“Yeah, and these are my good pants. I didn’t expect to be doing this shit, either,” another voice further back said.
The others broke into a burst of confident laughter, but Scalese didn’t find it amusing. “Shudup and do what I told ya!” he turned and snarled angrily at both of them.
Several of the others stopped at the dark wood line and squinted, trying to see into the dense underbrush. “Wuddaya think’s in there?” one of them asked. “You think there’s any snakes or bears or other shit?”
Scalese opened the breech of his sawed-off shotgun, saw that both chambers were loaded, and snapped it shut loudly. “If I hear any more crap out of youse, I’ll shove this Lupara up your asses and pull the trigger, then you won’t need to worry about no snakes! Now move!”
Bob’s earbud came alive again, with “Ghost, Koz. My kid’s Cub Scout Den’s more organized than these idiots, and they make a lot less noise. I count ten, I say again ten, coming your way in groups of five each down the two trails. Trust me, you’ll hear them.”
“10-4.”
“You want us to redeploy and come in behind?”
“Negative. Stay where you are. I want to draw them all the way in. You two take out the guard. When we engage here, I’ll take down the ones I see, and the rest should go running back to their cars. If I’m right, you'll have a 'target-rich environment’ very shortly.”
“That’s why we came. 10-4, Koz out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“We screwed around here long enough,” Scalese snapped at the four men behind him. “Let’s go,” he pointed toward the path with his Lupara and marched confidently into the dark woods. The others quickly followed, trying to keep up as their leather-soled shoes slipped on the wet grass and gravel. Confidence is a fickle thing, however. The pale-yellow glow from the sodium vapor streetlights ended at the tree line, making the woods beyond seem even darker and more menacing, the closer they got.
Scalese’s feet understood, even if he didn’t. The moment he entered the woods, his steps became halting, until the feet stopped moving altogether. It was as if the dark, damp trees were sucking the willpower out of him. His eyes had not yet adjusted to the dark, and the best he could see were the dim shapes of nearby trees and bushes, while a warm, musty dampness wrapped around him like an old, wet blanket. The four men behind him seemed to have the same problem. When Scalese stopped walking with no warning, they piled into him and each other as if they were in a Three Stooges short.
“Jeezus, ain’t nobody got a freakin’ flashlight,” one of the men behind him grumbled.
“Shut up!” Scalese growled angrily. “And spread out, like I told you morons. Ain’t you ever seen no war movies? You never want to bunch up. So get your fat asses off the trail.”
“Christ, Tony, it’s all mud and crap out there, and I can’t see a damned thing.”
“And who’s da moron, anyway?” a muffled voice asked. “We didn’t pick a freakin’ place like dis for no meet.”
“Shut up and do what I tell ya!” Scalese ordered as he set off down the path again, his men cussing as they crashed through the underbrush behind him.
“Chester, Ace here,” Bob Burke heard. “I have a gaggle of Gumbahs in the South lot. They’re out of their cars and all bunched up like the Iraqi National Guard on field maneuvers. I count eight men on foot approaching our SUVs.”
“Roger that. Prepare to engage on my mark. The group up here is bumbling and stumbling through the woods and finally coming in sight. Am acquiring targets..."
“Yo, Tony,” Scalese heard over his Motorola radio. “It’s Eddie down in the South lot. We got a big problem, here. These two black SUVs belong to the goddamn Chicago cops.”
“The Chicago cops?” Scalese asked, suddenly concerned.
“Yeah, the license plates, the lettering on the sides, even the light bars on top — it’s the goddamn CPD. Maybe it’s their Tactical Unit. You didn’t say nuttin’ about us shootin’ it out wit no cops. My cousin Rico’s wit dem.”
“Wait a minute, let me think,” Scalese slowed down again. “You sure?”
“No question. But dere ain’t nobody here. Wuddaya want me to do?”
Through the pale-green glow of the night vision scope of his own SCAR Mk 17 assault rifle, Bob watched the surprisingly clear shapes of five men emerge through the trees and tall bushes on each side of the trail. In the lead came the broad shoulders of Tony Scalese himself. As much as he’d love to put him down first, the underboss could wait.
“This is Ghost, pick your targets,” he whispered calmly into his chin mic as he placed the crosshairs on the head of the Gumbah who appeared to be farthest away to the left. “Chester, how we doing down there?”
