Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense: The Rosary Girls, the Skin Gods, Merciless, Badlands Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  The Rosary Girls

  The Skin Gods

  Merciless

  Badlands

  Excerpt from The Echo Man

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Three

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Part Four

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  For DJC

  Cuor forte rompe cattiva sorte.

  PALM SUNDAY, 11:55 PM

  There is a wintry sadness about this one, a deep-rooted melancholy that belies her seventeen years, a laugh that never fully engages any sort of inner joy.

  Perhaps there is none.

  You see them all the time on the street; the one walking alone, books clutched tightly to her breast, eyes cast earthward, ever adrift in thought. She is the one strolling a few paces behind the other girls, content to accept the rare morsel of friendship tossed her way. The one who babysits her way through all the milestones of adolescence. The one who refuses her beauty, as if it were elective.

  Her name is Tessa Ann Wells.

  She smells like fresh-cut flowers.

  “I cannot hear you,” I say.

  “. . . lordaswiddee,” comes the tiny voice from the chapel. It sounds as if I have awakened her, which is entirely possible. I took her early Friday morning, and it is now nearly midnight on Sunday. She has been praying in the chapel, more or less nonstop.

  It is not a formal chapel, of course, merely a converted closet, but it is outfitted with everything one needs for reflection and prayer.

  “This will not do,” I say. “You know that it is paramount to derive meaning from each and every word, don’t you?”

  From the chapel: “Yes.”

  “Consider how many people around the world are praying at this very moment. Why should God listen to those who are insincere?”

  “No reason.”

  I lean closer to the door. “Would you want the Lord to show you this sort of contempt on the day of rapture?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” I reply. “What decade?”

  It takes a few moments for her to answer. In the darkness of the chapel, one must proceed by feel.

  Finally, she says: “Third.”

  “Begin again.”

  I light the remainder of the votives. I finish my wine. Contrary to what many believe, the rites of the sacraments are not always solemn undertakings, but rather are, many times, cause for joy and celebration.

  I am just about to remind Tessa when, with clarity and eloquence and import, she begins to pray once more:

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee . . .”

  Is there a sound more beautiful than a virgin at prayer?

  “Blessed art thou amongst women . . .”

  I glance at my watch. It is just after midnight.

  “And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus . . .”

  It is time.

  “Holy Mary, mother of God . . .”

  I take the hypodermic from its case. The needle gleams in the candlelight. The Holy Spirit is here.

  “Pray for us sinners . . .”

  The Passion has begun.

  “Now and at the hour of our death . . .”

  I open the door and step into the chapel.

  Amen.

  PART one

  1

  MONDAY, 3:05 AM

  THERE IS AN HOUR known intimately to all who rouse to meet it, a time when darkness sheds fully the cloak of twilight and the streets fall still and silent, a time when shadows convene, become one, dissolve. A time when those who suffer disbelieve the dawn.

  Every city has its quarter, its neon Golgotha.

  In Philadelphia, it is known as South Street.

  This night, while most of the City of Brotherly Love slept, while the rivers flowed mutely to the sea, the flesh peddler rushed down South Street like a dry, blistering wind. Between Third and Fourth Streets he pushed through a wrought-iron gate, walked down a narrow alleyway, and entered a private club called Paradise. The handful of patrons scattered about the room met his gaze, then immediately averted their eyes. In the peddler’s stare they saw a portal to their own blackened souls, and knew that if they engaged him, even for a moment, the understanding would be far too much to bear.

  To those who knew his trade, the peddler was an enigma, but not a puzzle anyone was eager to solve.

  He was a big man, well over six feet tall, with a broad carriage and large, coarse hands that promised reckoning to those who crossed him. He had wheat-colored hair and cold green eyes, eyes that would spark to bright cobalt in candlelight, eyes that could take in the horizon with one glance, missing nothing. Above his right eye was a shiny keloid scar, a ridge of ropy tissue in the shape of an inverted V. He wore a long black leather coat that strained against the thick muscles in his back.

  He had come to the club five nights in a row now, and this night he would meet his buyer. Appointments were not easily made at Paradise. Friendships were unknown.

  The peddler sat at the back of the dank basement room at a tab
le that, although not reserved for him, had become his by default. Even though Paradise was settled with players of every dark stripe and pedigree, it was clear that the peddler was of another breed.

  The speakers behind the bar offered Mingus, Miles, Monk; the ceiling: soiled Chinese lanterns and rotary fans covered in wood-grain contact paper. Cones of blueberry incense burned, wedding the cigarette smoke, graying the air with a raw, fruity sweetness.

