Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [91]
“Ga fuh-fuh-fuck yrrself. Fuh-fuck yrrself.”
“Oh, please. Your time for being morally indignant is long past…. All right, then… look at what we have here. Look at this.”
Concentrate, Stemkowsky fiercely reminded himself. Focus. Concentrate.
Monserrat’s hands were holding out a brown paper shopping bag. Up close to Stemkowsky’s face.
Monserrat was taking something out. “A blue cooking pot. Familiar?” Once again, that horrible smile.
Harry Stemkowsky screamed! He fought insanely against his bonds, forcing them to rip into his skin.
Up close to Stemkowsky’s eyes, a fork dipped slowly into the depths of the pot. The fork speared a dripping chunk of beef bourguignon that oozed brown gravy.
Stemkowsky screamed once again. He screamed and screamed.
“It seems you guessed my secret. You should also know by now how deadly serious this interrogation is. How important this is to me.” Monserrat turned to his lieutenants.
“Bring in the unfortunate cook.”
Harry Stemkowsky recognized his wife Mary, but only slightly. She was a pitiful caricature of her former self. Her face was bruised, purplish and raw in extended areas. Her mouth opened crookedly as she saw Harry. Some of her front teeth were missing; her gums were pulpy and bloody.
“Puh-puh-pleez?” Stemkowsky struggled; he lifted the chair legs right off the floor with his tremendous arm strength. “She doe kno.”
“I know that. Mary doesn’t know how you came to possess stolen Stock Market bonds in Beirut, then in Tel Aviv. You know, though.”
“Pleez. Doh-doh-don hur’ her…”
“I don’t want to hurt her. So you tell me what you know, Sergeant. Everything that you know. You tell me right now. How did you get the stolen Stock Market bonds?”
Once again, that horrible smile from Monserrat.
It took another cruel and gruesome fifteen minutes to get the information, to find out some, not all, of what Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky knew …
Information about the stolen bonds and Wall Street securities; about the bombings on December 4. Not where Colonel Hudson was right now. Not even precisely who the Vets leader was. But a start, a beginning at least. And a beginning was better than what Monserrat had been accustomed to recently.
Francois Monserrat stared down at crippled Harry Stemkowsky and his wife. From Stemkowsky’s perspective the terrorist leader seemed to be looking right through them, as though they were both insubstantial.
“You see now? None of your pain, none of poor Mary’s suffering was necessary. It could have been five minutes of talking together at most Now, how’s this for just rewards?”
A compact black Beretta appeared, paused so that the Stemkowskys could see what was coming, then fired twice.
The very last thing U.S. Army Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky ever thought… he and Mary never got to enjoy their money. Over a million dollars, which they’d earned It wasn’t fair. Life wasn’t ever fair, was it? That same question always left hanging, always unanswered in the end.
Chapter 68
THAT NIGHT, CARROLL traveled home to the Bronx. As he slumped up from the garage, the ground around him seemed to be spinning.
He climbed creaky front porch steps. Twinges of guilt struck hard. He’d been neglecting the kids for too long this time.
The nightlight was on, but nothing much else downstairs. There was the electric buzz of kitchen appliances. Carroll took off his shoes, and tiptoed quietly upstairs.
He stopped and peeked inside the front bedroom where Elizabeth, a.k.a. Lizzie, bunked with Mickey Kevin. Their tiny baby figures were delicately sprawled across twin beds.
He remembered buying the beds years before, at Klein’s on 14th Street Just look at the little creepolas. Not a problem, not a care in the world. Life as it ought to be.
An ancient Buster Brown clock from Carroll’s own childhood glowed and clicked softly on the far wall. It was next to posters of Def Leppard and the Police. Strange world to grow up in for a little kid.
Strange world for the big kids, too.
“Hi, you