by Jonas Saul
PUBLISHED BY:
Imagine Press
ISBN: 978-1-927404-01-0
The Kill
Copyright © 2012 by Jonas Saul
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Beginning
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
The Crypt - A Preview
About the Author
The Kill is dedicated to the family of that UPS driver. May he rest in peace.
Jonas Saul Titles
The Sarah Roberts Series
1. Dark Visions
2. The Warning
3. The Crypt
4. The Hostage
The Kill Series
1. The Kill
2. The Blade (Summer 2012)
The Threat
The Shock
Short Stories
Visitations - A Book of Short Stories
The Burning
The Numbers Game
Trapped
Suicide Note
The Elements
Hatred
The Reaper
The Ruse
Bound
Vengeance
Prologue
Vincenzo Fuccini reached inside his Armani jacket and gripped the butt of his weapon, which hung suspended in his shoulder holster. No one would die tonight. Not if he had anything to do with it.
Vincenzo turned in his seat and looked back at Ronnie and Frankie. Both men sat ramrod straight in the backseat, staring out at the passing countryside as the sun dropped below the warm July sky.
“Ronnie, Frankie, you both know what you’re supposed to do?”
Ronnie turned to face Vincenzo. “Yeah, Boss. We got it. Anybody who is not supposed to be there, we take them out. Any sign of trouble toward you, we take them out.”
Frankie nodded his understanding and then said, “We got this, Boss.”
“Good. Don’t let it get fucked up, because if it does, we won’t be going home, even if we walk away tonight. There are powerful men at this meeting.”
“Ahh, Boss,” the driver said. “Don’t talk like that. Your dad would kill us in the worst way possible if anything happened to you.”
Vincenzo turned back around in his seat, let go of the weapon he’d been gripping, and placed his hand on the armrest of the door. He could never remember the driver’s name. They changed so often that he stopped caring who they were.
“Nothing is going to happen tonight,” Vincenzo said. “Believe that. We make our deal and we leave.”
They continued on in silence, racing along the back-country road, heading to an abandoned airplane hangar in their brand new black Cadillac, each man lost in his thoughts.
Lights in the distance alerted Vincenzo that they were close.
“Slow down,” he said, “and cut the headlights. Here is good.”
The driver slowed the Cadillac and pulled over to the side. He flipped off the lights.
“Okay, Ronnie, do this and do it right. When the deal is over, we can’t pick you up. It’ll be too obvious. Just do what you gotta do and when everyone leaves, fall back and wait. We’ll come for both of you an hour later. Got it?”
Ronnie nodded and looked at Frankie. He nodded too.
“I want to hear it. Got it?”
“Yeah, Boss. Got it.”
“Frankie?”
“Got it.”
“Wait for my okay, and then go,” Vincenzo ordered.
Vincenzo opened his door and slowly stepped from the car. He stood by his door, placed both hands near his crotch and pretended to take a piss as he scanned the woods on each side.
After a moment, he tapped the roof of the vehicle and whispered, “Go.”
The back door on the passenger side opened, and Ronnie jumped out, followed by Frankie, who shut the door softly enough that Vincenzo heard the click as the lock snapped in place. Then both men, staying low, hustled off into the woods.
Perfect.
Vincenzo shook his hands near his dick for effect in case someone was watching. Then he leaned back in, sat on the front seat, and closed the door hard.
“Go.”
The driver pulled away and flipped the headlights back on. In moments, they covered the last mile and pulled up to a makeshift checkpoint.
Two men holding machine guns stood on either side of the road.
They had been hard to see as they were standing behind a pair of black vans parked on either side of the gravel road.
The one on the driver’s side motioned with the tip of his gun - what looked like an M16 - for the driver to slow up and open his window. Vincenzo’s driver came to a stop and rolled his window down two inches. “What’s this?”
“Open the trunk,” the guard said.
The driver flipped a button and the trunk popped open. The guard on the passenger side scanned the backseat with a flashlight. After a minute, the man at the back of the Cadillac slammed the trunk shut and walked back to the window.
“Names.”
It wasn’t a question as much as an order.
The driver looked at Vincenzo. “Is that okay, Boss?”
Vincenzo nodded.
“This is Vincenzo Fuccini,” the driver told the guard. “I’m Alex.”
The guard leaned down and looked in at Vincenzo. “I’m sorry, sir. Precautionary measures. Pull in and stay to the right.”
