Doppelgangster - Laura Resnick [114]
“Yes, Father. Good-bye.”
As soon as I was outside the church, I called Lucky.
“Well?” he said.
“This one’s the real deal. She bled. What do we do now?”
“Max says now we gotta abduct the ringer and bring it back to the bookstore for questioning. So we’ll see you back there, kid.”
21
What we really wanted to avoid now, I thought, was another visit from Lopez.
We had Elena Giacalona’s shrieking doppelgangster tied to a chair in Max’s basement. Her hands were also bound together behind her back. And although we had initially left her legs free, Lucky had agreed to tie her ankles to the legs of the chair after she kicked Max in the groin.
It was not a scene I felt I’d ever be able to explain to Lopez’s satisfaction. So I fervently hoped he didn’t feel another urge to come to the bookstore tonight.
Abducting a grown woman in the middle of Little Italy in the middle of the day wasn’t easy, but Lucky was an expert at this sort of thing. With a couple of quick phone calls, he had arranged for a large trunk, a small truck, and two sturdy Gambello soldiers to do the heavy lifting. And thus he had gotten Elena’s perfect double from her apartment to Max’s basement with no fuss, no mess, and no awkward questions asked.
The creature seemed to be dressed for Sunday Mass. Or possibly a dinner date. With Elena, it was hard to tell. She wore a dark blue knit dress, a silver wristwatch, cheap pantyhose, and plain black pumps. Her hair was styled in a simple but flattering twist, and around her neck hung the lovely cross she had inherited from her mother, made of silver, diamonds, and mother-of-pearl.
“Are you out of your minds?” she raged at us. “This is kidnapping! You’ll go to prison for this! And you’ll rot in hell, Lucky!”
She was every bit as convincing in her role as the other doppelgangsters we had encountered. But we had no doubt of her true nature. Apart from the blood I had seen oozing from Elena Giacalona’s hand at St. Monica’s today, Nelli’s hostile reaction to this creature, upon meeting it, had confirmed that it was indeed a duplicate.
Nelli was now upstairs, since keeping her separate from the creature was easier on everyone’s nerves.
Questioning the doppelgangster, which Max had been so eager to do, proved to be disappointing. As Max had previously postulated, they were not self-aware. Like the other ones we had met, this one was utterly convinced it was the real thing. Consequently, Max’s probing questions revealed exactly what we would have learned from the real Elena Giacalona about the nature of the doppelgangsters, the method of their creation, and the identity of their maker: nothing.
“I gotta go,” Lucky said after we’d spent about an hour with the infuriated perfect double.
“Go?” I repeated “Where?”
“Someone’s trying to kill Elena,” he said, his face strained. “I’ve got to tell her and convince her to get out of town until this all blows over.”
“Good plan,” I said. If I thought Lopez would agree to get out of town, I’d pack his bags and buy the plane ticket. “Go on.”
After the old hit man left, I took Max aside and admitted to feeling discouraged. Instead of being the killer, Elena was the next victim.
“I went way down the wrong track on this one,” I said. “And we’re still no closer to stopping the killer than we were yesterday.”
“Don’t lose heart,” Max said. “Although you were mistaken about the widow, your suspicion of her did inadvertently lead to our saving her life by ensuring she and her perfect double don’t meet. So some good has certainly come out of today’s events. Moreover, my instinct is that we are getting very close to a solution. We may not be able to see it yet, but I feel as if it’s just out of reach.”
I, on the other hand, thought it seemed a million miles away. But I didn’t think that saying so would help the situation, so I kept this opinion to myself.
The doppelgangster didn’t want any dinner, but I was