The Vendetta

by Thomas Laird

  The exposed eyes were more visible, now that the bleeding had slowed down.

  “Can you see me in there, Vince? I’m going to give you another chance to hurry things along and get this over with. What do you say?

  “We can party all night, if you want to.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “You like pizza?”

  Dani Hawke looked at Parisi as if she didn’t understand the question.

  “Do you?”

  “I suppose,” she answered.

  “Your enthusiasm is a little subdued.”

  “Yeah, I like it.”

  “How about we take dinner break at a place I know on the southside?”

  “I guess.”

  “You have another suggestion? I’m all freakin’ ears.”

  She scanned Parisi’s face for anger, but she didn’t find it.

  “It’s just dinner break, Detective. Not an invite to the fuckin’ prom.”

  “Okay…Fine.”

  Jimmy drove them out to Benjy’s on 84th and Pulaski. It had the finest thin crust he’d ever eaten, he explained.

  It took about twenty-five minutes to arrive from The Green Room, where they’d been watching Manny Fortunato. Ben Rossi was also inside, but after an hour and a half of surveillance, Jimmy was hungry. The two Outfit thugs weren’t going anywhere, he figured, and you had to eat. Dani Hawke, however, never seemed to take nourishment, on the job. Parisi had to constantly invite her to take their dinner breaks.

  They pulled into the side parking lot at Benjy’s and then got out and walked to the front door. It was a Friday night in the third week of September, and still the scorching temperatures held Chicago inside the oven. There didn’t seem to be a break in the weather coming any time soon, and it was already officially fall.

  Benjy’s sported the usual green and orange fluorescent lights in the front square of glass. And there were beer signs on either side of the eatery’s name—one for Old Style and the other for Budweiser. The beer logos were in blood red lights.

  The tables inside were covered in red and white checked cloths, and at the rear of the eating space, adjacent to the bar, on the far wall was a poster of Marlon Brando as The Godfather.

  They sat at a booth toward the back. The place was already crowded and noisy, but all that white noise would give them a semblance of privacy, Parisi thought. He wasn’t thinking of saying anything confidential to this Native American copper, but it was nice to know you could be free about your conversation.

  He ordered them a small pitcher of Coke after she’d indicated pop was fine. When the waitress with the big hair came back with the soft drinks, Jimmy asked Dani what she liked on the pie.

  “Sausage and mushrooms,” she replied without an inflection of any kind.

  Jimmy was beginning to become annoyed with her indifference.

  “Is it just that you don’t like me?” he smiled after he made the order and after the piled-high redhead moved away from the booth.

  “I never said I didn’t like you, Detective. I already told you I wanted to keep this professional.”

  “Well you’re winning that battle.”

  “Look. I just don’t want to get involved with anyone I work with.”

  He looked into those piercing brown orbs of hers, and something started to stir, and he became slightly uncomfortable with his reaction to her startling eyes.

  “Shit, there’s no danger of that happening.”

  “You mean you don’t think I’m attractive?” she bristled.

  “Hell yes, you are. But I know the way you want to play all this, and I wish you’d relax, loosen the grip on the wheel a bit. It makes talking to you difficult, and we can’t have that if we’re going to become successful partners.

  “Are you hearing me loud and clear?”

  “Yeah. I understand what you’re saying,” Dani replied.

  “Why don’t we start at the beginning? You tell me something about yourself. I don’t mean that you bare the secrets of your Native American soul, or anything.”

  “What do you want to know, Detective?”

  “You have to stop calling me that. It’s like throwing a block of ice at me every time you say it. You can try to just be a little more informal with me, can’t you, Dani?”

  The sound of her name changed her expression, momentarily.

  But then she resumed her ‘professional’ face quickly.

  “I have three brothers. They still live in Montana. I came to Chicago six years ago, when I hooked up with the Department.”

  “Yeah. You told me how fast you moved up to where you are.”

  “You have any siblings?” she asked.

  “Only child.”

  But he didn’t go into his family history about Jake not being his biological father or about his Uncle Nick being his progenitor. He thought it a little too personal, and he knew she’d get skittish if he went there.

  The pizza came and the talk ceased, and she dug in as greedily as Jimmy did on this delicacy that was really American, not Italian. People Jimmy knew called pizza ‘garbage’ because back in Italy it was crust with a bunch of leftovers dumped on it with the red sauce.

  “Where’s Cabretta been?” she asked when she came up for air from the food. She took a healthy swig at the pop.

  The noise was a constant buzz over their conversation. It was Friday, so there were already people lined up at the door waiting for tables.

  “Yeah, I was wondering, too. Asshole’s been absent for a few days, and it’s not like him to be away from The Green Door for very long because Rossi lives there, just about.”

  “You think something happened to him?” she threw out after another gulp of the Coke.

  “I sure hope not. I really am looking forward to an indictment on all three of these bastards.”

  She looked at him steadily, across the booth.

  “Can I ask you something personal…Jimmy?”

  “That’d be a first.”

  “Do you take money?”

