(A villa in Tuscany)
She caught herself on the verge of blubbering. An impulse that betrayed her. She needed to block it off. She could not permit herself to break down when they hadn’t even started on her yet. Quinn clenched her facial muscles and pulled herself together.
Her guard opened the door. As if to check that she hadn’t vanished as she’d been so quiet.
‘What’s going on?’ Quinn’s throat was scratchy, dry.
‘Nothing. We’re waiting.’
‘For who? For what?’
‘Don’t rush it, sweetie.’
‘Can you help me out? Please. Just loosen the straps a little.’
‘Ask me that again, I’ll cut your tongue out, make you eat it. You want mustard on that? Ketchup? Your own blood, that OK for the sauce?’
Quinn could tell when someone was trying to act super tough. Growing up in Park Ex, guys and girls often gave it a shot. They were all morons. This woman was a moron. She was not as tough as she talked. Maybe she was frightened by what might occur there. By what she might see. She’d made her point, though. Quinn would not ask a favor of her again.
Despair, like a drug, diffused through her veins.
Then, as though her despair really was a drug, she grew weary. Time ached by. With her arms spread wide and strapped in place, her head slumped forward. Then snapped up, waking her. It happened a second time. A lack of air, she thought. A lack of hope. She stayed awake for another hour, then bone-weary and mentally fatigued she allowed her head to slump again.
Waking up slowly – this time, not a violent, involuntary reflex – Quinn had no idea how much time had passed. She called out to her guard to tell her the time. She wouldn’t. Had she slept for two minutes or forty? The dreams she’d had.
The spell satisfied her need for sleep. Alert again.
The guard poked her head in again, to make sure she wasn’t up to no good.
‘What if I scream?’ Quinn asked her.
‘Nobody will hear you.’
‘You will.’
‘See that roll of toilet paper? I’ll stuff it down your yap.’ The woman held up the roll. Half-used. ‘Sounds good? The hole in the roll? Guys still come down your throat but you can’t bite.’
Left alone again, she cried. Quinn couldn’t help it. Embarrassed, ashamed, she wept. The woman had insinuated what might happen. She was terrified.
Her guard came back. She deliberately crossed her arms and stood over her. Without showing sympathy, she gave advice. ‘Sweetie, tell them what they want to hear. Truth, lies, just tell them. Make it up if you gotta. You’re better off saying what they want to hear.’
She believed her.
Alone again. Quinn tried to control her torment. It didn’t help to think about her mother, but she did. That made her cry and perhaps it made her stronger, also, somehow. She felt less alone. She wished her dad could save her, but mostly she dreaded him finding out that she was dead. Or worse than dead. She feared the things that could be done to her and tried to halt the way her imagination was bending, but it wasn’t easy. She needed to breathe. Breathe quietly. Easy. Easy, girl.
She held on.
Then, movement. Followed by footsteps. The door opened. A man stood there. She didn’t know him. He stared at her. He wore a suit, like a banker. She felt her blood pool into her feet. Quinn glanced at him. She didn’t want to provoke him and looked away quickly. He didn’t look like anything, just a man in a suit. He was an older man. Maybe he wanted nothing from her except that damn baseball.
When barely removed from boyhood, Captain Armand Touton survived Dieppe. Wounded, exhausted from swimming out to a British destroyer only to see it blow up, he swam two miles back to the beach. Captured by the Germans, he was interned for the duration of the war. A French doctor operated on him for his three bullet wounds without anesthetic and declared him the bravest man he’d met. Near the end of the war, he was force-marched back to Germany from Poland in the dead of winter and was close to dying of dysentery when an American tank rumbled into view. He recovered in Montreal and became a cop after exposing a practice of doctors taking payoffs. Examining physicians declared perfectly healthy ex-servicemen who wanted to be policemen unfit, unless they received a contribution. Touton tore that system down by having military doctors attest to his good health and, further, they announced that any physician saying otherwise would be brought before a tribunal with his license in jeopardy. Armand Touton imposed himself upon a corrupt system and fixed it.
