“There’s a body in the backyard,” I said. “It looked as if he caught a bullet.”
“Think Pembroke killed him and ran?”
“No, I doubt it. Didn’t you say one of their guys was shot earlier?”
“That’s what I heard; maybe the bloke did eat one.”
“Let’s check out what’s burning.”
Bludd and I crossed the field until we reached the smoldering remnants of the fire. Two twisted masses of debris, unrecognizable, sat motionless on the edge of the roadway. If Dino could be believed, these had been the cars our welcoming committee had brought to the party. Bludd and I took a closer look.
“What do you think went wrong on their end?” I asked.
“I dunno mate, but take a look over here. It’s one of them,” he said as he pointed to the charred remains on the ground.
Satisfied, neither vehicle was Pembroke’s BMW, we backtracked to my car. We could only see so much in the dark, and we weren’t hanging out until daylight to figure out what had happened outside while we shot it out inside. We loaded into the Avenger, and for a brief moment, I had second thoughts about cranking the engine. What if the Avenger had been bobby-trapped to blow? Sometimes you have to take a chance. The engine came alive at the turn of the ignition switch, and I whipped it around, and hightailed it for sanctuary.
As we passed by the cars, Bludd asked, “Where do you think our attorney ran off to?”
“He’s on the run to the only place he knows to go for help, Capo De Luca. With some luck, this’ll get dropped in the Boss of Bosses, Salvatore Giannetti’s lap.”
I could tell from the smile on Bludd’s mug, this was his cup of tea.
Chapter 13
“He didn’t become a rat, he’d always been a rat; what he became was a confidential informant, So he would be a better rat.”
—Walter
I didn’t see the need to hurry; however, Bludd disagreed. Max wasn’t going to like my phone call whether I called as soon as we got back or waited until morning. When all was said and done, the call wasn’t going to change a thing. Attorney Talbot Pembroke, Maximillian’s buddy, project resource, and Crown jewel of Toronto’s attorney’s office, would be a hard pill for Max swallow. It would be for anyone. Max had put a lot of stock in Pembroke, and unfortunately, had provided him with too much information. It spelled danger for the Palatini. He should have known better, and did, but it didn’t stop him from making a bad decision to involve Pembroke. The wool had been pulled over his eyes. Pembroke was a connected man, a crime family member, a mobster in his own right. It was an error in judgment Max would not make again. It was a hard lesson learned.
I understood how it happened. Max trusted Pembroke. People seemingly had a need to trust other people, but if the trust was placed in the wrong person, it could get you killed. Max had brought Pembroke in on the project; on the surface, considering his credentials, he would have been a good fit—but only one side of him fit. Pembroke was supposed to have provided us with input on the Abbandanza Mob. Instead, he got his hands on inside Palatini information and ratted us out to the Mob. Maybe Max figured he had to trust people like a prosecutor. However, it was a mistake I wouldn’t have made. I didn’t have a need to trust. In Maximillian’s situation, the adage, “loose lips sink ships” had come back to bite his butt along with the butts of the Palatini. If Max had given the idea more thought, he would have realized he had no way of knowing who would hear the things he told Pembroke, or how the attorney would use the information. Pembroke had sold Max a false bill of goods, and then betrayed him. The price tag was a heavy burden to accept, but Max owned it.
Mobsters had eyes and ears everywhere; it was a fact, and everyone knew it. It was a misconception, of a false belief that they were all on the street. The truth was the Mob owned a boat load of politicians, cops, and evidently prosecutors. Everything Max had told Pembroke had made its way to the Toronto Machine. In my book, his double-cross made him the primary culprit behind Cal and Anna’s disappearance. He had a lot to answer for, and I wanted to ask the questions.
I aimed the Avenger in the direction of Buffalo and put the hammer down. Pembroke was on the lam, and my guess was he hadn’t made it a half-mile away from the farm house before he was on his cell phone jacking his jaw to the grease balls. Without question, my name would top the Machine’s hit list. Bludd’s name would be a close second. No more random and roving targets. We would concentrate our efforts on Palatini enemy number one—Talbot Pembroke. He needed to die, and I needed to kill him. That was my version of a win-win solution. We arrived back at sanctuary, unloaded our gear, and turned in for the remainder of the night.
