Текст книги "Wild Card"

Автор книги: James Swain

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter 56

Banko drove with the siren screaming on the dashboard, then killed the siren two blocks from Hollis’s address, and crept up the street. It was a quiet neighborhood, and as they parked several houses away from Hollis’s, a dog started to bark.

They found Romero and Fuller standing on the sidewalk, shivering from the cold. Both men looked annoyed; Hollis had done a good job convincing them he wasn’t a killer. “You’re making a mistake,” Fuller said. “Hollis isn’t the Dresser.”

“Yes, he is,” Valentine said.

“How can you know? You haven’t even spoken to him.”

Valentine didn’t need to talk to Hollis to know he was right. His gut was telling him that Hollis was the Dresser, and his gut was never wrong. He was not about to back down.

“Bet you a hundred bucks,” Valentine said.

“You’re on,” Fuller said.

The four men started up the path toward Hollis’s residence. The house was a two-story square box that looked like a piece from a Monopoly game, with blinds drawn tightly on the windows, and old newspapers lying on the stoop. Fuller knocked on the screen door with his fist. The porch light came on, and they heard footsteps.

“Be careful. He’s got a grudge against Valentine,” Banko warned.

The front door swung in, and Hollis stood on the other side of the screen. In his late thirties, he was balding, with a pug face and deep, sunken eyes. Dressed in running shorts and a gray sweatshirt, he appeared to have been working out. Valentine stared at him through the FBI agents’ shoulders.

“Sorry to bother you again, Mister Hollis, but we forgot to ask you a couple of things,” Fuller said. “May we come in?”

“Can’t this wait until tomorrow? I’m going to bed,” Hollis said.

“Afraid not.”

“Who are those men standing behind you?”

“Two officers with the Atlantic City Police Department.”

“Do they have names?”

“Why is that important?”

“I just like to know who I’m letting into my home.”

Hollis was stalling. Inside the house, Iron Butterfly’s psychedelic rock song In-a-gadda-da-vida was playing loudly on a stereo, and sweet incense was burning. Every serial killer had a ritual, and Valentine guessed that Hollis’s ritual was to recreate The Summer of Love.

“Mona’s in the house,” he blurted out.

Hollis’s eyes grew wide. Fuller jerked the screen door open, and he and Romero rushed in. They pinned Hollis to a wall in the foyer, and ordered him not to move.

“You’re under arrest,” Fuller told him.

Fuller read Hollis his rights, while Romero cuffed their suspect. Valentine and Banko followed them inside. Seeing Valentine, Hollis suddenly looked afraid.

“Valentine,” he muttered.

“Where is she?” Valentine said.

Hollis said nothing. The interior of the house was chilly, yet Hollis was sweating. Most old houses on the island had faulty heating, and he guessed Mona was either in the basement, or the attic. He decided to give Hollis a chance to come clean.

“You left a thumb tip in the glove compartment of your car,” Valentine said. “A hooker you picked up last week saw it. The game’s over. We know who you are.”

Hollis looked baffled. Then, his shoulders sagged.

“Fuck me,” he muttered.

“Is Mona still alive?”

“Yes.”

“Take us to her.”

“Okay.”

Hollis stepped down into the living room with the two FBI agents behind him. Their suspect dropped his arms, and there was a harsh popping sound as he dislocated his wrists. The handcuffs slid free and hit the floor. Reaching into his shorts, he extracted a can of pepper spray, and spun around.

“Fuckers!”

The pepper spray hit Fuller first, then Romero and Banko. It gave Valentine enough time to raise his forearm, and partially protect his face. His eyes filled with tears, and he watched helplessly as Hollis kicked Banko viciously in the groin, then shoved the FBI agents into each other, and sent them to the floor.

Then, Hollis turned on Valentine.

“Ready to rumble, Tony?” he screamed.

Hollis had turned into a raving psychopath in the blink of an eye. He grabbed a metal lamp off a table and smacked Valentine in the side of the head, then hit him in the shoulders and arms. He was laughing now, and seemed to be enjoying himself.

Valentine hadn’t come here to die. He threw a lazy punch at his attacker’s face. Hollis ducked the blow, but not the elbow that came with it. Boxers called it throwing a chicken wing, and it was the dirtiest trick Valentine knew.

Hollis’s head snapped back, and he hit the floor. Valentine got on top of him, and started throwing punches of his own. He would have continued had Banko not stepped in. “Jesus, Tony, you’ll kill him.”

“Is that so bad?”

“How did he slip the cuffs?”