  At three ten, two men entered the club. One was the buyer; the other, his guardian. They both met the eyes of the peddler. And knew.

  The buyer, whose name was Gideon Pratt, was a squat, balding man in his late fifties, with flushed cheeks, restless gray eyes, and jowls that hung like melted wax. He wore an ill-fitting three-piece suit and had fingers long-gnarled by arthritis. His breath was fetid. His teeth, ocher and spare.

  Behind him walked a bigger man—bigger even than the peddler. He wore mirrored sunglasses and a denim duster. His face and neck were ornamented with an elaborate web of ta moko, the Maori tribal tattoos.

  Without a word, the three men gathered, then walked down a short hallway to a supply room.

  The back room at Paradise was cramped and hot, packed with boxes of off-brand liquor, a pair of scarred metal desks, and a mildewed, ragged sofa. An old jukebox flickered carbon-blue light.

  Once in the room, door closed, the large man, who went by the street name of Diablo, roughly patted down the peddler for weapons and wires, attempting to establish a stratum of power. As he was doing this, the peddler noted the three-word tattoo at the base of Diablo’s neck. It read: MONGREL FOR LIFE. He also noticed the butt of a chrome Smith & Wesson revolver in the large man’s waistband.

  Satisfied that the peddler was unarmed and wore no listening devices, Diablo stepped away, behind Pratt, crossed his arms, and observed.

  “What do you have for me?” Pratt asked.

  The peddler considered the man before answering him. They had reached the moment that occurs in every transaction, the instant when the purveyor must come clean and lay his wares upon the velvet. The peddler reached slowly into his leather coat—there would be no furtive moves here—and removed a pair of Polaroid pictures. He handed them to Gideon Pratt.

  Both photographs were of fully clothed, suggestively posed teenaged black girls. The one called Tanya sat on the front stoop of her row house, blowing a kiss to the photographer. Alicia, her sister, vamped on the beach in Wildwood.

  As Pratt scrutinized the photos, his cheeks flared crimson for a moment, his breath hitched in his chest. “Just . . . beautiful,” he said.

  Diablo glanced at the snapshots, registering no reaction. He turned his gaze back to the peddler.

  “What is her name?” Pratt asked, holding up one of the photos.

  “Tanya,” the peddler replied.

  “Tan-ya,” Pratt repeated, separating the syllables, as if to sort the essence of the girl. He handed one of the pictures back, then glanced at the photograph in his hand. “She is adorable,” he added. “A mischievous one. I can tell.”

  Pratt touched the photograph, running his finger gently over the glossy surface. He seemed to drift for a moment, lost in some reverie, then put the picture into his pocket. He snapped back to the moment, back to the business at hand. “When?”

  “Now,” the peddler replied.

  Pratt reacted with surprise and delight. He had not expected this. “She is here?”

  The peddler nodded.

  “Where?” asked Pratt.

  “Nearby.”

  Gideon Pratt straightened his tie, adjusted the vest over his bulging stomach, smoothed what little hair he had. He took a deep breath, finding his axis, then gestured to the door. “Shall we?”

  The peddler nodded again, then looked to Diablo for permission. Diablo waited a moment, further cementing his status, then stepped to the side.

  The three men exited the club, walked across South Street to Orianna Street. They continued down Orianna, emerging into a small parking lot between the buildings. In the lot were two vehicles: a rusted van with smoked-glass windows and a late-model Chrysler. Diablo put a hand up, strode forward, and looked into the windows of the Chrysler. He turned, nodded, and Pratt and the peddler stepped up to the van.

  “You have the payment?” the peddler asked.

  Gideon Pratt tapped his pocket.

  The peddler looked briefly between the two men, then reached into the pocket of his coat and retrieved a set of keys. Before he could insert the key into the van’s passenger door, he dropped them to the ground.

  Both Pratt and Diablo instinctively looked down, momentarily distracted.

  In the following, carefully considered instant, the peddler bent down to retrieve the keys. Instead of picking them up, he closed his hand around the crowbar he had placed behind the right front tire earlier in the evening. When he arose, he spun on his heels and slammed the steel bar into the center of Diablo’s face, exploding the man’s nose into a thick scarlet vapor of blood and ruined cartilage. It was a surgically delivered blow, perfectly leveraged, one designed to cripple and incapacitate but not kill. With his left hand the peddler removed the Smith & Wesson revolver from Diablo’s waistband.

  Dazed, momentarily bewildered, operating on animal instinct instead of reason, Diablo charged the peddler, his field of vision now clouded with blood and involuntary tears. His forward motion was met with the butt of the Smith & Wesson, swung with the full force of the peddler’s considerable strength. The blow sent six of Diablo’s teeth into the cool night air, then clacking to the ground like so many spilled pearls.

