Killer Instincts v5

by Jack Badelaire

  That was the end of Donnie the Dick-Kicker.

  I needed to get moving. I folded up the bipod and the stock of the DeLisle carbine, then slipped the weapon into my backpack. Walking in a crouch to the rear of the building, I double-checked the line I'd looped around a rooftop ventilation pipe. The old iron was still strong, without any wiggle or sag that might suggest it had rusted out of its fittings over the years. I'd looped a rappelling rope around the base of the pipe, locked to itself with a carabiner. I snapped the line into my own rappelling ring, having put my clothes on over the harness. Hiding the repelling rig this way wasn't comfortable, but it did prevent stares and questions.

  Holding onto the line, I stepped to the edge of the rooftop and dropped into space, letting the line slip through my gloved fingers as fast as I dared, feet skipping and skimming along the side of the building so I didn't bounce or flail about in space. In three seconds, I was on the ground in the alleyway behind the brownstone, unsnapping the line from my harness.

  To retrieve the rope, I used a little trick Richard had taught me involving a fly-fishing reel and some line. I reeled down the carabiner securing the line around the pipe on the rooftop. Once in hand, I unclipped the line from itself, then pulled the line up and over the pipe, letting it go slack and drop from the roof. All in all, the process took about thirty seconds. Once I stuffed the line in my pack, I walked out of the alley and assumed a leisurely gait, hearing the first wailing sirens as police cars responded to reports of Donnie's shooting.

  Scratch one off the list, I thought to myself.

  A short walk to the B-line and one T ride later, I was back at my apartment. Without really thinking about it, I broke down the DeLisle, cleaned it, oiled it, and stowed it away before I did anything else. Next was a scaldingly hot shower, where I vigorously scrubbed my arms, hands, and face. I knew that gunshot residue tests could still find evidence even after a shower, but I wanted to be sure as little evidence as possible remained. Once I was out of the shower, I threw the clothes I had worn into my kitchen garbage, dumped in a few broken eggs and some lunch meat, and took the trash out to the dumpster, making sure the bag was buried as deeply as possible.

  Back in the apartment, I went to the fridge, grabbed a beer, flopped on the couch, and drank the entire bottle in about thirty seconds while just staring off into space. The killing of Donnie couldn’t have gone better, and although I had discussed a few of the details with Richard, ultimately the job had been mine, start to finish. No Richard, no Jamie, just me. I had taken the first step on the road to revenge, and it felt great.

  I got up off the couch and went into the bedroom. Opening my closet, I dressed in my black suit and slick shoes, foregoing a tie. I dug out my spending money and pocketed two thousand dollars in a silver money clip. I grabbed my keys and my “white” identity wallet, and I went out the door.

  One cab ride later, I was downtown. I spent a few minutes wandering the mostly deserted streets until I found a nightclub that seemed to have some action going on. There was a bouncer all in black, wearing a suit and an ear piece. There was a velvet rope across the entrance, and a half dozen men and women looking to get inside, all of them well-dressed and looking to party. I played it cool and soon enough, I found myself past the velvet rope, making a beeline for the bar. The music was shockingly loud, a deep techno dance beat that I could feel in my diaphragm. I elbowed my way through the milling crowd, and although I received a couple of dirty looks from the posturing males I bumped along the way, none of them took it any further after I returned their looks with a flat, don’t-fuck-with-me stare. That night, there was an aura about me, an almost sexual afterglow, that marked me as an alpha predator.

  I made it to the bar and scanned the top shelf liquor. I had a tumbler of eighteen year-old Scotch in my hand a few moments later, and I surveyed the crowd, not sure of what I was looking for, only that I’d know it when I found it.

  She was blonde, built tight, and already half in the bag by the time we made eye contact. A wispy black dress that barely covered her ass, no hint of a bra or panties anywhere to be found. Black fuck-me pumps and gold hoop earrings, bubblegum-pink lipstick and long, come-hither eyelashes. I bought her a drink, there was about three minutes of small talk, and we were all over each other before we made it into the cab.

