| A DANCE
WITH THE DEVIL, by Carolyn Marchetti |
CHAPTER ONE
Mick paced between the sink and
the refrigerator listening to the phone on the other end of
the line. Four fucking minutes. That’s how long it had
been ringing.
Yesterday, when he’d pushed
the numbers, put the phone down and driven over to Musto’s,
he could hear it ringing standing on the back stoop. So it worked.
The fucking phone worked. And where in hell was Musto? He’d
been trying to find the fucker since Tuesday. Today was Saturday.
He looked at the clock above the
kitchen table. Six-twenty. Which meant maybe an hour before
that big one-eyed bastard with the mangled ear showed up to
collect his twelve hundred bucks. Technically Tessier’s
twelve hundred bucks. But it might as well be the Cyclop’s,
the way his good eye started twitching if you said you were
short.
And this week he was short. Short
the seven hundred he’d lost on the Dolphins, plus the four
he blew out his ass on those fucking Jets.
He slammed the phone back in its
cradle, picked it up again.
“How the hell am I supposed
to know where he is? What am I, my brother’s keeper?”
And then Buddy brayed into the phone like the jackass he was.
“Go ahead, Buddy, like what
the hell do you care. But your fucking brother’s got eighteen
hundred bucks of mine. I gave it to him ten days ago, a three
day loan he called it. And I haven’t seen the bastard since.
He’s nowhere. And since I’d have a pretty good idea
where my brothers were, if I had any, I figure you’re no
different. Even if yours is a fucking asshole.”
“Look, O’Flaherty,”
Buddy said, “we’ve been friends a long time, right?”
“Why the hell do you think
I’m calling you?”
“But Jake’s been my
brother a long time, too. And yeah, he’s grabbed me by
the balls a few times, so I know how it is.” He sighed
into the phone. “Okay, look ... he’s got a job. Leaves
tonight, be back Tuesday. With cash. I’ll see you get your
money then. Even though this is none of my business. I mean,
it’s not my problem. You understand that.”
“Maybe you should understand
this. I need that money now. Not Monday. Not Tuesday. Now.”
“Then you got yourself a
problem, man. Because just in case you’re thinkin it, I
don’t cover no one’s bets but my own.” Then he
hung up.
Mick slammed the phone into the
receiver hard enough to crack the plastic. Goddamn. Goddamn.
He looked around the kitchen.
So now what. He opened the refrigerator, slammed it shut, walked
over to the window and looked up and down the alley. He was
gonna kill him. First he was gonna get his money, then he was
gonna kill him.
A cat picked its way through the
tall grass on the edge of the macadam, slid between two trash
cans and disappeared. Kitty. Kitty Musto. Whose two sons weren’t
allowed to go anywhere without some of her food in their gut.
He grabbed his keys, and going down the front steps said a prayer
he wasn’t already too late.
For the first two hours, his eyes
never left the house. Four cars drove into the driveway, almost
one right after the other. Six guys went in through the back
door and didn’t stay long. And not one of them was Kitty
Musto’s youngest son Jake.
By ten o’clock, his stomach
had been roaring for an hour. At eleven he knew it was nothing
more than a total fuck-up.
He put the seat back a notch and
stared at the moon through the windshield. He had eighty-five
bucks in his pocket and three days, if he was lucky, before
he could go home. He tried to think of someplace else to go,
someplace he was welcome. Even someplace he wasn’t. Then
a pair of headlights swung into Kitty Musto’s driveway.
Mick sat up.
Jake stayed long enough to put
away maybe one bowl of risotto, and Mick had to keep telling
himself out loud, “Hang back. For Christ’s sake don’t
get on his ass.” He followed him with no headlights through
the neighborhood, kept him in sight through East Boston, then
onto Route 1, with Jake driving careful the whole way. They
turned onto 95 south, and cruising steady at 65, Mick let three
cars fill the space between them.
They left Massachusetts, drove
through Providence, then New Haven, Bridgeport, and it was just
after the George Washington Bridge that Mick started watching
the gas gauge. Where in hell was Musto going, for Christ’s
sake. Fucking Brazil?
“Jesus.” Mick glanced
at the gas gauge floating on red. What in hell good was it going
to do him to run out of gas in goddamn Pennsylvania? And then
twenty seconds after Mick had decided it was over, Musto put
on his fucking blinker and pulled off the highway into a service
area.
Mick gassed up while Jake pissed
and got food. Then he pissed and got food while Jake got gas.