He’d spent two and a half years as a prisoner of war because the ship he was swimming to had exploded. Only after the war did he learn that the explosions were a pyrotechnical ruse to make the Germans think exactly what he believed: that the ship was finished. Nearly three years of fear and misery because someone pulled a fast one and he fell for it, hook, line and sinker. He nearly sank.
After that, having learned a hard lesson with horrific consequences, he kept his eyes peeled for smartass human shenanigans. No one put anything over on him again.
As a cop, his heroics, his bravery, his reformist agenda, his inherent attitude that if the Third Reich couldn’t kill him neither could any crummy pack of hooligans, and the legendary power of his fists that could destroy a man’s will to live with a single blow, made him both a national hero in line with hockey players or rock stars and a moral force within the police department.
The Night Patrol was being disbanded so that never again would an officer accrue his significance, fame, or power. Or, most importantly, his independence.
So. One last hurrah. Why not? He was all in.
Not easy, to organize a multitask strike force on the fly. He called in favors. Signaled friends. Arm-twisted the hesitant and fired up his loyalists. Rousted the day shift from their evening meals and TV sofas. Pulled patrolmen off their beats. Detectives quit their cases for a night. Any Captain or Loo or Sergeant-Detective with an idea – raid a whorehouse, disrupt legitimate strip clubs, barge into a numbers cellar, collar drug pushers on their rounds, end the festivities in Mafia bars and restaurants with a menacing police presence – was granted a green light to do so. He’d take the heat. Cops took the gloves off for a night, getting back at criminals who’d taunted them, provoking street fights without concern over warrants or arrests or convictions. One warden even issued a command to seize incarcerated henchmen from their bunks and drop them into solitary for the night.
Every cop made it known that Ciampini was to blame for the whole nine yards.
Within a seven-minute period, police hit twenty-three establishments – legit and illicit – then doubled that number over the next two hours.
Lawyers taking umbrage were ignored or asked to get in line behind the other lawyers taking umbrage. Or were arrested themselves on trumped-up charges later to be deemed accounting errors. Officers who signed the arrest warrants were found not to exist.
Arrested souls were lined up a block long and advised to hold their water. Processing them would take time. Roughly, the better part of the night.
Giuseppe Ciampini stood in the bathroom doorway, stared, assessed, and then departed. He returned ten minutes later with his jacket and tie removed. He sat on the edge of the bathtub and glared at Quinn Tanner as though that’s all that was necessary to coerce her to collapse.
She stiffened. Became stronger.
‘You sit on the can with your panties off. Why?’ His voice remained calm, neutral. ‘You know?’
‘I think so,’ she said.
‘Explain to me why.’
‘Because what you do will scare me. I’ll go pee.’
‘You go pee. What else?’
Her lower lip quivered.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘We’ll scare the shit out of you, too. That’s why.’
‘OK,’ she whispered. Quivering all over.
‘Not only scare you.’
‘I know,’ Quinn said. Her voice weaker now.
‘When you bleed, we don’t mop up. Only flush. Easy.’
She peed then. The tinkling in the bowl not only embarrassed her, it made her angry. ‘Oh Gawd!’ she cried out. Then wished she hadn’t. ‘Please, don’t,’ she implored him, then wished she hadn’t done that either. To be brave was too hard.
‘We don’t have to. We might enjoy, but we don’t have to. I want to know what I want to know. If you don’t tell me, the guys will hurt you. Maybe too much. I cannot control. You met the Rabbit. He wants first crack. Nobody says no if the Rabbit goes at you. You will scream everything to me if I put him on you tonight.’
She believed him. ‘Don’t. What do you want to know? I’ll tell you.’
‘I’ll ask you when I ask you. When I ask, you will answer. First, I want you to understand our situation.’
‘OK.’
‘I can save you from the Rabbit. In Italy I have a villa. In Tuscany. You could go there, for instance. I also have one in Sicily. The one in Tuscany is a very nice villa. I could take you there, away from the Rabbit. Are you still virgin, you?’
