Recall Night, page 6
part #2 of An Eli Carver Supernatural Thriller Series
“You tell Furio I don’t fucking care!”
The voice is angry and high. A woman with an incredible amount of blonde hair, tight leather pants and a short fur jacket climbs out of a yellow cab in front of The Falcon. I crouch, taking my time to tie my shoe, and listen.
She stands outside the restaurant, listening to her phone. Then, “He has no right to just brush me off like that! The time we’ve had together, does it mean nothing to him?” Another pause. “Busy man, my tight ass! Ever since he got wrapped up with Papa-whatever, he’s been ignoring me! I’m at The Falcon now, I’ll talk to Tony. And if he ain’t here, I’m going straight to Charlie’s Bar.” She pauses again, shakes her head. “Yeah? We’ll see about that!” She hangs up and slams her way into the restaurant, not even noticing me.
I head off up the sidewalk, make sure I’m not seen loitering. Maybe sometimes things do fall into my lap. Papa-whatever. Charlie’s Bar. Not much, but more details all the same. I’ll head back to the townhouse and see what Lombardi makes of all this.
* * *
“I want to talk to Bridget.”
Lombardi looks at me with one eyebrow raised. “You think you’re in a position to negotiate?”
“Fuck you, we’re in a business arrangement here. Cut it out with the Goodfellas bullshit. I have questions to ask you, but I want to talk to Bridget first, make sure you’re keeping up your end.”
“She’s probably being raped and tortured by those big-ass twins!” Dwight says, dancing an awful, boney jig behind Lombardi. Alvin laughs, Graney raises his hands, as if to say, He might be right.
Sly is sharing a joint with Michael, both leaning against the mantlepiece at the back of this large and ostentatious lounge room in the Bridgewater house, away from the others.
“You should just walk away,” Michael says.
I cock an eyebrow at him.
He shrugs. “She got herself in this mess. If you weren’t there at Gino’s she’d probably be dead by now, caught in the crossfire. All these assholes would be dead. Fuck ’em.”
He has a point, but I have a code. If I’m going to rebuild myself, if I’m going to follow my new path as a rōnin, I need to accept what comes my way. I made a promise to Bridget. I need to try to be a better man.
“Alfie, the phone, please?”
The old man goes to a table not six feet from where Lombardi is sitting and picks up an old landline phone, carries it over. The boss nods as he takes it, then presses the buttons to dial a number. I try to watch and get them, but Michael stands behind Lombardi’s chair and reads them out as he dials. I log it for future reference. I need to at least find that area code. That’ll put me one step closer to where Bridget’s being held.
“Davey, put the woman on.” There’s a pause, then, “Bridget? Your boyfriend wants a word.”
I take the receiver. “You okay?”
“My boyfriend?”
“He’s decided that, nothing to do with me.”
“Hmm. Yeah, I’m okay, other than being held hostage. But it’s comfortable here, they’re giving me good food and letting me watch TV and shit like that. Could be worse.”
“Nice place?” Come on, Bridget, give me a hint.
There’s a scuffling at her end and a cough and she whispers something real quick. Then she says, “Sure, I guess.”
“That’ll do,” Lombardi says, snatching the handset away from me.
Good girl. I think I heard her say Dorset Girls School. Hopefully she covered it enough that any goon with her didn’t notice. Lombardi is dumb, he just hangs up, doesn’t talk to his man anymore. Hopefully it’ll all go unnoticed. Maybe Davey will tell him later that she said something. All life is risk. Again, for now I just log it away.
“So she’s having the vacation of her life. Tell me what you know.”
Lombardi is scared. He’s rattled. I could go and find Bridget and get the hell out, but there’s the problem of all that money. I need to play along. Alfie takes the phone and puts it back on the side table. Stella arrives and offers us iced tea from a silver tray. She looks at me and I see something I can’t place in her eyes.
“What do you know about Charlie’s Bar?” I ask.
Lombardi shrugs. “Nothing. I can look into it.”
