SUSAN FANETTI
THE FREAK CIRCLE PRESS
Accidental Evils © 2019 Susan Fanetti
All rights reserved
Cover design by Susan Fanetti, with images licensed from DepositPhotos
Susan Fanetti has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this book under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
ALSO BY SUSAN FANETTI
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~ 2 ~
~ 3 ~
~ 4 ~
~ 5 ~
~ 6 ~
~ 7 ~
~ 8 ~
~ 9 ~
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~ 12 ~
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~ Epilogue ~
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY SUSAN FANETTI
The Pagano Brothers:
Simple Faith, Book 1
Hidden Worthiness, Book 2
The Pagano Family:
(Complete Series)
Footsteps, Book 1
Touch, Book 2
Rooted, Book 3
Deep, Book 4
Prayer, Book 5
Miracle, Book 6
Sawtooth Mountains Stories:
Somewhere
Someday
The Northwomen Sagas:
(Complete Series)
God’s Eye
Heart’s Ease
Soul’s Fire
Father’s Sun
Historical Standalones:
Nothing on Earth & Nothing in Heaven
Carry the World
The Brazen Bulls MC:
(Complete Series)
Crash, Book 1
Twist, Book 2
Slam, Book 3
Blaze, Book 4
Honor, Book 5
Fight, Book 6
Stand, Book 7
Light, Book 7.5
Lead, Book 8
THE NIGHT HORDE MC SAGA:
The Signal Bend Series:
(The First Complete Series)
Move the Sun, Book 1
Behold the Stars, Book 2
Into the Storm, Book 3
Alone on Earth, Book 4
In Dark Woods, Book 4.5
All the Sky, Book 5
Show the Fire, Book 6
Leave a Trail, Book 7
The Night Horde SoCal:
(The Second Complete Series)
Strength & Courage, Book 1
Shadow & Soul, Book 2
Today & Tomorrow, Book 2.5
Fire & Dark, Book 3
Dream & Dare, Book 3.5
Knife & Flesh, Book 4
Rest & Trust, Book 5
Calm & Storm, Book 6
Nolan: Return to Signal Bend
Love & Friendship
As S.E. Fanetti:
Aurora Terminus
For those with childhoods they overcome.
Love and enduring gratitude to my friend TeriLyn, for her deep reading and keen insight, and her wholehearted enthusiasm for helping me make my stories as good as they can be. And to Amy and Kim, for their friendship and steadfast support.
Of your philosophy you make no use,
If you give place to accidental evils.
~ William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Act IV, Scene 3, lines 144-145
~ 1 ~
Tony pressed his back to the cold concrete wall and took a deep breath. The cavernous room blasted with gunfire, shaking his eardrums, and lights swung and stuttered from the ceiling like strobes in a nightclub. Bullets hit the wall on the other side of this small corridor and whizzed past the corner to strike farther down the line.
He gave himself a moment to listen and hear where those shots were coming from and think about the layout of the space. There was cover about ten feet from his position; he could just see its edge. A large crate, about five feet high and eight feet long—almost like a low-rent, plus-size coffin. Big enough he could crouch behind, if he could clear those ten feet without getting hit.
While he scanned his memory of the room in his head, trying to place the shooters and gauge their shots, an explosion rattled the wall he leaned on. A grenade had been launched. He saw a body go flying and didn’t know if it was friend or foe. Shit.
Standing here like a statue wasn’t going to get him out of this situation. With another deep breath to set himself, Tony turned on the corner. A gunman leapt up right in front of him like he’d been waiting for his chance, and Tony fired. He hit center mass and fired again, going for the head.
Before he could get to the crate, another gunman jumped out from cover and shot. The bullet screamed past Tony’s ear, and he dived head-first to the crate. He was fifty feet from the door. Fifty feet and at least two dozen enemies between him and safety.
Body, then head. Body, then head. Body, head. The lesson had become a mantra. He wanted every enemy he hit down forever. Don’t go for the head first in heavy fire. Take the bigger target. Take the beat. Disable, then kill. Not flash, success.
More explosions, more gunfire. His ears rang and his brain throbbed against the inside of his skull. He peered over the top of the crate and saw the rounded shoulder of a man standing about ten feet away, just behind a pallet loaded with boxes. He could hit that shoulder, but which way would the blow force the body? Out of cover, or deeper into it?
Not worth the shot. Instead, he fired at a box on the pallet, about a foot over the head that would be attached to that shoulder. Showing the guy where he was. Then he waited. Take the beat. Take the beat.
The gunman ducked around the corner and fired. Tony shot him in the face.
He got a shot off, though. It slammed into Tony’s shoulder. Shit! He dropped behind the crate again.
There were too many enemies in here for him to pay any attention to the hit, so he ignored it, tried to roll his shoulder and work out the sudden ache. He aimed for his next leap to cover and got on with it.