Quinn didn’t answer.
‘I asked you serious question.’
She didn’t know where her defiance came from, but it popped out. ‘That’s none of your business,’ she said.
‘I knew your mother,’ Ciampini said. ‘She taught your father everything.’
‘What do you mean?’
He raised a hand and performed a dialing motion.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Your mother, I respect. She was a safecracker. The best. She taught your father. Then he became the safecracker. Not bad. Not as good as your mother. Later, she became everybody’s mother when she got reformed. To go straight, I respect, but she wanted everybody to fucking go straight. Come on, I have a business. Whacko nut job, your mother. But I respect.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘For sure I don’t lie. Are you the one causing me my trouble tonight?’
‘What trouble?’
‘Mmm,’ he said. He didn’t want to say. He stood and moved close beside her. Then closer. He drew his thumb down one side of her jaw to her chin, then two fingers down the other side. He did the motion repeatedly. She tried not to turn her head away. She tried not to show how much she was repelled. She would not give him that. He got no reaction from her. She let him caress her jaw like it was nothing to her. Nothing.
‘Answer me this time. Are you still virgin?’
She could not prevent the tears welling in her eyes.
‘Of course not,’ she whispered.
‘So. You are a dirty little whore,’ he accused. ‘You admit.’
She hated how close he was. How his trousers brushed up against the side of her face. She broke. ‘You’re a gangster. A mobster. You’re a fucking monster and you think calling me a whore makes me worse than you?’
‘Nothing worse to me than dirty whores.’
‘Yeah? I’ll tell you who’s a whore. Your own daughter. She’s the whore.’
The slap was powerful and came as a shock. He was too close to her, the blow lost momentum when it struck high on her head, not on her cheek. A slap, not a punch. She understood the difference.
‘I broke into her house,’ Quinn railed at him. ‘She was fucking another man. Not her husband.’
He took a step back to hit her a second time, and her head fell to one side as she suffered the clout.
Recovering slowly, she spoke quietly. ‘Her husband’s saving lives in a hospital while she’s screwing around.’
He walloped her again. Open-handed, and she took that as a sign. Had he closed his fist she might not be alive.
He supported his hands on his knees and leaned down to speak at the level of her face, their mouths inches apart.
‘Her husband,’ Ciampini informed her, ‘that fungus, that pile of mouse shit on top of dog puke, was outside his house sticking a knife in your boyfriend.’
Another shock. ‘Why would he kill Deets? I don’t believe you.’
‘You want to know? You got a right. Savina found evidence. The doctor thought somebody in his bed who didn’t belong. That fool got jealous. Like he had the right. Came home early. Saw the boy leave the house, the one who maybe helped you climb inside, eh? The doctor sees the handsome boy leave the house, go to the car. He pegged him to be Savina’s lover. When my daughter and me found out this surgeon was playing like a gangster, killing her lovers, we had to discuss. Make a decision. The same way I need to make a decision with you.’
‘I saw him come home, after Deets was already dead.’
‘Don’t be stupid in your face. He covered his tracks. Drove the knife away to ditch it. Maybe a knife from surgery. Except the stupid man left blood on his shirt – on the cuffs – for Savina to notice. You saw him come back the second time, after you robbed my daughter like you think you had a right. You never had that right.’
‘I’m sorry, OK? I won’t tell anybody anything. I promise.’ She didn’t like this. He had all but admitted to killing his son-in-law. How could he release her now?
‘Oh sure, I am to believe you in my heart. I walk through my life with my belief in people. Now, I ask to you a question. You will give back to me the answer. We will hurt you if you don’t. Me, the Rabbit, the Rabbit’s men, maybe that whore outside. Then for sure you will tell us the right answer. But it’s too late then, we go on hurting you more. Different ways. Because you did not tell to me what I want to know quick, fast, right now. Put me to the trouble, pay ten times over, then more. Tell to me. Right now. Where’s my fucking baseball?’ Then he said something that took Quinn by surprise. ‘Ezra, him, does he have it?’
