Violet Darger (Book 4): Bad Blood Read online

  The body lay in the tub, belly up, head swathed in a blood-soaked blanket. The pop of red was faintly discernible in the half-light, standing out from all those shades of gray.

  Jaworski leaned his shoulder blades against the wall, his body just about tucked into the corner. Compared to the fidgeting and fussing of the others, he was, as usual, the stillest figure in the room. He took in the atmosphere through swollen pupils. Watching the others. Examining the details of the space itself.

  His focus had been so fixed on the target, Cutter’s head and torso, that he hadn’t really absorbed any specifics about the apartment’s layout or ornamentation. Judging by the bathroom decor, it was a nice enough place, though not as fancy as a lot of the homes he fulfilled contracts in. It did have the modern feel that most did. Contemporary. Sleek lines. Stainless steel backsplash. Black granite top on the vanity. Every surface was clean and bright and just a little generic, like a bathroom at a hotel.

  Marasco paced the bathroom floor, his face looking long and grim in the half-light, wisps of shadow creeping along the edges of his narrow chin. Occasionally he stepped into the hall and glanced back and forth, but he mostly walked the linoleum strip to the toilet and back. Choppy steps. Jittery and agitated.

  Not the type accustomed to waiting, Marasco checked his watch every two minutes or so, shaking his head each time and huffing. Something about the behavior reminded Jaworski of a petulant dog — one of the small, fancy breeds — impatient to be fed. Jaworski knew this show-dog would be the one to break the silence, and eventually he did.

  “Should we try it?” Marasco said, not talking to anyone in particular.

  “Try what?” Carlo asked.

  The big man’s bulk rested against the vanity top, butt cheeks half propped on the granite’s edge, giant baby arms folded over his chest.

  “Cutting him,” Marasco said, pointing his index and middle fingers at the corpse. “Being done with it. Getting the hell out of here.”

  Carlo shook his head, tilted his head at his watch.

  “Got a ways to go yet before he’s ready. Twenty-five minutes, at least.”

  Marasco huffed.

  “I mean… we could try it. Just a little cut, you know, like, uh, what do they call it? Exploratory surgery or whatever. See if he bleeds. Hell, what would be the harm in trying?”

  Carlo glared at him.

  “We try it now, his blood gushes out of every incision like water out of a spigot. Floods the bathtub. That’s more mess, yeah? And more mess means more cleanup time. We’ll be here scrubbing until morning. Covered in blood ourselves, too, of course. Hands and eyes stinging from all the bleach. That what you want?”

  “I ain’t sayin’… I mean, I’m not talking about…. Exploratory, I said. I think I was pretty clear about that, and it was just a suggestion. Christ. Forget it.”

  Marasco went back to pacing.

  Lombino messed with his phone, swearing under his breath.

  “Shit.”

  He glanced up at Jaworski, met the big hitman’s eyes.

  “Fucking phone’s dead. Can I use yours?”

  Jaworski squinted, visions of cell phone tower records being used in court dancing in his head.

  “I’m not making any calls or nothing. I just want to check some scores. Took heavy action on the Pistons tonight, and the game should be wrapping up by now.”

  Jaworski nodded. Handed over the phone.

  Immediately Lombino fell into a series of ritual gestures, crossing himself as though he were a devout Catholic, and then a sheepish look came over his features.

  “Shit. You mind if I take this in the hall?” he said. “I get superstitious as a motherfucker with these big bets. My OCD comes out to play. Kind of want to check the scores alone.”

  “It’s no problem,” Jaworski said.

  Lombino scurried into the hall, the phone cupped in his hands before him like something precious.

  All eyes in the bathroom watched as he disappeared into the gloom, and everyone’s attention stayed glued on that spot for what felt like a long time awaiting his return. The man’s footsteps paced back and forth, the glow of the phone screen floating along the wall, lighting his way.

  When Lombino reappeared in the door frame, a smile split the bottom half of his face. He returned the phone, went back to sitting on the edge of the tub.

  “Pistons got curbstomped. Bucks crushed ‘em by 18. Too bad, so sad, for the guy who bet 25 large on ‘em, right?”

