Buffalo Jump (26 page)

“And we need this because …?”

“In your haste to rid yourself of Marco Di Pietra, and the burden he has become, you fail to consider one important factor.”

“Yes, Professor?”

“Call it the carnage factor. Unless we can find Marco alone, we have to take out whoever we find him with, be it a bodyguard, a hooker or anyone else. How many people you prepared to kill?”

He was right. Shit. My focus had been on eliminating the threat Marco posed to me and everyone around me. I had to start seeing the bigger picture.

“You want to keep casualties to a minimum?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“The closer we have to get, the messier it’s going to be. The long gun gives us a chance, understand?”

God help me, I did.

We left the airport via a narrow road where a work crew was regrading a roadbed in the fierce heat, images of the men rippling above the hot asphalt like waves in a mirage.

“Where are we likely to find Marco?” I asked.

“He’s no nine-to-fiver but he has a few regular stops.”

“Where’s his house?”

“The new part of Woodbridge. A big pile his father-in-law built him, all floodlit pink brick inside a ten-foot fence.”

“I thought he lived in Hamilton.”

“His father does, him and the other old-timers,” Ryan said. “The guys who wanted to run Toronto without actually having to live in it. But our generation prefers Woodbridge or maybe Guelph if you want something more rural. Cara’s—my house—is in Woodbridge, and I got to your place last night in under thirty minutes, Highway 7 to 404 and down the DVP. It’s the best of both worlds. Close to downtown but the houses are new and you get space for your money. Anyway, hitting Marco in his house is out of the question. There’s always people
around, including his wife and kids and his mother-in-law, plus the usual armed entourage.”

“Marco has children?”

“Unfortunately.”

“And he could still have Lucas Silver killed? How many children?”

“Three with the wife, two boys and a girl. Couple more outside the friendly confines.”

“Five kids. The bastard doesn’t deserve a single one.”

“Hey, for all I know he likes dogs too.”

“Where else does he go?”

“There’s places he eats, drinks, goes to get laid, watch people get beat up. Again, you’re always going to have too many witnesses.”

“So what’s left?”

“One of his so-called businesses is a trucking company just off Highway 7, a few minutes from here.”

“The one where the Ensign smokes were headed?”

“That’s right. It’s mostly for show—gives him a way to launder money coming in. But he keeps a few trucks on hand, half-tons and cube vans, to haul slot machines, cigarettes, booze, whatever. He runs a sports book out of the place and hosts high-stakes Hold’em tourneys. Sucks in fools who think they can play ’cause they’ve seen it on TV. It’s as close as anything he has to an office. He turns up most days at some point or another. Let’s start there and see what’s what.”

“Would he be there this early?”

“No, he’s a night owl. But there’s a guy, Tommy Vetere, kind of runs the place: answers the phones, takes bets, hands out gas money to the truck drivers, like that. He’s usually there by nine. And he might know when Marco’s coming.”

“He would tell us?”

“He would tell me. Remember how nice I can ask?”

“What if he’s not there?”

“We’ll scout it out. See if there’s some way to use the long gun. Can you shoot?”

“Me?”

“It’s your gig, man. Also, I can distract Marco. Show myself. Chat him up. Lead him outside. You can’t do any of that without him taking a body part as a souvenir.”

I pictured Roni Galil standing over me as I lay on my belly, sighting down the barrel of an Israeli sniper rifle called a Tessler during training. “If you have to shoot someone, Yoni, I hope he’s big like a house because that’s all you going to hit. Should 1get you a slingshot like our King David used against Goliath?” But that was early on in my training. By the end I had become a decent marksman.

“I can shoot,” I told Ryan.

“There’s a fence around the property. Bushes along most of the sides and trees at the back. Trucks parked here and there. Maybe we can set up a blind where you can take him out as he’s getting out of his car. With his arm in that cast, moving like he is, he’ll present a beautiful target, don’t you think?”

“A stunner,” I said.

A few minutes later, Ryan turned off Highway 7 onto Minden Road. He pointed to a red and white sign up on our right. “That’s the place. Aspromonte Trucking. Little joke of Marco’s.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Aspromonte’s in Calabria. In the old days, that’s where the ‘Ndrangheta hid kidnap victims while they waited for ransoms to be paid. They’d stash them in a cave if they were giving them back alive. Dump them in a crevice if they weren’t.”