“This is about as good as it gets," Chester answered. "They suddenly stopped short of the SUVs. Looks like one of them’s talking on the radio."
"Roger. On my mark, jam their radio and phones… Five, four, three, two, one, now!”
Scalese raised his two-way radio and was about to reply to Eddie Fanucci’s question, when a loud squeal suddenly hit his ear. “Ah! Goddamn!” Scalese growled. “Eddie, what the…”
In the South lot, Fanucci experienced the same problem. With his radio to his ear, the blast of static cut into his head like a migraine. “Christ!” he exclaimed as he dropped the radio on the asphalt, where it broke into a dozen pieces.
Bob Burke calmly pulled the trigger and watched the impact of the 7.62-millimeter NATO round through his scope. This rifle was a new model he hadn’t fired before; nor did he have the opportunity to ‘zero’ this specific one. As a result, the bullet struck perhaps an inch high and right of where he aimed, not that he would complain about a near-perfect shot under the circumstances. After all, a headshot was a headshot, and the target dropped like an overweight sack of potatoes on the forest floor, dead. The new SCAR featured very little recoil and deadly accuracy. With its noise suppressor, it was unlikely that anyone standing ten or even five feet away would understand what they heard, unless the barrel was pointed directly at them, in which case what they heard wouldn’t matter. Bob quickly traversed the rifle barrel and found his next target.
Jimmy DiCiccio leaned back against the right front fender of Tony’s Lexus and paused to look up at the stars. The two groups of “family” gunmen were gone now, having disappeared down the trails into the dark Forest Preserve. That was fine with Jimmy, and good riddance. He was painfully overdue for a left hip replacement, and entirely too old to play hide-and-seek in the woods chasing an ex-soldier and one of the girls from the office. He had seen Linda Sylvester at the front desk often enough to know she seemed like a nice kid. So did the one in the backseat of the Lexus with the little girl. Every now and then, DiCiccio turned his head and glared at the doctor. DiCiccio kept his Colt Python revolver out, making sure the ‘Doc’ saw it too. DiCiccio had also worked security in the CHC building off and on, and he had heard the stories. He was a good Catholic. If it were his decision, he’d march that evil prick Greenway into the trees, cap one behind his ear, and never shed a tear. He did that to plenty of other guys for Old Sal, but the truth was there was already too much blood on Jimmy’s hands. He respected Mr. D, but they were both getting a little old for this stuff. He didn’t think much of Tony Scalese, however. If Tony ended up in charge… well, then it would be time for Jimmy to dust off those retirement brochures for Miami Beach and say goodbye to the Chicago winters.
He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, bent down, and lit one with his old Zippo lighter. He took a deep drag and was actually beginning to enjoy the crickets and the other earthy sounds of the forest, when a 7.62-millimeter rifle bullet hit him in the cheek and blew on through, splattering his brains, blood, and half his head across the front windshield of the Lexus.
Inside the car, Patsy Evans screamed and covered Ellie’s eyes, and Lawrence Greenway’s mouth dropped open. He was a doctor and had personally covered the late-night shift in his inner city clinics on ma
ny occasions. The sight of blood and gore like this, even a lot of it, didn’t usually bother him. However, the shock of seeing old Jimmy’s blood and brains suddenly running down the Lexus’s front windshield was a “game changer” for him, as they say.
“Ghost, Koz. The guard’s down. Want us to take the car?”
“Not yet. The others will be coming back and you need to re-target to the trailheads. After you knock them down, have the Batman take the Lexus while you provide cover. Copy?”
“Roger.”
“Ghost, Ace. One down and two go on my side.”
“Ghost, Chester. Two down and two to go on mine, but the rest took cover behind the SUVs with Ace’s leftovers.” Keeping his own quick body count, that meant six down and twelve to go, including Scalese.
“Chester, Ace. They won't stay there long. I have a good angle. I’ll see if I can skip a couple of rounds underneath and flush them out.”
“Go for it, but don’t hit the SUVs. We’ll need them.”
