Young Guns Box Set

by Kane, Remington

  * * *

  The boys arrived in Spenser’s private room and were glad to see him looking better. They had been there days earlier, before leaving on a road trip to Arizona. Both Romeo and Cody had money hidden away in the Grand Canyon state inside safe deposit boxes. Those funds had been needed for them to start over.

  Romeo had recovered well from his wounds but bore the scars they had spawned. He estimated that he was at ninety-percent and was restless from the period of inactivity he’d had to endure.

  Cody had suffered no outward injuries but was the most damaged of all. May Ling’s betrayal and loss had gutted him. He was drinking more than his normal amounts, working out less, and had grown a beard. The facial hair wasn’t a style choice, it was just easier than shaving every day. Shaving meant looking in the mirror at the man who killed May Ling.

  The boys were aware that the trip to Arizona and back might be the last time they traveled together for a while. Spenser’s injuries changed everything, and a new Tanner had to be named. Romeo didn’t doubt for a moment that Spenser would choose Cody as his successor. He recognized that Cody’s abilities were superior to his own. He felt no bitterness toward his friend.

  Losing Emma had broken Romeo’s spirit. He rarely went an hour without thinking about her and had little ambition other than to get through the day.

  With the law looking for him under the alias he had used for years, he thought it best to leave the country and attempt to start over elsewhere. While on the trip to Arizona, Romeo mentioned that he might return to Indonesia to check on their friend, Nadya. The teen had recently lost her beloved father and Romeo wanted to make sure that she and her mother were doing all right.

  As for Cody, if chosen to be Tanner Seven, he would leave the western United States and ply his deadly trade elsewhere.

  * * *

  A smile beamed out from beneath the eye patch Spenser wore as he greeted the boys. At one point during his ordeal he had feared that Cody and Romeo were either dead or seriously injured. When he regained consciousness and found that they’d both survived, it lifted his spirits tremendously.

  After telling Spenser about their trip, they waited to hear his decision.

  “In the beginning, I had hopes that one of you might be good enough to become a Tanner someday. The fact is that you’ve both exceeded my expectations and have become my equal in all but experience. Your success at the Citadel last year proved that, and you’ve only gotten better since then.”

  “We had a great teacher,” Romeo said.

  “And I had fantastic pupils. On top of that you two became friends. I can’t tell you how much that pleased me.” Spenser took in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Now it’s time for me to choose a next in line, a Tanner Seven, but let me say first that either one of you is worthy of the title. I couldn’t be prouder of you.”

  Spenser announced who would be his successor, and Tanner Seven was born.

  147

  Last Contract

  CLIFTON, NEW JERSEY, MARCH 2004

  Cody Parker, while using the identity of Joe Collins, worked away at a wooden bench while sitting atop a stool. He was in a factory that manufactured helmets for firefighters.

  Alberto Rigoletto sat across from Cody as they toiled to hit their quota of sixty helmets a day. They were one of a pair of eighteen workers who assembled the firefighter helmets from parts. The pay was low, the work monotonous, and the warehouse was chilly, on what was one of the last days of winter.

  Cody had been working there for less than a week; it seemed as if he’d been there far longer. Alberto, a twenty-nine-year-old with dark curly hair, had been employed in the factory for six years.

  Cody liked Alberto; the man helped him when he first got started. Once the routine of assembling the parts became rote, the work was easy, if boring. They talked to pass the time. Even though Alberto had been working in the factory for years, he was ambitious and had plans.

  “Homemade beer?” Cody asked. “How do you make that?”

  “I got a set-up in my garage. The secret is in the grain. I’ll bring you a six-pack of bottles if you’d like.”

  “Do you sell the beer or is it just a hobby?”

  “It’s a business. I brew the beer and my wife makes up the labels and shipping cartons. I’ve already sold to a few local bars, but business is picking up on the web. I made as much with the beer last month as I do working here.”

  “That’s great, Alberto, I wish you luck.”

  “What about you, Joe, you got anything going on outside this place, a girl maybe?”

  Cody swallowed before answering. “I had a girl but… it didn’t work out.”

  “Too bad, and yeah, life rarely works out the way we think it will. I’ve been blindsided before by fate.”

  “I know the feeling,” Cody said.

  * * *

  During the afternoon break, Alberto was summoned to the office, which was a glass-enclosed space at the front of the warehouse. Cody watched over his shoulder as a delivery driver handed Alberto an envelope. Alberto looked perplexed and asked the man, who was dressed all in brown, a question. Whatever answer Alberto received made him frown.

  After reading the note that was in the envelope, Alberto stuffed it into a side pocket and returned to the work bench.

  “Is something wrong?” Cody asked.

  “Um, no.”

  Alberto was quiet the rest of the afternoon and seemed preoccupied.

  * * *

  That night, Cody watched from a neighbor’s yard as Alberto slipped out the rear door of his garage. After glancing around, Alberto climbed over the fence at the back of his home. Cody noted that Alberto had changed into a black hood jacket and black jeans.