  Diablo folded to the pitted asphalt, howling in agony.

  A warrior, he rolled onto his knees, hesitated, then looked up, anticipating the deathblow.

  “Run,” the peddler said.

  Diablo paused for a moment, his breath now coming in staggered, sodden gasps. He spit a mouthful of blood and mucus. When the peddler cocked the hammer of the weapon and placed the tip of the barrel to his forehead, Diablo saw the wisdom of obeying the man’s order.

  With great effort, he arose, staggered down the road toward South Street, and disappeared, never once taking his eyes from the peddler.

  The peddler then turned to Gideon Pratt.

  Pratt tried to strike a pose of menace, but this was not his gift. He was facing a moment all murderers fear, a brutal computation of his crimes against man, against God.

  “Wh-who are you?” Pratt asked.

  The peddler opened the back door of the van. He calmly deposited the gun and the crowbar, and removed a thick, cowhide belt. He wrapped his knuckles in the hard leather.

  “Do you dream?” the peddler asked.

  “What?”

  “Do . . . you . . . dream?”

  Gideon Pratt fell speechless.

  For Detective Kevin Francis Byrne of the Philadelphia Police Department’s Homicide Unit, the answer was a moot point. He had tracked Gideon Pratt for a long time, and had lured him into this moment with precision and care, a scenario that had invaded his dreams.

  Gideon Pratt had raped and murdered a fifteen-year-old girl named Deirdre Pettigrew in Fairmount Park, and the department had all but given up on solving the case. It was the first time Pratt had killed one of his victims, and Byrne had known that it would not be easy to draw him out. Byrne had invested a few hundred hours of his own time and many a night’s sleep in anticipation of this very second.

  And now, as dawn remained a dim rumor in the City of Brotherly Love, as Kevin Byrne stepped forward and landed the first blow, came his receipt.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER they were in a curtained emergency room at Jefferson Hospital. Gideon Pratt stood dead center, Byrne to one side, a staff intern named Avram Hirsch on the other.

  Pratt had a knot on his forehead the size and shape of a rotted plum, a bloodied lip, a deep purple bruise on his right cheek, and what might have been a broken nose. His right eye was nearly swollen shut. The front of his formerly white shirt was a de
ep brown, caked with blood.

  As Byrne looked at the man—humiliated, demeaned, disgraced, caught—he thought about his own partner in the Homicide Unit, a daunting piece of ironwork named Jimmy Purify. Jimmy would have loved this, Byrne thought. Jimmy loved the characters, of which Philly seemed to have an endless supply. The street professors, the junkie prophets, the hookers with hearts of marble.

  But most of all, Detective Jimmy Purify loved catching the bad guys. The worse the man, the more Jimmy savored the hunt.

  There was no one worse than Gideon Pratt.

  They had tracked Pratt through an extensive labyrinth of informants, had followed him through the darkest veins of Philadelphia’s netherworld of sex clubs and child pornography rings. They had pursued him with the same sense of purpose, the same focus and rabid intent with which they had stepped out of the academy so many years earlier.

  Which was just the way Jimmy Purify liked it.

  It made him feel like a kid again, he said.

  In his day Jimmy had been shot twice, run over once, beaten far too many times to calculate, but it was a triple bypass that finally took him out. While Kevin Byrne was so pleasantly engaged with Gideon Pratt, James “Clutch” Purify was resting in a post-op room in Mercy Hospital, tubes and drip lines snaking out of his body like Medusa’s snakes.

  The good news was that Jimmy’s prognosis looked good. The sad news was that Jimmy thought he was coming back to the job. He wasn’t. No one ever did from a triple. Not at fifty. Not in Homicide. Not in Philly.

  I miss you, Clutch, Byrne thought, knowing that he was going to meet his new partner later that day. It just ain’t the same without you, man.

  It never will be.

  Byrne had been there when Jimmy went down, not ten, powerless feet away. They had been standing near the register at Malik’s, a hole-in-the-bricks hoagie shop at Tenth and Washington. Byrne had been loading their coffees with sugar while Jimmy had been macking the waitress, Desiree, a young, cinnamon-skinned beauty at least three musical styles Jimmy’s junior and five miles out of his league. Desiree was the only real reason they ever stopped at Malik’s. It sure as hell wasn’t the food.

  One minute Jimmy had been leaning against the counter, his young-girl rap firing on all eight, his smile on high beam. The next minute he was on the floor, his face contorted in pain, his body rigid, the fingers of his huge hands curling into claws.