Black River (17 page)

Saturday, October 21

6:10 a.m.

T
hey
cut a hole in her head. “Not very big,” the post-op nurse
said with a smile. She held her fingers about an inch apart.
“About the size of a stamp.”

She busied herself changing an IV bag and straightening
the covers. “Her vital signs are better this morning,” she
announced. “I think doctor is going to be pleased.” Not
the
doctor or Dr. Something-or-other. Just
doctor
. Corso grunted.

He was holed up in a brown leatherette chair under the
window, sipping lukewarm coffee through an articulated straw, trying
not to wonder if things could get worse.

The door opened and another nurse marched in and
dropped both morning papers in his lap. She stood with hands on
half-acre hips, waiting for him to have a peek. Without looking down,
Corso thanked her, folded the papers in two, and stuffed them between
the cushion and the armrest. She huffed once, looked at the post-op
nurse as if to say
Some people
, and left.
Post-op was still chuckling when she completed her tasks and squeaked
out of the room.

Corso waited a minute and then crossed to the bedside.
Her rest was more troubled now. Her extremities twitched and, just
after the last doctor had left, she groaned once, as if to say enough
was enough, and tossed her head back and forth. He had the urge to pull
the covers up over the spiraled words and images that encircled her
bare arms, but she seemed so fragile, and her hold on life so tenuous,
he couldn’t bring himself to touch a thing.

He returned to the chair and looked down at the papers.
He used two fingers to pry the top paper off and turn it face up on
the seat. The
Seattle Times
.
Lunar-landing-sized picture. He and Rogers, hand in hand at the top of
the dock ramp, looking like they’d been rode hard and put up wet.
Banner headline:
EASTLAKE GUN BATTLE
.
He winced. Turned it over and grabbed the other paper. After the
Times
, how bad could it be?

Bad.
MARINA SHOOT
-
OUT
. The
Post
Intelligencer
photographer had caught them by the car: Corso
snarling at a cameraman, Renee Rogers, down on one knee, gathering her
things back into her purse. You could see it plain as day, the strap
and one cup of her brassiere hanging out on the asphalt. And the little
wet bundle still nestled inside the bag that you knew just hadda be
the panties. Warren’s really gonna hate this, he thought.

Corso deposited both papers in the bathroom wastebasket
and was on his way back to the chair when Detective Sorenstam poked
his hat in the door and gestured for Corso to come out in the
hall.

Hamer leaned against the wall, picking his teeth with a
blue twist tie. Sorenstam had his notebook out. “We talked with
Jonesy and his partner,” he said. “They caught the Barth
squeal.” Corso waited for him to get to the point. “The
number crunchers read it like you do. Guy’s living like a mouse
for years. Sending all his cash back east so’s his kid can get an
education.”

“Then, last year, he gets behind,” Hamer
offered.

“Med school’s a bitch.”

Hamer chewed the piece of plastic like a cigar.
“He tries to borrow thirty grand from his credit union, but they
turn him down. Back in Boston, the kid’s trying to finagle a loan
for himself.”

“And then,
bingo!
” Sorenstam snapped his fingers.
“All of a sudden he pays off the whole damn thing. All the way to
the end of the year.”

Hamer dropped the twist tie to the floor. “And
while that’s going on, this Barth guy is leaving the house every
day, kissing the little woman good-bye and going where?” He
didn’t wait for a reply. “ ’Cause he sure as hell
wasn’t going to his job at the school district. He’s on
leave June through September of ’ninety-nine.”

“Neighbors say everything was status quo. His
truck came and went as usual.” Sorenstam shrugged. “Wife
swears it was same-old same-old.”

“So where did he go?” Corso asked.

“Someplace you could get forty grand,”
Hamer said.

“What about this Joe Ball guy?” Corso
asked.

“Still missing,” Hamer said.

“Missing Persons has a guy says your friend Miss
Dougherty was the last person to see Mr. Ball before he turned up
lost.”

Corso held up a hand. “So let’s assume our
friend Mr. Ball was responsible for burying Donald Barth and his
truck.”

“Why would he want to do that?” Hamer
asked.

“Probably because somebody paid him
to.”

“Okay.”

“And whoever paid him is unhappy when the truck
turns up.”

Hamer bumped himself off the wall and wandered over.
“And you’re thinking your girlfriend here walked in on them
expressing their displeasure.”