“Yeah, do that. I’ll check it out tomorrow, might give me new leads. What about someone called Papa something?”
He frowns. “Papa something?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know what.”
“No idea, never heard of him.”
“You see that?” Michael asks, leaning on the back of Lombardi’s chair.
I don’t say anything, or even nod, but I did see it. Stella flinched at the mention of that Papa character. Alfie is giving her hard eyes across the room and she scurries away. Interesting.
“I guess we need to find out something about Charlie’s Bar then.”
Lombardi sits back, face angry. “That’s it? That’s all you got from a whole day?”
I smile and sip my iced tea. It’s really good.
* * *
I don’t know where Lombardi goes at night, but after dinner he’s nowhere to be seen. I guess he has an office here somewhere, there are several closed doors I haven’t seen behind. I head to bed early, around 10:00 p.m., and listen as the house goes still and quiet. The three guys Lombardi called in when I left earlier are still here, one in the room next to mine where Bridget was the night before. I hear him snoring through the wall. The other two are in rooms downstairs.
As I creep back down, careful to stay silent, I hear a TV playing quietly from one of those rooms, nothing from the other, but both doors are shut. I go into the kitchen and look across at two doors. One leads out into the small back yard of the house, the other is where Alfie and Stella go, so I figure it’s their quarters. I wonder what their story is. The age difference is too much for them to be partners, but they could be father and daughter. There’s a distinct family resemblance.
Standing in the kitchen, I wonder what to do to get their attention. I could just knock quietly and ask for something, see if I can get them talking from there. The door opens. I notice there’s a camera above it. Well, that works too.
“Help you, sir?” Stella asks. She’s in a housecoat and looks tired.
“I’m sorry, did I wake you?”
“No, not sleeping yet. You need something?”
“I got hungry, thought I’d make a sandwich, but I don’t know where anything is.”
“Let me make it for you.”
I don’t want her waiting on me, but I do need an excuse to keep her talking. I can’t in good conscience let her serve me though. “Maybe just tell me where—”
“In the time it takes to explain I can make your sandwich, sir. What do you want on it?”
I guess I can’t argue with that. “Ham and cheese okay? Maybe a little relish or something.”
“Of course.”
She gets to work and I hover nearby. “You like working here?”
She smiles. “I know how it looks.”
“Oh yeah?”
“My uncle was here since he was a boy, used to help his daddy when Mr. Lombardi’s grandfather owned the house. When my daddy died, his brother, he took me in. Mr. Lombardi looks after us both.”
“Looks after you well?”
Stella glances at me, that indefinable look in her eyes again. “Better than he ever treats Cora.”
Interesting. “He’s rough with her?”
Stella looks at me a moment longer, her lips pursed. A tiny wince passes over her brow and she looks away again. I think she wants to tell me more but doesn’t dare. I need to tread carefully, move around things. “Alfie is your uncle, huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And your mother?”
“She was killed in a car accident when I was five, Daddy died when I was ten.”
“Man, I’m sorry. That’s awful.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Alfie have a wife?”
“No, sir, he never married. But he has good friends.” She flicks a smile back over her shoulder and it’s loaded with unspoken details. I wonder if she means his best friends are other guys.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You already did.” She cuts the sandwich in half with a wicked sharp carving knife and puts it on a floral ceramic side plate.
“When I mentioned something to Lombardi earlier, it seems to me like you maybe recognized the name.”
“You have everything you need now?” Alfie asks from the door. His eyes are hard. Stella’s lips tighten and she presses them together. She smiles and hands me the plate.
“Thank you so much.”
She nods, points at the fridge. “Milk in there if you want it, glasses up in that cupboard. I get you anything else?”
“No, that’s great. Thanks.”
She slips past Alfie back into the small unit beyond the door. It looks like they have a couple of rooms back there, maybe three, and a small bathroom at the end. There’s a framed picture on the wall of the short hallway, all blacks and purples, like a scene from Hell. I can’t figure out the tangle of limbs and bilious clouds represented there. Under it is a small table, and on that a kind of altar. Black candles, votive icons, beads and feathers hanging from the bottom of the picture frame.
