Two Guns and a Weasel

Dear story snacker,

I’d love to talk your eyes off, but I think I’ll just get straight to the point and let you see what happens after that cliff hanger last time!

STORY SNACK

DEATH AND BOTTLE CAPS

Part 4

Parts 1, 2 and 3

Raising both hands in surrender, Romulus shrugged his bony shoulders. “Purely business related, Diana, I’m not here for any of your customers. Not while they’re here, at least.”

Diana Del Monte—Diamond to some of her clientele—glared daggers that felt as threatening as the cold gray barrel currently kissing the detective’s frontal lobe.

“What business?” she hissed. “Talk. Use small words, too many syllables make my trigger finger twitchy.”

Not wanting to turn the booth into a Jackson Pollock of his brain matter, Romulus talked.

“I’m looking for a missing husband, gone two days. Careful—” he said as he reached slowly into his pocket with two fingers and Diana pressed the gun warningly into his forehead. “Keep your bullets cold, it’s just a picture.”

He plucked the snapshot of the McVales free and tapped it into the booth’s round table. The redhead glanced down at it. Her lip wrinkled. “I hate to see a beautiful girl settle.”

“Maybe he’s funny.”

“Knock-knock jokes can only get you so far,” Diana sighed, leaning back into the black upholstery and lowering the silver gun from Romulus’ face. “He didn’t look very funny two nights ago, but maybe that was the lighting.”

 Romulus exhaled. The gun’s cold touch lingered on his forehead like a cadaver’s kiss. “He was here,” he rasped rhetorically. “Doing what?”

With a smile that would melt through hearts and steel locks, Diana shook her head. “Information is a commodity, darling.” She flicked an imaginary mote of dust off the slide of her pistol. “What will you give me in exchange?”

Romulus raised one finger. “The warm philanthropic feeling that you helped a distraught wife…”

Sequens flashed on Diana’s gold dress as she shook with a derisive giggle. The detective raised a second finger.

“And the assurance that you won’t see me in here again for a year.”

Diana’s eyes became hard and sharp as diamonds. “Not for a year. Forever.”

“A year. After that I’ll always let you know I’m coming.” He held out a gnarled hand.

A moment’s pause, then delicate fingers shook his hand once, Diana’s other hand secreting the silver pistol back beneath her dress. “Deal.”

The black curtain to Romulus’ right shifted slightly. He tapped one finger on the table. “I’m all ears, Diamond.”

“That Cro-Magnon you’re after barged in two nights back,” Diana said, extending one slender hand and examining its perfect nails. “Bribed Les to let him back here. I was otherwise occupied when he came in, but one of my girls says he looked mad as a hungover hornet. He went straight to a booth where Anton Zino was drinking with some friends—”

“Anton Zino?” Romulus asked, a single eyebrow arched. He knew most of the mobsters of Italian persuasion in the city, but this name rang about as many bells as a non-denominational church.

“Low level capo, new in town,” Diana said, her tone silkily derisive. “Pretty little Sicilian. Long lashes, short fuse. Anyway, your hornet made a beeline for Zino. Trish was nearest and said she thought she heard your Harry say something about a debt…but then Zino pulled the curtain, and she couldn’t hear anything else without being obvious.”

Cataloguing all this in his head, Romulus nodded to his right. “Is Zino here tonight?”

When the woman shook her head, her hair undulated like red silk curtains. “He hasn’t been back since that night. He left with your Cro-Magnon. I don’t know where they went, so don’t ask.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not the one I was going to ask,” Romulus said as the black curtain shifted slightly again. “Don’t shoot him.”

Diana’s eyes widened. “Don’t shoot—”

Romulus’ right hand shot out, grabbing something beyond the curtain in a ferocious grip. Sliding over to make room, the detective pulled the man who had been listening at the curtain through it by his collar, forcing the squirming man down to sit beside him.

“Yes, don’t shoot him,” he reiterated, pulling the curtain closed with his right hand while his left twisted the collar of the eavesdropper into a knot. He was a skinny youth in a painted-on black suit with the face of a weasel and the bulging eyes of a chameleon.

The man cringed away from Romulus, trying his best to melt away into the black leather seat. Keeping a tight grip on his collar, the detective draped a skeletal arm over the young man’s shoulders.

“It’s common courtesy to ask before you spy on a private conversation, son.”

“I wasn’t—” the weasel began, but spluttered to a halt when Romulus’ grip winched his collar into a vice. Diana looked on calmly, the only sign of her surprise at the new arrival a slight wrinkle in her forehead.

“I’ll forgive your rudeness if you tell me something I’d like to know,” rasped the detective magnanimously.

Sweat beaded on the man’s chalky forehead, and he nodded, eyes flicking from detective to Diamond.

“Where did Zino and Henry McVale go two nights ago?”

