Vengeance by Eric Prochaska Page A

“Lenny,” he said. “I’ve about pushed my luck too long.”
    “Yes, you have,” Lenny said, snatching the bills. “You take it easy, Liam. I’ll see you around one of these days. I’m sorry again about your boy.”
    I shielded my eyes as we emerged from the cave. I paused outside the door, squinted against the glare coming off the tin siding. It looked like a cannonball had thundered into the wall at waist level. “Damn,” I breathed. I couldn’t imagine how I had missed it before. Dad was waiting by his door, so I reached into my pocket and unlocked the car. I peered beyond him, to the road, and got a sense of the width of it. I tried to visualize the monster that could heft a limp body and throw it across that distance.
    “It’s the way it happened,” my dad said. He was sitting in the car with his door still open. “It was without pity or mercy. You understand? Rook has a background, I told you. What he used to do, he did well. He never hesitated and he always did what needed done. He’s not scary because he’s big or tough. He’s scary because he’s cold as the grim reaper. He didn’t calculate whether hitting that guy’s head into the wall would give him brain damage, and I can tell you he didn’t look both ways to be sure a truck wasn’t coming before he tossed him into the street. And he wasn’t out of control, either. He just didn’t care.”
    We weren’t far from my motel, so it was a shame to have to drive him up the other side of the river just to head back out this way. I pulled into a break in traffic and accelerated.
    “You don’t hang out there anymore, do you?” I asked.
    “No,” he said. The resentment in his voice was directed at the situation regarding the bar, not me.
    “You got blacklisted?”
    “It’s none of your fucking business,” he said. “You needed to see what Rook’s capable of. And knowing the bar won’t hurt, either.”
    “You and Rook are friends?” I said, reading into the way he talked about him.
    “We’ve got history. But that’s not important. Nothing goes down in this town without his knowledge and consent. If Aiden was killed, Rook should know.”
    “He’s going to tell some kid like me that a crime boss ordered a hit on Aiden?”
    “Don’t be such a wise-ass all the time. It pisses people off,” he said, then muttered something too low for me to hear. “You think I’m full of hot air. Some broke dick has-been telling stories from his glory days. Fine. But have enough sense to know when you should take a man seriously. I’m not saying some crime boss had Aiden killed. That doesn’t make any sense. They’d never get involved with something so small. Whoever had Aiden killed was street level, and no one on the street has the authority to put out a hit.”
    “You’re saying the chain of command wasn’t followed?” I said. “Is that supposed to comfort me?”
    “There’s no comfort for any of us,” he said. “But if someone is breaking the rules, we might be able to get some justice.”

 
    Chapter 8
     
    Sitting in the car outside my motel, I tried to piece together a picture of what had happened. But it was like working a jigsaw puzzle with only a handful of the pieces.
    Paige and my dad were convinced that Aiden hadn’t really died in a motorcycle accident. Did I want to believe what they were telling me? I can’t say there was much solace in either version of events. Accident or not, Aiden was gone. But if someone had killed my brother, I wanted someone to find his killer. The police had already written it up as an accident. They weren’t going to change their minds. As for me, I needed something more tangible or at least more credible than my dad’s story. I trusted my father to different degrees depending on the context. He was known for his hyperbole. Sometimes everyone knew it was bullshit and laughed along. Other times, his friends would finish their drinks trying to ponder how much of what he had told them might