The Mafia Trilogy (71 page)

The doors were locked. A sign on the wall beside the door said that the way in was through the pro shop.

Darwin headed for the pro shop. This made sense to him. With the kind of meeting that was taking place, the powerful people present, they wouldn’t have these double doors unattended.

At the front, he stepped inside the pro shop which was filled with golf supplies and equipment. Where was the security? If three rival Mafia families were really meeting here, right now, then it totally didn’t look like it to Darwin.

Or maybe that was the idea.

They would have the meeting when it was a normal day at the golf course with the public buying green fees and driving carts around and no one would be the wiser.

“Can I help you?” the clerk asked.

One golfer stood near the back, eyeing up a new driver.

“Looking for the entrance to the convention center. The sign said it was through the pro shop.”

“You here for the meeting?”

Shit. Are you serious? It’s that public?

“Yeah.”

“Name?”

“Dar—” he almost said his own name. “The Scythe.”

The clerk’s eyebrows raised and he looked Darwin up and down.

“Really?”

Darwin pulled the handles of the scythes up high enough to show the clerk and then slipped them back.

“Yes. Really,” Darwin said.

“Holy shit,” the clerk whispered. Then louder, “I’ve heard of you.”

“The convention center?”

The clerk pointed toward the back of the pro shop. “Back there. Go ahead. They’ve already started.”

Darwin walked by the counter and headed for the back. The golfer with the driver in his hand stayed where he was, a blank expression on his face. The clerk was still behind the counter, shaking his head back and forth.

At the back, two doors opened to a hallway. With caution, he took each step, watching for traps, alarms, or guards.

Maybe the pro shop clerk is their gatekeeper?

At the end of the hall, his stomach in knots, he tried the double doors and found them unlocked. He paused, breathing in and out like a locomotive. When he opened these, the Russians could be waiting. They would probably have guns and shoot him down. Then Rosina would die.

It was hopeless and he knew it. But what else was there? They would live together or die together. One thing was for sure. If he didn’t walk through these doors, his wife
would
die.

He had never planned to go up against the Mafia, the Italians or the Russians. He had wanted to enjoy his honeymoon in Rome with Rosina and fly back to Canada to start a life together. But the Italians wouldn’t leave them alone. Then the Russians got in on it. This had to end and the only way was for the decision makers, the
bosses
, to be killed. There would always be a contract on Darwin’s head as long as the bosses were alive.

So he had to walk through these doors and enter the convention center. But he didn’t have any bullets left in the gun, only the two blades.

He pulled a scythe out and held it in his left hand. There was bound to be a guard by the door who would try to hit Darwin or pull a weapon. Darwin could use the guard’s body as a shield if anyone else shot at them. He could cut the hand that held any weapon and then use it to repel his attackers.

I hate odds like this. Fucking sucks.

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Then he took another and opened the door to the convention center.

No one stood on either side of the door. There were no armed guards. Only a long wooden table on the other side of the cavernous room with four men sitting at it, their backs to him.

He took in the room as the door behind him clicked shut. Nothing threatening, nothing untoward.

What the fuck? Where is everybody?

He looked at the four men. To cross the distance to the table would take half a minute as they were at the wall on the far side.

All four men turned and then stood up at the same time. They adjusted their jackets, one fixed his eyeglasses. Darwin’s heart pounded in his chest as he thought he would’ve seen Rosina as soon as he opened the door. Whatever state she was in, he had to accept, but not seeing her brought his spirits down. This nightmare seemed far from over.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Kostas. Glad you could join us.”

Yuri stepped away from the others.

“Where is she?” Darwin asked. “It doesn’t have to end this way,” he added. “You could walk away when this is over.”

Yuri smiled. “There are times when I wish you worked for me.”

“Fat chance.”

“Or slim chance,” Yuri added.

“Huh?”

“Fat chance and slim chance mean the same thing,” Yuri said. “Odd, isn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was trying a little of your sarcasm and ridiculing your language at the same time. But I guess we’re past that.”

“Where is she?” Darwin pulled the other scythe out. Now both hands gripped the comforting handles.

“You’ve come a long way,” Yuri said, wiping his chin.

“I’m not here to talk about me.”

“You’re holding blades. A month ago you would’ve killed the person who got that close to you with those. Rosina told me all about you and your phobias.”

A wave of anger pounded through him. At that moment he felt no amount of bullets would stop him if he decided to cover the waxed wooden floor with Yuri’s blood.

“It’s over, Yuri. Tell me where she is. We will walk away and I won’t kill you. Any other option will not turn out so well for you.”

“I believe you. I do. You always back up what you say. But before I bring her in here, I wanted to tell you how predictable you are.”

Darwin rubbed the blades against each other and took a step toward Yuri. The metallic sound of the blades echoed throughout the large room.

“You fell face first into my trap,” Yuri said. “I want to thank you for that.”

Darwin took another step.

“Of course my bartender would tell you I’m at the strip club where Arkady is. I wanted to offer you the pleasure of killing that asshole for me. He was too uncontrollable. I made sure everyone thought I was staying at the Park Hotel. I even joked with Arkady that if he saw you, he could give you the room number. What a fool he was that he didn’t see the big picture.”

