“Nervous?” the paunchy, red-faced driver asked. He wore medium blue with a plum maroon tie.
Vincenti did not answer. He took another deep toke and chewed on the acrid smoke. Tall, slim, impeccably groomed in pearl gray, with eyes like slate, he somehow resembled a statue.
The wheelman’s name was Morganza. He was also the finger. His hair looked like a wet, blue-black cap, and there was something anxious in his pale eyes.
“I’d be nervous,” he said.
“You are.”
“I mean if I was you.”
“I wouldn’t doubt that.”
Vincenti’s voice was silken. It appealed to women, along with everything else about the man, and he enjoyed that fact.
They were on Franklin and mid-afternoon Tampa traffic moved glitteringly, sedately. Then Morganza made a sharp right and slowed the flash car. They drew to the curb.
Vincenti’s practiced finger flicked the roach out the window. He was patient. He had to be.
“It’s that loan company, across there. Acme,” Morganza said. He coughed lightly and checked his wrist where gold gleamed. “Due – right now.”
Vincenti watched the Acme Loan entrance. His nose was a blade and his chin held a deep cleft. He sighed and yearned for Vegas with some fresh broad. Well, it would come later, after he returned to LA.
The grass had given him a small lift.
Suddenly Morganza said, “Here it is, you.”
Vincenti looked quickly towards the Acme Loan.
An enormous man in eye-shattering white, slow-moving, ponderous but with the provoking grace of an elephant, still young, shoved from the Acme entrance into the street. Another man, short, reed-like, gripping a tan straw hat, was with him. They stood there on the sidewalk. The short man gestured ubiquitously, while the big man grew like a tree.
Morganza opened his door and stepped out.
“Which the hell one?” Vincenti’s voice was flat, like tepid tea.
“Biggie,” Morganza jerked, and was gone, melting into the afternoon.
Vincenti lifted long legs and slid over beneath the wheel, planting his feet. He waited, watching the big man.
So, this was Nemo Lucelli, god of the Gulf Coast, with wormy fingers that fatted into Miami’s guts, palpated Jacksonville, and saw to the Bahamas skim. Overlord of Florida crime, glutting on everything from prostitution and narcotics to illegal Florida gambling; twisting the coat-tails of governors, senators, and shipping magnates. It was reported authoritatively that his Mexican connection was the fatted calf itself. And anachronistic Murder Inc. was nothing to Lucelli’s bloodbath.
The Big Nemo . . . but Vincenti hadn’t figured him this big in girth.
The National Syndicate wanted Nemo wasted.
Vincenti knew he would be able to retire for maybe three years after this job, able to thoroughly feed his own ravening appetites. Women. Young girls.
He tightened his teeth, his slate-colored eyes checking every corner for soldatos, bodyguards, the lieutenants of Lucelli’s regime. The Tampa hierarchy did not know Vincenti and would not make him. Morganza was from Chi, with capo Ringotti. Morganza would already be at Tampa International, a fly duck.
A quick-moving soldier opened a Caddy limousine door, and Lucelli lurched towards the shiny car, leaving the short fellow still gesticulant.
Vincenti knew that car would be slug-proof.
A door slammed. Vincenti saw the fat man in white lift a glass from a portable bar in the limo. Then the Caddy purred into traffic.
Vincenti knew it had to be obtuse.
Now was the word. Or as close to now as conditions would permit. Make the damn hit and get out.
Vincenti quickly lit a previously rolled joint, took a vigorous toke, and skunked after the Cad, holding his breath, experiencing a tingle in his solar plexus. This was the biggest hit he’d ever attained, and he was playing it to rule . . . the rule cooked up on the cross-country jet flight.
Hit – now. No maps. No clockwork. No shenanigans.
It had to be hit now, because Lucelli’s fortress could be creepy, and there was the ever-gnawing probability that winds would blow news of this top-brass execution decision.
There was always a long tongue, no matter how the odds looked.
Vincenti toked the fat joint deeply, holding the narcotic smoke, the red ember sputtering. Ordinarily he spent days, sometimes weeks, on a hit – planning, scheming, checking every angle. Not this time. No time was this time.
He knew he had to be high. It was in and hit and run.
Desperation was beginning to drive him now.
He worked at desperation. He was a pro. His card was death and the deal was no shuffle, no cut.
They were approaching West Shore Boulevard, the limo blurringly smooth at a sixty clip.
Traffic was heavy.
The afternoon sighed, turned, and rolled over towards four o’clock. Black palm fronds fingered the yellow haze like cemetery hands.
Abruptly the limousine crawled into a circular drive rimmed with glistening poplars and silk oaks, slowed to gleam and glitter in the shadows of a portico fronting a small yellow-stone cottage – small by Lucelli’s standards, Vincenti mused, firing another joint. Actually the cottage was a minor mansion.
Still . . . it didn’t look like home ground, for some reason.
He tooled the outside lane slowly, turning to check. Sure enough, Lucelli was out of the limo and the big car was pulling away in the drive.
Vincenti checked the rear-view mirror, holding his breath.
The Cad crept back onto the boulevard and increased speed.
Lucelli was alone back there at the yellow-stone cottage.
Vincenti wheeled the Continental to the right, down a curving red-brick street shaded with ancient water oaks.
He couldn’t believe it! He couldn’t!
The now was in solid.
Curtly, then, the professional took over. He sped down the block, turned fast right again, marking where the yellow-stone cottage would stand on the boulevard.
He parked at the curb, allowed his right hand to check the spring-holstered, silenced Luger beneath his left arm, then just sat there a moment.
The quiet-looking stone home to the right, behind fastidious dark green Florida poppy hedge, seemed uninhabited. Vincenti had the salesman’s antennae about matters like that.
Anyway, it was now – not later.
He lit still another joint, left the car, and walked rapidly along the outside poppy hedge that bordered a blue-gravel drive. He glanced neither right nor left. He held smoke in his lungs and the afternoon was a cinema screen, flickering impossible paradise.
The large homes on either side were set distantly.
He approached a yellow-stone wall. The cottage where Lucelli had stopped took up, in grounds, obviously most of the block. The place with the hedges was a cheapie.
He flicked the roach away, touched the wall, and with a smooth leap elbowed the rim.
He clung there, taking it in – a kidney-shaped swimming pool under silk oaks, the water like green ice. Walls. Footpaths. Flowers in bloom. A mocking blue jay.
Glass doors open on glitter and shadow.
Nobody. No sound other than the blue jay.
Then . . . soft music. Bartok. Vincenti prided himself on a secret vice. Lucelli the Slaughterhouse, attending Bartok?
He sniffed – sniffed again. Musk. Incense. Lucelli. Avanti. Nemo Lucelli!
A white shape moved through velvet-red shadows inside the cottage.
Vincenti went up the wall, and down into a horseshoe flowerbed of yellow roses. He barely landed here before he was running lightly, silently, around the pool, past canvas deck chairs, luxuriously padded chaises, across a broad flagged patio with a half-finished drink on a redwood table, and over to the glass doors.