  At this point I was operating purely on adrenaline-fueled hormones, so I directed the cabbie to make for the nearest, nicest hotel he knew. The concierge gave us the stink-eye the moment we walked into the lobby, but I handed him my credit card and tipped him the cost of the room in cash. Suddenly, but not surprisingly, we were the best of friends and the most valued of guests. Funny how that works.

  My hands were under her dress and hers were down my pants before we even got off the elevator, and I dropped the key card twice on the way to the room. Inside, I practically threw the girl - her name was Staci - onto the king-sized bed, and thirty seconds later, no one was wearing any clothes and her fingers were raking my back. While the sex I’d had with Sophia was violent, scary, and sometimes downright disturbing, Staci and I just fucked like champs. I had never considered myself a loser in the sack, but that night, I was a sexual dynamo. At one point, I found myself looking into the mirror over the bureau, and I posed for myself while maintaining my rhythm just like Christian Bale in American Psycho.

  Some interminable time later, we were both collapsed in the tangle of bedsheets, and I stared out the window, looking over the nighttime Boston skyline with an exhausted smile on my face. Tonight I’d killed a man in cold blood, and without skipping a beat, I’d gone out afterward and scooped a ten off the dance floor, thrown several hundred dollars at a hotel clerk just for the hell of it, and fucked until I was fairly certain any more sexual activity would result in permanent damage to my nether regions. I felt no fear, no regret, no remorse for what I’d done, and zero trepidation about doing it again.

  Truth be told, I could get used to this.

  SEVENTEEN

  Three weeks after Donnie met his end face-down in a Brighton street, my sights were set on the reason for all my miseries, the rapist and murderer Pauly Paggiano. The first night we met, Sophia had provided me with Pauly's schedule, and I was able to find a small but practical window of opportunity, during which he would be vulnerable. I made sure to confirm my hunch for two weeks straight before deciding it was the right move to make. After a lot of leg work and a lot of unobtrusive observations from here and there, I confirmed that on Thursdays, Pauly would treat himself to the lunch special at Gianouli's, an Italian seafood restaurant tucked back into Boston's North End that was "protected" by his family, and of course, that meant Pauly ate for free. Thursday was the day Gianouli's offered their seafood pasta lunch special, and whatever was in it, it kept Pauly coming back for more. He apparently liked to get there right as they opened for lunch at 11:30, and he'd stay there until roughly 1:00, after which his mother hens would bustle him into his Cadillac and they'd depart for the day's business.

  I was sitting at a little coffee shop four doors down across the street from Gianouli's, sipping a decaf latte and keeping an eye out the window. Whenever Pauly was done with lunch, his driver would go and fetch the Cadillac and bring it around, so Pauly didn't have to walk to his ride. I'd seen this little routine twice now, and it didn't vary. The driver always parked the Caddy in a "reserved" parking space a block further down the street, and from the time he left to fetch the car to the time he pulled up, it always took between four and a half and five minutes.

  Once the car was out front, one of Pauly's two bodyguards would step outside, give the sidewalk a brief look-over, and then open the rear door, at which point Pauly and his remaining bodyguard would exit Gianouli's. Pauly would get in the back and sit behind the front passenger seat, while the second bodyguard would walk around and get in behind the driver. Once everyone was in the Cadillac, the first bodyguard would get into the front passenger seat, and the car would pull away. It was a good arrangement; the prin
cipal was out in the open for perhaps four seconds, flanked the whole time by his two bodyguards, and once in the vehicle there was a guard in the front and in the back, one to the right watching the sidewalk both ahead and behind through the side-view mirror, one to the left on the street side keeping an eye out for anyone attempting to cross the street or make a drive-by.

  And this is why my timing had to be spot-on. I wanted them all trapped in the vehicle, where bringing their guns into play would be that much more difficult and I had a small, target-rich environment to fire on. But once they were all in the vehicle, I only had a second or two before the Cadillac pulled away and I was out of luck. It was a very small amount of time in which to do the maximum amount of hurt, and I needed to get to that window without alarming Pauly's bodyguards and giving away the game.

