Shaking but trying to hide it, Decker went over to Chaim and lifted him to his feet. “Are you all right?”
Chaim was still sobbing.
“Shut him up.”
“He’s terrified-”
“He’s giving me a headache. Shut him up!”
Chaim clamped his trembling hands over his mouth, his body quivering and unstable on his feet. Tears ran from his eyes. Decker slipped his arm around his shoulders. Chaim melted into his arms.
Donatti went over to Merrin’s body, still flowing with rich, oxygenated blood, and plucked the gun from the holster. “Guess who has all the wea-pons,” he sang out. “Guess whose ass you’d better start kiss-ing.”
“What do you want?” Decker whispered.
“I’d like your wife, and probably the easiest way to get her is to shoot you.” He stared at Decker, his eyes filled with avarice and hunger. “What do you think, Lieutenant? Her luscious lips around my cock, those gorgeous baby blues looking up at my face… Good, huh?”
Decker felt his stomach churn. “You’ve got the gun. You’re entitled to dream.”
Donatti grinned. “Nice comeback. You can live another five minutes.” His eyes went to Chaim. “I just shot a nice piece of my income.” He aimed the gun at Chaim’s head. “To make up for that, you’re going to work for me. I need details. You can start now.”
Silence.
Donatti shot a bullet at Lieber’s feet, making him do a little hop. “Don’t keep me waiting, you stupid kike. Tell me about the operation.”
“I…” Chaim cleared his throat. “I was helping… import. I was importing-”
“If you can’t stop stumbling over your words, I’m going to kill you. Now try it again. Go on, I’m getting testy.”
“I bring in the stuff… in my electronic equipment.”
“From where?”
“Europe… Israel… Asia… all over.”
“And Merrin was your distributor?”
Chaim nodded, breaking away from Decker. He tried to stand straighter, but his legs were still wobbly.
“What’s your cut?”
“It works out… to about…” Heavy breathing. But it was clear that Lieber was calming down. “I took about thirty percent of street value.”
“Well, now you’re down to twenty.”
“Sure… yeah. Okay. Whatever you want.”
“Whatever I want, ‘Mr. Donatti.’ ”
“Yes, sure… Whatever you want, Mr. Donatti.”
“Who did Merrin sell it to?”
“The locals kids from the townships… behamas… beasts. Kids with nothing better to do than to go crazy.”
“These vermin over here…” Donatti pointed to the corpses. “They were locals?”
Chaim nodded.
“Merrin sold directly to the boys?”
“He had… others in the force to help him out.”
“Good to know. How’d you get into this?”
“Merrin… he was using dancers… him and the Israelis and the Arabs… but then they got caught in Miami. They… needed another way to import the stuff.” He looked at Decker. “Weiss suggested me because I needed money.”
“You worked with him before?”
“I borrowed some money from him, yes. But I paid it back. I wouldn’t have done it.” Again a look at Decker. “But Merrin found out that I was… I was doing things.”
Slowly, Donatti grinned. “I thought you looked familiar. Course all you kikes look alike when you’re naked.”
The videotapes from the whorehouse. Decker raised his eyes. Jen had told him she didn’t know Chaim Lieber. And maybe she hadn’t known him. Maybe he had come under an alias. Or, just as likely, Donatti instructed her to deny knowing him. And, of course, she’d follow orders. Stupid of him to believe anything she told him. She’d said it herself. She was a user, too.
“Merrin offered you an opportunity, then,” Donatti said.
Chaim nodded. “He told me it would be just a couple of times. But then… the money… the money was good.”
A quick glimpse at Decker.
“It’s not like you think. I didn’t squander the money… yes, a few massages-but mostly, I used it for business. For my business. I used it to feed my large family. I used it to take care of my elderly father. I used it for the local schools and synagogues. Why should I care if I take from the pockets of thugs who crash cars, have sex like animals, and spit when they see you walking down the street? Why should I care if they blow their brains out on drugs? And why should a self-righteous prick like my brother ruin everything for me? Him… the moral do-gooder who has been on and off drugs for ten years. Who borrowed money from me and from my father without ever paying any of it back. Who never raised a finger to help out with my father or help out with the business because he was too stoned to get out of bed. Who had the nerve to tell me how to raise my children when he has never accepted responsibility for anything in his life!”
Indignation gave him a certain amount of ill-placed dignity, except that Decker had heard it all before-the self-rationalization and situational ethics to help defend evil actions. “So you gave Ephraim over to Merrin and his goons because you were resentful?”
“Not to kill!” Chaim spat out. “Just to talk some sense into him.” In a quieter voice. “And if they scared him a little, so be it.”
“They did more than scare him,” Decker said softly.
“I wouldn’t know…” Chaim looked away. “Something went wrong.”
“A bit of an understatement,” Decker said.
“And who gave you the right to be my judge and jury?” Chaim snarled.
Donatti said, “What happened with your daughter? Did you set her up, too?”
“I didn’t set anyone up!” Abruptly, Chaim’s eyes watered. “Especially my daughter. I loved Shayndaleh! She was my own flesh and blood. It wasn’t… She wasn’t supposed to be there. I don’t know what happened!”
“What happened was they killed her.”
“It was an accident!” Chaim cried out. “They claimed they knew where she was. They were supposed to bring her back to me. She resisted. A gun went off-”
“She knew them, Chaim,” Decker broke in. “They killed her because she could identify them. It wasn’t any accident.”
Donatti said, “They don’t call you lieutenant for nothing.”
“No, you’re wrong. It wasn’t like that at all!” Chaim protested. “They said they could rescue her.” He started sobbing. “They said she struggled, that she was screaming. It wasn’t meant to happen that way.” He became hysterical. “I didn’t kill her. I DIDN’T KILL HER-”
Donatti’s gun spat three pellets of hot lead, leaving Chaim Lieber with three blood-filled holes in the center of his chest. He was still forming words when he fell to the ground, his lips ring-shaped, mouthing the letter O.
The air smothered with its silence. Decker’s heart was pounding against his chest. “What… why’d you… why’d you do that?”
“Why?” Donatti glared at him with stone eyes. “Because that bitch was mine, Decker. It would have been one thing if she left on her own, but she didn’t. She was taken from me. Nobody steals from a Donatti and gets away with it. Nobody! Not even her father!”
He was panting like the dog he was.
“Besides, I dislike self-justifying bastards. Asshole’s worse than I am. At least, I’m honest about what I do.”
Donatti was holding two guns-Merrin’s Smith & Wesson.32 in his left hand, his own semiautomatic in the right. He went over to Lieber’s body and tattooed the inert hand with gunpowder by firing off the rest of the magazine from the semiautomatic, in various directions. When he was done, he left the gun at Chaim’s side. Several of the stray bullets had missed Decker’s feet by inches. When Donatti got back on his feet, he was holding Merrin’s revolver in his left hand.
“If anyone had shot you, it would have been Merrin, don’t you think?”