Chapter 7
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Gio could be very convincing, Hudson discovered. Once they got back into the office, waking Finch who had been dozing in the chair, Gio laid it all out simply and plainly.
“…so Hudson could still be right, but we need to go outside to check. We need to make sure, Mr. D.”
Finch gave them a skeptical look. “I don’t know, guys. If the stairs were dry, like Hudson said—”
“Our perp coulda had a towel or some shit, wiped it down,” Gio pointed out. “It’ll take five minutes max. We’ll be out and back in no time. And I won’t let Hudson run. You can count on it.” He smirked.
“I don’t need to run,” Hudson said. “Because I didn’t do anything.”
“Okay, okay,” Finch said wearily. “Fine. Go out, check if there’s, I don’t know, footprints or something leading away from the door, then get back in here. But go check on those guys downstairs before you go out, will you?”
Gio gave a nod. “Sure thing, Mr. D.”
Finch tossed a couple of keys towards Gio—the one for the break room and the deadlock key for the main doors. “Let’s hope they haven’t already taken each other out,” Finch added in a bored tone that made Hudson re-evaluate once again his mental list of Scariest D’Amatos.
But all was quiet when Gio and Hudson approached the break room downstairs. “Yo, you guys okay in there?” Gio shouted through the main door.
“Let us the fuck out,” Brady shouted back.
“No chance. Not till we get this cleared up.”
“That dead dipshit in the toilet was leaking all over the floor,” Art the cleaner shouted. “You want to keep things quiet, you should let me out to clean up the mess. It’ll take a while.”
“We can move the body,” Dino added. “If you let us out.”
Gio gave a snort. “Yeah, I don’t think so. You guys sit tight. Won’t be long now, one way or another.” He moved away from the break room towards the main entrance of the nightclub. “Come on,” he told Hudson.
But Hudson was looking the other way. “Maybe…” He began hesitantly. “Maybe we should have a look at this dead guy.”
“Why? He couldn’t have taken the money.”
“I know, but just—just to be sure he’s really dead. What if he was faking?”
“This guy was not faking, believe me. Plus I told Mr. D we’d be fast,” Gio said, his voice less gentle now.
“I know,” Hudson said. “But…” He gave Gio a pleading look.
Gio rubbed his nose on the back of the hand holding his gun. “Fuck, Blondie, you’re gonna get me in trouble. But okay, let’s go check on the corpse.”
Part of Hudson had expected the body in the bathroom to have disappeared, but no such luck.
“He’s definitely dead,” Gio said. “Happy?”
“Not really,” Hudson said, and went into the next stall along, where he carefully vomited into the toilet.
He came out again after flushing and rinsed his mouth at the tap, trying not to look at the dead guy, who looked like he had died in a lot of pain.
“Do people who overdose always look like that?” he asked shakily.
“Wouldn’t know.”
Hudson rinsed his mouth again. “Do you recognize him?” he asked when he was washing his hands for the second time.
“Nope.”
Hudson chanced another glance, but it only confirmed what he knew the first time he’d looked. “Me neither. He’s not a regular.”
The dead guy had long, stringy hair of indiscriminate color.
There was vomit and blood everywhere, and a heavy smell of shit.
The guy was scrawny; his ankles stuck out from the end of his jeans and his stained hoodie was barely protection for winter in New York.
Hudson guessed that was why he was so desperate to get his coat back from Dino.
“Did someone check his pockets when you came down?”
Gio nodded. “Me. He had nothing on him, except the plastic baggie with the rest of the drugs.”
“How’d Dino know it was a speedball?”
Gio laughed, and then realized Hudson was serious. “Shit, I don’t know. I guess he has experience with that kind of thing, you know what I’m saying?”
Dino had been supposed to stay up with Hudson to guard the office, but he hadn’t. At the time, Hudson had assumed it was just the adrenaline that had made Dino run down with everyone else, stick with the herd. But on the other hand, Dino might have left Hudson there alone on purpose.
Hudson took another quick look at the dead man. “We should check for his coat in the cloakroom.”
Gio made an ostentatious show of looking at a non-existent watch on his wrist.
“I know,” Hudson said. “But we should check.”
The problem was, there were quite a few coats in the cloakroom, and no way of telling which one belonged to the dead guy at first glance.
Hudson knew his own, of course, but there were at least twenty more.
Some would belong to the staff still in Kismet right now.
Some would have been left by other staff who liked to keep an extra coat at work.
And still others were lost property left behind from club patrons who’d forgotten to pick them up on exit over the last few weeks.
Dino usually had a clean-out of lost property every three months.
None of them looked like the kind of coat the dead guy might have worn.
They were all good quality, heavy winter coats.
Although, Hudson reminded himself, he shouldn’t make assumptions about a guy based on his ill-fitting clothes.
For all Hudson knew, too-short jeans and dirty sweaters were in fashion right now.
“We don’t have time to check all these coats,” Gio said, irritation starting to creep into his voice. “Not right now. Let’s go check the outside and then ask Mr. D if we can look through the cloakroom.”
Hudson sighed, but he had to admit Gio had a point. “Okay.”
“Hey,” Gio said softly. He’d come close again without Hudson noticing. “Hang in there, Blondie. I know you got balls. Maybe you should remember that, too.” He slid his hand into Hudson’s and squeezed his fingers. “Come on, let’s head outside. You wanna grab your coat?”
“Nah, it’s just for a few minutes,” Hudson said, and let Gio lead him back to the main doors. “What did you mean?” he asked, while Gio started unlocking the various deadbolts.
“About what?”
“About my balls.”
Gio grinned. “Heard you got big brass ones, that’s all.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you talk back to Don Morelli the first time you met him? And didn’t you wear him down and make him let you go in to see your sis—Ah, that’s all I mean. Word is, you stood up to Luca D’Amato and made him give in.”
Hudson thought about that as Gio shot back the final lock. It was true, he’d even raised his voice to Luca D’Amato when he thought the Morelli Don wouldn’t let him in to see Connie in the hospital. “How did you know about that?”
“Shit like that gets around. And hell, you helped rescue Mr. D that one time, right?”
The door opened and Hudson gasped as winter roared into the nightclub.
Maybe he should have taken his coat after all.
But it was too late; Gio was already through the doors and waiting for him.
“That was Angelo Messina,” he said through clenched teeth as he waited for Gio to lock up again from the other side.
Thankfully he only did the main deadlock this time, and then they started jogging carefully down the block.
“I just stood there. Actually, I think I got in his way,” Hudson shouted over the noise of the wind.
The weather was awful. Really, truly awful. It wasn’t snowing again yet, but the wind was kicking up ice, throwing it right in Hudson’s face. Hypothermia was a real possibility.
“Shit,” Gio said. “We shoulda grabbed those coats. Oh, well—” he took Hudson’s hand and pulled him along. “Come on, Blondie, let’s make this fast!”
They ran as fast as they dared along the icy sidewalk, took the corner of the block, and ran back up the next street to where they knew the door opened out.
It was quiet for New York, apart from the wind; distant honks sounded, but subdued.
The streets were empty. It was still black outside, and even the streetlights seemed dimmer to Hudson.
The door was unobtrusive and easy to miss, and they ran by it before they realized, and had to backtrack. But it wasn’t just that the door was small and faded into the wall due to its color.
There was a big bank of snow piled up against the building, right up to their knees. It couldn’t have been disturbed for days.
The only footprints around were their own.