  Carlo and Marasco chuckled a little to themselves, but the good cheer was short-lived. The tension of the wait resumed as before, the rhythm of Marasco’s nervous pacing seeming to lull the room back into some kind of trance that required a restless hush.

  Several minutes passed without words.

  Lombino still sat on the lip of the bath, picking at the caulk seam running between the tub and the surround, a faraway look in his eyes. He seemed either unaware or undisturbed that the corpse’s hand rested less than an inch from his left thigh, the tips of the fingers touching the fabric of his pants sometimes when he moved.

  He lit a cigarette. Puffed it a few times. Spoke.

  “I don’t know what your secret is, Jaworski. It always seems to go smoothly when you’re running with us. Never any problems,” Lombino said, eyes shifting around the room’s ceiling as he spoke. “It ain’t always that way.”

  Now his eyes shifted to Carlo, his chin ticking up as he spoke to him.

  “Remember the guy — Pinky Thomas — who managed to jump out the fuckin’ window?”

  Carlo laughed, touched his forehead with two thick fingers.

  “Yeah. Jesus,” the big man said. “Guy bolted when he saw the gun. Leapt out a third story apartment window. Snapped both his ankles, too. I remember looking down off that balcony at him squirming in the parking lot, pulling himself over the asphalt with his arms, mangled legs dragging behind. Looked like a goddamn sloth trying to crawl away, you know? There were three of us there, standing on that balcony, and I don’t think one of our mouths closed for ten minutes. Couldn’t fuckin’ believe it.”

  Marasco chimed in.

  “You have to go down and cap him out in the open?”

  Carlo nodded, shrugged.

  “Had to. Something like that? What else are you gonna do?”

  Marasco sucked his teeth.

  “Damn. Everybody has to be a fuckin’ hero, right? Jumpin’ out windows. Runnin’ for it like Jason Bourne or something. I hate that shit. Jump out a window just to suffer longer, you know? Squirm around on shattered legs for what? You still get your brains blown out. Makes no sense.”

  Lombino squinted as he answered.

  “It’s primal shit. Coded in our DNA. The survival instinct, you know what I’m sayin’? It has to be that way. Guy was in a bad spot, right? So he could do nothing like you’re suggesting, freeze like a rabbit in the headlights or something, wait for death and die on his knees. Or he could jump out a window, break his legs, maybe give himself a fraction of a percent chance of getting away. Both of his options were bad. No way around that. But he had to make the best bad choice, and so he did. Jumped. Gave himself a chance to live, however small. Didn’t work, of course. Big Joe had to run down three flights of stairs to finish him in the parking lot, but still….”

  The smirk on Marasco’s lip faded as Lombino talked, and when the speech was done, everyone in the room seemed to think a while on what he’d said. They fell quiet again for a longer stretch this time.

  Marasco’s pace seemed to slow over time, to calm itself just a little, and his footsteps lent a peculiar beat to the scene. Almost like a heartbeat, Jaworski thought. Something hypnotic and strange about it.

  Jaworski’s mind wandered out of the here and now, the rhythm on the linoleum somehow leading his thoughts further and further away from this bathroom tableau.

  And he thought about Urszula. Urszula Jorgensen. His girl. Pictures of her flashed in his head, a rapid-fire burst of images, memories, drea
ms. Even with his eyes open, he could see her like she was really there in the room with them. Her dark hair hacked off in severe bangs, a straight line just above her eyes. The feline way her cheekbones tapered to her jaw and then to her chin, all the angles striking — the almost chiseled lines somehow still soft enough to be feminine in a mesmerizing way.

  She was out there in the world right now, waiting for him to get home, waiting for the two of them to be together again.

  Urszula was seven years younger than him, a University of Michigan graduate student to his high school dropout. She came from a long line of intellectuals on both sides of the family, her father a surgeon, her mother a playwright, her grandparents consisting of an architect, mechanical engineer, mid-list novelist, and a public interest lawyer, respectively.

