Inside Out wm-1 Page 2

  Winter steered his Ford Explorer up the steep driveway and, as the vehicle passed hidden sensors, bright security lights illuminated the front of the house and walkway. As he passed the back corner of the house, another bank of floods lit the backyard and driveway. He parked in the two-car garage beside a dark LeSabre. He took his canvas duffel out of the backseat, picked up the eleven roses from the floorboard, and dropped them into the trash on his way to the door. The remaining roses would only serve to remind him of the one he'd left behind.

  His mother had woken when he came up the driveway and had beaten him to the door. Seen through the glass panels, Lydia Massey looked like a wraith bent on haunting his entrance. She snapped the lock and opened the door as if she didn't believe that he could locate the lock without her assistance and would stand there frozen all night with his key poised. She was wearing a wispy robe over her rayon gown, and as he kissed her cheek he was overwhelmed by the lemony scent of her cold cream. She patted his arm absently and said, “I wasn't expecting you back until tomorrow,” then set about trying to reshape her hair where the pillow had flattened it. “I'll fix you something to eat. We had hamburgers for supper.”

  Winter said, “I've already eaten.” He hadn't eaten since morning, but food was the furthest thing from his mind. The US Air steward had handed him a rubbery turkey sandwich, but he had given it to the man beside him and substituted it with a Johnny Walker Black.

  Lydia studied him. “You look like a gaunt old tomcat that needs a meal and a week under the porch. Your son went to bed early. I don't think he felt well.”

  Winter's mother was a product of rural Mississippi, the daughter of a Methodist minister, and in her world breakfast was breakfast, but lunch was “dinner” and dinner was “supper.” She referred to African Americans as coloreds, sometimes negroes, the way older Southerners occasionally did.

  “Did Rush have a fever?” he asked, trying to squelch the panic he felt. Since Eleanor's death he knew that he had become overly protective, but he couldn't help it.

  “No fever,” Lydia answered. “I double-checked. But he's been dragging around the last few days. Just sits there listening to the television. I think something happened, but he isn't going to admit it to me. Boy's just like his father. Keeps everything inside where it can make ulcers, heart troubles, strokes, and cancer. I haven't seen you smile in a very long time, Winter Massey. You lighten up and so will he, I bet.”

  “I'm beat, Mama,” he said, “but let me give this smile thing a shot.” He grinned, showing his mother his large even teeth. She swatted his chest and he hugged her. “I promise I'll smile once a day from now on, whether I want to or not, Mama.”

  His watch said it was only ten-he hadn't reset it since Memphis. He pulled the stem and spun the hour hand around. “I'll check in on him.”

  He watched his mother head toward the guest room, her home since his wife's death. He then stuck his head into his son's room, which always seemed to smell like a hamster cage, or how he remembered the cage smelling when the boy had owned one.

  “You awake, Rush?”

  The three-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback, Nemo, whined loudly. Nemo licked Winter's hand, delighted to see him again. Rush was sitting upright in bed, staring in the direction his father.

  “Nemo heard your car.”

  Winter took a seat on the bed and hugged the boy, who smelled of shampoo and whose cheek was as soft as satin. At almost twelve, Rush was between the age when he wanted to be hugged and when he would be mortally embarrassed by any sign of affection. Nemo lay back down near the bed, his muzzle pressed into the rug, eyes locked on Rush.

  Rush ran his hand over his father's face, the fingertips as light as a butterfly's touch. “You're purely tuckered, Marshal. You get your bad guy this time?”

  “Villain's freshly acquainted with the sound of a jail-cell door slamming shut.”

  “Way to go, man!” The boy raised his palm and Winter slapped it. “Wow, howdy, he never should have gotten himself in your sights, right?”

  “Yep, drawing the attention of this deputy marshal was the biggest mistake of that desperado's ill-spent life.”

  They both laughed.