“It’s a magic trick.”

Valentine grabbed Hollis by the collar and lifted his head. With his other hand, he pulled back one of his eyelids. Hollis was out cold.

“Damn it,” Valentine said.

It took Fuller and Romero a few moments to pull themselves together. When they had, and Hollis was under their control, Valentine and Banko ran through the house, checking the rooms as well as the basement and attic. There was no sign of Mona.

“The garage,” Valentine said.

The garage was a separate structure that stood behind the house. Banko opened the sliding door, and Valentine found a light and turned it on. A florescent bulb lit up the interior, revealing a white AT&T van with a ladder perched on the roof. Valentine grabbed the handle on the van’s rear door and jerked it open. Empty.

“Jesus,” Banko swore. “Look at this.”

Banko faced a wall lined with dozens of apothecary jars. From each jar stared out a pair of helpless eyes. Squirrels and rabbits and cats were swimming lifelessly in formaldehyde. Some people collected stamps. Hollis collected dead animals.

They returned to the house. Every room had been ice cold. So why was Hollis sweating? Valentine took another walk through the downstairs. The rooms were laid out in a circular design. If it was a circle, then where was its center?

He checked the closets, and banged on the interior wall. The closet in the den sounded hollow, and appeared to be made of particle board.

“In here,” he shouted.

Banko joined him. With their combined weight, they took down the wall. If fell inward, and they entered a small, dimly lit space that was twenty degrees warmer than the rest of the house. Mona hung by her wrists from a meat hook in the ceiling, her mouth covered in duct tape, her face a deathly blue.

“Help me get her down,” Valentine said.

He gave her mouth to mouth until an ambulance arrived, and a pair of medics went to work on her. She’d always joked about them getting together one day. Not like this,he thought. He leaned against the wall and watched the medics try to jolt her heart back to life. It wasn’t working.

He shuddered. It was what passed for tears after he’d been a cop for a while. He realized he needed to sit down. There was a chair against the wall, and as he sat in it, he noticed a plate of hot dog and beans lying on the floor beside it. Had Hollis been eating his dinner as Mona had starved to death? He couldn’t think of anything more cruel.

A small desk sat in the room’s corner, on it an open shoe box. He thumbed through snapshots of Mary Ann Crawford, Melissa Edwards, Connie Howard and Maria Sanchez that showed them gradually starving to death. The last envelope contained snapshots of a naked man lying atop a naked woman tied to a bed. The woman did not look thrilled with the situation. The man in the photos was Special Agent Fuller. Now he knew why Fuller had run out of town; Hollis had the goods on him.

Valentine glanced at the medics. They were still working on Mona, and paying no attention to him. He shoved the incriminating photographs of Fuller into his pocket, then walked out of Hollis’s lair. In the living room he found Banko talking to a couple of uniforms. His superior took him aside and said, “How’s she doing?”

“Not good,” Valentine said.

“I’m sorry. I know you cared about her.”

“Thanks.”

Through the living room window appeared the blinking lights of several police cruisers, as well as the shadows of uniformed cops standing on the front lawn. Valentine went outside, and found Hollis sitting in the back of a cruiser, his wrists handcuffed behind him, his face stained by his own blood. Their eyes met, and Hollis gnashed his teeth, trying to make himself frightening. Only he wasn’t; he was just a pathetic little man. Valentine put his face to the window. “Will you tell me something?”

Hollis stopped gnashing. “What?”

“Why did you kill those girls? It was my wife you wanted.”

Hollis brought his face to the window. “I fell in love with your wife the first day I met her. You’ve always stood in my way, protecting her like a guard dog. I considered killing you, but never had the courage. So I killed those hookers instead.”

“But why? They didn’t hurt you.”

“I had to have your wife, even if it meant dressing those girls up, and imagining her. Do you understand? I had to have Lois Fabio for my own.”

“You’re sick.”

“ I loved her!” Hollis screamed.

Valentine heard someone say his name, and glanced over his shoulder to see Fuller standing on the front path, smoking a cigarette. The FBI agent had a strange look on his face, and Valentine approached him wondering what was on his mind.

“Looks like I owe you a hundred bucks,” Fuller said.

“You owe me more than that.”

“How’s that?”

Valentine took the incriminating photographs from his pocket, and handed them to him. The cigarette fell from Fuller’s lips. He tried to speak, but could not find the words. Valentine said it for him.

“Deep down, I think you’re a good guy. But you’re going to have to prove it.”

Ashamed, Fuller stared at the ground.

