West 47th (46 page)

Bechetti was driven back but managed to keep his feet.

Mitch held on, kept close in, clutched Bechetti with his left fist while his right delivered three hard blows below Bechetti's rib cage.

The machine pistol quit, its magazine spent. Bechetti used it and the trap as a club. They slammed down between Mitch's shoulder and neck. Twice more.

Mitch hung on, kept the struggle in close. He made a defensive grab for the pistol, didn't get it. However, the trap's dangling anchor chain was whipping about and his hands found it. Before its links could run through his grasp he got a grip on it.

Now he backed off. He pulled on the four-foot-long chain and heard and saw the pain that caused Bechetti. The chain was like a tether connected to the trap and its teeth that were connected to the pistol and Bechetti's deeply incised finger.

Mitch yanked the chain sharply.

Bechetti cried out in pain and, needing slack for relief, came with it.

Mitch yanked the chain again spitefully and then, not allowing slack, he began circling Bechetti.

Bechetti circled with him, alternately pleading for mercy and calling Mitch a
stronzolo
, which Mitch didn't know meant
piece of shit
.

Mitch circled faster.

Bechetti was being whirled, round and round. He wanted to let go, would have, but the trap had his trigger finger.

The fibrous ligaments and connective membranes of that finger were nearly severed. It was a wonder they'd held together until now, couldn't any longer. The lacerated soft tissue also gave way.

The finger tore off, second knuckle to tip.

With it came the pistol and the trap.

For Bechetti it was like being thrown from a speeding carousel. The sudden release from the centrifugal force sent him reeling across the width of the bluff. He tried for balance, fought the momentum, and he might have been able to stop himself had he been wearing appropriate shoes rather than the typical have-around city sort with leather soles and heels that slipped on the granite and couldn't for the life of him put on the brakes.

He was reaching wildly, as though the air might offer him anything to grab on to, when he hurtled over the edge.

Chapter 34

Riccio felt the bathwater. It was on the hot side. She couldn't be long out of it. The tile floor was wet where she'd dripped.

The smell in the bathroom made him not want to breathe. It brought to mind embalmed guys laid out and surrounded like they always were with lilies. A couple of months ago up in the Bronx he'd paid respects to an old, onetime capo, and, although he'd only stayed a polite half hour, he'd come away so stunk up by lilies he'd had to hang his best black suit out to air.

This place was worse than four funerals. So bad it had his eyes watering. He pinched his nose shut and jerked open the door that was at one end of the bathroom. She wasn't in there. Just a toilet bowl with blue water, and a bidet. Only rich people have such special little rooms where they piss and shoot water up their cunts, Riccio thought.

He and Fratino went on with their search of the house. They were sure she was hiding somewhere in it. Probably, because she was blind, it would be an obvious place such as beneath one of the beds or in the back corner of a closet, wishing she was invisible.

Riccio had Fratino believing there'd be something extra in it for him if they found her and got what they wanted out of her. Intentional emphasis on the word
extra
so Fratino would take it to imply it meant one of the twenty-five extra large the two emeralds would bring. Riccio had said all along and too often that to him this thing was first and foremost a matter of saving face. If the emeralds came it would just be a nice plus, he didn't expect them, they probably wouldn't come but if they did it would be as he put it,
nice
.

The have-arounds knew Riccio well enough to see through that old-mob shit. The emeralds were what Riccio had first in his head. Not to say that doing the guy and his wife wasn't also there.

The wife, the rich wife, she'd know where the emeralds were, Riccio reasoned. Mitch wouldn't have kept that from her. Civilians usually made the mistake of letting their women in on such things. She'd know, and when Fratino had her bound and bent over and greased and it became evident what he intended to do to her she'd give them up.

Her give-up, however, wouldn't make a difference to Fratino. He'd keep on with it, and there'd be no reason for Riccio to stop him. Fratino had never had his way with a blind man or woman, someone unable to see how repulsive he was. He'd remarked to Riccio that just the idea of it caused him to have half a hard-on.

