Machine's Work: A Hyper-Violent Crime Thriller (Assassination City Book 1)

by Jack Cuatt

  Machine eases the Smith from the shoulder holster as he crouches in the dim bedroom. Now that he's inside, he’ll need the quiet certainty of the familiar weapon, not the firepower of the Škorpion. For a moment, he listens and waits.

  No footsteps. No voices. But there are still two corpses out on the lawn. He needs to move fast.

  He knows from the architect's plans that the two doors on the opposite side of the hall lead into Scarpo's suite. The far door opens into a sitting room, the other, the one directly across from the room Machine is in, opens into the old man’s bedroom. A large dressing area connects the two rooms. He wonders if Scarpo is in bed yet? Probably not. He should still be downstairs counting the money his nephew has just dropped off.

  Machine crosses to the hall door and opens it a crack. Crouching to reduce the chances of being seen, he presses his eye to the gap and looks down the hallway. The lanky blond has shifted in his seat, but he still looks asleep.

  Or is he?

  The man’s breathing doesn't seem as deep and even as it had through the window. His chest rises and falls. No other movement. He must be asleep.

  Machine steps into the hall, his eyes on the dozing man and the stairs beyond, closes the door quietly behind him, turning the knob so the latch doesn't click, and steps to Scarpo's bedroom door. He tries the knob. It's locked. He has to make a snap decision; pick the lock and risk the exposure or take the chance of creeping to the sitting room's door, twenty feet closer to the sleeping goon. He starts toward the far door.

  The sleeper’s head slumps further toward his chest and he mutters something. Machine freezes. For several seconds he remains motionless, trying to determine whether the soldier is awake or playing possum. The sentry snorts, licks his lips and seems to settle into deeper sleep.

  Machine whisper-steps to the sitting room's door and tries the knob. It's unlocked. He pushes it open and slips through the gap, into a dark, silent room. He halts just inside the door and waits for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  He’s standing on a narrow three-foot ledge that encompasses a rectangular, sunken sitting room filled with low leather furniture in bright colors, and carpeted in deep black shag. The furniture sits tight against the ledge to allow for a monstrous glass coffee table. Glass and chrome tables support lamps with shades in primary colors. Modern art prints dot the whitewashed walls. The door to the dressing room and the bedroom beyond is directly to his right, five paces away. Machine heads that way, walking softly, the silenced Smith & Wesson leading the way.

  A soft noise comes from the bedroom just as he reaches the dressing room doorway. Light footsteps coming his way. He steps close to the wall and presses himself flat. A moment later a silhouette appears in the doorway, pauses then steps past him without seeing him. The shape is small, the hair long and light-colored. Machine smells cigarettes and expensive perfume. A woman.

  Machine raises the Smith as she starts to turn, her mouth going wide. He gets the impression of black roots anchoring light brown hair just before the 9mm's barrel cracks into the side of her skull. Her eyes roll up and she collapses against him. He catches her one-handed and is lowering her to the carpet when the hall door swings open and the blond sleeper from the hallway steps in, his shotgun at hip level, his bony right hand locked around the shotgun's pistol grip.

  The sleeper sweeps the room with the barrel of the gun, looking for a target. He’s still looking when Machine shoots him twice in the side of the head, splattering his brains across two paintings, a red leather chair and six square feet of white wall. The sleeper goes straight down, the carpeting muffling the thump.

  Machine hurriedly steps over the dead man to the open hall door and looks up and down the empty corridor. No one in sight. But that doesn’t mean no one is coming. The sleeper’s quiet entrance into the sitting room had appeared to Machine to be the actions of someone who thought they had seen or heard something and was merely checking it out, not the actions of someone who was sure they were walking into a gunfight. Still, Machine has to assume the sleeper had alerted his comrades.

  He kicks the sleeper’s legs aside and eases the door closed then steps over the dead man and the unconscious woman, back into the corner nearest the dressing room door. From the shadows, he faces the hall door, the 9mm in his hand, hammer back, and waits.

  Five minutes pass and nothing happens. He chances another look up and down the hall. It's still empty. He pushes the door closed, stoops by the girl and presses his index finger to her throat. A strong, steady pulse vibrates beneath her sallow flesh. The girl has overlapping, uneven teeth and bad skin. Her parted lips are smeared thickly in red. She's wearing a skimpy see-through blue robe with nothing underneath. Scarpo's current toy, not any older than Machine himself.