“Not to me, but to your partner. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” he whispered.

“Good. It’s been nice knowing you.”

Valentine went back inside to Hollis’s lair. The medics were bringing Mona out on a stretcher, and had an oxygen mask over her face. He saw her look up at him through half-shut eyes, and grabbed her hand.

“Mona. You’re alive.”

Mona said something through her mask, and managed to smile. Valentine couldn’t believe it. She’d been dead five minutes ago, and he looked at the medics for help.

“What happened?”

“One of the cops came in, and started praying for her,” one of the medics explained. “After a couple of minutes, her heart started beating again. Don’t ask me to explain, because I can’t.”

Valentine didn’t need an explanation; seeing Mona alive was enough. She was trying to say something, and he leaned down, and put his ear next to her mask.

“I need a cigarette,” she rasped.

“Later,” he told her.

He watched them carry Mona out before going in. Romero stood at the desk looking at the photos of Hollis’s victims. He remembered Romero saying how he wanted to save a life someday, to atone for his lost girlfriend. God had been kind to him.

“You got your wish,” Valentine said.

Romero turned around. His eyes were filled with tears, and he nodded solemnly.

“God works in strange ways,” the FBI agent said.

Chapter 57

If anything good had come from the arrest, it was that Lois was finally safe. Going into the kitchen, Valentine found a phone, and dialed his house. “We got him,” he told his wife. “Guy named Farky Hollis. He had a big crush on you, if you can call it that.”

“You’re sure he’s the killer?” Lois asked. “I mean, there were a lot of boys – ”

“Trust me,” Valentine said. “He’s the one.”

“What about the prostitute he picked up?”

“We saved her. She’s going to be okay.”

“That’s so wonderful.” She paused, then said, “Is it okay if I tell the detectives watching me the news? I’m sure they’d like to go home, and be with their families tonight.”

“I don’t see why not,” Valentine said.

“Will you be home soon?”

“Another hour or two.”

“I’ll stay up. Thank you for keeping your promise to me. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Valentine said goodbye and hung up. He heard someone coming up from the basement. Banko appeared at the top of the steps looking shaken. His superior went to the sink and let cold water run, then splashed it repeatedly in his face.

“Something wrong?” Valentine asked.

Banko indicated the basement stairs. “Down there. He wasn’t just into women.”

The basement stairs were old and creaky, and Valentine descended while clutching the wood railing. At the bottom, he found himself in a large, finished room used to house Hollis’s vast collection of magic equipment. There was more stuff than Uncle Al’s store, and he saw several rows of folding chairs facing a makeshift plywood stage on the other side of the room, and guessed that Hollis had put on shows for the neighborhood kids.

A uniformed cop stood on the stage next to a large trunk. The trunk was covered with stickers from faraway places like Singapore and China. It looked like a prop, only the uniform’s ashen face said otherwise. Valentine climbed onto the stage.

“This is sick,” the uniform said.

“What’s sick?” Valentine asked.

“See for yourself.”

The uniform flipped back the trunk’s lid, and Valentine stared inside. His heart skipped a beat. A little boy lay face-down in the bottom of the trunk. The child was small, with bushy brown hair the texture of cotton candy, and wore a small tuxedo.

“God damn monster,” the uniform said.

Valentine looked at the empty chairs facing the stage. Had Hollis snatched a kid from the audience of one of his shows, and later killed him? It seemed the likely answer, only he couldn’t remember a young child having gone missing in a long time. As the uniform closed the trunk, Valentine noticed a name stenciled on the trunk’s lid. Woody.

“We need to let the medics handle this,” the uniform said.

Valentine flipped the trunk open, and touched the back of the boy’s head. The hair was fake. He grabbed the boy by the collar, and lifted him clean into the air.

Woody was a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Valentine raced up the creaky stairs holding Woody in his arms. The kitchen was empty, and he ran out the front door. The cruiser with Hollis had left. He found Banko standing in the driveway, and shoved Woody into his arms.

“It’s a dummy,” Valentine said.

The horror ebbed from Banko’s face. “Is this what I saw in the basement?”

“Yes. Hollis is a ventriloquist. That’s how I got tricked the other day at the Bijou, when the piano nearly fell on me. You need to alert whoever’s driving that cruiser that Hollis can throw his voice. Otherwise he’ll trick him, just like he tricked me.”

Banko climbed into the cruiser. Getting on the radio, he called Marlene, and told her to contact the cruiser, then call him back. Hanging up, he said, “I got fooled by a dummy. God, I thought I was going to have a stroke.”

