From A Dead Sleep Read online

  At the end of the short hallway, there’s a thick door with a silver security lock above the knob. I suspect it might be a storage room so I twist the knob and give the door a push, but it doesn’t budge. I assume that if Comb-Over uses the house for guests, there’s probably certain stuff he doesn’t want visitors messing with and keeps it in locked storage. I take another taste of my drink and walk back toward the stairs. Before I reach the bottom step, though, it occurs to me to turn back and check the top of the doorframe for a key, in hopes that I’m lucky. I am. I feel the thin metal under my fingertips and I pull it down. It fits in the keyhole, and I feel the door give when I push on it this time.

  The room inside is completely dark and the light in the hallway is of little help. It smells musty. I feel around along the wall for a light switch and soon find one. I flick it and the room lights up.

  There’s a row of aluminum shelves right beside me lined with boxes and some landscaping equipment. I hold up the rim of my drink to my lips and turn to face the rest of the room. When I do, I flinch wickedly at the sight of a man, terribly bloodied and beaten, laying on his side along the cement floor just a few yards in front of me.

  My heart stops and my body goes numb. I feel the bottle of ginger ale shatter beside my leg when it crashes to the floor. My mouth is gaping open as I absorb the horror my eyes are struggling to accept. The man is strapped to an overturned steel folding chair. His wrists are bound behind him and his ankles are sealed to the front legs of the chair with duct tape. Beneath him on the floor is a large, doubled-over sheet of clear plastic like what would be used as a drop cloth when painting a room.

  The man’s eyes are shut tightly, and he twists his blood-soaked head to the floor to escape the glare of the light from above. His face is contorted in pain, which offers more evidence that he’s alive. A few feet away from him is a large chain with thick steel links coiled along the floor. The man’s blood decorates it.

  My gut tells me to turn around, shut the door, and leave. I wasn’t supposed to see this. It’s not what I’m paid for. It’s what Alvar is paid for. Whatever this poor sap has done to incur Moretti’s wrath, it’s not my concern. I’m very aware of the stone cold brutality my boss is capable of, but I’m purposely sheltered from that side of the business. To Moretti, having a deaf bookkeeper isn’t a liability; it’s an asset. I don’t hear the kind of things I’m not supposed to hear. I’ve never eavesdropped on an incriminating conversation because I can’t. I’m a prosecuting attorney’s worst nightmare of a witness.

  God, Alvar really beat the shit out of him. On his head, there’s a welt the size of a golf ball and a deep gash along his cheek under his sickly swollen eye. What looks to be a tooth is coated in a splatter of blood in front of him on the plastic sheet. I don’t think he’s making it out of this basement alive.

  I wonder what the unfortunate bastard did. We aren’t in Vegas anymore. The guy can’t be some smalltime dealer stepping on the boss’s turf. It can’t be related to the Colorado deal, either. It’s on the up and up—at least for now. No one was getting their skull bashed in over a casino that Moretti hasn’t even taken ownership of yet. I speculate that Moretti may have caught some yahoo in town staring too long at Arianna’s ass and he went ballistic. It wouldn’t be the first time, but those beatings were always quick and to the point, ending on a sidewalk or in the back of an alley. He didn’t bring that shit home with him. If he only knew who was really getting a taste of Arianna.

  The man’s not gagged, which means he must have been screaming his ass off while that maniac, Alvar, worked him over. I’m sure the racket could be heard throughout the entire house, blaring up from the registers while I was right upstairs reviewing contracts and crunching numbers. All the pleading and crying . . . fallen literally on deaf ears.

  Resting on a two-by-four that’s part of an unfinished wall is a pair of black, polished goggles with a canvas strap weaved in and out of hooks beside the eyecups. I’ve seen them before. They’re night-visions that Alvar picked up somewhere in Vegas. Alvar has never spotted an overpriced, eccentric combat tool that he didn’t purchase.