Rather than answer, Quinn said, ‘I know why you want it.’
She was not denying anything. She was keeping him talking.
‘You don’t know the dick in your mouth from the one up your tight ass. Big, small, they’re the same to a dirty whore like you.’
‘It proves you killed your old boss,’ she said. ‘The baseball does that.’
That stopped him.
Then came a knock on the door.
Ciampini straightened up, not taking his eyes off her. She returned his gaze.
She didn’t know if what she said would keep her alive or quicken her demise. Her pulse pounded so hard in her throat she worried she’d gag.
The knocking persisted, more urgent. Quinn glanced at the door, as though to suggest that Ciampini should, too.
‘What?’ Ciampini barked out.
The door opened a crack. Quinn waited for the woman guard to speak, but a man’s voice parleyed a message. ‘More trouble,’ the intruder said.
‘More?’ Ciampini barked back again.
The voice sounded mildly fearful to be conveying the news. ‘Hell, yeah. They’re hitting restaurants.’
Ciampini turned, opened the bathroom door, and went out.
A few minutes later, the woman guard looked in.
‘Still alive?’ she asked.
‘Still, yeah,’ Quinn said. Clearly, she was breathing.
‘Don’t worry, babes, it’s only temporary.’
Giuseppe Ciampini assessed the situation. His empire was under siege. New York called. News was traveling the pipeline. Everybody around him was hot. He couldn’t permit himself the luxury. He had to stay cool.
He was seeing for himself what the situation looked like when all hell busted loose.
‘Every contact. Inside the police, outside, on the street, call it in. Tell me what they do next before they think it. When, where, who they hit, how. Smack me in the eyeball? I cut off their nuts. One ambush, we stop this in its tracks.’
‘Kill cops?’
‘Their funeral.’
‘Everybody’s already calling in,’ the Rabbit told him. ‘They scream it in.’ He was better informed as to the scope of the operation against them. ‘It’s fast. We hear about a raid two minutes after they bust down the doors.’
‘I’ll make a call,’ Giuseppe Ciampini said. ‘Leave me alone. Let me stop this.’
He dialed Captain Armand Touton’s number, and when Touton picked up, he said, ‘Old friend, hello. We talk?’
As a reporter remarked, a crook could incriminate himself with a sigh. A deeper inhalation? Pull an overnight in the lockup. Blink? Be roughed up.
Typically, detectives and the serious bad guys were acquainted. On occasion, they’d have breakfast together. They talked baseball in summer, hockey once the snow flied. Inquired about each other’s kids. That night, courtesies were set aside. Both camps knew that someday the status quo would be interrupted, but for that to happen right across the board created a shockwave. Cops knocked on the doors of criminals they monitored, said hi to their wives and kids, then hauled the hoods in.
‘On what charge?’
‘We’ll make something up along the way.’ Another shock.
‘I’m calling my lawyer.’
‘You can try. He’s probably under arrest.’ Alarm bells.
The news burned across mob networks like a pyromaniac’s fantasy. Detectives pulled in anyone who was mobbed up, and Cinq-Mars set out to provoke an incursion of his own. Overdue. A chat with Ezra Knightsbridge. He intended to go soft, be physically benign yet tactfully and psychologically invasive. As he stepped inside the pawnshop, the jangle of the overhead bell announced his presence twice – once when struck by the door, and again when the tall man’s head knocked it.
The old proprietor glanced up. Only a minute before closing, Cinq-Mars flipped the sign on the door to read FERMÉ. ‘I decide if I’m open or closed,’ Ezra Knightsbridge informed him. He chose to speak English as he was more adept in that tongue. His tone carried only faint authority, a surprise to both men.