  He drags her through the dressing room into the bedroom, her heels leaving furrows in the black shag, then heaves her up on the bed and dumps her there. She offers no resistance; she's out cold. With the electrical tape from the chest-pack, he does a quick job on her hands, feet and knees, wrapping them tight, but not tight enough to cut off circulation. He checks her nostrils for blockage before placing a strip of tape over her mouth then makes a quick tour of the bedroom.

  The bedroom is decorated in the same style as the sitting room, primary colors, chrome, and glass. There are no chairs or sofas, just huge, multi-colored pillows heaped in the corners. A purple parachute sags from the ceiling, anchored at the corners. The room has the look of a color-blind pasha's tent.

  Machine rifles the drawers of a dresser and finds a neat stack of T-shirts. He takes them to the sitting room and wraps what's left of the sleepers head in them then ties them off around his skinny neck, covering the worst of the damage. He grabs the body by its wing-tips, drags it into the bedroom, and dumps it on the far side of the bed, near the window overlooking the front lawn.

  Back to the sitting room. With the rest of the T-shirts, he wipes down the chair and pictures. He tries the same thing on the walls, but it doesn't work. The blood smears the water-based paint into pink swirls. He turns to the wet bar, fills the ice bucket with water and sluices the wall. Some of the blood and paint washes away to be absorbed by the dark shag. He repeats the process a dozen times. By the time the wall is clean, the carpet is as damp as a used beach towel, but the dark nap doesn't show the blood.

  Machine rehangs the pictures, replaces the ice bucket and returns to the bedroom. The girl is still unconscious. He crosses to the window overlooking the front lawn, settles on his haunches and peels back the curtain. In the distance the gate can be seen beyond the pine windbreak. Two of Scarpo’s crew are standing near the gate house, jabbering at each other.

  Behind him, the girl moves, writhing groggily, then comes suddenly, sharply alert. She tries to sit up, finds that she can’t and starts to fight, thrashing and wriggling like a landed fish.

  Machine stands and circles the bed, holding the silenced 9mm parallel to his leg, out of sight. He doesn't want to frighten her any more than he already has. Her eyes lock on him and her face spasms behind the tape. Machine reaches for her shoulder, speaking as soothingly as he can, unwilling to strike her again unless absolutely necessary.

  “I'm not here to hurt you. I’m here for Scarpo.”

  The girl jerks at his icy touch and a muffled moan escapes the tape. Her eyes roll and her bare feet dig into the comforter. She shoves herself across the bed, getting dangerously close to the edge. He taps her skull with the barrel of the Smith. Lights out.

  He sits down on the corner of the bed, facing the dressing room door, the 9mm resting on his knee, and waits.

  26

  Time passes. Machine checks his watch. Almost 10:30 PM. He wonders if the card game is still going. By the amount of food and beer on the table, it should be a late night for the players seated ten feet from the claymore.

  The sigh of the sitting room's hall door opening brings him instantly alert. The dressing room's gloom is briefly alleviated by a spill of light from the hall,
a set of footsteps cross the threshold, and the door clicks quietly closed. Darkness again.

  Machine glides to the wall beside the dressing room door, presses himself flat, and waits. His pulse throbs in his head. He holds the Smith at a forty-five-degree-angle, ready to drop and pop anyone coming through the door. But no lights come on. The footsteps don't resume. The seconds stretch. Machine is on the verge of creeping into the dressing room when the footsteps resume. Then a whisper of shoe leather on carpet. The steps are slow and heavy, a man's. They cross to the dressing room, enter it and stop again, inches from the bedroom door, only two feet from Machine.

  Labored breathing and the smell of cigar smoke. Scarpo? The man steps through the door.

  He's five foot six and hunched-shouldered, obviously well past sixty, but still rock-steady on stubby, bowed legs. His features are blunt and brutal, as if they were carved with a dull blade. His eyes are small, black and set in rheumy sockets. Scarpo for sure. Without further hesitation, the old man heads for the bed and the dark shape of the girl, a fat brown envelope dangling from his right hand.