The morning greeted me with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Bludd was already sipping his tea when I joined him at the table. Over tea and java, Bludd and I rehashed what we knew, what we thought we knew, what we didn’t know, and what might be on the horizon. No matter how Max received my phone call, Bludd and I were going to forge ahead, locate Pembroke, and kill him.
In Buffalo, it was one in the afternoon when I placed the call across the pond. For Max, the time frame would be perfect. The call more than likely would catch him during his evening meal. I’d hoped what I had for him would kill his appetite. I counted on it. I was prepared for an uphill battle with Max. He had to be convinced, beyond doubt, of Pembroke’s involvement with the Mob.
Maximillian’s phone rang. Some people get worked up over the littlest things. Not me. I relaxed and waited for him to answer. My dad told me many years ago, “If you don’t want a bad reaction; don’t make a bad first action.” My reaction would wait until we had our conversation.
Max answered with a cheerful, “Hello.”
“Hey, this is Scythian.” The news would be ugly, no sense setting the tone before the conversation got underway.
“Yes…good,” he said, “do we have progress?”
I started with the good news first. I could have started with Pembroke, but we would have dwelled on it and not focused on what we’d accomplished. We had done some good, and the project was still in motion. He needed to see the positive side. “I met with Gladys Mitchell as you suggested. She’s a first-class act. I gave her some names and a couple bucks to help her cause.”
“Delighted. Have you met with the source?”
“I have, I hate to say it, but it didn’t go as well as we’d hoped.” The cat was out of the bag.
Max cut to the chase, “Are there new developments?”
“I’d say that’s an understatement.” I ran through the scenario with my allegations of Pembroke’s loyalty to the Mob. It was met with silence, the kind of silence that strangles the life out of the air around you, and made it hard to choke out another word. I could cut the tension with a knife.
“Is he terminated?”
“On the loose.”
We would have been considerably safer had he died at the farmhouse. Now he posed an extreme threat.
“We suspected a mole inside our operation had been providing the Mob with Intel. Our fears were confirmed when Cal Alonzo came up missing. Anna and I discussed it in depth. She was not willing to shut down the project and get out as I requested.” Max said.
“She told me the same thing Max. I couldn’t get through to her. She knew it was no longer safe, but I couldn’t persuade her to pack it in.”
“I told Talbot about the girls who had escaped the clutches of the Abbandanza crime family. He was aware Cal was hiding them out. He suggested they stay there, and he would coordinate efforts with police. We looked to him for help with their placement, but something went awry. And now we know what. We had not suspected Pembroke to be the mole.”
“It’s all twenty-twenty hindsight.”
“How could someone like Talbot become an informant to the Mob?” Max asked, but I suspected it was rhetorical.
“I think you have it all wrong, Max. “He didn’t become a rat, he’d always been a rat; what he became was a confidential informant, so he would
be a better rat.”
Max was silent. It was an uncomfortable stillness. Finally, he asked, “What could Talbot have hoped to gain? He had money, power, prestige, and honor.”
“My guess is greed. He wanted more money, more power, and more prestige. He never had honor; it was a self-serving façade he’d created in his mind, and displayed to the world.”
I could hear the sound of disappointment in Maximillian’s voice as he sighed. The knife that had cut through the tension had choked the life out of the air and was now squarely planted in his back. With every memory of Anna it twisted and with every word, it stabbed at his heart. Max had become a victim too.
“This is my fault,” Max said.
“It doesn’t make any difference. All mistakes become history. It’s over. The only thing that makes a difference now is where we go from here.” Casting further blame and criticism on Max might have made me feel better, but I didn’t have time for that. Killing the mole, the man that made the events unfold the way they did, was the only thing that would give me satisfaction—even then it wouldn’t be enough.