Aspromonte Trucking sat on a wide, dusty asphalt lot. Its immediate neighbours were a retailer of farm implements and a lumber yard. The entire property was surrounded by an eight-foot cyclone fence topped by three strands of barbed wire; the only entrance visible from the road was a gate, front and centre, that hung halfway open. The building was one storey, about the
size of a service station, half the frontage given over to a large garage door that was rolled down shut. There were two half-ton trucks parked to one side, with enough space for a third between them. A black Escalade was blocking the front door.

“Christ,” Ryan said. “That’s Marco’s.”

“He’s here this early?”

“Or this late. Maybe they had a poker game last night.”

“Would it still be going?”

“Not with no other cars here. But maybe we caught a break. If it went real late, he might have crashed here. There’s a room at the back with a bed in it.”

He drove a few hundred yards past the gate and turned into the lot of a company that made wooden shutters in a California style. There were only a few cars scattered in its lot and we parked as far as we could from the entrance, partially blocked from view by a cedar hedge.

“You think Phil and Tommy are with him?” I asked.

“Does it matter?”

I sat in the stolen Altima, my mouth feeling dry. I had not taken Percocet this morning, wanting to keep my head clear. My side ached but the real discomfort lay elsewhere. In the next few minutes, three men might die: Marco, Phil and this Tommy Vetere. And that was if we got lucky and neither one of us joined in. We were talking about men like pieces on a game board. I had signed onto this mission to practise
tikkun olam,
to repair a part of the world that badly needed it. Save an innocent life. And maybe we still would. Maybe we’d save the entire Silver family. But how many lives could pile up on the other end of the seesaw before it slammed down to the ground and sent our end lurching up?

“Tell me about Vetere,” I said.

“What’s to tell? He’s been in Marco’s crew for years. Before that with Vinnie Nickels. He’s no altar boy, if that’s what you’re worried about. He’s broken his share of bones. He’s fired
his guns. He’s never affronted me personally, so I have no feelings for him pro or con. But if he’s in there with Marco and this is our chance, then I say he has to go. It’s the life he bought into, just like me.”

“Isn’t there a way to make Marco come out alone?”

Ryan thought about it and said there was. I didn’t like the way he smiled when he said it.

“Go on,” I said.

“I go in alone. I tell him I have something in the trunk for him.”

“And that would be?”

“You.”

I
had to say this much for the Altima: it had a roomy trunk for its size and the owner kept it clean. Nothing in there but a Sunday golf bag with half a dozen clubs and a putter, and a set of jumper cables. The carpet was coarse and the overall smell was of grease and metal, but I couldn’t complain.

Not that I didn’t at first.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” I’d yelled.

“Admit it,” he said. “You don’t trust me. After all we been through, the way I’ve put my ass on the line for you, you think I have another agenda.”

“What do you want from me? I was raised to think the goyim have it in for Jews. So a guy like you tries to talk me into the trunk of a car—”

“Goddamn it,” he barked. “I keep telling you, you dumb fuck, if I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. How many opportunities do I need? Your apartment Monday night, I could’ve put two in your head right there and been done with your dumb ass. Drunk the whole bottle of wine by myself. Tuesday in the park, all I had to do was keep my trap shut and Marco would have stabbed you in the heart. But no, I stuck my neck out and warned you but this you somehow forget. Which brings us to Wednesday. Where were we Wednesday? Oh yes,
a soundproof room full of fucking guns. I could have done it then. Or this morning, while you were having a bad dream, moaning like a broken-down whore, I could have popped you right in your bed with a pillow on your face and nobody would have heard a sound.”

His voice was strained, his eyes dark, his fists curled tight. Then it came to me: he was hurt. Dante Ryan was genuinely hurt by what I’d said. He’d shoot me dead on the spot if I suggested as much but there it was. I slowed my breathing until my weight settled and my anxiety passed.

“Sorry,” I said. We made eye contact and bumped fists, our hands encased in tight black leather.

We spent a few minutes making me look roughed up. Shirt untucked and smeared with dirt. Face too. Hair all over the place, like Lyle Lovett on a windy day. I got in the trunk with Ryan’s metal gun case and the canvas bag that held the Remington rifle. I put my hands behind me and Ryan wound coarse yellow rope around them loosely, so it would give way with a good yank. We ran through it a few times to make sure.

