Deep (The Pagano Family Book 4) (15 page)

The real plan was half as complicated as the decoy plan and twice as dangerous. But the families had the edge, since their enemies were expecting a different target approached at a different time. Instead of going for Stone after the exchange, they were going for the cartel
and
Stone in the middle. Twice the enemies, twice the risk, twice the result.

So when forty-three Italians from five different families converged on a gutted elementary school in a derelict rural area outside of Danbury, Connecticut, the thirty-plus members of the Zapata cartel and Jackie Stone’s crew assembled there were taken unawares.

Their assault had two prongs—stealth from the perimeter and straight in from the front. The frontal assault, as planned, caught the Zapatas attention first, giving the men on the perimeter another edge.

Nick was not reckless, but neither was he one to hang back and let men with less power and more to lose take his risk. Moreover, he wanted to make it clear that the cartel was not facing a bunch of guineas with little brains and big guns. He led the frontal push, Brian at his side—and Vio Marconi, Enzo’s son and underboss, at his other side.

They drove in in three armored SUVs and piled out, using the trucks for cover. The men inside the school came roaring out of the front doors of the old school in a wave, their fully automatic rifles filling the air with metallic thunder.

The goal was to keep Jackie Stone and Emilio Zapata, the most important targets, alive in this storm of bullets. Stone for information, Zapata for a message.

The next minutes were a chaos of bullets and bodies. Nick kept his field of vision simultaneously narrow and wide, getting good focus on targets before him and keeping his periphery open to prevent being blindsided. It required a depth of cognition and perception far beyond that which most people needed, and it took a massive amount of energy to maintain.

The AR15 magazine went dry as Nick brought a Colombian down, and he caught movement to his right. He dropped the AR and pulled his Beretta from its holster as he turned. He fired as soon as he sighted on one of Stone’s men.

“Nick!” He heard Brian’s voice from behind him and wheeled around to see his friend sailing at him, his empty arms outstretched. Where was his weapon? In the thick of the gunfire, one shot sounded out somehow more loudly than any other. Time seemed to slow to a crawl, and Nick would be sure for the rest of his life that he saw every drop of blood spray that left the back of Brian’s neck in an arcing plume.

His friend hit him full force, blood leaving his neck in great gouts, and knocked Nick flat, sending all the air from his lungs in a rush. The Zapata who’d fired came forward to see what damage he’d wrought, and Nick raised his Beretta and shot without aiming. When the man dropped, Nick rolled, putting Brian on his back.

“Brian! Fuck, you stupid son of a bitch!”

He was alive, but his spine was exposed, nerves showing like so much capellini, and his mouth was full of blood. He died with his eyes open, but without seeing Nick leaning over him, shouting at his stupid, brave, loyal face.

Nick sensed someone coming from his left and raised his gun, taking a scant moment to aim before he fired. And then he stood and got back to the business of taking these fuckers down.

~oOo~

When it was over, only the Council was left standing. With three key exceptions, all of Stone’s men, and all of the Zapatas, were dead—killed either in the fight or after it. Ten Council men were dead, including Brian and four other Pagano men. Vio Marconi was badly injured, shot in the shoulder, but he was on his feet and barking orders to his men to start rounding up the bodies. Arrangements had already been made for a mass burial; everyone had expected blood.

Nick went back to Brian’s body and waved away the Marconi men who’d come to carry him to lie with the other Council dead. But when he squatted down to lift his friend himself, Dom Addario grabbed his shoulder.

“No, boss. We got him. You have work to do.”

He was right. Nick nodded and turned toward the school. Vio walked in with him, holding a cloth to his shoulder.

“They’re set up as planned. This is your play, Nick. I’ll back you.”

Too focused for words, Nick again only nodded. He straightened his tie and suit jacket, feeling Brian’s blood wetting his hands.

Bound and gagged, lying on the ground in the rubble of the cannibalized old school gymnasium, Emilio Zapata, Jaime Rojas, and Jackie Stone awaited their fate.

Rojas and Zapata bore the signs of struggle. They had been in the fight. Stone, though, had tried to flee, leaving his men behind. He’d been caught and dragged back. Other than the heavy sweat of fear that drenched his shirt, he looked nearly clean enough for Sunday church.

Nick moved to the center of the room and then nodded at Matty, who was solid, though obviously exhausted and freaked by the various events of the day so far, and what he knew was yet to come. Matty went immediately to Zapata and pulled him up to a seated position and removed his gag.

Nick squatted at his feet. “I am Nicolo Pagano, underboss of the Pagano Brothers of Rhode Island. Behind me is Silvio Marconi, underboss of the Marconi Family of Connecticut. We have representatives here today from all the families of New England. We are allied. We are in accord. And we are resolute. New England is our neighborhood—our turf. There is no corner in our neighborhood for Colombian drugs.”

Zapata, calm, said nothing. Nick respected that—there was nothing, at this point, for the man to say. He knew that Nick had not laid his cards down yet.

He turned and waved Sal DiNapoli forward, and he came, bringing a large, army-green duffel. Stone made a ruckus behind his duct-taped mouth. Nick ignored him.

“This is the cash Stone was meant to give you. One-point-five million dollars. And we have control of the drugs, as well. Here are the terms. You may take your drugs, and Stone’s cash”—again, Stone yelled, and Nick looked up at Matty, who knocked him out with the butt of a shotgun. What Nick needed from Stone came later. He would have liked to make him watch the rest of this exchange, but he could fill him in on the docks.

