The Prince Of Deadly Weapons Read online

  Curled in the lip of the bottle was a business card which he removed while watching the threaded shapes and opaque night-shades around him. The card belonged to the Rocket Boyz and on the back was a handwritten note from Tommy Fenn.

  Thought we might have a beer and cool our jets some— maybe next time.

  As Dane held the noose in the web of his hand the phone inside rang and he felt as if something had reached out and grabbed him. He was sure it was Nathan until the message machine turned over and he heard Paul's voice. "Hey, I'm leaving you a fuckin' message—"

  * * *

  DANE GRABBED the phone. "I'm here, Paul."

  "You're not start in' to go native and screen your calls?"

  Dane backed into the darkest part of the room so he could watch the bay window and the open front door where that bottle slowly swung like a tethered weight.

  "No, Paul. I was just outside with a beer."

  "In that case I'm fuckin' relieved."

  Dane finger lifted a blind of the window beside him and scanned the muted shadows.

  "I could give you some bullshit about why I'm calling, but you know why I'm calling so I won't insult you with bullshit and don't, please, don't bullshit me."

  Dane walked the perimeter of the walls. He looked into one bedroom, then the next. "Forget it, Paul."

  "What was going on with the wonder boys?"

  Dane eased open the swinging kitchen door. It made a creaking sound. A sickly apprehensive creaking sound. Through the window he could see the light from the river beacon on that hilltop windmill shining like a small but perfect moon. It tinted the kitchen with a dreamy stillness except for another empty beer bottle on the table that Dane had not left there.

  Taylor would have been so perfectly alone here, Dane thought. And if he was someone vulnerable to all those invisible mind cuts that have at your courage, that sneak up inside your fears until you feel their shapes hunting you out, a game like this, well—

  "What am I, fucking wood, here? Are you gonna answer me?"

  "No, Paul. I'm not. And I won't bullshit you. I won't because you're honest and sincere. And you've been kind to me. So I will just keep silent."

  There was a gruff sigh at Caruso's end of the line. But it had a scratch of anger in it. Anger and frustration.

  "Don't fly too high, don't fly too low. That's not some frag-assed slogan. Take it from a man who did an eight-by-ten for the long haul. And it's not something you print on a friggin' T-shirt then forget."

  Dane let the kitchen door ease closed until there was only a crease of pale light slipping through. "If they ever bring back the Round Table you should get an honorary seat at it."

  "That's pure jive. That's you tryin' to get past me politely."

  "Politely is the operative word, Paul."

  More silence at Caruso's end as Dane went to the hall closet. From it he took his battered leather suitcase. He knelt down and opened it.

  "At least tell me one thing," said Caruso, "and then I'll hang the fuck up."

  Dane reached into a corner pocket to see if the sheathed battle knife and short-nosed .38 were still there.

  "And I want the truth."

  Dane held the revolver up using the porch light coming through the open front door to see if the gun was still loaded. "What?"

  "Are you alright, son?"

  * * *

  CARUSO HUNG up the phone and looked at his wife. The bar was closed, they were alone. She smoked and waited, he brooded and drank his beer.

  "Is he alright?"

  Caruso's pockmarked face creased. He glanced at the wall near where he sat. The first copy of the labyrinth he'd collected hung there. It was the one he'd had in his cell all those years and it showed an unaware Theseus being watched by the Minotaur as he made his way through the maze.

  "Is he alright?"

  "The boy's got the speak and doublespeak down pat." Caruso snapped his fingers rapid fire as he got up and walked over to the wall.

  "Do you think any of this has to do with Taylor?" said Sancho Maria.

  Caruso stared at the old print. The sorry thing had been taped and retaped so many times just to hold it together. It had chinks of missing paper that made it look like a target practice poster. Caruso ran his hand over the print and thought out loud, "What's in your head, son? What's in your head?"

  * * *

  DANE LEFT the beer bottle hanging in the noose. He closed the front door and turned off the porch light. He sank into the couch drained and put the .38 next to his wallet on the end table beside him.

