I looked incredulously at my uncle. “You can’t tell me you planned this from the beginning? Getting shot and dying here so you can take the blame?”
Jamie smiled and shook his head.
“I never planned on this, no. But it looks like Fate improvised.”
I knelt there for a moment, holding my dying uncle’s hand. To have lived through so much, only to meet his end at the hands of a teenage boy. Of course, it could have been a Viet Cong teenager with an AK thirty years ago, but the thought wasn’t very comforting.
We both heard it, the sound of a siren off in the distance. Jamie gave my hand a feeble squeeze.
“Get going. Get to the fence. Remember the ladder. Stay low, slip away before they can see you. Get to the cabin. Get your story straight. A letter under the turntable. Everything you need.”
I nodded. Leaning over, I drew my uncle’s Glock and put it in his hand. He said nothing, but nodded. A warrior shouldn’t meet his end without holding a weapon. I picked up the functioning Uzi - someone might ask questions if they found two of the same weapon in the ruins - and looked at my uncle one last time. He waved the muzzle of the Glock towards the doorway.
“Go on...move...damn you...” His eyes wandered away from me and his head sagged and lolled, dazed from the shock and blood loss, his speech slurred.
“The chopper...won’t wait forever. Get to the...”
Jamie trembled once, then went still. His eyes remained open, staring into a jungle half a world away and a lifetime ago.
I stood and left the room. I walked past the corpse of Mary, down two flights of stairs, past the corpse of John. I pulled the pin on the incendiary grenade and dropped it into his lap as I walked past. Instead of heading for the front door, I went out the kitchen entrance, shutting the door behind me just as I heard the whump of the grenade as it showered the inside of the mansion with burning fragments of white phosphorus.
I walked to the edge of the house and peeked around the corner. Down at the end of the drive, I could see police cars lined up along the street outside the gate, and about a dozen flashlights shining all around. Too close and too many. I’d be spotted for sure if I tried for the ladder. I might be able to find a board or some other means of getting to the top of the wrought-iron fence, but I’d have no way to put it back, and it would be completely obvious that someone left the scene of the crime.
“Y’know, this here ladder sure ain’t going to climb itself.”
I peered into the darkness. On the other side of the fence, the rope ladder hanging next to him, stood Richard. He’d dressed as he did when we raided the meth lab, a black-clad commando out for a stroll in the wee hours of the morning.
“Well fuck me,” I said.
“You’re a handsome kid, but not really my type. Come on, before they park a police helicopter with infrared over us and the whole gig is up.”
So away we went, off into the night, as the Paggiano mansion burned to the ground behind us.
TWENTY-FOUR
It was a long, miserable summer.
Richard drove me back to Maine in an airport rental. He had decided to fly in right after getting off the phone with me, and set himself up in an observation point to watch and see what happened. When he saw the police were closing in and we hadn’t made our escape, Richard grabbed the rope ladder and waited for us.
When I emerged alone from the house, Richard knew what must have happened, but he focused on the mission, and at that moment, the mission was to escape without being caught. I went over the fence, we cut across a couple of lawns, and we reached Richard’s car, parked in the same driveway as Jamie’s Jeep.
Before hitting the road, I changed into a fresh set of clothes and shoes, while everything - clothes, guns, gear - went into a trash bag in the trunk. Before we left, Richard broke into Jamie’s jeep, grabbed something from underneath the driver’s seat, and then planted a little “present” in the glove compartment: a timed thermite charge.
“It’ll look like Jamie planned on torching his own car if he knew he wasn’t making it back in time. This way, there’ll be no evidence left that you were ever in the vehicle.”
Richard had rescued Jamie’s pistol from under the driver’s seat. It was the gun he had used to kill Julian, a slightly customized Colt 1911 .45 automatic. Richard handed it to me while we drove away.
“That pistol has a long and distinguished pedigree. Hold onto it, for his sake at least.”
I just nodded.
The drive north to Jamie’s cabin took about five hours, and we pulled in around 8:30 in the morning. The battered pickup was there, parked next to the shed, and everything looked just as it did when I left over two months ago.
Except, of course, that nothing was the same. Jamie was dead, the Paggianos were dead, and I’d killed over a dozen people in the last month. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, to thank my uncle for helping me or damn him for not stopping me cold the moment I suggested the idea back in Calais. I sat in Richard’s rental sedan and simply stared at the front door.
“You’re going to have to get out sometime. I’ve got to return the car,” he said.
“I have absolutely no idea what to do with my life from this moment forward,” I replied.
Richard pondered for a moment. “You’re going to be approached by the police, probably the FBI. They’re going to ask you a lot of questions, but the most important thing to remember is that you’ve never had anything to do with this, officially anyways. No fingerprints, no paper trail, no money with your name associated with it. Jamie paid me for your training out of his own funds, assuming he’d be able to recoup the costs as the life and home insurance policies and family assets became available.”
“But what about an alibi?” I asked.