  Swiftly, Machine holsters the Smith, steps behind Scarpo and punches the old man in the base of the skull, pulling the punch at the last second so he doesn't kill him. Scarpo changes from solid to liquid. Machine catches him under the arms and eases him to the carpet.

  Machine pulls out the silenced Smith, thumbs the safety off and leans down over the old man, keeping alert to the room's two doors. He slaps Scarpo across the face. And then again. And again. Finally, Scarpo blinks and winces. Both his arms rise then flop weakly to rest.

  “Fuck...?” He groans and shakes his head. “Wha...” he slurs, trying to focus on the dark shadow stooping over him. He flinches as the image comes clear, recognizing Machine for what he is - a killer.

  “Fucking—” He breaks off, coughing. His eyes grow clearer. His lips curl and his hands clench into fists. He shows no fear; Scarpo is a banger of the old school, hard until stiff. “Who's paying you, you fucking crawler? I wanna know who's pulling that fucking trigger.” The old man tries to sit up, but his arms aren't up to the task. He settles back to the carpet.

  “Tell me the name of the chopper you paid to work Moses Slaski and I'll make it easy,” Machine replies through his teeth, ready to pull the trigger, wanting to kill Scarpo more than he has ever wanted to kill a man in his life. It was by this man's order that Connie Slaski was killed.

  The old man grunts, and shakes his head. “I don't know a Moses. I—”

  “Red Sleeves.”

  For the first time the old man's eyes show a flash of emotion; fear. “Bullshit,” he hisses. “Bullshit. I pulled the fucking bounty. We had a deal. I fucking paid!” His voice grows louder by the word.

  “Paid?” Machine asks, realizing as he asks the question what the old man means: Moses had changed sides. He had betrayed Kukov, turned on the mob family. A chill runs up Machine's spine.

  “Right fucking here,” the old man says, talking loud. “Two hundred large plus two kilos of black tar up front. Twenty grand a month until the war's over. I fucking paid!” Scarpo starts to lever himself off the carpet. Machine discourages him with a quick kick in the ribs. The old man crumples, gasping in pain.

  The girl on the bed moans and rolls onto her back, blinking her eyes. Machine ignores her.

  It takes Scarpo a minute to get his breath back, but the kick doesn't teach him anything.

  “I know who you are, you fucking spook,” he wheezes, “You’re that bastard’s kid. The fucking Machine. But you ain’t so tough that you can get out of here. You kill me and you die too. My guys will chew you up,” Scarpo snarls then tries to push himself off the floor one more time, glaring at Machine like he's decided to do the chewing himself.

  Machine believes the old man. The deal is just the kind of thing Moses would have done, especially for two kilos of heroin. And that means Machine's business with Scarpo is finished. And so is Scarpo.

  Machine pulls the Smith's trigger, the barrel only two feet from Scarpo's face, and a two-inch diameter hole opens in Scarpo's forehead and his skull bounces off the carpet. For a moment, he twitches like he's got a live wire in his head, then becomes slack. His sightless eyes stare up at the purple parachute as a wave of blood flows out from the back of his skull. But Machine isn't paying attention to Scarpo anymore, he’s staring unseeingly at the wall, shoulders sagging. The raw fury bleeds out of him, burning out as quickly as a grass fire. All this killing for nothing. To be back at square one. A noise behind him makes him turn. The girl is awake again. She mewls through the tape, eyes popping. He looks away, shamed by her fear, and spots the envelope that the old man had been carrying, lying on the carpet, splattered with blood. He stoops, picks it up, and peels back the flap.

  Four fat packets of hundred dollar bills. Forty thousand in all. Certainly not the day’s total, just Scarpo's cut off the top. Machine slips the envelope into his waistband and crosses the room to the window overlooking the front lawn. He stays left of the glass, peels back the curtain and takes a look over the dark landscape, the driveway and the yard falling away to the gate. It looks normal. The guards at the gate are in the same place as before, still gabbing.

  Not for much longer.

