Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

She pulls the truck onto the gravel shoulder. The pickup crunches to a stop.

In the windy silence, the engine softly ticking, Kornblum dabs the corners of his eyes and blows limestone dust from his nose one more time with a loud honk. He tries to pull himself together. “I’m sorry,” he mutters into the bandana.

“That’s okay, Andy. I understand,” the big guy comforts him, patting him on the shoulder. “Listen. Back to the two things I want you to think about. You don’t know me. But the thing is, I know all about dying. Fact is, I’m coming up on my fifteenth anniversary in the business.”

Kornblum looks at him. “Pardon?”

Oswald gives him a grave nod. “Yep. I used to offer up my services to a certain clientele. Sort of alleviated people of their lives for a living. You follow me?”

A pause here, as Kornblum stares at the guy with the ugly scar on his cranium. “Oh... right.”

“Which brings me to the two things I want you to think about. Next time. All right?”

Kornblum nods obediently and waits.

The big guy does not blink. He holds one index finger up. “Number one is Courtney.” A pause here, for dramatic effect, as the Indian reaches for the door handle with his free hand. “Number two…” he says, holding the second finger up, “is Tiffany.”

Kornblum has begun to reply when they hear a loud metallic click.

The passenger door bursts open, and Oswald grabs Kornblum’s Izod shirt, yanking the emaciated man out from behind the stick shift, then across the bench with the force of a threshing machine. Kornblum tumbles out the open door with a gasp, his arms flailing wildly.

He lands on his ass in the weed-whiskered gravel, the sun in his face.

The big Indian sticks his square head out the open passenger window as the S-10 pulls away, its rear wheels spraying gravel. “You try and off yourself again—I’ll whack ’em both! I mean it! Courtney and Tiffany, Andy! With extreme prejudice!”

Kornblum, dazed and breathless on the sun-bleached gravel, stares agape as the truck roars away, Oswald’s booming voice echoing: “TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF, ANDY—OR ELSE!”

By 5 o’clock that afternoon, Derleth Bridge is bustling with activity, roadblocks set up at either end of the span, and across the east-facing façade of the quarry building. An ambulance sits at the west end now, near the quarry entrance, its roof chaser still flashing. A diminutive old Mexican man is perched on the tailgate, a first-aid blanket wrapped around his tiny little brown body.

For the last couple of hours, the little chicken farmer has been answering questions—through a translator—about the lunatic who started the shooting match on the bridge. He has cooperated fully, and has given the sketch artist a fairly decent visual description. Evidently, in all the chaos, the old man was thrown across the pavers and quickly scurried behind the bridge’s massive trusses amidst the hail of chicken guts, crouching down in the shadows and watching the whole bizarre incident unfold before his eyes.

But now, as the late afternoon sun starts to droop behind the Sumac, the old man just wants to go home and maybe call his State Farm agent to see if he can make a claim on all the casualties to his stock.

Unfortunately, just as the paramedic is removing the blood pressure cuff from the old man’s arm and is preparing to release him, a group of plainclothes cops appears on the Derleth walkway from the east, their sober gazes fixed on the old Mexican as they approach at a quick, businesslike gait.

“That the old codger?” asks Lieutenant Anna Marie Rigby, Liaison with the Chicago Organized Crime Task Force, nodding toward the ambulance, as the FBI agent and Trooper Ganz escort her along the wind-swept cat walk. She wears her trademark plus-size overcoat, its tails flapping in the river winds. She has half-moon reading glasses on, and her Margaret Thatcher bob is wilted from all the fishy humidity downstate.

“That’s him,” Special Agent Daniel Hanover tells her with a nod. Head honcho with the Feeb’s St. Louis field office, the balding Hanover is in shirtsleeves, his thin tendrils of combover-hair dancing in the breeze.

Hanover was called in earlier in the day when the IBI learned of the fracas at the quarry: The moment Oswald Means stepped over the dusty threshold of Carbonate Amalgamated, he was officially crossing state lines, making things a federal case.

Now Hanover’s mirrored aviator sunglasses reflect the frightened little Mexican as they approach the ambulance.

“Buen-ahs diahhhs, Senor,” Lieutenant Rigby says to the little man as she digs in the pocket of her good Republican coat. Her voice is toneless, humorless, a laughable attempt at Spanish in her South Side stockyards accent with its hard Rs and vowels as flat as soda crackers. She pulls out a black-and-white snap of the Big Chief from the latest mug book, and she holds it up for the old coot to ponder. “This the hombre messed up your chickens?”

The little man takes one look at Oswald’s glowering visage and nods like crazy. “Si—si, si—si, si, si!”

“Grahss-ee-ahs,” Rigby says, putting the photo back, cringing at a pain in her arthritic hip. A long road trip downstate is the next-to-last thing in the world she wants to be doing today—second only to cleaning up some mess caused by Oswald “Big Chief” Means. Rigby’s sister Doris is due in town later this evening, and Rigby has two tickets to the Ice Capades, which will now, alas, go to waste. With a sigh, Rigby gives the chicken farmer a smile. “One more question, Senor, if you don’t mind.” She nods at Trooper Ganz, who stands beside her, nervously crossing his slender arms against his badge. “Trooper here says the big fella was pulling this suicide off the bridge.”

The old man looks vexed.

“Do you know the word, Senor? ‘Suicidio’? ‘Le uerto’? You understand what I’m saying?”

The old man stares.

Rigby wipes her lips. “C’mon, Hanover, help me out here. What’s the