The dispatcher called back a few moments later.

“He’s not picking up,” Marlene said.

“Try him again,” Banko said.

“I tried several times. He’s not answering.”

“Has the cruiser come in?”

“No, sir. There’s no sign of him.”

“Keep trying.”

“Yes, sir.”

Banko signed off. He turned to speak to Valentine, and saw that he was gone.

Lois sat at the dining room table grading a stack of history tests when she heard the rock come through the glass in the back door. The detectives assigned to guard her had gone home, and she froze in her chair. The nightmare was over. Tony had said as much. It’s over, she told herself.

Staring through the open doorway to the kitchen, she saw a man’s hand come through the broken pane of glass, and fumble as it tried to unlock the back door. She’d learned a lot of practical things from Tony over the years. The first, and most important, was never to panic. Rising, she went to the head of the stairs, and called to her son. “Gerry, I want you to go to your room, and lock the door. You hear me?”

Her son appeared at the head of the stairs. “What was that noise? What’s going on?”

“Go to your room.”

“But —”

“Now!”

She heard Gerry’s door slam. Then the back door banged open. She calmly crossed the room, and removed the Smith & Wesson Model 65 revolver from a shelf in the china cabinet. Tony had given the gun to her one Christmas, and taken her to a firing range and taught her how to shoot. It was a hefty, solid piece of steel. Equipped with a speed-loader, it was capable of popping all six rounds at once.

Two men entered the kitchen, and staggered towards her. The first was a baby-faced cop, the second a smaller man with a bloody face, who pressed a handgun to the cop’s side. Holding the Model 65 with both hands, Lois aimed at them.

“Stop,” she declared.

“Hello, Lois,” the man with the bloody face said.

“I said stop!”

The two men were inside the living room, and halted.

“Do you remember me?” the bloodied man asked. “My name’s Martin Hollis. Everyone calls me Farky. We met on the Boardwalk many years ago. I was in the Summer of Love show with you.”

Hollis wrapped his free arm around the cop’s neck, and pressed the handgun to his temple. “Put your gun down, or I’ll splatter his brains against your lovely dining room walls.”

“No,” Lois said.

“Do you want me to kill him?”

“He’s a cop. He knows the risks.”

The cop’s eyes went wide.

“I’m sorry,” Lois told him.

“God damn you, I said drop it,” Hollis screamed at her.

“No!”

“Very well.”

Raising his gun, Hollis pointed it at the ceiling, and let off a round.

Lois heard a loud thump on the second floor. She envisioned Gerry taking the bullet and nearly fainted. Hollis pressed the gun’s smoking barrel against the cop’s chin.

“Now, drop your gun,” Hollis said.

“Gerry,” she yelled upstairs, “are you all right?”

“What’s going on,” her son yelled back fearfully.

“What was that sound?”

“I heard a gunshot and dropped my guitar on the floor.”

“Stay in your room. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, mom.”

Hollis nodded at the ceiling. “He’s right above me. I can hear the pitter-patter of his little feet. I’ll shoot him through the floor. Do you want that?”

“ No!” Lois exclaimed.

“Then do as I say, and put your gun away.”

Lois started to cry. Tony had told her to never put the gun down when faced with certain danger. But what choice did she have? She slipped the Model 65 back into the china cabinet. As she moved away from the weapon, her husband entered through the back door, gasping for breath. In his hand was his beloved snub-nosed .38.

“Drop the gun, and put your hands in the air,” Tony said.

Hollis glanced over his shoulder, then turned to look at her. “I love you. You realize that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Lois said quietly.

Hollis shoved the young cop into the dining room, then spun around like a gunslinger. Her husband emptied the .38 into him, the bullets tearing through his sweatshirt. Hollis staggered back and stopped a few feet from where Lois stood. He made a face like he was dying. Then, he burst out laughing.

“Fooled you!” Hollis shouted.

He lifted his sweatshirt, and showed Lois the bulletproof vest he’d stolen from the police cruiser. He was a magician, and had tricked them.

“Now, it’s my turn,” Hollis said.

Hollis walked toward the kitchen aiming the weapon at her husband. Tony had run out of bullets, and was helpless. Their eyes met. He mouthed the words I love youto his wife.

Lois did not remember moving toward the china cabinet, or snatching up the Model 65, or the sickening sound it made as she emptied it into the back of Hollis’s head. All she remembered was Tony holding her in his arms a few moments later, and telling her that everything would be all right. Feeling safe was all she’d ever wanted, and she prayed that maybe this time, he was right.

