The Last Whisper in the Dark: A Novel (27 page)

Five wouldn’t fit in the fastback.

They hadn’t carjacked some old lady and held her hostage in her station wagon.

There’d been two getaway cars. When the driver wiped out, the crew piled into the second car. With a second driver. Someone who knew the route. Someone who was sharp behind the wheel.

Those scrapped cars were laid out in heaps. Piles of bumpers, engines, crankshafts, undercarriages, hoods, doors, stacks of tires. Cairns of spare parts rose up all around me. I drifted among them, scanning the roofs of the houses that backed up to the lot. Cheap A-frames, saltboxes, and double-wide trailers. It took me a while of meandering before I could see a pattern emerging to the maze. Another route through the lot came into focus. It led to a well-hidden little alcove shored by gutted, topless convertibles covered in bird shit. Inside the niche was a tarp-covered vehicle.

I untied the tarp and pulled it off. Beneath was a ’62 Crown Vic with a battered body and a souped engine. It was big enough for all five of them, but Chub would’ve wanted to go his own way afterward.
That’s why the two cars. The tight four-man crew heads off in one direction, Chub speeds off on his own. But after the botched bank job, and the driver breaking his neck, Chub got stuck taking the rest of the heisters out of there and babysitting them until the heat was off. Except with all those dead ex-cops the heat would never be off.

Thank you, Scooter. Two pictures of houses, one hidden behind the other, helped to point the way.

Last time I was here I thought about how Chub would have land, a house, or a pad already prepared. Maybe out of state, maybe upstate.

Or maybe right behind the garage.

Just like hiding a second safe beneath the first. I could see him being brazen enough to buy a hole-up space within spitting distance of his own place of business. It was ballsy as hell. Maybe it was smart too, I wasn’t sure.

There would be a well-hidden locked gate somewhere nearby. I didn’t bother with searching for it. I took out the passenger-side car mat of the Crown Vic and tossed it over my shoulder. The ten-foot fence had metal slats like Venetian blinds woven through the chain links for privacy. It made it hard for me to get a grip as I jumped onto the hood of the Vic. I reached, clung to the fence, and started to climb. When I got to the top I finagled the car mat over the b embplasarbed wire topping and managed to scurry over without tearing my flesh or my clothes. I leaped down and found myself in the small grassless yard of a dark saltbox.

It didn’t matter. I knew someone from the crew would be patrolling and watching, just like he had that night I staked out the garage. There was a reason I’d felt eyes on me.

I stood there and lit a cigarette. I smoked in the cold air and said, “I want to see Chub.”

The guy was careful. It took him a couple of minutes to work around and sneak up behind me. He pressed the barrel of a gun into my ear. “You didn’t learn the first time you ran up against us?”

“I wasn’t running up against you then or now, even though everybody else in the world is. I just want to talk to Chub.”

“You’re packing. Lose the piece.”

“No.”

“Then I’ll shoot you in the head right now.”

I took another drag on the cigarette and flicked it away. “It’s almost four o’clock in the morning. You’ll wake up a lot of people. This might not be the best neighborhood on the island, but I bet a .44 going off nearby would still get a few folks dialing 911.”

“Let’s go.”

I led him toward the back door of the saltbox. The door was unlocked. I walked in and lights were on. The place had been blacked out like a London apartment during the Blitz. The window shades were made of an especially thick material and were pinned in place.

The other two crew members stood there in a kitchen empty of furniture. Empty beer bottles had been carefully restocked inside the cardboard case containers. I smelled recently overcooked meat. Plates, glasses, and silverware had all been washed and stacked in the drain-board. Like me, they’d probably heard a lot of the same stories of guys on the run who’d wiped down all the prints from some hideout, forgetting about the dirty dishes. They weren’t going to make such a dipshit mistake.

The other two held their hardware on me as well. All three of them were carrying .44s. Without their little black wool caps on and their coats zipped to the collar, they still looked similar, cut from the same cloth, but I could pick them out of a lineup now.

I knew their names. “Dunbar, Edwardson, Wagstaff. Which is which?”

“That shouldn’t matter to you.”

It didn’t. I applied the names just to keep the three of them straight in my head.

“He’s carrying,” Dunbar, the guy who’d been roving the area, told them.