“You need to be awful careful, Mr. Carver,” Alfie says. He shuts the door before I can ask any more.
I take the sandwich back upstairs to eat, then go to bed. I don’t know how to get better intel here, it’s all proving to be stubborn. Sleep steals over me while I’m trying to see a way to use the tiny clues I have.
* * *
The first thing I notice on waking is the noise in the house. Lots of raised voices. The second thing I notice when I sit up is a scrap of paper on the floor by the door, like it’s been slipped underneath in the night. When I pick it up, I can’t help smiling. In a neat, tight script is reads:
Papa Night – Maplewood
Thank you, Stella. At least, I assume that’s who left this little breadcrumb for my trail. I have another lead. That’s three things I plan to follow up on today.
But first I’d better check what the shouting is all about.
Turns out the Andrettis hit one of Lombardi’s bars last night. At least, that’s my assumption, the place shot up and the takings stolen. Their war continues. Lombardi tells me to focus on my part of things. The sooner I find his wife, the sooner he can go full auto and wipe the Andrettis off the map. That’s how he puts it, but he’s still a scared man posturing. I get the feeling he’s all talk and he’s fast losing this war.
Regardless, I’m happy to follow his suggestion. He tells me that he’s found Charlie’s Bar, a place in Newark where some of Andretti’s people apparently hang out. He gives me the address.
“I need a car, I’m all about the suburbs today.”
He frowns at me and I shrug.
“You can take the Oldsmobile out front.”
He gives me some keys and I head out.
First off I only drive a couple of blocks then find a shady spot under some trees to park. Using the browser on the phone Lombardi gave me, I do some research. Papa Night comes up with no results.
So I look up Dorset Girls School. Nothing comes up. But scrolling through the almost hits I see a few entries for Dorset Hills School. That could be it, I misheard Bridget’s rushed whisper. One of those Montessori places, it’s on the edge of a country club not far from Morristown. I double check that with the area code I saw Lombardi dial and it checks out. Only about thirty minutes from here. I tap up the address into the phone’s GPS and start driving.
Forty minutes later I’ve found the place, Davey’s shiny black Cadillac parked on the driveway of a two-story square house, yellow brick underneath with pale blue siding on the top floor. That easy. Finally something goes my way. As soon as I spot Davey’s car, the same one we all rode back in from the shoot-out at Gino’s, I log the address and keep driving. Hopefully no one will be looking out the window the same moment I go by. I hang a left at the next intersection and head toward Newark.
That’s one job of three covered. I know where they’re holding Bridget. The temptation is to grab her now and just leave all this behind, but I need to find her money if I can. For now, the Papa Night lead is a bust, so I move onto job three.
It takes another thirty minutes to drive east to Newark and I find parking about two blocks from Charlie’s Bar. I’m wearing a black hoodie and jeans, my two guns concealed like before. I slip the phone into my hip pocket, pull up the hood and walk. I’m a fairly big guy, but going unnoticed is more about attitude than physical presence. I learned long ago in the life that there are three types of people. I think of them as victims, assholes, and ciphers.
Victims are the kind of folk who expect the worst from the world, so they usually get it. They walk the streets terrified of being jumped, so they act and move scared and skittish. Even if they’re big, they look like a victim. Someone on the prowl for a fight or a mugging isn’t looking for a challenge, they’re looking for a victim. They’re looking for chumps like this, people who have defeated themselves already.
Then there are assholes, the kind of guys who strut and swagger everywhere. They act like their balls are so big they have to curve out their knees, and their backs are so broad they have to carry imaginary piglets under each arm. More often than not it’s insecurity and these guys are scared, but they overcompensate the opposite way from the victims. Most guys fall into one or other of these categories, to varying degrees.