  At 12:53, the driver emerged from Gianouli's and began walking up the street towards the parking spot. Clock ticking, I finished my latte, collected my red-and-white striped gym bag from the floor next to my chair, slipped the cup into a side pocket of my bag, and stepped out of the coffee shop. I turned left and walked away from my target, towards Commercial Street and downtown. I walked up to the end of the block, waited patiently for the light to change, crossed at a leisurely pace, and turned right, now facing the restaurant and walking back into the North End. I’d walked this little roundabout path a dozen times over the last two weeks, timing myself at various speeds and trying to mentally judge where the car would be at any one time. Because of this, I put myself on a path towards Gianouli's just as I saw the Cadillac approaching the restaurant.

  Now my pacing wouldn't just be the most important thing, it would be the only thing. Too fast and I'd be noticed, and even if I wasn't considered a threat, the bodyguards would be watching me and I'd lose the element of surprise. Too slow and I wouldn't get there in time, which meant the Cadillac would be driving away by the time I got into position.

  Luck, however, was on my side. I had timed it right, and as I closed in towards the front of the restaurant, I could tell I would reach the car just as the first bodyguard slipped into the front seat next to the driver. Thirty feet away, I recalled Richard's advice about moments like this.

  "The most important thing for you to do," he’d said, "is to make your aura as benign as possible."

  "My aura? You mean, what, like my chi or something? Give off warm vibes before I blow them all away?"

  "You laugh, but it's true. The best close-in killers are able to mask that predatory vibration they send out, the thing that tickles your animal hindbrain when you're on the receiving end and causes all the hairs on your neck to stand up, the old ancestral genetic early-warning radar that told you something had you zeroed in and was moving to make the kill."

  "Are you saying they'll be able to sense I'm going to kill them?" I asked.

  "If they are good at their jobs, yes. A good bodyguard, really anyone with true combat instincts, can tune in on that aggressive mental energy when it's pointed their way. For most people, it only works at a subconscious level - like instinctively moving out of the way of someone because they make you uneasy and you can't quite put your finger on why, or turning around for no reason and seeing that someone across the room is glaring at you. We all do it from time to time, but it's not conscious. But the real survivors, the operators who dodge those shots that should have taken them down, but they somehow avoid at the last millisecond, those people can use their inner threat radar actively, and can pick up on the predatory vibe coming their way."

  "So you're saying I need to act casual, and not give them the stink-eye to keep from tipping them off."

  "Its more than that. You need to learn how to control that aggressive aura, make it work for you. A good killer can put themselves into stealth mode right up to when they pull the trigger, and then when all the innocent bystanders are getting in the way and slowing you down, milling about in a panic, you dial it up all the way and blast it out like the bow-wave on a ship running at flank speed. You can clear a path through the crowd; they'll get out of your way without even knowing why. I've made it work for me, and I’ve seen others do it as well. It's just another weapon in your arsenal."

  And so, I did my best to control my aura now. Richard told me the easiest way to accomplish this is to focus your mind on something completely trivial - the weather, a pretty girl walking by - anything to put your mission into the background of your mind right up to the moment when it's showtime. I looked at my watch and looked across the street and thought about the bagel and cream cheese and banana I had for breakfast, and how the latte I had just finished was a little weak for my liking.

  Out of the corner of my eye, because I didn't look at the man directly, I could see the bodyguard - a big, blocky figure of a man in a well-cut charcoal suit - step out from the restaurant and look at me. I could almost sense his own predatory bow wave as it hit, a pulse of threatening aggression. Don't fuck with me, it said. Don't even think about it, just walk by, shithead, and don't even look at the chubby guy in the nice expensive suit walking out from the restaurant and getting into the Cadillac.