Chapter 58

The hookers eating breakfast at Harold’s House of Pancakes gave Valentine a hero’s welcome the next morning, with plenty of kisses and hugs. He was blushing by the time he slipped into a booth, and a gum-chewing waitress took his order.

Fuller and Romero came in a few minutes later, and sat across from him. Through Banko, he’d learned that the two FBI agents were facing an official reprimand from their bosses for leaving Atlantic City while Hollis was still on the loose. They were both in hot water, and facing uncertain futures.

Normally, Valentine wouldn’t have cared. They had made their beds, and now they had to sleep in them. Only there was unfinished business that needed attending to, and he had decided that Fuller and Romero were the perfect pair to make things right.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” Valentine said.

Fuller put his elbows on the table. “In case you haven’t heard, we’re screwed.”

“Come to mention it, I did hear that. This could change things.”

Fuller glanced at his partner, then back at him. “Change things how?”

“Make you look good.”

“How the hell are you going to do that?”

“When I got the job to police Resorts’ casino, I thought I was supposed to keep cheaters out. But then I found out something worse was going on. A skim was happening right in front of my nose. A hundred grand a day out the door.”

“Mafia?” Fuller said.

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“It’s their speciality.”

“This may be their crown jewel. Resorts makes twenty million a month profit. Fifteen percent of that money is used for comps to lure high rollers. It’s the same formula used in Las Vegas, only we’re not Las Vegas. Las Vegas is in the desert. Atlantic City is a two hour drive for fifty million people. We don’t need to give away anything. Only the auditors don’t realize that.”

“So the mob is stealing comp money,” Romero said.

“That’s right.”

Fuller acted skeptical. “Where’s your proof?”

Valentine removed the Prince’s address book from his pocket along with the write-up of the skim which he’d planned to send to the newspaper. He slid both across the table. “The address book contains the names of the runners. The ringleader is a New York mobster named Vinny Acosta. Every day, a runner goes into the casino, and draws a credit line at the cage for a hundred grand. He plays for a while, then cashes the chips, and leaves with the money. The loss is shown on the books as paying for comps.”

Fuller took his time reading through his notes. Holding the page which described how the loss was being hidden by Resorts’ bookkeeping department, he said, “This reads like a big job.”

“It is,” Valentine said.

Fuller put his elbows on the table, and lowered his voice. “Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page. You want the FBI to set up a sting, tail these people, tap their phones, and put all the pieces of the puzzle together.”

“That’s right. Think you can handle it?”

“That’s what we do every day.”

“I know that.”

Fuller leaned closer. Romero leaned in as well.

“So what’s the catch,” Fuller said, sounding skeptical.

“I want you to do it my way,” Valentine said.

A couple of hookers took the table next to theirs, and the three men went outside to the parking lot to finish their conversation.

“My way,” Fuller said. “Isn’t that one of Sinatra’s songs?”

Fuller was trying to be funny, and maybe to an outsider it wasfunny. A bunch of Mafia goons had come to town, and stolen millions of dollars right in front of everyone’s noses. It sounded like a script for a movie, only the script included too many lives being destroyed. There was nothing funny about any of it.

“Here’s the deal,” Valentine said. “When you make your bust, you’re going to tell the media a story. You happened to be visiting the casino, and spotted Vinny Acosta. Knowing he was mafia, you put a tail on him, and discovered he was up to no good. Everything you learned from that point on came as a result of your own brilliant detective work. The Atlantic City police weren’t involved, and neither was I.”

Romero understood, and nodded his head. Fuller didn’t, and said, “You want to be left out of the picture?”

“Correct.”

“And all the credit goes to us?”

“Right again.”

“Why?”

“Because I live here, you idiot.”

Fuller got it. “That shouldn’t be too hard,” he said.

Valentine had said everything he wanted to say. Fuller and Romero started to thank him, and he waved them off. He hoped he never saw either of them again.

The FBI agents got into their Chevy. Valentine tapped the windshield with his knuckles, and the driver’s window came down.

“How long will the sting take to organize?” Valentine asked.

“These things take time. At least a few months,” Fuller said.

“Call me the day before you make the bust.”

“Will do.”

He stepped away from the car, and they drove away. The wind was blowing hard off the Atlantic and the tip of his nose had gone numb. He’d parked the Pinto next to the building, and he got in and stuck the key into the ignition. The engine rolled over once, then made a sound like a dying animal drawing its last gasp. Cursing, he got out and gave the car a good kick, then went inside the restaurant, and called his wife for a ride.