Recti moved his jacket aside, to reveal the gun on his hip.
“Leave, Tanner.”
O’Connell shook his head, he was amazed that Frank Recti would be stupid enough to threaten him. For a moment, he considered killing the man, but decided against it. The way Recti was going, he’d be dead any day.
O’Connell left the office without saying another word. He considered Frank Recti a part of his past.
During the winter of 1923 Keane O’Connell took a contract on a man who was said to be impossible to kill.
The man’s name was Gilberto Ricco, and Ricco was doing a good job of edging his way into the business of importing illegal alcoholic beverages.
He was even better at staying alive and had survived six different attempts on his life. The men who had attempted to kill him all died while trying. This included one who’d been sent back in pieces, after having been hacked to death by a meat cleaver.
Tanner agreed to take the contract for a flat fee of five-thousand dollars, which was a small fortune at the time.
Ricco was guarded by several dozen men, many of whom carried Thompson submachine guns. Ricco seldom left his home, and when he did, it was said that he rode about in a car that had armor plating, with special glass that could withstand a shot fired directly at it.
O’Connell hadn’t known that such a car could exist for personal use, but he had seen similar military vehicles during the war.
Along with his fee, O’Connell asked for any information that was known about Ricco. To obtain more intelligence, O’Connell grabbed up one of the man’s bodyguards, forced him to talk, then killed him.
With the information he’d gathered, he developed a plan to not only kill Ricco, but to ensure that he survive the aftermath of the hit.
According to the bodyguard, Ricco had a huge shipment of booze coming in by boat on Lake Michigan. Ricco himself would be there to oversee the unloading and determine the quality of the product. Because of the recent attempts on his life, over fifty men would be on the shoreline, and along the roadways leading in to the area where the boat would offload.
There were also spotters already in place as a precaution against someone setting up an ambush, and several dirty cops would be on hand in case any civilians entered the area. In other words, any attempt to kill Ricco would be an act of suicide, and the shooter would likely never even get close to the man.
Keane O’Connell stepped onto the ice covering Lake Michigan and began walking in a southwesterly direction toward the shoreline of Chicago.
It was seven p.m. and he had to reach a spot over twenty miles away by first light on the following morning. The lake ice was thick, although hardly frozen over, given that the huge lake had a surface area of over twenty-thousand miles. O’Connell expected to make many detours along the way to avoid stepping on thin ice.
He carried a rucksack he had picked up while in the army. It held a change of clothes, some food, matches, a spare compass, and extra ammo, in the form of two five-round stripper clips. The ammo was for the Springfield rifle on his back. It had a Winchester scope attached and was wrapped in white cloth. Everything he wore had been dyed or painted white for the purpose of camouflage.
The moon was full and visible among drifting clouds, but the temperature was well below freezing. However, it was expected to climb to a balmy 24° by morning. O’Connell wore a ski mask, but he hated the thing. It was uncomfortable and made him itch.
He lit matches to read the compass he carried and found that he strayed off course often. Once, he had to walk miles out of his way, before finding ice thick enough to walk on.
When he was back on track, an arctic wind blew in from the north and the temperature dropped like a stone. O’Connell reasoned that such a fierce and biting wind wouldn’t last long, not with the morning temperature expected to be in the low 20’s, but the cold was debilitating.
The wind was at his back for the most part, and he could feel his neck getting numb. He began to shiver and understood what that meant.
The wind was sapping the heat right out of him. He needed to find shelter from it. But where?
After walking another mile, O’Connell saw a mound of snow that an earlier wind had formed. It was five feet high and twice as wide. The bitter wind had taken whatever snow had melted in the sun the day before and reformed that side of the mound into a wall of ice.
He walked around to the other side of the snowdrift and found refuge from the wind, while discovering that the drift was covering a damaged rowboat. The wood of the craft was only visible amid several bare patches.
Someone had taken the small boat out on the lake and gotten caught up in the ice. That same ice had eventually shifted and crushed the modest vessel, which was later covered with snow.
Whoever the unfortunate mariner was who had owned the boat, O’Connell blessed them. He began feeling warmer without the sting of the wind, and decided to eat something, to take in a few calories and rest.
When he resumed his trek, he had been delayed for over an hour, but the wind had died down, and there was a glow in the east.
When O’Connell finally reached the area of his destination, it was after eight a.m., but to his relief, liquor was still being ferried ashore by rowboats from a ship.
There was a car parked near the trucks being loaded, and from the description he’d received, O’Connell was certain he was looking at the armored vehicle containing his target, Gilberto Ricco.
The sight of the car buoyed O’Connell, who was exhausted from his long stressful trek over ice. But, he had determined that an approach to the shoreline from the lake was the only flaw in Ricco’s defenses.
He assumed that the men guarding Ricco had deemed such a trek across the ice as impossible. It wasn’t impossible; however, it was perilous and unsound. At any point along his tramp across the ice, O’Connell could have fallen through and never been seen again.
