Hellbound

by Chester Campbell

  Hellbound

  Chester D. Campbell

  Published by Night Shadows Press

  Copyright 2015 by Chester D. Campbell

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the copyright owner and Night Shadows Press.

  Also by Chester D. Campbell

  Post Cold War Political Thriller Trilogy:

  Overture to Disaster (3)

  The Poksu Conspiracy (2)

  Beware the Jabberwock (1)

  Greg McKenzie Mysteries:

  A Sporting Murder (5)

  The Marathon Murders (4)

  Deadly Illusions (3)

  Designed to Kill (2)

  Secret of the Scroll (1)

  Sid Chance Mysteries:

  The Good, The Bad and The Murderous (2)

  The Surest Poison (1)

  October 1999

  Nashville, Tennessee

  1

  Moving like a hurricane ready for landfall, slow, deliberate, destruction on his mind, Boots Minelli paused at the door. With that innate sense of the totally committed, he felt the payoff almost within his grasp. After years of chasing down false trails and blundering up blind alleys, he would soon see the terror in the traitor’s eyes. The bastard who had nearly wrecked the Vicario “family” no longer had his days numbered. It was now only a matter of hours.

  The thin metal pick looked like a toothpick in his beefy hands, and though he hadn’t used the gadget in years, Boots wielded the thin metal pick with the ease of a locksmith. Pulling the heavy, wood-paneled door open, he squeezed through. Not that the doorway was any narrower than normal, but Boots had the size and demeanor of a snorting bull.

  In his black outfit, he could have passed for an undertaker, which wasn’t that far off the mark. He lingered in the slate-floored foyer, stared into the living room, noted the faint lemony odor of a cleaning spray. It led him to suspect the room’s tidy, vacuumed appearance was the result of a housekeeper’s recent visit. The only thing out of place was a folded piece of paper on the floor.

  The effort of stooping to pick it up left him panting, mouth agape, like some dumb-ass hound he might have chased off to fetch a stick. Ridiculous, he thought. Maddening. But that was the way a lousy fate had treated him lately. A big man in his middle fifties with abundant black hair, he had a bloated face, a joyless twist to his thick, pursed lips, and a body that made him a prime candidate for by-pass surgery.

  Boots unfolded the paper and tilted it toward the light from the window. A heading identified the sheet as the itinerary for Lovely Lane United Methodist Church’s “LLSS New Orleans Tour.”

  Beneath that was a list of dates and times for the week, starting with Monday:

  “7:30 a.m. Board Bus, Depart Lovely Lane.

  “1:00 p.m. Lunch at Barnes Crossing, Tupelo, MS.

  “2:00 p.m. On to Natchez, MS, to spend the night.”

  The gold Rolex on Boots’ massive wrist showed not quite seven a.m. A little earlier, parked in his rental car a short distance up the quiet suburban street from the red brick ranch, he had watched the man who called himself Bryce Reynolds pull out of the driveway in a four-year-old charcoal gray Buick. If Reynolds was leaving on the church bus at 7:30, Boots had a detailed schedule of where the man could be intercepted along the way to or from New Orleans.

  But Boots had worked too hard and too long to risk any slip-ups. He needed a positive ID. Shoving the paper into his pocket, he launched a quick search of the house. Three-bedrooms, two-and-a-half-baths. One of the bedrooms had been furnished as an office. He pulled on a pair of sterile gloves and began to probe about the desk with surgical precision. He found a few utility bills, brochures promoting investment newsletters, an ad for a music CD club. Mostly he spotted Post-It notes stuck everywhere. It resembled a mini-billboard jungle–reminders of bills to pay, events coming up, checklists of things to do. One note confirmed Reynolds’ plans to be on the New Orleans bus tour. He’s in his seventies, Boots thought, tends to forget things if they aren’t written down.

  Though certain Reynolds was not the man’s real name, Boots found nothing around the desk that would hint at a concealed identity. Next he turned to the family room. He found strictly masculine furniture, heavy wooden pieces informally placed. But he had an odd feeling that something was missing. Then it hit him.