They gave the house a thorough going over from cellar to roof. For Riccio, not finding her was an insult. He couldn't accept it. About twice a minute he grunted like he was being poked with a stick.

He went from room to room looking for things to take that might appease his disappointment. Nothing he saw was going to make up for twenty-five extra large. What's more he didn't have the understanding or appreciation for the valuables that were there. None of the paintings. He passed up a Jackson Pollock and a Willem de Kooning and an Egon Schiele nude that he believed must have been painted by some whacko with the shakes.

Grudgingly he settled on a Georgian silver service. Placed it near the front door for one of his have-arounds to carry to the car on the way out.

Fratino uncorked a couple of bottles of vintage red. He and Riccio went out onto the second-floor rear terrace. They sat close to the rail. Riccio lighted another of his Sicilian twists. He grunted between swigs and puffs.

“Did you look on the roof?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe she's up on the roof.”

“I tell you I looked.”

“How could you see the roof?”

“I went outside and looked up. It's slanted.”

An increase in grunts.

“This fucking place,” Riccio grumbled. “How'd you like to live up here?”

“Not me, no fucking way.”

“I'd go crazy up here. Think how it must be in winter.”

Some shots were heard from deep in the woods off to the right.

“They're doing the guy,” Fratino commented flatly, as though reading from a program.

“Be perfect if we could only find the fucking wife. Wrap this thing up. I got to be back in town by seven, no later than eight.”

“What can I say?”

“Nothing. Keep quiet,” Riccio snapped. His bad cigar was spoiling the taste of Straw's good wine, not that he realized that.

His attention was drawn to a mid-air skirmish almost directly above the terrace. A pair of starlings trying to peck and outmaneuver one another like enemy aces. The two birds were really going at it and neither seemed to be getting the best of it until one took flight out to a field beyond where the grounds were kept.

Distance transformed the bird into a black, indefinite creature that dropped from sight out there in the tall, untended grass.

Riccio, with nothing better to distract his aggravated mind, had followed the bird's retreat. In doing so he happened to notice that the uniform texture of that grass was interrupted by a contrasting line that ran straight all the way to a large white structure. It was worth a look, he decided. He and Fratino went down and out to the unmowed meadow.

It was obvious to them that someone had recently cut through the grass, and they had no difficulty following the same trampled course. To the large double doors of the barn. Fratino slid those apart and they went in.

Riccio knew in a breath she was in there. The predominant old barn odor of the interior was laced with the scent of lilies. Now, exactly where in here was she?

He looked around, then walked around clockwise. An insouciant, old-mob smugness about him as he took in the disparate contents of the place: cardboard boxes of canning jars, storm windows, a stack of mildewed and rusted steamer trunks, various pieces of unfortunate furniture, a dresser minus two drawers, chairs without seats.

He paused every few steps to sniff and gauge the strength of the giveaway scent. At the far end of the barn stood the stove, the potbelly that Maddie and Mitch had pocked up with shots from the Beretta. The scent was not entirely undetectable there but much fainter.

He moved on, down the barn's other long side. Past a pileup of tubular outdoor loungers and numerous sections of cast iron grill-work.

The lily scent was more pronounced.

And even more so when he came to the lineup of forsaken farm equipment. Two tractors, a backhoe with all tires flat, a rake and a hay baler.

Only the hay baler offered a hiding place.

Riccio centered his attention upon it. He raised his chin a fraction to indicate it and gestured to have Fratino come over to him. Riccio was positive that she was hidden in the baler. He savored the moment, relighted his cigar, chewed it from the left corner of his mouth to the right. He rotated his paved diamond, ruby and emerald Italian flag ring.

The pressing chamber, the oblong, lidded compartment where the hay was compressed and bound, was just barely large enough to contain Maddie. She was doubled up tight and hunched in a kneel and, for the first time in her life, experiencing claustrophobia. She felt crammed, crunched, as though her flesh and bones were now literally the shape of a bale of hay. And what a relief it would be when, if ever again, she was able to take a deep breath.