Cinq-Mars stared down his impressive beak at the fellow. Hawk-like, this glare, as some were wont to say. Eagle-like, according to others. He could never parse the difference. He never told a soul that he had learned the gaze from a psychiatrist encountered on his travels. The physician believed that a severe look drew the bare truths from his patients that they were loath to impart. ‘Another advantage,’ the doctor quipped, disguising if he was serious, ‘I can fade away yet look engaged.’ Cinq-Mars, for his part, looked engaged. He introduced himself, omitting his rank and any reference to being police.
‘Should I know you?’ Knightsbridge answered back.
‘Let me remind you of the times we’re living in.’
A look of abject innocence.
‘It’s not possible that my name has not been mentioned to you recently. Yours has been mentioned to me by the same person.’
He stopped short of identifying Quinn by name. He wanted Knightsbridge to reach that conclusion on his own.
In his head, the pawnbroker ran down a shortlist of lies. None worked for him. ‘Cinq-Mars. Formerly Night Patrol. Part of tonight’s police rabble gone wild. Is that what you mean by the times we live?’
‘That covers it, in part,’ Cinq-Mars agreed.
‘You’re alone? No storm troopers?’
‘On hold.’
‘Beware the blessing in disguise,’ the shopkeeper intoned. Then he had a thought. ‘Maybe you should lock the door behind you.’
Cinq-Mars twisted a small nub. Serious deadbolts, requiring keys, were lower down.
‘I’m glad you did that,’ Knightsbridge stated.
‘How so?’
‘It suggests you’re not here to haul me in on some ridiculous trumped-up charge.’
‘That remains a possibility. We’re trumping-up a lot of charges tonight. I thought we could have a quieter chat here than at the station. Utter chaos down there.’
Cinq-Mars crossed to the counter. He looked around as though something might be on view for him to evaluate. He processed details of the layout.
‘How may I be of service, Detective?’
‘Quinn’s been abducted.’
Ezra Knightsbridge did not appear to know that.
‘Your old cellmate is a suspect.’
The man was clearly taken aback that his life in prison was known to anyone. Let alone that anyone was aware he’d shared a cell with a criminal of consequence. He believed that era had been obliterated by the dust of time.
‘Before we go one inch further, Detective, consider, please, the Cubans.’
Cinq-Mars stared down his beak at him again. The old man had more hair on his knuckles than on his head. Bushy white eyebrows, a gleam to his gaze. He knew him to be clever.
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘In part, you made your reputation thanks to the Cubans. The explosives.’
A secret story. In 1970, Cinq-Mars and Touton had been integral in disrupting the Front de libération du Québec, a terrorist cell devoted to the independence of Quebec. During that investigation, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police stumbled upon an arsenal of munitions protected by the Cuban embassy and meant to aid a clutch of terrorists. Enough explosive to level city blocks. The Cubans established the warehouse as embassy property, and therefore part of their sovereign territory under international law. Consequently, the cops were compelled to leave, and the Mounties were doing so when Touton arrived on a tip and refused to oblige. Cinq-Mars stood by his boss. Their puny pistols against a battery of high-powered weaponry. A stalemate ensued, one that was not resolved until the Prime Minister of Canada telephoned Fidel Castro. The Cubans stood down and surrendered the munitions, while the Canadians accepted a stipulation that they would keep the matter secret. The Prime Minister talked about an “apprehended insurrection” when speaking to the press and was mocked because he could explain himself no further, snared by an edict to never reveal what had happened. He never did.
Knightsbridge understood Cinq-Mars’s reticence to discuss the episode.
‘Ask yourself,’ he suggested to the policeman, ‘how the Mounties arrived on the scene in the first place. Ask yourself, who tipped them off. Then ask, who tipped you off.’
‘I have no way of knowing.’
‘And yet I know what happened. I’m not supposed to know.’
‘What does that have to do with the price of milk?’
‘Don’t assume I’m not sympathetic. All I wish to convey, Sergeant-Detective.’
Cinq-Mars took a stroll amid the flotsam that had drifted into the store. More mental notes.
‘How may I be of service?’ Knightsbridge asked again.
