He comes out of it talking. My guess is he’s been conscious long before he opened his eyes. He was hoping we would give something away while he pretended to be sawing logs, but his patience went unrewarded.
I sit in a metal folding chair in front of him. I hit him with a full wet rag of chloroform-hell, I almost passed out just soaking the cloth-so I estimated we had a couple of hours to make arrangements. We bribed a member of the hotel’s security to take us down the service elevator and get us to our car in the garage. Five thousand dollars and a story about a Motown record producer who tripped himself stupid got us a wheelchair, an escort, and no questions. The lethargic guard might not have bought it from me, but one look at Risina sold the story.
It only took twenty minutes of driving around downtown for us to find what we were looking for: an abandoned warehouse. Shit, you could put on a blindfold and walk around downtown Detroit in any direction and find one. A cursory reconnaissance of the place yielded no derelicts and no security.
So when Deckman finally opens his eyes, it’s the three of us alone, and with his arms and legs fastened tightly, like I said, he wants to talk.
“You have no idea who you guys are fucking with. If you touch one hair on my brother’s head, I will open up a hurricane of destruction on you and your operation you can only dream of.”
I just stare at him with somnolent eyes, like I’m somewhere between amused and bored.
“Where is he? Where are you holding my brother?”
Still, I give him nothing, just let him get himself worked up.
“You might intimidate a lot of people with that thousand-yard-stare, tough guy, but I guarantee you are wasting it on me. We can talk and figure this business out together or you might as well pop me and get it over with, because the more you make me wait, the less lenient I’m going to be when we meet up later under different circumstances.”
“I could give two shits about your brother.”
He grins. “That makes two of us. You got a cigarette I can bum?”
I just shake my head and he shrugs like it was worth a shot to ask for one. I wait for him to strain at his bindings again, testing out their tensile strength. He gives up after a moment, and I lean forward.
“I want to know how to contact Spilatro.”
Some hitters like to use their fists to elicit information, try to break a man so he’ll pour out his secrets, like punching a hole in the bottom of a water bucket. Not me. Like Kirschenbaum did to me in that hotel room in Connecticut, I stagger Deckman by playing with his expectations.
The name “Spilatro” floors him, like a driver who has to jerk the wheel suddenly when an animal darts into the road.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I let him dangle.
After a moment, he sighs and looks up at the ceiling. “You’re the guy, huh? The one he’s gone on about?”
“I’m the guy.”
“Columbus.”
“That’s right.”
“So you kidnapped me to get to him.”
“Means to an end.”
He nods. “So now what?”
“A swap. You for my friend.”
“Oh, yeah. The pistol.”
“Pistol?”
“Black guy in Chicago. Pulled a. 22 from under his mattress. Name was Grant but we’ll always call him the Pistol after that.”
“That’s right,” I say, and I’m oddly comforted that Archie impressed them enough to earn a new nickname. “Spilatro had two guys there.”
“Three, actually. And Spilatro never left the lobby. Pretty straightforward snatch-and-grab except your friend pops up with that pea-shooter right as I get my knee into his back. He squeezed a round off at Bando but missed his head by six inches-I pried the gun away from him after that.” He spits on to the dirty cement next to his feet, making a clear mark in the dust. “That scrawny dog could put up a fight. I’ll give him that.”
“Who broke his nose?”
“Who cares?”
“Little payback from Bando?”
“Does it matter?”
I let that one sail by.
“How long have you and Spilatro been government guys?”
He looks at me sideways. “Who sold you that dope?”
“Two and two makes four.”
“Except you put the wrong numbers into the calculator.”
“Did I?”
Deckman shrugs. “Who’s the chick?” he asks as he cranes his neck to get an eye on Risina.
“Man in your position might choose his words more carefully.”
“I haven’t felt this terrified since my dad got out his belt,” he says flatly.
“Your dad in Northville?”
“My dad six feet under in Birmingham.”
“That’s right. It’s your brother in Northville.”
“You hurt him?”
I shake my head.
“Sure I can’t have a smoke?”
I shake it again and he grins. “How’d you get Lance to give me up?”
“I told him you were dead. Said you left him some money.”
He nods. “Dollar signs was all it took, huh? Surprised you were the first to try it. He tell you I was a government man?”
“I already knew it.”
“Uh-huh. He’s my kid brother. You think I’m gonna tell him I plug guys for money?”
“I don’t care what you tell him.”
He falls silent for a moment. Then lifts his chin again, “You gonna let me-“
I interrupt to throw a wrench in his tactics. “How do we get ahold of your army buddy?”
He snickers, like this is all too much for him. “You’re not fishing. I can tell that. You must have a full file on me.”
“I had to pick up a new fence since you snatched mine.”
Risina smiles at that. She’s behind Deckman, so he doesn’t notice. I repeat, “How do I contact Spilatro?”
“You got my phone?”
“What’s the number?”