  In the shadows of the bedroom Winter couldn't see the scar on his son's face. In the light it was a line no thicker than a kite string, which ran from the middle of the right temple, to the edge of the left one. It passed over the eyelids, the bridge of his nose. In the dark, Winter could pretend nothing terrible had happened to his boy. Each time he looked at that scar he experienced that hollow feeling he got as a child when the roller-coaster car he was in topped the first hill.

  The light that had once radiated from his son's beautiful blue eyes-exact duplicates of Eleanor's-had been replaced by spots of white paint expertly applied to the surface of the acrylic replicas. An artist had painted them using, for reference, a color photograph Winter had taken of Rush only weeks before the accident.

  “So, what did you bring me?” Rush asked, his tone businesslike. When he was three, they had started a tradition. Every time Winter was away from home for more than a night he would bring his son a gift. The memento could be a pack of gum or just a seashell. There would always be an entertaining tale about the trinket, the longer the better.

  Winter reached into his pocket for the dark hoop, pushed it over his son's left hand, and squeezed it down to fit his wrist.

  Rush let his fingers investigate it. Since the accident he had learned to feel, smell, taste, and hear what he couldn't see. What he comprehended using these senses was often remarkable to his father-almost as if the boy had psychic abilities. In his occupation, Winter had to be a reader of eyes, muscle twitches, and body language. But his son seemed to have learned to read those things without being able to see them.

  “What is it?” Rush demanded, giggling now with anticipation. God, Winter lived for the sound of his son's happiness.

  “It's a bracelet.”

  “I know that! What's it made of?”

  “Guess.”

  “Aw, man. No fair.” But he nodded and played the game, running his fingers over the bracelet, biting down on it, rubbing it against his teeth and his cheek. “Well, it's sort of like braided gold or silver, but it isn't. It's not cotton or wool.”

  “It's from something powerful, fearless, had a mouth full of teeth and is strong of odor.”

  Rush laughed, delighted. “Shakka! Shakka the lion?”

  “I had it woven for you from hair I clipped from Shakka's mane.”

  There was a gallery of family pictures in the Masseys' hallway-a conglomeration of old and new, prints of different sizes in mismatched frames, some black-and-white, some color. In one, Eleanor Massey was still Eleanor Ashe, a skinny little girl with missing front teeth. In another, Winter's parents were still together and Lydia held a baby Winter in her arms. In another, Winter was a Cub Scout, and framed beside that was a photo of Rush as an infant being bathed by his mother. The most recent showed Rush wearing sunglasses with his arms around the neck of a moth-eaten lion. The lion's teeth were worn down so close to the gums they looked like small whitecaps on a dark sea.

  The lion had been the property of a Charlotte drug dealer, who kept him in a basement and used him to frighten children and drug runners. The federal judge had ordered Winter and another marshal to put the cat in a U-Haul van and escort it to an animal rehabilitation center in Florida. The lion was so gentle that Winter had taken Rush to the warehouse where Shakka was kept before transit was arranged and had let the boy use his hands to get to know it. The old cat's tongue had made a hivelike abrasion on Rush's cheek. Winter had read a book once that described how a man-eating lion used its tongue like a rasp to remove the skin from human prey before consuming it. He hadn't told Rush that.

  “Shakka liked me, didn't he?” Rush said now. “He was really big, wasn't he?”

  “Nemo sure didn't like Shakka,” Winter reminded him.

  Winter had left Nemo at home that day, and when they got b
ack to the house the dog planted his nose against Rush's chest. He growled fiercely for a long time, the fur over his spine standing like quills. Winter had been afraid at first that he was going to bite the boy, and, when he tried to pull his son away, the usually gentle dog had snapped at Winter. His behavior seemed to be a chastisement for allowing Rush so close to something that smelled like an enemy of children. Nemo's breed originated in South Africa. Some ancient warning had obviously risen up within the dog.

  “How are you feeling?” Winter asked his son.

  “Fine. Why?”

