When he entered, he shut the door softly, then threw the dead bolt. It clicked, and the couple broke off a cheerful conversation in the kitchen. “Hello?” the man asked. “Bill, is that—”
He came into the kitchen doorway and stopped, a jar of organic peanut butter in his hands. “I’m not Bill,” Massimo said.
“I can see that. What do you want?”
“Nothing you’re prepared to give.”
“Sherry, call 911,” the guy said. “Look, you—”
“No phone calls,” Massimo said. He started toward the man.
The guy threw the peanut butter jar like a fastball. Massimo swatted it away, but it hurt his hand. “Sherry, run!” the guy shouted as he charged Massimo.
He caught Massimo, grappled with him. The woman came out of the kitchen, trying to go past the men to the front door. Massimo wrenched his right arm free of the man’s grip, threw a quick, powerful jab into his solar plexus and the man doubled around Massimo’s fist. The woman gave a scream of terror as she tried to pass, but Massimo kicked her in the side of the knee. He heard a cracking sound and she screamed again, in pain this time, as she fell.
The man swore and put his hands on Massimo’s throat. He had strong arms, which Massimo credited to tennis, maybe. Or swimming—he had that kind of build. Tears filled the man’s eyes and he was snarling, spittle flecking his lips. Massimo stood there for a moment, letting the man choke him, letting the certainty that the man would soon die fill his spirit, and then he broke the man’s grip with ease, cocked his fist back and drove it with all the muscle he could put behind it into the man’s nose. It pulped, cartilage tearing, blood fountaining from it. Massimo hit him again, in the left eye this time. The man went to his knees, wordless sounds issuing from his mouth along with mixed blood and saliva. Massimo hit him once more, putting the man flat on the floor.
Meanwhile, his wife was still screaming, trying to drag herself to the door with her useless leg trailing behind her. Massimo went to her, put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Does it hurt?” he asked softly.
“Yes! Yes, it hurts!”
“I’ll make it stop.”
Without another word, Massimo wrapped his hand around her face, grabbed her by the cheek and twisted her head toward him with a sudden jerk. He could hear her neck bones snap, and she went limp in his hands.
The man was still trying to move, writhing on the floor. The pain had to be incredible, Massimo knew, but even that was probably secondary to his rage and terror. Whether he knew what Massimo had done, or only guessed, Massimo couldn’t tell.
He went back to the man and picked up his right hand off the floor. The man tried to jerk it away, but his strength was ebbing fast. When he started to scream, Massimo ripped off part of his shirt and jammed it deep into the man’s mouth. Then he began breaking bones, a few at a time. When the man finally lost consciousness, the entertainment value dissipated, so Massimo finished him off quickly.
As he left the house, he found himself hoping that his father would take action against Uncle Dom soon. He had just killed two people, but he wanted more, and he wanted it now.
* * *
“WHERE’S YOUR BROTHER?” Nuncio asked. “He’s never around anymore.”
“I don’t know, Papa,” Gino said.
“Well, why the hell not? Don’t you talk to him?”
“More sometimes than others,” Gino replied. “Lately, not so much.”
Nuncio caught Cosimo’s eye, then Brendan’s. “Brothers. Family. When did it all get so complicated?”
“Family has always been complicated,” Cosimo said.
“Not like this.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Brendan said. “The Civil War, brother against brother, remember? And didn’t Dickens write something about unhappy families?”
“Maybe he did,” Nuncio said. “But I’m not talking about other families, I’m talking about this one. What the hell has happened to us? Gino and Massimo not talking. It’d break their mother’s heart, God rest her soul. And that brother of mine, away for all those years and then he gets back and can’t even spare me a kind word or a few minutes of his time. I don’t understand. I don’t understand this world we’re living in.”
They were in Nuncio’s office on the top floor of the building on Rockwell. It was luxuriously appointed, with leather furniture and a floor of fine Italian marble, covered in part by expensive antique Persian rugs. His desktop held a humidor filled with pricey Cuban cigars, the one vice he still allowed himself that broke the law. Nuncio had done well for himself, and he liked to be surrounded by fine things. His house was the same way, though he had not taken as much pleasure in that once his wife was gone.
But he hadn’t been home in more than twenty-four hours, and wasn’t sure when he would be again. He and his guys were all holed up in the office building where they could keep an eye on one another and defend against what he was increasingly sure were attacks on his interests coordinated by Dominic. None of it had started until Dom came out of the joint. Since he’d been back, it had been nonstop.
Dom would either come for him here, or he would take it to Dom. Which way it went didn’t matter to Nuncio, as long as there would be a reckoning.
He picked up his phone off the desk and punched Massimo’s number. On the other end, it rang four times, then Massimo’s voice came on. “Leave me a message,” it said.
“This is your father. Where the hell you been? Call me!” He ended the call and dropped the phone again. He crossed to the window, looked out toward the lake, then down at the street. Traffic passed by, people who carried on with their business, blissfully unaware that a man’s family was falling apart and his life might be in danger.
Cosimo cleared his throat. Nuncio whirled on him. “What?” he snapped, his fists clenched.
“Nunce, you’ve got to accept the possibility.”
