by Brian Hodge
They had followed their mark in the white Daytona, northeast across Tampa, until he arrived at what was presumably his home. A shabby two-story house in a block full of similarly humble dwellings, not far east of the University of South Florida. April had said the general area had been coined Suitcase City, so named for its transient population.
At first they’d parked along with other cars out on the street, a block away but in view of his car in the driveway. But after darkness fell, they knew they had to get closer. Easier said than done; the only available places were too close for anonymity. Justin had turned their car onto an intersecting street, around the corner from the guy’s house. Out of sight as well, as they found what was undeniably an unoccupied house with a badly overgrown lawn and boarded windows. He parked in its driveway. Kerebawa solved the visibility problem by leaving the car and finding a bushy vantage point from which to keep an eye on things. Anything happened, he promised to be back in a flash to let them know. Justin had told him to come back for a shift change when he felt tired.
Hours ago, that had been. Kerebawa seemed adamant about pulling his weight. The only time they had seen him since was after April had hiked off on an expedition for fast food, and they sneaked him some chicken.
Justin keyed the ignition to auxiliary power to check the time. Blue-green digitals, almost two o’clock. From somewhere in the neighborhood he could hear a stereo, through open windows, but it sounded small, far away. A distant lullaby when he didn’t feel much able to sleep at the moment.
He kissed April on wet cheeks, Salty. Nuzzled at her forlorn attempt at a smile.
“What do you want to do to celebrate when all this is over?”
She pulled her hair free where it clung damply to her neck.
“I want to go someplace where it’s cold. I want to feel cold outside.”
A worthy goal. They’d spent too much time sweating in cramped cars, sweating out hopeless situations. Somewhere cold in May, June. Far far north. Sometimes it felt as if he would never know cold again.
“Make love with me,” she said softly. “Please.”
“Right here? Now?”
She nodded. Clutched at him. “I need to feel you with me.”
He stroked her hair, traced a finger along her cheek, jaw-line. “What if Kerebawa comes back?”
“Then he comes back.” She lifted fingers to her blouse and slowly began to unbutton. In the moonlight, her hand was a sensual ghost. “As close together as they live in his village, you don’t think he’s used to that by now?”
“Probably.” It was the last thing he needed to say for a while.
Justin slipped his jeans down as she wriggled out of hers and let them lie in the floor atop accumulated trash. He scooted out from behind the wheel, slumped a fraction to let her turn her back to the windshield and ease down onto him. She gasped, leaned in, and hung on to his shoulder, then swayed back.
Moonlight burned through her hair, turning it platinum, and as she began to ride him with a frantic urgency, he felt on his chest the splash of a single tear.
Late Friday morning, Tony tried on Agualar’s office throne, just for size. It felt a little sprung out by the ample ass of the late, unlamented kingpin, but still, not bad.
He got up, strolled out from behind the polymer desk, crossed the room to a mirrored mosaic on the far wall. Nine separate square mirrors in all, etched with a pattern that looked vaguely Asian. Tony stared past the pattern, checking his reflection. A far cry from last evening. Now he sported one of his two-grand white suits. Freshly showered and shaved up in one of Agualar’s sumptuous bathrooms, with his hair skinned back from his forehead into an immaculate ponytail. He was the resplendent picture of success.
A grand morning, absolutely. Tony had company, inside himself. Chunks of the essence of Rafael Agualar, held eternally in a prison of flesh, locked into a soundless scream. Until he, like Sasha, would be drained into a negated existence. Food for the soul. Tony had never felt so nourished, neither physically nor spiritually.
A knock at the door.
“Yo,” Tony called out.
The door swung half-open and Lupo popped his head in, much as Agualar’s boy Andy had done last night.
“First car just came up out on the drive,” Lupo said.
“You know who it is?”
“Guys at the gate radioed back, said they thought it was Rojas.”
Tony nodded. “Keep everybody waiting out in the front room until they’re all here.”
Lupo said he would, and that was that.
