"The Paggiano family has its heart in this estate, up in Swampscott. About twenty acres right on the ocean. There's a wrought-iron gate that goes around half the property, with the other half bordered by the cliffs. Those are pretty sheer, but there are a couple of places where you could hopscotch down to the waterline if you wanted, but there's no sand down there, just rocks and water.
"Aside from the main house, which is three stories and a basement, there is a large four-car garage and a grounds-keeper's cottage right by the front gate. The gate is motorized and controlled by a remote in the cottage. The cottage is a house in itself; two floors, a basement. Two guys stay there at all times, taking turns to keep an eye on the security cameras, watch the gate, handle any deliveries or parcels that come to the place. They take turns sleeping at night, so there's always someone awake. It's not always the same two men, but there's always two of them."
"You said security cameras?" I asked.
"Yeah, here, see the diagram? That's where they are. Two on the cottage, one covering the gate, the other looking back up the drive towards the main house. Then up at the main house, there's one on each corner, covering the property itself. I know there are monitors in the cottage for all the cameras, but I'm guessing there's another control room somewhere in the main building as well."
"What other security measures are in place?"
"They have dogs, at least two. Dobermans, running free on the grounds at night. During the day there's a fenced-in kennel, right here next to the garage, where the dogs are kept so they don't get out or go after anyone who brings in deliveries."
"The guys in the cottage, do they have guns?"
"I've never seen any, but I'm sure they do. No idea what kind, though."
"And the house?"
"As far as I can tell, there are eight bodyguards who live on the estate itself. Two of them are always in the cottage, six of them up at the house. I'm guessing three stay up at night, three go to sleep. Beyond that there's a cook, a maid, and a butler. Of the Paggianos, right now Pauly, his older brother John, John's wife Mary, and their son Adam stay on the estate. Then there's the head of the family, old man Dominic Paggiano, and his wife, Maria."
"That's a pretty big house. What...fifteen people up there at any one time?"
"Yeah, about that. It's immense though. One of those labyrinthine old mansions with dozens of rooms and no order or symmetry whatsoever."
I gestured to the other documents. "What else do you have?"
She shuffled through several folders. "Brief dossiers on all of the Paggianos and their worker bees. The estate crew do some enforcement work; they aren't just babysitters. Outside of that bunch, there are only a couple hard-hitters worth looking into. I've got photos, homes, schedules, routines, weaknesses, anything you want."
I nodded and finished off my second beer. "Looks like you're pretty good at this."
"I should be. Undergrad at Northwestern, Master's at Cornell, focusing in investigative journalism. Been doing lightweight freelance investigation work for a couple of private dicks here and there, but I spend the bulk of my time working for Richard."
"So you know him too?" I asked.
She was quiet a moment. Getting up, she finished her beer, then went into the kitchen and returned a moment later with the last two bottles opened. Handing one to me, she sat down on the couch again and took a long pull on her bottle before speaking.
"I was born in El Salvador, 1975. It wasn't a very friendly place back then. By the time I was ten, every relative I had was dead, or missing and presumed dead. Although I don't really remember it well, I know Richard was working with the CIA as some kind of freelancer, and he helped get me and some other orphaned children into the States. He found us good homes and made sure we got into good schools. I went to college on his dime. Now I work for him."
"Wow. To tell you the truth, I'm kinda surprised. I wouldn't have thought a tough nut like Richard would have mustered up that sort of kindness."
She tipped her beer bottle back and drained what was left in several fast gulps.
"What fucking kindness? He acquired, educated, and established a network of intelligence assets. We're indentured servants, not charity cases. I don't know what he'd do if I tried to leave, but I know I can't just up and walk away from him. If he hadn't gotten me out of there, I'd have been dead before my next birthday."
I didn't know what to say. A minute passed, and finally I asked, "Do you think this is a bad idea?"
She shrugged. "It's not my place to say."
"But if it was? If I told you I'd walk away if you said it was a bad idea?"
"Would you?"
"What?"