“What possibility? What are you talking about?”
“That he’s gone over. To Dom’s side.”
“Massimo is my son!”
“So’s Gino,” Cosimo pointed out. “And Gino’s sitting right here. Massimo’s not, so what does that tell you? He could be moving against you. All the files from the safe at the plant were stolen, all the formulas. They may be starting their own operation. What does all of that tell you?”
“That I should have worn a rubber that time. Is that what you want me to say?” He sat down heavily in his desk chair, put his elbows on the mahogany surface and buried his face in his hands. “My son and my brother both betraying me, together? It’s too much. It’s just too fucking much!”
“Papa,” Gino said, his voice pleading, “you don’t know that yet.”
“Neither one will answer my goddamn phone calls. My world is falling apart and neither one of them is here. Marco’s right.”
“I’m just saying,” Cosimo said. “You’ve got to accept that it’s a possibility, so you can take appropriate action if you find out it’s true.”
Brendan was sitting on a leather couch, his arms folded over his chest, looking vaguely uncomfortable. “What do you think, Brendan?”
“I don’t know you as well as Marco does,” the young man replied.
“You’ve been with us for what, a couple years now, right?”
“Nearly.”
“So, long enough to form impressions.”
“You’re putting me on the spot, Nunce.”
“Damn right.” He kept his gaze leveled on the young man. “You’ve worked with Massimo plenty. You know him.”
“He’s a hard one to figure out,” Brendan said. “He keeps his own counsel, I guess you’d say. But yeah, he definitely looks up to Dominic. Worships might be too strong a word, but not by a lot.”
“So my own flesh and blood—the brother I shared a womb with, and
the son who’s the fruit of my loins—want to kill me.”
“You don’t know that yet, Nunce,” Cosimo said.
Nuncio slapped his chest. “I know it here, Marco. I know it here. They’ve turned against me, and they want to see me dead.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely. What’s worse is they think that knowledge alone will break me. Make me weak.”
“But it won’t, will it?” Gino asked.
“Hell no,” Nuncio said. “The only thing it’ll do is make me more determined. They think they can betray me? I’ll spit on their graves.”
“You’re getting yourself worked up, Nunce,” Cosimo said.
“They’re getting me worked up. I didn’t start any of this.”
“Papa, maybe it’s not what you think,” Gino said. “Maybe—”
“Maybe nothing!” Nuncio exploded. “I know he’s your brother, Gino, but he’s in league with the devil now.”
“The devil?” Brendan asked.
Nuncio looked at the young man, unsure of how much he really knew. Then he looked away, picked up a gold lighter set into a block of heavy stone that had once been part of the Berlin Wall. He flicked the lighter and stared into the flame. “Growing up, we did some things, Dom and I. We were hell-raisers, you might say. It was a different era, and we went along with whatever had to be done. We took what our father had started and made it into something bigger, something better. But Cleveland was a tough city in those days, and we had to be tougher. I won’t say I’m proud of everything we did, but I’m proud that we did them, if you get my meaning. Proud we had what it took.
“But Dom, he was more than proud. He enjoyed the life—not just the women and the cars and the good booze and the fancy clothes. He liked the hurting and the killing. Some men are just that way, I guess. And I think maybe Massimo, he’s like that, too. I wasn’t—I mean, I did it, but not just for the doing.
“So what I think now is, I think that Dom believes I’m soft. He believes that because he liked doing those things and I didn’t, that means he can and I can’t. That now he’s out, he can just move in on all I’ve built while he’s been away. He can take it from me, take it over, because he’s the strong one and I’m the weak one.”
“But you’re not weak, Papa!” Gino insisted.
Sometimes, Nuncio thought, that young man was pathetic. If he’d had half of Massimo’s steel in him... He pushed the thought from his head.
“You’re right, son,” he said. “I’m not weak. But Dominic won’t believe that unless he’s shown. That’s why I’m going to demonstrate to him that he’s not the only strong one here.”
“Demonstrate?” Cosimo asked. “How?”
Nuncio put the big lighter down with a heavy thump. “Brendan, bring a couple of those out-of-towners in here. You know the ones I mean.”
“I think so, Nunce.”
“The kind who can make a statement,” Nuncio said. “It’s time to get this party started.”
20
Bolan watched Massimo come back into the big, open room behind the coffee shop. He walked with his shoulders back, his head cocked at a slight angle. He looked as if he had just swallowed a smile and if he relented for an instant, it would pop back out. His cheeks were flushed, and as he passed Bolan caught a whiff of fresh, ripe sweat.
And there was blood on his clothing that hadn’t been there before.
Maybe he had cut himself shaving. Maybe he’d helped someone who’d been hit by a bus, or had been in a fight and bloodied somebody’s nose.
Bolan didn’t think so, though.
He had seen plenty of violent men over the years. He knew a little something about them, especially the worst of them, the ones who didn’t use violence as simply a tool to achieve a desired result, but who enjoyed it for its own sake. They had a way of carrying themselves, a way they walked and a way they looked, that could tell the close observer that they weren’t to be trifled with. They set themselves above the rest of humanity. There were two classes of people—them and those who could be their victims.
