Disoriented and sobbing, I somehow managed to dig my Ruger out of my suitcase and jam two cartridges into the cylinder. By then he was almost on top of me. I was aware of the sound of the
rain and his wheezing breath. The knife was inches from my throat when the third squeeze of the trigger finally struck firing pin against primer. In a deafening explosion of gas and flame, a Silvertip ripped through his abdomen, knocking him back several feet and down to the floor. He fought to sit up, glassy eyes staring at me, his face a gory mass of blood. He tried to say something as he feebly raised the knife. My ears were ringing. Steadying the gun in my shaking hands, I put the second bullet through his chest. I smelled acrid gunpowder tainted by the sweet odor of blood as I watched the light fade from Frankie Aims’s eyes.
Then I fell apart, wailing as the wind and rain bore down hard against the house and Frankie’s blood seeped over polished oak. My body shook as I wept, and I did not move until the telephone rang a fifth time.
All I could say was “Marino. Oh God, Marino!”
I did not return to my office until Frankie Aims’s body had been released from the morgue, his blood rinsed off the stainless-steel table, washed out pipes, and diffused into the fetid waters of the city’s sewers. I was not sorry I had killed him. I was sorry he had ever been born.
“The way it’s looking,” Marino said as he regarded me over the depressing mountain of paperwork on top of my office desk, “is Frankie hit Richmond a year ago October. Least, that’s how long he’d been renting his crib on Redd Street. A couple weeks later he got himself a job delivering lost bags.
Omega’s got a contract with the airport.”
I said nothing, my letter opener slitting through another item of mail destined for my wastepaper basket.
“The guys who work for Omega drive their personal cars. And that’s the problem Frankie run into long about last January. His ‘eighty-one Mercury Lynx blew the transmission, and he didn’t have the dough to fix it. No car, no job. That’s when he asked Al Hunt for a favor, I think.”
“Had the two of them been in contact before this?” I asked, feeling, and I’m sure sounding, burned out and distracted.
“Oh, yeah,” Marino answered. “No doubt in my mind, or Benton’s, either.”
“What are you basing your assumptions on?”
“For starters,” he said, “Frankie, it turns out, was living in Butler, Pennsylvania, a year and a half ago. We been going through Old Man Hunt’s phone bills for the past five years–saves all the shit in case he gets audited, right? Turns out that during the time Frankie was in Pennsylvania, the Hunts received five collect calls from Butler. The year before that it was collect calls from Dover, Delaware, the year before that there was half a dozen or so from Hagerstown, Maryland.”
“The calls were from Frankie?” I asked.
“We’re still running it down. But me, I got a strong suspicion Frankie was calling Al Hunt from time to time, probably told him all about what he done to his mother. That’s how Al knew so much when he talked to you. Hell, he wasn’t no mind reader. He was reciting what he knew from conversations with his sicko pal. It’s like the crazier Frankie got, the closer he moved to Richmond.
Then, boom! A year ago he hits our lovely city and the rest’s history.”
“What about Hunt’s car wash?” I asked. “Was Frankie a regular visitor?”
“According to a couple of guys working there,” Marino said, “someone fitting Frankie’s description was down there from time to time, apparently going back to last January. The first week in February, based on receipts we found in his house, he had the engine in his Mercury overhauled to the tune of five hundred bucks, which he probably got from Al Hunt.”
“Do you know if Frankie happened to be at the car wash on a day when Beryl might have brought her car in?”