“What is your plan, Scythian?”
“I don’t have one at the moment. What you can do for me is to trust no one from here on out. We have boots on the ground. Let us run the operation the way we see fit. We’ll thin the herd.”
“Agreed,” Max said.
Bludd and I sat down together and made a shopping list of targets. We couldn’t complete everything on our list and continue to work as a team on every project. I wanted Pembroke as a trophy; he was a two-faced rat that would look good mounted on my wall. Carmine Bruno, the guy that ordered Cal and Anna’s torturous death, deserved the same treatment, and I had the stomach for it. There were capos, and enforcers like Frank Rizzi who was culpable in the immigration racket—the reason for Palatini’s involvement—and they needed to die. For the rest of the mobsters, if they got in my way there would be no mercy. It wasn’t just tough talk. I would kill any and all comers.
Bludd was concerned that sanctuary might have been compromised. Staying put was no longer an option. We decided on a must-vacate timeline and started the countdown. There was no way of knowing what information had passed back and forth between Max and Pembroke. He may have unintentionally let slip our location. Since he trusted Pembroke, he’d given it to him having thought it would be in our best interest. We intended to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to find us. We surmised our best bet was to motel hop, one cheap room after another, along the outskirts of the cities in our area of operation. We would stay in one place only as long as we considered it safe and convenient. We would discard our throwaway cell phones for new ones, and do so more frequently. We would become ghosts.
The phone rang. I figured Max was going to be a pest. He wanted a piece of the killing action. However, with the wind in my sails, and an overabundance of energy, I was quick to answer. I wanted to get the show on the road.
“Yo!”
“This is Kuhl, I’m coming in.”
The line went dead. I racked a round into the chamber of my Glock and holstered the weapon. Bludd grabbed his holsters, tossed them on over his shoulders, one .44-caliber draped on either side of his torso. I ejected the magazine from my .40-calber and added another round, bringing it up to sixteen opportunities, then reinserted the magazine.
“What do you think, mate, gangsters?” He suspected a sequel from the previous night. His eyes were bulging wide open from the prospect of such an encounter.
“Kuhl says he’s here and coming in.
We waited for the knock. It was a single rap on the door. Bludd responded. With one .44 in hand, he opened the door with the safety chain in place. It wouldn’t take much to bust the chain, but the slightest edge in a gunfight could make the difference between who lives and who dies. When Bludd was satisfied, he looked toward me, winked, and opened the door.
In walked Thomas Orlando Kuhl. I wasn’t impressed. He didn’t look tough, and he wasn’t a big guy. Less than six-foot tall, fortyish, and in the one-hundred seventy pound vicinity didn’t bring me excitement. I could see his eyes shift quickly from side to side while partially hidden behind the military style black-framed glasses. It was a scan to size up the situation he’d stepped into. I respected him for his behavior, but I still didn’t have anything for him. He introduced himself and put his right hand forth. I had a problem with that. I didn’t want to tie up my shooting hand, not yet.
“Good,” Kuhl said. He walked to the little dining table and took a seat, “Bring me up to speed on the project.” Bludd went to the kitchenette and started another teapot of water while I sat at the table across from Kuhl.
“Do you have something to drink?” Kuhl asked.
Bludd offered him a cup of tea which he readily accepted. I thought to myself, just great—two tea drinkers. Was this an omen? Whether it was for good fortune or bad luck, was yet to be seen. Kuhl removed his Blackwater ball cap, and revealed another commonality he had with Bludd; a shiny bald head. His most prominent feature was on his face where he sported a bristly horseshoe mustache. If he’d had a cowboy hat, he would have taken on the appearance of a western outlaw from yesteryear.
“How did you find us?” I asked. “How did you know where we were?”
Without batting an eye Kuhl said, “Maximillian.”