The takeover of Rafael Agualar’s stronghold of a home had been accomplished with military precision. After dispatching Lord High Agualar himself, Tony had waited out the skullflush change in the pond, flexing muscles and psyche alike. Working off the lethargic bloat of his meal. A couple hours before dawn, he climbed painfully out of the water as he became his other self again. No worries about the staff raising an alarm over the boss’s absence; Agualar had signed that particular clause of the death warrant by his own hand — had told Andy in no uncertain terms that he should be left alone all night.
Tony had waited for dawn, and by the time the first blue and pink smudges kissed the eastern sky, he was dressed back in black. When coming out for the moonlight swim, Agualar had left his office exit unlocked; another subconscious suggestion Tony had planted while tiptoeing through the man’s mind. Tony had crouched just beyond the range of the camera covering the unlocked door. Timing was vital here. He knew from Santos’s briefings that he would have a three-second window of opportunity to get inside unseen moments after the camera had finished a thirty-degree pivot, due to the rotation of monitor images in the security room.
Once inside, Tony had retrieved the pistol from Agualar’s office desk, then stalked the plush world of eggshell and gray, up to the second floor. Burst into the security room like a nightmare. He’d just as soon have dropped both guys on the monitors right where they sat. One shot, two shots, wipe the brains up later. But Agualar’s gun was a revolver, couldn’t be silenced. A pair of shots would rouse the rest of the house and sleeping staff.
So he improvised. Held the gun on them while he entered, and in that moment of surprise and paralysis, they offered little fight before he clubbed both their skulls. As he watched them slide to the carpet, Tony knew he’d chosen the moment of attack with a strategist’s eye. Dawn. It was the best time to launch an offensive against an enemy, he had heard. Dawn was when your enemy’s stronghold was in its most psychologically vulnerable state. They’d survived the night, while the greater security of daylight lay ahead, reprieve and finish line all in one. People started to relax their guard. For a wise attacker, dawn was when your punches packed the most.
Tony stripped the fallen security men, bound them with their own shirts, stuffed their mouths with their own underwear, and dragged them into a closet. Then he turned attentively to the matt black console of closed-circuit video monitors and computer grid showing a graphic overhead map of the entire estate. After scanning the control panels for a few moments, he found the in-house remote controlling the front gate. And kept his eyes glued to the gate monitor, showing two guards with too little to do.
Four minutes later, the monitor’s static image showed the Lincoln easing to a halt before the gate. Lupo got out, sipping from a large cup of steaming coffee. Fingers crossed. The pair of guards spoke with him through the gate a moment; Tony had granted him carte blanche on whatever lie he wanted to feed them as an opener. Then in a wink: He pitched scalding coffee into the face of the nearer guard. Next thing they knew, Lupo had produced a silenced automatic and had clipped them down.
At which point Tony pecked the switch to open the gate. The barbarians had just breached the city walls.
Lupo cruised the Lincoln in, the Barrington brothers hidden behind its mirrored glass. A minute behind were another two cars filled with reliable soldiers recruited from street operations, each one rabid for an upgrade in salary and assignment.
Soon followed by a quick, efficient mop-up operation of off-duty sleeping staff. Divide and conquer, search and destroy. A few prisoners, a few casualties. And a few instant defections by some wise souls whose ties to Agualar were solely a matter of employment without sentiment. Tony and Santos had gone over the roster one by one the day before, separating wheat from chaff. Likely candidates for conversion, guys with enough brain wattage to recognize a silver opportunity. And guys whose pigheaded allegiance to an outmoded regime made it pointless to offer them anything other than lead.
Never let it be said that Tony Mendoza killed indiscriminately.
Satisfied with his reflection in the mirror, Tony paced back to the desk. Nervously, he had to admit. Nothing wrong with that. Nerves were good, kept you alert. Nerves kept you thinking and watching, so long as you didn’t let them snowball into panic.
He reached to the floor beneath the desk — ample legroom down there — and brought up a vinyl bag. A softshell camera casethat he’d found upstairs earlier in the morning. He plopped it to the desktop at his elbow as he sat waiting for the final act of the coup d’état to play itself out.
