[2010] The Ghost of Blackwood Lane Page 14

They were busy eating, and Mike was explaining to Denise about his latest architectural project when Gary interrupted and asked his father the question for which he’d driven 500 miles.

  “Dad, do you remember a guy from St. Louis that looked like a gangster, with dark eyes and a strong chin? He had dark hair and looked very mean.”

  The sudden silence around the table was palpable.

  It was obvious to Mike that they must never talk about these kinds of things. Gary’s father had been caught so completely by surprise that his forkful of pot roast hovered between the plate and his half-opened mouth. It was all Mike could do to keep from laughing out loud, and he stifled his chuckle with a sudden cough into his napkin.

  John slowly set his fork down and sipped from his water before answering.

  “Gary, what is this about? Why do you care about someone from back there?” Mike noticed that John had said the words “back there” like they tasted bad.

  Gary shook his head, though Mike didn’t know why. “Dad, I’ve...I’m trying to remember some stuff from back there, from back in St. Louis. Do you remember anyone who looked like that?”

  “No,” the father answered immediately, glancing at Denise before going back to eating. Mike wondered if he was telling the truth.

  Denise spoke up next, obviously curious.

  “Why do you ask, Gary? Is something wrong—is this why you’re visiting?”

  Gary didn’t answer for a long minute, and John Foreman was the only one eating. Denise looked concerned. Mike was very curious to see what, if anything, Gary would say.

  It took a few minutes to come out, but Gary began slowly describing the dream, starting with how it had begun a couple of months ago and ending with last night, describing how the dream had repeated over and over, ending only because the alarm had gone off to wake him for the early drive.

  Gary described the bloodied man in the dream so clearly that Mike could almost see him, walking into the darkened dream-room and standing over Gary with that big knife. Mike had heard the story before, but only in bits and pieces. To hear it all again, all from the start and all at once, made Mike realize just how much stress his friend had been under the past few weeks.

  His parents’ reaction was interesting, to say the least.

  When Gary was finished, Denise sat quietly and seemed to be pondering what she should do.

  Gary’s father got up and walked out of the room.

  Mike watched Gary’s eyes as they followed his father out of the room. Then Gary rose and left the dining room in the opposite direction, heading out the front door.

  After a long, awkward silence, Denise finally took a drink of wine and nodded at Mike.

  “Sorry about this, dear,” she said by way of apology to Mike. “They don’t talk about this kind of stuff very often. When it comes up, it takes awhile for them to get together. I just wish...wish it was easier for them to talk.”

  Mike nodded. “Well, all I know is that Gary’s freaked out about this whole thing—he’s been talking to me about it for weeks. The other night, he saw something in his dream that he couldn’t place, and he just suddenly decided that he had to come up and ask you two about it. In person.”

  Denise nodded.

  “It seemed sudden to me,” Mike continued. “But now I guess I understand why. His father doesn’t seem like the chatting kind, and trying to talk to him on the phone about something like this would be pointless, I’m guessing.”

  Mike stared at the empty chair where Gary’s dad had been sitting. “Do you know much about their time in Illinois?”

  She shook her head and looked away. “No, not really. I met John a year after they moved out here. We married while Gary was in college.”

  Denise stood and started picking up dishes. “John doesn’t talk about his life back in Illinois at all, and we’ve never been back to visit. He doesn’t even get any mail from anyone back there, so I guess we’ve really got nobody and no reason to visit.” She leaned in a little closer. “His first wife died in a car accident, so the memories are very painful for him. For them both.”

  Yeah, Mike thought, but that didn’t help Gary unless the old man would open up and talk about it. Gary seemed convinced that the face in the dream was someone from his past, someone that he could almost remember. And his father was the only link he had to the past, his only link to his life back in St. Louis.

  ------

  Gary walked through the quiet streets of North Highlands, a small suburb of Sacramento. Walking always helped him clear his head.

  He smoked a cigarette, his third since leaving his parents’ house. They always calmed him—the relaxing and familiar habit of removing the cigarette from the pack, tapping it on the back of his hand, lighting it, and taking that first deep breath.

  The scene at the dinner table was typical of his dad—if there was something that needed to be discussed or some problem that needed to be solved, his father would more than likely avoid the topic. If pressed, John Foreman would get up and leave the room to avoid answering a question.

  It had always been that way with his father, back as far as Gary could remember.

  Gary could remember some things about St. Louis very clearly, but others were fuzzy. Of course he could remember his mother and his house and the friends he had had, but it always seemed to give him a throbbing headache when he tried to remember too much. It was as if his mind was protecting him from the horrible memories of seeing his mother killed.

  Gary remembered the car blowing up, and he remembered flying through the air and landing painfully on one leg, rolling away from the fireball as it consumed his father’s car. Afterward, the FBI had moved them to a hotel, and it had been some time during their stay when their home had been ransacked and burned, destroying many of his things, including his high school yearbooks and all of the other memorabilia from his childhood. He didn’t have anything from before the time of the trial—no childhood baseball trophies or old report cards or pictures that he had drawn as a child.

