Shotgun Lullaby (A Conway Sax Mystery) (35 page)

 

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

“It is,” Charlie said. He did not turn. He showed no surprise.

He slid three feet to his left.

I sat next to him. “You let her go easier than I would've thought,” I said, looking straight ahead like Charlie.

He cocked his head. “Emma? Or Rinn?”

“Emma.”

He lipped a
puh
sound. “They held the cards. Rinn and Peter.”

“Not the DNA card.”

“I play that card, I fuh”—he flinched like he expected the Jesus up front to shoot lightning from his eyes—“I screw up Emma's life for a good long time. Besides, you got any idea what the discovery phase of a custody trial would turn up?”

I thought about the abandoned mill, the stench from the body dump. I nodded. “A pretty good idea, yeah.”

We were quiet awhile.

“My problem,” he finally said, “I'm immersive, as a smart lady friend of mine once put it. When I jump in, I jump in with both feet. Back when I was in the thick of the life, I got out of bed every morning looking for reasons to beat on guys. To torch their offices, bust their fingers, humiliate 'em in front of their families.”

“What happened?”

“Jazz happened. Nah, that's not it. Life happened. I changed. I got sick of it. Then one day I chucked it all, or as much as they let me, and hitched everything I had to the Hi Hat.”

“Both feet,” I said. “All in.”

Charlie looked at me for the first time. “Got a feeling you know a little something about that. About jumping in now and asking questions later.”

I said nothing.

“When I look back,” he said after maybe thirty seconds, “all the signs were there that my own guys, led by my own
son,
were screwing me. I didn't see it because I didn't want to see it.”

That made me think of Peter Biletnikov, playing dumb while his fancy shotguns were used to blow holes in people.

I said, “You know what happened to Teddy? How it ended with me and him?”

“Teddy the freak who was all set to slit my throat and take my action?”

“No. Teddy your son.”

Charlie said nothing.

“Nobody should lose a son. But what he did, a kid … a
girl
I care about was at—”

He raised a hand. “I know as much as I need to know. Say no more. He was a true disappointment.”

So that was that.

“Deep down,” I said after a while, “you knew your own guys were gunning for you. But you hated getting pulled back in. You were tired of it. It wasn't your thing anymore.”

“Yeah.”

“I could tell in the skate park. That wasn't your idea at all, was it? You seemed … tired.”

“That's the word. Like I said, you know a thing or two about all this. How tired it makes you. That's the part people, civilians, don't get.”

“I get it.” My voice was so low I don't know if he heard me.

Charlie checked his watch, sighed, grabbed the pew ahead as if to pull himself up.

“Wait,” I said. “Almost Home. The halfway house. Did your man, the guy I call Boxer, don't even tell me his real name again 'cause I don't care, did he go in there looking for Gus?”

He nodded. “That's what I heard when I leaned on a few people, yeah. They decided since I'd turned into a jazz sissy who forgot how to be a criminal, they needed to turbocharge their rep, at least while they were getting started. You know, ‘Don't even think about messing with us, look what we do to skimmers and slow-pays.'”

It made sense. “Teddy told Boxer what Gus looked like. He went in all jacked up, blew away the wrong kid. So he had to do it all over again out in Sherborn.”

“Nah,” Charlie said, standing, twisting at the waist the way people do when they've been sitting a while. “That one he didn't do.”

I froze. “What?”

Pundo hadn't picked up that this was huge to me. He kept twisting, now with both hands at the small of his back. “He drove me to Smalls that night to catch a set by Eli Degibri. I dragged Teddy along, hoping against hope to civilize him.”

“What's Smalls? Where is it?”

He looked at me like I'd asked who was buried in Grant's Tomb. “The Village. West Tenth, I think.”

“New York?”

“Of course New York. I'm leaving.”

I gave Charlie Pundo a ten-step head start while my head tried to arrange new facts.

Boxer hadn't killed Gus.

So who had?

Outside, I caught up to Charlie and peppered him with questions: double-checking, triple-checking. He was casual. He was dead certain. He wasn't hiding anything—why would he cover up for the jerk who'd tried to blindside him?