“Your gardener has been coming up here once a week since you left, long enough to go out boating with Jamie, be seen at a distance by some of the locals, drive by some houses or through town in Jamie’s truck. As far as anyone knows, you’ve been grieving in seclusion for the last two months. If you’re asked about your uncle’s whereabouts, just tell them that he would drive down to Providence now and then for a few days to take care of family-related business, or at least that was the case as far as you know.”
“Do you really think they’ll buy that?” I asked.
Richard shrugged.
“At the end of the day, they’d not only have to suspect you, they’d have to prove you were involved. What is the more likely scenario? A white-collar college kid goes on a shooting rampage and wipes out an organized crime family, or the reclusive Vietnam veteran, ex-Green Beret? No one is going to miss the Paggiano family, and your uncle has already given the FBI the suspect they’ll want in order to pin this on someone. Play it cool through the rough patches, don’t make any stupid mistakes, stay out of the media as much as you can, and you’ll be fine.”
I nodded and climbed out of the car. Leaning in at the door, I offered my hand to Richard.
“Thank you for coming here. I don’t think it would have gone well for me if you hadn’t.”
Richard turned the engine over and put it into gear.
“That would have been a piss-poor way to protect my investment.”
“Investment?” I asked.
Richard just smiled.
“Be seeing you,” he said.
I watched the rental back down the driveway, and soon it was out of sight among the trees. I acquired Jamie’s hidden key and let myself into an empty home.
My empty home.
The FBI, when they arrived a day later, were surprisingly polite. A team came into the house, carefully and thoroughly went through everything they could find with a fine-toothed comb, including the shed and the surrounding property. They boxed up a number of items, but I could tell that they were somewhat disappointed. They kept asking me if I knew any other place where my uncle kept things, or if I ever saw him leave with documents and not return with them, but in all honesty I told them no. A number o
f my uncle’s guns were taken away, but none of them, I knew, would be part of the criminal investigation, and they were all eventually returned to me.
Jamie’s Colt automatic, along with a number of other weapons, documents, and souvenirs, was now buried in a sealed plastic container half a mile into the woods, on a piece of land that was owned only by the state. The morning I arrived, I read the letter Jamie had hidden under the turntable. The contents were fairly simple, just directions to his cache. I found not only the .38 revolver we used during my visit, but a Russian Tokarev pistol and a couple of other guns, about fifty thousand dollars in cash, some gold coins, survival gear, packaged food and bottled water, several alternate identities, and information on how I could access two different offshore bank accounts, each of which carried a balance well over half a million dollars. Between that and the insurance money, I found myself, at the age of twenty-one, a multi-millionaire.
After several stupefyingly long interviews and a detailed written statement, all I had to endure was several weeks of unpleasant media scrutiny. The news vans and the helicopters swarmed, as I knew they would, but I stayed inside, phoned the local grocery store to have my food delivered, and waited it all out. I gave no interviews, I made no statements, and I barely showed my face through the door when the grocer arrived. After a while, pressure from the locals towards the media to leave me alone did its work, and the reporters dwindled away, happy enough to feast in the carcass of my uncle’s reputation, which they tore apart.
At the time, I read nothing written on the subject of the Paggiano killings. Several years later, when I found myself in a quiet period of my life, I did some research online and dug up a number of the old articles. I read about the killing of my family, the speculation on where I was and a simple, brief statement from my uncle to the media about how I was “traveling abroad”. Apparently a number of my college friends were interviewed, with the usual bullshit statements about how they were sorry for my loss. The speculation was, of course, that it was done by the Paggiano family, but without solid evidence, nothing ever came of it, and of course, the rape and murder investigation stalled out, witnesses suddenly becoming much more “confused” about the events that occurred.
I had seen the news media coverage about Donnie and Pauly, but the stories about the Paggiano mansion “massacre” were new to me. I discovered, with mixed feelings, that the cook and the maid were both killed in the assault. I hadn’t seen them and assumed they were either not in the mansion that night, or they had somehow escaped during the shootout. I could only guess that when Jamie and I sprayed the rooms on the second floor with automatic fire, the two women were either killed outright or wounded to the point where they couldn’t escape the fire, or they’d hid until the smoke and flames made escape impossible. I felt sorry they had died. Neither of them had so much as showed their faces, as opposed to the butler. On the other hand, no one works for a family like that for so many years without knowing full well what was going on.
Reading about my uncle though, that was the hard part. He was crucified from the moment his identity was revealed, painted as a gun-crazy loner, lurking in the Maine wilderness, self-secluded from society to protect the world from his kill-crazy proclivities. Although my uncle had, at the time, never been suspected in the first two attacks against Donnie and Pauly, he was retrofitted into the investigations, his special forces training considered exactly what was needed to pull off both of the hits.
When it came to the attack on the mansion, the descriptions of the assault as “carried out like a military operation”, my uncle “returning to his days as a Green Beret” were both further from the truth and yet closer to the truth than they realized. Yes, Jamie put his experience and training to good use, but the attack was never a re-visitation of Vietnam.
