Rahm turned and looked at the harbor again. He raised his glass.
“To Ronnie,” he said.
“To Sister Veronica,” I said.
We all drank.
“It is a beautiful night,” Rahm said quietly
“Yes, it is.”
The End
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REVIEW
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***
Alton Rhode returns in GUNNER. Here is an excerpt:
Prologue
From his rental car across the street, the killer watched as the man clearing the snow from the driveway paused every few minutes to lean on the shovel handle to catch his breath.
The man in the car shook his head and mashed his cigarette in the ashtray, immediately lighting another one. It wasn’t a long driveway, but the old guy should know better. Typical of a spring snowstorm, the accumulation was wet and heavy. Each shovelful probably weighed 30 pounds. Kids were roaming the neighborhood asking residents if they wanted their sidewalks and driveways cleared. As a teen-ager, the assassin had made good money doing just that when he was sent to live with relatives in Boston. He wondered what the kids charged now. Probably a fortune. Hell, he thought, I once cleared over a hundred bucks in one day, and there were just two of us doing it. Whatever the cost now, the man should have hired some young muscle. He’s overweight and obviously out of shape. His face is mottled red with the exertion. Might have a damn heart attack.
And, the killer knew, he wouldn’t get paid if the man did a face plant in his driveway slush. He smiled. Maybe I should give him a hand, just to make sure he lives long enough for me to ace him.
It was getting dark, and that was good. The man lived, apparently alone, on a quiet street in a secluded neighborhood, Eltingville, on Staten Island’s south shore. The assassin in the car had reconnoitered the job for days. He was quite sure that no one would pay any attention to a well-dressed white man walking up to Panetta’s door. This would be a piece of cake. The guy didn’t even have a dog. He could never understand why anyone living alone didn’t have a dog. But he was happy when they didn’t. He loved dogs and didn’t like killing them, something he’d had to do a few times. Dogs didn’t turn on you like most of the people in his life. He smiled at the memory of the dogs he’d had before he went into the Army. Hunting dogs. Labs and pointers. Smart as all get out. He was a crack shot, with good dogs. Life in rural Kentucky was just about perfect before the family lost the farm to foreclosure. Maybe someday he’d get a job that involved killing some Wall Street types or bankers, who he blamed for all the country’s ills. He often fantasized about doing some pro bono work along those lines on the side. He lit another smoke. Shit. I’m probably working for some of those pricks half the time, he thought in disgust.
John Panetta finished his shoveling and slowly trudged into his house. Some cars turned onto the street. Most pulled into driveways. People probably coming home from work. There was a train station nearby with a commuter lot. The killer liked the neighborhood. It wasn’t what he expected on Staten Island, so near to Manhattan. It was his first time in the borough, although he did know someone who lived there. His platoon leader in Afghanistan. I wonder how the Skipper is doing, he thought. Love to see him. But that just wasn’t in the cards.
The killer waited another 45 minutes until the street quieted down and then got out of his car and calmly walked across the street to Panetta’s house. He carried no weapon on his person. There would be something suitable to use in the house. In his pocket was a plastic bag containing some hairs and skin fragments from a man long since buried. The dead man was black. The killer wasn’t a racist. He was only playing the racial card to throw the cops far off the scent. Staten Island was a conservative borough, he’d been told. His other instructions had also been clear. Make it look like a home invasion. Take some cash and the guy’s watch, which would go in the plastic bag, and then in the nearest body of water, which wouldn’t be a problem. It was an island, after all. The killer knew that murders were rare on Staten Island. He had done some homework with recent crime statistics. Only six people had been murdered the entire previous year in the borough. He had a hard time getting his head around that figure. Six! Out of a population approaching half a million. It was so safe, he might have to move here. True, robberies had jumped 16 percent, to 476, a figure that had local law enforcement in a froth. As he approached the front door, he smiled. He knew of cities with many fewer people that would have loved such a low robbery incidence. He wondered where the Panetta hit would fit in. Homicide or robbery? Probably both. Jesus, he was going to boost the murder rate in Staten Island by about 15%! If he were in sales, he could put that on his resume.
The killer had no idea who John Panetta was. Or who wanted him dead. It didn’t appear to be a mob hit, despite the victim’s name. Guy’s a nobody. Living too openly and too modestly. Shovels his own walk, for God’s sake.
Moreover, he didn’t care. All Panetta was to him was $20,000. He did wonder, however, why a nobody rated such premier treatment.
