by Thomas Perry
Schaeffer's left hand was pumping his shotgun as he ran for the single door at the end of the short hall. He knew that the less time he took, the better his chances were, so he lifted his right foot and stomp-kicked the door. The door swung inward, splinters flying, and he dashed in after it, his shotgun aimed at the bed. He flicked on the overhead light.
There were two people in it, a man and a woman. The man was Joe Castiglione, but the woman was much younger, probably her mid twenties, with long bleach-blond hair. Castiglione was in the middle of a half roll, reaching into a drawer in his nightstand.
As Castiglione fumbled to get the gun in his hand, Schaeffer shot him in the back of the head. The woman screamed, her hands clawing at the sides of her head like talons.
"Shut up," he said.
She took a deep breath to scream again so he shot her, and she sprawled backward on the bed, her arms spread like wings.
He picked up the ejected shotgun shells in the bedroom and then the one he'd fired in the big room, and then went down the back stairs. He climbed out the basement window and pushed it shut behind him, and then took his shotgun apart and put it in his messenger bag. He walked quickly away from the house along Lake Shore Drive toward the parking lot where he had left his car, put the bag in the trunk, and drove off toward the next house.
The point would not be made without the other two brothers. The second one was Paul, and the youngest Sal. He knew he had no more than an hour or two to do the rest of the job and get out of town.
When he arrived in Paul's neighborhood, it was three A.M. The night air was cool and fresh, just a stealthy breeze flowing onto the land off Lake Michigan. In the evening it had seemed hot, but as he walked along the street, the air felt alive to him. It filled his lungs and gave him new energy.
Paul Castiglione lived only a couple of minutes from his older brother. His house was an old redbrick two-story cubical building that had a white wooden porch in front with Doric columns. It wasn't quite a mansion, but the sort of house that had probably been built just after the Great Chicago Fire and painstakingly restored by whomever Paul had bought it from.
Schaeffer drove past and scanned to be sure there were no clusters of cars and that the street behind looked about the same as the last time he'd been here. He parked just around the corner, where he could reach his car quickly, but where it couldn't be seen from the house. He opened the trunk, took the two Beretta pistols, and put them in his jacket. He closed the trunk, walked up to the house, and looked into the window of the garage. There were three cars inside, a black Cadillac, a black Corvette, and a black SUV that seemed to be about seven feet tall. Even though he'd been in the United States ten years ago, the sight of those big SUVs still startled him with their ugliness and impracticality. But he was pleased. The three cars looked as though they represented three moods of Paul Castiglione—pretentious, childish, and stupid.
He walked around the building, examining window latches through the glass, testing doorknobs. Through the window near the front door he saw that there was an alarm system. It probably wasn't the kind that rang in the office of a security service or a police station because Paul Castiglione wouldn't want to give the cops a legal excuse for bursting into his house, but he was sure it would make noise. He could see the keypad lights glowing on the wall. He thought it probably wasn't necessary, but in case he made a mistake, he went to the rear of the house, opened the phone junction box, and disconnected the telephone wires.
There had to be a way around the alarm system because there always was. As he continued around the house, he found it. Set in the wall beside the kitchen door was an old-fashioned milk delivery box. There was a small wooden cabinet door with a weathered brass latch on the outside so the milkman could put the bottles of milk in it. Inside there would be another door that opened inward so the cook could bring the milk bottles into the kitchen.
It was a long-obsolete feature. Nobody now would have a little door set into the brick facing like that. The renovators must have left it there because antique details reminded people that this house was the real thing and not a copy. He reached up and turned the little knob and the milk door opened. He pushed on the inner door, but it was locked. He looked in and he could see four small brass screw heads flush with the surface of the door. He looked at the inner side of the outer door to compare, then used his lock-blade knife to unscrew the four screws. When he pushed the door inward, it moved. He jiggled it a bit, moving it inward until he could get his hand in and pull the latch free.
