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  THE IMMORTAL GAME

  Mike Miner

  The Immortal Game by Mike Miner

  Published by Out of the Gutter

  Copyright © 2014 by Mike Miner

  Cover by Outland Grafix

  This is a work of fiction in which all names, characters, places and events are imaginary. Where names of actual celebrities, organizations and corporate entities are used, they’re used for fiction purposes and don’t constitute actual assertions of fact. No resemblance to anyone or anything real is intended, nor should it be inferred.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without the written consent of the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts for the purpose of review or promotion.

  THE

  IMMORTAL

  GAME

  1

  It gets dark fast up here. Cold too. These Vermont mountains murder the weak January sun and leave nothing but gray clouds as witnesses.

  A triangular house on a steep, wooded hillside. The windows glow. Smoke puffs out of the chimney. Quaint.

  The figure in the woods is nearly invisible, an inkstain on asphalt. Black coat, hat, boots, the figure, wrapped in midnight-colored shadows, creeps panther-like through the snow. Black gloves assemble a sniper’s rifle, slowly; the quiet clicks disappear in the wind. The figure becomes deadly, a killer.

  A silhouette crosses behind a curtain.

  Inside, a man walks into the kitchen. He chops vegetables for a salad. He’s good with a knife. Since moving here, he’s worked as a butcher at the local grocery store.

  Outside, a car pulls into the driveway. Headlights bring the shadows in the forest to life. All but one.

  The killer holds the rifle expertly, gingerly, like a parent with a favorite child. It is snowing. Perfect. No footprints.

  A girl steps out of the car.

  The man inside finishes his second glass of whiskey, takes a deep breath. He’ll tell her tonight. Tell her the man she’s seeing is William “Whitey” Scarlotti. Yes, that Whitey. Explain where his dreams come from. His dreams offer no witness protection. No immunity. Each night he drowns in a deep bath of blood.

  This morning he woke up with his fingers around her throat, his eyes full of a bottomless meanness.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  He had no answer.

  The door opens. Time for answers.

  The killer focuses. Patient. If you’re going to act like a ninja, think ninja thoughts, the man who taught the killer was fond of saying. The voice in the killer’s head is the voice of the man inside. Nothing slows down, but the killer is aware of everything, every snowflake is just where it should be. Even this sudden gust of wind was the killer’s idea.

  There is one window with no curtain. It is a small circle on a high wall. From the woods, Whitey and the girl at the dinner table are perfectly framed.

  The girl, Karen, takes a sip of wine.

  He knows it’s a mistake. But look at her. Those blue eyes don’t know from badness. She is unstained. That smile. He should just walk away. Tell her to get out. Don’t come back.

  “You look like you got something on your mind, Billy.”

  Billy Piccolo. That’s who she thinks he is. Who he wants to be. He tries to think of his past life as someone else’s. Just nightmares. But his memory’s too good.

  “I’m not who you think I am,” he says.

  Just before the killer feels a rush. Like falling. Nothing but the target. No stopping. A finger caresses the trigger. Squeezes. The crack of the rifle echoes beautifully in these quiet mountains.

  Whitey will never know if the look of surprise on her face is from what he said or the sensation of a bullet hitting her between the eyes.

  The killer runs. Rifle over shoulder. Boots chug through the snow. Over the ridge, half a mile away, a black Cadillac with no plates waits.

  Pistol. Spare clips. Coat. Knife. Whitey is out the door. His heart is like a man about to be buried alive. Pounding to be let out. Listen. Footsteps crunch. Up the hill. He watches, watches for that moving shadow.

  At the top of the ridge, the killer goes flat. Aims the rifle at the cars in the driveway. Hits two tires on each one.

  Whitey sees where the shots are fired from and he’s off, weaving through trees, fast and quiet. He feels unleashed and dangerous, a drawn sword, and he will not return to his scabbard until he has tasted blood.

  The killer is tumbling downhill. Breathless. Sees the car.

  Whitey sees it too. Sees a familiar figure in black glide into it. He shoots, but at this distance….

  The car roars and skids onto the road.

  Whitey knows who it is. Taught her everything she knows. He imagines her grinning now, looking in the rearview mirror.

  His wife always had a killer smile.

  2

  Dylan Thomas Lonagan should have known.

  He knew the well-dressed man was a gangster. Knew he was packing. Could see, in an instant, that the man had the thousand-yard stare, the one we get when we kill someone. Lonny didn’t have it yet.

  The well-dressed man did. Mixed with a little crazy. Maybe a lot.

  As he jogged along the Charles River on a weird and warm January morning, that’s what Lonny knew.

  He should have known the man was there for him.

  But he was thinking about chess. The game he’d lost that morning to Vilma, his old caseworker from the C&S Foundation. C&S: Clean and Sober. Eight years now. They’d kept in touch after Lonny’s rehab was over. They played once a week, most weeks. He’d never beaten her. That morning, they had played in the lobby of the Copley Marriott. She had a beautiful board, hand-carved wood, from her home, a village in Guatemala.

