Thrice Told Tales Read online

  While he’d never make a James Bond type, Tino took to the work like a natural, his only drawback his huge frame—as he stuck out in a crowd big time. But he learned to counter this by using his natural gifts, and even his size to throw off a mark he could work in close, get close contact when needed. On the surface, he looked the part of a slow, slight retard with a goofy grin no one would take for a mask. And for the next fifteen years, he had racked up a record of forty clean kills, seventeen not so clean kills, sending fifty seven men and sometimes women to their everlasting.

  Tino had become highly respected in the business, and the family counted on him whenever a problem arose, until this thing with the Iguana came along.

  Capino had grown senile, a hit man’s worst nightmare—a boss with senility making bad decisions and taking out contract hits on the basis of unreasonable slights. This time he insisted that Tino take out Carmine Russo’s pet Iguana.

  Worse yet, he wanted the Iguana to die mercilessly and messily—butcher fashion. Piece by piece and all of the bloody remains laid out on Carmine’s bed as a sure warning, see? Tino had no problem with this, not initially.

  But that all changed in one moment; in one blink of emotion. An emotion Big Tino the Ax had not felt since childhood.

  Fucking childhood. No matter how far you stray from it, it is always there in the gut of your brain, in the pit of your mind like a hard peach seed. It may be covered over, it may be forgotten, unused for what seems forever, but that hard little core, convoluted and unbreakable is there just waiting for you to reconnect, recall, remember a whiff of a childhood moment of perfection—the perfect starry night, perfect breeze, perfect odor, perfect touch, perfect kiss. And it came that way for Tino—the odor of this Iguana filling his brain with memories of Loretta. And startlingly enough, strangely enough, the name on the Iguana habitat read Loretta. And how fucking coincident is that, for when The Ax slipped the lock and eased into Carmine’s place after having dispatched his body guard with a quick jerk of the neck, sending him to the Netherlands of eternity, he discovered quite quickly where the tincture and very quintessence—the eau de Iguana--led him direct to the habitat labeled Loretta.

  At first, he thought it just a cosmic joke, one of those things God did to pass the time—just fucking with us. But then he drew near, and the nearer he got to the Iguana’s habitat, the more the odoriferous Loretta overtook his mind. The thing’s odor held pause the huge de-boning knife over his head, when their eyes met, and the liquid beauty of those black eyes were identical to those of the long-remembered, long bereaved loss. The fond eyes of Loretta. God how he had loved her; God how he would have sacrificed anything for her. God how had suffered so much pain on losing Loretta.

  Now this dilemma.

  He steeled himself. Shake it off, he kept thinking in mantra fashion. This ain’t Loretta. This is a fucking Iguana, man, and that odor from childhood is not exactly the same as the odor this Loretta is exuding with her excretions—what’d they call it guano? Or was that term reserved for bats only? Did Iguanas and turtles and such exude guano, he wondered, or just plain old shit.

  That’s the ticket, he told himself in the silence of the dark room where only one light shone, the light in Loretta’s eyes. Black like grapes, yes, but a seed of light in each eye, just like his long-lost Loretta.

  “It ain’t nothing personal,” he said to Loretta, but the words were meant for himself; actually it was not his today self but his long-forgotten self he needed the mantra for, that self that remembered. “Nothing personal. Can’t let emotions rule. No feelings on the job. It’s just another job, albeit the target never done nothing to nobody.”

  He grabbed a willing Loretta who looked pampered with her pink bow tied about her neck, and in one hand he held her curled, smiling face in the half-light up to his eyes, and their eyes again met. Melting eyes; eyes that had soul…eyes that—

  He plunged the knife into the creature’s gut as training took over, and those eyes that held him now bulged and pealed back, and an aching keen that sounded like “Whhhy?” escaped Loretta Iguana. Like air slowly exiting a balloon, and the curled smile turned to a crooked sickness, and the seed-lit eyes turned off…but the odor remained. That one most powerful of all senses, the olfactory at work overtime, filling his brain with a thing he’d forgotten existed, a thing called love.