He studied the dimensions of the milk door. In the years since he had left the trade, he had aged, but he was still relatively flexible, and he judged that he could fit his middle through the two-foot square. He took off his jacket, heavy with his two pistols, and hung it on the brass handle on the door. He ducked to get his head and arms into the opening, turned sideways to get his shoulders in, and then pushed against the inner wall to slide in to his hips. He could reach a counter to his right now so he used it to pull himself the rest of the way in and get his left foot on the floor and then the right.
Turning to reach outside, he grasped his jacket and brought it in with him. He put it on, closed the milk door, stood with his back against the wall with the two pistols in his hands, and listened. There were only the tiny, barely audible sounds of a house—the refrigerator compressor, the air-conditioning system.
He moved forward into the kitchen. He had always preferred to take a great deal of time so a listener would not connect one of his moves or sounds with another. Tonight he had to bend time in the opposite direction, moving from place to place more quickly than anyone would expect. He had to find and kill Paul Castiglione, and then get inside Sal's defenses before he knew his brothers were dead.
He was halfway across the kitchen when Paul Castiglione materialized in the doorway in a big, loose-fitting bathrobe and bare feet. Castiglione took a couple of steps and opened the refrigerator door. The light spilled out of it onto the floor and splashed the walls.
Castiglione leaned over and squinted into the refrigerator, and then the sight he'd seen in his peripheral vision as he'd turned registered in his brain, and he jerked his head and looked. "Holy shit."
"Hello, Paul." The two pistols came up in Schaeffer's hands, so that Castiglione saw not only the shape of a man in his kitchen, but also a vaguely familiar face staring at him above the dark, gleaming muzzles of the two Berettas.
"It's you. What would you come to me for? I can't save you."
"I never asked." He shot Castiglione. In the light of the open refrigerator, he could see that the single shot had passed through his forehead. Schaeffer heard a woman's voice call from upstairs, "Paul? What was that? Did you knock something over?"
Schaeffer had to make a decision. Going through the house, first killing the woman and then maybe Castiglione's kids, would take time and do nothing for him. It was too late to preserve the quiet. He had to get to the third brother as quickly as he could. He turned, stepped out the kitchen door, and closed it again. Beyond the door he could hear the alarm, an electronic imitation of a bell ringing. He ran hard toward the car, got in, and drove off. The first time he had to stop at a traffic signal, he retrieved the shotgun from the trunk and reloaded it, then propped it on the passenger seat beside him.
It took him fifteen minutes to reach Salvatore Castiglione's house, and he could see he had not made it in time. Paul Castiglione's wife must have come downstairs, seen her husband's body, and started dialing the phone. The house was a suburban one-story ranch-style house set on a large lawn with a pine grove behind it and along the sides to form a narrow privacy barrier at the edges of the property. As he drove past, he could see that in spite of the fact that it was nearly four A.M., there were already lights on in the house and the shapes of men moving across the front windows. A big black car with tinted windows sat in the driveway with its motor idling. It had to be Pugliese's men, here to get Sal out of danger. Schaeffer kept going, heading his car to
the north toward Milwaukee.
25
ELIZABETH'S FLIGHT LANDED at Midway at four P.M. She was traveling with the two Justice Department investigators Morris had temporarily assigned to her. Morris had chosen Manoletti and Irwin, both of them men about forty years old, with at least a dozen years of field experience. They inspired confidence, but they weren't very good companions for her. They were businesslike and distant. They considered themselves "sworn" peace officers, like cops and FBI agents. The fact that everyone in the Justice Department took the same oath to preserve and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign or domestic, meant nothing. The gun she was carrying at this moment didn't make her one of them either. It only made them more nervous about her. She wasn't entirely satisfied with them. In spite of the fact that Morris knew she wanted to do some undercover surveillance, he'd picked men who looked like cops. They both had that triangular torso that men who lifted weights often achieved, so the seams of their sport coats looked strained. They looked as though they'd gotten their hair cut on a military base.