As he talked, Burke put the crosshairs of his rifle on another head, aiming slightly lower and left, and pulled the trigger. The result was the same. The second Gumbah toppled over backwards into the bushes with a loud grunt. Both of the gunmen he put down had been walking behind Scalese. As he watched, the big Italian continued to try to fix his radio, oblivious to what was going on around him, or that two of his men behind him were now down. He finally screamed at the radio, and threw it against a tree in frustration.
As Bob turned his aim on one of the two men still standing behind Scalese, two loud Booms went off behind him as Ernie Travers opened up on the other trail with his Benelli 12-gauge shotgun.
“Jeez, Ernie!” Bob turned his head away and complained, as the shotgun blasts broke his concentration and sent his rifle shot high and wide. Out of the corner of his eye, however, he saw two dark shapes go down from Travers’ buckshot. That made eight, he figured, but the advantage of surprise went down with them.
“Yeah, but even I can’t miss with this thing. Damn, this is fun, Bob!” Travers laughed.
Through the scope, he watched as Scalese and his two remaining street thugs tried to squeeze behind some of the thicker tree trunks. In a dense forest like this, sound ricochets. They twisted and turned, but could not tell where the gunshots were coming from. To make matters worse, they could now hear a fusillade of gunfire coming from the South parking lot — unsilenced, large-caliber pistols from the sound of it, which meant his crew.
When one of the Gumbahs behind Scalese peeked around the trunk of a thick oak, Burke took him out with another clean head shot. The man toppled over backward, landing spread-eagled on the ground near Tony’s feet.
Scalese twisted around and looked back up the trail, convinced that the gunshot must have come from the parking lot behind him. Confused, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket, turned it on, and looked at the display, but there was nothing there — no bars, no apps, no nothing, only a blank screen. He was stunned. Even the goddamned cell phone was working against him now. In a fit of rage, he smashed it against a tree with a loud “crunch.”
Finally, he turned toward his last remaining gunman. “Corso,” he called out sharply. “This way, come on! We gotta get to that picnic area and find some cover, quick.”
“Like hell, I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Corso answered. He was lying flat on the wet, muddy ground, looking around at the growing collection of bodies near him, as he crawled behind the biggest tree he could find. “You and your freakin’ big ideas, Tony!”
“Well, we can’t stay here. I think they’re shooting at us from the parking lot. Maybe we can work our way south and meet up with Eddie Fanucci and his boys.”
Scalese tried to look through the dark shadows to the other trail, where he expected to see his second team coming in from the North lot. “Johnny!” he shouted and waited for a reply that never came. “Johnny G., you over there?”
Finally, a familiar voice called back to him. “He’s down, Tony. It was that freakin’ shotgun.” Scalese knew that was one of Johnny G’s crew talking. “And he’s hit bad,” the man shouted out. “Christ, he’s bleedin’ like a stuck pig. That bastard Greenway's a doc, ain't he? He still back in your Lexus? Well, we’re gonna drag Johnny and Petey back there.”
“No, no! You need to keep heading for the picnic area... You’ll pay for this, you rats, the both 'a youse,” Scalese barked, but they weren’t listening to him any longer. “Corso! Come on, let’s go.”
“Not me, Tony. Those guys are right. I’m goin’ back to the car with them.”
“You son of a bitch,” Scalese screamed. As Bob watched through his night vision scope, Corso crawled away through the brush, trying to find the trail that led back to the parking lot. Bob took aim, but before he could shoot, Scalese stepped from behind his tree, took two steps toward his own man, and fired both barrels of the sawed-off shotgun into Corso at point-blank range. The flaming-red blast from the 12-gauge Lupara bounced Corso off the ground and almost cut him in half.
Well, Bob thought as he watched Corso’s lifeless body lying in the bushes, that makes eleven down and seven to go — the two heading back up the trail here, the four pinned down behind the SUVs in the South lot, and Tony Scalese.
“Koz, Ghost,” he called, knowing he should warn the team covering the North lot. “Two Gumbahs are retreating back up the trail toward you."
“Copy that.”
“Ghost, Ace here. We put a couple of rounds under the car and they took off like quail flushed from a Nebraska cornfield. Chester and I dropped two of them, but the last two got away. We might have winged one, but as far as I can see, they’re still runnin’ up the entry road beyond the streetlights. Do you want us to go after them?”