  So he managed to piss off not only Capino but also Carmine Russo, and between the two of them, Tino The Ax was by now a twice-marked man in a twice-told tale. A man with two targets on his back, either one of them high-paying markets. Uncle Sal, Capino remained adamantly pissed; pissed that his Tino, toward whom he’d put so much time and effort had failed him. Tino simply had not do the job as told—cut up Loretta in twenty pieces over Carmine’s bed, so the blood spatters would create a kind of Jackson Pollack painting over Carime Russo’s White Russian made down comforter. Now Uncle Sal had put out a major contract on his nephew’s head—to be filled only if Tino’s carcass were cut into twenty pieces.

  Meanwhile, Carmine Russo, pissed that Loretta had been stabbed by someone ballsy enough to get past his bodyguard and into his home, placed a contract out on his life as well.

  Chicago, which had always been home for Tino the Ax, a place of familiarity and comfort—like in comfort zone, as they say—disappeared that night he’d killed Russo’s Iguana. He no longer felt at ease in the Windy City. So he had made for parts unknown, and for six months he’d craftily evaded his pursuers. Two hitmen he knew well—Jack Divine, a scar-faced West Virginian who believed John Wayne a Shakespearian actor in cowboy boots and spurs—and Binney Melvino, the Butcher, who really liked knives and the cleaver. While Tino knew very little of Jack Divine except by reputation as out of town muscle, he’d had professional debates over methods and process with Binney. In fact, the two men had an odd, perhaps eerie mutual admiration society going. They admired one another’s results.

  Thank you, God, it had to’ve been the worst of the two, the butcher, who had found Tino first.

  He knew that Binney would not go against Sal. Knew that Binney was all pro.

  The Butcher had trained in the same manner as the Ax, and he’d perfected a genuine heartlessness that any sociopath might admire. The Butcher was a hit man’s hit man, a model, a master craftsman, as he felt nothing for anyone, nor for anything animate. He had laughed in Tino’s face as he recounted the ‘pussy’ thing he had done at Carmine’s when Sal Capino wanted it done in butcher fashion. Fact is Sal had originally wanted the Butcher to do the job, but he’d recently had some dental work done and the migraines that came along with it had laid him low.

  “Shoulda offed the fucking Iguana the way you was told, Tino. So tell me, before I kill you, tell me why? Why’d you not slice and dice the damn Iguana like the contract called for? Why, man, why?”

  “Why? Why?” Tino spat out blood into his killer’s eyes, amazed he had any left. As Tino heaved up, gasp-driven blood pumped over his lips, yes, but it also pumped from in a hundred rents and tears and little stabs the Butcher—Binney Melvino--had made all over Tino’s body now: genitalia gone, ears, nose, hands gone. “Why, yeah… why didn’t I butcher Loretta?”

  “The Iguana, yeah…gotta tell me, Tino…why?”

  “She reminded me of my own Loretta so damn much, down to how she smelled, man.”

  “Whoa…really? Reminded you of a woman? I knew it. I told Sal there had to be a woman involved someplace in all this. How else you make sense of it?”

  “Whoa up, what woman? My Loretta was accidentally killed when she got out of her aquarium… crawled up under the rug and my dad stepped on her. She didn’t stand a chance at the vet’s.”

  “Wait up…she was an animal, a pet?”

  “W-w-was my pet turtle. Loretta.”

  “Damn…ohhh, shit, man, I had a special turtle once myself, name of Gigi…when I was just a little tyke.”

  “Hey man, kill me if you must…but don’t fucking mock me…. You gonna mock what’s real, hu
h?”

  “No, man, seriously. I take that shit serious, OK? Turtle love for a child is too precious.”

  “Really?” asked Tino between death gasps.

  “When I was like four, maybe five.”