  The poor guy on the floor probably didn’t even see a lot of those shots coming. Once the power went out, Alvar probably took the opportunity to grab his goggles from the car to continue the beating from the pitch dark. Knowing Alvar, he got off on it, the same way he gets off on making derogatory comments about me from just a few feet away when my back is turned so I can’t read his lips. He doesn’t do it when Moretti’s around, but he likes to get a rise out of the boys. Having the edge on someone is like porn to that lunatic.

  Now adjusted to the light, the man on the floor opens his eyes and glares at me. I gaze down to avoid a connection. Instead, I scrutinize the thick streaks of blood painted across his flannel shirt and the dried caking of mud along his denim jeans. I glance back up and I find him staring right through me. His face is a mixture of desperation and something else I don’t quite recognize. He opens his mouth and a web of blood drips from his lips and onto the plastic. I begin backing my way out of the room when I feel something crack under my feet. Glass from the ginger ale bottle. Alvar and Moretti will know I was down here and saw their punching bag. I better clean up the mess.

  I turn back to the shelves and wade through boxes and rubber containers as if I’m engaged in a weekend project, pretending for just a few moments that I’m in another world. Below a mounted pegboard with a handful of dangling tools, I find a ball of plastic grocery bags and a wad of cloth rags.

  I keep my focus on the floor beneath me, carefully picking up shards of glass and placing them in one of the bags. I envision an empty room settled behind me rather than the crimson clump of a person withering along the floor. He’s not my problem, I tell myself again. Once I’m convinced there are no more bits of glass twinkling along the floor, I use the rags to dab up the liquid. My breathing fluctuates when I notice that enough has been absorbed into the pores of the concrete to keep it looking wet. It’s going to have to dry on its own but I worry how long that will take. Alvar could return at any time. I toss the rags into the trash bag with the glass and make sure that the items on the shelves are in the same positions as they were before I entered the room.

  To survey the rest of the room for blemishes, I’m forced to glance back down at the man on the floor. Again I see his eyes. So intent are they on me that it’s tough to look away. He raises his head an inch up off the floor and he says something to me. It’s not help. I’m certain of that. He swallows and tries again. It’s something that starts with a C or a K. It looks like kill. My adrenaline is pumping hard and I continue to have trouble catching my breath. I force the thought that he’s begging me to end his misery out of my mind.

  I begin to back up toward the door, feeling like the walls are closing in on me, yet I find myself peering again into his pleading eyes. Like before, I read something more than desperation in them. I turn and exit the room, flipping off the light switch on my way.

  I close the door and am about to turn the key clockwise when an icy chill funnels down along my spine. I realize what I saw in his eyes: recognition.

  He wasn’t saying kill. He was saying “Kyle.” My name.

  Chapter 34

  I swing back open the door and flip on the light. As I quickly pace toward him, I read his stained lips.

  “It’s me, Valentino Greco,” he says.

  I’m bulldozed to the floor. Valentino Greco. I prayed I’d never hear that name again. He’s barely recognizable beneath the grime and swelling. Short hair now and no sideburns. He’s gained weight. His face is fuller, but some of that might be from the swelling. The fact that Valentino is lying right here, right now, means that an atomic bomb has been released from high above and it’s dropping fast. Its shadow’s looming over me and is growing larger. Impact is imminent.

  I fall to my knees as the room seems to spin. I grab Valentino by the chest of his shirt, feeling his blood ooze between my fingers and shout
at him to explain why he’s here. I can tell by his eyes that he doesn’t understand exactly what I say. He always had trouble with that. He’s no idiot though. He knows the gist of my query. I hone in on his soggy lips to read his response.

  “Moretti fucking found me, man,” he slurs.

  “How?” I scream.

  He shakes his head and says he doesn’t know. He explains that he owns a shop in town now, and that Alvar was waiting for him when he stepped out back to empty the trash at closing time. I miss some of what he’s saying behind his frothing, but it sounds as though he was stuffed in the back of Alvar’s car and brought to the house.

