Known to Evil

55

It was daylight by the time we made it to Hicksville. We went in a dark-green Lexus. Leo the Mammoth was driving, with Shell riding shotgun. I was on the floor in the back, bound hand and foot and happy to be so misused.

Happy because the only alternative to my discomfort was death.

"Okay," Shell said. "We're at North Broadway. Where to now?"

"Go four more blocks to Lathrop and turn right. Follow the street past the houses and keep on going until you get to a big stone wall that has a gateway."

The number I had called was the number. I got the idea when Alphonse Rinaldo had given me that special 911 number for the elite NYPD SWAT team. I thought that I should have my own personal emergency number.

I got special phones for me and Hush dedicated to this purpose. We had come up with passwords, like little boys initiating a clubhouse. Mine were Tolstoy, Nikita, Dimitri, and John-John. Anything else meant, "Get me out of here!"

This was taking a big chance. I didn't want to be involved with killing, if at all possible. Hush knew this, but he was also a psychopathic killer, by nature and by trade-even if he was retired. We were friends and he respected me but still the urge to kill was a natural place for him to go and I had called that number for the first time.

The car came to a stop.

For two minutes there were no words spoken.

"I don't like this," Leo grumbled.

"Who is this Brennan guy?" Shell asked me.

"He does bodyguarding for me sometimes. His cousin manages this cemetery."

Actually the place was managed by a man who, after sizing him up for a week, Hush decided to let live. It was a long and convoluted story that had to do with a dog and a little girl. The man paid Hush a fortune and the assassin helped him to create a new identity.

"Do you trust him with your life?" Shell asked. "Because we're going to have guns on you."

"He'll have a gun too," I said. "But he'll talk before shooting."

These words paved the way to a few more minutes of silence.

I used that time to make my peace with what was going to happen to Mammoth and Shell. I wasn't angry with them. They tortured me, but I'd done the same to Patrick.

And I'd done worse.

Once, many years before, I'd destroyed the life of a young girl who grew up into a woman self-named Karma. Karma kept coming back, from a restless grave, to give me as I had given.

But this wasn't about me. It was about Angie and her persecution. Shell was a part of that, and he'd have to meet his own fate. I'd save him and his woolly friend if possible, but what could I do with my hands and feet bound?

"Get back there and cut him loose, Leo," Shell said.

The big man cut the heavy tape that bound me. Then he showed me a long-barreled six-shooter, an anachronism in a caveman's hand.

"You fuck up, buddy," he said, "and I will give you all'a these here caps."

I nodded, did a sit-up, and pressed myself from the floor in the back of the car.

THERE WAS AN INTERCOM system at the gate of the old Quaker Cemetery. The last body had been interred nearly a century before. Visitors rarely came and the few who did made appointments.

I pressed a button.

"LT?" Hush said through a haze of static.

"Hey, Bren," I said. "I got a couple'a guys wit' me might help the girl."

"Come on in," the electric voice crackled.

The car-wide gate rolled open.

In the backseat again, Shell sat next to me with a gun muzzle pressed against my side. The tension in the car was palpable. I was afraid that they'd off me before we got to Hush; that he'd slaughter them before my eyes if I made it that far. They were afraid of the unknown that lay ahead of them. Working for Sanderson, no doubt, Shell had already messed up with Angie three times. The thug had fallen short in his attempt to intimidate her. The men in front of her apartment, obviously his, had failed to grab her. Later, his hired assassins had also missed the mark.

The car rolled down a cobblestone lane between silent pines until it got to the stone chapel at the end. We got out of the car. Leo took the lead, with Shell at the back, his gun nudging my spine.

Some kind of bird made a strangled cry off in the woods as we stood in the secluded circular driveway in front of the silent yellow-and-white stone building.

Half a minute passed.

"Call him," Shell hissed.

"Hey you!" someone screamed from my right.

The pressure left my vertebrae and I heard a loud thunk.

Shell groaned and fell to the ground.

"What?" Leo grunted as he turned his old-fashioned gun to the right.

Another thunk and the big woolly man was on his knees, something like a small white pillow bouncing away from him. He was hit in the diaphragm by another pillowy round and joined Shell in painful semiconsciousness.

"Hey, LT," Hush said, coming from the blind of trees. He was holding a canister gun, like a miniature bazooka. "Crowd-control device they use in Taiwan. Knocks a normal man out with just one shot."

He went to the fallen men and secured their hands and feet with flex-cuffs. We dragged them into the chapel and carried them down into the basement, where we secured them behind a heavy oaken door.

Leo weighed two fifty at least, but I'm a light heavyweight in training and Hush is much, much stronger than he looks.

HUSH LED ME TO the study on the second floor of the old building. There was plenty of sunlight coming in through clear and stained-glass windows. My savior gave me a first-aid kit and a snifter of brandy.

After dressing my face and downing the liquor I told Hush what I knew.

"You should'a killed Patrick," was his first observation.

"He never saw my face clearly."

"But Rinaldo left a trail by having him arrested. He might find a way back to you. You know, this isn't a game, LT. It's not like you can take a piece off the board and he stays in the box. These are killers, flawed men who go out after money and revenge."

"How long can we keep 'em down there?" I asked, to change the subject.

"Ike's closed the cemetery for a few days," Hush said. "He's going to have to change jobs unless you want to use an empty crypt in the north corner."

"I thought you gave up killing."

"I haven't killed anybody, have I?"

That bought him a wry grin.

"But let me ask you something," he said.

"What?"

"How deep do you plan to dig this hole before you gonna let 'em bury you in it?"