  No pictures.

  Not a single photograph was displayed anywhere in the house, the mark of a man with a hidden past.

  As he shifted his gaze about the wood-paneled room, Boots thought of the years of searching that had finally paid off. He finally had a current name and address for the man whose testimony at the big New York Mafia trial in the early nineties had decimated the Vicario stronghold.

  Though there were no photographs, Boots noticed the walls had been decorated with paintings. They included a tranquil mountain village draped in snow, a melancholy lighthouse beside foaming breakers, a drab old grist mill amidst a fiery display of fall foliage. Boots had no taste for art, but he guessed these were real paintings, not knockoffs turned out in some assembly line operation. The traitor had money. He could afford the real thing.

  Boots stared at the grist mill, but his thoughts strayed to the contact he had employed in Tennessee to dig into Reynolds’ background. There was little to be found. The man kept to himself, made no close friendships. He had bought the house in Madison, an unincorporated suburb on the northeastern side of Metropolitan Nashville, in 1995. His only slip had been a mention that he came from Tulsa.

  A check in Tulsa turned up records of a Bryce Reynolds who had gone bankrupt in 1992. He started drinking heavily, and his wife left him. He disappeared from the radar screens shortly afterward. Presently he would have been in his early sixties. Boots’ source said the Madison Reynolds was likely over seventy.

  The bright colors of the leaves around the grist mill slowly dragged Boots’ attention back to the painting. Then he had an idea. He walked over and pulled the frame away from the wall enough to peek in back. Nothing. He checked the lighthouse, in a smaller, vertical frame. This try rewarded him with the outline of a cutout panel.

  The thump of excitement in his chest triggered a brief return of breathlessness. Boots took a moment to catch his breath then removed the painting from the wall. He pried the panel open with a pocket knife, revealing the combination lock of a wall safe. Probably an old one, he thought, put in when the house was built back in the sixties. A simple “box job.” Safecracking was a skill he had learned from a fellow student during his happily brief sojourn at a New York facility for the education of the criminally inclined, otherwise known as the state prison at Attica.

  He flattened a large ear against the safe and gingerly twisted the dial. In the silence of the room, he listened to the soft click as the tumblers landed in position. He had the door open quickly. Inside lay a stack of “C notes,” crisp hundred-dollar-bills bound with rubber bands, probably a few thousand bucks’ worth. The safe also contained a handgun, but what caught his eye was a photograph and a long, thin case. He checked the picture first.

  Bingo! A man and a woman, with two smiling younger men. He immediately recognized Patrick Pagano, his wife, Ellen, and their sons, Paul and Phillip. He knew what was in the case before he had it open. A star-shaped medallion with the word VALOR beneath an eagle’s outstretched wings, attached to a blue ribbon emblazoned with white stars. On the back was engraved “Sgt. Patrick O. Pagano, December 22, 1944, Bastogne, Belgium.”


  The Congressional Medal of Honor. A flag-waving patriot despite his problems with the government, Tony Vicario had proudly bragged about having a Medal of Honor winner on his payroll.

  Boots mustered the first genuine smile he had allowed himself in ages. He had withheld details of Pagano’s new identity from his boss until he could be certain he had the right man. Now he would tell Vicario he had accomplished the seemingly impossible.

  2

  The church parking lot had not seen so much activity this early on a Monday morning since a visitor tossed a burning cigarette into a trash can, starting a mini-conflagration that turned a nearby fence into charcoal. In addition to cars pulling up to liberate hopping, skipping, squealing youngsters headed for the Lovely Lane Day Care Center, others dropped off an equally excited, though less demonstrative, group of folks at the other end of the time spectrum. They tugged and dragged stuffed travel bags over to a big red and white bus with Nova Tours painted on the sides, highlighted by a stylized shooting star logo.