Darwin continued to move closer to the four men.

“I was surprised when you connected me to the adult store in North York and I didn’t think you would kill my man in the back parking lot, but that’s okay. I understand. You’re angry.”

Darwin’s face flushed with heat. The nails of his fingers wrapped around the handles of the scythes so tight they dug into the palm of his hands.

“I sent word out on the street that if The Scythe—I love that you took on that particular moniker—came asking about me, to tell him to come here.” He laughed. “A stolen police car? Really?”

Darwin stood twenty feet away now.

“Stop where you are.” Yuri’s face tightened, his eyes hardening. “You will have a bullet in each leg with one more step.”

Darwin stopped, not willing to test Yuri yet. None of the men had pulled weapons out, though. He could run and leap on Yuri, cut the life out of his throat in seconds and be done with it, but still, he halted.

A red beam, like a laser light, flashed across his eyes. He looked up at the steel beams that lined the ceiling, crisscrossing every which way.

Seven men hung suspended in various poses. All of them had weapons pointed at Darwin.

When he looked down at his chest, red lights moved below his neck where the snipers had taken careful aim.

“Place the scythes on the floor,” Yuri said.

Rosina wasn’t here. She wasn’t in this room and they hadn’t shot him yet. He took a step back. No one fired. He took another step and then turned and walked to the double doors, every second waiting for a bullet in his back.

At the door, he yanked on the handle but nothing happened.

“Last chance. Drop the scythes or they will be taken from you.”

He put his shoulder into the door. It was like body checking solid steel.

He gazed across the room. Four men from the upper beams were shimmying down ropes. When they landed, weapons came up and took aim on Darwin. They moved forward while the other men used the ropes to descend.

Unless the FBI was about to storm the convention center a day earlier than what their intel suggested, Darwin realized that his wife and he were dead.

Yuri motioned some kind of silent order with his hand.

A gun went off and the scythe in Darwin’s right hand was torn away. Another shot and the left one zinged into the wall behind him.

The vibration resonated through his hand and up his arm but he didn’t cry out.

A moment later he was surrounded by the first four armed men to come down from the beams.

Maybe this is a blessing. No more running, no more trying to stay alive and outwit the Mafia.

The nightmarish ride had taken its toll. A part of him was happy it would be coming to an end.

“Bring him to the office,” Yuri ordered as he walked away. “He can wait with his wife.”

“Do you want him handcuffed like her or strung up on the hooks?”

Yuri stopped and turned back. “String him up with all fourteen hooks for his wife to see when she wakes. They both die tomorrow, so it won’t matter much, but I’ll enjoy it.”

Chapter 19

Since Florida, which seemed a lifetime ago, Darwin finally got to see his wife. They brought him to a room in the back of the convention center that would normally serve as an office but was large enough to be the size of two standard hotel rooms.

Inside the room was exactly what he expected. Chains hung suspended from the beams in the ceiling. More chains dangled from wall mounts behind a square chunk of plastic taped to the floor. A metal table off to the side held a variety of implements that looked like something only a Nazi doctor would love. Darwin remembered the dirt-laden socks Scythe had used on his back and the bloody urine he’d experienced afterward. What lay on the table would get his blood flowing from a lot more places than just his bladder.

Rosina lay spread out on a makeshift bed, her hands cuffed to a chain that was attached to a steel necklace at least an inch thick.

When he called out to her, she didn’t budge.

“Is she alive?” he asked the men who pushed him inside the office.

“Drugged sleep.”

They stood him over the square piece of plastic and cuffed his ankles and then his hands. The whole time he stared at his woman, tears filling his eyes. His lower lip quivered with the sadness that they had become instead of the happily married couple who had once toured Rome on their honeymoon.

He didn’t resist as the men secured him. One of the men remained near the door, a long gun, probably an AK-47, pointed at him.

After a few moments, his hands were bound behind his back and attached to a chain lodged to the wall. His feet couldn’t move more than an inch as the ankle restraints were fastened to a chain that was also bolted to the wall.

In one quick movement, his stolen golf shirt was ripped from his body. Then one of the men produced a large knife and sliced off the hoodie, careful not to touch Darwin. He almost thanked the man for his tenderness, then thought better of it.

Small gifts.

He may not have a phobia of knives anymore, but he still didn’t want one slicing through his skin. His neurosis had evolved to a natural fear of knives.

They started on his pants.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.

He didn’t even get a grunt for an answer. A moment later, his pants were removed and he stood in his underwear, the manacles already chaffing his skin.

Outside, the summer air was super-heated. Inside, air conditioners cooled the room, producing goose bumps on his flesh. He shivered and glanced over at Rosina. She looked so good, resting. He remembered watching her rest when they were first together, a lifetime ago. They had had such great times together.

He stared at her through water-covered eyes and pledged that he would do whatever he could to get them both out of this mess and make things right. They would deal with the trauma on their own time, tilling their garden, sipping wine in the evenings, eating pasta as the sun dropped over Italy. Their day would come, he was sure of it, even though the odds were completely against them.

The worst pain he had ever felt pierced his consciousness as it tore into his skin. He yanked away from it, but the cuffs that held him only gave an inch.