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

the remainder of the pregnancy, reporting back to Ferri that she was still at large. When the baby was born—a scrawny premature little girl—Oswald personally escorted mother and child downstate to the Catholic orphanage. The nuns had initially balked at admitting the child of a prostitute, let alone a Jew, but Oswald could be very convincing—especially when pressing the barrel of a .45 snub-nosed Bulldog up the left nostril of the monsignor who ran the place.

The sad fact was, Oswald had never planned on killing the mother. He knew the Ferri family would require proof of death, and whacking her would certainly be a way to ensure the child’s safety. But Oswald still harbored feelings for the woman. He wasn’t sure if it was love. He never truly loved anybody until Matilda. But the woman didn’t deserve to die. And Oswald would have gladly whisked her off to a safe place at that point if she had simply kept her shit together.

But that’s not what happened. Oswald had just begun to make arrangements for a safe house in Louisville, Kentucky, for the woman, when she up and had a nervous breakdown. She bailed on Oswald. Caught a train back to Chicago, and went straight to the police. The organized crime unit must have thought they had a star witness on their hands—they kept the woman sequestered for a few days at the local Hyatt—but Oswald knew it was game over.

Disguised as a limo driver, he picked her up at the hotel, drove her out to Melrose Park, and shot her in the head. Blew her wig clean off. Put a starburst in the middle of the rear window. It was the coldest night of the year—February—and thinking back on it, Oswald could have sworn his tears froze on his cheeks as he dug her shallow grave.

He ditched the car but took the wig with him. The Ferri family would have their proof of death. But what they didn’t know—what they would never know—was that Alberta’s assassination was postpartum.

At only eight weeks old, the skinny little baby girl had her mother’s eyes and robust constitution. On the birth certificate, Alberta had named the child Laura, but Oswald had always thought the little waif-like kid looked like a rodent, and his nickname for her—Gerbil—caught on by the time she had reached the emancipation age of eighteen.

Now the ghost of Alberta Goldstein burns her gaze into Oswald. “You never told her, did ya?”

Oswald keeps looking at that shitty carpet. “She knows plenty.”

“You never told her.”

Oswald wipes his mouth. “She knows enough... she knows her mom got whacked.”

“Yes, but does she know who did the whacking?”

“I’ll tell her when the time is right.”

“Sure you will.”

“Gerbil is doing fine, she’s doing fine. Don’t you worry about your little girl. She’s a trouper.”

This is followed by a moment of terse, dry silence. Oswald turns away from the ghosts, and he lets out a long, pained, exasperated sigh.

He gazes through the partially shuttered blinds, out beyond the flickering neon MOTEL sign, out beyond the vast darkness of the night. He can almost feel the phase of the moon turning like the hands of a cosmic doomsday clock: less than ten nights left, and seven lives to go.

Behind him, the voice of the Accountant sounds philosophical: “I guess it just goes to show…”

Oswald keeps staring through the window. “I can’t wait to hear this.”

The Accountant continues, his voice heavy with regret. “... just how easy it is to make somebody disappear nowadays, for very little money down, I might add.”

Oswald closes his eyes and speaks softly, more to himself than to anybody else. “Yeah, well... keeping people from disappearing ain’t so easy.”

Another comment from the Head-Wound Guy: “That’s one thing about the mob—you can always depend on ’em —like death and taxes.”

Oswald gets very still. An idea—like a bolt of lightning—crackles across the back of his mind. He spins around and sees the ghosts fading, the channel losing its signal. He holds up his hands. “Wait a minute, wait, hold on a second.”

The Accountant stares at him. “What now?”

Oswald points at the head-wound victim. “What did you just say?”

Head-Wound Guy shrugs. “What do you mean? Just now? About the mob?”

“That’s right, that’s right. Something about depending on them?”

A brief pause here as the gallery of dead people stare at Oswald.

Head-Wound Guy shrugs. “I said you can depend on them like death and taxes.”

“That’s it!” Oswald snaps his fingers repeatedly. “That’s it! That’s it! That’s it! That’s it—!!”

Oswald jerks forward in his nest of blankets, making another ramshackle set of bedsprings squeak. He comes awake with a hacking cough, his eyes geeked open, the words caught in his throat, as he gazes around the empty dance floor of a room. The ghosts are gone. The lucid dream has dissolved with the abruptness of a soap bubble popping.

“That’s it,” he utters in a strangled voice. His head is buzzing, his stitches itching, his ears ringing like a lunch bell.

“That’s what?” The voice comes from over his shoulder to his left, from the shadows of the adjoining doorway.

Gerbil Goldstein is standing there in her underwear, looking at him with a wary expression, rubbing the sleep from her bloodshot eyes.

He looks at her. “Huh?”

“You were grunting like a pig in your sleep. Saying ‘that’s it, that’s it’—over and over again.”

“Sorry about that.”

“So what’s ‘it’?

He takes a deep breath and gives her a thousand-kilowatt smile. “The way we’re gonna find seven more people to save by next Thursday.”

PART II:

The Big Wipe

“The little black train is coming,

Get all your business right.

Better set your house in order,

Because that train may be here tonight.”

- Jay Farrar, “Gob Iron”

15.

Around 10 o’clock the next morning, Arthur “the Candy Man” Morrison, small-time purveyor of downscale sex workers and discount drugs, paces nervously across the deserted picnic area of the Albany Park Forest Preserve. The modest little pavilion sits