  He lit a cigarette and stared at the bay window. Taylor's desk there, his chair angled slightly, were back lit by a mist sprinkled night sky. A wave of sorrow overcame him.

  "Am I alright, Paul asked," said Dane, talking to the desk. "Is there any way in this world to be alright… to be, all-right… to be, at all, right?"

  Clamped to each corner of the desk were blacks winging lamps and against the dark blue vagary of the bay window they looked like arms rising up out of the darkness, scaffold arms that seemed to hold two doomed eyes.

  He could imagine Taylor sitting there the night he died with all those stark ambiguities piling up around him. "We have our secrets, don't we." Dane stretched forward. "We just hid them in different ways, hide them in different ways."

  He smoked and all that sorrow he felt poured words into his mouth. "You did a heartbreaking thing, and a beautiful thing. Yes, I wouldn't say this to the others, but I could understand taking your own life. Maybe out of fear or desperation. Out of shame or guilt. Out of a need to self-punish. Out of some singular sense of rebellion. I could understand taking your own life out of just plain old-fashioned sorrow."

  He reached for the ashtray and the barbed-wire cut across his arm stung the muscles. He put the ashtray on the floor before him and looked down at the deep gash. He flexed his arm and the wound puckered like a fish gill breaking that lightning bolt almost in half.

  He grinned at the somewhat sadistic dichotomy of it. Then, he went back to looking at the desk, the window. This solitary imprint of time.

  "There is one thing I wish I could ask you. I have this purely terrifying feeling that sweeps over me and I could only describe it as a fearless pleasure at the idea of dying. I felt it today when I got ready to operate on warrior boy's throat. I felt it riding that pickup blind. I felt it on the bridge and that locomotive just inches from my face. It's like a come-and-have-at-me defiance."

  He sat there listening to the silence as if answers were awaiting. He smoked, he seemed to himself a stranger. "I wonder," he said, "if what I felt is a form of suicide."

  There was a deeply breathed pause. A searched-out personal reflection. He looked again at the desk. "Maybe we are closer to each other than anyone might ever suspect. After all, we share secrets, we share lies. We share the same house"— his face grew unforgivably human—"the same possibility for love."

  The phone rang. The message machine kicked in. It was Nathan asking to be called.

  A faint breath, the machine beeped off. Then, "I could take them," said Dane. "I could lie my way through them, then pocket the difference that it all makes. I could make them listen and believe what I say. I do make them listen and believe what I say because they are desperate to believe in something… as we all are. That is the beauty of the fraud, and the fraud of beauty. Yes, we have our secrets, don't we."

  He stared at the black air around his cigarette as it burned and he considered all the essential human qualities which were that easily obliterated, which were each of us as we rebel against the overwhelming.

  "I'd like to be twenty-five without all the baggage. But I tried that, and look where it got me."

  Dane glanced at the end table, at the gun and wallet lying side by side. Don't fly too high, don't fly too low. Maybe Paul was right. But if he was, then what? Do you just settle down to a steady diet of limitations? What about the voice that keeps on wanting to know where you are in the scheme of things. That wants to
know if you can or will test the hard divide. That works the combinations of you like some ghostly burglar till you have been opened up and seen for what and who you are.

  "He called me son tonight. It probably didn't mean much to him, but that's one time more than I ever was with even the slightest sense of sincerity for my well-being attached to it."

  Dane could not see his own lips go white, nor his jaw lock. He could not see the stoic clinch of his body to keep from crying. But he could hear his voice breaking all the way down to his heart and then some.

  When he was done crying Dane went into the bathroom and washed his face. He took a beer from the refrigerator; thankfully Tommy Fenn had not finished them all. He sat at Taylor's desk. He set his cellular down beside the beer. He drank the beer slowly and smoked a cigarette composing himself for the call he had to make.