“There’s three ways this can play,” he said. “One, I don’t like the odds—say there’s just too many guys inside for us to handle. I give Marco some bullshit story about setting up the Silver hit for tonight. You stay in the trunk and we drive away. Two, the odds seem in our favour. There’s no more than one or two guys besides Marco. I get Marco to come out alone to see what’s in the trunk. I open the trunk, you act dopey and scared, I pop him right there. You get out, he goes in, we go inside and take care of the others.”

“They won’t come running when you shoot Marco?”

“Not with the right tool.” He opened his jacket. Sewn into the lining was a slim sheath from which the cross-hatched butt of a handgun showed. He turned so no one at the window-shutter place could see anything and eased out a slim long-barrelled gun with a silencer threaded into the barrel. “It’s a
subsonic .22,” he said. “With the suppressor on it, all you’ll hear is the dry-fire. You could cover the sound with a cough.”

“Do we have to go inside? Can’t we just drive away with him?”

“After I’ve shown myself? Haven’t you been listening? Geller, we have to do what we have to do and not make mistakes. One shred of evidence links it back to us, we’re both dead. Tits up in a field somewhere.”

“Why would Vito care? We’d be doing him a favour.”

“He’d still have to avenge Marco. For the family’s honour, and to keep people from thinking he did it.”

“What’s the third scenario?”

“Marco wants to come see what’s in the trunk but the others come too. In which case, I’ll bring them out and open the trunk. You act scared.”

“I won’t be acting.”

“I take you out of the trunk and walk you inside. Might have to kick you around again.”

“You enjoy that part, admit it.”

“Better me than Marco. As soon as we’re in the door, you get the rope off your hands and pull the Beretta and we shoot the shit out of anything that moves.”

“You’re going to get into a gunfight with that popgun?”

“Relax,” Dante Ryan said. He opened the other side of his jacket and there under his left arm was his Glock 20 in a breakaway shoulder rig. “If we go toe-to-toe with them, fuck the suppressor. I’m not going to care who hears what.”

We tucked the Beretta Cougar in my pants at the small of my back, a load in the chamber, the safety off. I climbed into the trunk. As Ryan closed it I told him to watch for speed bumps and potholes. “You hit one with this gun where it is, the crack in my ass will have company.”

The car pulled out of the lot, made two left turns and stopped again. The driver’s door opened and closed and footsteps
receded into the distance. I was in virtual darkness. The trunk was uncomfortably hot. No, hell was uncomfortably hot. The trunk was baking me like a chicken. No air conditioning. Precious little air of any kind. The coarse carpet stung my face and neck where sweat was running freely. I tried to take my mind off the discomfort by visualizing the moment I would rip my wrists free of the rope, pull the gun out of my pants and point it at whoever was closest to me.

I tried not to visualize much after that.

Then the door to the building creaked open and banged closed. Footsteps approached. I tried to determine whether there was one person or more. It sounded like one, which likely meant Ryan hadn’t liked the odds and we were calling off our raid.

I thanked God silently—a knee-jerk reaction from my upbringing. Or maybe there are no atheists in car trunks.

When the trunk opened, light burst into the pitch-black space and blinded me for a moment. I squinted at the silhouette standing over me. There was no need to act scared as I was coming by it quite naturally. But there was definitely just the one man there, and as my eyes adjusted, I could tell it was Ryan. He held out a hand to help me out of the trunk.

“What?” I whispered.

“Scenario four,” he said and started back toward the office, his black loafers kicking up swirls of dust.

T
ommy Vetere was an indistinct man with pockmarked skin and hair the colour of wet cardboard. He hadn’t shaved in at least a few days and hadn’t been that careful the last time he did. His short-sleeved white polo shirt rode up on his paunch, showing more hair and gut than most visitors would likely want to see. There were two bullet holes in his chest a few inches apart and another in the middle of his forehead, black stippling around it from unburned gunpowder that had blasted straight out of the gun barrel into his skin. Two shots knocking him off his feet and onto his back, the third to make it official. The pool of blood around him was tacky near the outside edges. He’d been dead for hours.