‘You attended Dietmar Ferstel’s funeral. Wandering among the tombstones. I’m curious. Did you consider him one of yours? Did you set him up with Quinn? Hypothetical questions. No need to reply.’
‘A man who answers his own questions is probably confused.’
‘Ferstel was one of ours, too. Did you know he planned to be a policeman?’
Knightsbridge considered the news. ‘Now I am the one confused. Touché. One wonders where his heart lay. With the police, or with a wilder society? Who was he preparing to betray? Tell me, Cinq-Mars, why are you here?’
‘Without the storm troopers? They may yet make an appearance. Here it is. Quinn’s been abducted. We don’t want another funeral.’
Knightsbridge contemplated a reply. ‘My scalp is in play,’ he remarked.
‘Be brave. One of those times. Look, you’ve lived a long life.’
‘Well spoken. But I don’t consider being foolish an adequate substitute for bravery.’
‘I will keep your secrets.’
Knightsbridge remained still a moment. Then asked, ‘You attack Ciampini on every front?’
‘Every front we know.’
‘And still you don’t find her. Giuseppe Ciampini is weaker than in the past. His punks peter out. Old age. Death. Retirement. Key men incarcerated. Lesser powers establish satellite gangs. The young are impetuous.’
‘You’re saying he’s weaker?’
‘Yet powerful as ever. How can this be?’
The man was posing a riddle. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Alliances, my young detective. Perhaps you and I can form such an alliance. Be beneficial one to the other one. In the future, the world will turn according to what alliances are formed. Ciampini is weaker now, yet equally strong. Where is his muscle? It’s not in-house. It’s no longer one hundred percent Italian.’
This seemed like a motherlode. ‘Who then? What alliance?’
‘The Rabbit.’
The policeman drilled him with the full force of his stare. Hawk-like, eagle-like, or just plain cop-like. The pawnbroker had a history of deflecting his own shenanigans onto the Rabbit, but this seemed different. Cinq-Mars could readily imagine a scenario where the Rabbit courted the favor of the Mafia and vice versa. They had much to offer each other: high-end organization and vicious street muscle conjoined.
‘The Rabbit,’ Cinq-Mars said at last.
‘Hurry,’ Ezra Knightsbridge implored him.
The man certainly had a knack for getting cops off his back. Cinq-Mars had to salute him for that. Still, this was a lead. He did as he was told. He hurried.
Touton expected the call.
‘How’s your health, Joe. Good?’
‘Not so bad. Armand, I ask myself, how did things get this way? I ask, how do we make a truce to happen here tonight? I want your opinion. Your health, how does it go?’
‘I’m fine. As for tonight, total capitulation will work,’ Touton suggested.
‘Don’t be so ambitious in your old age, Armand. For argument, let us say it’s not in the cards.’
‘A truce won’t work for me, Joe. It’ll buy you time. You’ll crank your lawyers up to speed, slide judges into place. Get your politicians and journalists on the warpath. What’s the advantage for me?’
‘I heard you retire. Pack it in soon. Congratulations.’
‘Thought I’d go out with a bang. You’re an old man, too. Why not pack it in?’
‘You don’t want me to retire, Armand. Like you, I might go out with a bang.’
‘You could go fish, like me. Hunt and fish.’
‘This could cost you your pension, Armand. Maybe I see to it.’
‘Joe, that’s only in the movies. Maybe other jurisdictions. Here, I’m in a union. My pension is rock solid. The Police Brotherhood took care of that before you. Now, I can shoot the Pope and still collect. What else you got?’
‘Other ways exist to cut off a man’s pension, Armand. You follow?’
‘Try it. Maybe I’ll enjoy shooting back. Like I said, I’ll be hunting. I’ll be armed.’
‘What do you want from this, Armand. Just me?’
‘I’ve wanted you my whole working life, Joe. You’re my one big failure. Still, I can live without nailing you. But only if I get the girl. You know the one I mean. Harm the girl, this won’t end. No further negotiation. The girl out, no harm done to her, then we can negotiate. Otherwise, this never ends.’
