Headstone City Page 6

  “Do you remember getting into the car?” Dane asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How'd you do it?”

  “What a foolish question.”

  “Then answer it.”

  “I—” Howards said, and fear reared up in his eyes. The warden did a good job at keeping control and not losing his cool. Dane had found him hard but fair. A bit too stuffy for his own good but not often judgmental. He was a little street ignorant and so he was more honest than other men in similar positions of power. Because he didn't have quite so much on the ball, he was somehow easier to deal with.

  “How?” Dane repeated.

  “I never opened the door, did I? I simply . . . entered.” Still reasoning his way through it, voice calm but lifeless. “I feel rather disconnected, which is not an altogether unpleasant experience.”

  If he didn't feel that way, he'd be screaming his ass off, halfway out of his head, knowing his soul was separated from his sleeping body. “Glad you're enjoying yourself.”

  “I didn't say that. Is this what the New Age metaphysicians would call my astral self?”

  “Call it what you like,” Dane told him.

  “What do you call it?”

  “I don't put a name to it.”

  “You often avoid questions put directly to you. The prison psychiatrists noted that in your files as well.”

  Dane tried not to sigh and failed.

  Sort of funny, the way the warden started staring at his hand, like he thought it might become transparent. Bringing it up to his eye, looking at the palm and inspecting the other side, touching his fingers together. What would those fuckin' doctors tell him now?

  Howards bent forward and said, “How odd and unique, to be born with this gift.”

  “It's not unique and I wasn't born with it. At least I don't think I was.” He still wasn't sure. Maybe the burden was always there, like with his grandmother, and the crash just made it heavier, stronger. Who knew, maybe Vinny was right, and they'd both been dead since the accident.

  “Someone else has it?”

  Dane found himself measuring his words. “Similar anyway.”

  “Who?”

  “Vinny Monticelli.”

  “Ah, I see. I've heard strange stories about him. How he believes he has visions and the gift of prophecy. So it's true, then? My God, how awful that'd be.”

  “He doesn't seem to mind.”

  “And you?”

  “I get along,” Dane said.

  “How did you both acquire such facilities?”

  “We went through a windshield together,” Dane told him.

  Looping over to the parkway, heading down to the beach. When he was a kid his parents used to take him out there to go swimming, the waters a lot cleaner than the sludge over at Coney. They'd build sand castles and his father would make sounds like the seagulls, his voice echoing among the dunes.

  Almost nervous now, thinking about it all a little more, the warden asked, “What happens if I wake up?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Might I die?”

  “I suppose it's a possibility.”

  “Oh, this is terrible. You don't understand what Edna's snoring is like. I must wake up twenty times a night. I suggest you get me back soon.”

  “In a minute. I need answers first. What have you heard about the Monticellis' action lately?”

  “What makes you think I'll tell you the truth?”

  “You don't have any choice.”

  “Oh my.”

  Howards thought about it and appeared to consider his options at the moment. Deciding whether he should say anything more to an ex-con released only this very morning. Sitting in the backseat of a Buick trying to stare through his hand. Scared that his wife's nasal drip might inadvertently kill him. But Dane meant what he said. Nobody on the night ride could lie to him.

  “Almost nothing,” the warden said, wagging his unwieldy head, looking out both windows, hoping they were on their way back to his house. “You must know that their business operations are almost completely legitimate at this point.”

  “More or less. But our problems aren't business, they're personal. And they still had some reach into your prison. They put a hit on me this morning while a couple of your boys looked the other way.”

  It rattled Howards and got him refocused. “The incident with Mako and Kremitz? In the showers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They said they'd attacked each other because of pilfered cigarettes.”

  “They're trying to save their skins. The Monticellis still have enough muscle to cause trouble. I'm just not sure why they'd bother going about it like that.”

  “Give me the names of the offending officers and I'll look into the matter.”

  Dane told him, just to nettle the bulls a little. The charges would never stick, but maybe it would shake them up. Word would get back to the family.

  “If what you say is true, Mr. Danetello, then I'll make sure these men are properly dealt with.”

  “Okay. Anything else you know that might help me?”

  “The FBI did inquire about you. There was some discussion on whether you'd be willing to wear a wire for them.”

  “What? If the family is so legit now, then why would the feds care enough to wire somebody? What are they after?”

  “Almost completely legitimate, I said. I assumed they wanted information about past activities, unsolved murders, that sort of thing.”

  “When was this?”

  “After the fire in your cell.”

  “So why didn't they approach me?”

  “I only dealt with a single agent. A man by the name of Cogan. He read through your case file and seemed to feel that contacting you was either unnecessary or could wait indefinitely.”

  That sounded like a fed all right. Plays it close to his vest, even in front of Howards. Makes some kind of a show about getting Dane to wire up, then just lets it drop. Something was stirring in the Monti camp.

  Dane drew up in front of the warden's mansion again. He checked the rearview and nodded to Howards. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Am I going to remember any of this? On a conscious level?”

  “No, you'll pass most of it off as a dream.”

  “I highly doubt that.”

  “We'll see.”

