Again Jack’s blood pressure began to rise. A headache was forming at the base of his skull. It wasn’t enough that this idiot was contributing to the deaths of people caught in the grip of addiction; any twelve year old with a crowbar and a curious disposition could easily be victimized, too.
It was time to finish this.
Jack opened one bin after another, leaving the covers strewn about the garage floor, until he found what he was looking for: processed heroin, ready for distribution from this dealer to his street team. Glassine bag after glassine bag, filled with powder and sealed with twist-ties, had been stacked next to small plastic syringes like those used by diabetics, capped off and ready for use.
Full service, Jack thought, and curled his lip. He had collected his usual fee from Mr. Stanton after agreeing to take on this job, but decided right here and now to return it upon completion, to be refunded in full to Brett Farnum’s grieving mother.
This assignment would be on the house.
Jack picked up a baggie and examined the contents, wondering how many other addicts had been killed by the abnormally high level of strychnine in the batch of heroin that had been supplied to Brett Farnum. It had undoubtedly long since disappeared in the three months that had elapsed since Farnum’s death, but Jack wasn’t worried. He could always improvise. It was a particular talent of his.
He pulled three baggies of heroin out of the bin and dropped them onto the workspace. Then he lifted out a syringe and placed it next to the heroin. Returned to the bin filled with cutting supplies and removed a small metal canister, slightly larger and deeper than a big spoon, which he placed next to the other items on the examination paper, everything lined up in a neat, precise row.
Then he stood and stretched.
Thought for a moment.
“I need a little water,” he muttered to himself.
He remembered tossing the empty Walther into the passenger side of the dealer’s messy car. It had bounced off a partly full water bottle before coming to rest on the floor. That would do perfectly, assuming it actually contained water and not vodka or gin or who knew what else.
Jack walked around the car and opened the door. Picked up the water bottle and examined the contents. Unscrewed the cap and sniffed. Then he shrugged and looked at his prisoner. “This contain water?” he asked.
The man ignored his question, but he had been watching Jack closely the entire time and his wide-eyed gaze and increased agitation told Jack he had finally tumbled to what was coming. “I don’t touch that shit,” he said, the words coming out in a rush and making him sound breathless. “I’m not a user, so don’t even think about it.”
Jack had known this moment was coming and was a little surprised it had taken this long for it to arrive. On the other hand, anyone who would leave tens of thousands of dollars in illegal drugs inside a garage protected by a single padlock couldn’t be considered a criminal mastermind under any circumstances.
He began walking around the car, holding the dealer’s gaze as he went. “I don’t blame you for not using,” he said. “Dangerous, right?”
The man ignored his comment and kept babbling, and Jack continued. “It was especially dangerous for Brett Farnum.”
By now he had reached the dealer’s door. He leaned inside the car and unbuckled the man’s belt, yanking it off the waistband of his jeans. He reached into the back seat and lifted the dirty gym shorts, wrinkling his nose with distaste.
Moving quickly, he stuffed the shorts into the dealer’s mouth as the man was repeating the offer of cash that Jack had already rebuffed once. Apparently he was out of original ideas. Jack looped the belt around the man’s head and then pulled it tight, anchoring the shorts in place and cutting off the flood of words mid-bribe.
Then he returned to the workbench. He slit open one of the bags of heroin and dumped it into the metal canister. Poured some of the water over the powder. Reached into his pocket and pulled out a disposable lighter, which he flicked and held under the canister until the concoction inside started bubbling. It didn’t take long.
After a moment he placed the canister on top of the workbench and uncapped the syringe. He dipped the needle into the liquid and drew back on the plunger until the syringe was filled.
He walked over to the dealer, who was now bouncing around in his seat like a little boy who had to go to the bathroom. He was trying desperately to speak but could manage nothing more than the muffled sounds of panic and terror.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Jack said. “We need a filter. Unfortunately, we don’t have anything to use as one.” He shot the dealer a sympathetic look. “We’ll just have to make do, I guess. When you think about it, it’s not going to matter much, anyway, in the long run.”
The man renewed his pointless efforts at escape, thrashing and bucking. By now his actions were so frenzied that Jack thought, if given enough time, Mr. Big Shot Drug Dealer might actually kill himself by heart attack or stroke.
But he wasn’t here for maybes. He was here to do a job, thoroughly and completely. And time was beginning to become an issue. There was no telling if or when his new friend might have visitors.
He watched for another moment and finally decided he had seen enough. “This won’t do,” he said, and slugged the dealer in the head one last time with the butt of his Sig. He put most of his muscle behind this blow, and the man moaned and slumped back in his seat, his eyes rolling up into his head.
“I was really hoping you’d be awake to experience this, but we all have our crosses to bear,” he said, crouching down on his haunches and examining the crook of the man’s left arm. It was clean, meaning the dealer had been telling the truth about not being a heroin user.
Or maybe he really was a user and he injected somewhere else on his body. It was a possibility.
Not that it mattered.
Jack slapped the skin hard a few times and a greenish-purple vein rose up. He nodded grimly and placed the tip of the syringe against the skin. Then he gently inserted the needle into the vein and eased the plunger down until the contents of the syringe had been expelled into the dealer’s arm.
