“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.”
CHAPTER 35
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.”