  "I have news," Dane said into the phone. "There is a laundering operation going on here… Partly my contact, partly luck…"

  Without mentioning Essie's name Dane went on to explain how the shipment was being handled, which was exactly the same technique of using boxes of animal plasma that launderer in Los Angeles had been using along with his sons to siphon money to UCLA athletes.

  "Only this wasn't cash. It was diamonds… No, cut stones. So you'd only have them for nonpayment of taxes… About two million dollars' worth… See what you can find out about a man named Merrit Merton… Who else?… The Fenns are involved… Charles Gill… Nathan, probably. I'll know later."

  Dane stood up. "How?" He rubbed at the tension in the back of his neck. He walked to the open front door. He detailed his conversation with Nathan and a room full of dinner guests about his accident and opening the box before he delivered it. There was no mistaking the pause at the other end of the line, or the disturbed breathing.

  "Nathan's been trying to call me… Yes, I could be jeopardizing your operation. That sure is one way to look at i t… I did it for a reason… knowing the risk."

  He looked at the bottle hanging from the porch light by a string. He pushed at the bottle with a finger and it began to sway back and forth.

  "I had to because… I shorted the delivery. You heard me right. I copped about a hundred thousand worth of diamonds before I delivered them to the Fenns… I have them hidden away."

  Dane went back to rubbing his neck. He went and took the beer bottle from the desk and held it against the muscles along the side of his throat. The little coolness left to the bottle soothed the pain that was working its way up into his head.

  "You can't pull me out of here now… that is over… Why? Because they might suspect something if I just disappeared, right? And how would they react? Maybe they'd shut down the operation and reorganize. That could set you back months, maybe permanently. Maybe you never find out what happened to Greene or Reynolds. No, you can't pull me out of here… Yeah, I guess I've seen to it, right.

  "You can forget that threat… I'm not into begging… But isn't that why you brought me here? 'Cause I don't balk in a fight?"

  Dane went to the couch and dumped himself down. He reached for the pack of cigarettes on the end table lying there beside the gun. He tookthe pack, changed his mind, and tossed it across the room.

  "I know the risk… but it will flesh them out… They're gonna go at each other to find who shorted the load. 'Cause shorting loads puts everyone at risk."

  Dane glanced at the open front door, at the bottle Tommy Fenn left there still swaying back and forth from a string.

  "And their first stop will be the Fenns. Characters like that always are the first stop." Dane rubbed at his temples with an open palm. "I'm sure they'll get around to me… if Nathan doesn't have someone put a bullet in my head first.

  "Whatever you think, this is my territory now… Yeah, you're right… I could probably write a textbook on the hustle… Maybe I will someday and then you'll have all your trainees reading it… And maybe you shouldn't have sent me here in the first place. But it's too late for that, isn't it?…

  "Yeah… you're gonna ride with me all the way, or end up having to shut down my end of the operation. And I don't think you want to have to explain that away with everything I managed to help get you, just so far."

  He sat there silent. He listened to their threats and their accusations and their demands and even their questions. But behind all that official positioning he also heard they were trying to work up a little wiggle room amidst all that posturing because they were in no hurry to have to explain blowing off an operation like this that'd been delivering. Not with the mortality rate of government careers.

  "You always think I'm working an angle… You always get back to that." You lay out a premise, you set the tone, then you cap it with a temptation. There's only one thing left after that… Dane looked over at Taylor's desk. At a picture of Essie he had taken from Taylor's personal belongings and placed there. "Well… maybe I am working an angle… Fuckin' sleep on that."

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  NATHAN SAT AT the bar in his living room. Utterly disconsolate he rested his hands on the counter and closed his eyes. He prayed. He actually heard himself praying that all this could be made right. He was suddenly humiliated by the gesture, but it did not stop him from praying; it actually made the process all the more intense and resolute that God would show mercy and get this resolved so he could go on.

  Ivy came into the room and his eyes opened. She was wearing one of his bathrobes. She had taken off her makeup. She was drawn and her beautiful eyes were nearly colorless. "Did he answer?"

