Butcher's Road (47 page)

Leading Hayes again, Butch hurried around the back of the house and hopped into the yard. He raced to the east side of the structure and without pausing, drove the blade of Keane’s knife through a window. He made quick work of the pane, scraping glass out of the frame and then found the latch. A few moments later, he was climbing inside. He checked the window and saw Hayes lumbering through the snow in the side yard. The old guy was doing his best, but the snow was working against his muscles and his stamina. Butch leaned over the sill and held out his hand, which Hayes took the moment fresh gunfire erupted from the front yard. Butch yanked with all of his strength, hauling the older man into the room before slamming what was left of the window closed. Together they slid to the floor, protected by the brick and lathe as bullets
chicked
against the side of the house. Glass shattered above them, rained down. Next to him Hayes groaned.

“Don’t sweat,” Butch said. “They’re wasting their ammo.”

“Not a complete waste,” Hayes said.

The Alchemi bent his knee and in the gloom Butch noted the streak of glimmering fluid running down the man’s pant leg from knee to ankle. One of the bullets had tagged the back of the older man’s calf. The wound wasn’t fatal, but Hayes’s running was over for the night.

“You’ll be okay,” Butch said. “Use your scarf to tie around the wound. I’m going to see if that door locks.”

Rising to his feet, he heard the first footfalls crashing in the hall. Hayes leaned back against the wall with a resolute look on his face and sighed, as if saying: that’s it. Butch wasn’t as committed to surrender. His mind sparked and snapped. Every moment was as clear as crystal and charged with possibility. Simultaneous to the door’s being thrown open, Butch grabbed the metal bar from Hayes’s hand, and with little that amounted to a true aim, he whipped the bar toward the doorway and fell back as the ratchet fast explosions of gunfire peeled through the room. Plaster popped from the wall, leaving dozens of divots in a line where a standing man’s chest would be, but then the relatively uniform pattern shifted, drawing lines down the walls. Both Hayes and Butch himself would have been cut down had it not been for the mahogany desk between them and the gunmen. Slugs ripped through the top of the furniture and lodged in the thick, polished boards. Butch’s ears rang, but all else was silent.

He slid on his back until he could peer around the desk. There he saw two men lying in a heap beyond the threshold with the iron bar jutting from the wall behind and above them. Though he couldn’t imagine what magic the bar had performed to bring down both men, he accepted it as a blessing. A miracle. Butch leapt to his feet and sprinted to the hall. With a quick check of the corridor, he stepped over the dead men and pulled the iron bar free. Back in the room, he retrieved the dead men’s guns, sliding them across the floor where they came to a stop against the edge of the carpet. He locked the door and removed the key. He carried it and the iron bar back to Hayes, who was wrapping his scarf around the bullet hole in his leg.

“That’s a thick door. They won’t be getting in here anytime soon.”

“And you’re telling me this, because you intend to leave me here?”

“I can’t carry you.”

“You do remember this house is burning, right?”

“I won’t be long,” Butch said. “If I don’t come back, wait until you’re certain the fire brigade has arrived. Stay close to them until you can get back to the car. It’ll be your best chance.”

Shouts and pounding footsteps rose in the hall as Impelliteri’s men gathered outside the door. Butch stood and pressed against the wall beside the window. He checked the side yard. Two men stood in a crater of trampled snow. When they saw Butch, they opened fire, sending a barrage of bullets across the side of the house and through the open window. Leaving the wall, Butch crouched and duck-walked across the study to retrieve the machine guns he’d taken from the dead men in the hall. He gave one to Hayes, who looked at the weapon like it was a monstrous child. He kept the other and used it to send a short burst of fire through the window. The men fired back, but Butch had the advantage over the more experienced gunmen because they stood like arrogant statues in the middle of the open yard—dark targets amid a field of white. Butch’s bullets ripped through the shoulder and neck of one man, who spun away and toppled into the snow. The other man received a slug in the biceps, which sent his arm back and down. He fired useless rounds into the snow and Butch took him out with another short burst of fire.