  “Damn…how serendipity is that shit. Me too…same thing. But hey….fuck this, shit,” said the Butcher, and he ended it, taking pity now…the recall of his pet turtle filling his nostrils with a long-forgotten odor—the odor of turtle dung and turtle food, and turtleness.

  “My turtle’s name was Shane,” came a voice from behind Melvino the Butcher, “named for the part Alan Ladd played in the film. But you know how Shane died? I dissected him alive myself!” These were the last words Tino went into eternity with, along with a miasma of screams coming out of the Butcher, and along with the sure knowledge that the Butcher was at the mercy now of Cowboy Jack from Western West Virginia.

  And now both he and the Butcher died with the strange realization that all three of them had seen their turtles brutally if unwittingly killed before their eyes. And with the realization of the power of the sense of a man’s smell as it resides over the years in a special place in the brain, no matter his career choice. This made the love of Loretta, and the love of Gigi, nay the love of a good turtle anywhere on the otherwise sordid planet so crucial to a child’s upbringing.

  And so that is how one of Chicago’s most promising hit men, on the verge of hit man legend, one Tino ‘The Ax’ Capino awoke in an unmarked grave with a lotta pieces missing. Tone, as he’d been called as a boy, knows now that he will likely spend eternity trying to put all the missing pieces--both physical and mental—back together again…aTonement, he jokingly told himself, even as a fresh whiff of Loretta—his original Loretta—floats by his dead nostrils. He also spectrally wonders if a search for Loretta out here in the Nether Regions is in order. And he secretly wishes Binney Melvino no ill will, and that he might find peace and Gigi again, too. As to that bastard Cowboy Jack Divine, a man who as a boy would kill his own turtle, Tino realized that his suffering continued as Divine lived yet, but that it was Divine Hell because Jack had to live inside his own skull. Something Tino had freed himself of with a little help from Binney. He also had gotten word that Cowboy Jack, while alive was a walking dead, as if he hadn’t been all his life. Furthermore, Tino had gotten it through a grapevine that Jack was wanted dead in twenty pieces. Ol’ Sal Capino again had worded the contract placed on Cowboy Jack Divine in the same manner as that put out on Loretta. You see, Sal became pissed at Jack’s unproven results, because Sal had wanted to see all of Tino’s parts for himself before that fool Divine buried them all in a dozen places.

  Finis

  From Rob:

  The following story is a spinoff based on my characters in the eleven novels of the Instinct Series. She is’ME Jessica Coran, FBI Agent and forensic genius. Dr. Coran has been for many of my readers their most endearing character and in Unnatural Instinct, she actual made contact with Detective Lucas Stonecoat of my Edge Series of novels. Enjoy:

  RULES OF FOG

  Dr. Jessica Coran lifted the lungs from the dead man’s chest cavity. As she did, she marveled at the shredded condition of the pair of sacks now like pizza dough without cohesion, threatening to slip through her gloved hands. The lungs, pockmarked with countless rents and tears where membrane walls had caved in, was the worst she’d seen in her twenty-five years of autopsying questionable deaths.

  Jessica guessed that this one had chained smoked five, maybe six packs a day, the sort unfazed by the Camel Tax, undeterred by reason or facts or statistics. Jake Helspenny, the paperwork said, nickname’d “Smoke.” Coran guessed he’d lived in a perpetual fog of cigarette exhaust and carbon monoxide. He’d traded breath for addiction.

  Her auburn hair tied back and tucked beneath a surgical cap, Jessica stowed away a fact that Smoke Helspenny’s lungs told her: he’d’ve been dead inside a year or two had nothing untoward happened. But what had happened?

  The ex-marine had been found dead in Arlington National Cemetery, once General Robert E. Lee’s family homestead, confiscated by the US government as “payback” Lee’s having commanded the Southern armies in the War Between the States – Arlington, a cemetery consecrated to the dead of all wars, where heroes slumbered within sight of the tomb of the Unknowns.