  "No." He saw she was trying to get a vial of pills open. "What's that?"

  "Xanax."

  "You already took Valium."

  "I took Valium." Her long fingernails literally wrenched the top off. "And now I'm taking Xanax."

  She poured red wine from a decanter into a glass to get the pills down.

  "You can't keep doing that."

  "I'm having a terrible anxiety attack, all right? I can't handle these situations." She emptied the glass of wine. She poured another.

  "You can't keep on like that."

  "He knows." Her eyes fluttered upward. "He knows."

  "He may not."

  "Didn't you hear him at dinner?"

  Nathan saw Ivy start to hyperventilate. She took deep breaths to calm herself. "I feel like I could have a heart attack." Dizziness set in and she had to bend down to try and get the blood back into her head.

  Nathan stood and held her but Ivy's body contorted. "You can't touch me right now; it makes me feel like I'm being tied down."

  She started to walk the room as if trying to escape what she felt. One hand gripped around the other, the fingers flexed erratically. She saw her ghastly pale reflection in the glass patio doors that looked out over Discovery Bay.

  On the farthest outskirts of the bay she watched boat lights as they moved on into the darkness. It was the night of Taylor's death all over again. The wine and pills were not working near fast enough. She walked back to the bar. "He's testing us."

  Her hand was trembling as she reached for the decanter.

  "We don't know that."

  "He's testing us. He's testing us. He knows. He wants to see—"

  She went to pour. Her fingers had a puttyish feel. There was no blood in them, it was all in her heart and chest and lungs and feet.

  "If he knew," said Nathan, "if he even thought something was wrong, why didn't he take us aside and say it? Hell, why didn't he just go to the police? Or to Roy—"

  The decanter dropped like a stone to the tiles on the word "police." It burst apart and scatter shots of glass and long strands of red wine were spit across Ivy's legs and she literally screamed out.

  * * *

  IVY SAT on the floor of the shower in the dark. The water was scalding hot, the room steamed over. Her legs were pulled up to her chest and with a cloth she wiped them down. There were numerous cuts and wine stains that looked like the tracks of some tiny creature that had skittered insanely a
cross her legs.

  The wine and pills were taking effect and that one blow-up had pretty much purged her of any energy she had. The shower door swung open. Her head rocked sideways. Nathan stepped in and the steam engulfed him. He was naked. He squatted then curled around Ivy, easing her forward so he could sit behind her with his back to the wall.

  "You calming down?"

  "Burning down is more like it."

  "Ivy… I need to… ask you something."

  Ivy's head dipped despondently. "Please, nothing now."

  "I've been avoiding it—"

  "Please."

  "You told Roy—"

  She tried to pull away. "Don't I mean anything to you?"

  Nathan's grasp tightened, she could feel the blood pumping through his forearms.

  "I haven't had the courage to ask you this before. But courage or not, I have to know now. You told Roy—"

  Her fingers clutched up around her face. She did not want to see, to hear, to speak… to remember. "I know what I told Roy."

  "Is it true or did you just say it because you felt Taylor might have suspected—"

  "I was trying to protect you from pain." Her body convulsed for one cruel moment. "Now try to think of me."

  "Taylor didn't say anything to make you—"

  Ivy wailed, "I was trying to protect you. Don't you understand? And fuck Roy for breaking a confidence."

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  CHARLES GILL WAS at an all-night rave club in Rocklin called Dance Heaven getting his fill of sonic addiction. He loved to come to this jammed-down hole in a strip mall where the bass tore your eardrums apart and fed off the vibe. Let his imagination indulge that all those young scenesters were there waiting for the stud mystery, waiting as the MC yelled into the mike, "Even guitar gods need a little earthly assistance," and then Charles would step into the applause through a pulse of lights and faces.

  That sense of being carried away on a youthful fantasy left him bitter because except for the fact that his position and money allowed him a few artistic eccentricities over people who hadn't the slightest interest, Charles would be condemned to a life of unfulfillment.