The unconscious man stirred, moaning behind his gag. His arms and legs twitched but he did not awaken. Jack waited a moment and then moved to the workbench and repeated the procedure.
Twice.
When he had finished, he checked the man’s pulse. It was rapid and erratic. His skin was much paler than it had been upon Jack’s arrival, and sweat glistened on his forehead.
He would be dead within minutes.
Jack stood and gazed at the drug dealer, not pleased with what he had done but not upset, either.
It was his job.
And he was good at his job.
He waited a moment longer and then he slipped out the garage door, not bothering to lock it behind him, not even bothering to close it. There was no reason to. As soon as he had gotten into his rental car and driven a couple of blocks, he would notify the police of the dead man via burner phone before tossing the device into a trash barrel.
Involving the authorities certainly wasn’t standard procedure, but nothing about this assignment had been standard. Jack couldn’t take the chance of someone finding the heroin and whatever the hell else the dealer had hidden inside his garage and/or his house. It was imperative the drugs get taken off the street immediately.
He drove slowly back to where he had waited an hour or so ago for the dealer, then pulled to the curb.
Called the Somerville police and left an anonymous tip.
Drove to Logan Airport and returned the rental car.
Then he climbed into his truck and headed for Southern New Hampshire and home.
2
Joel Stark pulled his car into a rest stop somewhere along I-80 in Ohio. He didn’t know exactly where in Ohio he was because it didn’t matter. He had been on the road a long time, though, and that did matter. His ass hurt and he was dog-tired and he could almost feel his back stiffening by the m
inute.
Plus, he needed gas and he had to pee. So when he saw the sign for the traveler’s plaza, he aimed for the off-ramp and paid no attention to mile markers or town names or anything else. He’d take a short break and then get back on the road. His goal was to get to Las Vegas as quickly as possible and that was what he was going to do. Whether he was in Ashtabula, Akron or Dayton was irrelevant.
Joel Stark was nothing if not single-minded.
He had pulled out of Brooklyn with a full tank of gas and evil intent at seven-thirty this morning, knowing he would face brutal rush-hour traffic getting out of the city but accepting the inevitable delays. They would be worth the aggravation. Once the congestion cleared, he would at least be farther along than he would have been had he slept in and departed later, and who needed sleep, anyway?
Single-minded.
It was now nearly nine-thirty on a clear, cool night. He had been driving for virtually fourteen hours straight, stopping only every few hours, and only for a few minutes at a time to refuel, piss, grab a burger or sandwich, and then hit the road again. He had covered almost eight hundred miles of his journey, an impressive feat given the amount of traffic he had faced early in the day.
He eased into a parking spot outside a utilitarian-looking brick and glass building, shut off his engine and stepped onto the tarmac. Stretched and checked out his surroundings. Eighteen-wheel behemoths dominated the lot, outnumbering passenger vehicles like Joel’s by at least a three-to-one margin.
He shivered in the slight chill of the late-spring air as he locked his car and turned toward the restaurant. Out on the interstate, passing vehicles created an endless symphony of road noise. The constant whine of rubber on asphalt was irritating, like a mosquito buzzing around his head, and he tried to ignore it.
The cafeteria-style restaurant was tired-looking and plain and seemed as though it had been lifted straight out of the 1950s and plunked down in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the 2010s. The girl at the cash register was probably nineteen or twenty, average-looking but with a sort of resigned desperation written all over her face, like the thought of doing this job for the next five or six decades was almost too much to bear but she knew she stood no chance of ever getting out of Bumfuck, Ohio.
She was nothing compared to the girl who haunted Joel’s dreams every night and most of every day. But just by virtue of her sex she reminded him of the reason he was making this long-distance trek.
Joel dragged his plastic tray along a stainless steel track, passing in front of macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, gray meat loaf and unidentifiable other food items that looked as though they had stopped being fresh about the time Joel was getting his driver’s license. He stopped in front of a grilling station, and the girl trudged down the line to meet him with an expression on her face that said she would rather be almost anywhere else, doing almost anything else except serving him.
“Help ya?” she asked, indifference oozing out of every pore in her body.
He said nothing, staring at the girl’s chest and making absolutely no effort to hide his interest in it. Her uniform buttons strained to hold her breasts captive. The young woman might be a plain Jane, but she had great tits; Joel had to give her that. The blouse was a little too small, and when the girl turned to her right, he could see a hint of red lacy bra peeking through the openings between the buttons.
She was delectable.
***
Jessica Trapp’s face flushed bright red. She could feel it happening but was powerless to stop it.
After a whole year spent working in this dump, having started the week after high school graduation, she would have thought she’d be used to the lecherous stares and clumsy come-ons from the endless supply of truck drivers and perverted weirdos who seemed drawn to this place on the overnight shift. But every time she felt a strange man’s gaze running over her body, she reacted exactly the same way. She felt dirty and wished she could take a shower.
“Sir?” she said again. “What would you like?” The creepy bastard’s wolfish smile widened and she immediately regretted her unfortunate choice of words.