In the hall beyond the study door, voices were raised. The doorknob rattled. Someone called for Impelliteri to bring a key.

“I have to go,” Butch said.

Hayes nodded, pulling the tommy gun into his lap.

It was a meager farewell for them both, but there was no time for sentiment or even well wishes. Butch climbed onto the windowsill and dropped into the snow. He ran toward the front of the house, hugging the siding. After finding the front yard empty, he ran to the brick wall and climbed over it. Secure behind the barricade, his mind raced, clicked and hummed as he considered his next move.

Hayes might live through this, though Butch found it unlikely. His own chances of survival were next to zero. Even if their conservative estimate of a dozen men proved accurate, that meant three armed guards remained, and Impelliteri wasn’t going to let them leave his side. On the other hand, Impelliteri’s force might have only been halved, leaving a squad of ten gun-toting lunatics between Butch and his target.

He had not intended to walk away from this place. That was okay. As long as Impelliteri didn’t see Christmas, that was okay.

Hayes used the metal bar as a cane, pressing it hard against the floor as he slid up the wall. He balanced on one leg. Eventually he had to give up on the bar because it was too short to help him complete the task, but he managed to stand, using Impelliteri’s desk for support. The pain from his leg came in waves, though the throbbing there was as consistent as a drum beat. Icy wind blew through the shattered window, working its way into his skin and bones. Snow danced in the opening; it frosted the sill and the edge of the desk. Men talked in the hall outside the study door. They’d given up on beating the wood with their fists and testing the knob. Instead, they waited for the master of the house to bring them the spare key. Hayes needed to get to the door and jam the lock before that key arrived, but getting to his feet had proved an uncommon effort, and Hayes took a moment to compose himself. He rested his hands on the desk and took deep breaths, which had the power to sporadically ease the pain below his knee. As he prepared to push on toward the door, a large photograph in the center of the desk caught his attention. His eyes had adjusted to the deep gloom in the study, and though he could not see the picture clearly from where he stood, something about its subject caught Hayes’s eye. Before he could remind himself that the door’s lock was his priority, Hayes slid the photograph across the desktop. A bullet had punched a hole in the upper left quadrant, but the image and what it represented was perfectly clear. His heart raced, momentarily eclipsing the pain and pulse in his leg.

“No,” he whispered, feeling the kind of panic a parent endures when seeing their child toddling into a busy street.

Hayes squinted and pulled the picture closer to his face and then held it away, but distance didn’t change the wholly familiar structure he saw there.

One of the men in the hallway laughed, startling Hayes out of his disturbance. Ignoring the pain, he hopped quickly to the door and pressed against it as he fished the Ever Key from his pocket. He slid the steel pin into the lock. A moment later, it had adapted to the mechanism and would serve as a perfect key, but Hayes needed something else from the object. With a flick of his finger, he tapped the blunt, dime-sized handle three times. The protruding metal shifted and melted, flattened out against the keyhole, forming a seal that was as impenetrable as if he had poured molten lead into the apparatus. Then he hopped back to the desk and lifted the photograph, hoping the image had changed, had proven itself nothing more than a figment of his panicked imagination.

But this was not the case. There on the paper, captured by a camera’s lens was the exterior of 213 House—the home of the Alchemi and the metals they protected. Hayes had retrieved the photograph from a spray of papers at the center of Impelliteri’s desk. He swept these together and took them to the corner, where he sank down on the floor. Using his matches for light Hayes read the telegrams and the notations, each one adding weight to his dread.

On one sheet, Impelliteri had written notes, which would have been all but nonsensical to most.
The rose and what else? How many men inside? No survivors/no backlash/no one to talk. I’ll need a crew of ten maybe fifteen. Contact Larocca for local muscle. Come into my house? I’ll tear yours to the fucking ground.

Impelliteri was planning to attack 213 House. After acquiring the Galenus Rose, the mobster intended to visit Brooklyn with a squad of men, and wage war on the Alchemi, murdering every one of Hayes’s associates. Nothing in the notes indicated that Impelliteri knew about the arsenal of metals in the chambers beneath the house, but Lonnie Musante had told his boss about the Rose. Was it so unlikely the man would offer up more information? Maybe even everything he knew about the Alchemi and the pieces they guarded?

