“See?” Lyman said. “We’re having a conversation already. Tell me where she is.”
Lardman and the Undertaker exchanged glances, and suddenly Lyman knew what was coming.
Lardman made an abrupt turn down a dirt road, then began accelerating.
So much for agreements, Lyman thought.
The Undertaker moved, quick and catlike. His hand went inside his jacket.
Charles Lyman fired the Smith & Wesson point-blank into the back of the driver’s seat. Lardman jerked the wheel to the right as he crumpled over it. His foot came off the gas and the car slewed toward the ditch.
Lyman reached forward as the Undertaker came up with a gun, took it from him, grabbed the back of his suit collar, and shoved forward with everything he had.
The Undertaker’s face got very personal with the windshield.
The car came to a stop in the sand at the side of the road and fetched up against a culvert, hard. The Undertaker flopped back in his seat, out cold.
“Should have buckled up,” Lyman told him. “It’s the law.”
He dropped the snub-nosed.38 he’d taken from the Undertaker onto the floorboard and kicked it under the seat in front of him.
Lardman was slumped over the steering wheel. He had a hole in his back. Probably the bullet had gone through the seat of the Crown Vic, through his back an inch to the right of his spine, and most likely was lodged in his right lung. His days of eating linguini were over.
Lyman got out, opened the driver’s door, fished out Lardman’s wallet, and found a driver’s license. The license was out of state. Samuel Rosario. No middle name. Some address in Brooklyn, New York. There was nothing else. He replaced the wallet, went through the man’s pockets, and came up with a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, a gold lighter, and a wad of cash about the size of a small horse apple.
“I’m giving this to Carlos’s family,” Lyman told him.
He went back around to the passenger side and checked the glove box. Nothing.
He went through the Undertaker’s pockets and found an ancient calfskin wallet and with it a name: Victor Cicchese.
Victor sported a nose that grew in size and kept emitting a stream of blood and mucus as Lyman continued the search through his pockets.
“One pocket comb. Check,” Lyman intoned. “One prophylactic, unused. Check. One tin of Altoids. Check. Aha,” he said. “What have we here? One slightly tarnished photograph of a little cutie-pie.”
The photo was a black-and-white studio shot of a platinum-blond young lady of that indeterminate age somewhere between seventeen and twenty-five.
He flipped it over.
Blue ink told the tale: Linda, sophomore year, NYU.
In the inside pocket of the Undertaker’s jacket he found a magnetic key card with a bright Motel 6 logo emblazoned across it.
At that moment, Mr. Victor Cicchese let out a low moan.
“Doesn’t feel so good, does it?” Lyman said.
Victor’s head lolled to one side. His eyelids fluttered for a moment and then slowly opened.
“Hello,” Lyman said.
“Uh… what?”
Lyman punched him, hard. His eyes closed.
“Sometimes I just can’t help myself,” Lyman said.
A truck was coming, trailing dust.
“Ah, hell,” Lyman said.
The truck slowed. It was his own pickup, and as it drew closer, he recognized the face behind the wheel. It was Cassandra from the restaurant.
Cassandra got out, raced over to Lyman, and threw her arms around his neck. She kissed him on the cheek. It took not a little effort to get her to stop.
“I thought you’d be dead,” she said.
Lyman chuckled, holding her in the air. After a moment he had to set her back down.
Charles Lyman’s first thought was to turn the Undertaker into a hood ornament and strap him across the front of his truck like a trussed deer, but then he reminded himself that he wasn’t looking for more attention than he could handle at the moment.
Cassandra found a spool of twine in his truck, which he used to bind up their captive and ensconce him in the bed of his pickup truck. He took a moment to get the Crown Victoria off the road and into the corn.
He walked back to the road.
“Darlin’,” he said, “where’s the Motel 6?”
Cassandra directed him to the motel.
“Be right back,” she said, and climbed out. “I know the girl who works the counter here. This won’t take a minute.”
True to her word, she was back beside him in the pickup in seconds.
“Around in back and down on the end, number 167,” Cassandra said.
“What’d you tell her?”
“I told her that we were borrowing our friend’s room. I told her I got lucky and found a man.”
Charles laughed. “I wouldn’t want to make a liar out of you,” he said.
The door had a Do Not Disturb sign hanging from the handle.
They found Linda Sneed inside, barely alive. Charles had to fish out a pair of bolt cutters from his pickup in order to get the handcuffs off of her while Cassandra held water to her swollen lips. She was dehydrated, had fouled the bed linens underneath her, and was talking out of her head.
The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes after she regained full consciousness. Ten minutes after that, the sheriff came knocking.
“What was it all about?” Ralph Bigham asked him.
“It was about money and revenge. She knew her life wasn’t worth anything if she told them where it was stashed. So she rode it out.”
“What money?”
“Lardman’s,” Lyman said.
“Who?”
“His name was Sammy Rosario. I call him Lardman because I like that name better. Linda met him at a bar in the Bronx. He bragged about being a hit man who had just made a big score and was going to retire. She took him to bed, robbed him blind, and cut out.”
“How much?” Bigham asked.
“Quarter-million. That is, if she’s telling the truth.”
“What about the other guy?”
“The Undertaker? His name was Victor Cicchese. Lardman’s cousin.”
“Okay. What about McDaniel? Why’d they kill him?”
Lyman released a long, slow breath. The answer came to him, and as he said it, he knew he was right.
“Because. Some guys are lucky. Some ain’t. They make their own luck, good or bad. Carlos put himself in the path of the tornado. In that respect, he was a lot like my brother.”
“I don’t understand,” Bigham said, knowing it was the only way to finally pull it out of the craggy-faced, teal-eyed man in front of him. But Lyman shifted the subject from himself, from his own past, and back to McDaniel.
“McDaniel screwed up pretty bad. Linda Sneed was his client, and he broke a rule. He took her to bed. Word got back to Lardman somehow, where she was, what she was doing, who she was screwing, and they came looking for her. But they found him first.”
The silence grew around them. The restaurant had grown still.
“I’ll go ahead and tell you,” Lyman said. “Because you want to know, and it’s secrets that always get us. My brother made his own bad luck. I caught him in bed with my girl. We were going to be married, you know.”
A moment passed. Then another.
“I killed him with my own bare hands. It was rage, Ralph. Consuming rage.”
“When was that?” Bigham asked.
“Twenty years ago. My parole expired last month. I’m a free man now. I can go where I want, do what I want.”
“Yeah?”
“But we’re never free, I think. That is, until we somehow make it right.”
Ralph Bigham looked down at the table, weighed his own words before speaking. “I hope,” he said. “I hope you’ve made it right again, Chuck.”
Lyman smiled. “Me too,” he said. “Oh. I almost forgot.” He reached into the large paper bag beside him, pulled out the leather gun case, and pushed it across the table. “I gave it a thorough cleaning.”