Massimo, he thought, had bought into that.
He would fight and he would kill, just because he took pleasure in dispensing suffering to others, and even more pleasure in dealing out that final end. He liked to hear their breathing stop, liked to see the light vanish from their eyes.
He watched Massimo cross the room, pour some coffee into a foam cup and taste it. He made a face. Bolan didn’t blame him for that—a whole coffee shop was out there, and they were drinking bitter brew from an industrial-size pot. But Massimo downed the coffee as he stood there, then crushed the cup in his hand. Droplets of hot coffee got on his skin, and bits of white debris from the cup snowed toward the floor. Massimo ignored all that and threw the cup at the steel wastebasket by the table. It hit the rim and bounced off. Massimo didn’t notice.
He took a seat off by himself. Some of the other men looked his way, but no one approached. Everyone knew he was the son of their target, and some of them had confessed to Bolan that they weren’t entirely sure where his loyalties might lie.
Bolan was sure now. He had seen it in every move Massimo had made since he’d walked in that door. His father had prevented Massimo from killing—he was going straight, after all, running legit businesses, and he had wanted Massimo to join him in that endeavor. So Massimo had grown up hearing stories about his father’s crimes, his murders, and knew that his uncle was in prison for his crimes. Probably he had looked up to Dominic, who reportedly had never ratted out his fellow mobsters, even when it might have shortened his own sentence.
Nuncio had stunted Massimo’s growth into the criminal, the killer he had always wanted to be. Bigger than the other boys and the other men, Massimo had wanted to revel in his sheer physicality, wanted people to be afraid of him. But they hadn’t been, because he had been Nuncio’s kid, and therefore walked the straight and narrow.
Dominic had come home from prison and let the young man off his leash.
Bolan had no doubts about Massimo’s loyalty. He would kill for Dominic Chiarello, would perhaps even die for him, if necessary. And he would kill his own father with his bare hands, just because he could.
Just because his uncle had given him permission.
* * *
ARTIE D’AMATO CAME into the big room and stopped in the doorway. He called out four names, including Tom Kenner’s. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Where to?” someone asked.
“Dom’s place,” Artie said. “We’re moving him and Annamaria over here, where they’ll be safer.”
“We got a place to put them?” That was a guy named Micelli, one of the out-of-town shooters.
“There are a couple of rooms upstairs,” Massimo answered. “They’ll be comfortable there.”
Bolan went along with them, as requested. He didn’t have any reason to argue, and he figured some up-close-and-personal time with Dominic Chiarello couldn’t hurt. He still hadn’t learned who at NDC was responsible for the decision to go into the Ivory Wave business, though he was leaning toward Nuncio, since from the sound of it, although the company name included his initial, Dominic hadn’t been involved in business decisions while he was in prison.
Artie loaded them into a black Lincoln Navigator and drove them out of town. About thirty minutes later they had entered a neighborhood of elegant homes set far apart, with lush landscaping and manicured lawns. Artie slowed the SUV before a wrought-iron gate with three men standing behind it. He rolled down his window and spoke a couple of words to the men, and they activated the gate. It parted in the middle and the two halves swung wide. Artie thumbed his window up as he drove the Navigator up the drive. The house at the end of the drive had the look of a French château from the Renaissance era, except scaled down and updated.
“Nice place,”
said a guy named Bennie. He was from Chicago. Bolan had claimed to be from Vegas, and he worried a little that someone else from there would press him about people he knew. He had a basic knowledge of some of the players in Nevada, but it wouldn’t stand up under an intense interrogation. So far, he had been able to establish himself as a quiet guy, and the other men hadn’t tried to engage him in any extended conversations.
“Dom’s always been a good earner,” Artie said. “Smart guy, made some good investments early on.” He braked the Lincoln to a halt in front of the doorway. Three similar dark SUVs were already parked there. From the drive, four steps led up to a wooden door that two pro basketball players could pass through, one sitting on the other’s shoulders. Two bruisers flanked the door, H&K MP5s in their hands.
“Get out,” Artie said. “But don’t go inside the house unless I tell you to.”
The men did as they were told. They nodded to the men on the steps, but no words passed between them. Bolan had been in similar situations countless times. Men were brought together from different states, different countries. They had different political beliefs, came from different races and economic backgrounds. The only thing they had in common was that they were all trained to kill, and ready to do so when they were ordered. For that reason, they shared a comradeship that often went unspoken. When you knew the guy beside you might be dead any minute, or you might be dead unless he did his job, words often seemed beside the point, and inadequate at best.
Artie went inside and the door closed behind him. Bolan eyed the shadowed parts of the lawn, where tall trees and thick shrubbery might provide cover for the enemy. A few minutes passed, and the door opened again. This time an older man who had to be Dominic Chiarello came out behind Artie. Artie carried a suitcase, and so did the guy behind Dominic, one of the hired shooters. Behind him came a slender woman who could only be Annamaria. She was in her late fifties probably, but well kept, with some plastic surgery to keep her flesh tight. Her hair was artificially blond, her jaw taut. Some wrinkles on her neck gave away her age, but for the most part she made Chiarello look like a cradle robber.
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