Romulus loosened his grip on the man’s shirt top. “H-how should I know?” wheezed the weasel in an attempt at bravado that was offset slightly by the stutter.

Giving the youth the same smile wolves gave treed raccoons, Romulus patted him on the shoulder. “Because there are two reasons you would risk spying on someone in this club. Either you work for Zino and are after information for him, or you have information for sale that’s relevant to the conversation you overheard. Either way, you know where they went. Tell me for free and I’ll stop doing it.”

“You’ll stop doing wh—” The weasel’s voice was cut off again as Romulus twisted his collar tighter than before, making the protruding eyes bulge even further. The man wriggled like a besuited fish for a few seconds until the detective loosened his grip.

“S-Seaside,” spat the weasel, glaring furtively at Romulus. “Seaside Hotel. That’s where they went two nights back. I don’t know nothing else.”

Romulus took his arm from around the man’s shoulders and released his now very wrinkled collar. “Thank you, son. Don’t let me keep you.”

A moment later the only sign of the weasel was a flutter in the black curtain and a lingering scent of inadequacy. Wiping his hands on his pants, Romulus turned to Diana. “I feel a little out of touch. Who did I just threaten?”

Re-crossing her slender legs with a sensual scissoring motion, Diana waved a hand. “Stretch Rafferty, high-class bottom feeder. Funny, I didn’t see him here two nights ago. Suppose one of his rats told him about Zino and your missing link.”

Romulus took his coat and slid it on, feeling the reassuring weight in the right inside pocket. “Thank you, Diana. I’ll see you next year.”

“Let’s make it two, Erik.”

“It’s a date.”

*

Noon sun fought feebly to breach the rain clouds painting the pavement outside the Red Curtain with drizzle as Romulus emerged. He took a deep breath of moist, cool air, then turned his left wrist over to glance at his watch. 12:15.

Romulus set off down the sidewalk, cars hissing past on the downtown street. He had less than nine hours until his life-or-death meeting. The Coke bottle cap felt even heavier in his shirt pocket, like a coin for Charon itching to send him to the afterlife…or pay his way out of it.

Romulus turned a corner, heading east toward the docks. Henry McVale had been at the Seaside Hotel two nights ago with a handsome two-bit mobster named Anton Zino, if weasels were to be taken at their word. If the gods were kind, he’d still be there. But Romulus had been betting against divine kindness for fifty years and hadn’t lost much more than his Christmas cheer for it. Still, the lead needed following up.

The dank, suspicious scent of this case filled the lupine old man’s nostrils along with petrichor as he walked. His path felt too easy, as if someone had already blazed it, leaving him obvious signposts to follow. Puzzle pieces flitted around his mind, bouncing off each other instead of falling into place.

Low level capo—bribed Les to get in—Sicily in the sun—something about a debt—high class bottom feeder—pretty little Sicilian—Cro-Magnon…

Using the window of the building across the street to see behind him without turning his head, he noticed the man in the baseball cap keeping pace with him half a block back.

Romulus had seen that cap before. In the club. And Grounds Zero.

With a sepulchral sigh, the detective strolled on without changing his pace, though he couldn’t help the rhythm of his heart elevating from the thump of bluegrass to the rat-tat-tat of rock’n’roll. It had been too long since the last time he’d been followed.

He turned off the wide street into a narrow alley between two tall apartment complexes, immersing himself in shadow and wet garbage smell.

Down the street, the man in the baseball cap increased his pace, fast-walking to the last place he had seen Romulus before resuming his normal walking speed as he turned into the alley. A few dark doorways and overflowing trashcans were all that occupied the long space between buildings. The detective was nowhere in sight.

A soft word not found in most dictionaries came from beneath the baseball cap, and its wearer jogged down the alley, hoping to catch sight of the detective out the other end.

As his tail ran the other direction, Romulus stepped out of the dark doorway where his black suit had helped him blend in, not bothering to look down the alleyway as he re-entered the street he had just left, setting off eastward at a brisk pace.

If his pursuer was as amateur as he seemed, Romulus would reach the Seaside Hotel before the kid found him again. He had a pretty good guess as to who had put the tail on him, but he wasn’t sure why yet.

Romulus unbuttoned his jacket as he moved, pulling the right side open enough so that he could check on the gray steel revolver tucked in the pocket. He’d hoped he wouldn’t need it today, but he’d brought it anyway because in his experience hope helped as much as a raindrop on a river.

He re-buttoned his coat, adjusted it minutely and walked on through the drizzle. He slipped the bottle cap from his pocket and squeezed it between two fingers as he thought about everything he’d learned, and about his long-awaited meeting.

Romulus wondered if it rained on the river Styx.

Daylight is starting to wain, and just like the sun, things are about to go down…

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See you next story,

-Zossima