  She was an aggressive and fearless chess player, loved to exchange pieces. He couldn’t remember the last time she had finished a game with her queen. She giggled every time he captured hers, as if he had stepped into a trap. Usually, he had. “You are too protective of your lady.” Her accent made her seem thick-tongued. Then she would pin him with her bishops, wreak havoc with her knights. “Check, and her sister, mate, amigo,” was how every game ended.

  “How is life?” she asked.

  He grimaced. Life had become something to endure, to get through. The program helped, this one day at a time stuff suited him. Life, real life, was something he missed. His wife, his son, his badge. All gone, like Job’s family. At least Job had faith.

  Vilma lowered her gaze, tsked him.

  After, Lonny went for a jog down Copley until he hit the Charles, then left.

  The well-dressed man made a motion with his hand as Lonny passed him. Lonny was still thinking about the game. I shouldn’t have traded rooks, she was baiting me. Then the two other suited gangsters appeared. They blocked Lonny’s path, arms up. He had nowhere to go. Adrenaline pulsed through his system.

  Behind him, a deep, low voice said, “Easy, Lonny. The boss just wants to talk to you.

  Lonny calculated, escape routes, witnesses, came up with zero.

  “If we wanted you hurt, you’d be hurt.”

  True enough.

  Lonny’s sweat turned icy now that he’d stopped running. He shivered, but relaxed his fists, nodded to the first man.

  The well-dressed man exhaled, nodded back. He motioned for Lonny to follow him. Lonny and the three gangsters made their way to a black Mercedes sedan. The engine was still running. Who would steal it? Lonny sat in the back with the well-dressed man. Both Lonny and the man were tall but their legs had plenty of room.

  “Back to the ranch, Marco,” the first man said.

  Marco nodded his boulder-shaped head. He was short but powerfully built. His neck was the size of a tree tr
unk. The two men in front talked to each other in Italian and Lonny realized they were probably brothers. Marco and Polo he decided to call them. They pulled onto Storrow Drive, headed north. The North End. Naturally.

  “What’s this about?”

  “The boss would prefer to tell you.”

  “Who’s the boss?”

  The well-dressed man grinned slightly. “Richard Scarlotti.”

  The mention of the name seemed to make the car ride lower. Richard “Red” Scarlotti was a serious name. Outside of Providence, he was The Boss.

  “What does he want with me?”

  No one offered an answer.

  3

  In another life, Dylan Lonagan had had one prior involvement with the Scarlotti family. A strange encounter.

  In this previous life, Lonny was known as Detective Lonagan. He worked Special Crimes. His job was to find kids or people who hurt kids. He was ruthless, as ruthless as the criminals he hunted, maybe more. Did what he had to do. Which is why he broke every finger of a man’s left hand trying to locate a missing eight-year-old boy, a schoolmate of his son’s. Which is why, when that yielded nothing, Lonny started on the other hand, using a hammer. Before he broke the man’s second pinky finger, the man gave him the child’s whereabouts.

  The boy was saved. The man was freed and received a handsome settlement. Lonny was fired.

  He could have lived with it. The papers branded him a hero. Work was easy enough to find. Boston still had children to find and people willing to pay him for his efforts.

  But he couldn’t find his own son after he went missing. Never came home from school. Lonny searched every square inch of his son’s walk home, of the school, then slowly expanded his search area. Nothing.

  Until too late. An anonymous phone call revealed the location of the body.

  The sight of his son in a small coffin broke Lonny, cracked him in half. The man with the broken fingers sent the Lonagans a beautiful floral arrangement and a tasteful condolence card.

  So Lonny went to see Whitey Scarlotti.

  Red and Whitey Scarlotti had inherited their father’s rackets: the women, the protection routes, the dealers, the whole nine yards. Educated in Cambridge at Harvard, Richard was the brains; educated in the back alleys and pool halls of Boston, William the muscle.

  He held an audience with Whitey in his kitchen, with his wife, Katherine.

  “Call me Kat,” she said when she introduced herself. Her nickname on the streets was “Katwoman.” Rumor was she had done more hits than Whitey himself.

  Lonny had a piece of paper with a name and address.

  Whitey smiled. “This would be the guy with the bad fingers?”

  Kat snatched the paper, looking like a child at Christmas. “Ooh, goody. It’s even better when they deserve it.”

  Whitey looked at her like an indulgent parent, then back at Lonny. “Can I give you some free advice, Detective?”

  “Dylan.”

  “Don’t do this, Dylan. You haven’t gone over to the other side yet. You’re still with the angels. Stay there, man.”

  Lonny took out an envelope with cash in it. Put it on the table and stood.

  Kat chuckled. “I knew you had it in you, Dylan.”

  Lonny shook her hand. “A pleasure, Kat. William, thanks for helping me out.”

  Whitey shook his head and squinted up at Lonny. He had a killer’s eyes, but there was an intelligence there that surprised Lonny. He picked up the envelope. “We’ll get word to you next week. Take your wife to a show.”

  “Raul Julia’s playing the man of La Mancha at the Colonial,” Kat said.

