Nightlife (46 page)

Four minutes later, the monitor’s static image showed the Lincoln easing to a halt before the gate. Lupo got out, sipping from a large cup of steaming coffee.
Fingers crossed.
The pair of guards spoke with him through the gate a moment; Tony had granted him carte blanche on whatever lie he wanted to feed them as an opener. Then in a wink: The scalding coffee was pitched into the face of the nearer guard. Next thing they knew, Lupo had produced a very business-oriented silenced automatic and had clipped them down.

At which point Tony happily pecked the switch to open the gate. The barbarians had just breached the city walls.

Lupo cruised the Lincoln in, the Barrington brothers hidden behind its mirrored glass. A minute behind were another two cars filled with reliable soldiers recruited from street operations, each one rabid for an upgrade in salary and choice of assignment.

Tony closed the gate, watched the silent black-and-white screens as the trio of cars rolled up the drive to the house. By the time they were at the front door, Tony was down to meet them, greet them, open up, and let them inside.

Soon followed by a quick, efficient mop-up operation of off-duty sleeping staff. Divide and conquer, search and destroy. A few prisoners, a few casualties. And a few immediate defections by some wise souls whose ties to Agualar were solely a matter of employment without sentiment. Tony and Santos had gone over the roster one by one the day before, separating wheat from chaff. Likely candidates for conversion, guys with enough brain wattage to recognize a silver opportunity. And guys whose pigheaded allegiance to an outmoded regime made it pointless to offer them anything other than lead.

Never let it be said that Tony Mendoza killed indiscriminately.

Satisfied with his reflection in the mirror, Tony paced back to the desk. A bit nervously, he had to admit. Nothing wrong with that. Nerves were good, kept you alert. Nerves kept you thinking and watching, so long as you didn’t let them snowball into panic.

He reached to the floor beneath the desk—ample legroom down there—and brought up a vinyl bag. A softshell camera case; he had found it upstairs earlier in the morning. He plopped it to the desktop at his left elbow as he sat waiting for the final act of the coup d’état to play itself out.

It began ten minutes later. A half-dozen guys whose shiny cars lined the drive, summoned earlier by one of the defectors under admittedly false pretenses. Rojas, a walking display of jewelry-store gold. Henderson, fair and vaguely Nordic and wearing light workout clothes. Fernandez, a cherub-faced guy who favored open collars. Others; Riva, Diaz, and Monroe. Agualar’s lieutenants one and all. The next set of links in the chain of command, the men who legged the orders out into the streets, who got things done or delegated responsibility and puppeteered life and death and dealings from a comfortably insular distance. In purely conventional white-collar terms, middle management.

The wary confusion was in their eyes, ushered into Agualar’s inner sanctum by enough familiar faces to make things seem normal enough. But plenty of new faces, too, who made no effort to conceal just how well-armed they were. All told, fifteen guys in this office. With more to come when the time was right.

“Mendoza, what the fuck you doing here?” Fernandez didn’t try to disguise the contempt in his voice as he took a seat before the massive desk.

Tony smiled tightly. “Mister Agualar has finally taken me under his wing. He and I—well, we’ve come to a business arrangement that should interest all of you. He’ll be down in a few minutes.” A big grin. “He had a rough night.”

“Rafe’s gonna have your balls, he comes in and finds you in his chair,” said Monroe.

A knowing titter rippled among them. Let them laugh, Tony did not care. He’d have their undivided attention—and respect—soon enough.

Tony glanced back to the doorway, caught Lupo’s eye, and gave a terse nod. Lupo disappeared for a moment, then came back in escorting Santos. The accountant turned Judas. He had doffed the sunglasses today, although the bruises inflicted from Agualar’s fists had faded only minimally. Other than that, he looked as cool and collected as a grand-an-hour lawyer.

Tony rose and met Santos at the edge of the desk, drew a comradely arm around the man’s narrow shoulders. Ushered him to his own reserved seat behind the desk. A move that brought no small degree of interest from the lieutenants. Legitimacy.

Tony opted to remain standing as he addressed his guests.

“Ours is a business no different from any other,” he said. “You want to know who the movers and the shakers are in the game, all you need to do is follow the money. Money doesn’t lie.”

