Killing The Rat (An Organized Crime Thriller)

by Dani Amore

  Betty waited.

  “Or worse, you certainly don’t come back with no record whatsoever, am I right?”

  “You’re right,” Betty said. Her voice was slow and mechanical.

  “So somebody hired you to retrieve a package. You took the job and then came back without it. I call that being unprofessional.”

  “It wasn’t—”

  “You can atone for your breach in the professional’s code by telling me truthfully where that package is now. I must warn you, though. Any information that does not pertain to the exact location of the package will be dealt with professionally.”

  “I don’t have it,” Betty said.

  The man sighed.

  “This little piggy...” he said. There was a soft spit behind her and she felt a slight tug on her right foot. She looked up, fear consuming her, knowing what she was going to see, her mind struggling to comprehend the savagery, to deal with it, put it away.

  Her pinky toe was gone.

  The pain tore up her body. She stifled a scream. She looked at her foot. There was a tiny little jagged stump of blood tissue and bone where her little toe had been.

  “ went to town,” the man said. Another raspy chuckle. “You see,” he said. “You simply stated where the package was not. Quite different from what I asked you to do, quite professionally, I might add. You were to tell me where the money is rather than where it is not.”

  Betty tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the quiver from her voice. “Please, this is not necessary.”

  The man spoke. “I am the professional. You are a local. You give a bad name to my occupation. You exhibit your shoddiness by not giving me what I want, and then telling me that what I’m doing is not necessary. Now, not only are you being unprofessional, you’re being insulting.”

  “Okay,” Betty said. “I understand.” Betty’s mind raced. The truth wasn’t going to work here. She had to come up with something. Come up with it fast. She had to come up with something that would make this man want to let her live. She had not tried to look at his face. She didn’t know who he was. He could go and leave her. She would survive. If she could just stop the bleeding.

  Her mind shifted into high gear, an idea formed and she opened her mouth to speak—

  “This little piggy...” the man said.

  Another spit came behind her and the next toe was gone. A great bubble of horror burst in her stomach and she wanted to cry. Instead, she tried to tell herself to stay cool. You’re still alive. So you lost two toes. You can lose them all, as long as you’re still alive.

  “ took too long...” the man behind her said.

  Betty knew, despite the terror welling up inside her, threatening to swamp her like a big wave over a small boat, that the man would not accept any protests that she didn’t have what he was looking for.

  “I have it.”

  Silence, and then the raspy sigh.

  “This little piggy...”

  The gun spat. Her middle toe disappeared. She bit her lip until blood oozed down the side of her face.

  “ keeps disappointing me.”

  “Jack has it,” Betty said. Her voice was rising, wanting to turn into a scream. She fought to control herself, like a car that had just blown its tires. Blood gushed down her foot.

  “At his place. He’s going to hold onto it.”

  “And this Jack...”

  “Cleveland.”

  “He’s in Cleveland?”

  “No, that’s his last name. Jack Cleveland.”

  “Mr. Cleveland lives where?”

  Betty looked down at her foot. It was covered in blood. There were three ragged stumps where her toes had been.

  “This little piggy...”

  The silencer spoke twice and Betty’s remaining toes disintegrated. Where her big toe had been, there was now a single large stump. The gun fired again and the stump exploded into a shower of blood and flesh.

  “ wants to know where Jack Cleveland lives because that’s probably where the money is.”

  Tears streamed down Betty’s face. She thrashed in the chair, but it felt like it was nailed to the floor. Probably had been. A low moan escaped from her body.Something tugged on her left foot and she heard the gun spit. Her left pinky toe was gone.

  “This little piggy is getting tired of this.”

  Betty didn’t know where Jack lived. No one did.

  “He’s got an apartment downtown. It’s called Colonial Heights. Room 813.”

  The man sucked on his cigarette, then said, “This little piggy wants to know, if Jack has the money, when and where were you going to split it?”

  Betty’s lips trembled. Her mind worked as fast as possible. “In a week.” Her eyes rolled in her head. “At the Ambassador Hotel. Downtown. Room 313.”

  Betty heard the man crush the cigarette out on the table. He was going to let her go. She hadn’t seen his face. She’d given him a plausible story. There was no reason to kill her.

  “This little piggy cried...”

  The gun spat behind her.

  “Wee...”

  Spat.

  “Wee...”

  Spat.

  “Wee.”

  Spat.

  “All the way home.”

  Spat.

  Betty forced herself to look. Every toe had been shot off. Her feet looked like crude drawings. Blood streamed down each foot. It was pooling at the bottom of her heels.

  The man stood over her. He was pale. A big Adam’s apple. Pockmarks on his cheeks. Short, dark hair. Small dark eyes.

  He raised the gun. Betty’s eyes looked into the small circle of black. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  A soft moan escaped her lips.

  The music on the stereo rose in a crescendo and then faded to nothingness. The last track. Done. The room fell silent.

  The man smiled slightly. His teeth were small and stained. Black-coffee-and-cigarette teeth.

  “A professional never cries,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” she whispered.

