Dagon Rising(21)
Baby-face smiled. “Your mother was right.”
Tony returned the smile. Then he spat in his captor’s face. Baby-face flinched as the wad of saliva splattered against his cheek and slowly rolled down to his chin, but his smile, although faltering, remained.
“Was that really necessary?” He grabbed a napkin from Tony’s kitchen table and wiped the offending fluid away.
“Let’s cut the happy feel good bullshit,” Tony said. “You motherfuckers come busting in here, knock me the fuck out with your Mr. Spock shit, tie me up in this fucking chair, kidnap some poor schmuck from outside, drop him in my crib, and then tell me that I’m special and this is all for my own good? As the brothers are prone to say—nigga, please.”
Baby-face opened his mouth to respond, but the older man interrupted.
“Tell him. We’re wasting time.”
“Not yet. We still—”
“We have no choice. Tell him.”
Baby-face turned around and pointed at the maintenance man. “What about him?”
“I’ll take care of him. You just get Genova prepared for what’s to come. We don’t have much time. The plane leaves in an hour and thirty minutes. We need to be on it.”
The older man grabbed the back of the maintenance man’s chair and tilted it toward him. Then he began to drag the captive across the floor toward the door. The maintenance man kicked and struggled against his bonds.
“Get your hands off me,” he shouted. “I know who you people are! Black Lodge. You’re Black fucking Lodge, right?”
The older man stopped, releasing the chair as if he’d been shocked. The other man—the one Tony’s age and build—gasped. The woman simply stared, clearly surprised.
“He’s got your goat,” Tony said. “I don’t know what the fuck any of it means, but he got you.”
“Get him out of here,” Baby-face said, his calm demeanor betrayed by the edge in his voice.
“No,” Tony said. “The lawn jockey stays. If what you’re saying is true—if you need me for some job—then he stays. Otherwise, I ain’t doing jack shit, and you can just kill me now.”
“I told you, Mr. Genova, we have no intention of killing you. And why are you worried about the welfare of this man, whom you don’t even know?”
“He senses a kindred spirit,” the woman said, moving to stand over Baby-face’s shoulder. “He doesn’t know who this maintenance man is, but he knows that they are the same. They both have blood on their hands. Since Mr. Genova views both himself and this other man as our captives, he’s hoping to keep the other man alive long enough so that the two of them can work together to effect an escape.”
“Wow,” Tony gasped. “Lady, you’re good. You should take that mind reading shit on the road. Get yourself on Oprah or something.”
“When you were twelve years old,” the woman said, “the neighborhood bully, one Max Delveccio, taunted and harassed a friend of yours. The friend’s name was Paul Novak. The harassment progressed to sexual harassment, and then rape. Delveccio’s cruelty forced your friend to run away from home. Paul was never seen again.”
“How did you—”
“I could have gotten that information from any number of sources,” the woman continued, “but what I couldn’t have known was this. You lured Max Delveccio to an old abandoned house, and then you killed him. He was the first person you ever murdered. You thought that if he went away, your friend would come back home again. You were sick after you did it. You stayed home from school for three days. Your mother believed you had the flu. You buried Delveccio’s body in the basement of the house. When you were sixteen, the house was torn down to make way for a county park. You were worried that someone would find the remains, but they never did. His bones lie there to this day. They whisper your name.”
Tony’s voice was barely audible. “I’ve never told anyone about that. Not even Vince. How the fuck do you know that?”
“I know everything about you, Mr. Genova.”
“Because you can read minds?”
She nodded. “How else would you explain what I just did?”
Tony shrugged. “So, what? You tell me about a murder I supposedly did back when I was a kid, and I’m supposed to be all impressed now? You don’t know shit.”
The woman was nonplussed. “I know more about you than you probably know yourself. Indeed, we all do.”
“We know about the dreams,” Baby-face said. “More importantly, we know why you have them.”
“What dreams?”