He bought himself three cheeseburgers, three large fries, three
cokes, three pies. He had no idea where the hell this was going,
but even if he ended up driving across half the fucking country,
it was better than the Cyclops shoving a two by four up his
ass. Plus it was a goddamn good reason to get double his money,
plus interest and maybe break a few of Musto’s teeth in
the process.
Around two a.m. heading west somewhere
in Ohio, he started falling asleep. He drank his last coke,
put all the windows down, turned the volume up full on somebody
quoting scripture.
A half-hour later, they passed
another sign for a motel, and Mick stuck his head out the window.
“Fucking stop you fucking idiot!”
But Musto kept going.
Then it started to rain, and he
had to put all the windows up again. That’s when Jake’s
car started doing funny things. Mick watched the tail lights
drift in and out of the lane. A semi passed Mick, came up behind
Jake and blew its horn as Jake drifted in one direction, then
the other, and for a while after that Jake’s driving went
normal.
Mick rolled his window down again,
let the rain soak his shoulder, his pant leg. Then the rain
stopped and he stuck his head out the window every time he felt
his eyes closing.
Up ahead, Jake’s tail lights
started drifting again, then cut sharp toward the edge of the
road and tilted sideways. The car turned over, turned over again,
and finally came to a stop upside down in the dirt.
Mick was so gone himself, he watched
the whole thing like it was on TV, interesting but not real.
He stopped a hundred feet away, and the first thing he noticed
when he got out was the silence. And the dark. His highbeams
were on Musto, but outside that arc of light the night was black
as coal.
He heard a moan, went up to the car, got down on his hands and
knees. “Jake?”
Another moan. The smell of gasoline
was everywhere. Musto moved, turned his head. His ear was full
of blood.
For a second he stared at Mick.
“What the hell … Jesus Christ, what happened? Mick?
Jesus, get me out, Mick. My legs ... Christ, I can’t move
my legs!”
Mick tried to open the driver’s
door, but it wouldn’t budge. He went around the other side,
got that door open after a couple of tries.
“Mick? What the hell are
you doing here? Jesus …”
Mick got down on his hands and
knees again. There was paper stuck to his hands and he brushed
it off. Then he looked at it. Money. He looked at the ground.
There was money fucking everywhere. He picked up a handful.
“Christ, Jake, you had all
this and you were stiffing me for a lousy eighteen hundred?”
“What? What the hell are
you sayin …get me out, Mick, get me out’ta here for
Christ’s sake.”
He picked up all the money, but
more kept falling out of the fucking door, and when he yanked
at the liner, packets of money fell out all over the ground.
“Mick ... Jesus, Mick. Is
that gas? You smell gas?”
“Gotta do something first,
Jake. Hold on.”
Jake started to cry.
He stuffed the front of his jacket,
went back to his car and dumped it all on the passenger seat,
went back and got his hands under the sprung door lining and
ripped it down far enough so he could reach inside the cavity.
He stuffed his jacket again.
“What the hell Mick! For
Christ sake get me outta here!”
When the front door was empty,
he yanked the back door open and kicked in the lining. There
was more. Son of a bitch, there was more.
He was running back for a fifth
load when he saw the first blue flames licking the ground. Jake
was yelling the whole time now. He mashed his fingers on the
bottom of the second door cavity and came up with the last of
the stacks.
“Fire!” Jake screamed,
“Get me out. For the love of god fucking get me out!”
“I’ll get you Jake,
hold on.” He ran back to his car and dumped what was in
his jacket. He was making a try for the other rear door when
the car went up. It sounded like a gas burner igniting on Ma’s
old stove, just one hell of a lot louder.
The heat hit him, staggered him
back. Even fifty feet away it was unbearable. He watched the
yellow-orange flames light up the sky, thought about the money
inside those last two cavities.
A pick-up truck swerved to a stop
and two men got out. “Anyone in there?” the driver
yelled.
“I don’t know. Too hot
to get near. I’ll go call it in.”
He got in his car, looked at the
money and drove off.
Five minutes down the road, it
started raining again.
He took the next exit, found a
motel, asked the clerk for half a dozen packets of instant coffee.
It took three hours to count it
all, and when the sun hit the window, the floor was covered
with stacks of money. Two hundred and sixty-seven stacks of
hundreds, a hundred to a stack. A hundred and thirty-four stacks
of fifties.
He leaned back against the bed and looked at it. He was somewhere
in Ohio, on a caffeine high that was making his teeth ache.
His eyebrows were gone, his hair was singed, and he had more
money than there was in the whole fucking world. |
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