"Would you walk away if I said it was a bad idea? Would you let the people who killed your family and burned your house to the ground go on living?"
I hesitated. She smiled.
"He's gotten into your head, too. Richard. You're a part of his insanity now."
I shook my head. "The plan was my idea. My uncle wouldn't go along with it, so he put me in touch with Richard. Richard said he didn't have an opinion on way or the other, he just said he didn't see a problem with a man taking his own vengeance."
Now it was her turn to shake her head. "Two men who've both seen terrible things in their lives, and they let a young man, with his whole future ahead of him, throw away any chance at a normal life, and you don't think you're being manipulated?"
I was taken aback by this. "I can't imagine my uncle would let me get manipulated by someone like Richard. It doesn't make sense."
She leaned in to me now, only inches away. Her stare was shocking, piercing in its intensity. "Richard has made a pact with Death. He sold his soul, and to keep the Grim Reaper from collecting on the deal, Richard keeps feeding people into the mouth of Hell. It doesn't matter if he pulls the trigger, if you do it for him, or even if it's you who dies. Everyone who comes into contact with him gets sucked into oblivion. You, your uncle, everyone."
There was the beginnings of a laugh in me, but it died when I realized she wasn't kidding.
"Sold his soul?” I said. “You can't really mean that. No one makes a pact with Death. That doesn't even make sense."
She sat back. "There are certain men, certain violent men, who live through the blood and the death all around them, surviving when they should’ve died a hundred times. These men have made a deal, a pact, with Death. In exchange for their lives, they must offer up lives in return. It is an old magic. A dark magic, a warrior's magic. That is the magic of blood and murder, and Richard has practiced it all his life. He’s a sorcerer. A vampire. He may never die, he has seen and caused so much death."
She was breathing hard now, her eyes wild. For no reason I could fathom, the skin at the back of my neck and along my arms prickled, the hairs standing on end.
An idea came to me.
"The brotherhood,” I said.
She nodded.
I looked at her. "And you?"
She shook her head. "I'm just carried along, helpless on the wave. One day it'll crash and I'll be swept away like all the rest. Dragged down into Hell, useful while I lasted, but not any more."
"But he's known you since you were ten years old."
"By the time Richard met me, he’d killed a thousand men, and he's probably killed thousands more since. I wouldn't be worth a thought to him."
"Do you really believe that?"
She paused, looked away, glanced at the empty bottles in front of us, then back to me. There was an unspoken question in her eyes. We just stared at each other, and the silence dragged out into an awkward tension before she finally turned away and looked at my bedroom door.
"I want to get fucked," she said.
The sex was rough, almost desperate. At one point she hauled off and slapped me across the face, hard enough to make me see stars.
"What the hell?" I said, stopping in mid-thrust.
She slapped me again, tears in her eyes. "Don't stop, you bastard! Don't you fuckin
g stop!"
I tried my best to drive her through the mattress.
Later that night we lay awake, sprawled across the bed sheets, neither of us moving. I was almost afraid to say anything. She was clearly damaged goods, damaged in the worst way, although I had no idea how or why. Finally I turned to her, silhouetted next to me in the dark, staring at the ceiling.
"You don't have to tell me your name, but I'd like to know what to call you."
"Call me Sophia," she said.
"All right, Sophia. Do you really believe what you said earlier? About Richard having a pact with Death."
She turned to me. I could see the whites of her eyes in the dark.
"Even though I was very young, I still remember some of the men who would come into my village, the soldiers, the death squads. Most were nothing but jackals, men who killed and raped and looted for fun, because it was the easy thing to do. But some of the killers, they had a fear about them, like an aura of death. They would look at you and your blood would turn to ice and your heart would feel like it had stopped beating in your chest. Those were the men who killed and killed and would never die themselves, time after time. Whether they knew it or not, they had made a pact with the Reaper, a pact to stay alive as long as they kept sending souls in their place."
"And you think Richard is like these men?"
"Don't you? Killing is like breathing to him. He has bathed in the blood of countless murders. I have seen him kill three times, and on each occasion, he should have died time and again, but the other men were a heartbeat too slow, or the bullets a few inches to the left or right. No man is so lucky for so long without something making that luck for him."
