Battaglia angled the boat that way and cut the engine to a growl.
“See anything?” Battaglia asked.
Gianelli slowly scanned the shoreline — so dark was the night, he might have been staring down a gun barrel.
“Can’t see a goddamn thing,” he admitted.
Where was the car, and the son of a bitch who was supposed to meet them? Had there been some foul-up? Worse yet, a double cross?
Gianelli strained to make out a shape that might be a car in the darkness. But all he saw was the rise and fall of the dunes. There was the occasional house out here, but not in this stretch — that’s why they’d picked it.
Only thing out here should be their contact…
“Where the hell is he?” Battaglia wondered.
Running parallel to the beach, motor idling, sand on their right, Gianelli could make out only the sound of the tide rolling up to slap the shore, the motion of the water moving them slowly forward and slightly right.
Starboard, Gianelli reminded himself.
Ahead of them, up the beach, he saw a glimmer of light…
… and then it was gone.
Had he seen it or imagined it?
“You catch that?” he asked.
“Catch what?” Battaglia replied, his face turned farther astern.
Maybe he had imagined it.
Gianelli looked again, harder, if that was possible, and waited. And waited some more. And some more…
There it was!
A small dot of light maybe fifty yards farther up the beach — a flashlight, no doubt about it.
“I see it,” Battaglia said, and guided the boat in that direction.
As they neared the shore, Gianelli realized the guy was standing at the end of a short pier. Battaglia cut the engine so they could float in alongside the wooden structure, and the guy doused his light.
Battaglia tossed a line to the guy, who pulled them up to the dock and tied it off on a cleat.
As Battaglia and their host hefted the package out of the boat, Gianelli studied the beach, still unable to see the car in the moonless night.
“Where’s your wheels?” he whispered, the nature of their activity calling for that tone more than any chance they’d be overheard.
“Closer to the road,” the guy said.
Gianelli pulled a small flashlight from his jacket pocket and shone it in the man’s face.
Man?
Hell, this guy was a kid, barely eighteen — curly black hair, wide brown eyes, and a face that looked like it never met a razor.
“Closer to the road?” Gianelli asked, keeping his voice down, knowing it carried at night.
“Yeah,” the kid said matter-of-factly.
“Why the hell’s it over there?” Battaglia asked, just a little irritated.
The kid let out a long breath as they rested the package on the dock.
“Either we carry this load closer to the road,” he said, his baritone voice older than his face, “and toss it in the car, or I pull the car up here for us to stuff this guy in… and then explain to the cops why the car sank in the sand and we got stuck.”
Battaglia still looked pissed, but Gianelli was nodding. “You got a brain or two, kid. What’s your handle, anyway?”
“David Musetti,” the kid said, his voice as hushed as Gianelli’s.
“Good thinkin’, Davey. Come on, Johnny, let’s get this dead weight up to the car.”
Fifteen minutes later, the body was stowed in the trunk of a ’42 Chevy, while Battaglia was stuffed in the backseat, Gianelli sitting on the passenger side next to Musetti as the young man started the car.
“Know where you’re goin’?” Battaglia asked.
“Yeah,” Musetti said matter-of-factly — they might have been discussing what restaurant they were choosing. “Been there before.”
They crossed the railroad tracks of the South Shore Line, a train that ran from the city to South Bend, Indiana. Gianelli and a couple of other mugs had even brought a body here in a trunk one time on the train.
The Dunes Express, the boys used to call it.
But lately it had been strictly delivery by car — the feds had infiltrated the railroad dicks, watching for wartime sabotage; so hauling corpses by rail was out.
The Musetti kid turned the Chevy right onto Highway 12 and switched on the car’s headlights. They’d barely gone a mile when they passed an Indiana state trooper who had some poor bozo pulled over.
The cop was watching, smugly skeptical, as the drunk tried to walk a chalk line on the edge of the road.
Gianelli admired the fact that the kid neither sped up nor slowed down when he drove past the scene.
Gianelli said, “Kid, you’re a pretty cool customer.”
Musetti shrugged, then glanced into the mirror before turning left without a signal, easing onto a dirt road that was little more than a cow path.
The kid killed the lights.
They rode back into the woods almost half a mile, cresting a hill and easing down the other side before Musetti turned off the car.
They sat in silence for a moment before climbing out.
“Let’s get to it,” Battaglia said.
Funny how little emotion there was in it, Gianelli thought. He was a sucker for sad movies and had to work not to blubber at a funeral of a friend or family member (either family). And maybe even a bent flatfoot like Hill deserved better.
But that was how it was in war — bodies didn’t get respect, just disposal, and the ones doing the disposing didn’t feel anything much other than an itch to get done and get back home.
Gianelli grabbed the shovels while the other two lugged the body. The soil here was marshy and that would make the digging easy, but Gianelli wished he had thought to wear less expensive shoes.
The body was buried deep in no time. Gianelli wondered how Captain Ed Hill would feel if he knew how many of the Mafiosi he had chased over the years were interred around him.
“On Judgment Day,” Gianelli said, “when all these corpses come up outa the ground, this poor bastard’s gonna be way outnumbered.”
Battaglia laughed.
Musetti didn’t.
Soon the taciturn kid was pulling the car onto the highway and retracing his route back to the dunes. As they ambled along, Gianelli reflected.
The marsh was home to many mysteries, Gianelli knew; and nobody would come out here looking for bodies. The sandy earth would keep its secrets forever.
Or till Judgment Day, anyway.
And maybe not even then. Gianelli laughed to himself, and Battaglia looked over at him stupidly.
What kind of angel would want to come out to these godforsaken boonies to resurrect anybody?
1
Like a thick oil slick spreading over lake Michigan, an oppressive wave of heat coated Chicago, as it had since early spring.
The summer-long drought, coupled since late July with a garbage strike, made for long nights and longer days in a city where aromas were high and tempers were short. Piles of garbage accrued over the last seven weeks had become giant disease-bearing compost heaps.
Op-ed writers for the newspapers were referring to Chicago as “Fecund City” and “The City of Big Smoulders,” but neither side budged in the strike negotiations, and Mother Nature seemed to have decided to simply parboil the city.
In this town where smiles were rare about now, Special Agent Seeley Booth sat in a meeting room of the Everett M. Dirksen Federal Building barely able to contain his grin.