Frank only half-heard the last part. His mind was elsewhere. He saw a woman cocooned in duct tape, a drug-crazed man leaning over her, a clot of her hair in one fist, a hammer in the other.
“Hey. You with me?”
“Can do,” Frank said. “We’re good.”
“Listen,” the guy pleaded. “You pass this on, please, the part about me bitching about Lonnie, that’s strictly you and me here talking, right?”
“Got it,” Frank said.
“And the part about me losing them for two hours.”
“No problem.”
It took another five minutes to get rid of the guy. Once he was gone, Frank stumbled back inside the house and to his room. A dime bag of crank was stashed in the wall behind a dummy light socket. He did five fast whiffs, rearing back his head with each snort. Shortly his spine crackled, his eyes cleared. His heart pounded like a fist inside his chest. The real me, he thought, banging to get out.
He went hunting. Something told him to check the trunk of the Mercedes. When he did he found pay dirt: five rifles, plenty of shells. He grabbed a Remington pumploader, armed it with nine shot, pumped a round into the chamber and filled his pockets with extra shot shells. Then he got in the Mercedes, started her up, hid it out beyond the barn and went back to the kitchen.
Right when I needed you the most, he thought. Ain’t that the way. Sorry little cheat. Liar and cheat. He wondered how much of it had been her plan all along. The setup with the Mexicans, it was just a ruse to get him killed with the chavos. Shel had decided to hand him over to Felix and the law and the Briscoe family all on the same night, pass him around to the highest bidder. Play them all against each other and slip away in the chaos. He’d never seen it all this clear. It’s not me, he thought. It’s them. Every goddamn one of them.
But especially her.
He sat with the gun across his legs, stroking the barrel like a cat and drinking from a bottle of Old Fitzgerald he held by the neck. I survive Roy’s killfire and come home to this. What can you say? One thing after another, then a kicker at the end. All of it fitting and fair.
The sound of an engine drifted up the hill, approaching from the county road. Frank went to the window. In time he heard rubber on gravel, then watched as the headlights sprayed the grass beyond the bluff. This time it was Shel. He could tell that from the motor.
She entered the kitchen and glanced at the clock. After leaving Danny she’d hurried back from the bar only to find Frank still gone, so she’d turned around, headed back out, driving around in a fury, hoping against hope to find him somehow. That was hours ago. After that she’d just given in, kept driving just to move, because staying in one place felt too much like waiting to die. Who knew where Roy and his brothers had taken Frank after their little episode, if they’d taken him anywhere. He might very well have been left there to die. It might already be over. She thought of Felix Randall telling her she ought to be married. In sickness and in health, till death. She thought of Jill Rosemond pressing her on where to find Frank, like some middle-aged Nancy Drew out to solve The Mystery of the Two Dead Twins. Everywhere, everybody, everything: death.
And then she thought about Danny. After all these years. Danny.
Every plan she devised ran smack into a wall, every backtrack, too. There was no right way to go, no best way out or even any way out- which was why, in the end, she’d just come back here. The place where all wrong turns converge. Home.
She tossed her purse onto the breakfast nook table before spotting what else lay there: a cigar box filled with nine shot shells and a checkerboard.
“You play chess?” Frank asked from behind.
She turned to face him. He was juggling a chessman one-handed. The other hand held a shotgun. His eyes were bleary from drink and yet there was something else about them, too.
“My God,” she said. “You’re here.”
“True enough,” Frank replied. He gathered up the chessman in a knuckleball hold and hurled it across the kitchen at her. She ducked the missile and called out from behind her arm, “What’s wrong with you?”
“A wee bit surprised to see me?”
He crossed the distance in two long steps and gripped her throat with his free hand. With the shotgun he forced her head down onto the table.
“Thought I’d be gone for good, right? Dead maybe? Not enough to tell Felix: Do it, kill him. Had to make sure. Just in case the Akers boys fucked up. Play both ends. ’Cuz you had a whole new set of plans tonight.”
She squirmed in his hold but could not break free. Her arms flailed without connecting.
“They found you, right? The twins’ family, they made you an offer and you grabbed it. Was that before or after you fixed it with Felix?”
With his tongue protruding through his teeth he drove the gun butt hard into her kidneys. Her knees gave way and she slid to the floor. Her bladder broke. The gun butt came down hard again, this time on her neck.
“Frank,” she shouted, “you gotta listen, this woman- ”
“I know all about the woman,” he said.
He kneed her in the back, a vertebrae cracked. Grabbing a shank of hair, he dragged her kicking across the floor.
“What I ever do to you?” he said.
He pulled something from under his shirt. It had been hidden there, tucked in his belt. She saw what it was when he raised it over his head. A hammer. Shel screamed his name.
Chapter 13
Abatangelo stood pinning up prints in the back room of his North Beach flat, drinking a beer and listening to a cassette of Maria Callas performing excerpts from Tosca.
He turned around to recue the tape each time his favorite aria ended: “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore.” Now in my hour of sorrow, Maria Callas sang, I stand alone. Callas’s was not normally a voice he preferred, but in this particular rendition, this aria, she gave him the chills. He’d read somewhere that the aria was often called “Tosca’s Prayer.” A misnomer, he thought. She isn’t praying. She’s braving her fate. Which brought Shel to mind and returned him to the matter at hand.
Despite the repartee, a hint of the old spark, even a kiss, Shel had left him standing there. A perfectly good reason existed for that, of course. Frank could be the biggest skank on earth, it wouldn’t change a thing. There was a child in the picture. And the boy got waxed. God only knew what the whole story was. Regardless, he knew Shel well enough to know she’d never in a thousand lifetimes turn her back on a thing like that.
And what about you, he thought. All you ever want to do is help, right? Like some heartsick freelance Boy Scout. All you want to do is say, Tell me how far to go. I’ll lie, cheat and steal for you, baby. Better yet, just like Tosca- I’ll kill for you, if you suffer for me.
He dropped into a chair near the wall and wiped his hands on a dish towel. The damp prints dripped on the floor, dangling from a plastic clothesline hung wall-to-wall by eyehooks. This was the darkroom. With sheets of black plastic he’d sealed off the kitchen in his flat. Upon a card table he’d stationed rubber bins filled with developer, stop bath, fixer. He worked by infrared lamp and an egg timer.
The photographs were those he’d shot from the hilltop overlooking Shel’s house. They seemed very much beside the point now. Even if he passed them along to Jill Rosemond the PI, what would it net him? Frank and Shel were most likely already on the run somewhere, far away and for good, leaving behind lonesome Danny and his pointless schemes.
He did not hear the rapping at his door until his next recue of the tape player. He remained still a moment, ear cocked, wondering if he hadn’t imagined the sound. It came again, more like a scratching than a knock. He tread toward the sound in his socks across the tile floor.