Peril

Where the fuck is he going? Caruso asked himself, already tired now, which only suggested that he was no better off than Morty Dodge when it came to staying in shape. He’d thought of exercise, of eating better, both of which he’d considered before. He’d actually bought a stationary bike at one point, then watched helplessly as it became the world’s most expensive clothes rack. He was thirty-six but looked at least five years older, a fact that wasn’t lost on the women he tried to pick up. He knew that they looked at his paunch, his thinning hair, the circles beneath his eyes, and thought to themselves, This guy is fucked. And why shouldn’t they think that? he wondered now. Here he was, a thirty-six-year-old guy, following this weird bastard who was probably going to lead him to yet another weirdo. The worst part was that while he and Mortimer both had to answer to Labriola, Batman didn’t because the Old Man had no idea who he was. But that would change soon, Caruso thought with sudden gleeful satisfaction, as if he’d just found a way to get even with this mystery man he had never met and yet envied for his freedom, and thus wanted to bring down. He smiled. Maybe Mr. Labriola would feel the same way. Maybe he’d think that this fucking guy, this Batman-arrogant asshole, needed to be taught a lesson. Caruso indulged himself in that fantasy, imagining the Old Man’s hand on his shoulder, giving him the Big Assignment. He could even feel Labriola’s lips at his ear, whispering the honored instruction, the one only the most trusted men ever received, Whack Batman.

STARK

Stark sat down behind the mahogany desk and reviewed the few details Mortimer had given him when they’d first discussed the job, trying to divine which of them were true.

The facts themselves were spare.

A woman had left her husband.

She’d done so only three days before.

She’d left from Montauk, Long Island, and gone to an as-yet-unknown place.

She had not taken her own car.

Mortimer had offered nothing beyond these scant details save that his “friend” did not wish to reveal himself but promised to supply considerably more information about his wife, at least as far as where she might have gone and by what means she’d gone there.

In itself, his client’s reluctance to identify himself was not unusual. In such situations people on the other end of the arrangement were often jealous of their privacy. He’d worked for politicians, high-profile businessmen, actors, and musicians. No one was safe from the eternal tendency to fuck up. That was one of the things Stark had learned over the years, that rich, famous, and even quite intelligent people could suddenly find themselves neck deep in trouble. Their personal relationships abruptly spun out of control because they’d screwed the wrong person or trusted some grifter who’d promised five bucks for every nickel they invested. Human life went forward on a sputtering wave of such mindless improvisation. On some otherwise normal day a line drive went foul. A man met a woman, took her to bed, awoke to find a psycho in his arms. Or he let a stranger buy him a drink, talked a little about money, turned over half a million to a thief. There were a thousand ways for a life to go disastrously awry. And when it did you looked for a way out that didn’t blow what was left of you to smithereens. You found someone who could make the necessary correction, have some face time with the face you wanted to wipe out of your life. Oftentimes, the job reduced to simply that, a single eye-to-eye confrontation, one Stark always ended with a standard chilling statement, This is over . . . as of right now. Whatever you thought you were going to get, you’re not going to get it. From this moment on, you only start to lose. How much you lose is up to you.

He’d delivered these words scores of times, to distraught mistresses and wily con men and well-heeled drug dealers, and the look in his eye and the tone in his voice had rarely failed to do the trick. No matter how venal or stupid or psychopathically greedy people were, they never failed to know when the man they were dealing with couldn’t wait to die. A man who regarded life as nothing more than a long, boring wait at the airport held the ultimate means of intimidation. No one wanted as his enemy a man whose only friend was death.

Of course, there’d been those few exceptions even to this rule. People who didn’t trust what they glimpsed in Stark’s eyes, didn’t really believe he was what he appeared to be, dismissed his lethal stare as a bluff.