  Alberto’s choice to sneak off over the fence told Cody that he was aware that he was being watched. Two goons from the area had been tailing Alberto all week and were parked in an old Chevy across the street from his house. They had missed Alberto’s exit, Cody hadn’t. He followed Alberto on foot to his destination.

  * * *

  FLORENCE, ITALY

  Romeo scaled a courtyard wall then climbed a trellis that placed him on a balcony. The stone veranda granted him a view of a villa eight hundred yards away. Unstrapping a rifle from his back, Romeo pulled over a chair from the wrought-iron set that included a table and a striped umbrella. It was two a.m. and the city was as quiet as Romeo had ever heard it. He had visited it once before while with Spenser and Cody.

  He’d been in Florence for days. He was there to fulfill the last contract of Tanner Six. The target was a seventy-four-year-old businessman. The textile magnate had avoided being convicted of funding terrorists because of a technicality. An unknown client thought that was a travesty that needed to be addressed.

  Fearing he would become the victim of an assassination, the target had taken precautions. He never left the grounds of the villa and was accompanied at all times by four bodyguards. There was no view into the villa available because the drapes on every window were kept drawn.

  Spenser was able to obtain blueprints of the villa’s layout and had committed them to memory. That the target was never alone wasn’t quite true. At night, Spenser assumed that the bodyguards stayed outside the bedroom. The bed had been positioned somewhere in the expansive room behind thick stone walls, but there was a point of vulnerability.

  It was the huge master bathroom. The home’s master suite was located on the third floor and accessible either by stairs or an elevator. There was a picture window that looked out over the city and granted a fine view. A smaller window was in the bathroom. Although beveled, that glass was also covered by a curtain.

  Spenser had reasoned that a man of advance years might find himself in that bathroom in the middle of the night, as the call of nature interrupted his sleep. For three nights that assumption had proven to be false. No lights had come on in the bathroom during the hours of darkness. On Romeo’s fourth night of patient observation, Spenser’s belief had t
urned out to be correct.

  Looking through his scope, Romeo saw a faint glow appear at the top of the bathroom window where the loops of the curtains hung from their rod. He held in his breath, took aim, and fired.

  Romeo’s first shot destroyed the window while damaging the right end of the curtains’ support rod. His second shot struck the rod on its left side and sent it tumbling to the floor. Both rounds wound up in the ceiling.

  It would have been easier to fire a barrage of shots through the glass, but that would risk killing an innocent and missing the target. The old man might have a woman with him, or maybe a guard turned on the light for some reason. No, the target had to be verified before he was eliminated.

  With the window glass gone and the curtains on the floor, the room’s occupant was revealed. It was the target. He was wearing a set of blue silk pajamas and holding his penis in his right hand. Romeo had interrupted him in the middle of urinating.

  The shocked expression on the old man’s face morphed into one full of fear. As Romeo lined up his third and final shot, the former industrialist turned terrorist sympathizer ran to his right to the safety of his bedroom. He left the heated tile floor of his bathroom and stepped onto plush carpet, out of sight of the window.

  The last steps he’d taken had been relayed to his feet by a brain that was no longer intact. Romeo’s shot had entered through an ear and blown out the other side of the man’s head. The corpse dropped to the floor as the bodyguards flooded into the bedroom, too late to be of any use. Spenser’s last contract was fulfilled.

  * * *

  Romeo made it back down the trellis and over the wall with haste. The rifle had been left behind. Nearby was a white minivan with decals and a taxi roof sign. Romeo drove it for a block in the direction of the villa then pulled to the curb outside a late-night bar.

  A tipsy couple climbed in the backseat as a black sedan drove past. Three men were in the sedan, which had its rear windows down. Romeo recognized one of them as a security guard from the villa. They were on the prowl for the man who had murdered their boss.

  If they had come across Romeo alone and driving a normal car, they would have confronted him. They never gave more than a glance to the cabbie picking up fares.

  Romeo looked at the couple in his backseat and spoke to them in Italian.

  “Where would you like to go?”

  With the contract fulfilled, Romeo would continue on to his destination: Jakarta, Indonesia.

  * * *

  In Clifton, New Jersey, Cody watched as Alberto ran across a traffic circle and into the parking lot of a large strip mall.

  Cody was delayed in following because of the flow of vehicles. When he finally got across, Cody found that Alberto had entered a pizza parlor. The restaurant had glass windows, so it was easy to see inside.

  Instead of stopping and staring into the shop, Cody kept walking. If anyone were waiting for Alberto to show, he didn’t want them to realize he’d been followed there. Cody entered a variety store three doors down from the restaurant. After buying a protein bar and a bottle of water he went back outside and walked past the pizza parlor again.

  Alberto was seated alone at a small table and ignoring the slice of pizza he’d bought. Out in the parking lot, there was a man seated behind the wheel of a luxury car that had rental stickers on it. His face was in shadow, but he appeared to be staring into the pizza parlor.

  Cody circled around to a spot at the back of the lot that gave him a view of the man in the car. Past that, he could see Alberto checking his watch.

