M.I.A. Hunter: Miami War Zone (13 page)

Stone pressed the barrel of the pistol to the side of the old man's head. "Are you sure about that?"

"You don't scare me, asshole. You fire a shot and the whole house comes running."

"You may be right." With his left hand Stone pulled out the silenced .22 automatic. "But no one will ever hear a shot from this."

Don Vito's eyes narrowed. "What did you want to ask me?"

"Just a couple of simple questions. Let's start with the first one. Do you have Jack
Wofford
?"

"Never heard of him. Is he an asshole, too?"

"He sure talks dirty for an old man," Hog said. He was admiring the room. "I got to admit he has a good decorator, though. I like all this red
shit
."

"Too bad he's not going to live to enjoy it any longer," Stone growled. "Do you still have that plastic knife?"

"The one that's so brittle that it breaks off in people's bodies? Yeah, I still got it." Hog bent down and removed the knife from his boot.

Stone took it from him. "Where do you think we should stick him first?"

Hog thought about it. "How about the abdomen. He'd still live for a while, long enough to beg you to finish him off after he told you what you wanted to know."

Stone nodded. "Sounds good."

A
l should have been to the top of the stairs by now. Loughlin couldn't figure out what had happened to him. Was there another way to reach the don's room, a second staircase? He heard a toilet flush.

"That take a load off your mind, Al?" someone yelled.

"Everybody's a fucking comedian."

Loughlin heard steps on the stairs. Al was coming up.

S
tone held the knife poised, pointing it in the direction of Don Vito's abdomen beneath the covers.

Hog was struck with an inspiration. "Wait a minute. I got an idea. A guy with a room like this, a nice mirror on the ceiling, a padded leather bar, a guy with a redhead in the room, there's some things worse than dying. You know?"

Don Vito glared at him. "What the hell do you mean?'

"Well, I was brought up in Texas." Hog smiled and rubbed his hands together. "I worked on a cattle ranch for a couple of summers, and I had to learn how to do what they call 'cutting calves.' That's a nice way of
sayin
' they castrated '
em
. There was one guy that always brought a little brown paper sack when we did that. He saved all the calf balls and fried '
em
up for supper. Mountain oysters, he called '
em
."

Stone listened to the performance in silence. For all he knew, it might have been the truth.

"Now you
bein
' so old, I expect your balls would be too tough and stringy to eat. In fact, you hardly ever use '
em
, I bet. Still, I know you'd miss '
em
if they were gone. And that's exactly what they're gonna be if you don't tell my friend what he wants to know. You see that plastic knife."

Don Vito didn't answer, but his eyes were riveted on the knife in Stone's hand.

"It's real sharp," Hog went on. "I can have those old balls of yours off before you can count to ten. Slip a rubber band around the sac, and you won't hardly bleed at all. You got any rubber bands around here?"

Don Vito tried to speak, but his mouth was dry. "N—no," he finally croaked.

"Well, never mind. You probably ain't got much blood in you anyway. Probably runs real slow. You'll be all right."

Hog walked over to where Stone was standing. He extended his hand.

Stone put the knife in it.

"You hold that gun on him real steady,
Sarge
. That way he won't flinch too much. No
tellin
' what else I might cut off if he flinches. We don't want to mess up his
plumbin
' completely."

Hog reached for the edge of the covers, which the old man held in his
clawlike
hands.

"Crazy," Don Vito managed to say. "You're fucking crazy!"

"
Yessir
," Hog agreed. "I expect you're right."

He ripped the covers out of Don Vito's grip and tossed them to the foot of the bed. "Shit. They've shrunk up so little I might have to cut everything off after all. What
d'you
think,
Sarge
?"

"Go ahead. We don't have time for delicate surgery."

"Right." Hog moved the knife.

A
l looked down the dark hallway. Usually the bimbo would be done by now and ready to go. Sometimes they were waiting in the hall.

But sometimes they weren't. On those occasions, Al liked to go and listen at the door, his ear pressed to the wood. Somehow it gave him a feeling of power to hear the intimate cries of the mighty crime lord.

It was just something Al enjoyed. He didn't think of himself as sick.

He started down the hall toward the door where the thin line of brightness still showed.

He never got there.

Loughlin came up behind him like a fog. One of the Brit's big hands covered Al's mouth, while the thumb and forefinger squeezed his nose tightly shut. At the same time, Loughlin wrapped a forearm around Al's neck, pulling backward with a terrible force.

There was not much Al could do. Loughlin had effectively prevented him from yelling, snorting, or even breathing.

Al's body jerked convulsively as he tried to get a breath. He tried to thrash from side to side, he tried to kick, he tried to bite.

Nothing worked.

Al's eyes bugged out. His body suddenly strained forward, his back arching as if a thousand volts of electricity were flowing through him. His heels beat a tattoo against
Loughlin's
shins.

The Brit hung on, his forearm tightening inexorably.