“Negative. Let ’em go. They aren’t worth the risk, and I don’t care if someone makes it back to tell the tale. Chester, disable their two cars, then you and Linda go back to the SUVs and get ready to leave. Ace, you and Vinnie come back up to the campground, south side, ASAP."
“Roger that.”
Now, it was Big Tony S’s turn, Bob decided.
The evening had not exactly gone the way Tony Scalese planned, he thought, as he bent down behind a tree and reloaded the Lupara. He brought eighteen men with him. As best he could tell, over half of them were already down, maybe all of them; and he didn’t have a clue what hit them. No, that wasn’t true. It was that bastard Burke, the little “telephone” twerp. Other than those two shotgun blasts and a lot of moans and groans, he hadn’t seen or heard a goddamned thing. Were they using silencers? That had to be it. Even so, who could make those kind of shots at night, out in the woods? Nobody he knew. The bastard wasn’t human. As for Eddie Fanucci and his boys in the south lot? With their radios out, who knew? Scalese was completely in the dark, literally and figuratively now. All the boys he brought with him were “made men,” tough street soldiers whom he had begged and borrowed from one DiGrigoria crew or another. Most of them were now dead or running back to the cars, and the entire operation had blown up in his face. There would be hell to pay in the morning. When Mr. D called him on the carpet to answer for all of this, Tony knew who the last casualty would be. It would be him.
Scalese knew he should never have taken out his frustrations on Louie Corso, but the dumb bastard wouldn’t follow orders. The truth was, if Scalese could have hit those other two with the Lupara or the Colt .45, he would have done that too. Unfortunately, by the time he reloaded the shotgun, those cowards were long gone, disappearing up the trail and leaving him alone in these wet, stinking, goddamned woods.
“Ghost, Koz. We put down the two coming back to the North lot from the trailhead dragging two other guys. While we were doing that, somebody got out of the back seat of that Lexus, got in the front, and is driving away. You want me to stop them, over?”
Bob thought about it for a brief second and answered, “No. Cease Fire. The girl might be in the car, and I can’t take that chance. Let them go.”
Sca
lese figured his best shot was to work his way down to the South parking lot. He bent over as low as he could and crept slowly through the trees, hoping he might be able to sneak away and find Fanucci’s boys. Unfortunately, the farther he went into the woods, the underbrush and the trees only got thicker and thicker, snagging his new sharkskin sports jacket and scratching his face. He tried to bull his through the bushes; but he was making more noise than a rampaging moose in heat, so he stopped. His mind immediately conjured up that scene in Lord of the Rings again, when the trees came alive and closed in on the evil, white-robed wizard, and a shiver ran down his back. That had to be it, he thought. It was the goddamned trees! They were creeping him out again.
Every twenty feet or so, he stopped and listened intently for any sound, but all he heard were the goddamn crickets and the mosquitoes buzzing around his ears. Off to his right, through a gap in the trees, he finally saw the grassy picnic area in the pale, white light of a quarter moon, so he set off in that direction. Maybe he could work his way around the edge and find the path to the South lot. Yeah, that could work. His luck might’ve run bad, but that didn’t mean Eddie Fanucci and his crew weren’t down there waiting for him at that very minute. Then, he’d get them organized and come back up here. Yeah! He still had his Lupara, his Colt .45, and his stiletto, and there would be payback. Nobody could do this to Tony Scalese and live to get away with it, especially not that little prick Burke.
He finally reached the edge of the picnic area and looked at it through the trees. He saw a tall, white pavilion standing in the center, with picnic tables scattered around it under the maple and pine trees that dotted the open area, casting deep shadows in the moonlight. The pavilion itself had a steep cedar shingle roof, a tall cupola, and a raised, wooden dance floor with a wooden railing, which now lay in deep shadow. Still, it was dead quiet and the picnic area appeared to be empty. No time to stop now, he thought, so he decided to make a break for it. He got to his feet, lowered his head, and set off toward the pavilion at a dead run. When he reached it, he tried to take the stairs two at a time and jump onto the raised wooden dance platform, but his middle-aged legs were too tired and wouldn’t jump that high anymore. The toe of his shoe caught the edge of the top stair and he stumbled, crashing painfully onto the dance floor. As he did, he lost his grip on the shotgun and heard it skitter away into the darkness.
Burke's War: Bob Burke Action Thriller 1 (Bob Burke Action Thrillers) Page 34