  “Are you working part time for Internal Affairs?” he laughed.

  “No no. I just wanted to know. The last thing I am is a rat.”

  “Best looking rodent I ever saw.”

  She snapped up erect.

  “That was a joke,” he apologized.

  She relaxed her posture. Her face softened.

  “No, I’m sorry. I want to make this work. The job, I mean. I didn’t mean…”

  “Jesus, Dani. You gotta back off the gas. I’m really not throwing moves at you.”

  “You didn’t answer the question I asked you.”

  “About the money.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “No. Not once. Not ever. Are we good, now?”

  They finished off the food and drink.

  Dinner hour was over.

  *

  Ben heard a noise from downstairs. He looked over at the red numbers on the digital clock, and it was 4:10 A.M.

  Manny had gone home. He wasn’t going to crash on the sofa downstairs because Fortunato had been up for thirty-six hours, and Ben wanted him fresh for tomorrow night. They had some business on the north side to attend to. There was money involved and the work might wind up becoming wet. Some punks had been skimming on the protection cash they were supposed to be collecting on a string of laundries.

  He heard it again, so he reached under the pillow and took the .44 magnum out from its spot against the headboard.

  He got up slowly because he was a little woozy from the beers and wine they’d put away at The Green Door. Alcohol didn’t ordinarily go to his head, but he hadn’t been sleeping very well, the past week.

  He was clad in only his boxers, but he felt pretty confident the disturbance was something like the wind that had awakened him. Nobody had ever dared breach his door before. They knew what was waiting for them if they did. The magnum was just one of the ten or twelve handguns he had scattered about the house. He had them all in his bedroom when Nick was a little boy, bu
t he’d taught his son gun safety when the boy turned ten. And Nick knew better than to fuck around with the old man’s weapons because he’d been caught once, and it was the only beating Ben had ever handed out to the kid.

  He crept down the stairs stealthily, straining his ears to listen for sounds of an intruder.

  There was nothing.

  He turned left at the bottom of the flight from the bedrooms upstairs and headed toward the kitchen. The house was blanketed in darkness. He didn’t use nightlights to find his way in his own home at night. Rossi’s night vision was excellent. He thought it might be because he ate a lot of fucking carrots. His mother had told him: “You never saw a blind rabbit, no?”

  Nothing in the kitchen. He left the lights off just in case he might make himself visible to a potential b and e guy.

  He walked slowly back into the living room. There was a chill because the air conditioning was set down to 65. He liked it cool when the heat was on, outside.

  Ben saw a form atop the couch in the living room, the sofa with its back to the front window.

  “You better freeze, cocksucker!”

  There was no response. He edged closer to the figure on the divan, the .44 mag pointed right where the head would be.

  He couldn’t make out a face, or any features, in the darkness, so he found the switch for the lamp next to the couch, and he flipped it on.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ!” he bellowed. His voice shattered the silence of the previously soundless living room.

  There was a human form sitting on the center pad of the three-seater.

  But there was some kind of hood over its head. And the arms and legs were bound with duct tape.

  “The fuck!”

  He approached the body or whatever it was carefully, looking from side to side as he did.

  Ben finally stood in front of the motionless entity before him. Then he reached toward the hood on top and pulled off the cover. He bolted back in horror.

  It looked like Vince Cabretta, but it was hard to tell.

  The eyes were gone. There were two black, empty sockets, and the holes contained black, crusted blood. Rossi felt his gorge rise.

  Then he saw the deep stain on the crotch of the body’s pants. Those slacks were light brown, so the stain was highly visible.

  He had no intention of loosening the pants to examine the cause of the blackened patch where Vince’s balls were supposed to be, but he knew what the discoloration meant without getting up close and personal. Cabretta had been castrated. Of that much he was certain. He’d seen how much men with a wound like that had bled, a few times before.

  There was a lone sheet of paper lying next to the sitting-up stiff. It was more like a scrap. Ben held it up where he could see it clearly.

  It read:

  “David Johansen says hello.”

  *

  This shit was intolerable. He called Manny over at ten the same morning, and when Fortunato spied what had happened to his partner, he turned crimson.

  “I’ll cut his head off, whoever done this.”

  “Never mind about who did this, Manny. It’s my fuckin’ head and yours that we both ought to be concerned about.”

  “They maimed this poor son of a bitch. Look how he cut him. His eyes…Who the hell does a thing like this?”

  He showed Fortunato the brief message.

  “Is this guy trying to be cute?”

  “I wouldn’t call it cute, Manny…We need to bring some people to the house. You need to stay close, too.”

  “Sure, Ben.”

  “You don’t understand, do you? Vince was first. What does that tell you?”

  Fortunato blinked twice.

  “We’re next,” he told Rossi.

  *

  They brought six soldiers into the Rossi compound in Cicero. One of the soldiers also brought one of those Belgian shepherds that the cops used to sniff out bombs and drugs. They hauled over six M-16s, the kind the Army used in Vietnam, as well. And they included an M-60 machine gun. Ben Rossi wasn’t taking any chances with the prick who did Vince Cabretta. They were prepared for full out siege.