It began ten minutes later. A half-dozen guys whose shiny cars lined the drive, summoned earlier by one of the defectors under false pretenses. Rojas, a walking display of jewelry-store gold. Henderson, fair and vaguely Nordic and wearing light workout clothes. Fernandez, a cherub-faced guy who favored open collars. Others — Riva, Diaz, and Monroe. Agualar’s lieutenants one and all. The next set of links in the chain of command, the men who legged the orders out into the streets, who got things done or delegated responsibility and puppeteered life and death and dealings from a comfortably insular distance. Middle management.
The wary confusion was in their eyes, ushered into Agualar’s inner sanctum by enough familiar faces to make things seem normal enough. But plenty of new faces, too, who made no effort to conceal how well-armed they were. All told, fifteen guys in this office. With more to come when the time was right.
“Mendoza, what the fuck are you doing here?” Fernandez didn’t try to disguise the contempt in his voice as he took a seat before the massive desk.
Tony smiled tightly. “Mister Agualar has finally taken me under his wing. He and I — well, we’ve come to a business arrangement that should interest all of you. He’ll be down in a few minutes. He had a long night.”
“Rafe’s gonna have your balls, he comes in and finds you in his chair,” said Monroe.
A knowing titter rippled among them. Let them laugh, Tony didn’t care. He’d have their undivided attention, and respect, soon enough.
Tony glanced back to the doorway, caught Lupo’s eye, and gave a terse nod. Lupo disappeared for a moment, then came back in escorting Santos. The accountant turned Judas. He had doffed the sunglasses today, although the bruises inflicted by Agualar’s fists had faded only minimally. Other than that, he looked as cool and collected as a grand-an-hour lawyer.
Tony rose and met Santos at the edge of the desk, threw a comradely arm around the man’s narrow shoulders. Ushered him to his own reserved seat behind the desk. A move that brought no small degree of interest from the lieutenants. Legitimacy.
Tony opted to remain standing as he addressed his guests.
“Ours is a business no different from any other,” he said. “You want to know who the movers and the shakers are in the game, all you need to do is follow the money. Money doesn’t lie.”
Let it sink in a moment, make sure they were all on the right track.
“Mister Santos here” — a friendly clap on the accountant’s shoulder — ”with all his financial savvy, has decided to side with me. And this is one smart man, by anybody’s standards.”
Financial savvy. Now there was the understatement of the day. While he didn’t know the combination — that was likely lost with Agualar’s last breath — Santos had assured him that an upstairs wall safe was stocked with roughly five million in emergency cash. No matter; the safe could be cracked. Of considerably greater significance, Santos had access to another fifty-five mil in bank accounts and holdings as far west as Dallas and as far east as Zurich. And sixty million in play money was nothing to take lightly. Sixty mil could sling around vast tonnages of weight.
Especially when considered as a mere seed for greater fortunes.
Tony realized he was letting the thought of all that cash distract him. He barely caught it, somebody bitching about his boast of Santos shifting allegiance. It would be weak to ask the whiner to repeat himself. No need, though. He’d caught the gist of it: Agualar would most definitely have something to say about that. Hell to pay.
Tony merely smiled and unzipped the camera bag. “I’m glad you brought him up, I was about to forget him.” He reached into the bag. “Why don’t you ask him to his face if he minds.”
Tony grabbed a fistful of matted hair and yanked. Like hefting a melon by the vine. He let the vinyl bag fall to the floor and in the same fluid move plunked Agualar’s head onto the desktop. The ragged stump of his neck made a wet slap and dribbled pinkish water, the last drainage of what he’d soaked up in his pond. Tony took care that the ghastly gray face was staring out at the lieutenants, no mistake in the identity.
“Makes a good paperweight, don’t you think?” said Tony. He couldn’t have snared their wholehearted attention any better if he’d snorted skullflush and changed right before them. Controlled pandemonium. You could chart it in their eyes, a comfy complacency over what they thought would be another routine meeting veered 180 degrees away from the norm. Bedlam, babble, and uproar.