It started snowing again as the killer ascended the steps to the porch. Not that he was particularly worried about leaving any traces, but he appreciated the fact that the snow would cover any footprints. Looks like it would be a couple of more inches. He put a smile on his face and rang the doorbell.
Panetta opened the door. He looked past the man standing on his porch.
“Damn it! Wouldn’t you know? It never fails. I just finished shoveling.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” the killer said.
***
“Hey, Howie! Take a look at this.”
Howard Caduceus put down the prescription pill bottles in the dead man’s medicine cabinet.
“Nothing special in the bathroom,” he said, walking into the bedroom. His partner, another homicide detective named Charles Palermo, was standing by an old chest of drawers with his back to the door. The only other furniture in the room was a metal-framed bed. “Aspirin, Cipro and Crestor, the same statin I’m on for my cholesterol. I’ll check with his pharmacy and doctor to see if anything is missing, but my guess is whoever killed him never came up here. Probably panicked. Not that I think this guy had much to steal.”
Caduceus was an experienced homicide cop who always kept an open mind. But he was fairly certain that the murder they were investigating was straightforward. A break-in gone horribly wrong. The victim’s wallet had been rifled and his pockets turned inside out. From markings on his wrist it looked like his watch was also gone. The forensic boys downstairs were dusting for prints and bagging and tagging whatever they could find on the body and the room in which it was found. They’d come upstairs later. After the post, the M.E. would announce the official cause of death, but Caduceus knew strangulation when he saw it.
Palermo turned around. In his gloved hands was what looked like a black felt jewelry case.
“What’s that?” Caduceus said.
“This what I think it is?” Palermo said, handing the open case to Caduceus. “It was in there under his socks.”
Inside the case was a medal on a thick pale-blue ribbon. The medal itself was a five-pointed gold star surrounded by a green laurel wreath. It was suspended from a gold bar inscribed VALOR, on which stood an eagle.
Caduceus turned the medal over and saw another bar on which there was an engraving: THE CONGRESS TO JOHN PANETTA, U.S. ARMY.
“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Better tell the boys downstairs to be extra careful, Charlie.”
Caduceus knew that Panetta’s murder might still be straightforward, but it was also going to create a shit storm.
***
In Dallas, where he now lived, the hit man had been checking the Internet for any news related to the killing.
There was nothing the first day. Or the second.
Apparently nobody missed the poor old guy.
Finally, on the third day, Panetta’s death was reported. Except it wasn’t on the Internet.
The killer was in his kitchen having his regular breakfast of black coffee, two poached eggs and rye toast while he watched CBS This Morning with Charlie Rose, the only news he could stand; all the others, in his opinion, having turned into entertainment shows. The broadcast started off with a 90-second recap of the day’s top headlines. The fourth item concerned “the brutal murder of a Medal of Honor winner in New York City.”
The killer stared at the screen. There was a clip of Panetta’s house, easily recognizable, now surrounded by yellow crime scene tape. Squad cars and media trucks were parked out front and officers could be seen walking in and out. Uniformed cops kept small clusters of the curious across the street.
A somber voice-over explained how Vietnam War vet John Panetta “winner of the nation’s highest award for valor” had saved his entire company during a North Vietnamese attack outside Saigon by sticking to his machine gun even after being severely wounded “only to be strangled during an apparent robbery in his own home.”
“Those cocksuckers,” the hit man said aloud. “Those rotten cocksuckers.”
***
If you would like to read all of GUNNER, here is a link:
GUNNER
Lawrence De Maria’s thrillers and mysteries:
ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES
JAKE SCARNE THRILLERS
COLE SUDDEN CIA THRILLERS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lawrence De Maria began his career as a general interest reporter (winning an Associated Press award for his crime reporting) and eventually became a Pulitzer-nominated senior editor and financial writer The New York Times, where he wrote hundreds of stories and features, often on Page 1. After he left the Times, De Maria became an Executive Director at Forbes. Following a stint in corporate America – during which he helped uncover the $7 billion Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme and was widely quoted in the national media – he returned to journalism as Managing Editor of the Naples Sun Times, a Florida weekly, until its sale to the Scripps chain in 2007. Since then, he has been a full-time fiction writer. De Maria is on the board of directors of the Washington Independent Review of Books, where he writes book reviews, features and a regular blog column:
THE WRITE STUFF (MY BLOG)
SISTER (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 4) Page 17