"Do you think he is evil?"
"Killing and evil are not always the same thing. I do not think he is a good man, but I don't think he is an evil man, either. I think he is like an earthquake, or a bolt of lightning. If you are in his sights, you die. The only question is, what put you there."
"Do you feel the same aura around Richard that you felt around those men in El Salvador?"
"You are comparing a candle to the sun. Those other men, they were apprentices in the ways of Death. Richard is a master."
"And what about me?" I asked.
"I feel it in you too, a spark. I imagine you are as Richard was forty years ago."
"Then why did you sleep with me?"
Sophia rolled onto me, climbing up and straddling my hips, moving to slip me inside her again.
"Because until I die for Richard, I want to live for myself."
SIXTEEN
A week after meeting with Sophia, I sat on the roof of a four-story brownstone in Brighton and looked down on the evening's killing ground, half a block to the south. Donnie DiMarco, aka Donnie the Dick-Kicker, first-class knuckle-dragging muscle for the Paggiano family, liked to get his knob polished on a regular basis. Donnie kept a dirty little thing by the name of Tina Greene in a one-bedroom on the third floor of the apartment building fifty meters down the street.
At least three times a week, after a long day of kicking the living shit out of anyone Dominic Paggiano didn't like, Donnie dropped by Tina's place and got his ashes hauled. Apparently Donnie was a little possessive of Tina, because one of his toadies tried to swing by Tina's pad a couple of years ago and convince her that Donnie had "rewarded" him with a visit. Apparently Tina was to fellatio as Kristi Yamaguchi was to figure skating, and her performances were legendary and highly coveted. Upon discovering this little ruse, Donnie beat his flunkie into unconsciousness, and then, for good measure, crushed his skull by repeatedly stomping on his face.
Donnie was also, as best as Sophia's investigations could determine, the man who beat my mother and sister to death. It would be difficult to tell for certain, what with the house fire that incinerated their bodies and all, but the coroner was sure that all the breaks and fractures their bodies sustained were the result of a beating severe enough to kill, not just damage due to the fire.
Not surprisingly, I made Donnie DiMarco the first target on my list.
Donnie was a man of inviolate habits. Thanks to Richard's incredibly capable intelligence asset, I knew that Donnie almost always visited Tina after drinking with the boys for several hours, so he never arrived until at least ten o'clock, sometimes later. Doing my due diligence, I'd been up on this roof since eight-thirty, before the daylight had completely disappeared from the horizon. I was hunkered down low, peering over the ledge at the top of the building every few moments to make sure I hadn't missed him due to some quirk of circumstance.
But no, Donnie pulled up in his black Mercedes S-Class at 10:23, coming from my direction and parking in front of Tina's brownstone so that his car was facing away from me. There was plenty of room out in front of the apartment building. I was sure no one, but no one, takes the last spot and forces Donnie the Dick-Kicker to go find a parking space.
Sitting next to me on the rooftop gravel was the DeLisle carbine. I had unfolded the small bipod underneath the barrel, and at a suggestion from Richard, the DeLisle wore a black wire mesh "brass catcher" fitted over the ejection port. When I worked the bolt and ejected the spent brass, it was caught like a hockey puck in the goal net, not kicked out into space where I'd never find it. This kept the casings from being found by some eager police forensics technician, reducing my “forensic footprint”.
The moment I saw the car nosing into the parking space, the moment I knew it was Donnie's black Mercedes and not that of some poor unfortunate who'd later get a beating, I had the DeLisle's bipod propped on the roof ledge. There were other, better vantage points on other buildings along the street, but this was the only building with a ledge of any appreciable height facing the street. I crouched low, decked out in blue jeans, black sneakers, and a dark green windbreaker. I wore a sandy blond wig and a navy blue baseball cap pulled low over my eyes. Good dark colors to blend in with the night, but not some wannabe ninja outfit that’d make me look a little too obvious coming to or from the scene of the crime.