  Meanwhile, Jaworski’s father did odd jobs to afford liquor, and his mom worked in various factories and convenience stores. His grandparents had similarly lived paycheck-to-paycheck, working in blue-collar industries like construction and manufacturing — hard workers who never quite managed to get ahead. They ultimately died young, the longest-lived of the four only making it to 61.

  Urszula had grown up in a mansion in Bloomfield Hills. Jaworski had been brought up in a public housing development so notoriously rough that the six apartment towers had been razed to the ground in recent years. Apparently, an empty lot of dirt and a few vacant buildings ultimately offered more to the community than the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects did, enough so that the city spent a considerable amount of money to demolish all six of the fourteen-story apartment towers.

  But none of these things mattered. The surface level things. Hell, there was no denying that she was a beautiful girl, too, and even that didn’t matter to their relationship in Jaworski’s eyes. Not really.

  So many people got hung up on the shallow side of relationships, Jaworski thought — the skin deep side, or the paper deep side, or the arcane genetics-obsessed side as though they were monarchs trying to breed the next king or whatever.

  But what mattered most in a relationship was a lot simpler than these things. It came down to a kind of chemistry that defied language, a kind of connection that was beyond the realm of ambition or values or physicality or any of the typical power struggles couples got tangled up in. Something that just happened organically. Something you couldn’t manufacture or will into being, no matter how many Dr. Phil books you read. Something animal and spiritual at the same time.

  It was like pheromones in a way, he thought. When animals chose a mate, they often relied on compatible hormone smells, something in the air, an odor unique to each individual — an almost subconscious cue that told them who they’d get on with, who they belonged with. It wasn’t based on pleasing their eye, or career successes, or family histories, or any of these things. Their bodies just knew. It was meant to be.

  On a conscious level, he thought it had to do with finding someone you connected with on another level, someone whose simple company you enjoyed every day, every hour, every minute. Someone you loved not as an idea, not as an image, not as a face or body to touch, nor as a source of entertainment. Someone you loved in the simplest yet most profound way. A soul, a self, a person you loved to be with. A companion above all.

  The fools spent their time trying to acquire a mate like they were making a major purchase, shopping for an expensive appliance or gadget — something novel, good-looking, with all kinds of gimmicky features. Trying to find pleasure instead of a connection. Trying to consume someone else. Trying to own them. They were shopping, always shopping. So many tough choices. Did they want the chrome finish or the brushed steel?

  When Carlo spoke next, it brought Jaworski back to the bathroom where the corpse lay, seemed to shake all of them out of a trance.

  “It’s time,” the big man said, lifting himself from the vanity’s edge. “Wanna give it a shot?”

  Marasco stopped pacing finally, blinked a few times, nodded. That restless look had fled his long face somewhere in there, replaced by a somber one. All the angry puckers smoothed out, left the skin around his lips and eyes looking droopy and soft.

  He knelt to access the little tool kit at Lombino’s feet, a few pieces laid out on a blanket. He selected the hacksaw.

  “One cut at the shoulder and then wait,” Carlo said. “See if he leaks at all. If so, we gotta wait. If not….”

  “I know,” Marasco said, moving to the body.

  He climbed into the tub, feet straddling the torso, and he squatted over Cutter, lifting the dead man’s right arm to position it the way he needed it, propping the elbow on the edge of the tub. The body still had that floppiness to it, the pliability of dead weight. Rigor mortis wouldn’t set in for another three hours at the soonest.

  He pawed at the man’s shoulder with his free hand, knuckles going white from the pressure he applied, feeling the contours through the man’s shirt to find the appropriate spot. Satisfied, he applied the blade of the hacksaw at the crook of the meaty ball of the deltoid muscle, taking an angle so he’d ultimately sever the ligament and disconnect the limb via a detachment at the ball and socket joint.

  The saw whispered a little as he worked it back and forth, a sibilant hiss with some grit to it. Careful strokes. Slow. The sound changed pitch a little as the metal teeth chewed through the shirt and skin and bit into the meat.

  “Leave it now,” Carlo said. “Let’s just see.”

