Violet Darger (Book 4): Bad Blood Read online

  Weird how that worked. Thirty seconds ago he hated these men, could barely stand to be around them, but now they moved together as though choreographed, worked toward a common goal.

  A pack of wolves moving in for the kill.

  Cutter took a left at the top of the stairs and stopped eight paces later when he reached his door, keys jingling in his hand. His body turning, turning.

  Jaworski’s eyes went wide as the target’s profile came into view. The hitman’s pupils dilated. The muscles along his jaw bunched. Somehow he was conscious of these things in this moment of heightened awareness. He could feel them, know they were happening, even if he didn’t know how or why.

  If Cutter sensed the men approaching, he showed no sign of it. He still didn’t glance their way even as the wise guys drew right up next to him.

  Cutter’s wrist snapped to the right, unlocking the deadbolt. He turned the knob with his opposite hand. Pushed open the door. Stepped inside.

  Carlo stuck out an arm to catch the door before it swung closed behind the target, and Jaworski drifted into the opening. Standing just behind the doomed man.

  His whole body tingled, every follicle of hair turned on with electric current. He could hear the little whistle of Cutter’s breath exiting his nose. Could smell the char of the barbecue ribs the guy had for dinner, the bright tang of his aftershave now long dried on his cheeks.

  The door clicked shut behind them, the automatic lock engaging with a heavier thud.

  The dark closed in. The colors sucking out of everything. The whole world going gray.

  His hand retracted from his jacket. Forearm flicking up to level the gun at the back of skull before him, the fluff of white hair there looking even stranger up close. Weirdly fine and shiny. Almost inhuman.

  Cutter stopped. His shoulders hunched. His body language finally acknowledging the footsteps behind him. A little too late.

  He whirled in slow motion. White hair rasping. Eyelids fluttering. Mouth opening into a capital letter O.

  The hitman’s finger located the trigger.

  Squeezed.

  The muzzle blazed.

  The slug penetrated Cutter’s skull. Flung a wad of blood and brain sludge out the back. Dark spray. A chunky mucus flecked with shards of bone.

  Jaworski squeezed again.

  Now the broken head flopped on a limp neck. Flimsy.

  The silencer cut the gun’s crack into two lisped syllables.

  THUFF. THUFF.

  And one little breath came out of the man’s mouth as he collapsed. A final exhale. All his muscles going slack at once.

  Lombino rushed forward and caught the man before he could even hit the ground, wrapped the blanket around the wounded head. Held him up, the dead weight of the corpse leaned against his torso, the small man’s arms cupping under the armpits.

  And Marasco stepped forward with his blade at the ready. He jabbed it into the dead man’s chest. Into his heart. Furious thrusts. Over and over.

  He scraped a rib once, the metal screeching out an awful sound against the bone, but otherwise his strokes were clean and quick.

  Marasco’s tongue licked out over his teeth. That evil grin appearing there. The joy. The lust for violence. It disgusted Jaworski to see the pleasure he took here, and he looked away.

  Typically, the heart would keep beating. Even after death, it could squeeze a while out of habit, pump out quite a lot of blood. This stabbing routine was how the Battaglia crew put a stop to that. Traumatize the heart until it could beat no more. Cut off the bleeding immediately. Prevent the mess and the cleanup as much as possible. This crew had placed an emphasis on it, but the practice dated way back in mafia lore.

  Marasco stepped back at last, still grinning. He wiped the knife on the victim’s shirt, one side of the blade and then the other, leaving two dark streaks over the right side of his chest. The left pec was all chewed up, of course. A perforated shirt stretched over shredded muscle. Tattered and wet. It looked kind of like steak tartar, Jaworski thought.

  “Bathroom is this way,” Carlo said from somewhere down the hall.

  Marasco squatted down to take the man’s ankles, and he and Lombino tipped the body to carry it in a mostly horizontal position. The blanket now obscured the face, obscured the damage the bullets had done, a soggy flap of fabric shrouding the dead man’s features.