Back to Donnie. I watched him shut off the engine and open the car door, and I couldn't help but notice how utterly massive a creature he was. I knew Donnie was six foot four, well into the mid two-hundreds, with hands like slabs of concrete and a closely shaved, bullet-like skull. A man of Donnie's size can kill a person with a single punch, crushing ribs and causing internal bleeding with a body blow, or delivering a depressed skull fracture with a fist to the head. That is, of course, if the punch doesn't just break the victim’s neck. I had to force myself to breathe deep and pull in the air I'd need when I settled in for the shot. I tried to ignore the mental movie playing in my brain, showing Donnie knocking my sister and mother around my mother's bedroom, like a child might slap and punch a couple of insolent dolls during playtime. My teeth clenched so hard, I could hear them creaking though my skull.
Donnie finally extracted himself from the confines of the Mercedes and stood to his full height, turning away from me as he closed the door of his car. I tried to time the shot so it would coincide with the metallic thump of a heavy car door being slammed shut. As the door closed, I saw the puff of fabric in the middle of Donnie's broad back, as the bullet tore a hole in his tent-sized polo shirt.
Donnie's body didn't even rock from the impact of the subsonic .45 caliber hollowpoint. For a second or two I wondered if Donnie wore some kind of concealable body armor under his shirt, something that had absorbed the impact of the bullet and kept Donnie upright. But by the glow of the streetlamp a few meters from my target, I could see the dark stain spreading between Donnie's shoulder blades, and I knew I'd got him. But still, Donnie stood.
I fired another shot. My hands had cycled the bolt automatically the moment I fired my first round. The second bullet struck Donnie square in the right shoulder blade, landing a little off-target as he turned slightly, his body coming around to look behind him, his movements as sluggish as an oil tanker at sea. That shot caused him to rock back against the side of his Mercedes, but Donn
ie remained on his feet, one massive paw extended out to steady himself on the car. Donnie didn’t shout or cry out or move to cover. At that point I realized he was probably drunk as a skunk, having been out with his wrecking crew for the last couple of hours.
Fuck this, I decided. Working with assembly-line speed and economy of motion, I fired off four more .45 caliber slugs. In the indistinct light of the streetlamp, Donnie's pale yellow polo shirt began to look like blooming sunflowers, as one by one, dark blotches flowered across his chest.
And yet, Donne didn't die. With six bullets in him, Donnie remained upright, though brought to his knees, clinging to the side of his car. Donnie kept himself from collapsing into death by sheer drunken stubbornness and his immense physique. The gleaming bullet head was raised, looking for the source of the gunfire but staring into the shadows of doorways and down the street, not up at the rooftop where I sat, invisible and silent, raining down death.
I realized now why Richard had suggested, when we talked over the phone two nights ago, that I kill Donnie from a distance with the suppressed carbine. If I had attempted to kill him up close and personal, using the Glock or even the shotgun, I might have panicked when confronted with Donnie’s sheer intimidating physicality. If I had shot him, and he didn't drop, I might have paused just long enough for Donnie to cave in the side of my skull with one of his wrecking-ball sized fists. Sniping at him from the rooftop, his intimidation factor went away, and I could kill him without experiencing the fear that close proximity would have created.
Richard, you are one crafty motherfucker.
No man, not even Donnie, was going to live through the punishment I'd delivered. On the other hand, I had no idea how long it would take for his body to finally accept the fact that it was going to stop functioning. Already I could hear shouts, and I saw someone down the street hurrying over to Donnie, mistakenly assuming he was having a heart attack or some other ailment. With my mental countdown ticking away, I centered the crosshairs on Donnie's forehead and sent him my last bullet, just before a concerned citizen reached him to see if he needed help. The bullet caught Donnie just above his right eye, dropping him face-down on the pavement like a felled ox. The hole in the back of his head was big enough to hide a billiards ball. The concerned citizen, a paunchy fellow in his late 40's, promptly turned and puked, then scrambled away from Donnie as if his body was about to explode.
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