  The man chuckled. Raised the gun. Pressed the muzzle against Betty’s forehead.

  “This little piggy is dead.”

  36.

  Vincenzo Romano thumbed the tender skin around his last remaining areola. He felt sorry for it, as if it were a husband or wife whose spouse had died too soon, leaving the surviving partner with nothing but years of emptiness ahead.

  His nipple hardened slightly, just slightly, and he let his hand drop away. He raised his left hand to where his left breast should have been, but then he let that drop away, too.

  Old habits died hard, he guessed.

  Oh, it wasn’t that he used to sit and play with his titties, it’s just that, a man, now and then, touches himself just to make sure all the parts are in working order. And it’s a part of human nature, two of everything. Two eyes. Two feet. Two legs. Two arms. If you feel a funny bump on your body, you feel the other side to make sure there’s a matching bump. And if there is, you instantly forget about it. It’s okay. If you’ve got two, it’s as nature intended.

  But this, Romano thought to himself, this was not as nature intended.

  He padded into the small bathroom tucked discreetly around the edge of one of the bookcases.

  He turned the light on and stood before the mirror.

  The scar was ugly. He couldn’t believe how ugly it was. He’d asked the doctor, “What kind of mark is there going to be?” The doctor had said, “Not to worry,” in a real clipped, precise voice. The voice of the confident professional, Romano thought bitterly.

  Well, he’d see. The doctor had said he had to give it a year to heal, that the marks would fade.

  They’d better fade or the doctor was going to have to have Romano’s foot surgically removed from his ass.

  He still couldn’t get used to it. Doubted he ever would. Women had breast cancer. Women got mastectomies, not men. Oh, sure, when the lump was first felt by the doctor, and when the biopsy had been done, they’d a
ll inundated him with facts about how many men had breast cancer each year. He’d read all of the brochures. All of the magazine articles. But it didn’t so much as amount to a rabbit turd.

  Because Vincenzo Romano had gotten to the top of the Detroit mafia by thinking only of himself. With cunning. With a singleminded determination to make sure if shots were fired, he would be the only one left standing.

  So he didn’t care that Joe Buttfuck in Indiana had breast cancer, or that Steve Cocksucker in Florida had breast cancer. They could rot in Hell for all he cared.

  Vincenzo snapped off the light switch and stood briefly in the dark. He realized he had to stop thinking about it. He had to focus.

  In his minds eye, he could see his copy of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” It was on the first bookshelf to the right of the door. On the middle shelf between Blackstone’s Principles of Society, and Francis Bacon’s essays.

  Sun Tzu’s book was a favorite of his. He liked the simple sentences. He liked the stories of generals and armies.

  And he felt it applied to what he did for a living.

  One of sun Tzu’s principles was that in order for a general to be successful, he needed to understand himself as well as his enemy.

  And Vincenzo Romano knew himself.

  That’s why he knew that part of finding Tommy Abrocci, part of finding the money and the tapes Tommy had made, had to do with his recent parting with his left breast.

  He knew that on some level, he was feeling the need to exert his manhood. To exhibit his masculinity. To let the world know, as well as himself, that he was still all man.

  That he could crush his enemies simply because he wanted to.

  The call from his highly paid informant came a half hour later. Romano, the big thinker in the big study with the big bookcases, had fallen asleep and was snoring softly. He heaved to his feet and got to the cell phone perched at the edge of his big desk.

  In a clipped, precise tone, his informant rushed to give him all the information there was to give. As the informant rushed, Romano’s powerful logic itemized the facts in a neat, highly anal order:

  —Tommy Abrocci was not dead.

  —Tommy Abrocci’s twin brother, Dominic, was dead.

  —Tommy Abrocci could not be found.

  —Tommy Abrocci had hired a hooker who got away at the time of the hit.

  There were many times, many years later, when Vincenzo Romano would look back and wonder where it all truly went south on him. The phone call, although more a diagnosis of the ongoing problem, would forever remain fresh in his mind. Granted, it wasn’t the actual operational missteps, but it was the neatly wrapped bundle that represented his shit hitting the fan.

  It was like when the doctor told him he had breast cancer.

  Tommy Abrocci was still alive.

  Romano thumbed the end call button on the cell phone and sat back in the big chair.

  As a plan formed in his head, his fingers went to his one remaining breast and began to circle the nipple.

  It hardened to his touch.

  37.

  Amanda Rierdon’s face glowed in the light from oncoming traffic on I-75. Her cheeks felt flushed. Her skin warm and silky. Her body, hours ago feeling strung tighter than a banjo, was now humming gently, an engine fresh from tuning.

  As she drove, she struggled to push the images of the motel room, of her lover, of what her lover had done to her, from her mind. With each passing mile, the satisfied glow inside her diminished, replaced by the bright intensity of the responsibilities of her job.

  By the time she reached 696, thoughts of the tryst were gone, albeit not forgotten. She would call the images to mind when she needed them, when she had the opportunity to do something about it.

  But that time certainly wasn’t now.