  Gary’s dad wouldn’t even let him visit the burned-out wreckage of their home—John had described it clearly to Gary, but had told him that going to the house or even seeing it would be too traumatic. But some of their things had been recovered and had been sent along with them to Sacramento when the FBI had placed them in the Witness Protection Program. When he got back from his walk, he planned to dig through some of it to try and see if any of it would spark a memory.

  More out of habit than anything else, his hand reached into his pocket and pulled out his tarot deck, shuffling it mindlessly as he walked, the cigarette dangling from his lips. He pulled out a few cards and looked at them, but his heart wasn’t into trying to ascertain their meaning.

  His father—there was just no good way to talk to the man. If it was about school or work, he could listen and would contribute to the conversation, and that was when he and his father had their best discussions. But if the conversation ever turned to their past in St. Louis, his father would clam up, or worse, just walk away.

  The topic of girls was even worse—whenever he tried to ask his father for advice, the man would get the strangest look on his face and then change the subject. Once when he had been complaining to his father, saying that he didn’t think he would ever find a woman to spend the rest of his life with, his father had actually teared up and left the room—and his father never cried!

  Gary had gotten used to not having a father to talk to about certain topics. But now he needed his father’s help. It was either that or fly back to St. Louis and—

  Fly back and do what? Would anyone back there recognize him? The FBI had told both Gary and his father that they were never to return to St. Louis or O’Fallon. Even though the man Gary’s father had worked for had long ago died in prison, there were still plenty of people who wanted John Foreman dead and, by proxy, his son.

  So what could Gary do? Fly back to St. Louis and drive around O’Fallon in dark sunglasses until he saw the mysterious yet
familiar guy from his dream?

  Gary didn’t know. He pulled out his cigarettes and lit another, enjoying the smell. He didn’t feel like he knew anything—and the lack of sleep wasn’t helping. He needed rest, and he knew it, but the Dream made him want to stay awake as long as possible. The caffeine and cigarettes were keeping him going, but he didn’t like the feeling of his heart racing all the time.

  It wasn’t the fear or the crazy dark-haired guy with the knife in the dream that really frightened him. It was the unanswered questions about why he was having the dream that scared Gary to his very core.

  He continued walking, trying to dredge up answers from the murky depths of his mind. He walked and walked, but nothing came.

  Chapter 17

  Tony Luciano’s East St. Louis operations were centered at Pier 32: the docks for the gambling riverboats, the warehouses, and an expansive and guarded parking structure used alternately by customers and the reenergized Luciano crime family. The docks were located right on the water, with the shining buildings of the St. Louis downtown standing just across the wide expanse of the Mississippi River.

  The Lucianos’ first boat, the Princess Anne, had been in operation for almost two years. Customers poured across the river and joyously parted company with their money in the glitzy surroundings of the rebuilt barge.

  The Princess Margaret was docked about ten yards downriver from the Princess Anne and was not yet open to the public. There were roulette wheels to be installed and carpet to put down, but everything was on schedule for the opening date. The second boat was twice the size of the Princess Anne, almost 200 feet long. Tony Luciano was betting the future of his fledgling gambling empire on this expensive and impressive showplace, and its gala opening with all the trimmings was scheduled in less than three weeks.

  Next to the parking structure that had been built especially for customers of the new boat, two large warehouses stood, guarding their contents with blank, glazed-over windows.

  Warehouse One contained the offices and construction staging areas for the Margaret. This building also contained the main complex of offices for the riverboat operations.

  Warehouse Two contained a different type of staging area, and it was abuzz on this Saturday evening. An entire complement of men was hard at work in various areas of the large building, moving boxes of items onto trucks or offloading pallets of goods with forklifts and handcarts. There were crates and crates of liquor and cigarettes and electronics and microwave ovens and frozen fish and a dozen other commodities. They’d all been stolen or purchased illegally and were being loaded onto trucks bound for Chicago or Tennessee or wherever they could be sold at an inflated price. As soon as Tony Luciano had decided to take the family back to its roots, these old methods of doing business had become exceedingly profitable—in the ten days since the fateful decision had been made, they had managed to ramp up to a full organization that trafficked exclusively in stolen goods.

  In one corner of the warehouse, a completely different sort of commerce was taking place.

  Inside a large, guarded room, around a series of long tables, trusted men carried out the laborious task of cutting down the original shipment of cocaine that the Luciano brothers had procured only the day before.

  First, the individual coke packages had to be opened carefully. This was done with a very sharp knife over a normal cookie sheet that had been polished almost silver, so that any coke dropped from the opening plastic bag could be easily recovered. The contents were poured into shiny stainless steel bowls, which were then weighed on a large, expensive electronic scale to calculate the exact weight and volume of the cocaine in each brick.

  Next, the cocaine was tested. A small dot of the substance was taken from a random location on the rounded mound of cocaine in the bowl and mixed in a beaker with some chemicals. The color of the resulting concoction was compared to a test strip to determine the purity and quality of the cocaine. After testing the first couple of batches, the word had gotten around quickly that this stuff was very pure and of extremely high quality, words that had pleased Vincent as he watched the men work.