At all times, Tony had been keeping one eye on Riva. One of the younger lieutenants, good-looking chisel-faced guy. Looked like he should do shaving cream ads. Santos had filled him in that Agualar and Riva had some sort of father-son rapport. Not the kind of background that would let him take this news with an amiable shrug. Tony watched Riva regain his fragmented composure, then plunge a hand beneath his jacket. Tony had seen enough custom-tailoring jobs to know what hung beneath Riva’s left armpit. He had had a few custom-tailoring jobs himself.
This time, though, the gun was resting in an open desk drawer. Almost immediately in hand, and silenced to save a lot of grief on all their ears in the room’s enclosure. He fired twice into Riva’s chest, sent him tumbling backward to overturn his chair atop himself.
“Sit down!” Tony shouted to the rest. He held the pistol with a rigid arm, bent at the elbow so he aimed at the ceiling.
A very James Bond pose; he wished he could see himself in the mirrors. Should have assigned somebody to film this whole event. “Sit down and shut up!”
He waited a few more beats, and when the silence fell, it was thick with electrified tension.
“Anybody else?” he asked them. “Anybody else stupid enough to let sentiment get in the way of profit motive?”
It was a moment of nervously roving eyes, twitches, and tics. Of dawning realization of being players in a brand-new ball game.
“Let me tell you something.” With equal halves amusement and amazement, he realized he was sporting, at desk level, an impressive erection. Not that anybody was keeping his eyes at half-mast. “Let me tell you something. You think Agualar was gonna keep his fucking head together for much longer? Think again. Every one of you that used to work for him, I just saved you prison time.”
This was always a grabber. Talk of rehab and restitution and making little ones out of big ones was nothing to take lightly.
“You know what kind of man he’d become. Every one of you. He was paranoid. He was hooked on his own supply. His judgment wasn’t worth shit anymore.” Tony shook his head, then took a gentle swipe at Agualar’s. It toppled over with a thump and performed a languid roll, like a jack-o’-lantern nudged by
a careless foot. “It was just a matter of time before he went down, and I promise you, if he’d gone down for the DEA or somebody, he would’ve taken some of you right here in this room with him. Shit rolls downhill, you know.”
Now, at last, a few murmurs of agreement, and Tony bulldozed right ahead, keep the show moving. He flicked another glance back to Lupo and snapped his fingers. Lupo ducked out for another several moments.
A few months back, Lupo had read a biography and insisted Tony read it as soon as he was finished. The book was about Vlad Dracula, the Transylvania-born fifteenth-century prince of Wallachia. Tony had balked at first, but once into it could hardly put the thing down. Forget Lee Iacocca and Donald Trump — this was a man who knew how to rule an empire. Vlad the Impaler, as he’d come to be known, had been the real-life inspiration for the fictional vampire.
That they had managed to water him down into limpwristed, swishing Bela Lugosi was a travesty. Lugosi couldn’t frighten his way out of a wet paper bag. The genuine Vlad was one terrifying monarch. He surrounded his capital with a forest of corpses impaled on huge wooden stakes to warn off marauding armies. When meeting with visiting dignitaries who refused to remove their hats in his presence, Vlad said more power to them and then had the hats nailed to their heads. For all his bloodlust, though, he had been an incredibly successful ruler and defender of his country.
The book’s lessons were not lost on Tony. In a world where you lived by your balls as well as your brains, you could never overemphasize the importance of driving home your point with a good display of carnage. Just to demonstrate that you meant business.
Agualar’s death? A necessity. Shooting down Riva? Self-defense.
Next on the agenda, though…
Lupo and a couple of other soldiers marched in seven guys with the efficiently brisk stride of guards in a POW camp. Former Agualar employees, hands bound with nylon cord behind their backs, mouths sealed over with two-inch tape. Above the tape, their eyes were huge and luminous white, roving for escape or salvation, they didn’t look picky. But the sawed-off shotguns carried by their escorts were all the incentive needed to kneel when told. Before the desk, facing the audience. Pretty maids all in a row.