O’Connell had been aware of the risk, but he had taken money to fulfill a contract and was willing to do whatever it took to complete the kill.
O’Connell unpacked the rifle with some difficulty since his fingers were numbed from the cold. His face hurt as well, and he couldn’t feel his ears. The wind had picked up again, and the cold sliced like a blade. The hours of walking across the uneven terrain of the frozen lake had made walking a chore, and the soles of his feet were aching.
An hour later, he was still watching, still waiting, as the last of the cases were loaded onto the final truck. Ricco had not stepped out of his car or even opened his window. Meanwhile, it had begun to snow.
The snow was a blessing, in that it aided in camouflage, and a curse, as it made sighting in on the target more difficult.
O’Connell had been nearly a half mile from shore, but had crawled closer as the snow developed.
The nearer he got to the shoreline, the thinner the ice became, and the greater the risk of falling through it and into the frigid lake water.
O’Connell hoped that by lying down, it distributed his weight well enough so as not to stress the ice.
He tensed to take a shot when he saw a man in an Ulster coat with a fur collar approach the fortified vehicle containing Ricco.
O’Connell was hoping for Ricco to step out, or at least open the door wide for the other man to get in, but no, the window only lowered several inches, so that they could speak.
Three photos of Ricco had been given to O’Connell along with his payment. They showed a swarthy man with bushy eyebrows and a thin moustache.
O’Connell never saw the moustache, but the bushy eyebrows were in his scope. He took in a breath of frigid air, held it, then released the breath as he pulled the trigger.
The shot echoed over and across the frozen landscape, causing all who heard it to grow tense. The recoil of the rifle shifted his weight and the ice beneath his booted feet gave way. O’Connell’s boots slipped into the water, but he dared not pull them out, or move in the slightest.
Several men on
shore had scoped rifles of their own. If they spotted movement, they’d fire at it.
He was certain his shot hit Ricco right between the man’s bushy eyebrows and was pleased when he watched the man in the Ulster coat fall backwards and land on his ass.
There was blood on the man’s face, blood splattered from the corpse of Gilberto Ricco.
“Ricco’s dead!” the man shouted. “His brains are all over the car.”
More shouts came as everyone looked about for the shooter. O’Connell was relieved to see them looking in every direction but out at the lake.
The driver was pulled from the front seat by a man who began beating him. The assumption being that he had killed their boss.
Then, one man took a rifle from an underling and began using his scope to peer out toward O’Connell’s position. O’Connell had him lined up in his sights, and if the man spotted him, he would kill him first.
A gunshot rang out, and the man with the rifle spun around, only to be shot in the stomach.
“Calavechi must have killed Ricco, but the bastard won’t get away with it,” the shooter cried.
He was then shot from behind, and his killer placed the blame for Ricco’s death on another faction of their gang.
With their leader dead, war had broken out between Ricco’s lieutenants, and in the confusion and chaos, O’Connell slipped away.
Two hours later, he walked ashore on a strip of ice and buried the rucksack and rifle beneath a snow drift, to be retrieved later.
His wet feet had no feeling in them, so he hailed a cab and told it to take him to where he’d left his car, rather than walk another step. Back at his hotel, he summoned the house doctor, then took a long hot shower.
His feet were red, but feeling had returned to them accompanied by stinging pain. By the time the doctor showed up, O’Connell had eaten heartily, and blisters had formed on his toes.
The doctor, an older man with a jaded expression, told O’Connell to stay out of the cold while predicting a full recovery.
O’Connell thanked him, then ordered a bottle of champagne. Once his bottle arrived, O’Connell drank a glass of the bubbly in celebration of killing a man who everyone said couldn’t be killed.
Word would get around, and not only in Chicago, but across the country, as the mobsters and goons talked about the Ricco hit.
They would ask who killed him, and the answer would be Tanner.
Tanner had killed a man that no one else could.
O’Connell lofted his champagne flute up in the air, as a toast, but not to himself.
He was toasting Tanner, his alter ego, Tanner, who was the best assassin on the planet.
“Fad saol agat,” O’Connell said. It was a Gaelic toast which meant, “Long life to you.”
On that snowy night in 1923, Keane O’Connell could have never imagined just how long-lived Tanner’s life would be, and that the legend was just beginning.
15
Drake Diamond Movie Fest
Nadya had just inserted a second Drake Diamond Blu-ray into the player when Florentina woke up.
After she fed the baby, Sara and Amy took turns rocking Florentina until the child fell asleep again.
When the movie resumed, Amy brought out a bottle of wine, and the women settled in for another movie.
By the time the movie ended, the bottle of wine was empty.
Spenser came up with a plan while watching Tricks move the stones aside.
There was a thick section of trees nearby. Spenser walked among them while gathering up wood to burn in a campfire. While doing that, he made a phone call and found out that the Greene brothers were headed in his direction.
He had called a former client. A man he had rescued from a murderous loan shark. Spenser had a network of grateful clients who were happy to be able to help him when they could.