He finally raised his eyes from her chest to her face, and when he did she had to suppress an urge to shudder. The man’s eyes were flat. Lifeless. Reptilian.
Jessica immediately glanced around the dining room to see if there was anyone who might be able to help her when the trouble started. A couple of truckers way down at the back of the room, sharing a table as they falsified their logbooks. An elderly couple. That was about it.
Maybe the truckers would step up if she needed help; there was no way of knowing until it happened.
When she looked back at the man’s face, she again found him staring at her breasts. The intensity of his gaze would have been comical if it weren’t so damned frightening. Finally, and to her immense relief, the guy said, “Cheeseburger and fries” in a strangely toneless voice.
She turned to slap the burger onto the grill and felt the man’s eyes crawling all over her ass like ants on a picnic lunch. The meat sizzled and popped and Jessica walked as casually as she could into the kitchen for no other reason than to escape those awful shark eyes.
The night manager was a large, matronly silver-haired woman named Georgie. She’d been working at the traveler’s plaza since before Jessica was born. Breathlessly, Jessica whispered, “Georgie, you wouldn’t believe the creep out there!”
The older woman looked up from the mountain of potatoes she was peeling. “Only one? Well, that’s an improvement, wouldn’t you say?”
Jessica tried to smile at her boss’s joke and it felt forced, fake. “No, I’m serious. It’s like The Walking Dead out there. I think he’s a zombie or something.”
“Well, get out there and serve him before he decides to kill us and eat our brains.”
She could feel the color drain from her face and the manager said, “I’m just funnin’ ya. Probably.”
Jessica took a deep breath and said, “Okay. Yeah. Right,” her voice shaking just a bit. She knew she was being silly but she couldn’t help it; the guy was that creepy.
Finally she turned around and reversed course to the grill, flipping the burger and wishing desperately it would finish cooking so she could get this scary dude on his way. He didn’t appear to have moved an inch while she was in the kitchen.
After an eternity the burger was done. She passed it over the counter and dared to take a closer look at him. Greasy brown hair—curly, but not “cute” curly, just “gross” curly—hung limply over a face pocked by the remains of adolescent acne scarring. A pair of soulless, empty eyes glowed black above a mashed nose that had obviously been broken at least once.
This time Jessica did shudder; she couldn’t help it. She hoped their hands wouldn’t touch as she handed him his food. They didn’t and she was glad.
Despite her fears, there was no trouble. The man moved to the register with his tray, paid for his food, and then turned and walked into the dining room. Her sense of relief was overwhelming. Jessica had nearly been raped once as a high school freshman while out on a date with a senior boy, and at the end of that night she had felt frightened but also angry as hell.
This man just left her frightened.
***
Joel Stark ate his food alone and in silence. He had enjoyed putting a scare into the little slut at the counter. Her fear had been written all over her homely face. It was exhilarating and an incredible turn-on.
He had been half-tempted to shout, “Boo!” as he was paying for his meal, just to see if he could get her to piss her pants. He was pretty sure he could have. But as much fun as that would have been, it was important he keep his eye on the ball and remember why he was out here in the middle of Nowhereville, Ohio to begin with.
And screwing with some hick farm girl wasn’t the reason.
He finished his burger and then went to the men’s room to take a leak. Looked behind the counter for his new girlfriend as he walked and was unsurprised
to see that she had abandoned her station. Joel guessed it would take a kitchen fire to get her back out to the dining room while he was still here, and he smiled thinly. Sometimes life’s little pleasures were the best.
He found himself whistling softly as he crossed the massive parking lot to his car. He started it up and drove the short distance to the gas station conveniently located between the restaurant and the interstate on-ramp.
Then he filled the tank and hit the road again. He still had a long way to go, and his best girl was waiting for him at the end of the journey.
3
Rudy Palermo had the look of a banker, bland and anonymous. He was average height for a man, average weight as well. Brown hair, brown eyes. Glasses prescribed to combat a mild astigmatism. Dressed in a suit, as he usually was, he looked exactly like a thousand other guys dressed in suits.
Anonymous.
And that was good. Anonymity allowed him to blend into crowds, to become—or remain—invisible, to perform his duties as a made member of Vegas’s Mercadante crime family without ever becoming memorable in the eyes of potential witnesses. For a mob guy who was expected to get his hands dirty—and sometimes bloody—every now and then, being memorable would not have been conducive to a long career.
Rudy’s assignment today was a touchy one. He knew that in all likelihood it would end in bloodshed somewhere down the line, and while he had no problem with that—he relished the opportunity to pull the trigger in this case, if he was being honest with himself—he appreciated his “regular-guy” persona even more than usual today because of that possibility.
He was tasked with tailing a man he knew very well. In fact, it was a fellow member of the Mercadante family, albeit a man much lower on the company ladder. The man was a jack-of-all-trades, a courier/enforcer with the improbably exotic name of Blake Arthur Standiford III. Standiford, who Rudy detested with a passion normally reserved for people who owed him large sums of money and were late with their payments, was rumored to be sleeping with the wrong woman.
The Organization Page 2