  ***

  Rierdon remembered when she’d busted Abrocci. The satisfaction of explaining to him that she wasn’t “Mygirl...” and that she could cuff him and throw him in the squad car outside, take him down to 123 Jefferson and let him cool his heels. Put the word out on the street that he was in custody. He could keep his mouth shut and do at least twenty hard years in prison, be a good soldier to Mr.Romano, and get out of prison when he was in his fifties, after having been sodomized more times than he’d be able to remember.

  Or, he could flip.

  It really wasn’t a choice.

  So when she’d flipped Tommy, they immediately put a wire on him and began to record any and all conversations he had with Romano and his goons.

  They’d gotten some good stuff, not enough, but there was stuff they could use. Tommy had promised them that something big was going to go down, he wasn’t sure what, and when he had it, he’d come in.

  So they’d all been waiting.

  And then he disappeared and they tracked him to Ann Arbor.

  Why Ann Arbor?

  The answer was simple: it wasn’t Detroit. Abrocci had wanted to get away from his “associates.” Ann Arbor was the place to do it.

  Or it should have been.

  How had they found him?

  38.

  When Jack Cleveland was unable to get through to Vincenzo Romano on his third try, he had a fairly good idea what was happening. Jack had once read an article about Hollywood, about struggling actors. The reporter said that Hollywood was a place where people starve to death while being told they’re wonderful.

  The fact was, his job was sort of like that. It wasn’t the kind where you got a performance review after six months. Where you and your boss sat down and together worked out some long and short-term goals, talked about areas you could improve and perhaps received a small raise. They didn’t exactly kill you with kindness like they did in Hollywood, but they also didn’t let you know when you were on the way out.

  No golden parachute, just a lead jacket. Or concrete shoes.

  In this business, things happened quickly and without warning.

  From his dingy hotel room on Detroit’s south side, Jack knew he was being given an involuntary warning.

  The money was gone. Romano didn’t know who had it. The fact that he wasn’t returning Jack’s call meant that Jack was a suspect.

  Jack felt no fear.

  Romano had paid him; the money was in the numbered account. He’d decided to stay just to make sure things were okay before he blew out of town. He had a ticket to Seattle, then another ticket that would take him to New York.

  But he was going to stay now.

  He punched in Betty’s number on his cell phone.

  But there was no answer. He was bounced to a pager, but he didn’t key in his number.

  He’d already done that twice.

  Jack weighed the options. She could have left town for a few days, although she probably would have told him that. She could be screening her calls. But then again, if she knew he was calling he was fairly confident she would have answered or called him back.

  The last option, well, he didn’t want to think about. Jack had a rule about getting close to people. The rule was get close only if you plan to kill. If not, don’t get close at all.

  But a few years back, on a job, Betty saved his life. One of the few oversights he’d ever made in his life. A drug dealer who’d cut into the Combination’s profits had been taken out, along with a few associates. Jack had checked the dealer’s pulse and it had stopped. But at some point, the pulse resumed, because moments later the dealer was sitting up with a gun pointed at Jack’s back. Betty stepped into the room at the same time and was a hair quicker.

  Jack owed her.

  He threw his few belongings and shaving kit into the small black duffel bag that served as his travelling bag. He walked out of the hotel and into the muggy Detroit afternoon. Jack’s rental car, a tan Ford Explorer, sat in the corner of the parking lot.

  He threw the bag inside and fired up the big vehicle, then steered it out of the hotel parking lot.

  Ferndale was ten minutes away.

  Years back, Betty had sh
owed him where she lived. It had been an act of trust, that normally, Jack would have frowned upon. But at the time, he took it for what it was. Betty knew Jack was indebted to her. Besides, they had become lovers over the few months they were together on a long job. And like most men, Jack considered himself an exception.

  He took a right, went a few blocks, then took another right. He drove past Betty’s house without looking at it directly. Her garage door was shut. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Jack drove around the neighborhood for several minutes, looking for anything that might catch his eye. A man in a parked car. A curtain pulled aside surreptitiously.

  But Jack saw nothing that raised an alarm.

  Finally, he drove back and pulled into Betty’s driveway. Went to the door and rang the bell.

  There was no answer. He slid the small leather case from the inside of his sportcoat and quickly found the right pick. Moments later, the door popped open and Jack stepped inside, shutting the door quickly behind him.

  Jack remembered the layout of the house. He stood silently, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. His mind took him through the house, remembering the furniture, the places someone could wait for someone like him.

  As it turned out, there was no need for the mental tour. Everything Jack needed was in the living room.

  He stepped forward, his feet making no sound on the floor. Betty was on her back, tied to a tipped-over chair. Her feet, or what was left of them, were sticking straight up into the air. Against her brown skin, the trails of blood down her legs looked black.

  Jack’s .38 materialized in his hand, but he instinctively knew the killer was gone.

  He knelt beside Betty. Put his index finger against her neck. But he knew she was dead. At least half a day. He gently untied her right arm and tried to raise it. It hadn’t stiffened. Probably late last night, Jack thought.

  Jack looked down at Betty. He remained objective. His mind swiftly processed the variables, the circumstances, the most likely occurrence of events that could have resulted in this event.