Blood And Bone

“What?”

“A question. I got a question for you.”

“Who is this? Kyle?”

“Yeah, it’s Kyle.”

“Yo, Kyle, how you doing? Wait a second. Hey, Fred, turn the sound down a sec, I’m talking to my nephew.” The smooth voice of Harry Kalas dimmed. “Okay, go ahead.”

“You ever help my father move anything into my mother’s house?”

“When?”

“I don’t know, not long before he died. I’m talking something heavy, like a file cabinet.”

“Like a file cabinet?”

“No, you’re right, not like a file cabinet. It would have been a file cabinet. Did you ever help him move a big brown file cabinet into my mother’s house?”

There was a pause from Uncle Max’s end of the line, where Kyle could still hear the game slipping away from the Phillies’ bullpen. It was illegal now to smoke in Philly bars, but Kyle heard his Uncle Max light a cigarette and take a drag.

“Your mom called me,” he said finally. “Asked for a favor. I had the truck then for my work with the funeral homes, and everyone was always calling me to help them move. That’s why I quit and got rid of the thing, I was getting too damn helpful. But I still had it then, and she called, and what was I going to do? Say no to my little sister?”

“How come I don’t remember it?”

“We did it one night when you was at that Chinese girl’s house.”

“She’s Korean.”

“You don’t say? And all this time I thought she was Chinese. Fu

“Uncle Max.”

“Okay, okay. Your mom, she didn’t want you to know, and she made me promise never to tell. She didn’t want you getting no ideas about it meaning something.”

“Though she got them herself, didn’t she?”

“She was my little sister, and I loved her, Kyle, I really did, but I never understood a thing about her. We even had to hide it once it was inside the house.”

“From me?”

“No, that was your father’s doing. He said he needed to safeguard it from someone. Toth, I assumed. But that file cabinet was so damn heavy it near gave me a hernia. You know, I never had no problem with my back until I wrestled that sucker into the basement, and since then I been no good for nothing.”

From within the 280ZX now, through teary eyes, Kyle stared at his old house, gone to hell, and the top of the basement wall under the porch, behind which, he was certain, stood his father’s file cabinet. Somewhere inside would be the O’Malley file, with a boatload of trouble on every page. But if you looked deep into Kyle Byrne’s heart, you would see it wasn’t really the O’Malley file he was after. For Kyle, the common concerns of the common world, which prized money and power over all things and was seeking mightily that selfsame file for venal ends, held little sway. But still his heart raced at the possibility of the file cabinet’s being somewhere in his old basement. Because he couldn’t help the feeling that inside that heavy brown cabinet, along with the useless detritus of his father’s legal career, somewhere, in some mislabeled file, scrawled in his father’s hand, would be the closest he’d ever come to discovering the very meaning of his life.

CHAPTER 25

THE DISCUSSION DID NOT go very well.

Of course, these discussions never went well anymore. In the begi

“That’s why you’ll never amount to anything. You don’t have an ounce of initiative. But what else could have been expected? You’re a Spangler, and the Spanglers never had initiative. A clan of belching crotch scratchers, all of them. It’s a wonder that any of you ever get off the toilet in the morning.”

“I determined it wasn’t to our benefit to kill him,” he had told her. “I’ll determine what is to our benefit,” she said, her voice a drip of liquid nitrogen. “You’ve spoiled things enough already. Once you set him on the trail, it was inevitable that he would have to be dealt with.”

“I just wanted to be sure he didn’t have a copy, like Laszlo.” “It didn’t matter if he had it or not, he would find something. His father was greedy as a hyena, the son will be no different. Blood always tells. It’s why you’ve been such a disappointment to me.”

“If he was killed so soon after Laszlo, someone would draw the co

“Who, the police? That pair of fools at the funeral? Perfectly adequate for servants, maybe, but not as detectives. I hardly think those two will be swift enough to catch on. If you’ll just do as I tell you, it will all work out as we hope. There are grand things afoot. I won’t have the boy get in my way.”

“What exactly do you want?”

“I want the boy gone. I want you to take care of him like you took care of the father. I will not have that Irish piece of trash confounding me from the grave.”

“The boy’s not so easy to find. He doesn’t have a set place to stay anymore. He lives out of his car.”

“Oh, Bobby dear, I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

And he had, yes he had. Bobby dear had found a way. The call had come in just a few minutes ago, from one of the spies he’d set up throughout the city. This was from one he had contacted in the boy’s old neighborhood. I’m looking for the Byrne boy. You remember him. He used to live across the street. He drives a small red sports car now, an old Datsun. I have something quite valuable to give him, but I can’t seem to locate young Byrne. If you see the car, could you just give me a call? I’ll make sure you’re amply rewarded. That’s all it took these days to create a spy. And the spy had let him know that the boy’s car was stopped right at the moment on his old street, that the boy was right at the moment in his car and staring at his old house. Now, about that reward . . .

The spy shouldn’t worry, she’d have her reward: a crushing case of guilt when that curtain-twitching old biddy heard the sirens and looked out her window.

For Bobby was going to kill Kyle Byrne, yes he was. Not just because he had been ordered to kill him. And not just because part of Bobby was hungry for the taste of acid and the boy had shown him disrespect at the waterworks. But also because he sensed that she was wrong, finally, that the co