“How about if you lose the piece,” Wagstaff said, emphasizing his words by pointing his gun at my face. I removed the Sig Sauer from my pocket and Dunbar shoved the barrel of his .44 a little harder against the back of my head, reached over my shoulder, and snatched the pistol from my hand. He jammed it into his own coat pocket.

“Didn’t we make our point well enough last time, little doggy?” Wagstaff asked.

“That was before you guys turned a score into a bloodbath and lost your driver.”

“He wants to see Chub,” Dunbar told them.

Edwardson and Wagstaff shared a weig">No Boundariesre couple of hty look and then Edwardson shrugged and Wagstaff nodded. “Let him.”

Dunbar pushed me forward into the next room. Calling it a living room would’ve been gracious. The walls were empty. A small television had been set up in the far corner. At one window sat a chair. On the sill was a pair of binoculars. A slit had been made in the shade. Chub had it worked out that he could look into his office window from here and check on cops, feebs, or hitters who wandered into the garage. I guessed that some of the metal slats in the fence had been removed in certain places so the crew could take turns checking on anybody nosing around. That’s who I’d felt watching me.

Chub was on a brown Naugahyde couch with orange throw pillows, and he was dying. One look told me he wouldn’t last another hour. He lay half covered by a too-small comforter, coughing and shuddering with his shirt off, his chest much whiter than the seeping bandages wrapped around his stomach, lathered in a viscous ashen sweat. His lips and nostrils were caked with blood.

He gave me a cockeyed grin.

He said, “Hey.”

My mind was filled with so much that I wasn’t thinking about
anything anymore. I held my ground for a second. Dunbar crowded me and I fell back against him. He shoved me off. Scooter’s smiling dog ran past in my mind, and in my mind I named him FDR.

I kneeled at Chub’s side, peeled his bandages back while he moaned, and tried not to vomit at the smell. The bullet had torn a jagged chunk from his lower belly, leaving a runny hole the size of my fist. It was badly infected and oozing pus and bile. There was no exit wound. They’d found him some bent doctor, but the butcher must’ve been like most underworld docs: disgraced, drunk, and ambivalent. There were hesitation cuts. The incisions were amateurish. Some halfhearted attempt at suturing had been made but the stitches had pulled. Chub’s skin had started to go citrus yellow.

“Which one of these pricks shot you?” I asked him.

Wagstaff said, “Us? We didn’t do it. A trigger-happy armored car guard pulled his pistol and started the ball rolling.”

I hissed at Chub, “Why for fuck’s sake did you go on the job?”

“I wanted a bigger cut.”

“Why?”

He grinned stupidly. It seemed a point of pride with him not to answer me.

“The doc wasn’t sure if the bullet nicked his liver,” Edwardson said. “We’re pretty sure now.”

“Antibiotics?” I asked.

“He’s taken them all.”

“You guys couldn’t have broken into a pharmacy and picked him up something else to try to hold off infection?”

“We couldn’t leave. That was the whole point of locking down in here.”

“You could’ve called me.”

“We wanted to,” Wagstaff said, which surprised the hell out of me. “But he told us no. He’s a stubborn son of a bitch, same as you.”

That made Chub chuckle a little, followed by a wave of agony
rolling through him. He shuddered and tried to keep from screaming. The concern on my face made him laugh even more, which caused him greater distre">“Yes, she is,” I agreed.tpss. He leaned aside and spit red-flaked phlegm into a wastebasket set near his head. He huffed for air but couldn’t seem to catch his breath. I put my hand on his bare back and rubbed and patted.

“The doc gave him something for the pain,” Edwardson said.

“Where?”

“End table.”

The freshly polished tabletop smelled of pine. They probably cleaned every couple of hours to sweep prints and strands of hair away. They weren’t just pros, they were fastidious, obsessive fuckers who’d been crawling all over each other for days. I looked for prescription bottles. It took me a second to realize that wasn’t the kind of painkiller he’d been given.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, lifting a baggie of white powder. “This is heroin.”

“It’s done the job,” Dunbar said. “He’s not feeling much. Don’t let him have any more right now or he’ll OD.”

I pulled out my phone and all three of them said, “No,” and pointed their .44s loosely at me. They were starting to look exactly alike again. I drew the Sig Sauer. I’d plucked it from Dunbar when I’d fallen against him. I pointed it at Edwardson’s chest because he happened to be standing in the middle of the trio.