“Could be,” Corso said.

“There’s a chase,” Sorenstam
prompted.

“She crashes.”

“One of them gets out to finish the deal, but
civilians show up.”

“How’d they know she was still
alive?” Corso asked. “How’d they know which hospital
to find her in?”

“Maybe they followed the ambulance,” Hamer
said.

“Maybe,” Corso muttered, without believing
it for a minute.

“Doesn’t explain their beef with you,
though,” Hamer said.

“Assuming they’re the same people, of
course,” his partner added.

They stood in silence for a moment, before Corso asked,
“You gonna put somebody on the door?”

Hamer looked puzzled. “What door?”

“This one.”

“What for?”

“In case you haven’t noticed,
somebody’s trying to kill her.”

“She’s safe up here. Nobody knows where she
is,” Hamer said.

“She’s unlisted,” Sorenstam assured
him.

“
You
found
her,” Corso said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hamer
demanded.

Corso leaned down and put his face in Hamer’s.
You’ll excuse me, won’t you, if I’m not exactly
dazzled by your investigative footwork?”

Hamer dropped his hands to his sides and leaned on
Corso with his chest. “I was you, I’d worry about my own
ass.”

“You was me, you’d probably have detected
something by now.”

Sorenstam was using his forearms to push them apart.
“Hey, now…hey, now…take it easy. We’re all on
the same side here.” He looked from one to the other but came
away empty.

“She needs protection,” Corso insisted.

Hamer used his finger to pry something out from between
his teeth and then spit it to the floor. “You think she needs
protection, you do it,” he said with a grin. “According to
the papers, you seem to be on a roll when it comes to saving damsels in
distress.”

Saturday, October 21

12:09 p.m.

J
oe
Bocco just
happened
to be Italian. When
you’ve got a name like that, a scar on your cheek, and you break
legs for a living, a number of stereotypes come immediately to mind,
not the least of which would be the assumption that, with his ancestry
and occupation, he must be part of some wider, more well-known criminal
conspiracy, involving others whose names likewise end in vowels.

Not so, though. Joe was an equal opportunity thug.
Billed himself as private security. For the right piece of change,
he’d dance the tarantella on somebody’s spinal column for
you or, if he was sure you were a pro, maybe even follow you through
the front door of a rock house.

They’d met five years ago, when Corso had been
working a story about the longshoremen’s union. Lotta pension
money turned out to be missing. Lotta people thought union president
Tony Trujillo was responsible. Some of those same folks wanted him
dead. Corso had interviewed Trujillo on a sweltering hot August day,
down on Pier 18, while Joe Bocco sat in the corner wearing a turtleneck
and a full-length raincoat. Never broke a sweat. Never even blinked.
Two days later, a pair of cowboys tried to force Trujillo’s limo
off the Fourth Avenue Bridge. Bocco killed the driver and left the
passenger paralyzed from the waist down. Front-page news.

Bocco checked the room, then looked over at Dougherty.
“This the one from the paper?”

“Yeah.”

He stroked his chin. “Which ain’t the same
one you was on the front page with?”

“No.”

He marinated the thought for a moment and then turned
his gaze back toward Meg. “So somebody tried to cap her and offed
a couple of civilians instead.”

Corso frowned. “Where’d you get that from?
That wasn’t in the papers.”

“It’s all over the radio.”

“Shit,” Corso said.

“Be better off the hitters didn’t know,
wouldn’t it? They any kind of pros, they’re gonna be pissed
as hell.” He pulled open the bathroom door and peered inside.
“Obviously, you think they’re coming back.”

“Could be.”

“And you want me to make sure she doesn’t
get any unwanted visitors.”

“That’s what I had in mind.”

“I quoted you a rate on the phone. That gonna
work for you?”

“Yeah.”

“Sooner or later I gotta sleep.”

“You got any brave friends?”

He shook his head. “Know a couple of fools,
maybe.”

“Have one of them relieve you.”

“Be another seven-fifty.”

“And Greenspan said there was no
inflation.”

Joe Bocco sneered. Did the insurance company
commercial. “How can you put a price on peace of mind?” he
asked.

Saturday, October 21

1:13 p.m.

N
ot
a word in six hours. Not since this morning, when they seen the TV news
about the bitch still being alive. Just sitting there on the bed,
cleaning his piece over and over again, staring out the window at the
water. When Ramón finally spoke, Gerardo nearly choked on his
room-service burrito.