At least, not until he laid bleeding and dying in Dominic Paggiano’s study.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Article after article spun a web of paranoid violence and conspiracy around my uncle. There were theories that a second shooter was involved, but rather than implicating me, the speculation was that Jamie had contacted an old Vietnam war buddy to help him. The transfers of money to mysterious accounts that led the FBI nowhere seemed to support this theory, but it was never accepted as fact since there wasn’t enough forensic evidence to support the theory, and all the ballistic evidence - ammunition casings and bullet fragments - were destroyed or rendered unusable in the fire. Some thought the money was simply spent on acquiring information and weapons, while others concocted even stranger theories. Even today, a decade later, a little investigation on the web into various true crime forums shows people still talking about the killings. Someone even tried to contact me a couple of months after the attack with a proposal to option the story and make it into a made-for-television movie, but I simply ignored the request.
After the media circus died down, my life became rather dull, and most of the month of August was spent sitting around Jamie’s cabin, listening to vintage records, leafing through his Vietnam documents and letters. I felt hollow and rudderless, all the money I could ever need, but no motive to spend it on anything or anywhere.
I didn’t hear about the attacks on September 11th for two days. I had gone hiking that morning, and when I returned on the evening of the 12th, I had simply showered, unpacked, and went to sleep after a couple of beers. Jamie didn’t have a television, and rather than listening to the radio I usually just put a record on the turntable if I wanted some music. It wasn’t until the morning of the 13th, after I drove into town to buy some groceries, that I saw the headlines plastered across every newspaper. I picked up a copy of every paper and returned back to Jamie’s cabin, turning on the radio for the first time in three months.
The news of what happened - the fall of the Towers, the crash at the Pentagon and Flight 93’s rebellion - it all sank in with a curious dullness. I was shocked at what happened, almost amazed at the scope of the disaster, but my own personal tragedies were simply too fresh, my desensitization to violence a little too thorough. I read the stories in the papers, listened to the radio news and the various commentators. In a perverse way, hearing about so much tragedy and loss helped push my own suffering into the background, a sick form of schadenfreude.
I woke up the morning of the 14th and drove into town early to pick up the paper so I could bring it home and read it over breakfast. I had just finished my coffee when the phone rang. After the initial storm of calls from newspapers and other media trying to get a statement, the calls had died down for several weeks now, so I went ahead and answered the phone.
“I hope you’ve picked up a paper or turned on the radio this week.”
It was Richard.
“Yeah, I’ve been following. Was out in the woods for the first couple of days.”
“Gone caveman, have you? Running around in the wild wearing a deerskin loincloth and carrying a spear?”
“Just getting out of the house a little. There isn’t really a booming social scene around Moosehead Lake if you’re not into fishing.”
There was a pause on the line. I could tell Richard was trying to find a way to say something.
“Just come out and say it, Richard.”
There was a quiet chuckle on the other end.
“Well, if you’re going a bit stir-crazy in the woods, maybe you’d be interested in some work?”
I thought for a moment.
“What kind of work?” I asked.
“You’re reading the news, seeing what’s happening. What do you think the fallout is going to be, after these attacks?”
“There’s going to be a lot more work for Delta Force, I guess?”
“There’s going to be a lot more work for anyone who knows how to kill people, period. This is going to make the Cold War look like the Great Depression for mercenaries and special forces types.”
“I’m still not really following you.”
“Governments everywhere are going to be throwing money at a
nyone who claims to be an anti-terrorist expert, or mercenary or private security groups willing to help fight terror. Money is going to be shoveled into those black book budgets in sums you aren’t going to believe. Much easier to hire freelance someone of dubious moral standards to do the CIA’s dirty work than use government agents who’ve got to fill out paperwork.”
“So what does this have to do with me?” I asked.
“I’m going to be really blunt here, son. Come work with me, put in a few weeks more training out here in Texas, and I can put you in touch with the right people. The kind of people who would pay very, very well for an operator who has, shall we say, cut some notches on his belt.”
“You mean they want someone who’s actually killed people before.”
“Aced it in one. There are a lot of posers out there in the private sector. And the buyers want to know they are getting the genuine article.”
“And you can give them that assurance, I suppose?”
“Ever since I retired, that’s been my speciality.”
“A pimp for killer mercenaries?”
“That’s one way to look at it. I do skim a finder’s fee off the top, help make the arrangements. Travel, contract negotiation, arms dealing.”
“A regular paramilitary entrepreneur, you are.”
“That’s right. That’s exactly what I am, William. And what are you? A vigilante killer, with a score of rotting bodies to your name.”
“That’s pretty cold, Richard.”
“You’re right. Downright arctic. But I’m still waiting for an answer.”
“I’m not sure this is the direction I want my life to go in right now.”
There was another long pause on the other end of the line.
“Take a real long look at your life right now, William. Tell me, just what is it you do intend on doing for the rest of your days?”
Killer Instincts v5 Page 26