  The warden began to make his way back up the walkway, outside of the car without opening the door, gait unnatural and his ass cheeks clenched. Scared that his neighbors might be watching.

  Dane let out a chuckle and Howards's shoulders tensed. Like he might turn around and say something else, but he vanished before hitting the pool of light surrounding front door.

  Mostly a wasted trip, but he had nothing better to do. Dane started to pull away from the curb when a blur of motion caught his eye.

  Coming straight for him, running across the lawn, was Aaron Fielding, the dead grocer.

  The old man appeared as despondent as when he'd shown up in Dane's cell. Holding his arms out and waving them, his mouth moving but no sound coming out.

  “Ah, shit.”

  Like Dane didn't have enough troubles already. Now he had to get into the middle of this, whatever it was.

  Fielding had almost reached him when the guy started to dissipate, becoming dim and ashen, evaporating step by step until, only a few feet away, he dissolved into the fog.

  “Okay,” Dane said. “I get it. There's something important you want help with. I'm sorry I didn't listen before. Come back and tell me.”

  Dane waited there another five minutes, hoping Angie or Fielding would return. Or anybody else who wanted to come and talk with him. But no one did.

  All this, and some prick named Cogan skirting around in the shadows too.

  EIGHT

  Staring down at his grandmother's list, written in her crimped script, Dane walked into the La Famiglia Bakery and asked the girl behind the counter for ten anisette-almond biscotti, a half pound of pignoli cookies, three sfog
liatelle, and six cannoli. The girl let out a small chirp of anguish, turned pale as pork belly, and stared at him, her bottom lip trembling so badly it looked like it might flap away.

  He didn't want to do it, but he did it anyway. He spun and checked out the scene behind him. It was bad. He rubbed at his forehead, and went, “Uyh.”

  A three-man crew had made a move against JoJo Tormino. Two were dead, and the third held his quivering hands over his shredded belly, spurting blood and other colorful fluids between his fingers. The hitter whimpered, “Jesus Christ, get me to a doctor . . . I'll pay you anything, give you whatever you want. Please.”

  Dane turned away. JoJo had troubles of his own. He'd been shot four times: the left elbow, the left thigh, a graze along his jaw, and the one that really counted taking him high in his upper chest. Small caliber, maybe .22s, so the gunfire didn't bother anybody out on the street. Anything bigger than that and he'd already be dead.

  Still, JoJo was dying fast although he appeared to be calm, sitting at a little table with a folded newspaper in front of him, holding tightly to an empty cup of coffee with one hand, his .32 in the other.

  “I know you?” JoJo asked.

  Dane nodded. “I'm from the neighborhood. My father was a cop. Sergeant Johnny Danetello.”

  “Lucia's grandson.”

  That stopped him. You didn't expect your grandma's first name to fall out of the mouth of a dying mobster. “You know my family? My grandmother?”

  “You're the one who had all the troubles over Angelina.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Johnny. Used to pal with Vinny Monticelli when you were teenagers, right? You're the soldier boy, uh?” Blood seeped around the edges of JoJo's mouth. “Been in the army?”

  Dane was starting to get interested. “That's right.”

  “And in the joint.”

  “I just got out.”

  “Sit with me for a while.”

  In twenty-five years, Dane might've said five words in passing to JoJo, who was a low-level lieutenant in the Ventimiglia family. They looked into each other's eyes and it seemed to hit them both at the same time. Their lives had meant nothing to each other so far, but this moment took the structure of a great and fateful sharing.

  You couldn't get away from it. Sometimes people entered your sphere only by the force of their own deaths.

  The sucking wound in JoJo's chest gurgled faintly, but didn't affect his voice much. Strings of blood trailed down his chin and dribbled over the fresh carnation in his lapel. Fat beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and clung to his brow, his skin now a sickly, bright yellow. The bullet graze along his jaw had cauterized the flesh in a fiery, jagged pattern.

  “Please—God, please—”

  The bakery girl remained frozen in place, so completely still that Dane wondered if she'd fainted on her feet and just hadn't fallen down yet. Apparently no one had called 911. Dozens of people strolled past the store window, everybody so wrapped in their own worries they didn't even glance to one side or the other. Fifty bullets flying around and not one crack in the plate glass.

  “You need help,” Dane said.

  “Too late for that. Were you over there in the Middle East?”

  “No, I spent most of my time in the stockade.”

  “For what? Brawling? You look like a brawler.”

  “Apathy, mostly,” Dane admitted.

  He thought, Hell, if only Grandma hadn't gotten a sudden jones for sugar, I wouldn't have stepped into this mess. She's probably climbing the walls by now, waiting for her biscotti. The thought alarmed him nearly as much as all this shit.

  The hitter squirmed on the floor, his dripping hand stretching for Dane's ankle. Touching him lightly there the way Mako had done in the showers.

  The stink grew worse, but there was also a pleasant aroma of fresh struffoli and sfogliatelle wafting in from the back room. Dane eyed the scarred knuckles, wavering, praying the guy would just die already. “Please—please . . . am . . . ambulance—”

  “Don't let that piece of shit bother you,” JoJo told him. “Listen, I need you to do something for me.”