Her heart was galloping, the roof of her mouth had gone dry. She had the Beretta in her right hand. Off safety.

Riccio was about to order Fratino to open the lid on the baling compartment and pull her out. No need to be concerned about her being armed. She was blind. At most she'd put up a clawing, kicking struggle.

The lid flew open.

Maddie sprung up like a released jack-in-the-box and began firing the Beretta. She relied entirely on her sense of direction, altering her point of aim slightly every couple of rounds. She fired the clip empty, released it, rammed in a full and rapid-fired another fifteen rounds in the same hopeful left to right manner.

The smell of lilies and gunpowder and Sicilian cigar.

It had been over for fifteen minutes by the time Mitch got there.

Riccio and Fratino were down, sprawled in surely dead positions. Blood was pooling beneath and around their heads. There was an entrance wound in each of their temples. Neat little holes in almost precisely the same spot.

A shaft of sunlight permitted through the barn's old roof was striking upon Riccio's hand, causing scintillations from his Italian flag ring.

Maddie was seated off to the side on the edge of a rusted-out cast iron love seat. She looked bedraggled. The Beretta was still in her hand.

Mitch spoke up to keep her from possibly taking a shot at him. He went to her, held her. To have her in his arms again was an unexpected pleasure. She, however, wasn't able to give entirely to the embrace. Some of her body's usual compliance had been appropriated by rigidity.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“No wounds or anything?”

“Some scrapes and scratches is all.”

“Tell me, if I could what would I be seeing?”

He told her, but didn't elaborate. It was evident to him that she wasn't too happy with herself at the moment.

She did an on and off small smile, trying to demonstrate her pluck.

“Let's go in,” she said. “Maybe a little later on I'll feel up to fixing you something special for supper.”

Chapter 35

The bodies of five mob guys.

What to do with them had Mitch sitting in the dark on the side of the bed. Waiting for daylight as though it might bring the answer.

Five dead mob guys strewn all over Strawbridge land. What a feeding frenzy the police and the media would have with that, Mitch thought. He could hear himself attempting to explain it: “There were these two emeralds, see …”

A mass grave was the most expedient solution he'd been able to come up with. He'd get that forsaken, old backhoe running somehow, fix its flats and all and use it to dig a hole so deep that hungry dogs would walk right past it. Somewhere remote on the land, in the woods maybe where the disturbed ground would cover over quickly with leaves and brush.

It would take a lot of doing, at least all day.

It would also mar the pleasure of this land for him. He'd never be able to see it the same, knowing its grisly, buried secret.

He dressed, went down, microwaved a mug of yesterday's coffee and at first light, went out to the West Meadow. Along the way he reminded himself that he knew nothing about operating a backhoe. He also wondered by what means he'd be able to extract Fat Angelo from the muck of the marsh. That would take a goddamn derrick.

When he arrived at the equipment barn he didn't believe what he saw, or, rather, he disbelieved what he didn't see.

The bodies of Riccio and Fratino weren't there.

Coagulated blood but no bodies.

Was it possible that his wishful thinking was so intense that he'd manufactured an illusion? Had something supernatural occurred? When he'd last seen Riccio and Fratino they'd been dead as dead could be dead and he didn't believe in resurrections, anyway certainly not when it came to mob guys.

No bodies in the barn.

Nor was the body of Little Mike or the carcass of the cow out in the pasture.

Nor was the corpse of Fat Angelo mired in the marsh.

Mitch hurried to the bluff. At the base of it not a sign of Bechetti, who'd plunged the equivalent of thirty stories.

There was, however, a clue on the exterior ramp of the Straw-bridge boathouse. Along the length of it, soaked into its dry, weathered wood were numerous streaks of blood. As would be caused by bleeding bodies being dragged.

Within the boathouse Mitch noticed the boat with the outboard motor was tied up in its slip bow first. It had previously been tied up bow out. The motor was cold. Blood had been wiped from the gunwales, seats and floorboards. Dried, remnant smears of it were visible to a close look.