Al's body continued to spasm as he tried more and more desperately to suck in the air his lungs were starving for.

After what seemed to Loughlin quite a long time, the struggles stopped. Al's body went limp.

T
he point of the knife touched Don Vito's scrotum. "
Wofford
!" he hissed.

Stone punched him in the temple with the pistol barrel. "Don't raise your voice again."

The don's voice came in a hoarse whisper. "The D.E.A. guy, right?"

Stone nodded.

Hog didn't move the knife.

"I didn't know the name, I swear it." Don Vito's breath came in ragged gasps. "But if it's the D.E.A. guy, yeah, I can tell you about him."

"He's the one. Tell me, or my friend starts to cut."

"I don't know anything. I'd tell you if I knew."

"Go ahead, Hog, cut them off. Don't be too gentle."

Hog gave a little jab with the knife, enough to draw blood.

"Oh, shit!" Don Vito wailed. "Oh, shit! I'd tell you, but I don't know anything!" Even in his extreme fear, the old crime boss had lost none of his cunning. He knew that the longer he could hold out, the more likely the two men were to believe what he told them.

And he was going to tell them. There was no doubt in his mind about that. But he wasn't going to tell them everything. Hog gave another dig with the knife.

"I don't have him! I don't know nothing about it! It wasn't my idea!"

"Wait a minute," Stone growled. "You say you don't have him. Then tell me who does. Whose idea was it?"

"It was my son. Charlie. They call him Crazy Charlie. Who knows what a crazy man does? Shit!"

"And you have no idea at all where your son might be keeping Jack
Wofford
? None at all?"

"No! I swear it on my mother's honor!"

"That's too bad, then." Stone's eyes were cold. "Chop '
em
off, Hog."

A
t least Al had just dumped his load
, Loughlin thought. It was always messy when someone you were strangling voided his bowels.

Keeping his hand over Al's mouth and nose, and keeping his grip on his throat, the Brit dragged the corpse backward to the bedroom through which he and the others had entered.

He dumped the body on the musty bed.

Al lay dead and still, his sightless eyes staring into the room's darkness.

"Sweet dreams," Loughlin told him.

W
hat the hell
, Hog figured,
maybe the old guy doesn't care after all
. "Kiss '
em
good-bye," he snarled, moving the point of the knife in hard against the groin and reaching with his hand as if to grasp the scrotum to tighten it for the cutting.

"He's at Charlie's place! Shit! Charlie's place!"

"And where is that?" Stone snapped.

Don Vito gave an address in a trembling voice. Hog kept the pressure on the knife.

Stone had no idea where the address was, but he knew that Carol Jenner would be able to locate it almost instantly on the map.

Hog looked disappointed. "He might be
lyin
'," he said plaintively. "Let me cut '
em
off anyway."

The door opened behind them.

Stone whirled, the .22 lowered.

"It's only me," Loughlin said. "Sorry to interrupt. It looks like quite a touching scene."

Hog's eyes never wavered from the don's face. "It might have been a whole lot
more
touching."

"I'm sure. I just dropped in to give you a news bulletin. I had to kill a guy in the hall. They might miss him downstairs soon, though given the kind of worthless rat he was, I wouldn't count on it."

"We were just about through here anyway," Stone told him. "Let's tie the old man up."

Just at that moment the redheaded woman on the floor stirred and raised up. Hog glanced at her.

It was Don Vito's first, last, and only chance. He was old, but he was still vicious. Still dangerous. And lifelong habits are hard to break, especially those related to survival.

Ever since he was a young hood, working his way up through the ranks, Don Vito
Lucci
had slept with a gun nearby. Even sex was not enough of a distraction to make him forget his weapon.

When Hog's eyes slipped away and the pressure from the knife eased somewhat, he twisted in the bed and reached his scrawny hand underneath the stack of pillows.

He came out with a short-barreled .38.

Stone moved even faster than Hog, the hard edge of his hand smashing into Don Vito's throat, crushing his larynx, killing him instantly.

The old man gave a weak, gawking cry.

Blood gushed out of his mouth.

The woman screamed, and the don's finger, tightening on the trigger of the .38 in his death spasm, fired off a shot into the ceiling.

The bullet rocketed into the mirror above the bed, smashing it into a thousand glistening shards. Stone and Hog threw themselves to the side as the deadly glass daggered down from the ceiling.

The woman couldn't move as fast as the trained men. She screamed as one of the shards pierced her left breast.

Her scream was changed to a bloody gurgle as another shard sliced through her throat. Blood
fountained
up and splashed across her breasts.

Several of the glittering pieces of glass flashed down and punctured the dead don, who didn't mind at all.

Hog looked at the dead whore, shaking his head. "What a
fuckin
' waste."

"Let's move it," Stone ordered. "Unless those goons downstairs are stone deaf, they heard something. They may be on the way already."

The three men started from the room.

They heard the sound of the bodyguards rushing up the stairs.