The guard stepped back. Vincenzo’s driver eased the car down the lane and pulled in behind a line of three other Cadillacs. He cut the engine.
Vincenzo collected himself and stepped from the car. The driver would wait in the vehicle, the windows rolled up. The guards would allow all the drivers to lower their windows an inch for air in rotating shifts after the meeting started. Vincenzo wasn’t comfortable with all the details, but he was here and he had two men hiding, watching his back. If anything went down, he would walk away and the bosses of the other families wouldn’t.
A part of him wanted shit to go down. What a power play that would be. Three Eastern Canadian crime bosses in one building at one time, plus him. Wicked shit could happen.
Vincenzo stepped around the Caddy and stopped as two guards walked up close to him.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Everyone gets patted down before entering the building.”
“You’re fucking kidding, right? I’m Vincenzo Fuccini.”
Neither guard said a word as one stepped back to give room for the other to do the pat down.
“Get on with it then,” Vincenzo said.
He raised his arms straight out. The guard started at his shoulders and worked his way down, pausing when his hand touched the gun in Vincenzo’s holster.
The guard eased it out by the butt end and handed it to his colleague who emptied the ammunition and dropped the weapon in a leather satchel.
When the frisk was completed, the guard said, “You’ll get your gun back when the meeting is complete.”
Vincenzo grunted and started for the open door. He knew the pat down was more about hidden wires than weapons. In this business, there wasn’t any trust. He smiled to himself, knowing they had allowed him to keep his keychain. On it was a Kubaton with a nice hidden surprise if h
e needed it.
Having three Canadian crime bosses in one building was exactly the reason his father said he wouldn’t attend. Too much power in one room. If any one of them lost his temper, or one of their guards got trigger happy, a major war would be on everyone’s hands, and no one wanted that.
Vincenzo had argued that he shouldn’t go either. But his father said this was a peace deal. It was a long time coming and, since Vincenzo would be taking over as Captain in the coming year, he needed to be there. The other bosses had reluctantly agreed that Vincenzo could stand in for his father.
He reached the door and stepped into the bright interior of a remodeled airplane hangar. Guards were interspersed around the perimeter, standing by every door, each with an M16 in his hands. They were armed for war, with thick Kevlar vests, spare bullet belts, and radios, along with other junk strapped to their belts. A large rifle-like gun leaned against the wall beside each guard. The huge weapon reminded Vincenzo of the elephant gun he’d fired a year ago at an African Safari. It had enough stopping power to kill a charging pachyderm.
What the fuck is all this for? I thought this was a peaceful meeting.
“Vinny, come join us,” Phil, the Boss for the Montreal area called out.
The three family leaders sat in leather armchairs situated around a circular coffee table in the middle of the hangar. One chair remained empty. A bottle of booze sat on the little table, an empty glass placed in front of the unoccupied chair.
Vincenzo walked over, leaned down to the table and grabbed the bottle of Johnny Walker to pour himself a shot. In all his years of running errands for his father, he had only met two of the men sitting at the table. The third man was hardly seen by anybody.
The last thing he wanted was for them to see his hands shaking. He poured fast, set the bottle down, and with the ease borne among men of stature, he sat down, arms stretched out, and legs open.
“It’s Vincenzo, not Vinny. Don’t ever call me Vinny again. Only my mother got to call me that, God rest her soul.”
The three men exchanged glances as Vincenzo took a large swig of the whiskey.
“Now that we’re all here, let’s get started—”
A gunshot in the distance cut him off.
Vincenzo jumped a little and leaned forward. “What the fuck?”
All three men turned to him. Another gunshot rang out through the night.
He studied their faces, one by one.
What the hell is going on?
Phil, the man who called him Vinny, spoke first. “Does your father know about the two men you brought with you?”
“What men?” Vincenzo asked.
Phil looked at his colleagues and then back at Vincenzo. “Is this how we’re to conduct a meeting? One that is supposed to be based on trust? Your family was asked to be here out of respect. Your family has ties to the old country. The Fuccini’s are one of the strongest families in Sicily today. But you come here and lie to us. How do you expect us to respond?”
Vincenzo felt stumped. He held the lowest rank. He knew it and they knew it. It should be his father sitting here. Was this an ambush? Would they try to take out a boss’s son? Was that the purpose from the beginning?