  Three more minutes passed, then the man in the car got out and headed inside while glancing about in all directions. Cody got a good look at him when he stepped beneath one of the parking lot’s sodium vapor lights.

  He was a chubby man in his fifties with thinning dark hair and a large nose. It was the target, Vincenzo Rigoletto. He was Alberto’s estranged father and a man wanted by the Manhattan mob. He would soon be the first of many men killed by Tanner Seven.

  148

  First Contract

  CLIFTON, NEW JERSEY, MARCH 2004

  Seated amidst dating teens and families bonding over a meal out, Alberto Rigoletto and his father Vincenzo met inside a pizza parlor.

  Vincenzo Rigoletto walked away from his family twenty years earlier and settled in New York City. He was a second-generation bookmaker and was as trusted as anyone in the mob ever became. That is to say that it was accepted that he would do some skimming, but Vincenzo was never obvious or greedy about it.

  That changed when he was looking at going to prison on his third DUI arrest. Vincenzo had never been to prison and was willing to do anything to avoid going there. He began wearing a wire for the Feds.

  One of the whores hired for a party felt the listening device on Vincenzo as she gave him a lap dance. She later told her pimp about it. Either Vincenzo got nervous or he saw someone looking at him the wrong way, but he shot the pimp and managed to escape.

  Everyone thought he would run back to the Feds and enter the Witness Protection Program. Vincenzo was bolder than that. He emptied the safe of a bookmaking operation and hit the road.

  He had taken off with over two-hundred G’s in cash; with that kind of money he could go anywhere and hide for years.

  Old Sam Giacconi, head of the Manhattan mob wanted him bad. Instead of putting a price on his head, Giacconi said that whoever hit Vincenzo could keep the money he ripped off. That was a smart move by the old man. It made everyone not only want to track Vincenzo down, but to do it as quickly as possible. The longer the thieving snitch stayed free, the more money he’d burn through, and the smaller would be the reward.

  Despite the motivation, no one had a clue where to find Rigoletto. He had no family and his wife had died the year before. At least, that was what most people believed. Cody had gone online to a site that, for a fee, allowed access to public records.

  He discovered that a man named Vincenzo Rigoletto was married in his home town of Clifton, New Jersey back in 1973. His wife gave birth to a son in 1975. The son’s name was Alberto.

  After moving to New York City, Rigoletto never spoke of the family he ran out on. The wife he’d recently lost to breast cancer was his second wife, whom he had married in 1987.

  Cody decided to play a long shot and tracked down Rigoletto’s son. When he spotted the local thugs keeping an eye on Alberto, he figured he was on the right track. The locals knew something that the New York boys didn’t.

  Someone remembered Rigoletto from the old days and knew that he had a son. It was even possible that they knew Rigoletto contacted Alberto on occasion. Alberto was nine when his father left him and his mother. He never became a mobster and was on the verge of becoming a successful entrepreneur. Having his estranged father reenter his life didn’t seem to please Alberto.

  * * *

  Cody watched Vincenzo slide a thick envelope across the table to Alberto. Alberto looked down at it for a moment before shoving it back toward his father. Cody couldn’t see Alberto’s face, but his posture revealed that he was angry.

  That envelope likely held cash. A going away forever present from a guilt-filled father who was now on the run.

  As Vincenzo pleaded with Alberto, Cody used a slim jim bar to pick the door lock on Vincenzo’s rental. After climbing inside, he continued to view the drama taking place in the pizza parlor. Alberto was on his feet and pointing down at his father while shouting something. Vincenzo looked frightened by the attention, as everyone in the restaurant was staring at them.

  Alberto calmed himself, waved a dismissive hand at his father, and left the restaurant. Whatever Rigoletto had hoped to gain by offering his son a packet of ill-gotten cash was not coming his way. Alberto had made it through life without him and intended to keep doing so.

  Rigoletto left the pizza parlor a few moments after Alberto and trudged back to the car. Cody was ducked down on the floor behind the front seats and went unnoticed. After starting the vehicle, Rigolett
o made it around the traffic circle and headed onto the nearby ramp for a highway.

  * * *

  They were on the move for well over an hour. Then, Rigoletto backed the car down a short driveway and into an attached garage. After lowering the garage door with a remote, he stepped out of the vehicle, then released a cry of shock as Cody followed him out of the car.

  Rigoletto made a weak attempt to free a gun from under his coat. Cody took the weapon from him and smashed the butt of it against the top of his head. Stunned, Rigoletto allowed himself to be steered up three steps to the door that lead into the house. He still held his keys. Cody told him to use them to unlock the door.

  The house was a modern two-story home in a block of identical houses that were built a year earlier. Cody explored it while prodding Rigoletto along with his own gun jammed against his back.

  There was no one else in the house, which was fully-furnished. Like the car, it was a rental. The place looked like a model home and revealed no signs that anyone actually lived there. Cody saw no photos, but there were pictures depicting nature scenes hanging on the walls. No clothes hung in the closets, but an open suitcase was on the floor inside the bedroom.

  “Did Sam send you after me?” Rigoletto asked. He was speaking of Sam Giacconi.