Body, head. Body, head. He made his way from cover point to cover point. Taking down bad guys as he went, dropping empty mags and reloading, trying to remember to take a beat, set his shot. Success, not flash.
Fifteen kills. No more than ten left. Nine, he thought.
Eighteen kills.
Twenty.
About twenty feet from the door, right under an erratically flashing light like a star flickering its last gasp, he sidled around another tall pallet of plastic-wrapped boxes and came face-to-face with a little girl, the fourth innocent he’d come across in here, and the second child. He caught his trigger finger a nanosecond from its squeeze and grabbed her by the head, shoving her behind him.
Now Tony was shaking, and he stopped where he was, back against the stack of boxes, and breathed until he had his shit back. He inched closer to the edge of the stack—and a barr
age of bullets flew past his face. They hit another tall-stacked pallet and sprayed wide.
More than one shooter in the same place, he thought. He studied the pattern of those bullets, got a sense of how close the bad guys were, how tall they might be. Where a body shot should go.
Okay. He blew out a breath and turned out of cover. Two bad guys, right in the corridor between pallets. They slid back toward cover, but he fired, chasing them before they could get clear. Body, head. Body, head.
All at once, the room filled with the earsplitting wail of a siren, and the lights went still and bright.
“FUCK! WHAT!” Tony shouted. “FUCK!”
He went to the site of his last kills and saw: there was another body, just beyond one of the bad guys. A woman, holding a swaddled infant. There was a gouge through the side of her face where the bullet had struck.
The siren stopped. The brain-rattling noise of explosions and gunfire faded away. Tony stared at the woman and child on the floor, and his mind showed him a different vision entirely, but painfully the same, too.
A small boy, his throat shot away, choking on blood and pain as he died.
A father, screaming for his son in a voice that wheezed with the air leaking from his own open chest.
Tony squeezed his eyes shut, harder and harder until they ached. “FUCK!”
He kicked the body on the floor before him. The ballistic gel gave, and he put his foot clear through the neck of the woman-shaped dummy.
He turned and found one of the cameras, high on a nearby wall. “Reset it,” he called. “I’m going again.”
~oOo~
Wrapping a bleach-stiff white towel around his waist, Tony left the shower and shuffled in his Adidas slides to his locker. The locker room was completely empty, which was how he liked it, personally, but it didn’t thrill him, professionally. He was an investor in this place, and it hadn’t found its market yet. They were more than six months in, and he was starting to worry. He’d put just about everything he had in for a forty-percent share.
The Coastal Ballistics and Self-Defense Center seemed like a great idea to him. People were all about guns and toughness and self-defense these days, so why not make a buck off their balls or their lack thereof?
They’d bought an old bowling alley and recreation center about five miles downshore from Quiet Cove. The place had been big with tourists about ten, twenty years ago, but had gone bust a few years back, and had sat empty and abandoned since. The building was nearly the size of a city block and had three floors. He and his fellow investors had decided to do all that space up right. A gun range, a martial-arts gym, and a shop on the main floor. The top floor held meeting spaces. And the basement was a real-life scenario, automated shooting range, with randomized ballistic-gel bad guys fitted with motion sensors and designed to fire paintballs back, and random collateral innocents to get in the way. All the parts could be moved around, and they had a room full of staging props, so each experience was new.
That had been Tony’s idea and by far the most expensive element of the project. It had taken him a lot of persuasion, some of it Pagano Brothers style, to get his partners on board. He’d had his own reasons for wanting it, but he’d thought for sure all these people who talked about being the ‘good guy with a gun’ would want to get real-life scenario training to test their wits and their chill as well as their aim. So they could actually be, you know, the good guys with guns. Somebody who could actually be useful in, say, a shooting at a school or a church or a mall. Instead of just another asshole making shit worse.
So far, only a handful of people had signed up to use the basement. It was expensive—a thousand dollars for one scenario, fifteen hundred for two, which included training and supplies—but it wasn’t like there weren’t people around here who could afford it. Plus, there was no place like it anywhere along the seaboard. He’d really thought it would be popular.
But it was practically his own personal playground. And he could not afford that. Nor could his partners.
He sat on the bench before his open locker and dragged his hands through his wet hair. Water dropped off the ends and trickled down his bare back and through the hair on his chest, so he grabbed another towel from his locker and dried himself better.
With his eyes closed and the towel over his head, he saw the kid again. Lying on the floor with his throat blown out. Staring up with fear and confusion in his big eyes. Reaching for his father. Dying.
Artem Honcharenko. Seven fucking years old.
And Tony had killed him, because he hadn’t expected him, and he’d fired without making sure of his shot.
~oOo~
After he dressed and checked his look in the locker-room mirror—he wore a suit, not custom, but good quality; he might be only a soldier, but he intended someday to be a capo, and he wanted Don Pagano to see him looking the part—Tony grabbed his bag of gear and weapons and headed out.