“You let me call,” I said, “or this situation goes into meltdown.”

“Then that’s what happens,” Wagstaff told me. “Give up the phone and the piece.”

“No.”

I was close. I was on the edge. I’d been there for a while. The underneath called to me and begged me to fire, to murder, to die. It promised me the end of anguish and a proper understanding of purpose.

Chub said, “Terry, don’t be a moron.” He giggled. The H had
him out of his head, but it didn’t seem to be helping much with his pain. He held his hand out to me but I was standing just beyond his reach. He tried to grab me again. “Forget it.”

“You need a hospital.”

“No hospital.” His voice was barely a whisper.

“Now’s not the time to be obstinate, you asshole.”

“Would you go?”

I would go. I would run. I would push little old ladies out of the way. I wouldn’t die on Naugahyde, coughing up my yellow guts. But I didn’t have a wife and child to share in my stupidity and terror and humiliation. If I did, I’d probably die quietly alone like Chub wanted to, if I could find the courage.

I snapped my phone shut. The three of them jammed their guns in my face and grabbed the phone and the Sig Sauer. This time Dunbar sneered and tucked the piece in his inside pocket.

They saw in my eyes that I wasn’t going to do anything else. That there wasn’t anything else to do.

“You should pack faster,” I said. “You need to get out of here now.”

“Why is that?” Dunbar asked.

“Some very bad people are after you. If I can find you, so can they.”

“We’ll be gone in fifteen minutes.”

“Go faster.” the only one I had left aplas

They left me there with Chub and gave the place one last quick spiff job, wiping all surfaces down, before heading to the bedrooms to pack up. The hideout was blown. Even if they killed me, what were they going to do? Hide both our bodies in the bathtub? Bury us in a back lawn that didn’t even have grass or leaf cover? The crew gathered their guns and satchels and luggage.

I sat on the edge of the couch and took Chub’s hand.

“You watched me come and go,” I said.

“They saw you and told me.”

I grabbed a pillow, tore off the outer lining, and ripped it into rags. I soaked them in the sink and washed his face down. I dabbed his forehead and wiped his mouth. “Why didn’t you talk to me?”

“I wasn’t sure if you would help or not.”

I couldn’t blame him for that. “So why was my number in your phone?”

His organs and nerve endings were shutting down. The pain seemed to ease. He spoke more clearly. “In case anything happened to me, Kim would give you a call and you’d look out for her.”

The crew came out carrying their bundles. They paused in the doorway but had nothing to say. Chub gave a nod in their direction.

“Watch out for a handsome guy with perfect teeth,” I said. “He’ll ice you with a needle, if you’re lucky. If you’re not, he’ll just scramble your prefrontal lobe.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Wagstaff asked.

“Just keep an eye out for him.”

Then they were gone. I didn’t know where they had stashed a new car, but they’d have one. I didn’t hear them walk away. I didn’t hear a car engine start. They stepped into the darkness and disappeared along the path of their plan, one that Chub had helped set up. He had organized a hundred escape routes before, but now when he needed only one more, there weren’t any left for him.

Not even thirty seconds later, a sound. I heard a heavy, blunt noise like a wet cough. It was a grunt of pain. It was the unmistakable sound of instant, traumatic death.

Then, from the doorway. “Terrier?”

“Hello, Walton.”

He stepped into the living room. He stood there being beautiful and merciless, with three more lives added to his score sheet. His hands were in his pockets. I still didn’t see the needle, wherever it was, whatever it was. He beamed at me.

“Who’s this?” Chub whispered.

Endicott said, “I was hired to kill you.”

“Too late.”

“I see that. I can smell the sepsis from here. I’m sorry.”

“If you were just going to kill me anyway then why are you sorry?”

“I would have made it painless. I would’ve answered your call. I would have fulfilled your purpose.”

“My call?” Chub asked. “My purpose?” He looked at me.

“Walton talks like that,” I said.

“Oh.”

Endicott watched me, smiling, his brash good looks almost daring me to jump forward and meet my own death head-on, his will drawing the mongoose forward to the serpent. Except he wasn’t the fulfillment to my purpose and he wasn’t getting paid to dispose of me.