The Big Boom by Domenic Stansberry Read Free Book Online Page A

the line, to get tough. To make the calls that had to be made. But none of that mattered now.
    “My daughter’s dead,” Antonelli said.
    There was quiet.
    “I’m sorry,” said Smith.
    “I’m going to find out what happened.” The grief was apparent in Antonelli’s voice. “I’m going to goddamn find out.”
    He heard his wife out in the yard. Barbara was calling the cat. Nick could see her through the windows, crouched over, peering into the bushes where the cat had disappeared. Her voice was high and sonorous, but the sight of her, piteous, full of grief, calling that goddamn cat, filled him with rage. “Goddamn cat.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Angie’s cat—my wife lets it in, lets it out. That’s all we have left of my daughter now. That goddamn cat.”
    The words came out peculiar. Like he cared about the cat. Like it meant something to him.
    “My daughter’s cat,” he said.
    “I see.”
    “I’m going to find out what happened to Angie. I told you acouple of days ago. I’ve hired a detective, and I’ll hire another. I’m going to find out what happened.”
    “These things…,” Smith spoke softly, with a certain coolness, a certain edge, like a man speaking from the ether. “Sometimes, maybe it’s better to let these things go.”
    “What did you say?” Antonelli shot back.
    There was no reply.
    Despite himself, Antonelli felt a little jolt of fear. Outside, the cat skittered out of the bushes, back toward the diving board. Nick felt again the dread that had been palpable in his chest since Angie disappeared.
    “What did you say?” Antonelli repeated.
    He never had liked these son of a bitches: the dot-com people with their smugness. They had this demeanor, this attitude—all the rules had changed and you couldn’t possibly know, couldn’t possibly understand. You should just be glad they talked to you. Count yourself blessed. He had structured the deal cleverly, dealing from his gut, but there’d been a rush to it, the way these new people rushed everything, and he wondered now, old bull that he was, if he’d charged too soon.
    “I’m sorry for your loss,” said Smith.
    “Sure,” said Antonelli.
    Whatever Smith’s original reason for calling, he didn’t reveal it now. He let Nick go. Nick looked down at the family portrait. He batted it to the floor. Then he batted himself against the blue bedroom wall, wailing—and at length exhausted himself on the carpet. And when he was done, he lay with the picture in his hand. His poor daughter. Happy, smiling, full of vulnerability. That bastard Mancuso should have married her, he thought. Him and his ugly fucking nose.
    “Son of a bitch,” he said.
    And then he rolled over on the floor. He wailed. A week ago he had had the world in his hands, but now …
    He walked over to the bedroom phone and called Cicero again, demanding action. When the conversation ended, he took the receiver and broke it against the wall.
    A couple of hours later the doorbell rang. Barbara was on the kitchen phone, speaking in that low, tender voice of hers, almost sensuous. Someone had called a few minutes before on the house line, but it had been for her apparently, not Nick. Something about his wife’s posture made him pause, but then the doorbell rang once more.
    A young woman stood in the entry, clipboard in hand. She was a rangy girl who wore her hair in a fall.
    She was looking for donations, for some clinic in the city. You didn’t get much of that up this way, and it made him wonder. When she smiled at him, though, he could not help it; despite everything, he smiled back.
    At the same time, though, he could hear Barbara. Something about arrangements. Something about papers that needed to be signed. Then he realized she was talking to Gucci’s kid, lousy-ass mortician down at the Diamond Mortuary.
No, before anything like that, before they put Angie in the ground
…
    Nick walked away from the young woman at the door.
    “No,” he said to Barbara.