The Kill Circle by David Freed

Author:David Freed
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781579625467
Publisher: The Permanent Press
Published: 2017-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

WEDGED BETWEEN a taqueria and a Vietnamese nail salon, The Rehab brought new meaning to the term, “dive bar.” The decor was cave-like. Dim lighting. Walls splashed with graffiti. A floor covered in sticky linoleum that sucked at the treads of my shoes. A massive antique jukebox took up the far end of the joint. Taped to it was a handwritten sign: “Not working.” The same could’ve been said of the scruffy regulars perched at the bar.

Tomasello was sitting at a small pedestal table next to the jukebox with a blousey older blonde with a big bouffant and even bigger cleavage. The two of them were laughing too loudly at something.

“Hello, Cyril, remember me?”

He looked up, bleary, trying to focus. “Donald Trump?”

The blonde cracked up.

“No, Cyril. Not Donald Trump. We met at the VFW a couple of days ago. I asked you about Rico Perris, remember?”

Without taking his eyes off me, the drunken smile melted from his face. “Take a hike,” he told the blonde.

“But, baby—”

“I said, get lost.”

She offered him her middle finger—“Up yours, you freakin’ loser”—and got up unsteadily to go find a spot among the other lushes at the bar.

I took her seat and sat down. “You’re quite the ladies’ man, Cyril.”

Tomasello’s phone was sitting on the table next to his nearly empty beer glass. He twirled it around and around, glaring at me.

“What do you want?”

“The truth.”

I walked him through how we’d talked to Maureen, his estranged honey. I recounted the dust-up he’d had with Rico Perris shortly before Perris’s death and how he’d driven up to the mountains the day Perris was killed. I explained that we knew all about his driving demolition derbies, which made him an expert in crashing into other cars. Then I told him that body filler we’d recovered from Perris’s Porsche matched the chunk of filler I’d seen embedded in the mangled fender of his Jeep. That last part, if you’ve been following along, was a lie. But when you’re trying to determine whether you’re dealing with a good guy or a bad guy, nobody ever said you must be George Washington.

“You got it all wrong, man,” Tomasello said. “I didn’t kill Rico. Rico was a buddy.”

“We know you met with Alessandra in Angel Falls. Rico died that night.”

He blanched and looked down at his phone, spinning it with one hand.

“What were you doing up there, Cyril?”

“None of your damned business.”

“Wrong answer. You want me to rephrase it? Because I know you used to be a marine, and I think we can all agree that marines tend not to be the quickest bunnies in the forest.”

The slight flew over his head. “A marine’s never not a marine,” he said woozily. “Once a marine, always a marine.”

“Not exactly a badge of honor from what I’ve observed. You guys are overrated. For one thing, you’re terrible marksmen. I once saw a marine throw himself on the ground—and miss.”

“You better shut your mouth, mister, unless you’re planning to eat those words.”

I continued provoking, pummeling him with every dumb marine joke I could remember.

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