Don Pendleton - California Hit

Now if the boys just didn't get uptight and...

The Tiger went out through the French doors to the garden-patio and casually circled the grounds. The fog was lifting. It was now holding at about rooftop level, but the air below it was still saturated with moisture, cold, uncomfortable. Miserable goddam crap! The outside boys would be getting stiff and disgruntled if this kept up.

Rivoli made a mental note to make hourly shifts. As unobtrusively as possible, he would have to rotate those boys between the cars and the open-air stakeouts. The inside boys stayed inside, period and bullshit. There would be no juggling around with those hard boys inside.

A police car went by out front, cruising slowly, and the sight of it disrupted the Tiger's chain of thought. He frowned and headed that way. Those jerks would scare the guy off. Imagine, patrolling in a marked cruiser. How dumb could a cop get? Were they trying to scare the guy away?

As he reached the front of the big house, Rivoli noted that a delivery van was standing at the curb down by the service gate, and a guy was coming out of the van with a clipboard under his arm.

Cool it, goddammit, cool it! Don't go slapping that guy up against the fence and frisking him, Christ's sake!

The Tiger hurried forward to personally supervise the reception of the deliveryman, groaning inwardly with the certain feeling that the two gatemen were going to over-react — and that those cops in the cruiser would nose into the act. One thing Tony did not need at this point was cops swarming all over the place and asking a lot of jerky questions.

His worries were apparently an over-reaction within himself, though, and this he discovered as soon as he was within earshot of the service gate.

Apparently the boys knew this guy, this delivery jerk. He was a tall guy wearing Levi's and a white jacket, and Rivoli himself had seen the Bay Messengers truck around the neighborhood. The guy had shoved his hat back away from his forehead, and he was grinning and scratching the bridge of his nose with a pencil.

Jerry the Lover Aspromonte was jawing around with the guy through the closed gate, obviously kidding him about something, and Rivoli caught the scrap of a comment, "... told you the other day, meathead, LaManchas don't live here,"

The guy sort of giggled and told Jerry the Lover, "Aw shit, ain't you ever gonna let me live that down?"

"Shit it ain't my fault you can't read th' fuckin' addresses," Aspromonte was saying when Rivoli got there.

"I got it right this time," the guy insisted, with a pleading glance at the new arrival. "You gonna take the damn package or ain't you?"

Tony Tiger didn't give a damn about this jerk and his small worries. The cop car, sure as hell, had come to a complete halt and the dummies were idling there beside the van and ogling the little exchange at the fence.

Rivoli angrily punched the electronic lock and swung out through the gate, causing the delivery jerk to dance back out of the way. The Tiger crossed the street and leaned into the cruiser.

"You guys need something?" he inquired quietly.

One of the guys in there was a fucking spade. In plain clothes, at that. He showed Tony an ivory smile and told him, "Routine patrol, Mr. Rivoli. Don't you be concerned — we have the entire neighborhood under surveillance."

Where the hell did these guys get off, dropping his name around that way? How did that black bastard know what his name was?

Rivoli muttered, "Why the hell should I be concerned about anything?" He whirled around and crossed back to the other side of the street.

The delivery jerk was standing there, arms crossed over his chest, grinning at him with that fuckin' paisano mustache curling down over his upper lip and into his mouth. He probably sucked on it, he probably liked the taste of hair in his teeth.

Rivoli snarled, "What the hell are you smiling at, guy?"

The smile froze and the jerk just stood there. He mumbled something about just trying to do his job, then he turned back to Jerry the Lover and said, "Hey, take the package, eh?"

"What is this great big worry you got there, guy?" the Tiger growled.

"I got a delivery for a Tony Rivoli, in care of Roman A. DeMarco. It's this address, I got the right address, but this guy won't get serious. He keeps telling me LaManchas don't live here, just because I..."

"Okay okay, whatta you mean you got a delivery? What kind of a delivery?"

"This little package here, that's all."

The jerk was holding it in the palm of his hand. It was square, like maybe a ring box or something done up in brown wrapping paper.

Rivoli saw the police cruiser in the edge of his vision, moving slowly on along the street.

"Who the hell sent it?"

"Well why don't you just take it and maybe you'll know who sent it. Hell I just run the things around, I just drive the damned..."

Tony the Tiger snatched the package out of the guy's hand and moved on inside the fence.

The guy moaned, "Hey I gotta have somebody sign."

"Sign it and give the jerk a buck," the Tiger instructed Jerry the Lover. Then he went on to the front entrance to the house, fuming inwardly over spade cops who dropped his name around like they had a right to or something.

A package?

Who the hell would be sending the Tiger of the Hill a goddamned package? A package of what? In all his thirty-three years, no one had ever sent Tony Rivoli a package of anything. Not even on his birthdays. Not even, by God, on Christmas. It couldn't be a damn bomb, it was too small.

It couldn't be a...

Something froze around Rivoli's heart and his fingers trembled slightly as he tore at the wrapping. Too late he had an impulse to yell back to Jerry the Lover to stop that jerk, to hold him there a minute... the van was already moving along and cornering onto the street at the side of the house.

Yeah. Yeah, it could be, and it was.

It was a marksman's medal, done up real fancy in a jewelry box with a velvet cushion under it.

The nerve! The nerve of that cocky bastard to send it to him to give to... The coldness pressed harder upon the Tiger's heart as he realized that no, no, it wasn't addressed to the old man at all, it was addressed in care of the old man... the goddam thing was meant for Tony Rivoli himself!

Where did the wise bastard get his name? Where was everybody suddenly coming up with the Tiger's name, Christ's sake!

Rivoli whirled about to shout an instruction to the two gatemen, but the words stuck in his throat. Heavy black smoke was billowing up over there, totally obscuring that area of the yard, and he could not even see the damned gate or Jerry the Lover or the other boy or anything but the damned smoke.

In just one fucking second?

Shit, he was hitting! In broad daylight and with cops prowling all around, the nervy bastard was hitting.

Rivoli raced into the yard to give the signal to the upstairs boy, the signal which would be relayed to all the outside boys, to bring them in quietly into a ring of steel around that house, around the whole neighborhood, to seal the smart bastard inside, to cut away all of his running room and even his walking room, to grind him surely and securely within the confines of that house on the hill, and to begin his education into the fantasies of mercy.

And then the Tiger ran on into the smokescreen, to see what the hell had become of the boys at the gate, and to continue wondering why the bastard had sent the mark of death to him — why him? — why the Tiger instead of the Capo?

Despite smarting eyes and bursting lungs, Rivoli found the smoke bomb and hurled it across the street. He also found the two boys lying in their own blood, great gaping holes between their eyes, and he found the electric gate standing wide open.