There was never a way for them to forget she was on the other side of the department, the side with lawyers and administrators and analysts—she had become all three—and she was several levels above them on a parallel branch of the hierarchy. Worse, she was a woman. In the twenty years she'd been in Justice, women had become common, but there were still men who seemed determined to maintain a distance. Sometimes she had suspected that their aloofness was a strain of puritanical discipline left over from an earlier time. A woman, if she looked like a woman, was a temptation and a threat to their integrity. They probably knew that Elizabeth posed no threat to their chastity, but her presence still made them vulnerable to rumors and suspicions.
They seemed not to dislike her, but they weren't volunteering any personal thoughts or observations about anything. It was as though they were pretending that they had no thoughts or opinions that hadn't come from a manual.
The three waited their turn to get off the plane, inching forward in single file like the rest of the passengers. Then they rode the escalators down to get their luggage. Manoletti was the first to get his suitcase, so he went out of the baggage area, by prearrangement, to get an early place in the cab line. When Elizabeth stepped out with Irwin, Manoletti already had the cab waiting with its trunk and back door open.
At the hotel they went to their respective rooms without much consultation. Elizabeth had learned many years ago to open a suitcase immediately and hang up anything that could hang. As soon as she had her suitcase up on the folding rack, she called home and left the kids a message. "I wanted to let you guys know I'm on the ground in Chicago and I'm in my hotel, the Hyatt. When you two get home, if you feel like calling me, please do. I have my phone on. And here's the hotel number." She read it off the sticker on the telephone, then hung up. She turned on the television set and found a news program. She half listened for a weather report.
"...savage attack at the home of Joseph Castiglione, in which two men and a woman were killed by shotgun blasts. This was followed by—"
She dialed the number of Irwin's BlackBerry with her left hand. "Turn on your TV," she said.
"We've got it on," he said. She could hear the voice of a different newscaster in the background.
"We've got to meet about this. Call me in a few minutes."
Elizabeth dialed the number of her office and Geoffrey answered, "Justice Department, Organized Crime."
"Geoff, it's me. There's something about Joseph Castiglione on the news. Did something happen while we were in the air?"
"We're trying to sort it out. Two of the Castiglione brothers are dead—Joe and Paul. There are also four men described as Castiglione associates dead at a motel south of Chicago."
"I can't believe it," she said. "What does he think he's doing?"
Geoffrey ignored the question. "Special Agent Holman from the FBI called on your personal line when you were still on the plane. I gave him your cell number. I hope that's okay."
"Of course. I thought he already had it. He hasn't called me yet. Do you have IDs for the bodies?"
"They haven't been released, but the FBI had them, and they e-mailed the list to you."
"Is there a Vincent Pugliese?"
"No. The names all sound like stops on an Italian train schedule, but he wasn't one of them."
"Good work, Geoff. I've got Holman's number on my phone, so I'll try to get back to him."
"I'll be here for a while, and I'll relay whatever comes in to you."
"Thanks. If nothing hits by seven, go home. The next shift can take over. Just tell them I'm here and I'm interested."
"I'll do that."
"Got to go." She hung up and took the call that was coming in.
"Waring."
"Hi, Elizabeth. This is John Holman. I hope I didn't interrupt your dinner or anything. If so, I can—" His voice sounded different. It was openly friendly, as though she had passed some very big test.
"No, you're not interrupting. I'm in Chicago right now, and I expect dinner isn't any time soon."
"How did you get word so fast?"
"The short, honest answer is that it was a coincidence. I was flying here looking into something else, and this seems to have happened while we were in the air. I just got to the airport Hyatt and turned on the TV."
"Our people there are on it, of course, and I'll let them know you're in town. If you want anything, just call the Chicago office. Or stop by. It's on West Roosevelt. They'll know who you are. I'm flying in this evening. When you get this figured out, give me a call."