Touton hung up on him. The best way to deal with the man. An ultimatum backed up by refusing to share another word.
In the quiet of his office, he got to thinking and called Ciampini back for an encore. He phoned the Mafioso’s office. Voices in the background sounded in full battle mode.
‘I was just talking to him. We got cut off. Tell him to call me back.’
If nothing else, he might be able to trace where the call out of that office located their boss and go from there. Or trace the call coming in. Touton set all that in motion, then waited by his telephone. He waved off officers wanting to see him. For now, only this mattered. Two minutes later, Ciampini was back on the line.
‘On me you hang up, why?’
‘The phone slipped out of my hand. Look, I meant to offer you an incentive.’
‘You put me in a shit mood, hanging up.’
‘Calm down. Keep the girl safe and release her. That’s number one. My part, if I can get you the baseball, I’ll get you the bloody baseball. I know how much it means to you. You know how much it means to me. Remember, a cop died that night. I mention this to show how serious I am. I’ll get you the baseball if the girl’s released. Otherwise, it goes straight to New York City, to friends of yours. Relations. Cousins. Curious people like that.’
Captain Touton hung up on him again. He wasn’t close to certain that he could deliver on a promise to return the baseball. At least, he had planted the thought that he was in possession of it, which might curtail any counteraction, stop Ciampini from hunting for it himself. Stop him from torturing Quinn to find out where it had gone. If he failed to deliver on the baseball, that might not be the end of the world – except that the girl, if freed, could be in jeopardy all over again.
In a curious way, this was like the exploding ship at Dieppe that never actually exploded. A bold gambit either works or it fails. In either scenario, if a few unfortunate people get held captive for the duration, so be it. Though he’d prefer that the girl not be held captive for the duration. For this ruse to pan out – for the girl to be safe after her release, if she was to be released – he had to place his trust in Cinq-Mars, in whatever scheme the kid had in mind. If he himself, and the department, the courts, and others, had to pay a price, so be it. He’d been down that road.
Not easy, to let go, to place one’s trust in a protégé. Was Émile Cinq-Mars ready? Had he been properly prepared? Could he pull this off? Did he really have a clue? Or was he still a naïve wide-eyed choirboy, a failed priest with a degree in animal husbandry, of all things, with a wild idea?
Soon enough, they’d find out.
The whole city would find out.
The Rabbit slammed the door open so hard it smacked the side wall.
‘Her white ass! Out! I mean like now!’
‘What, are you talking to me?’ Ciampini snarled. He was unaccustomed to anyone telling him what to do. Partnership required an adjustment. Especially when your new partner was a psychopath. ‘Who you talking to?’
‘Your fault, Joe. We’re next.’
‘For what are we next?’
‘Dino’s! My place. That pimp cop from Mount Royal, Giroux, called it in. We’re next. I’m being fucking raided because of you, Joe. You make a fucking phone call to the police? What do you think? They don’t trace the call? They don’t look up the address? Fuck you!’
‘Take it easy. I’m taking her out.’
‘You take it fucking easy! This is my place. Get her ass out of here! Like right now. Out. Go!’
The night was not progressing well for either man.
Ciampini made a call, then beat it out of there in a big Chrysler.
Quinn rode in the plush rear seat, behind the driver.
Her hands were tied in front of her. Otherwise, she sat unbound.
Ciampini rode in the back beside her.
He poked a pistol into her ribs.
‘In case you get an idea. I like to put one in the gut first. Hit the liver, too. Unbelievable, the hurt from that. I watch them roll around in their pain. So much pain, so much blood. Then I finish them off. You don’t want that. It’s not so quick.’
She had no argument.
Instead, she asked, ‘Where are we going?’
As if they were out on a date.
‘Don’t play smart with me,’ Ciampini warned her.
And yet she believed that that’s what she had to do. Play smart. Or die young.