Then there are ciphers. Often if someone is described a cipher it means they have no agency, no power. They’re used by other people. But it can also mean a person is indefinite. Indefinable. Ciphers are unknown quantities, but usually confident, which makes them dangerous. And the best of the ciphers are the sort of guys who don’t even get noticed. Victims and assholes are spotted right away, everyone sees them. A cipher kind of guy can move around without raising too much attention, without being noticed at all.
I try to be a cipher.
In the two years I was laying low in Canada, I studied a lot. It’s when I learned about rōnin and realized that’s what I was now. That led me to study eastern culture and I learned a lot about samurai. One of my favorite books is by Miyamoto Musashi, called Go Rin No Sho or A Book of Five Rings. He also wrote another fantastic thing called Dokkōdō or The Path of Aloneness, which is just a list of twenty-one concepts, his philosophy for life. He wrote that only a week before he died back in 1645.
Everyone talks about Sun Tzu’s Art of War, which is a great book, but Five Rings and Aloneness get overlooked. Musashi was a Japanese swordsman, philosopher, and rōnin. He became famous for his unique double-bladed swordsmanship. He was undefeated in sixty-one duels. He even founded his own style of swordsmanship, the Niten Ichi-Ryū School. He wrote Five Rings and Aloneness, and gave them both to a dude called Terao Magonojō, the best of his students. He lived to be sixty-one and then died of lung cancer, which is some bullshit for a guy like that. This universe sure does lack justice.
Anyway, his books really stuck with me. They helped me through those two years of exile. Five Rings has wisdom like “If you wish to control others you must first control yourself” and “All men are the same except for their belief in their own selves, regardless of what others may think of them”. Now that last one, that hit me. It plays into my victim-asshole-cipher theory. What you think of yourself matters. Not the lies you tell yourself, but what you really think of yourself, in your heart. That’s what comes out when the shit goes down. And it’s how you ultimately present yourself to the world.
I know myself. I can fight, I’m a hell of a good shot—Vernon always called me a natural—but with shooting and fighting, I practice a lot. Aptitude is nothing without hard work. And I have a granite chin. No idea why, but I’ve always been hard to KO, which has saved my ass a few times now. So knowledge of those things gives me confidence, but I’m smart enough not to let my confidence show unless I choose to show it. I skim under the radar whenever I can. I cipher myself. That plays well into the realization that I’m rōnin now.
And that’s the attitude I carry for two blocks, and then into Charlie’s Bar.
The place is pretty busy, several of the tables surrounded by people drinking, another seven lined up on stools at the bar. A small group is gathered around a pool table at one end, talking too loud and overplaying themselves. Four guys and two girls, they look like they’re heading toward quite the party later on. Five Finger Death Punch is pounding from the speakers, not super loud, but enough that everyone has to raise their voice a little to speak, so the whole place is buzzing. Glasses chink, pool balls clack, one woman laughs like a coyote in heat. For just after 11:00 a.m., this is quite the pumping place.
With my hood up and my face down to account for any CCTV, I head straight to the bar. There’s a table in the back and four people sit around it, at least one of them was in The Falcon last night. I don’t let my gaze linger. At least the intel was right that Andretti’s guys use this place too. Now to see if I can pick up any further clues, anything to lead me closer to the boss.
“What’ll it be?”
“Just a beer, thanks.”
The bartender nods and pours for me. I pay him.
“The fuck are you thinking here, cocheese?”
“You can’t call him that anymore, Dwight. He’s a rōnin now!” Officer Graney’s voice drips sarcasm.
He and Dwight sit on stools to one side of me, Alvin and Sly to the other. Michael is behind the bar like he works there, leaning back against the rear counter under a long double row of spirits. I ignore them and drink my beer.
“You planning to follow someone from here, Mr. Samurai?” Sly asks, joint smoke spilling from his nose and mouth while he talks. He passes the spliff to Alvin, who draws deep. I hear the cherry crackle, then a cloud of fragrant blue envelopes me. I blow gently, making sure not to inhale any. I need to stay sharp. I’m not even certain I can get stoned on ghost weed, but I’m taking no chances. It’s happened before.