  Marasco retracted the saw, and all eyes locked onto the red slit in the shoulder. Waiting in silence. Watching for any signs of seepage, any growth or movement to that red rim of a stain on the white fabric.

  Nothing. The blood had congealed. Thickened like jelly. It would not run.

  Carlo let out a big breath, the air whistling a little in his nose.

  “Good. That’s good,” the big man said. “Go on now.”

  Marasco went back to work, the saw whispering again as it ate through muscle and connective tissue, the sound going slushier as it got deeper, thick and wet, grating once as he grazed a bone.

  And suddenly, he was through, the front of the saw busting free and clattering a little against the acrylic wall of the bathtub, the arm itself shifting, rolling away from the torso a couple of inches. Marasco went back to clear one last connected flap of armpit skin, and then he set the saw aside and grabbed a beach towel from the stack Lombino had ripped out of the hall closet, resting it in his lap.

  He gripped the severed arm around wrist and elbow and lifted it.

  The little bit of blood that seeped out of the end of the arm was as thick as motor oil. Marasco dabbed at the goo with the towel, taking great care as he wrapped the wounded place. Then the whole thing sank into the black plastic garbage bag that Lombino held out for him, the weight of the limb pulling the bag taut, the plastic crinkling a little as it settled.

  Lombino tied off the top of the bag, wrapped the whole thing up in a little wad like a Christmas package and placed the plastic-wrapped arm into another bag.

  “Always best to double bag your dismembered body parts, right?” he mumbled, seemingly to himself. “Learned that one the hard way, didn’t you?”

  Jaworski didn’t realize that Lombino was smoking a cigarette as he worked at wrapping up the body part until that moment. Smoke twirled into the man’s squinted eye, snarled up that half of his face into a grimace. The other half of his lip, however, smiled at his joke.

  Marasco made quick work of the other joints, his saw squishing out juicy sounds. A few thick droplets of blood spilled to the bathtub floor, splatting into circles the size of a penny. It looked like ketchup on a plate. Still, this mess was nothing compared to the pints that would have gushed out had they not waited.

  In the end, six packages lay on the bathroom floor — four limbs, the torso, and the smallest parcel, about the size of a bowling ball, that held the head. The black plastic packets would be dumped separately. It was best to divvy things up. The head and hands would get dumped off the bridge into tha
t murky Detroit River water. The legs, which lacked identifying features short of DNA, could wind up in any number of particular dumpsters behind grocery stores that were known to run through compactors on a nightly basis — a little higher risk of getting found, but not such a big deal if they did.

  The torso was the biggest and most problematic. Their disposal usually fell to Carlo to take care of, as tonight’s did. The abdomens were a little heavy, a little clunky and visually suspicious to handle out on one of the bridges or the grocery store parking lots where traffic could be a problem. Too much of a witness risk.

  For many years, Carlo had driven all the way down to the shipping docks with them. He’d slit the bodies from pelvis to sternum, let the swirling waters suck into the cavity and sink them. Typically the currents would carry them out into the deep.

  But the threat of terrorist attacks kept more law enforcement eyes on the docks in recent years. So for a while, he drove out into the boonies, heading due west of Detroit, burying the bodies in a patch of woods off of I-94.

  These days, he didn’t need to go so far. With thousands of empty buildings in Detroit, he merely had to head to one of the ghost towns, drive along an empty street until one of the vacant dumps called out to him, tote the package inside and leave it. No witnesses. No problems. Poking around, he could usually find trash or piles of filthy clothes to hide the bodies in. Some of the torsos stayed tucked away for years before anyone found them, rotting down to a spine and ribcage. A bunch of partial John Does that’d be nearly impossible to identify.

  Jaworski stooped to gather the packets containing the arms, and the other men gathered their pieces of William Cutter in turn, ready now to carry him out of his apartment, pile him into the trunk, shuffle him off to his final resting places all over the city.

  Marasco splashed a little bleach into the tub, scrubbed at the few places where the gummy blood droplets had pooled. Animals they may be, but this crew sure did work neat, Jaworski thought. He had to give them that.