  The gun barrel eased into an angle, leveled directly at Dane's guts. Dane said, “Threatening me isn't going to help you much at this point.”

  The .32 steered away and pointed toward the far wall again. “Sorry about that. Bad habit.” JoJo grinned, his teeth smeared with bile. “I suppose all my vices have about run out to the end.”

  “Jesus, you gotta help—” The hand wrapped itself weakly around Dane's cuff, those ragged, dirty fingernails clawing. Dane tugged his foot away.

  “I need you to give a message to Maria Monticelli for me,” JoJo said. “You know her?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dane had been in love with Maria since he was about seven. Every guy his age had been and maybe still was. A soft tragedy welled inside him at just the mention of her name. And Angelina had looked so much like her.

  JoJo was fading fast, but he tightened his face against the pain. He reached his blood-smeared fingertips into his jacket pocket and came out with a satin box.

  “I'll pay you ten grand to tell her I love her. That I've always loved her. You give her this.”

  “A ring?”

  “An engagement ring. I planned on asking her to marry me.”

  “I don't mean to bring you farther down, JoJo . . . but why's it matter now?”

  That made the dying man chuckle until his lips were flecked with bubbling red froth. He strained to keep his voice under control. “I've been carrying this engagement ring around for six months but I never managed to get up the nerve to give it to her. I've meant to propose . . . seriously, you know, doing the whole down on one knee bit . . . three or four times, but something always threw me off track. Some deal that had to be done or another enterprise. But I always loved her. I don't want to kick without her knowing . . . for certain.”

  “Isn't that the kind of thing she'd already know?”

  “Probably, but it always went unsaid. I finally want to say it to her.”

  Dane let it go by that JoJo wasn't going to be able to tell her anything much in another five minutes.

  “We all got one thing in the world that we love more . . . than anything else, Danetello. That makes us do . . . what we do . . . makes us who we are. You understand that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I've got the money on me. A hundred c-note bills. A deadbeat sold his house and finally paid off the vig from three weeks ago. You give me your word of honor you'll tell her for me, and it's yours.”

  Dane looked over at the killer, who was still on the floor plying his guts, pulling out pieces and moaning in torment. “Isn't Don Monticelli the one who sent him?”

  “Nah, not the Don. Probably Roberto. That bastard never liked me. It's all so stupid. Not even about business.”

  “Because of Maria?”

  JoJo's eyes opened wide and he shook his head as if he still couldn't quite believe what had brought him to this. “Yeah. He wants her to marry a dentist. Or a podiatrist like her sister Carmella did. I worked a lot of good deals between them and the Ventimiglias. For ten years I've been making money for them, good enough to hand over . . . green bundles that could choke a cow. But because I walk in his father's footsteps . . . I'm not good enough for his sister. The hypocritical stugots.”

  It was like a scene out of Romeo and Juliet. Dane had never read the play but he knew it didn't end well.

  JoJo gave an agonized leer. “You're smart, and you're a little pazzo. I'm glad. You'll get the job done.”

  “It might take me a while. I got some other pressing matters. What makes you think she'll talk to me?”

  “The rest of us, we know you were only trying to help Angelina. Maria . . . she'll listen.”

  That sent a buzz through Dane's chest, his heart rate picking up speed at the sound of her name. “You think so?” It came out almost joyful, hoping that Maria was the one person in the family who didn't hate D
ane's guts anymore.

  “Sure—”

  “What can you tell me about what's been going on in the Monti family since I went away? The feds have been sniffing around.”

  JoJo let out a dry laugh. Wheezing harshly, at least one lung collapsing. “Heard you nearly got clipped your . . . last day in the joint.”

  “Something's been stirring them up. What is it?”

  “Dunno, but your friend Vinny . . . he thinks he's the new Bugsy Siegel.”

  “What do you mean? He wants to start up in Vegas?”

  A clot of ruby dark blood poured over JoJo's bottom lip. “You . . . haven't given me your word. I want . . . it . . . your oath . . .”

  “I'll tell her,” Dane said.

  JoJo reached inside the folded newspaper and pulled out an envelope stuffed with cash. He started to rise, like he wanted to die on his feet, then fell over backwards. He hit the floor hard with a crack and his death rattle lurched loose. Dane looked over at the Monti hitter on the floor and noticed he was dead too.

  The baker's girl stood there gasping with tears tracking her cheeks. When Dane said, “Go get the cops,” she finally broke into motion and ran out onto the street.

  Dane took the money and the diamond ring, thinking of Maria's exquisite face, and the sorrow of his life.

  NINE

  His myths were quiet ones without heroes, where the storms broke wide and heavy across the lawns of churches, and neighbors hid in their homes full of small tragedies.

  Dane had always been too observant for his own good. He could clock the passing of time by the divorces down the block. The swelling bellies of his schoolmates. Those who went missing, one by one, down through the yearbooks. Who drowned off Fire Island, and which one died in a car crash over on the Major Deegan. And how she died on this surgeon's table, and she died on that one, and she was the first girl he ever felt up, who died a year ago from ovarian cancer.