  “Gram said you moped around all day, went to bed early.”

  “Is a bracelet for a man?” Rush asked, avoiding the question.

  Winter saw a corner of one of his late wife's bandanas peeking out from under Rush's pillow. They had been one of Eleanor's trademarks; she'd used them to keep her long blond hair under control when she was outdoors or working on the house. Rush had taken to carrying one in his pocket. After three years, he was down from a half dozen to a pair; one red and one blue. When it was absolutely necessary, he washed them by hand and laid them on a towel to dry.

  “Sure. I.D. bracelets are for men. Lion-hair bracelets are strictly for men who need some luck. So why the moping?”

  “Well, Angus is mowing yards next summer and when I said I would help, he said if I took a tin cup and some pencils downtown, people would buy them.”

  “That was mean.”

  “No, Angus didn't mean it like that. We were talking about ways to make money, but it made me think a lot about what I'm going to do someday. It sure as heck won't be selling pencils.”

  “No, it won't. But you need to get some sleep.” Winter kissed his son's cheek, tucked him in, hung Nemo's Seeing-Eye harness on the chair, and walked out. Nemo was supposed to sleep in the harness, but tonight Rush had merely leashed him to the bed, a minor violation of the rules for Seeing-Eye dogs. In the hallway he paused to look at the picture of Eleanor standing under the wing of a Cessna 120 she had soloed in at sixteen. He kept a picture of another Cessna, the one the insurance company sent him, in his file cabinet. He still couldn't look at it without feeling lost, like being pinned under tons of earth and rocks.

  He lay down on his bed in the dark. A few weeks after Eleanor's death, he had changed the room, bought a new bed, moved the furniture. He kept her jewelry in his gun safe, thinking he'd give it to his son's wife someday. Eleanor had three gold bracelets, a small strand of cultured pearls, a wedding ring, a Seiko tank watch, her flight chronometer, and a pendant made from Winter's Kappa Alpha Order fraternity pin. Nothing worth putting in a bank vault. Her favorite piece had been a pin that Rush picked out in a Walgreens. It was small, shaped like a soldier's medal, and said MOTHER on the gold-toned bar at the top, with a pink plastic heart hanging by a ribbon. Winter had asked the funeral director to pin it to her gown before the casket was closed, because she would have wanted it close to her.

  Winter had not looked at his wife's body after she stopped breathing. He had not left her side from the moment he was ushered into her hospital room until he gave the nod to pull the plug and she ceased to exist. Her face had been so swollen that she hadn't looked like Eleanor, which had allowed him to imagine that some stranger was in her bed, dying or dead. She was breathing, but not on her own, and for no good purpose except to keep her organs alive for someone else. At that point he knew that he was on the edge of exactly how much he could endure.

  He had managed to get through his wife's funeral by convincing himself that the casket was empty, that Eleanor was waiting for him at home, that some other woman had crashed the plane. After all, his wife was a master pilot, an instructor. In a glider she was a thing of the air, knew the secret winds, soaring on the thermals with the arrogance of a hawk. He had only once sat in front of her in a glider. He'd been certain the wings would fold up as she performed lazy loops so high above the earth. But he had loved every second of the sensation, sharing her passion.

  Rush had stayed in the hospital for a full month after the crash and spent months after that adjusting to his blindness. He seemed resilient and began testing the limits of his handicap almost immediately.

  Before Rush was blinded, the dark had been the one thing he was afraid of. Since he was first put into his own bedroom at the age of two, he had slept with the door open a crack, a night-light in the hallway illuminating the way to his parents' bedroom. Since the accident, Rush hadn't cared whether the door was left open or closed. Another small thing that feasted on Winter's heart.