  A soldier named Matt Calli did the cooking. He had worked as a chef in an Italian restaurant, back in the day. He was in his forties, and he was experienced, and the food was outstanding—better than going out to some expensive joint in the Loop. Rossi was going nowhere until they figured out what and who happened to Cabretta, anyway.

  They sat at the big dining room table, all seven of them, feasting on sausage and peppers and antipasto salad with the olives and the cheese and the prosciutto. It was almost worth staying put, Ben thought, but he knew it would soon become old and claustrophobic, being cooped up here. But he needed time to regroup.

  He looked out at his crew, and he threw it out at them.

  “It’s somebody connected to this prick Johansen, of course. Tomorrow, all but Manny and Matt are taking off to find out who that connection is. And I want results. And I mean fast. Anybody hears we’re walled up in here, they’re gonna think our shit is loose. You understand?”

  All of them nodded in the affirmative.

  It was a war council. Only one man did the talking, and it was their capo, Ben Rossi. No one pulled this kind of action on him. The others knew that whoever it was was dead. He might as well jump in a hole and cover himself over.

  It was nuts. It was insane. No one ever intruded on this personal territory. The cemeteries were full of idiots who even thought about attempting to whack a soldier in Benny Bats’ crew.

  “I don’t want this guy dead. I want him here because I’m a true believer in an eye for an eye—or two for two. And we’ll throw in his dick and balls, also. We can’t have this. In my own house. He throws that butchered up corpse in my fucking house!”

  Ben slammed his palms on the table, and the boom startled all of them.

  “You find him. You find him fast. And then you bring him here. You bring him right here to me.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Her eyes began to flicker. The movement was involuntary, and then her vision began to clear.

  The nurse, the one on the afternoon shift, walked in with her meds.

  “What the fuck am I doing here?” Carmen Rossi demanded of her.

  The nurse dropped the tray with a bang onto the floor.

  They brought her to the psychiatrist. His name was Edmund Banion, M.D. A full-fledged shrink. Charged a couple of hundred an hour in his private practice, and that was for a six months’ minimum dose of psycho-therapy and an equal dose of psycho-babble.

  He was a short, chubby guy with gray hair that was punctuated by a large globe of male balding pattern on the crown.

  Carmen sat opposite him, and Banion was amazed at her new state of alertness.

  “How’re you feeling?” he asked timidly.

  “I just woke up from a fucking nightmare. That’s how I fucking feel.”

  “Would you like something to calm your nerves a little?”

  “You mean those goddam drugs you been dosing me with?”

  “You seem more upset than anything else. I just thought you’d feel…more relaxed.”

  “I been relaxed for two months in this place. You think I don’t know you’ve been juicing me into this zombie goddam state?”

  “You were extremely distraught by the death of your–”

  “Distraught? Is that what I was?”

  “Please, Mrs. Rossi. I want you to breathe.”

  “I am breathing, you son of a bitch!”

  “If you can’t control yourself, I’ll have to put you in restraints.”

  There was suddenly a stern look on the doctor’s puffy face that told Carmen that she better turn down the heat.

  “All right, all right…I just want out of here.”

  Banion studied her pretty face. He thought she was extraordinarily attractive, now that she’d come out of her catatonic state. He didn’t prescribe EST for his patients. It was rather barbaric and out of date. And, certai
nly, psycho surgery was hardly an option, either. He was, in fact, at wit’s end about how to rouse this woman, just before she’d come back to life as rapidly and dramatically as she just had.

  “It isn’t that simple. You need some therapy before I can sign you out of here. Your husband committed you here. You can’t just suddenly walk out the door.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Her face was flushed, and he was just about to threaten her with the restraints, again.

  “Look, I’m all right. Can’t you see that?”

  “I see a woman who very well might be in the grip of denial. You came in here in a very bad way, Mrs. Rossi.”

  “My name is Carmen, Doc.”

  He knew she was trying to play him, now, and she knew he knew it.

  “I’ll make you a deal, Mrs. Rossi. You give me one month to make sure you’re firing on all cylinders, and we’ll seriously discuss your release, with your husband, at that time.”

  “A month?”

  “Just four weeks to make certain you don’t have a relapse.”

  “And what if I have one of those…relapses?”

  “We’ll talk about it when the time comes. But you look a lot better than you’ve looked the last two months. It’s quite…miraculous.

  “We need to talk about your son, about Nick.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Yes. But we need to talk about the way you feel about him, now that you’re somewhat recovered.”

  “I’ll never recover, about Nick.”

  “But we both have to know that his passing isn’t going to overpower you the way it did, after the…accident.”

  “He was run over in the street not far from our house. I heard him scream.”

  He saw that her eyes remained clear and focused on him.

  “I know you did. It must have been terrible.”

  The tears began to abruptly stream down her face from both of her eyes, but she was still locked onto Banion.

  “It’s good to let yourself feel the pain, Mrs. Rossi.”