It’s my fault,
Hayes thought. He shook out the match, which was dangerously close to burning his fingers, tossed it on the floor, and lit another.
Brand and I confirmed Musante’s story. The mobster might have thought it all some ridiculous fairy tale, but the moment we stepped into his house we made it real like two elves stepping from the pages of a Hans Christian Andersen tale.

Obscenities rose outside the door. Apparently the gunmen had found a second key, which would do them no more good with the lock than a chicken bone or a bowl of soup. Eventually, they’d give up and come around to the window. Hayes eyed the tommy gun on the floor and knew he could defend the study’s one means of entry, but he couldn’t stay here. The house was burning. If Mr. Cardinal failed, Hayes was as good as dead, and his home, the place he prized above all others, would come under attack.

Again he used the iron rod for a cane. This time he found it much easier to get to his feet. He slid along the wall and lifted the gun from the floor. Hayes poked his head out the window and found the side yard clear. After dropping his two weapons into the snow, he began the painful task of following them.

“The punk jammed something in the lock,” DeNardo said. “Key won’t even go in.”

Marco ground his teeth and closed his eyes, fighting the persistent urge to bellow his rage. The wrestler and his Alchemi stooge had invaded his home, had killed too many of his men; the cocksuckers had lit his house on fire, and it was coming down around Marco’s ears. Though the fire had not spread beyond the west wing, smoke filled the hallway. The abrasive mist stung his eyes, worked on his throat like sandpaper.

“Shut it down,” he said, quietly. “DeNardo take Robertson to the side of the house. Join up with Rudy and Theo and keep those two pinned down inside. If they try to slip out, kill the old man, but the wrestler has information I need. If he tries to run, take his legs off. He’ll only need to talk for a minute.”

DeNardo nodded his head and clapped Robertson on the back as he set off along the hallway. The other two men—Jake and Luke—remained in the hall, waiting for their orders. Marco would keep these two close. Both had hard, square faces with pencil-thin mustaches, and both had hands that looked like they could crush bowling balls if called to do so. They looked like twin statues carved from aggression. They weren’t bright enough to question his orders, but they’d proven themselves time and again—riding shotgun on shipments of whiskey from Canada—to be smart enough in a pinch. Marco trusted them as much as he trusted any men.

“Let’s get outside,” he said. “You two stay in front of me in case those fuckers managed to get out of the house.”

“Boss,” the men said in unison. They nodded their heads in assent.

The foyer of Marco’s home had grown oven hot, with smoke so heavy he couldn’t see more than a foot in front of him, and his rage ticked up another notch when he realized the place wasn’t going to be saved. The fire brigade would arrive in time to comb through charred and melted history, nothing more. Carmen would wail and sob and ask god, “Why?” on bended knees. His daughter, Sylvia, would be sorrowful and withdrawn, frightened to think that something so sturdy, so trusted, could be taken away with the striking of a match. At least they were safe. After the cop had called to pass along the wrestler’s threat, Marco had ushered his family out of the house. They would have dinner with Carmen’s parents and then go to Assumption for the Midnight Mass, where Marco had intended to meet them, but that wasn’t going to happen now. Even after he watched Cardinal bleed out, he’d have to remain on the property to explain the bodies littering his yard. He’d have to explain the fire. He’d have to relive every fucking thing that had gone wrong. Outside he followed Jake and Luke into the middle of the snowy lawn and looked back to see orange flames feeding on the walls and roof of his house. A lesser man would mourn the little things, the mementoes collected over the years to remind him of travels and milestones, weddings and fatherhood, but Marco kept sentimentality out of it. The house had cost a fortune—two fortunes by current standards—and now it was in the process of being reduced to black shit, and if he could murder Cardinal a hundred times—each one slower than the last—it still wouldn’t be enough to pay back this offense.