  Next, a man carefully measured out a portion of a different white powder, in this case common household flour, and added the flour to the mound of cocaine in the metal mixing bowl. A highly polished metal spoon was used to mix or “cut” the cocaine down to a lower level of purity, but not enough to reduce a user’s potential reaction.

  Next, the powder was carefully measured into small plastic baggies, each holding only about an ounce. About two-thirds of the shipment would go out at this dilution level of about half cocaine and half flour.

  At a second table, a higher concentration mix of cocaine and flour was being produced. These bags were cut with a two-to-one ratio of coke to flour, and these would be distributed to the dealers and more important clients. Hopefully the dealers would test the goods and find them to be of high quality, prompting more sales in the future.

  At another table, a more specialized concoction was being created—crack cocaine. Several large kettles were being used to boil a liquefied solution of the cocaine down to a hard, crystalline form that could be easily transported and sold. Two of the men wore goggles and carefully stirred each of the boiling kettles, checking the temperature frequently and methodically draining off the liquid mixture to reveal small nuggets of hardened, crystallized cocaine at the bottom of the tubs. The men fished these out of the tubs using metal tongs and placed them on a cookie sheet to dry before putting them into small plastic vials. This form of cocaine was more popular in urban areas and could be sold at a much higher margin of profit—the mixture required less cocaine to produce, but the boiling process concentrated the power of the substance, making for a much more powerful high. And that meant a much higher selling price per ounce.

  Vincent watched the entire operation with jealous eyes—this was the kind of operation he and his men had attempted numerous times but had never been able to make work. Purity control, or security issues, or internal theft had always prevented Vincent from making this type of operation really profitable, and now he knew why—all of these men could be trusted, something he was unable to honestly say about the men in his own small organization. These men knew exactly what they were doing and were doing a great job. And using this private room in a secured and guarded warehouse in East St. Louis was perfect.

  And the money—it would start coming through in only a few days. Selling cocaine was like printing money, and if he could convince his brother to let him handle this side of the business, he would be a very rich man in a short amount of time.

  He walked to the end of the first table, the one with the most diluted mixture of coke and flour that would make up the bulk of the shipment. There were several large piles of the small plastic bags, each weighing less than an ounce, and he picked one up to test the weight. He watched the powder slide from side to side as he held it up and moved the bag back and forth, and the mixture looked good—no clumping or sticking to the inside of the bag, something that could indicate humidity in the room.

  He glanced over at the air purifiers and dehumidifiers that had been set up in one corner and smiled. That was what he admired in his brother. He was always looking out for the details, making sure nothing slipped through the cracks.

  Chapter 18

  It wasn’t very long before Denise said something—John Foreman could tell she’d been waiting until the boys had gone to bed. Gary was in his old room and Mike in the rarely used guest room. Gary had finally come home after hours of walking the streets of North Highlands alone.

  “You know you have to say something to him,” Denise said quietly. “Don’t you?”

  The house was quiet. John Foreman was lying in bed next to his wife of eight years, staring up at the ceiling and trying to decide what to do. His son had been gone for hours. Gary had done a lot of walking like that when they’d first moved to Sacramento—it seemed to be his way of dealing with things.

  “I
can’t say anything to him,” John said quietly. “You know that, and you know why.” In the darkness of their bedroom, his words sounded pathetic, like he was trying to convince himself. “Things were bad back then. Very bad. I did what I had to do to get us out of there in one piece.”

  He couldn’t see her nodding in the dark next to him, but he could feel the movement of her head. “Yes, you did the right thing then, but maybe it’s time to tell him the truth. She’s probably married and happy by now. There would be no reason to think that they would get back together.”

  John sat up on one elbow and looked at the dark figure in the bed next to him. “That’s not what I’m worried about, honey. The Lucianos were a dangerous bunch and still are. They killed my wife to shut me up. After the trial, they killed her brother trying to force him to reveal our location.”

  They were quiet for a moment, and John could smell cigarette smoke coming from somewhere—probably Gary.

  “From what I’ve heard,” John continued, “the Lucianos are still powerful. If Gary goes back there, they could find him. And hurt him, or kill him—I don’t know if the contract on us ever expired. It’s just too dangerous. They could figure out where we’ve been hiding all these years and come after us, too.”

  His wife was quiet for a few minutes. He was starting to think she’d fallen asleep when she asked another question.

  “Do you know that boy in Gary’s dream?”

  John wasn’t sure. “I don’t know. It sounds like it could be Luciano’s younger boy, Vincent. He was at the trial. He was always the crazy one, the one Gino worried about.”

  “So, why do you think he’s having these dreams?”

  “I don’t know. Dr. Martin said that the block might eventually break down on its own, even without the phrase.”

  John was quiet for a moment, knowing the next question without her even asking. She’d asked enough times over the course of their marriage for him to know when it would come up, and this was the perfect time.