Peril (2 page)

“We're having tuna melt,” she told him. His favorite.

He kissed her, walked to the car, and got in. Denise offered a grudging, halfhearted wave as he drifted backward into the cul-de-sac.

Della returned Nicky to his chair, then began to load the dishwasher. The school bus arrived and Denise bounded onto it. Then the bus pulled away, and Della glimpsed her friend Sara's house across the cul-de-sac. It looked cold and cheerless and abandoned, everything
her
house was not, and she felt inexpressibly lucky to have found a guy who'd take care of her, make sure she had everything she needed, provide a life that was truly without peril.

STARK

As he strolled idly down the aisle of the antique shop, he thought of time, then death, then the sweetness of oblivion, how much he'd come to yearn for the end of life. So easy, he told himself, so easy just to let it go, this chain of days that stretched ahead of him. He imagined the moment, the feel of the pistol in his mouth, the shattering impact, and felt himself instantly disintegrate, burst like a vase of air, leaving nothing behind.

Literally nothing save the few luxurious items he'd purchased because the high craft employed in making them lifted his spirits and took his mind off Marisol.

But now, as he approached the anniversary of her murder, he realized that the power of a beautifully cut piece of glass or a perfectly woven scarf to change his mood had waned enormously during the preceding twelve months. He suspected that his getting older was part of it, though he was only fifty-three. The rest was loneliness, and the fading hope that there would ever be an end to it while he lived on earth. He'd loved once, and overwhelmingly lost that love in a whirl of violence, then lived on in the aftermath of that explosion, its shattering echo forever in his mind. Now, more than anything, as he admitted to himself this morning, he wanted an end to memory. Beyond life he saw a world of utter stillness and eternal dark, and yet he harbored the hope that somewhere in that darkness the soul of Marisol waited for him patiently. The nurturing of this hope, he knew, was an act of will. But if he abandoned it, Henderson would win, and Lockridge would win, and they could win only at the cost of Marisol.

Stark shook his head at the morbidity of his thoughts and glanced about the shop, hoping some small, precious thing would catch his eye.

Over the years, he'd spent almost everything he made because he saw no reason to hold on to anything. He had no wife, no children, no one whose later survival meant anything at all to him. And as for saving for that rainy day when he would be old and sick, he knew that he would never reach such a point. If he got sick beyond recovery, he would simply kill himself. When he got old, when the last small joys were gone, he would tuck the barrel of his nine-millimeter automatic against the roof of his mouth and pull the trigger. There would be no rainy days.

And so Stark spent whatever he had on clothes and restaurants and obsessive grooming. But more than anything, he spent money on delicately wrought objects, usually of glass or porcelain. They were tremendously expensive, these little statues or figurines, but in the past they'd kept him afloat. In them he'd been able to find something good in life, something done for the love of it, something to which an otherwise ordinary human being had applied the full measure of his skill.

In the past these things had soothed him like a soft, warm light.

But no longer.

“Beautiful, isn't it?”

Stark faced the dealer, noted the small rosebud in his lapel, thought it foppish.

“It's sixteenth century,” the dealer added with a nod toward the fluted glass at which, Stark realized, he must have been gazing.

“Not my thing,” Stark said coolly.

The dealer looked as if he'd been gently pushed away, perhaps with the nose of a silver derringer. “Well, if I may be of help . . .”

“I'll let you know,” Stark said.

“Of course,” the dealer said, then vanished.

Alone again, Stark strolled back down the aisle toward the shop's front door. Scores of beautiful objects lined his path, but nothing called to him, and because of that he knew that he'd slipped out of the old reality, the one that had held him for so many years. Even though Mortimer would arrive that night with the latest payment, he would never spend another dime on what he now suddenly dismissed as collectibles.

He walked out of the shop and headed south down Madison Avenue. He knew that dressed as he was, in a fashionably cut black suit, he looked like a successful Manhattan business executive. It was a look he'd cultivated over the years and which he scrupulously maintained. It went with the false and decidedly metaphorical name he'd chosen for himself, and for the secret life he lived, and it was incontestably appropriate for the elegant bars where, if he sat long enough, a woman would finally approach him.

Marisol.