Whether it was or not, he couldn’t come to them from a place of weakness. He had to show strength. One day, he would run the Fuccini family and these men would have to respect that.
“I brought my own security. That is how a Fuccini family member handles things. If you have a problem with that, talk to my father.”
There was a moment of silence before Phil responded. Vincenzo lifted his glass and sipped the whiskey. As soon as he did it, he judged the sip to be weak, feminine. He needed to hold their stare, not back down, and especially not sip his beverage as it smacked of nervousness, which meant weakness to these men.
Shit, I wish I could walk in the fucking door again and do this all over.
“We have no issue with security. Look around you.” Phil gestured with a wave of his arm. “I have security everywhere. What we have an issue with is you have defied the terms of our meeting. We made sure every family knew the terms. This meeting was to broker peace among us. We hire a joint security force, unbiased to any family. Our drivers wait in their cars. The location was only announced hours ago and was distributed through your store in Mississauga. That’s it. Any other guns or security detail would be considered hostile and the family member who brought them would be expelled from the meeting.”
Okay, now you’re talking to me like I’m a baby.
“Look, Phil, my men were here to watch my back, that’s it. They weren’t hostile.” Vincenzo pointed his finger at Phil. “Killing them was a mistake. That was hostile. You will have to make good to my father.”
Phil laughed.
“What the fuck is so funny?”
“We won’t have to make good to anyone. Your father knew the terms and he agreed to them. It is you who will have to make good, and you’ll have to do it to everyone in this room.”
Vincenzo had no idea what to say. Losing his temper right now would go a long way to kill any sort of deal for the Fuccini family, and that would go against his father’s wishes.
“We watched,” Phil continued, “as you slowed your car and pretended to piss on the road, your headlights turned off so that your two guys could run and hide. What do you take us for, amateurs? We have men posted ten kilometers in every direction. A fucking Cessna couldn’t get within a hundred meters of this building without being blown back into the last century. Maybe you’re not ready for this. Is it possible your daddy sent the wrong man?”
Vincenzo had heard enough. Two good men were dead. He needed this deal because if peace could be brokered, the families were supposed to work together in a more financially connected way. Within a year, his father had told him, they would be three times richer than they already were. But he wouldn’t sit there and be talked down to by some asshole who just had two of his men clipped for the crime of protecting him.
He stood up, swallowed the last of his whiskey and slammed the glass down hard.
“We’re done here.”
“I don’t think so,” Phil said. “The meeting hasn’t even started. But it won’t start until you tell us how you will make good on your disrespect.”
Vincenzo scanned the faces of the other men present. He looked up and examined the faces of the security detail closest to the foursome. What were they thinking, challenging him like this? He had done nothing wrong, yet he wouldn’t bow down to these men like he was a pussy. No way. They would always remember this night. If he caved, years from now the word on the street would affirm that anyone could push the Fuccini family around.
But he couldn’t leave without the peace deal in hand.
There had to be another way.
He reached in his jacket and pulled out his pack of cigarettes, flipped one out, placed it on his lips and started patting himself down for a lighter. He came up empty. The nearest guard watched him. Vincenzo stepped around his chair and walked up to the guard.
“Got a light?” he asked.
The guard shook his head in the negative.
Vincenzo turned back to the three men watching him. He reached in to his pocket and touched his keychain. “Ahh, here it is.”
He yanked the keychain out and grabbed the guard’s hand at the same time. The Kubaton was about the size of a regular Bic pen, but it was made of steel and twice as thick. Vincenzo slapped the Kubaton on top of the guard’s wrist and twisted up with force, snapping the wrist bone.
The guard screamed and dropped to one knee in front of Vincenzo. In that moment, he flipped the catch on the Kubaton and slid the hidden knife out. Knowing another guard might attack him at any second, he spun on his heel, and in the same motion, sliced the knife along the exposed neck of the guard, deep enough for a killing blow.
He was still turning back to the men in the leather chairs as the guard gagged on his own blood and fell to the floor of the hangar.
Vincenzo grabbed the huge elephant gun off the wall and aimed it at the nearest guard.
“Everyone, be cool. Stay cool or more people die.” He had to aim it at someone, lest a guard use his M16 to redecorate his face. “There will be no making good from me. It is you three who will make good to me and my family.”
All the men standing along the perimeter of the building edged closer. Phil raised a hand and the men stopped.
“Enlighten us. Why do we have to make good to you?”