  “We need you to go somewhere public, and be seen.”

  Lonny nodded.

  That was probably what did it, Lonny thought. Taking her to a show on top of everything else. Maggie had been so happy to go, such an out of the ordinary thing to do. Just what she needed, she said. Then the police had questioned them. Gently. Not wanting to connect what everyone knew was connected. What Maggie had known was connected.

  “You have shamed me, and you have shamed the memory of your son,” he remembered her saying. She talked like that, when she got mad. “You have become a criminal. You are damned.”

  And she left.

  He was only half surprised when, a few days later, the envelope with the cash in it was returned to him, in the mail, not a dollar lighter.

  Now he was in another Scarlotti home, this one much grander, a few blocks from Hanover. A brownstone that featured, Lonny felt certain, a view of the harbor from the top floor.

  He was escorted to an office. Hardwood floors and leather chairs, everything the color of rich chocolate. Red Scarlotti sat behind an oak desk stood.

  He shook hands with Lonny. “I believe you knew my brother, William.”

  4

  “He spoke very highly of you,” Red said, “and suggested if I were ever in a jam that perhaps I could rely on you.”

  Red sounded like a lawyer, with his well-heeled, stiff-jawed Cambridge accent, and according to the diploma on the wall behind him, he did have a law degree.

  “You are Dylan Lonagan? Formerly a detective for the Boston Police Department. Fired for—”

  “You got the right guy, Mr. Scarlotti.”

  Red bristled at being interrupted, but restrained himself.

  “Who’s missing?”

  Red nodded, closed his eyes. “My son.”

  “How old?”

  “Eight.”

  “How long?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “Police?”

  Red shook his head. He held up a finger. “I think you might understand my lack of faith in the police.” He held up another finger. “And for many reasons, I can’t have this information made available to certain parties.”

  Lonny shrugged, not really surprised. “What about him?” Lonny motioned to the well-dressed man.

  “To find my son, Mr. Lonagan, I need the best available. You are uniquely qualified. You can interface with the Boston PD but not be encumbered by their rules.”

  Lonny looked at a picture of Red’s son on the desk. For just a moment, Lonny’s head swooned with memories of his own boy.

  “I assure you, it will be worth your while if you find my son.”

  Lonny made a dismissive gesture. This wasn’t about the money. It was about getting the child back.

  “Tell me everything you know, Mr. Scarlotti.”

  Red nodded at the well-dressed man, who sighed and reluctantly left the room. After the door shut, Red opened a drawer and retrieved a plastic bag with an envelope inside.

  “What’s this?”

  “It arrived this morning. In my mail.”

  Lonny examined the letter through the bag. “No postage?”

  Red shook his head.

  “What’s it have to do with your son?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

  Lonny pulled out a pair of gloves. He opened the bag and extracted a news clipping from the envelope. He couldn’t tell what paper the article was from.

  LUDLOW – Townsfolk here are reeling from a bizarre shooting. Katelyn Clancy (25) of Plymouth was found murdered at the home of local butcher, William Piccolo (37). She was fatally shot in the head. Mr. Piccolo is being sought for questioning regarding the crime. Police have been unable to locate Piccolo, who moved to Ludlow six years ago and was employed at Singleton’s Grocery as a butcher. The two were reportedly romantically involved. Piccolo is not a suspect at this time.

  Lonny turned the article over and saw an ad for bras at Sears.

  “What’s this mean to you, Mr. Scarlotti?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  Red shook his head.

  “Ever receive anything like this before?”

  Red shrugged. “Not exactly. I’ve gotten threats through the mail before. I’m not sure if that’s what this is.”

  Lonny had a sudden thought. “What are you going to do to the people
that took your son?”

  “I’m going to make sure they never do it again. Is that a problem for you?”

  Lonny grinned. “Not really. It might explain you keeping the police out of this. We need to get this clipping and envelope to a lab.”

  “It’s your investigation.”

  “Mr. Scarlotti, if you hold back on me, it will jeopardize this investigation, my investigation. I am interested in one thing: finding your son. I am interested in nothing else. Not you, not your wife, not your business, not how much you pay me.”

  “Then our priorities are aligned.”

  Lonny cleared his throat. “Two days ago this happened?”

  “My son left for school in the morning. He did not make it there.”

  “He walks?”

  “Five blocks.”

  “St. Mary’s?”

  Red nodded.

  “He walks alone?”

  “Normally with a friend. Danny Meiser. He stops at his house. Danny was sick that day.”

  “He stopped there that morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you realize he was missing?”

  “The school called around ten to say he was absent.”

  “Does he skip school ever?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Where is your wife?”

  Red took a breath. “Returning from Florida. Landing within the hour.”

  “She know?”

  Red nodded.

  Lonny watched him. “When did you tell her?”

  Red bit his lip, pulled at his collar. “This morning.”

  “She in Florida when this happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I’ll still need to talk with her.”

  “Of course.”

  “I assume you’ve been looking on your own? Are you still looking?”

  “Yes.”