For years he'd tried to tell himself that she was just a woman, that if she'd lived and they'd remained together, they would have grown apart, their passion faded. But she had died horribly and thus became Helen still on the walls of Troy, and he had never been able to bring her down from that mythic height. He'd tried to find another woman, fall in love again, but the ghost of Marisol lingered in the air around him. She slithered between himself and any woman he caressed. Her breath stained every kiss.

And so for the last few years he'd pursued only sex, sex without affection, and except for Kiko, always with strangers. He could sense that this was just another detour from the road he truly sought and which he now imagined leading off into the shadowy and impossible distance, Marisol at the end of it, perfect and unchanged, her arms opening to receive him. He could almost hear her sensuous whisper,
Welcome home
.

MORTIMER

Sitting in Dr. Langton's office, he felt small and uneducated, both of which he knew he was, a dull, pudgy little man with a mind that had precious little in it, at least precious little of the stuff educated people had in their minds—dates and names and bits of poetry. If he had it all to do over, he thought, he'd have gone to college, even if nothing more than Bunker Hill Community College, gotten a little polish, a little class, so that he could look a doctor in the eye and not feel the way he did now, two pegs up from a bug.

“Good afternoon,” Dr. Langton said as he came into the office.

Mortimer nodded.

Dr. Langton sat down behind his desk, a wall of diplomas arrayed behind him. He placed the folder he'd brought with him on his desk and opened it. For a moment he flipped through the pages, then he lifted his eyes and Mortimer saw just how bad it was. His stomach emptied in the way it had during the war when someone yelled “Incoming!”

“I have the test results,” Dr. Langton said. “It's not good news, I'm afraid.”

“How long?” Mortimer didn't want to be curt, but he didn't want to string it out either, because he knew that if he didn't get it quick and straight, he'd end up feeling even worse than he already did.

“That's always a guess,” Dr. Langton answered. “But I'd say we're probably looking at around three months.”

To his surprise, Mortimer felt a screwy sense that it couldn't be true, that a man couldn't sit in an office, feeling more or less okay, and hear a death sentence like that, three lousy months. My God, he was only fifty-six. “You're sure?” he asked.

“I wish I had a treatment for you. But in this case . . .”

“Okay,” Mortimer said. The incoming round exploded somewhere deep inside him and he suddenly felt already dead. Then his mind shifted to the living, to Dottie, the wife he'd leave behind . . . with nothing.

“I'm sorry,” Dr. Langton said.

“Me too,” Mortimer said, though it was not for himself he felt sorry now, but for how little he'd accumulated. Nothing in the bank. Nothing in the market. Not even a little row house in Brooklyn or Queens. All of that had galloped away from him one horse at a time, galloped away on the back of some nag that finished fifth on the track at Belmont. Leaving him with nothing. No. Worse than nothing. In hock fifteen grand to a guy Caruso claimed was capable of anything. Breaking thumbs. Cutting out your tongue. And if Mortimer were, so to speak, beyond reach? What would Labriola do then? Was it really unthinkable that a guy like that, a crazy, brutal thug, might go after Dottie just to get even?

“Is there anything else?”

Mortimer looked at Dr. Langton. “What?”

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” the doctor asked.

“No,” Mortimer answered. Not you. Not anybody.

Once outside the office, Mortimer glanced down Eighty-fifth Street, trying to decide what would do him the most good now, the bustle of Broadway or some secluded corner of Central Park.

He decided on the park, and after a few minutes found himself seated on a large gray stone, watching dully as the park's other visitors made their way down its many winding paths. Not far away a fat black woman bumpily pushed a wheelchair across the lawn. An old man sat in the chair, his legs wrapped in a burgundy blanket. The old man's eyes were blue, but milky, and little wisps of white hair trembled each time the wheelchair rocked. He was deathly thin, his long, bony fingers little more than skeletal.
Even that fucking guy,
Mortimer thought,
ninety if he's a day, but even that fucking guy will outlive me.

But it was not the speed of his approaching death that rocked Mortimer now. It was how little time he had to make things right with Dottie. Poor Dottie Smith, the girl who'd been desperate enough or hopeless enough or just plain dumb enough to marry him. He had no illusion that she would miss him. He had not been an attentive husband. In fact, he'd hardly been around at all. Was that not reason enough to leave her something to make up for the thirty wintry years she'd spent with him, a guy who had never taken her out dancing, or even given her a little kiss when he left in the morning or came back at night. What could her life have been, he wondered, without that kiss? And now, after so many dull, dead years, the only kiss he had to leave her was his kiss of death.