"That's flattering, but I don't expect it will be me who figures this out."
"We'll see. I'll call when I'm there."
She sat for a second, staring at her phone. This was the way Justice and the FBI were supposed to work, but sometimes didn't. She suspected that the difference wasn't a change in the institutional mentalities. It was just a matter of proving to someone on the other team that you could be trusted.
There was a loud knock on the door of her room. She got up and went to the peephole to look out. She could see Irwin and Manoletti, so she opened the door. "Come on in."
The two came inside, and she pointed to the two chairs at the small table near the window. They sat, and she turned the desk chair to face them. "Lots of news, and it's got to make for lots of changes. You know what I wanted to accomplish here. As of right now, things look a lot more difficult."
"We seem to have arrived at the beginning of a war," Manoletti said. "If he's as wily as you think he is, he won't want to be anywhere near that."
"I don't think that's what it is," she said. "It's not what I would have predicted he'd do, but I think this is still him."
"You do?" said Irwin.
"I think the reason he came to Chicago was the personal ad from Vincent Pugliese, the Castiglione underboss. It was a trap, and that made him angry, so he decided to hurt the Castigliones, to make an example of them."
"With all due respect, ma'am..." Irwin looked uncomfortable.
"Go ahead," she said.
"Well, it's four men in a motel, a man in Joseph Castiglione's house, Castiglione himself. That's six. Paul Castiglione makes seven. These are not pushovers either. They're all made guys who have never done anything for a living in their lives that wasn't criminal."
"You got a list of the names?"
"Morris did, from the Chicago police," he said.
Manoletti said, "And if those guys were all bunched up like that, in groups, they were expecting something. At first glance, it doesn't look like one man."
"That they were expecting? Or who did it?"
"Either," said Irwin. "Too many armed wiseguys to turn into bodies."
"What do you think might have happened?"
Irwin said, "The thing about being in a real-world gunfight is that while you're shooting one man, his four friends have time to shoot you. So unless the guys on the other side are unarmed or unconscious, the score
ends at one to one. For that reason alone, I would guess this was a squad of four or five shooters moving quickly and knowing exactly where they were going, how to get in, and where their targets would be."
"And to me, that says Vincent Pugliese," said Manoletti. "I think the personal ad was for real. I don't see this as the Butcher's Boy, after twenty years, deciding to live up to his name and scare the crap out of the whole Cosa Nostra. It sounds like he and Pugliese getting together and deciding to get rid of the three little Caesars and their palace guards in one night. If they succeed, Vincent Pugliese is the sole boss of the Castiglione organization."
"What's in it for the Butcher's Boy?"
"You've been thinking that there was a contract for him because he killed Frank Tosca, and the old men didn't like it. Maybe as head of the Castiglione family, Pugliese has enough power to protect his favorite killer if he wants."
"Maybe you're right," she said. "When I asked Morris to assign you to this trip, the situation wasn't as fluid and unpredictable as it is now. I had the impression that he was alone and friendless, and that he might be ready to cooperate with the Justice Department. You were going to stand by while I raised the possibility."
"There's another wrinkle," Manoletti said. "We just got a text message from Morris. The FBI has this from here on. Irwin and I are ordered home."
"When?"
"Tonight," Manoletti said. He handed his BlackBerry to Elizabeth. She looked at the message and handed it back.
Elizabeth said, "Well, I guess you'd better get your flight arranged. I hope we actually get to work on something in the future." She held out her hand and each of them shook it.
Manoletti cocked his head. "Aren't you coming back with us?"
"No. When this mess came to light and we were on the plane, the FBI called, so now that I'm here I'm going to see what I can do to understand what's happening. I'll be back in my office bright and early Monday."
"Good luck," Irwin said. "I hope you land your informant."
"Thanks," she said. "But he's probably far away by now. We'll see what we can learn from what he left behind."