eyes ping-ponged first to the blade and then to Scalise’s face. “It’s about Melanie Penza,” he forced out, his voice a squeak.
“What about Mrs. Penza?”
“She’s cheating on the old man.” Rothman tried smiling, but it came out as something sickly. “It’s what you should expect if you marry a young thing who looks like she does.”
Scalise gave Colgan a questioning look.
“I think he’s a lying scumbag.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Scalise said. “You can’t trust a word out of his mouth.”
They started moving Rothman toward the back of the Lincoln again.
“I’m not lying, I swear,” Rothman insisted, his voice rapid-fire and in a high pitch. “The guy she’s seeing is big. If you knew who he was, you’d know how much money this is worth. Three times what I owe. Easy.”
Scalise closed up his knife with his thumb and put it away. This wasn’t worth getting blood on his clothing. Instead, he cuffed Rothman on the ear.
“Then how about you tell me while you’re still breathing,” he growled.
Rothman gave them a name. Scalise shot Colgan another questioning look, because if Rothman was telling the truth it was every bit as big as he claimed. Colgan shrugged, indicating he was undecided about the veracity of Rothman’s revelation.
Scalise asked, “Why should I believe a word out of your mouth?”
“Because I took photos on my phone.”
Scalise snapped his fingers and held his hand out, palm up. Rothman, his large fleshy face folding into a dejected frown, pulled a cell phone from his pants pocket. After unlocking it with the password, he handed it over. As Scalise scrolled through the photos, Rothman’s expression only grew more miserable. It was the look of someone whose winning lottery ticket had been set on fire and all he could do was watch it burn.
Scalise whistled softly as he found the first photo showing Melanie Penza walking into a bungalow with the guy Rothman had told them about. This was every bit as big as Rothman had said it was. Bigger, actually.
“Where was this taken?” he asked.
As morose as any human being could look, Rothman said, “Santa Monica.”
Scalise cuffed him again on the ear. “Quit being wise. Give me an address.”
Rothman gave him an address.
Scalise exchanged a look with Colgan, and each man took hold of one of Rothman’s elbows, rushed him over to the open car trunk, and threw him in headfirst. Rothman was actually surprised by this, squeaking out several times that they had a deal. He tried to turn himself around and scramble out of the trunk, but Colgan had gotten the jumper cables. He wrapped them around Rothman’s neck and pulled them tight. Rothman clawed at his throat, but it didn’t do him any good. Soon his eyes were bugging out and his face turning a deep purple, and then his body fell limp back into the trunk.
The plan that night had been only to rough Rothman up and scare him into paying some of the forty grand he owed, but Rothman gambled trying to escape a beating, and like all the other bets he’d been making lately, he lost badly. What he told them was too big to let him live. He should’ve expected what happened.
An hour and a half later, Scalise and Colgan were digging a grave in the Santa Monica Mountains. The temperature had dropped to fifty degrees, but even so both men were soon drenched in sweat. They took turns digging. This wasn’t going to be a shallow grave. They couldn’t afford to have an animal dig up the body or have the body rise out of the grave because of flooding. Joe Penza was eating a forty-grand loss because of this, and once Rothman was buried he needed to stay buried. At that moment it was Colgan’s turn to dig.
“This is dynamite,” Colgan murmured to himself, shaking his head as if he were in awe.
He’d already said this at least a dozen times since they had left downtown Los Angeles. Scalise took a drag on a cigarette and blew the smoke out of his nose. He noticed that the cigarette had burnt down to the filter, and he flicked the stub into the hole. Colgan continued to dig for several more minutes while Scalise stood silently watching.
Colgan tossed the shovel out of the grave. “Four feet should be enough,” he grunted. He held out his hand to Scalise to pull him out. Instead of taking the hand, Scalise reached inside his jacket and pulled a .40-caliber pistol from a shoulder holster. Colgan looked on in disbelief before asking Scalise what he was doing.
“Only what I have to.”
“After all the years we’ve known each other, you’re going to do something like this?” Colgan asked, aggrieved.
Scalise swallowed back a crack about how anyone who insisted on putting mayonnaise on roast beef deserved to be shot in the chest and decided to be magnanimous about it. The fact was he liked Colgan, and so he showed regret in his eyes and a rare moment of honesty. “I feel terrible about it. But you’ve been saying it yourself. This is dynamite.”
Colgan froze as if he were deciding whether to try escaping or go after Scalise. Before he made a decision, Scalise shot him in the chest, the hollow-point bullet punching a fist-sized hole out of his back. Colgan fell dead.
The photo Rothman had taken had to be worth at least a hundred grand if handled right. It could also get whoever had the photo killed. Even if Scalise could’ve trusted Colgan not to screw things up, he wasn’t about to share a hundred grand with him, which meant Colgan had to die that night no matter what Scalise might’ve thought about him.
Scalise didn’t mind the rough stuff he did for Big Joe Penza, which included robbing banks, extortion, collections, and hijacking the occasional truck. The truth was, he enjoyed it, but what had it gotten him? After fifteen years of working for Penza, he had a closet full of tailored suits, a new Lincoln, and twenty grand stashed away. That was it. He was never going to get rich doing this shit. Three weeks ago he had met a Russian who told him how he could make millions by embracing new technologies, namely something called ransomware. The way he explained it to Scalise, this was a computer virus that would screw up someone’s computer unless they paid money to make the virus go away. They’d only charge each victim two hundred dollars, but if the virus spread to hundreds of thousands of computers, it would add up. This Russian had a team of computer experts in one of those former Soviet republics with a name that was impossible to pronounce, and he promised Scalise he could get a ransomware concern off the ground with a seventy-five grand investment, and they’d be fifty-fifty partners. Scalise believed him, which meant the moment Rothman showed them his photo, Colgan was a dead man.
Scalise said a silent prayer for the soul of his ex-partner, then rolled Rothman’s corpse into the grave.
He first filled up the hole, then layered stones, leaves, and other debris on top to hide the freshly dug grave. While he did this, he thought about the story he was going to give Big Joe Penza about Rothman’s disappearance, and Colgan’s also. By the time he was done, he was satisfied with what he had come up with.
During his drive back to Los Angeles, Scalise thought only about how he was going to use the dynamite Rothman had given him.
Chapter 8
Over the last three days Lucky had gotten used