Let it sink in a moment, make sure they were all on the right track.

“Mister Santos here”—a friendly clap on the accountant’s shoulder—“with all his financial savvy, has decided to side with me. And this is one smart man, by anybody’s standards.”

Financial savvy. Now
there
was the understatement of the day. While he didn’t know the combination—that was likely lost with Agualar’s last breath—Santos had assured him that an upstairs wall safe was stocked with roughly five million in emergency cash. No matter; the safe could be blown. Of considerably greater significance, Santos had access to another fifty-five mil in bank accounts and holdings as far west as Dallas and as far east as Zurich. And sixty million in play money was nothing to take lightly. Sixty mil could sling around vast tonnages of weight.

Especially when considered as a mere seed for greater fortunes.

Tony realized he was letting the thought of all that cash distract him. He barely caught it, somebody bitching about his boast of Santos shifting allegiance. It would be weak to ask the whiner to repeat. No real need though. He’d caught the gist of it: Agualar would most definitely have something to say about
that.
Hell to pay.

Tony merely smiled and unzipped the camera bag. “I’m glad you brought him up, I was about to forget him.” He reached into the bag. “Why don’t you ask him to his face if he minds.”

Tony grabbed a fistful of matted hair and yanked. Like hefting a melon by the vine. He let the vinyl bag fall to the floor and in the same fluid move plunked Agualar’s head onto the desktop. The ragged stump of his neck made a wet slap and dribbled pinkish water, the last drainage of what he’d soaked up in his pond. Tony took care that the ghastly gray face was staring out at the lieutenants, no mistake in the identity.

“Makes a good paperweight, don’t you think?” said Tony.

He couldn’t have snared their wholehearted attention any better if he’d snorted skullflush and changed right before them. Controlled pandemonium. You could chart it in their eyes, a comfy complacency over what they thought would be another routine meeting veered 180 degrees away from the norm. Bedlam, babble, and uproar.

At all times, Tony had been keeping one eye on Riva. One of the younger lieutenants, good-looking chisel-faced guy. Looked like he should do shaving ads. Santos had filled him in that Agualar and Riva had almost some sort of father-son rapport. Not the choice of background that would allow him to take this type of news with an amiable shrug. Tony watched Riva regain his fragmented composure, then plunge a hand beneath his jacket. Tony had seen enough custom-tailoring jobs to know what hung beneath Riva’s left armpit.

He had had a few custom-tailoring jobs himself.

This time, though, the gun was resting in an open desk drawer. Almost immediately in hand, and silenced to save a lot of grief on all their ears in the room’s enclosure. He fired twice into Riva’s chest, sent him tumbling backward to overturn his chair atop himself.

“Sit down!”
Tony shouted to the rest. He held the pistol with a rigid arm, bent at the elbow so he aimed at the ceiling. A very James Bond pose; he wished he could see himself in the mirrors. Should have assigned somebody to do photodocumentation of the event.
“Sit down and shut up!"

He waited a few more beats, and when the silence fell, it was thick with tension that bordered on electric.

“Anybody else?” he asked them. “Anybody else stupid enough to let sentiment get in the way of profit motive?”

It was a moment of nervously roving eyes, twitches, and tics. Of dawning realization of being players in a brand-new ball game.

“Let me tell you something.” With equal halves amusement and amazement, he realized he was sporting, at desk level, one impressive erection. Not that anybody was keeping their eyes lowered to half-mast. “Let me tell you something. You think Agualar was gonna keep his fucking head together for much longer?
Think again.
Every one of you that used to work for him, I just saved you prison time.”

This was always a grabber. Talk of rehab and restitution and making little ones out of big ones was no topic for idle chatter.

“You know what kind of man he’d become. Every one of you. He was paranoid. He was hooked on his own supply. His judgment wasn’t worth shit anymore.” Tony shook his head, then took a gentle swipe at Agualar’s. It toppled over with a thump and performed a languid roll, like a jack-o’-lantern nudged by a careless foot. “It was just a matter of time before he went down, and I promise you, if he’d gone down for the DEA or somebody, he would’ve taken others right here in this room with him. Shit rolls downhill, you know.”

Now, at last, a few murmurs of agreement, and Tony bulldozed right ahead, keep the show moving. He flicked another glance back to Lupo and snapped his fingers. Lupo ducked out for another several moments.