He never asked them for payment, instead, he took money or possessions from the people he saved them from. He once collected a small fortune from a hiding place in a drug kingpin’s home, but he currently expected nothing from helping Andrea Jackson.
The Greene brothers had been grabbed by the police before Spenser could get his hands on them, and so he felt he owed her one.
“It looks like the Greene brothers will be here sometime this afternoon,” Spenser told Tricks as he dropped the wood he’d gathered. “They were spotted headed this way.”
Tricks was panting from all the work he’d done, while his soft hands had gained budding blisters. After taking a long pull from a bottle, he spoke.
“You sure this plan of yours will work, Spenser?”
“It will if you run fast enough.”
“What if they don’t fall for your trap?”
Spenser considered Tricks’ question, then he pointed at the hole where the rocks had been.
“Make that hole bigger. If they do kill you, then I’ll have to bury three bodies.”
“That’s not funny, man.”
“I know, with you dead I’ll have to fill the hole back in by myself, and I hate grunt work.”
Tricks glowered at him.
“You’re an asshole, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told, now, move more of those rocks… just in case.”
Tricks went back to work while mumbling obscenities, and Spenser began building his fire.
Romeo sat in a chair beside Andrea’s bed and kept watch out a rear window of the home. There wasn’t much to see other than trees and grass, yet off in the distance, beyond the abandoned superstore, was a section of the nearby highway. When Romeo used his binoculars, he could see that the traffic appeared to be light.
Andrea entered and smiled as she sat on the bed, facing Romeo.
“You have one hell of a tan, Romeo, and I love your tattoos.”
Romeo smiled back at Andrea. Her interest in him was obvious, and he found her attractive as well.
“I own a boat, so I get plenty of sun.”
“You and Tanner, are you like Spenser?”
“What do you mean?”
“Spenser helps people who can’t help themselves. Is that what you and Tanner do?”
“I’m just helping Spenser out for a day or two.”
“And Tanner? He doesn’t strike me as the helpful type. Actually, I think he’s a little scary.”
“Tanner’s the best, but yeah, he doesn’t help those who can’t help themselves. You might say that he deals with those who couldn’t help themselves.”
“I heard you call him Bro before. I guess it’s just a name you call him, you look nothing alike.”
“He’s the closest thing I have to a brother.”
Andrea reached out and ran a hand over Romeo’s right bicep.
“You certainly are in shape.”
“And married,” Romeo said.
Andrea removed her hand.
“I saw the ring, but it’s on your right hand.”
“I live in Indonesia. We usually wear them on the right there.”
Romeo took out his wallet.
“Let me show you some pictures of our new baby girl.”
Andrea laughed.
“You really are married.”
Tanner was watching the front of the home from the living room when Jasmine walked in and sat nearby. She held up her iPad, which displayed the cover of a popular book.
“Have you read this, Tanner? It’s really good.”
Tanner hadn’t read the book, but he had once glanced over the description and passed on it.
The book was about a man who discovered a way to travel between dimensions. The idea was that each time we made a choice, it spawned a new reality and a new world or dimension. Turn left at a stop light, and you’re in one reality, turn right, and you’re in another, different reality.
There was no one “real” reality, just an endless multiverse where countless copies of ourselves explored each and every possibility.
“I haven’t read it, but I understand what the book was about,” Tanner to
ld Jasmine.
The girl smiled at him.
“Do you believe it?”
“No.”
Jasmine’s smile went away.
“You don’t, why not? It makes sense to me.”
“I don’t buy the concept because I believe in free will.”
Jasmine looked confused as she tried to puzzle out Tanner’s meaning. When she didn’t see his point, she asked him to explain.
“How does this theory being true negate free will?”
Tanner smiled at her use of the word, negate.
“You read a lot, don’t you?”
“I do, and I’m a straight A student.”
After giving the world outside another look of scrutiny, Tanner turned his head and spoke to Jasmine.
“According to this theory,” Tanner said, while raising his right hand. “When I lift this hand, somewhere there’s another me lifting the other hand, correct?”
Jasmine nodded her agreement.
“Doesn’t that mean that the other me, the one who raised his left hand had to raise his left hand, as a reaction to my raising my right hand?”
“I guess.”
“And if I decide to stand, there would have to be a me somewhere that remained seated, and he would exist in that seated position because I stood. If that’s true, then these copies of me have no free will. They must act in a way opposite of the way I act, or I may have to act opposite of them.”
Jasmine looked down at the floor as she worked her bottom lip with her teeth. Outside, a pickup truck parked across the street with two men inside. The men were black and muscular, but their faces were hidden in shadow beneath the bills of baseball caps.
“I understand your point,” Jasmine said, “But the theory is looking at the numerous selves as one being, one whole.”
“I’m not a section of a being,” Tanner said. “I am myself, and the choices I make direct my life.”
“Maybe that’s just how it feels to us,” Jasmine said.
One Hundred Years Of Tanner Page 7