I sifted old info, new info. Shuffling along just behind Charlie, not paying much attention, I bumped into him when he pulled up.

We stood before the tailor shop. The little man inside was straight out of a Disney movie: the slight stoop, the smile that was sad but only a little, the chalk marks on his trousers where he wiped his hands. When he spotted us, he made a just-one-minute gesture and bent over a big padded table that dominated the shop.

“They can take a lot from me,” Charlie Pundo said, “and indeed they have. My wife died at forty-two. The only girl I've loved since up and hauled my baby back to that dipshit Biletnikov and told me I'd damn well best stay mum about it. My consigliere and my only son humiliated and backstabbed me.
You
came along and torched my club and my sweet, sweet record collection.”

He sighed long and deep. “But I've still got Arturo. I'll always have Arturo. Good-bye, Sax. Don't come around again. Not for a while, anyway.”

I barely noticed.

I was watching Arturo. Watching him slice through gray wool with a curved-blade X-ACTO knife. He made it look so easy. Used a thin paper template, but you got the feeling he could do it freehand if he wanted.

I stared.

I stared because I knew who killed Gus Biletnikov.

And it wasn't Boxer.

And it wasn't Fat Teddy.

 

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

The moon was one night short of full.

It lit the Biletnikov place as nice as you could ask.

But both the main house and the cottage were blacked out.

Which wasn't right.

I'd flown. I'd learned my truck's front wheels shimmied when you hit a hundred and fifteen. It was usually a ninety-minute drive. I'd shaved that by twenty minutes.

I'd called Randall, Rinn's cell, the Biletnikov home line, Lima's cell. I'd even had Information hook me up with Brad Bloomquist's apartment line.

Voice mail everywhere.

The only one I'd left a message with was Randall. Told him to get the hell over to the Biletnikov house fast and do whatever he needed to protect them from Brad.

Brad Bloomquist.

Whose car was still here in the drive, just ahead of Randall's.

Brad Bloomquist: Mister Mellow, called himself The Dude after some guy in a stoner movie.

Brad Bloomquist: lover of Gus Biletnikov, who apparently didn't love him back anything like enough.

Brad Bloomquist: stoner-stalker who moved from Cape Cod, the perfect locale for the likes of him, to a nowheresville apartment in Framingham—to be near Gus.

Brad Bloomquist: crazy-jealous when Gus, who he called his first love, got it on with Rinn at the sick behest of Peter Biletnikov.

Brad Bloomquist: who was tight with Gus and Rinn during the spurnings-and-strikings days. Which meant he would have known about Peter's fancy shotguns.

Brad Bloomquist: whose apartment featured a table like Arturo the tailor's, and all the leatherworking tools you could ask for.

Brad Bloomquist: who must have stolen a pair of boots from Donald Crump, then sliced most of the leather away and worn them like thong sandals.

That's the part that had clicked as I looked at Arturo the tailor in Springfield. Brad's size 16 feet would have hung out of Donald's boots all over the place—but the prints would point straight at Donald.

So add another line to the résumé. Brad Bloomquist: a lot more sneaky-clever than he looked.

A few other things had clicked for me on the way here.

The Almost Home hit had been pro city, the shooter—Boxer—calmly blowing away a pair of witnesses just because they turned up in a stairwell.

But the killing of Gus had been a different deal. Amateur hour, a passion kill using bird shot from Peter Biletnikov's gun safe.

It all clicked. I'd had a long, hundred-and-fifteen-mile-an-hour drive to beat myself up for not seeing it earlier.

Why is Brad's car still here? Why is a compound that ought to be a beehive, baby and all, blacked out?

I grabbed my small flashlight, climbed from my truck, stepped lightly across gravel to the main house's front door. Felt my heart jumping. Breathed myself calm.

The door was not locked.

A shooter in the dark would aim chest-high. So I got low. Crawled across the front hall.

Soon as I hit the kitchen, I smelled it: copper and fizzled firecrackers.

