“You mean the notebook,” I said.
She stared at the ice in her glass and nodded. “With the information contained between those covers, plus my vision and your gift, we can rule this dirty town. It’s high time that someone who thinks with her brain first is in charge.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head slowly. “Never. It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman. The whole thing has been rotten from the beginning and it will never change.”
“I don’t want to change it, you little fool,” she said. “I want to control it. But okay, fine and dandy, I’ll do it alone. . well, not quite alone. I have Poor Kevin. He’s my ultimate weapon because he loves me and only me, and would happily travel to hell and back at my command. He almost got you the first time, in the basement of your house, if it hadn’t been for that filthy little dog.”
“The basement,” I said, feeling again at my neck. “He almost killed me.”
“He was just trying to squeeze the notebook out of you,” she said, sipping. “I suppose it was a bit painful, but Poor Kevin despises you Rispolis. But then, don’t we all?” And then she lowered her voice and glanced around at her people. “Of course, I never told my officers about Poor Kevin. Better to have them all working independently. That’s good leadership, Outfit style. Never let your employees know exactly what you’re doing, or whom you’re doing it with. Secrecy is the key to success.”
“You mean secrecy plus a masked lunatic, don’t you?”
“Tsk-tsk, sticks and stones,” she said, crinkling her nose. “Poor Kevin is my avenging angel. Nothing short of a Mack truck can stop him.”
“I guess I’ll have to get a Mack truck.”
Elzy finished her drink, patted her lips, and said, “This has been fun, but I want that notebook and I want it now.”
“I’ll never give it to you. Why should I? You don’t have my family.”
“Oh, but I have something,” she said, tossing a pair of books on the table. I glanced at the titles, Roger Ebert’s The Great Movies, volumes one and two, and recognized Doug’s well-worn copies. “Your chunky friend traced Poor Kevin’s devil mask to a novelty store, asked a few questions, and actually tried to catch him,” she said with a small smile. “It didn’t work out too well.”
“Where is he?” I said quietly, using every ounce of restraint not to flip the table and stomp the answer out of her. “I swear to God, if you’ve hurt him. .”
“Don’t swear, and yes, of course we’ve hurt him. All you have to do is trade the notebook for your bloated buddy and Poor Kevin will let him go,” she said, narrowing her eyes behind the cat’s-eye glasses. “Of course, now that you’re here, I could just keep you, couldn’t I? Let Poor Kevin convince you to give up the notebook in his own special way. I have more than enough people here to. .” But she spread her arms at an empty bar. Her officers were all gone, with cigarettes still smoldering and drinks unfinished, as if ripped from their posts by silent, unseen hands.
That’s when one of those hands lit on my shoulder.
Elzy looked behind me and her jaw muscles rippled.
One of Knuckles’s dark and anonymous guys said, “Time to go, girly.”
I rose and saw his two companions, one near the bar, one at the door, and wanted to ask what they had done with Elzy’s people, but it wasn’t a Q amp;A moment. Elzy crossed her arms and said, “I see you’ve learned a couple of things from the notebook.”
“More than a couple.”
“Two hours. Come alone, unarmed, or you’ll have a fat corpse on your hands.”
“Where?”
“Rispoli amp; Sons Fancy Pastries.” She smiled coyly.
The bakery, where her brother lost his face.
Club Molasses, where my family buried its secrets.
Where everything began and where, I realized, she intended everything to end.
An hour and fifty-eight minutes is not much time to speed-read part of a chapter, scribble a list, grab cash from a steel briefcase, drive like a maniac to one store and then another store, and then build a bomb.
Actually, the notebook calls it an “incendiary device.”
Chapter six (Metodi-Methods) describes it as ideal for “scare tactics, arson, and safe-cracking.”
It also cautions that it could kill someone, which might be a good thing.
After I aged the brand-new leather notebook I’d purchased by backing over it with the Lincoln and beating it with a hammer, I very carefully wired it with the device. Everything I needed to assemble the little bomb was available at the corner hardware store, which in my former life would’ve been extremely disturbing. My present life was a different story-one that could end prematurely at any time-and I had no moral issue whatsoever about blowing off the rest of that evil sock puppet’s face.
At the hour-fifty-nine mark I pulled up in front of the bakery.
The time for parking down the block had passed.
Leaping roof to roof seemed suddenly ridiculous.
I lifted the notebook, climbed out of the car, and walked through the front door of the bakery, the bell jingling behind me. I’d thought about bringing the.45, but it was bulky and hard to hide, and besides, if my scheme went off as planned I wouldn’t need it. The front of the store was dark and so was the kitchen, but it didn’t matter, I knew where they were, and went straight to the Vulcan. I folded myself inside, whooshed quickly below the earth, and pulled open the heavy steel door of Club Molasses.
It was dark inside except for a single spotlight.
It shone on Doug in the middle of the dance floor.
He was slumped in a chair, chin on his chest, shirt soaked with blood.
I ran to him, set the notebook on the floor, and gently lifted his head. It was impossible not to grimace at his beaten, swollen face. I whispered, “Doug. It’s me, Sara Jane,” and he blinked heavily, trying to focus. Quietly, I said, “Where is he?”
Doug worked his jaws, spit out a tooth, and said, “Right behind you.”
There was no panic, only action, and I spun with my right fist curled at my chin and my left fist in front of my right. Poor Kevin bowed like a huge, rumpled maitre d’, emitting a gust of rotten-meat cologne from his melted head. “Welcome to Club Molasses! Table for two?”
“I have the notebook,” I said, vibrating with ghiaccio furioso, feeling it quiver and fade as it had with Elzy. It was plain me versus maniac him, and I said, “Take it and let us go. That was the deal.”
“Let you go? Oh no-no-no!” he trilled, pumping his arms in time to his words like a crazed sports fan. “Not until I inspect the no-no-notebook!”
“You want it?” I said, kicking it across the parquet dance floor. “Go get it.”
Poor Kevin watched it slide like a hockey puck and then looked at me. The pupils of his eyes through the ski mask holes grew larger and smaller, like two crazy cameras trying to find focus, and then he shrugged and shambled after it. And then everything sped up-me lugging Doug toward the door, Poor Kevin picking up the notebook, me bracing for an explosion and then hearing a soft, gentle pop. I turned to him staring at the blank, smoking pages that did not blow up, and then he lifted his horrific head and said as coldly as a frozen knife, “You think I’m stupid?”
“It’s a misunderstanding,” I said, backing toward the door with Doug attached to me like a three-hundred-pound anchor.
“It’s a death sentence!” he squealed, galloping across the floor. I dropped Doug, ducked and moved, and Poor Kevin’s massive fist missed my head by inches. When he turned, I was waiting with a hard left-right combo that stopped him. He shook his head and then went into a fighter’s crouch too, and we squared off on the dance floor. “Hey, this is gonna be fun!” he said as we circled. “Just like the old days when I used to beat the dirt out of that schlub uncle of yours! You Rispolis are all the same, blah-blah-blah, all talk and no. .” and then he had to stop talking because my fist was in his mouth-once, twice, three times-and he skidded backward. Then he charged forward, and I dropped a shoulder and threw my Willy Williams left hook.