this, lips compressing into a tight, thin line. I couldn’t help but feel this was also slightly staged, the way he momentarily cast his eyes askance, then knitted his brow, as though he too were mourning the loss of something precious.
Adam pointed down at his desk and a framed picture. It featured him and his wife, Heather, and their two sons, Adam Jr. and John, both boys dressed identically in green, collared golf shirts, posed in front of a wood-slat fence beneath a cherry tree against a powder blue background. The boys had inherited Adam’s black hair and square jaw. “I know how rough it can be,” he said. “I’d be lost without my family.”
We waited while Adam gazed wistfully at the JCPenney family portrait.
It was Pat who finally broke the silence. “I suppose you’ll want to be showing us that security tape?”
Adam smirked and unclipped the phone on his belt, tilting it sideways like a CB radio. “Luis, get me the surveillance disc from last night.”
A voice clipped through the static.
A few minutes later, we were all gathered around a plasma TV while Adam hit “play” on the DVD player. A black and white recording with eight split screens popped up, last night’s date and time stamped in military hours in the upper right-hand corner. Adam fast-forwarded until about the three a.m. mark, pointing at the lower left of the screen.
“There,” he said.
You could see a hooded figure scaling the fence and dropping on the other side, zigzagging and darting in the shadows through falling snow, moving from box to box, working his way across the grid like the world’s least graceful ninja. The figure, bundled in scraggly overcoat and bum gloves, morphed clearly into my brother.
In the last box, he’s standing on the doorsteps, banging at the lock with a rock, when he abruptly looks up and realizes he’s on camera. Instead of running off, my dipshit brother peers directly into the lens and smiles, displaying a mouthful of rotting teeth.