He didn’t stop by the front office; he had nothing he needed to tell the employees on the clock right now, and he intimidated them, anyway. He gave Ben, who was at the desk, a brisk wave as he strode past.
“Have a good one, Mr. Cioccolanti!” Ben called in response.
He nodded as he pushed his way through the front doors.
The June day was hot and bright, and Tony squinted against the sear of the sun. This was shaping up to be an unpleasantly hot summer. Even here on the coast, the highs were already in the 90s. His tie seemed to shrink around his neck, but he resisted the urge to pull at it.
He put his bag in the trunk of his black Alfa Romeo Giulia and slid in behind the wheel. Goddamn, the black interior was an oven. As he reached up for his sunglasses, the roar of an engine, moving fast, screeching around a turn into the lot, sent him diving over the console and going for the glove box and his spare Beretta.
The engine noise settled to a growl, and he heard the thumping beat of rock music coming through the panels of the car. Some kind of annoying 80s bullshit hair-band crap, Slayer or Warrant or Bon Jovi. Some old shit like that.
Tony knew who it was.
Still holding his Beretta, he eased up on the seat a bit, so he could check the rearview without exposing himself. Yep, he was right.
Angelo Corti sat in his blacked-out Hellcat, stopped right behind the Giulia, perpendicularly, blocking him in.
How Angie knew exactly when to slide in like this, Tony didn’t bother to wonder. Keeping his eyes on the rearview, he put his side piece away and sat up.
The bassline to some thrasher song rattled the Hellcat’s chassis. Angie put the window down, and the ‘music’ blasted into the heat. Tony got back out.
His boss grinned, black Oakleys slashing across his face. “Hey, John Wick. Get in. We got work.”
“I got my bag in the trunk.” It wasn’t smart to leave that kind of firepower, among other things, just sitting in the trunk of a parked car.
The Hellcat’s trunk popped open. “Bring it. Might need it. And I don’t mean for make-believe.”
Tony popped his trunk and hoisted his bag out.
~oOo~
“Is this Bondaruk shit?” Tony asked as Angie drove. The Bondaruks were a Ukrainian bratva that had been causing the Paganos grief for a couple years now. They’d crushed them twice, eradicating their presence in the States, but they kept coming back, like zombies. But not the slow Romero kind. More like the 28 Days Later kind. Or World War Z. Tough fuckers. Hard to keep track of. Rushing up out of nowhere.
And now they’d allied with another bratva, one with significant roots in this country. The Zelenkos, operating out of Brooklyn. The Paganos had been waiting for half a year to see what their next move would be.
Bogdan Bondaruk, first son of Yuri, the bratva leader, had put feet down on US soil about a week ago, on the day Donnie Goretti, the Pagano Brothers underboss, had gotten married. So Bondaruk mischief was bound to start at any time.
But Angie shook his head. “Nah. That’s comin’ but not today. There’ll be a si
tdown first, Donnie and Bogdan, and they’ll act like gentlemen while they decide there’s no grounds for peace. Then we’ll start killing each other again. My money’s on that meet going south before they actually sit down. So we’ll be ready.”
The barrage of the fucking rock-god guitar riff coming from the stereo—the screen showed Tony he was being subjected to Iron Maiden—was killing his already aching head, but if he touched the dial, Angie would break his fingers. He leaned back in his seat, trying to get a little distance, and yelled over the noise, “So what’s up?”
“Dominicans. There’s a crew dealing from the alley behind the boardwalk. Nick is tired of their shit, so you and me, we’re gonna leave an impression.”
The don didn’t have patience for drug traffic on his turf, and especially not in his town. Traffickers had to go around Rhode Island to move their product, and buyers had to leave his state to undertake anything but the smallest, most personal-use buys. Nick understood that people did drugs, they sold them, bought them, and used them, and not even he could control it, but where he could, he exerted all the control he could.
But there was always some organization thinking they could find the limit of Nick Pagano’s power and skirt his notice, or even face him down. Currently, it was the Dominicans.
“Where are they now?”
“Richmond. ”
“Dominicans are hiding out in Richmond?” He wasn’t sure there was a whiter place in Rhode Island.
Angie shrugged. “That’s the intel. Holed up in a foreclosure off Shannock.”
They were in Angie’s treasured Dodge, the third or fourth incarnation of the same car he’d owned in a row. Black Hellcat. The thing was like his child. No way they were putting bodies in here, alive or dead.
“We’re doin’ ‘em on site?” There was a lot of risk to putting hurt on somebody out in the field. A lot of variables to keep track of. Tony liked it better when they grabbed a target and went home.
“We are. This isn’t wet work. Just damp. They’ll be bleeding but breathing when we’re done.” He made that nasty slash of a grin he had, the one that said he was going to like the job. “Unless they try my patience, that is.”
~oOo~
They tried Angie’s patience.
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