Which meant, I knew, blood and gunfire.

Not fresh. Not old either.

Didn't need my flashlight. The moon was plenty. I crawled toward the hallway that led to a day nursery for Emma.

As I cleared the kitchen's island, I saw her.

Rinn.

On her back, soles of her shoes aimed at me. One rested sideways on the floor. The other pointed at the ceiling.

The blood pool beneath her was going crusty on top.

It was a big pool.

No pulse. Dead dead dead.

Her pretty hair covered most of her face and one eye.

I crawled through Rinn's blood. I crawled down the hall to the day nursery.

I rose.

Huh?

No crib.

I racked my brain, replayed the day I'd tossed the place. Yes. There'd been a crib, a little mobile with planets, the mobile high above, no risk of the kid grabbing anything.

So where was the crib?

A window smashed.

I ducked instinctively even as I figured out the noise had to've come from the guesthouse.

I straightened. I ran, feeling Rinn's blood on my hands and knees where I'd crawled through it.

Out the front door, take a right, down the hill.

Thunder. A shotgun blast. It lit up the cottage's big front window.

I pinwheeled in grass gone slick with dew. Moon at my back as I neared the guesthouse.

There was a light in its window now: Brad Bloomquist was all done caring who saw him do what. I saw him framed perfectly by the picture window, looking at something I couldn't see on the floor before him.

He'd broken open a single-barreled shotgun.

He was inserting a cartridge.

I lengthened my stride.

I looked ahead.

I timed it out.

I hurdled a little landscaping bed that fronted the cottage porch. The ball of my foot hit the porch railing nicely. The railing wobbled some—things you notice when your head's set on full-maximum intake—but held.

I pushed off.

I closed my eyes.

I went through the picture window headfirst.

 

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

At the Hi Hat, I'd been protected by a car.

This hurt worse.

I hit hardwood heavy and ugly. My shoulder made a ratcheting sound.

I ignored pain. I stood.

Bloomquist had spun my way, wearing a look of dumb surprise. The room's only sofa separated us.

I saw what he'd been staring at while I approached.

Haley. On the floor. Half-hidden from my view by the sofa.

But only half.

She was bleeding hard. Streams like something from a squirt gun jetted from the right side of her chest. From her neck and face. From her hairline.

She was pulsing blood, but she was
alive
. Staring up at me. Blinking, but not truly seeing.

Bloomquist said, “Huh.”

And he smiled.

And he pulled the trigger.

I threw myself backward to the floor.

It felt so slow. It felt hopeless, useless. I saw, took in, sensed
everything
. It seemed I could draw a picture of every pellet that left the barrel.

During the instant I was laid out horizontal in midair, looking up, not yet on the floor, I watched pellets pass over my busted nose. I swear I did.

It seemed that way, anyhow.

Then my head hit hard, and both my feet stung like hell—shot had hit the soles of my boots.

I wasn't dead. I wasn't even hurt that bad.

I shook my head to clear it, shook it like a wet dog.

That's when I saw Randall. Off to my left, in the small kitchen area. I couldn't see much of him, but what I could see showed pinprick blood.

Same as Haley.

All this registering in my head in some tiny part of a second.

While the main part of my brain screamed at me that a single-barreled shotgun takes time to load.

I crossed over the back of the sofa without touching it. I got my left hand on the shotgun's barrel before Bloomquist could move it. With my right hand, I went for his left eye.

I didn't get it—the eye squinched shut in time—but the move kept him on defense. Brad Bloomquist might be a three-time killer going on four, but he'd never had a serious man try to thumb out his eyeball.

Wish I could say the same.

We grunted. We wrestled. Standing there, toe-to-toe, while Randall and Haley bled out three feet away.

Bloomquist was a big fucker. Once he spread his legs and planted those feet, there was no moving him.

In a few seconds—all this felt slow but happened fast—he realized there wasn't a lot I could do with him. He started to feel confident. Still clinging to the gun's butt and trigger guard with his right hand, he found my ear with his left.

And twisted.

I shrieked. Couldn't help it.

He twisted harder.