  Jaworski tailed the others as they got to the bathroom and flopped the corpse into the tub.

  No one spoke for a beat.

  They stood over the dead man, their hearts all racing, Jaworski was certain, and he was just as certain that their minds were blank. Just like his. Tuned into that most primal frequency where words didn’t mean much.

  It would take 45 minutes for the blood to congeal. Maybe a little longer.

  They’d need to wait for that to happen before they could dismember the body.

  Chapter 18

  The night he’d murdered Joey Crampton, a 14-year-old Jaworski had walked two miles to the Detroit Riverwalk — a 3.5-mile walking and biking path running along the place where downtown Detroit dead-ended at the water’s edge. Breathtaking views of the river and city skyline, they said. Fun for the whole family, they said. But even here in the middle of the night, you could hear the sirens warbling somewhere out there. They never slept.

  He’d found himself conscious of the gun the whole way there. The metal was warm against his belly now, nestled in his waistband, and he kept thinking of the .38 as dirty somehow. Even though it hadn’t touched Crampton directly, it felt like an unclean object touching his skin, a little imagined itch erupting where his skin made contact with it. He kept getting the impulse to clean it, to wipe the blood off of it or something, even if there wasn’t any.

  Now he stood at the rail, leaned his elbows against the top of the metal grate, and looked into the water churning just on the other side. The river babbled out an endless stream of wet sounds at him, little whispered syllables that didn’t mean anything.

  He drew the gun from his waistband. Regarded its weight in his hand. Standing here, he could fling the weapon maybe thirty yards out into the murky water, let the currents swallow it up, take it away.

  Everyone knew the Detroit River was loaded with guns. It was like a cemetery for murder weapons. The news did stories about it from time to time. Police once found 11 firearms in the span of one archway of the MacArthur Bridge. They’d unearthed an automatic rifle another time.

  Of course, they’d also found other oddities: a DeLorean among a menagerie of other vehicles over the years, various wooden ships, their hulls preserved by the water’s chill, and even a collection of six British cannons dating back to before the war of 1812.

  According to the reports, the water was so murky, the dive teams made most of these discoveries by literally running their hands along the river bottom, feeling around for objects in the muck, be they large or small.

  Now, at night, the water looked utterly black at Jaworski’s feet. Opaque. The city’s lights sheening back from the choppy surface here and there. Smeared circles of illumination.

  He brought the gun back behind his ear like a football, shoulder muscles tightening like a stretched rubber band, a catapult waiting to launch. The river waited in silence for the offering.

  But those taut strands in his shoulder uncoiled. His arm drooped back to his side. He couldn’t do it. It was his father’s gun. The only thing he had inherited from the man.

  He was aware the thing was a murder weapon now. A liability. The one thing that could potentially tie him to Crampton’s death, should the body ever catch anyone’s notice either in the dumpster or later on at the dump. Even so, he couldn’t quite part with it.

  He tucked it back into his pants and climbed up to sit on the rail, feet dangling directly over the river. He stared into the black water for a long time.

  The gun didn’t feel dirty anymore. It felt like his.

  * * *

  Jaworski started making mob connections when
he was nineteen. He’d fallen in with a group of car thieves, and the crew had made something of a name for themselves in the area, eventually branching out into other forms of crime for hire. Arson. Running guns and drugs. Even hauling truckloads of cheap booze and cigarettes up from Indiana.

  When a heist went wrong, Jaworski killed three rent-a-cops, the third with his bare hands. The story spread through the streets — how Jaworski had somehow overcome a 3-on-1 situation up against armed guards, sparing his entire crew life in prison.

  That’s when the wise guys started getting in touch with contracts. Large contracts. Just one murder for hire was worth more than he’d ever made in a month.

  And his Polish background made him something of a novelty. An outsider. He could be hired to take care of squabbles among rival crews, trusted not to talk about it. He had no allegiance among the local sects, no ties to speak of. It was great. At first.