A few months back, Lupo had read a biography and insisted Tony read it as soon as he was finished. The book was about Vlad Dracula, the Transylvania-born fifteenth-century prince of Wallachia. Tony had balked at first, but once into it could hardly put the thing down. Forget Lee Iacocca and Donald Trump; now
there
was a guy who knew how to rule an empire. Vlad the Impaler, as he had come to be known, had been the real-life inspiration for the fictional vampire. That they had managed to water him down into limp-wristed, swishing Bela Lugosi was a travesty. Lugosi couldn’t frighten his way out of a wet paper bag. The genuine Vlad, though—one scary monarch. He surrounded his capital with a virtual forest of corpses impaled on huge wooden stakes to warn off marauding armies. When meeting with visiting dignitaries who refused to remove their hats in his presence, Vlad said more power to them and had the hats nailed to their heads. For all his bloodlust, though, he had been an incredibly successful ruler and defender of his country.

The book’s lessons were not lost on Tony. In a world where you lived by your balls as well as your brains, you could never overemphasize the importance of driving home your point with a good Technicolor display of carnage. Just to demonstrate that you meant business.

Agualar’s death? A necessity. Shooting down Riva? Self-defense.

Next on the agenda though . . .

Lupo and a couple of other soldiers marched in seven guys with the efficiently brisk stride of guards in a POW camp. Former Agualar employees, hands bound with nylon cord behind their backs, mouths sealed over with two-inch tape. Above the tape, their eyes were huge and luminous white, endlessly roving for escape or salvation, they didn’t look picky. But the sawed-off shotguns carried by their escorts were all the incentive needed to kneel when told. Before the desk, facing the audience. Pretty maids all in a row.

“I
do
respect loyalty. These men were loyal to Agualar, and I can respect that. Can’t understand it, but I can respect it.” Tony spoke while pacing out from behind the desk into a pathway between the desk and the kneeling men. When he came to a pair in the middle, bruised and lumpen headed, he cuffed them with open-handed slaps, one each. “And
these
two geniuses, they’re the ones let me walk right in here in the first place. I can’t function with fuckups like that around me.” He was at one end of the lineup by now. He turned smartly on his heel, military crisp. And shot the first of the seven in the back of the head. Was already behind number two when the first went pitching to the floor like a sledgehammered steer. Number two followed suit. A couple of the others whose turn was rapidly coming tried squirming to safety, wobbling frantically on their knees, and were kicked back into place by the soldiers.

“Look at you!”
Tony screamed at the lieutenants, Fernandez, Rojas, Henderson, Diaz, and Monroe, whose reactions were ranging from paralytic fear to utter nonchalance.

Number four had his eyes clenched tighter than fists, and from behind the tape came what sounded like garbled prayers. Hail Mary, full of grace, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our deaths. Tony let her kill two birds with one stone and dropped him spasming to the floor. Then continued on his merry way, administering the final coup de grace to men who had been dead since dawn and simply hadn’t had the foresight to cease breathing. Borrowed time was now being recalled with a vengeance.

“Look at you!”
he screamed again. His voice had grown tight and husky with passion, a hoarse roar. “You can’t tell me that a single one of you didn’t look at Agualar and think of a moment like this. You saw it,
you tasted it!
But you didn’t have the brains or the balls.”

Number six dropped with a strangled bleat, and the stink of blood and cordite perfumed the air. Wisps of gunsmoke wreathed Tony’s head, an ephemeral victory laurel sweeter than any olive branch. He could scarcely sense his feet touching the floor, swept away in a blissful angry whirlwind of Grand Guignol theater and allusions of deity. He was gliding, the angel of death.

Tony looked down at his suit, the pristine white now the canvas for a splotchy expressionist painting. Head wounds were a bitch when it came to blood. He felt another drop rolling down his cheek, as if he had wept blood. Tasted it when it rolled into the corner of his mouth. Salty, thicker than any tear. He shivered with delight . . .

And felt the familiar swirling sensation. The start of the plummet through aeons whose journey began with a single step of daring. Flesh and bone began to tingle, the ache in his jaws a sweet masochistic daydream. Loss of control, a fistful of sand.