Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

the road. Brakes squealed and angry drivers bellowed at him. I stayed with him as he ran into Front Street and headed for the covered market. He plowed through the terraced cafes there, sending deck chairs and tables flying. It slowed him down, but my lungs were screaming and I knew I couldn’t keep going much longer.

He was just turning the corner to sprint toward Beekman Street and I was asking myself where the hell Dehan and her back up were, when a blur flashed past my left shoulder and I saw Dehan, doing an Olympic sprint, streak across the corner and launch herself into a flying tackle. She flung her arms around his legs, like they were a long lost lover, and he slammed face first into the sidewalk. The file skidded ahead of him and I hobbled after it.

She got to her feet and stuck the Sig against his head.

“Get up, you motherfucker!” She was panting hard and her face was flushed. He slowly got up, his nose gushing blood. He turned to look at her. He was out of breath, too, but not much.

A Black Audi 8 came around the corner at speed and skidded to a halt. The back door flew open, but nobody got out. Harrison didn’t say anything. He just looked at Dehan, and walked toward the car. She looked stunned.

“Freeze!”

“It had two rounds in it. You’re empty.” He climbed in the car and closed the door. It took off at speed.

“What the fuck?” She looked at me. “What the fuck, Stone?”

I held up the file.

“He has friends in high places, and he is obviously still useful to somebody, but we have the file. Come on. Let’s go close this goddamn case.”

Epilogue

She had her hair tied in a knot behind her head. She had her sleeves rolled up above her elbows and she was perspiring. She had finished turning over the soil and was now making holes about four inches across, five or six inches deep. The sun was warm, but gentle, declining in the west towards a sweet, mid-April evening. The church was closed, pending the naming of a new priest, but the parish had given us permission to dedicate a garden to the children.

Dehan had had the sign made and she’d brought along her own masonry drill to fix it to the church wall. It was in brass so, as she said, it would never fade and never be forgotten. It said simply, ‘The Garden of the Orphaned Children’. Now she was planting flowers and small trees. She had twenty-four of them, two for each child who had been buried there. I had offered to help, one-handed, but she had refused. It was something, she said, she had to do herself. I guess I understood.

She was on her knees now, with the evening sun on her, and a few strands of hair falling across her face, pressing the earth around a small rose bush.

“Your job,” she said, “when I have finished, is to take me on a date, to eat a damn good steak that I can get intense about.”

“You expect me to do that one-handed?”

“You’re such a wimp. Here, hand me those azaleas.”

I passed them over to her. She was quiet while she set the small bush in the ground and packed it with dirt. Then, she said, “Will we ever get Harrison?”

“I don’t know. I’ll never stop trying, but I think the Bureau have a better chance than us. He could be anywhere.”

She nodded. “A strange case, Stone. Did we solve it? Did we close it? The only survivor got away. All the others died, but nobody was brought to justice.”

I shrugged. “What can I tell you, I’m not one for philosophizing, Carmen, but sometimes life has a justice all its own. Our justice is just overlaid, on top of it.”

She made a face, reached out her hand and said, “The orange tree.” I handed it over and she went on, “You talking about a god?”

“No.” I thought about it a moment, then said, “It just seems sometimes that things have a way of working out. Not always, but sometimes, it works out right.”

She still didn’t look at me, but she smiled. She stood and dusted the soil from her hands, then wiped them on her jeans, looking down at the small garden. “There,” she said. “Give it a couple of weeks, it will look nice.”

“It’s beautiful.”

She linked her arm through mine and we stood in silence for a minute, then she gathered up her things and we walked slowly back toward the car. She put her stuff in the trunk, and as I closed it, she said, “Did we do the right thing?”

I rested my ass against the old Jaguar and gingerly crossed my arms. “If we’d cut a deal with Vincenzo, sure, we would have trawled up ten or twenty of his lieutenants, maybe even a few people from the Manhattan families. We’ll never know. But the man responsible, the man who made the decisions, would have lived the rest of his life in comfort, like Pro, without ever paying for what he did, keeping his hand in here and there. I couldn’t rest easy with that. We’ll get the others, in time.” I shook my head. “We can’t catch everybody, but those we do catch, let’s make them pay.”

She nodded, “Okay. Answer me something, who killed Father O’Neil? I’m still not clear about that.”

“It wasn’t Vincenzo. He didn’t know yet that Father O’Neil had screwed him, and it wasn’t Hagan for the same reason. It had to be Bellini. When we started digging up his churchyard, word got to Bellini of what was happening, and he sent somebody to silence him. Maybe he called on Vincenzo for a couple of hit men. I guess we may never