  The bus blocked one lane of the parking lot beside the impressive stone building, its diesel engine rumbling impatiently. Not half as impatient, though, as the tall, thin woman who lingered beside the open door. Her angular face, accented by wide green eyes that kept searching for someone, was topped by a shock of frilly gray hair that overhung her brow like tendrils of Spanish moss. Her glasses, encased in thin metal frames, had been tilted up and jammed into her hair. At sixty-nine, Matilda Ellis was a marvel of movement, a highly charged bundle of energy.

  “If forty-three other people can get here by seven-thirty,” she said in the deep voice that rang from the alto section of the choir on Sunday mornings, “you’d think Sadie Blevins could, too.”

  “Want me to go in and call her, Tillie?” asked a short, dumpy woman standing nearby. “Surely she didn’t forget.”

  Tillie Ellis gave a deep sigh. “Don’t bet on it. That woman would forget her name if it wasn’t printed on her Social Security card. Go ahead and call, Polly. If she’s still there, tell her we’re about to send the sheriff after her.”

  The tardy passenger represented only a minor annoyance. The real source of Tillie’s frown lay on page five of the morning newspaper stuffed among her belongings on the front seat. A story that ran barely five paragraphs, the item chronicled a tropical storm that had just reached hurricane status in the West Indies. A retired travel agent, Tillie had listened with growing anxiety on numerous occasions to a colleague’s harrowing tale of being trapped in Miami by Hurricane Andrew seven years ago. The possibility of a similar fate had plagued Tillie during hurricane seasons ever since, a hangover from a fear of storms acquired when she was still in pigtails. The prospect concerned her even more now, with all the time and effort she had invested in this trip.

  She turned to the driver, a stocky black man with thinning salt-and-pepper hair, dressed to match his bus in white shirt, dark red pants and tie. “Have you ever been on a bus caught in a hurricane, Chick?”

  Chick Townes leaned against the door and shook his head. “No, ma’am. What’s more, I got no desire to.”

  “Well, let’s pray it doesn’t happen this time.” She glanced over at the church. “It looks like we may have a little delay, though, waiting for Sadie Blevins. That any problem?”

  “Not unless the weather really turns ugly on us,” he said. “If we get away by eight o’clock, we ought to be in pretty good shape.”

  Most of the passengers were already in their seats, dressed in a variety of casual outfits, some topped off with sweaters or light jackets. That would change the farther south they went. A few of the men were out strolling around the parking lot. Tillie stepped down to the asphalt and encountered Polly Pitts waddling up like a small, plump duck.

  “Sadie said she was just going out the door,” Polly said. “Claimed she’d be here within fifteen minutes.”

  “Thanks.” Tillie shrugged off a twinge of remorse. “I guess I shouldn’t talk about her. I’ll probably be worse than that when I’m eighty.” And I may feel like eighty a lot sooner if that hurricane doesn’t stay down in the tropics where it belongs, she mused.

  A retiree from the DuPont plant across the Cumberland River in Old Hickory, Fred Scott kept pace with his casually dressed companion as they strolled past the bus toward the street, where a changing traffic light brought a wail of screeching tires. He tried to think of something that might get Bryce Reynolds talking. “Looks like old Tillie’s really keyed up this morning,” he said. “Bet she spent half the night getting everything ready.”

  “Yeah,” Bryce said. His face showed no trace of what he thought about it. “Putting this together must have been a monstrous job.”

  “You ever done one of these bus trips before?”

  “No.”

  “Guess you were too busy making a living.”

  Neither his voice nor his expression changed as Bryce replied. “Guess so.”

  They walked along in silence, Fred adjusting his John Deere cap and puzzling over how to do a better job of pulling his new friend out of that hard shell he’d erected around himself. Fred knew he’d made a little progress, recalling Tillie’s telephone conversation a few weeks back after he had suggested she call Bryce about this trip. Fred had listened in on an extension in the church office. After introducing herself, Tillie launched into a persuasive sales pitch.