  Machine kneels by the window, digs into the chest-pack and extracts a black plastic container shaped like a rifle stock. Stored inside the hollow plastic stock is the firing mechanism and barrel of a collapsible Czech-made sniper's rifle. The rifle chambers a 5.56mm round and is fed by an eight-round box magazine. Its strongest attribute is accuracy, which will be spoiled slightly by the need for a silencer. He swiftly screws the barrel down on the firing mechanism and trigger housing then clamps it to the stock with a pair of wing nuts. The Starlight scope, taken from the sniper at Tommy's trailer, attaches to a ridge that runs the length of the rifle’s trigger housing. The scope is outdated and battered from much use, but still serviceable and much simpler than the digital equipment more prevalent today.

  As Machine's hands work, his mind chews restlessly at the pain nurtured since the killings at the Metro. He had expected a feeling of release with the death of Scarpo, but the old gangster hadn’t ordered the hit. All the killing, two men in this room, another outside, and how many before that? He knows the number, but refuses to think it. For his mother? No, Connie would be sickened by what her son has done. He has done this for himself. For revenge. For nothing. Just as Marie Kukov said in the cemetery that day. Machine pushes that thought aside. He won’t think of Marie now. Not here. It will only cloud his judgment.

  Taking a six-inch silencer from the chest-pack, he twists it onto the rifle's threaded barrel. Behind him, the girl pants through her nose, her makeup streaked by tears. He ignores her.

  No good can come from this, he thinks bitterly as he parts the curtains. He is no different from Scarpo or Kukov. No better, perhaps worse. How many fathers has Machine killed? How many orphans bear his stamp? He has surrendered himself to a nightmare of revenge that is only just beginning.

  “I have work to do,” he whispers. The collapsible rifle is light and true in his hands, an extension of himself. “I must do this and then everything can change. I can change. Become something...” His thoughts sputter out, he doesn't know about after. Can't think that far ahead. He leans the rifle against the wall, reaches up and flips the window's latch. Gently, he pushes the sash up five inches, just enough for the rifle and scope.

  On one knee, he edges the rifle's slender barrel over the sill, snugs his cheek against the stock and seats the butt firmly against his shoulder. He lays his finger over the trigger guard, puts his eye to the scope and night turns to day. He pans the scope over the front half of the estate, a painstaking one-hundred-eighty-degree search for Scarpo’s crew. The two at the gate are easy. The glow of cigarettes moving in their hands is bright green in the scope's circle. The others take more time.

  There are three in all. One is perched twenty feet up a willow tree outside the estate's walls
, obliquely facing the gate, his profile to Machine. A sniper's rifle with a night vision scope lies across his thighs. The two other soldiers are nearer to the house, inside the walls. One is fifty feet to Machine's left, seated on an iron bench near an evergreen hedge. He too is facing the gate, his back to the house. The other guard is the only one facing the house. He’s about the same distance away on the right, standing just inside a deep pocket of shadow created by a ghostly clump of birch trees. He's picking his nose and flicking his finger at the grass, absorbed by the task, an AK-47 strapped over his shoulder. He will be the first to die, Machine decides dispassionately. He's the farthest from the two at the gate, who will be the last to go.

  Machine takes a deep breath. The lightweight rifle rises on the intake and settles as he exhales. Thorough and fast, he tells himself. Eliminate them before anyone notices what's going on, or at least before phone contact can be made with the crew in the bunkhouse.

  The Starlight draws the guard’s head close, filling the lens. A wide forehead, narrow chin, unshaven jaws all washed a limpid green by the scope's light gathering device. The cross hairs center on his brow.

  The guard scratches his neck, shifts the AK to his other shoulder and yawns without covering his mouth. Through the scope, his mouth is darker than the night, rimmed in glittering teeth. Machine strokes the trigger.

  The gun's kick is light against his shoulder. It whispers through the silencer and a 5.56mm steel-jacketed, subsonic round speeds from the barrel.

  The bullet is mercury-tipped, designed to shatter on impact. It streaks across the yard, splits the guard’s skull above the right eye and gouges into soft tissue. A split second later, the dense mercury, sealed in a hollowed-out chamber at the tip of the slug, slams forward and explodes the bullet's steel jacket. Caught in mid-yawn, the man rises on tiptoe, arches his back, and collapses into the shadows. Machine strokes the trigger again and puts an insurance round into the man’s chest.