“Give me my phone and then give me my hands. I’ll track him down for you.”
“Your phone is smashed and in a trash can in the parking garage at the MGM. Along with your two pistols and the knife you had in that cute little wrist sheath.”
This gets him to draw in his smirk. “Doesn’t matter. They’ll know where I was last.”
“Who will?”
“You’ll find out.”
“Will I? It’s a big city.”
He shrugs, looks down at the floor. He tries to toe that spit mark he made in the dust, but can’t get to it with his foot.
I haven’t broken his confidence, but chipped at it, like a ship cracking through ice to get to the pole. I sit back and fold my hands behind my head. “Tell me about the dark men.”
His eyelids flutter, slightly. Then, he offers, “I gotta go to the can.”
I don’t move, just keep the chain tethered between our eyes.
“You gonna make me piss myself?”
“You can earn trips to the bathroom.”
“You’d fit right in at Abu Ghraib.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
He takes another run at the bindings then settles again to see if he accomplished any slack. He grunts, unsatisfied, then does that thing people do when they’re absently thinking. He sort of moves his lips over to the side of his face. After a moment, he looks up again. “All right then. How you wanna play this? Because I’m getting bored and quite frankly, a little angry.”
“Tell us how to bring Spilatro out, and this can end lickety-split.”
“What if I don’t?”
“I’m not going to shoot you, or beat you, or cut you, if that’s what you’re wondering. I always thought that was more of a weasel play, and I don’t care for it, to tell you the truth. I mean, if you want immediate results, it’s probably the way to go, cut a man up, get him to talk, but why go to the trouble when I have nothing but time? So what I’m going to do is sit behind you in the dark back there and watch you die of thirst.”
He stares at me evenly, his face hot, as he tries to gauge whether or not I mean what I say.
Risina walks over and hands me a fast-food bag. I take out a plastic bottle of water, take a swig, then set the remainder in my chair.
“I checked online, and the maximum someone can go without water is ten days. But the statistics say your body will pretty much shut down in three. Three days? Can you imagine? That’s nothing. That’s a weekend. That’s a ‘hey, I’ve got plans on Tuesday so I’ll see you on Wednesday.’”
Risina pulls up a camera and takes a picture of him. Then we leave him there to think about that water bottle just out of his reach, Tantalus with his grapes.
This place must’ve once been some sort of manufacturing plant servicing the auto industry, but it has the look of a place run-down long before the Big Three started asking for government handouts.
An office adjacent to the room provides a window that looks out onto the front of the building so I can spot any unwelcome vehicles approaching. Whoever owns this warehouse doesn’t keep a regular security guard here, but maybe he pays someone to come out and look around once a week or once a month, the way Bacino’s neighbor did back in Chicago. It doesn’t look like the front door has been cracked in years, and I’m happy to keep playing the percentages, but if someone does happen to roll snake eyes, I’d like to have a few minutes warning to get my money off the table.
The room has another window on the opposite wall that faces the back of Deckman’s chair. He spent the first hour trying to tip the chair, and the second hour yelling just to yell. The next morning, he’s stiff and sore and broken. It didn’t take long.
“You kept in your piss. I’m proud of you.”
“Fuck you,” he croaks.
I start to stand again, and I can see the desperation in his eyes as clear as if I can read his thoughts. I’m going to guess he’s never been tortured before, neither during the first Gulf War nor at any point in his professional life, because he doesn’t have the mettle to test his own durability.
“Okay, listen. I don’t know why we gotta play it like this.” His voice sounds scratchy, like a rake on the sidewalk.
“Tell me how to contact him.”
“Okay, but listen. Here’s the thing.” His eyes ping-pong between my face and the water bottle in the chair. “You’re a dead man. You have to understand this. I say this not to be confrontational, but it’s a fact, as sure as these walls are white or that floor is cement. As sure as I can admit you know what you’re doing in tying a man to a chair. Spilatro is the smartest man I know, the smartest I’ve ever known. He thinks differently, you see? He sees the world as interconnected lines, or, or, dominoes toppling against each other.. but he sets ’em up, you see? He cuts the lines. He knows exactly which pieces are going to fall when, because everything fits into the little designs, the patterns he creates. We’re the dominoes, man. And he’s the finger pushing ’em over.
“He was always better than me. It wasn’t even a competition. He has this disconnect thing he can do where he just shuts it all off, any compassion, any concern for innocents, anything that stands in the way of the dominoes falling. He’s already played this out, man. You just don’t know it.”
“If that’s true, then he gave you up like a pawn on a chessboard.”
“Did he? I don’t know. You can’t look at the micro with him. Just the macro.”
“So he’s expecting my call?”
“I’m sure he is. Which is why I don’t really feel like sticking out this ‘dying of thirst’ scenario. Let’s get on with it. Give me some water and I’ll tell you how to get to him.”
“Was he expecting me to kill you?”
His throat bobs. “What’s that?”