“Comes a time you gotta listen,”
Ramón said suddenly. “Somethin’ in the world is
talkin’ to you, tryin’ to take care of you, and all you
gotta do is open up your ears and listen to what it’s got to
say.”

“That what you been doing?” Gerardo asked
around a mouthful of bun. “You been listening to the
world?”

Ramón felt his anger rise. “I meant like,
you know, metaphorically.”

Gerardo dredged a pair of french fries in ketchup and
stuffed them into his mouth. “What’s that mean?” he
asked. “Meta…”—he waved a pair of red
fingers—“whatever you said. What’s that
mean?”

“It means I’m thinkin’ we ought to
maybe lay low for a while,” he said, as much to himself as to
Gerardo. “Maybe take a little time off.” He looked at
Gerardo. “You could visit your sister in Florida.”

Gerardo washed the burrito down with Coke. “Kids
must be getting big by now,” he mused. He flicked a glance at
Ramón. “You could maybe see your mom.”

Ramón sighed. “We got nothing to say to
each other.”

“She’s your mother, man.”

“I’m telling you. It’s not me,
it’s her. She don’t want nothing to do with me. Got this
new husband. Plays fucking golf. Don’t want none of the old-time
shit coming back at her. She don’t talk to my sister
neither.”

Gerardo stopped chewing. Frowned. “We gonna tell
the Russians?”

“Fuck, no. They’ll cap us for
sure.”

Gerardo started to argue, but Ramón cut him off.
“We’ll get replaced just like we replaced those Colombian
dudes.” He held up two fingers. Two in the head. “They
ain’t gonna want us walkin’ around. We know where the
bodies are buried.”

Gerardo waved the burrito around. “That’s
another one of those meta things, huh?”

Ramón wanted to explain that it was and it
wasn’t, but instead he kept things simple. “Yeah,” he
said.

“When we gonna go?”

“Soon as we take care of business.”

Saturday, October 21

1:13 p.m.

“I
told you he was in her
pants,” Nicholas Balagula said in Russian. It came out with a bit
of reverberation because of the way the hotel’s Swedish masseuse
was pummeling his vertebrae as he spoke. She was a large red-faced
woman with thinning blond hair and a pair of big red hands strong
enough to strangle a heifer.

She grabbed a double handful of his smooth rubbery
flesh and began to knead it like bread. Balagula put on his glasses and
read the text beneath the picture of Renee Rogers stuffing her
underwear into her purse. He looked up at Mikhail Ivanov, who was
holding the paper in front of his face. “You
didn’t—”

Ivanov raised an eyebrow. “Of course
not.”

“Not the Cubans?” Balagula asked.

“I did what you told me,” Ivanov said.
“They followed him home to the boat and then reported in. That
was it.”

Balagula nodded. “When this is over,” he
began.

“I’ll see to it personally,” Ivanov
said. They’d agreed. When the trial was over, they disappeared
into retirement. No need for the likes of Ramón and Gerardo.

She was using the sides of her hands like cleavers,
working her way up and down his spine. The thick skin of his torso
vibrated from the blows.

“The timing is interesting.”

“I thought so too.”

“Or perhaps Mr. Corso merely has a knack for
making enemies.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Ivanov
said.

Balagula reached back and grabbed the woman’s
wrist. “Enough,” he said in English. The woman stepped
back, offered a curt bow, and crossed the suite to a black athletic bag
she’d left on the side bar. She pulled a white hand towel from
the bag and wiped her hands. “Charge to the room?” she
asked.

“Please,” Ivanov said, and she was out the
door and gone.

Nicholas Balagula pulled the towel from his buttocks
and sat up. “Some company for tonight.” Ivanov looked away.
“Something fresh. Something not so long on the vine this
time.”

“You think this is easy?” Ivanov snapped.
“In a strange city?”

Nicholas Balagula shuffled across the floor. As he
walked, his privates swung to and fro beneath his belly. He put a hand
on Ivanov’s shoulder. “Soon, Mikhail,” he said,
“this farce will be over, and you can run to that house of yours
in France. Find yourself a cow to service you.” Ivanov stepped
out from under the hand. “In the meantime…”

“I’ll do the best I can,” said
Ivanov.