“Okay,” I said. I realized Kuhl was here to stay. It was time to get down to brass tacks. I gave him the low down straight and in a nutshell. I started with how the project was trashed and continued with a brief synopsis on the crime family, their structure, and their rackets. I ran down the loss of Anna, the people we’d killed, and the fact we were being hunted by the Mob while we hunted them. I included Pembroke’s escape and his priority status on the target list. I sprinkled a little of my philosophy in along the way. The project now was to kill as many mobsters as humanly possible. All of them. Every last one.
As far as I was concerned, there were no innocent mobsters. If they were members of the crime family, they were guilty of a get rich scheme where kids were being used as sex slaves. I was aware there were mobsters that looked down their noses at the human trafficking racket. They should have put a stop to it, but they accepted it. They were likewise guilty.
“We could have used you last night, mate,” Bludd said. “We had a godawful shootout.”
“At the farm—I was there,” Kuhl said.
“If you were there, why didn’t you come forward,” I asked.
“One of you cowboys might have shot me,” Kuhl said jokingly, “besides; I left my calling card for you to find.”
Bludd piped up, “What calling card was that?”
“You found dead guys that you didn’t shoot, didn’t you?”
His question was rhetorical, or at least I assumed it was. “You killed a couple thugs and set the cars on fire?” I asked.
“No, I didn’t set the cars on fire,” Kuhl said with a deadpan look. “I rocked their world!” As Kuhl recalled the event, he became noticeably excited. “I detonated plastic explosives. The same type as y’all use,” he said.
Bludd and I shrugged as if we didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t know what Bludd’s background in explosives was, but I’d never used plastics.
“Well, I have plenty more where that came from. I’ve found it to be handy when dealing with the Mob. There’s a large market overseas for plastics. I have Semtex with me, it’s a commercial grade explosive used in the construction trade for demolition. It’s used all over Europe, very stable, and an easy product to work with.”
I was interrogating our newest volunteer; why not, I felt uneasy. More so now that I had found out Max, and Anna suspected a mole inside, and hadn’t told me. I felt Max didn’t trust me; usually it was the other way around. Now, I had a hard time trusting anyone else. It felt strange to have had the shoe on the other foot. “How did you know where we were last night?” I asked.
“You’d given Maximillian your coordinates for the poww
ow. I’d called to let him know I’d arrived in Buffalo, and he gave me the info. It wasn’t rocket science. I essentially followed the same route you had taken to the turnoff, turned my lights off and crept down the road until I saw a couple cars parked together. I pulled off the road into the tree line…”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I interrupted Kuhl, “You pulled off the road into the woods, how could you have done that, there must have been a foot of snow out there?” That part of the story sounded too farfetched for me to believe.
“I have a four-wheel drive van, and the snow was more like six to eight inches,” Kuhl responded matter-of-factly then picked up where he’d left off. “I used a parabolic sound amplifier, probably similar to the ones you have; only mine is military grade.” Kuhl stopped short of finishing his statement. For a moment, he looked back and forth between Bludd and me before he asked, “You don’t have a listening device, do you?”
“I’ve never found much need for one,” Bludd said.
“I have a smaller version, an acoustic listening device, used for hearing through walls, but nothing for long range listening.” I said.
Kuhl, again jokingly said, “Y’all sure are a bunch of underprivileged killers,” but it wasn’t that much of a joke. Maybe we were. I had become impressed. Kuhl had skills and capabilities that would expand the Palatini abilities to bring death and destruction on a wider scale. Kuhl continued, “I listened to the group of men talk when they were by the two cars at the edge of the field. It was hard to dial in on them; one of the car’s radios was playing, which created interference with the clarity. The group split up and headed down the road to the house. One guy stayed with the cars.”
“We saw him,” Bludd said, “or what was left of him.”
“I’m never sure how a set up like this will turn out. I grabbed my gear, and brushed it until I was close enough to plant some insurance in the wheel wells of the two sedans. Between the music and one guy’s attention directed at the house, it was a cinch to plant the charges. If I had to light’em up, I could; otherwise, I’d shoot them one by one.”
Lawless Measures: Vigilante - The Fight Continues Page 20