  But not being Italian also prevented him from ever advancing. It was one of the rules dating back to the Omerta roots in Sicily. You needed Italian blood, preferably Sicilian blood, to ever become a made guy, to officially be part of what the mob guys called La Cosa Nostra — this thing of ours.

  In a way, Jaworski thought that the mafia was the purest form of business in America. On one hand, there were strict rules to be followed and enforced, a clear code of conduct, ranks of power and a pecking order established with an emphasis on respect. Loyalty and honor played some role, existed among thieves indeed, at least to an extent. On the other hand, it was ruthless. Brutal. A grim way of life that put money above all else. Spilled blood was just a cost of doing business, a fact of life.

  These callous tenets existed elsewhere in business, but they mostly stayed out of sight. Unspoken. In sweatshops making Nikes and iPhones, in the child and slave labor force responsible for most of the world’s cocoa production, in police and military action that served business interests above all, it could clearly be seen that profits mattered more than lives, more than people. Only the organized crime sector seemed transparent about this, took it into their own hands, owned it.

  But Jaworski didn’t get to partake. Not all the way. He could still get contracts, but thanks to his Polish ancestry, he could never advance, could never climb the ladder, could never become a made guy. He’d been left out.

  Chapter 19

  The motel room smelled like mothballs. Darger wrinkled her nose as the door shut behind her. She let her suitcase drop to the floor with a dull thud and headed straight to the bathroom.

  Plastic crinkled as she unwrapped one of the disposable cups on the counter. She filled it with water and pulled the pill bottle from her bag. The label said Tylenol, but the pills inside didn’t match.

  She flicked open the lid and jostled the bottle until a few of the tiny yellow tablets fell into the palm of her hand. Norco. 10mg of hydrocodone per tab.

  She’d promised herself she wouldn’t take them while she was working a case. But her head was killing her. If she let it go on, in an hour, the pain would be so bad she’d be bent over the toilet dry-heaving.

  She placed one of the tablets on her tongue, washed it down with water. After a few seconds, she took a second pill. The headache snaked tendrils of hurt down into her face and neck, an obscene throb that felt ready to spread.

  Lying on the bed about ten minutes later, she felt the drugs start to kick in, the narcotic wave rushing warmth into her skull. Immediately the tension in her shoulders began to loosen, and the sharp stabbing in her head faded to a distant thrum.

  She was supposed to be off the pills. She’d lied to the doctor that did her FBI physical, the one that cleared her for returning to duty. She knew if she’d told them about the headaches, admitted to sometimes relying on opiates for relief, they never would have let her come back.

  Her gut squirmed with guilt at the thought. She hated the stupid drugs. Hated the way they made her head feel fuzzy and half-numb. Hated that she had to depend on this foreign substance to get through the day.

  But she’d made a deal with herself. She never used the meds on duty. Never. It was strictly to help her unwind after, help her sleep at night.

  She floated in the opioid haze for a time. Still. Empty. Drifting. And then something buzzed against her hip.

  She slipped the phone from her pocket and forced her eyes to focus on the blurred letters on the screen. Owen.

  Fuck.

  That twist of guilt in her gut tightened into a hard knot. She’d put off calling him all day until she’d just forgotten entirely.

  “Hey,” she said, forcing a lightness into her voice she didn’t quite feel. “I was just about to call you. What’s up?”

  “I found it,” Owen said. The excitement in his voice was unmistakable. “She’s absolutely perfect. A fifty-footer with teak decking, built the same year I was born. That’s gotta be a sign. I’m gonna drive out tomorrow to see her in person.”

  Her thoughts were sluggish from the painkillers, and it was a moment before Darger figured out what he was talking about. The boat, she finally realized. Owen had been planning the trip for weeks. Charter a sailboat, cruise down the coast, check out the Keys. Nothing but sun, sea, and open sky. The ultimate freedom. That was how he sold it to Darger, anyway.

  Apparently, Owen had sailed a lot as a boy, exploring the Florida Keys with his twin brother and their uncle. Both the brother and uncle were dead now, but Owen’s dream of sailing the Keys again lived on.