  I wouldn’t have guessed in a million years that Valentino would have ended up in Colorado. When I told him that he needed to take his money and crawl under a rock, it seems he chose the Rocky Mountains. I figured he’d end up blowing it all in strip joints, maybe south of the border. At least, that was his style when I knew him. Instead it appears he opened a reputable business. Even so, it seems he couldn’t bring himself to stray too far from slots and blackjack tables.

  He pleads with me to untie him, but charity isn’t on my mind. My ass is.

  “What did you tell him?” I ask as clearly as I can muster, leaving no room for misinterpretation.

  He looks confused and again begs me to set him free.

  I’m in no mood for his bullshit. I place my thumb in the open gash along his cheek and press in. His mouth broadens as he screams, and I can see every tooth left inside it.

  “What did you tell him about me?” I shout. “Does he know I got you the money? Does he know about me and Arianna?”

  I watch his eyes look past me, and I can’t tell if he’s debating the truth or if he’s trying to figure out which answer I want to hear so I’ll let him go. His lower lip trembles, and I watch as a thick tear streams down the side of his nose, pulling blood with it before falling to the plastic in a blob.

  “What did you tell him?” I scream at a volume that makes him wince.

  “I didn’t tell him a fucking thing!” he screams before lowering his head to the floor.

  I fall back to my ass. Air escapes my lungs. I know Valentino’s lying. It’s written all over his mangled face. He squealed everything. It all becomes stunningly clear.

  Alvar had stood in the hallway upstairs earlier to make sure I didn’t poke my head out and see him drag Valentino into the basement. I doubt that moose knew a thing of my involvement before then. But when Alvar sped out of here, it had to be because Valentino had given it all up after taking the beating. The maniac was probably salivating to tear me limb from limb by the time he reached the top of the stairs, but he wouldn’t put a hand on me without Moretti’s blessing, or else there’d be hell to pay.

  It takes me a moment to figure out why Alvar didn’t just call Moretti at dinner for instructions. He couldn’t have. Cellphones don’t work up here and the power outage took out the LAN lines because the house’s phones, like most these days, need an electrical outlet. Right now, he’s on his way to tell Moretti. He never counted on me coming downstairs and finding Valentino before they returned.

  Arianna needs to be warned, but even if I knew how, it’s surely too late. It only takes fifteen minutes to drive into town and Alvar has been gone for twenty. By now, Moretti knows it all.

  The affair. The money. Everything.

  It’s almost a year to the date since the last time I’d seen Valentino Greco. He was Moretti’s prize stooge back then, who held a master’s degree in ass-kissing. I think the boss saw a younger version of himself in the kid, from the pompousness and that big, slicked-back hair to the over-the-top, cocky swagger whenever he walked into a room.

  When Moretti was recovering from gallbladder surgery across town, Arianna and I were certain we had the place to ourselves. Greco showed us how wrong we were when he found her naked, sweaty body on top of mine in the boss’s own walk-in closet. I was sure my life was over; if I hadn’t convinced Greco to take the money and run instead of ratting me out, it would have been.

  Nearly a million and a half . . . That was the price of my life that day. A large shipment of methamphetamines was due two days later from Mexico, and theMexicans only dealt in cash. We had the bills wrapped up tight in cellophane blocks in the bottom of Moretti’s wall safe outside his study.

  I’m the only one Moretti trusted with the combo. He thinks of me as family, and he knows that I know what he’d do to me if I ever stole from him. I usually only access the safe to retrieve and return his financials, contracts, and other private paperwork that he’s too skeptical to store digitally.

  I knew Valentino was an opportunist; it exuded from every crooked smile and fake laugh. I prayed he’d see the big picture—a one-time opportunity to make more in five minutes than he could in thirty years as Moretti’s chump. I also knew that he had no family. His parents were dead, no wife, and no kids—no one for Moretti to punish in his absence.

