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João Santos perched on the arm of a couch like a gargoyle. He wore an Order of Christ pendant, square and symmetrical with flared tips like an Iron Cross. It was pinched between his lips, white-gold chain drooping on either side of his chin like an eyeglasses strap. He was the smallest and least-liked of the crew, and in some ways the most dangerous. An MMA-ranked fighter in the Gracie tradition, he was underappreciated and undermined, covetous of the camaraderie the others enjoyed. Grapplers rarely got the same respect as snipers and demolition breachers, but if Sandman got someone—anyone—down to the ground, he owned them. During a tavern fight, Tenpenny had seen him hyperextend a guy’s elbow in an arm-bar and then rake it so severely to the side it looked as if the limb might twist right off.
Last was Rathsberger. Slouched low and crooked in a leather wing chair studded with bronze nailheads, Rath had one leg flung over the armrest, a wicked prince trying out the throne. He wore his 9-mil on his hip, as Folgore had. The kiss of white phosphorus from an artillery shell burn had turned the right side of his face into a hypertrophic mudslide, but his dark shiny eyes were intact, peering out from the depths of the wreckage.
Rath was the only one the others feared. He’d been the ringleaderover in the Sandbox, the guy who’d gone in not quite right and had spent his time inside the war theater giving vent to his worst and darkest instincts. If there was a lighter side to the man, Tenpenny had never glimpsed it.
Rath held up a slender test tube, which he ticktocked like a hypnotist’s watch, aggravating its living contents. To satisfy his infinity of perverse habits, he cast his line far and frequently into the dark net and fished out all order of evil delicacies. These latest, bull ants from Tasmania, grew up to an inch and a half. Their nasty scissoring mandibles were so long that, according to Rath, zoologists believed them to be evolutionarily derived from legs. The ants could jump like crickets and were known to hang off their victims once their mandibles were sunk into flesh.
Tenpenny had requested that Rathsberger keep the stopper in the test tube.
Rath had taken the news of Folgore’s death the hardest. He’d skipped grief-stricken and headed straight to rageful.
“So he killed him.” Rath rattled the test tube before his eyes. The bull ants seethed behind the glass, a tangle of menace. “Left him in an alley like trash. What are we supposed to do about that?”
“Not a damn thing,” Norris said. “This is a private job. We all knew that. There’s no taps, no flag presentation.”
Rath’s upper lip curled away from his teeth, and Norris’s Adam’s apple bobbed once with a swallow. The thick scarring of Rath’s chin and throat had led to contractures, the skin tight enough to tug down the right corner of his mouth and expose the gum line.
“But,” Tenpenny said, “we gotta cover our tracks.”
He lit up another Marlboro Red now, sucked in the inhale, and blew it out through clenched yellow teeth. He was a messy kind of smoker, bits of ash on his tie, stale tobacco wafting from his clothes with every movement. He never understood people who were closet smokers, who could indulge in the vice without having it seep into their pores.
“I thought everything was covered,” Sandman said. “What isn’t covered?”
“Relax, lil’ man,” Gordo said. “Let Tenpenny talk.”
Tenpenny took a drag, the tobacco hitting the bags of his lungswith a pleasing burn. “We have to lock down the home front hard. And. Those squeaky wheels in Boston surrounding the dear departed? We can no longer afford to have them out there squeaking. Not now that this asshole’s showed up prying around, kicking over rocks. Who wants to go to Boston, tie up loose ends?”
Rath jiggled the test tube. Even from here Tenpenny could make out the shapes of individual ants, their red waxy bodies, big compound eyes, and cutting jaws. A leaf trapped inside with them had been turned into jigsaw-puzzle pieces.
Rath slid upward from the chair onto his feet, his olive-drab utility jacket flapping wide to show off a barrel chest and a tapered waist. He tapped the test tube down into an interior pocket and rubbed his hands. “I’d be delighted.”
“Pick a battle buddy,” Tenpenny said.
Spitting out the Portuguese cross, Santos popped up eagerly, puffed out his own chest, dusted his hands on his jeans. He was a hair below five foot five counting the lifts in his boots.
Rath’s gaze swung right past him, and Santos deflated a little.
“I’m out,” Dapper Dan said. “I got interval training tonight. Part of a regime.”
“Oooh,” Rath said, “aregime.”
Dan’s smile was so white and smooth the teeth looked of a single piece.
Rath flicked a forefinger at Gordo, who shifted onto his left flank, setting off a rippling effect as he prepared to rise. It took considerable effort, and even once he was planted on his feet, his corpus needed some time to settle back into place around him.
“Take the jet,” Tenpenny said. “No loose ends.”
27
Me Neither
Outside a closed bedroom door on the slightly worn maroon carpet of the second floor, Mason turned to Evan and said in a lowered voice, “You will be honest with us. Completely. Or I will pull the plug on all of this. Understand?”
Evan said, “Yes.”
Deborah shouldered past her husband to Evan. For the size of the house, the hallways were surprisingly cramped. “Was Ruby right about Tartarus? Is Luke Devine behind this?”
“I don’t know.”