  Darger stared up at the textured ceiling and imagined the bumps and ridges were waves on a vast expanse of water.

  “Fifty feet sounds… big.”

  “Not too big for one person to handle. Once you get up to sixty, things can start getting tricky. But that’s the point of me driving down there. We’ll take it out so I can get a feel for it. The owner has done a lot of solo sailing himself, so it’s all set up for it. Besides, you’re gonna help, once you get your sea legs. You’ll be a natural buccaneer, I know it.”

  “I did mention my tendency toward seasickness, right?”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “And we weren’t even on the ocean. We were on a lake.”

  “Still not sure how you managed that.”

  “I told you, it was Fourth of July. There were a lot of boats in a small bay. It was choppy. There was turbulence.”

  Owen laughed. “Rough seas.”

  “What?”

  “Turbulence is planes. Rough seas is boats. Well, I guess rough waters being that you were on a lake.”

  Darger sighed, and apparently Owen sensed her anxiety in the sound.

  “I’ve seen you charge a 275-pound biker in a bar fight. But here you are, scared of a little boat ride.”

  “I’m not scared. It just makes me anxious is all. The ocean is big. And no matter how big you think a boat is, it’s always small in comparison.”

  “Hey, the first thing my uncle taught us when we were learning to sail was an old quote: ‘He who lets the sea lull him into a sense of security is in very grave danger.’” He continued, unfazed. “Don’t worry so much. Trust me, it’ll be a blast.”

  Despite her reservations, she couldn’t deny that his excitement was infectious.

  They talked a little longer, but it became obvious that Darger was too tired to be much of a conversationalist. They said their goodnights and hung up.

  Sprawled out on her back, with the Norco making her feel soft and swimmy, she almost felt like she was adrift on a boat somewhere.

  Usually when this feeling came over her, she fell right asleep. A strange, dreamless sleep. Maybe it wasn’t even really sleep, but a sort of drug-induced trance. In any case, just now the slumber wouldn’t come.

  She rolled off the bed and padded around on the carpet in her bare feet. The texture of the berber somehow reminded her of a giant head of cauliflower.

  Right now plainclothes officers were at Constantine’s, logging plate numbers, gathering names to be sifted through tomorrow. They’d be there deep
into the night, until the bar closed. For all she knew, they already had the plate they needed to break the case open. They could run the numbers on their computer, have a name within seconds. She thought about calling someone on stake-out duty, asking how things were going, but it seemed too obnoxious. Antsy. It could wait until morning. In any case, it was a promising lead, she thought.

  And yet something nagged at her mind. Something about the case.

  She worked her way through her memories of the day, starting at the Dan Howard scene and ticking off the stops they’d made, the witnesses they’d talked to, until she reached Lijah’s account of Angelo Battaglia’s murder at the hands of the so-called Striga.

  Whatever was bothering her eluded her just now. She couldn’t get her thoughts to align in a neat row, not with the drugs in her system. It made her slow.

  Exactly why she shouldn’t be taking them during a case, she thought. The voice in her head seemed bitter about it, but the infinite numb roiling out of her pleasure center washed it away quickly.

  She gave up, dropping back onto the mattress, letting her back go limp. She rolled onto her side and studied the paisley print on the bedspread until her eyelids grew too heavy to keep open.

  Chapter 20

  It usually took about forty minutes for the blood to congeal, so Jaworski and the men waited. Milled around the bathroom.

  They were quiet at first. Pensive. Each pulled into the depths of their interior worlds to process the violent spectacle they’d just partaken in. This dark ritual their lives revolved around simultaneously electrified and repulsed each of them — Jaworski was sure of that, even if they rarely spoke of it, amongst themselves or to anyone else.

  The glow of a night-light partially illuminated the room in a soft yellow glow, everything a little hazy, a touch out of focus, the lines all obscured by shadow. It was better to keep the lights out as much as possible when doing these things, in case any witnesses outside happened to be looking up at the windows. It would let them think that no one was home for as long as possible, never give up any sense of a timeline.