No, he decided. No, he couldn't do that. He had to find a way to leave something for Dottie. That, he concluded, was his mission now.

SARA

When the cab arrived, she opened the door and strode swiftly down the walkway, the click of her heels so loud she felt sure it would alert the neighbors, summon them to their windows, all eyes on her now, intent, quizzical,
Where's Sara Labriola off to?

The driver placed the suitcase in the trunk. “Getting an early start,” he said.

She nodded briskly, then got into the cab, careful to gaze straight ahead as it pulled away, afraid that if she didn't, the fear would reach out like a grappling hook and haul her back across the lawn and into the house, where the voice would begin to make its hard demand—
Kill him!
—growing louder with each passing day until, inevitably, she would obey it.

At the station, the driver placed the suitcase on the curb and touched his cap. “Have a nice trip,” he said.

Her fear spiked as the cab pulled away, and she was seized with the irrational suspicion that the driver worked for her father-in-law, that he was even then reaching for a cell phone,
Hello, Mr. Labriola, I just dropped your son's wife at the bus station in Montauk.
Her hands were trembling, and she struggled to still them. Her fear had reached the panic stage, so that she had to remind herself that it was the long years of listening to Labriola's stories that had created this paranoid sense that his henchmen were everywhere, whispering into cell phones, tracking her every move.

But none of that mattered now. The only thing that mattered was that she had to leave. She grabbed the suitcase and marched to the ticket counter.

“New York,” she said.

The woman at the booth wore glasses so thick they magnified her eyes. The frames were bright red plastic, a gaudy splash of color in the gray bus station. “One way or round-trip?” the woman asked.

So that was what it came to, Sara thought, whether you stopped at the brink of action or pressed on against all odds, boldly took the outbound road or the circular one that forever wound you back to the scene of the crime.

“One way,” she said, lifting her head, choking back her fear, pronouncing the words loudly, determinedly, as a soldier might call out
Charge!

The woman told her the price. She paid in cash, her credit cards left behind because she knew Leo Labriola would trace her if she used them.

“Bus leaves at ten-fourteen,” the woman said.

She walked to the departing gate and waited for the bus, the fear rising steadily so that she continually glanced about nervously, wondering if Labriola had somehow guessed she was leaving, already assigned people all along the route to keep track of her. She could hear their voices in her mind, Leo Labriola's minions.
Her bus is just pulling out now. She's headed down Sunset Highway. She just reached Cold Spring Harbor. Her bus just pulled into Port Authority. She's hailing a cab at Forty-second and Ninth. Looks like she's headed downtown.

Her eyes scanned the station for her father-in-law's shadowy agents and she saw them all around her. The teenage runaway flicking her pierced tongue; the soldier snoozing softly, his face concealed behind a newspaper; the old black man reading a tattered Bible; the businessman tapping at his laptop. Could all of them be working for the Old Man?

Of course not,
she told herself,
think about something else, put him out of your mind.
She drew in a long breath.
Think about something else. Something before Tony. Before the Old Man. Something good.

She returned to her first days in New York, the small-time cabaret singer she'd invented as herself. She'd even given her a name, Samantha Damonte, then created a person to go with it, a smoky-bar woman with plenty of experience, a burnt-out case at twenty-five. Not a bit of it had been true. In fact, as she'd finally come to recognize, Samantha Damonte was just a young woman who'd been afraid to grow up, afraid to go to college, afraid that she wasn't really special or all that talented, and so, despite the smoky-bar persona, just another girl who wanted to be taken care of. That was what Tony had dangled before her, a safe life, a chance to quiet the voice in her head, its incessantly murderous demand. She'd gone for it because she was weary of short gigs in out-of-the-way clubs, tired of agents and club owners who saw her as a mark, tired of fingers raking up her thigh, tired of the rage that swept over her like a hot wind every time some boozy customer sidled up to the piano, tossed a twenty in the glass, and nodded toward the room at the back, tired of the voice that kept rising from the smoldering center of herself,
Kill him!