  Still, it was a breathless gamble on my part, and one hell of a sell job. It could have easily gone the other way, with Valentino’s eagerness to please the boss outweighing his personal greed. I made the case that if he ratted me out, he’d suffer the same death sentence that I would. Moretti’s a big man in Vegas. He has an image to protect as someone who’s always in control—three steps ahead of anyone who would dare cross him. I explained to Valentino that the boss wouldn’t risk the secret getting out that his wife had been fucking his personal accountant behind his back. He wouldn’t trust that secret to a bigmouth wiseass like him. I don’t know if Valentino ever bought that part of the story. Dollar signs may have been enough to sway him.

  Of course, the scheme wouldn’t work unless I could prove to Moretti that the combination was hammered out of me like candy from a piñata. I let Valentino whale on me for a good five minutes. It was one hell of a beating, nearly rivaling some of the ones my old man used to give me. Like my father, Valentino enjoyed giving it, too, bruised knuckles and all. It was the final wing of his former life, and I suppose he was going out with a bang.

  I still remember the appalled look on Lisa’s face when I got home that night. One of Moretti’s doctor friends cleaned and bandaged me up, but I still looked like a monster. I told Lisa that it had happened during a field assignment, delivered by a suspect escaping from a hidden room in a house that the agency didn’t know about. It was just another lie among a marriage of lies.

  The irony was that the next week was the most real my marriage had ever felt. Lisa took good care of me. Real good care. She loved having me home and having my full attention. The guilt was tough to stomach. There she was, washing my face, changing my bandages, and signing that she loved me . . . and none of it would have ever come to be if I hadn’t been screwing another woman. Between the undeserved affection and the constant fear that Moretti’s guys would nab Valentino before he disappeared for good, it was a wonder I didn’t have a stroke that week.

  Ah, Lisa. There’ve been times when I’ve been caught in her captivating gaze and I’d swear those beautiful blue eyes of hers were peering deep down into my soul and unearthing my web of lies, but they weren’t. I’ve gotten too good at pretending to be someone else. Still, I’d always figured that one day the ruse would unravel to the point where I could no longer snip a loose thread and save it. It was always my greatest challenge to preserve the lie, but right now, it’s the least of my worries.

  It’s nearly unfathomable to believe that what started out as a mere pickup line turned into a two-year charade.

  I noticed Lisa the moment she first set foot inside Moretti’s casino. She was with a group of friends—fellow teachers out for a fun night on the town. She was a radiant jewel among dull stones with that perfect face, bright smile, and unrehearsed elegance that accompanied every movement. I’d always had an eye for beauty, and she personified beauty.

  I followed her through the maze of slots and tables like a love-struck school kid, looking for an opportunity to be noticed. The problem was th
at people like her don’t typically notice people like me. Sure, my work for Moretti has afforded me the luxuries of being able to dress nice and look professional, but life has routinely dealt me reminders that a man can’t completely shed his skin. There’s still a part of me that will always be a backwoods Kentucky hick who ran away from home at the age of fourteen to find a new life in an electrified desert in Nevada.

  I learned soon after I arrived in Sin City that you can get just about any form of fake identification one can dream up. Not just licenses and passports, but also birth certificates, social security cards, and occupational credentials. For a couple years, I even worked for a guy who was an expert at making them. I learned the trade, inserting photos into cards and passport pages, emulating government stamps, laminating the finished products. When I wasn’t doing that, I was managing my boss’s finances for room and board.

  Working the numbers has always been my real talent. Back in school, teachers used to stand in awe of my ability to breeze through math problems. They told me I had a future. It’s a shame they didn’t pay as close of attention to the bruises and broken bones I’d show up to class with. If they had, I might have been freed earlier from a man who cited religious beliefs for denying me antibiotics that would have kept a bout of scarlet fever from eventually decimating my ability to hear.

  Along with a phony Diner’s Club card, I was carrying an FBI badge in my wallet the night I met Lisa. I had made it mostly for grins, but had used it a few times to get laid. I didn’t have quite the physical build at that time to put myself over as agent. Instead, after sharing a blackjack table with her for twenty minutes, I introduced myself, after some feigned reluctance, as a forensic accountant for the bureau—one of the guys who goes to arrested suspect’s homes or offices and dissects paper trails and computer entries.