  “Fred Scott suggested I call you about our Lovely Lane Silver Shadows trip to New Orleans. It will be six days in October, a real fun-filled adventure. Are you familiar with our Silver Shadows group?”

  “Senior citizens, isn’t it?” Bryce asked.

  Tillie had glanced at Fred and waved a hand. “I’d say we were more than just a senior citizens group. Anyway, I think most of us prefer to be known by the more genteel term mature adults.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been with a group of mature adults,” Bryce said, a hint of humor in his voice. “I’m not sure I would fit in.”

  “Of course you would. Fred has told me all about you.”

  Fred groaned. That “all” was actually quite limited. Bryce said little about himself.

  Tillie charged on. “I think you’d find the group very convivial. We have lots of single ladies signing up for the trip. Actually, most are widows. The males are just about all accompanying wives.”

  “So I would be the token bachelor? I’m really a widower, you know. My wife died several years ago.”

  “I’m sure you won’t be the only one,” she said.

  In the end, she had talked him into signing up.

  When Fred and Bryce reached the sidewalk that bordered the parking lot, they turned toward a black asphalt apron surrounding a drugstore that abutted the church property. A solitary mockingbird serenaded them from a nearby oak tree.

  “I heard a new joke yesterday,” Fred said, glancing around. He caught a flash of the odd twist Bryce’s straight slash of a mouth showed with the telling of a funny story, one of the few bits of emotion he had coaxed out of the man.

  “This another farmer tale?” Bryce asked, his wide brown eyes beginning to shine.

  “I’m just a farmer at heart, you know.” Fred lived on a small farm down in Neely’s Bend, a part of Madison formed by one of numerous serpentine twists the Cumberland River took while meandering through Nashville. The area was an anachronism, a small chunk of rural America plunked down in the midst of a heavily populated suburb of Metropolitan Nashville.

  “Okay, let’s have it,” Bryce said.

  “Seems this farmer called the vet about a problem with a cantankerous bull that kept breaking out of the pen, giving the heifers a hard time. The vet says, ‘I thought I sent you some pills to keep that bull from getting so excited.’ ‘You did,’ the farmer replied. ‘But I had to throw ‘em away.’ ‘Why on earth?’ asked the vet. The farmer said, ‘Because my wife found out what they were for and I was afraid she’d put ‘em in my coffee.’”

  Bryce shook his head as he laughed. “Fred, you’ve
got more stories than McDonald’s has hamburgers.”

  They were halfway down the lot when something odd caught Bryce’s eye over near the drugstore. He stopped abruptly and stared at a tan car with the driver-side door open. A leg protruded from it. The rest of the man’s body appeared to be leaning the other way.

  “That guy looks like he’s in trouble,” Bryce said. He ran toward the car.

  Fred jogged behind him.

  As they approached the vehicle, Bryce saw an expensive-looking cowboy boot stuck out the door like a large leather exclamation point. The man appeared monstrous in size. He clutched one hand to his throat.

  “Are you all right?” Bryce called out.

  As he leaned into the car, a shock wave froze him into numbness. He stared at the flushed face of Boots Minelli, one of the most feared capos in the Vicario crime family.

  3

  On leaving Pagano/Reynolds’ house, Boots had decided to go by the church and check on the bus. He remembered passing the rambling stone structure on the way in and knew he would have no trouble finding it. Afterward, he would contact his young sidekick, Dominick Locasio, and the three other “wise guys” who had accompanied him to Nashville. They would rendezvous at the car rental agency before heading south.

  Elated at what he had found after all those years of fruitless searching, Boots drove with a semblance of a smile, a decided change from his normal dour expression during those difficult times. He had never remotely considered giving up, of course. He was the most loyal and devoted subordinate of the The Boss, Anthony Vicario, who had chosen Boots as a young stalwart to enforce one of Tony’s main credos, “death to traitors.” Let a turncoat get away and it would spread like an infectious disease.