  Jessica examined Smoke’s liver. She concluded it had been in less peril than his lungs, but not by much. The man had been also been a heavy drinker. The organs never lie, she thought. The condition of a man’s organs at death stood testament to his life and frequently his character. Often the sum of the injuries a man did himself damn near outweighed the thing that killed him.

  Jake Helspenny’s epitaph: He’d come out of the Marines a broken man, missing far more than his left leg, right hand, and a piece of his skull and brain from what his wife called “the incident” in Iraq.

  Jessica had met the woman before she had begun the autopsy, had interviewed her – a buxom blonde, whose once pretty features sagged from forehead to jowls, telling the tale of a rough life alongside Smoke.

  “All that Jake’d gone through in Iraq,” the woman – Katherine Helspenny – said, “tooth-to-nail fightin’, facing death every day, acceptin’ the death of buddies—brothers.”

  An Arlington homicide detective – Kyle Jensen, in possession of his gold shield for less than a year – had been with the wife. He’d pushed Coran, the Commonwealth of Virginia’s medical examiner, to do the autopsy rather than assign it to one of her juniors. “Sounds like he was a good marine,” Jensen had said to Mrs. Helspenny.

  “He was.” Katherine Helspenny dabbed at tears. “But Jake never got over being the only survivor in his squad. Had nightmares. . . . Now this.”

  Jessica studied the woman. “Do you know anyone who’d want to harm your husband?”

  “Not a soul, except Dooley.”

  Jensen, a thin, wiry youngish George Carlin-type, swiveled. “Dooley, ma’am? You didn’t mention a Dooley before. Who’s he?”

  “Went by the nickname Spider. It was always Smoke and Spider in their time in the Marines. . . . Dooley blamed Jake for walking out of ‘the incident’ that killed all the others.”

  Jensen and Jessica exchanged looks of concern.

  Katherine Helspenny pulled at a her wedding band, as if by habit, but it wouldn’t come off her pudgy finger. “Yes, Smoke’s so-called best friend, Dooley was.”

  Jessica turned to Jensen. “Looks like you’ve got a lead. Find Mr. Dooley and you may well close your case.”

  “Maybe?” the wife said. “What do you mean ‘maybe.’ Dooley hated Jake.”

  “Enough to kill him, his old war buddy?” Jensen asked.

  “That ‘buddy’ business was a long time ago. People change. Dooley sure did.”

  “Devolve,” Jessica mumbled.

  “De-what?”

  Jensen put up a hand. “Never mind that, Mrs. Helspenny. Do you know where I can find this Dooley.”

  “I’m not sure. Somewhere out in the cemetery, in the fog.”

  “He’s not likely still out there.”

  “Dooley wanders among the graves – reads the headstones, searching for men from his old outfit, the outfit Jake was in before ‘the incident.’”

  Jessica motioned for Jensen to step aside with her. “Were you in the military?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “I’d go out to Quantico, get someone to pull up Dooley’s service record. That might get you a lead on where this guy ended up.”

  A fourth person bustled in, a stubby little man named Roth – Mrs. Helspenny’s lawyer. Moments before, on seeing the corpses on gurneys parked in the autopsy room, Roth had run for the men’s room and retched. “Theopolis,” he said, picking up on the end of Jessica’s and Jensen’s conversation. He mopped at his face with a lavender handkerchief. “Theopolis Alexander Dooley is the man’s full name.”

  “You’re sure?” Jessica asked, a slight smile tugging at the corners of
her mouth.

  “Abolutely.”

  “Jensen,” she said, “there can’t be two with that name in the record dump. Your job just keeps getting easier.”

  Roth wound himself up, to earn his fee. “This woman’s suffered long enough.” The lawyer waved a hand in the direction of Mrs. Helspenny. “Dr. Coran, I expect you to get on this autopsy right away, and I expect you to give it your top priority. Anything less and you can expect to see Mrs. H and me on the Today Show with Katie and Matt.”

  Now it was Jensen who raised a hand. “Back off,” he said. “I’ve been told Dr. Coran doesn’t respond well to threats.”