I pull out my Glock and enunciate slowly. “Was he expecting me to kill you?”
His mouth moves to the side of his face again. “I don’t think the percentage play is to do that if you want your friend back. I’m sure that’s why we didn’t dump what’s-his name, Pistol, in the Chicago River. There’s an exchange to be made. That’s why we did it.”
“But if I shoot you now, it’ll throw Spilatro off his game, right?”
“If you shoot me now, your friend is dead.”
I don’t look at Risina. I told her she’d have to see this side of me and that she might not like it. But this is the game. This is the difference between talking about it and doing it, the difference between theory and application, the difference between looking at a photo of a crime scene and having another man’s blood on your face, your hands. They brought the fight to us and that’s where the truth lies. I hope she can see the difference. There is an entire universe in the difference.
“Maybe. All I know is if he was expecting me to take you and make an exchange, as you figure, then the best play for me is to kill you and disrupt his plans.”
“But you still don’t know how to contact him.”
“Then tell me.”
His eyes dart wildly, like a wild animal that wants the food in your right hand but is worried about the left hand he can’t see behind your back.
“If I tell you, how do I know you won’t kill me?”
“You’ll have to wait and see.”
“Not good enough.”
“I thought you wanted to end this. I thought Spilatro already knew how this was going to play out. One way or another, I’m going to confront him, either pretending I have you to trade, or physically having you to trade. Like I said, I have nothing but time.
“So we have three choices here. One, we can go back to the thirst scenario and see how you’re doing tomorrow. Two, you can give me the number and hope for the best. And three, I can shoot you and figure out another way to contact Spilatro, maybe a way he hasn’t figured yet.”
“That’s what I’m telling you… he’s figured all three plays! He knows what you’re going to do. There’s no free will here. Not with him!”
I pick up the water bottle, untwist the lid, and then take another swallow, so now the bottle is only half-full. “All right then,” I say, setting the bottle back on the chair. “See you tomorrow.”
I only take two steps before he says, “Wait.”
Thirty seconds later, he gives me the number to reach Spilatro. I take off the lid to the water bottle and hold it to his lips. He gulps it down in three swallows. While the bottle is to his lips, I put my Glock to the side of his head and fire once.
I suppose there was a fourth play, the one where he tells me what I want to know, and I shoot him anyway.
She’s in the bathroom, throwing up. I give her a lot of credit. She put up a brave face for a long time, but the reality of what I do for a living, what I’ve always done, caught up to her in this empty warehouse on the west side of downtown Detroit. I’m not going to try to talk to her through the closed bathroom door, though I have a lot to say. I do know the sooner we get out of here, the better I’ll feel. While she jerked her head at the concussive sound of the pop, her face bloodless as she saw Deckman’s head explode, and then turned on her heels to hightail it to the bathroom, I picked up the body and dragged it behind a rusted and forgotten drill press. Deckman kept his frame fit, so it wasn’t too difficult to move him. I saw the bathroom door slam shut out of the corner of my eye as I finished disposing of the body.
I hear the water running in the sink. It hasn’t stopped running. I imagine she’s checking herself in the mirror, searching for a visible change in her face. After a moment, the door opens and she emerges, ashen.
“I’m sorry for this,” she says, chewing on a breath mint. “I.. ”
“It had to be done, Risina.”
“I know. It’s just…”
“We couldn’t try to transport him. The longer you keep a prisoner around, the more chances he has to disrupt your assignment. And this is an assignment, Risina. I’ve been ducking that mentally for a while, but make no mistake about it, it’s an assignment. The name at the top of the page is Spilatro. After we deal with him, we figure the rest of it out.”
“I understand. I need to get some air, if you don’t mind, before I vomit again.”
I can’t tell if she’s agreeing with me because she processes what I’m saying or if she’s trying to block it from her mind.
We find the side door and the crisp air envelops us, sweeping away the smell of dust and death in the warehouse. I parked our sedan around the side of the place so it wouldn’t be visible from the street.
Before she can open the passenger door, I move over to hold her and she submits, burying her face in my chest.
“I was done, Risina. You know that. And then they came to us. They took Archie and penned a note with my name on it and forced me to answer it. These aren’t innocent men.”
“I know,” she says, her face hidden. Her eyes weren’t red when she emerged from the bathroom and she’s not crying now.
“You going to be okay?”
“Yes.”
She reaches up and kisses me on the cheek, but it’s perfunctory, devoid of feeling. “We should leave, yes?”
“Yes.”
She slides into the passenger seat, and I get behind the wheel, crank the engine. In two minutes, we roll away from the broken chain link gate. Another ten and we’re on the highway heading east. Another twenty and Risina’s asleep, the last forty-eight hours sapping her energy like physical blows.
I don’t know if her attitude toward me will change now that she’s stepped behind the curtain and seen me unmasked. I told her once I was a bad man, but up until this morning, they were only words.