“You may take Stone’s cash. We want no proceeds from this business. But you sell your wares elsewhere, and you recognize that New England is sealed. We left Jaime here alive because we know he is your son-in-law and dear to you. Consider him, and the money, our good-faith gesture.” He stood. “There will not be another.”

Now Zapata spoke, his voice showing no signs of distress and very little accent. “And if I tell you no?”

“Then we keep the money, destroy the drugs, and send another kind of message to your brother Ramon. And your journey ends here on this floor. Several difficult hours from now.”

“Do you honestly think that you can keep us out of all New England? Are you some kind of crusader?”

Nick squatted down again. “No, Emilio. I am a businessman, like you. We run a different kind of business and show our power in a different way. Your drugs get in our way. Think of it this way: with this money”—he patted the duffel—“and your life, we are buying out New England from your conglomerate. I honestly don’t give a fuck where else you sell. Have the rest of the country—the rest of the world. But New England is ours.”

He stayed down, nearly eye-level with Zapata, and waited. The seconds passed. And then, Emilio Zapata nodded.

~oOo~

Back in Providence several hours later, Nick stood in the middle of an empty Pagano Brothers Shipping bay. Jackie Stone hung from the ceiling by a heavy hook on a winch line. Chi-Chi Rinaldi was still in his box.

The box was an old, military-regulation footlocker, about four feet by two feet by two feet. Chi-Chi was five-ten. He’d been in there, bound and hooded, for about eight hours. That itself was medieval-level torture. If he was still alive when Nick was ready, then he had an even worse fate waiting for him. Nick had no need to interrogate his former soldier. He had Jackie Stone for that.

He’d been working on Stone for about an hour. He had broken after about twenty minutes, but most of what he’d offered was background and names. Getting details about Church specifically or his future plans was proving more difficult. Stone had run at the fight; it wasn’t toughness giving him the strength to hold out. It was fear.

Nick had not yet decided whether he would end him or set him free. But Stone was flagging hard after an hour of Nick’s attention, and it was time to make the decision.

There were benefits and challenges to either approach: end him, and, with the dozen or so men he lost today, his entire enterprise would go down in flames, closing off a major supplier to Church—a supplier of more than drugs. That hurt would hamstring Church. But Stone was Church’s friend and close ally. Ending him could galvanize an already fractious opponent. If Church could pin it on the Paganos.

Letting him go, but turning him—if he could be reliably turned—could give them information and opportunities to do further damage.

As Chi-Chi had done.

Nick made up his mind. “To be clear, Jackie, the choice you’re making here is whether to die now, quickly, or much later, slowly.” He put the gouge on the absorbent pad next to his kit. The key to this work was developing ways to prolong and intensify pain without doing mortal damage. You wanted blood, but not too much. You wanted to avoid internal damage as long as possible. Some men who did this work preferred big tools and big damage and would cauterize as they went, causing more pain and staving off mortal blood loss. But that approach risked sending the subject into shock, and it was difficult to pull a body back from that.

Sculpting gouges were among his preferred tools—they were precise instruments, small and sharp. They cleanly sliced skin away in long lengths without exposing organs and overly weakening the body. The pain they left behind was extreme, however. A little salt or hot sauce in the wounds made it worse. Stone’s bare chest, belly, and thighs were crisscrossed with seasoned gouge wounds. He was also missing eight teeth and all of his fingernails.

But he was flagging more quickly than Nick would have expected, and it was shock they were trying to hold back now. Nick wondered whether Stone had heart problems.

Through his bloody, swollen mouth, Stone whined, “I don’t know what more you want from me.”

“You do. As close as you are to Church, I don’t believe you know so little about him.” He lifted the tray out of his kit and took one of his larger tools—a set of blacksmithing tongs that he’d had modified. “Get his shorts off.” Matty did, and Nick walked up and snapped the tongs a few inches from Stone’s flaccid dick. “Back in the Spanish Inquisition, the priests used breast rippers on female heretics. Nasty things—did just what the name says. I made myself a junk ripper.”

Stone hadn’t wet himself until now, but now he very much did, and Nick stepped back out of the splash zone.

“The Armani is ruined, but I’m hoping the Bruno Maglis make it through the day, Jackie. C’mon.”

“You guinea fag.”

Nick grinned and grabbed hold of Stone’s junk with the tongs. Stone screamed as the claws dug into the meat around his trio—dug in, but did not yet break skin. “Not smart to insult your host, Jackie. Not smart at all. Last chance here, or I give this a good, hard tug, and you bleed out hanging from a hook, with your jewels on the floor. It’s slow going, trust me. I’ve seen.” For emphasis, he squeezed the tongs a fraction more, and Stone’s eyes bugged out.

“New York! He’ll turn to New York!”

He eased off the tongs. “Explain.”

“Alvin’s been talking to some Puerto Rican in New York. Ortega. He doesn’t like spics, that’s why I was on point with Zapata. He’s just been toying with this guy. But Ortega has cartel connections. You cut him off in New England, so he’ll go to Ortega. Get to Ortega and it’ll cripple Church and everybody connected to him. That’s the head of the snake. Now, Lord Almighty, kill me. Please.”

Nick removed the tongs. “Thank you, Jackie. You’ve been a great help.” He nodded at J.J., who’d been watching the whole scene with silent, rapt attention. “You take the kill, J.J. Make it clean.”