  But I knew what he saw. I could almost feel his own early-warning radar scanning me and finding nothing. I was wearing a baggy red t-shirt, white basketball shorts, and a pair of high-top sneakers. I had my gym bag slung with the strap crosswise over my chest, just another college-age kid coming from or going to a pickup game of b-ball and minding his own business. I had on a blond wig, a pair of sporty Ray-Bans, and a Celtics cap turned backwards on my head. As I felt the bodyguard’s eyes sweep over me, I glanced down at my cheap athletic sports watch and I filled my mind with the thought of how I would be on time for that game, and all was cool with the world.

  Fifteen feet away, I forced myself to just barely notice the bodyguard on the sidewalk climbing back into the front passenger seat of the Cadillac. At ten feet I distantly registered the car door shutting. At eight feet, almost of its own accord, my hand dropped into the open top of my gym bag. At six, almost surprised at what I found inside, I pulled the cut-down Remington 1100 semi-auto from the gym bag, the folding stock replaced with just a simple pistol grip. At four feet, I saw the bodyguard in the front seat staring at me, eyes wide, bellowing something I couldn't hear within the vehicle's luxuriously soundproofed interior.

  At two feet from the bumper of the Cadillac, the muzzle of the Remington pointed itself at the driver, and the shotgun roared twice in the span of a second. The driver's side of the windshield turned into stars from two distinct impacts. Not a killing spread of buckshot, but two rifled shotgun slugs, each an ounce of hard-nosed lead alloy, that punched through the tough curved windshield glass. The first slug tore through the top of the dashboard, passed through the opening in the steering wheel, and bored into the driver. The slug shredded his heart and spine with enough energy to pass completely through the back of the seat and shatter the knee of the bodyguard sitting behind him. The second shot, coming in high as I rode the recoil up, caught the driver right at the hairline, turning his skull into a valley of bone and brains. The slug painted the injured bodyguard with gore as it passed by his head and blew through the window of the left rear door, eventually lodging itself in a Toyota parked across the street.

  It was only then, after I had fired the first killing shots of my ambush, that I channeled the full force of my aggression at the occupants of the car, specifically the bodyguard sitting up front, who I saw scrambling at his coat, all thumbs, in an attempt to draw his gun from its shoulder holster. I took two quick steps forward, placing myself so that the two bodyguards, front and back, were in a direct line with my shotgun's muzzle. I could see the closest bodyguard's eyes, see the naked fear as he stared, not at me, but into the smoking muzzle of the Remington. I knew he saw death in that dark circle of steel, because he knew what was coming in the next heartbeat and he was too slow to stop it.

  I pulled the trigger three times, slightly slower now, one measured pull a second so I had time to aim after ev
ery load of buckshot did its gruesome work. The front bodyguard's head came apart with the first load of double-ought, disappeared entirely after the second, and even the headrest behind him was a tattered ruin after the third. I noticed, out of the periphery of my vision, the right rear door flinging open and Pauly Paggiano clawing himself out of the back seat, flinging himself out of the car, and stumble-stagger-running from me down the sidewalk, arms flailing, an inhuman shriek of pure horror tearing from his throat.

  I slipped the emptied Remington into the gym bag, and pulled from a side pocket the sleek little Beretta automatic. I sighted down the pistol at Pauly's back and aimed low, firing three shots that struck him high in the buttocks and the lower spine. Pauly dropped face-first to the pavement with a hard thwack, like a man who'd been tripped while sprinting, earning him broken teeth and a bloody nose. I stepped around the open rear door and glanced inside at the bodyguard in the back seat. The man was a ruin, pieces of his skull torn away, scalp shredded, sheeted in blood from his head to his lap. His right shoulder was torn to dangling fragments of muscle and bone, while his left hand was clutched around his throat, bright arterial blood pulsing between his fingers.

  I crouched low, leaned into the Cadillac, and fired two shots through his skull. The clutching hand flopped into his lap.

  I stood back up and walked over to where Pauly Paggiano lay blubbering and wailing on the sidewalk. He had scrambled and dragged himself a few feet from where he had fallen, and there was a smear of blood by his dead, dragging legs where his face had bled all over the concrete. I thought of making some pithy little speech about revenge being a dish best served with a smoking pistol or some other cold fucking action movie one-liner.