  5

  New York, New York

  It was almost eleven when a gimp-gaited Herman Hoffman walked up from the subway stop at 72nd and Broadway and started making his way toward the meeting. As he turned the corner, he spotted an elegant gray Towncar parked across the narrow street from the small coffeehouse. He ignored it, knowing that the driver was studying him, relaying to the man inside the shop on his mobile phone that Herman was approaching, without backup. A sign on the door said that the small business was closed. As he approached, a large man unlocked the door from the inside. As Herman slipped into the coffeehouse, he caught a reflection in the window-a small, ancient man wearing a tweed jacket, whose body seemed shaped like a question mark-the man he had become.

  Herman's limp was his badge of honor, the visible remains of his courage-compliments of an ill-mannered Stasi agent who had used a wood-carver's mallet on his knee in a futile attempt to elicit information. Men like Herman knew that torture rarely led to useful information. He was seventy-eight and his face looked like a cadaver's. The smell of ointment wafted from him. He looked like a man on the edge of the grave, not someone who held the reins to organized death and destruction.

  The New Orleanian he'd come to meet, Johnny Russo, was Sam Manelli's nephew-in-law, operations manager, enforcer, trusted messenger, and heir apparent to Sam's crime empire. Russo sat at a table in the rear, wearing an expensive sports jacket that shone like wet fish scales. With his buzz cut, his high-tech wire rims and patent-leather boots, he might have been mistaken for a forty-something art gallery owner instead of the savage he really was.

  Herman sat directly across from Russo, who closed his magazine, laid it aside, and folded his hands together. “Mr. Hoffman,” Russo said, concentrating his attention on the old man. “Coffee?”

  “Hello, John.” Herman allowed his face to communicate a flicker of amusement. “Too late for coffee.” He pursed his lips, shrugged his narrow shoulders and placed a small plastic box on the table. The green light set into its surface blinked a steady beat.

  “What's that?” Johnny Russo asked.

  Herman slipped the apparatus back into his coat pocket. “It's a little bird that chirps in the presence of any electronic devices like transmitters, even recorders.”

  “Where can I get one of those?”

  “They're not available. Is everything in order?”

  Russo raised his eyebrows. “Sam said yes to the figure. Who the hell's he going to shop prices with at this late date, right? I mean, it isn't like he has any choice.”

  “Things are in place.”

  “Sam wants out of that place like you wouldn't believe. He's hot as a two-dollar pistol over all this. All of the fee up front and he didn't even flinch. I guess three million for a single hit is some kind of a record.”

  “Nowhere near it.” Herman forced himself to smile. “Certainty always costs more than maybe. This is a complicated, expensive operation. Sam will get his freedom. You will get what you want. And I will get the satisfaction of performing the impossible-one last time.”

  “And three million, tax free.” Russo's eyes shifted focus and Herman realized that the mobster was staring at the large flakes of dead skin on the shoulders of his jacket. The disease that ravaged his skin was humiliating, especially considering the man he had once been. When their eyes met, Russo peered over Herman's shoulder at his man near the door and then gave Herman a we-are-going-to-rule-the-world smile. “When i
s this gonna happen? Sam wants it real soon. Every day he's in that jail is like a year to most people.”

  “I can't give anybody outside my group the date of an operation, John. My people have not failed once in fifty years. I know where the marshals have Devlin. You can assure Sam that the trial is never going to take place. Dylan won't even make it to testify before the ‘secret' congressional committee on organized crime. My people are already staging. That's all you need to know.”

  Russo's eyes danced with excitement. “That's great! If everybody gets the message that there is no safe place to hide if they betray me

  … The feds are gonna be hugely pissed.”

  “They'll know Sam was behind it, but they will never prove it unless you, Sam, or I talk.”

  Herman knew Russo well enough to understand that he was no Sam Manelli and when this self-important turd didn't have Sam on his shoulder, the empire was doomed. Of all the alliances Herman had ever formed, this one was singularly unpalatable.

  “Where is it?” Herman asked.

  “What?”

  Herman stared down at his hands again as if he were memorizing the liver spots. “The three-million-dollar fee.”