Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“We are closed, sir,” said Uncle Cisco in his invariably courteous way. “If you come back tomorrow…”

But Porky Pig took from his pocket a gun with a silencer screwed onto its muzzle. His voice was distorted by the mask.

“You want to be closed forever, or you want to pay us a hundred dollars a week so nobody comes around bothering you?”

“Senor,” began Uncle Cisco in a terrified voice, staring at the gun, “a hundred dollars a week will take all of our profits.”

“That’s one,” said Porky Pig.

Spic was drawn to the storeroom door by the voices. Porky Pig turned his stool to give the short skinny Mexican a measuring look, swinging the lethal silenced gun Spic’s way as he did, then turned back to Uncle Cisco as the main man in the equation.

“That’s two,” he said.

“We will pay, we will pay,” said Uncle Cisco very quickly.

“No, no pagamos,” muttered Spic sullenly.,

But Porky Pig must have understood Spanish. He said, “That’s three,” and the silenced gun said pfft pfft pfft, like that. But not at Spic.

Instead, Uncle Cisco seemed to leap backward, his feet coming up off the floor, the broom flying from his hand. He caromed off the end of the counter to sprawl facedown on the faded linoleum, his limbs jerking and twitching, then still.

Porky Pig stood up and began unscrewing the silencer from the gun. Death had loosened Uncle Cisco’s sphincter so the smell of shit overrode the hot grease smell in the little room.

“Whew!” he exclaimed in his muffled pig voice, “smells like something crawled up there and died.” He chuckled. “Must be all that hot Mexican food.” Spic hadn’t moved from the doorway of the minuscule storeroom. To him, Porky Pig added, “Remember, beaner, one hundred dollars a week, starting Friday.”

Then he was gone, leaving Uncle Cisco dead on the floor. Before calling the police, Spic took all the money from the cash register and from the body and hid it under the floormat of Uncle Cisco’s dilapidated Chevy. That way the cops would treat it as a simple robbery and would not look very hard for the killer.

Uncle Cisco, dead upon the floor.

Tonight, Uncle Cisco’s son Manuel, dead upon the sere yellow grass and frozen ground beside the Coates Pavilion.

Spic felt tears hot behind his eyelids. Leadership was a stern mistress. He opened his eyes, looked at his nephew Alejo across the scarred and battered wooden tabletop. The tequila bottle was empty, his limes and salt were gone. His drunkenness had passed. He wanted to be alone to mourn the death of Tio Cisco’s son at the hands of unknown assassins.

“Go get me another bottle of tequila, Alejo.”

“I s’posed stay with you, guard you, jefe.”

With a chuckle, Spic made the sign of the cross over him. “I absolve you.” He threw money on the table. “And more limes.”

Spic had paid protection for five weeks, always leaving the cash drawer ajar with a single hundred-dollar bill in it, staying in the storeroom until Porky Pig had come and gone. Then he began closing the store to follow Porky on his rounds, finally to the house where Porky lived under his real name of Alex Jones. One night after the wife had gone to bed, Spic cut off Porky’s head and set it on top of the TV set, tongue protruding, for Mrs. Jones and their two children to find in the morning.

Spic took over the collection route. When the Organization sent a man to kill Spic and thus reclaim the route, Spic killed him and buried him in a patch of woods overlooking the Minnesota River near Fort Snelling. He sent the killer’s head, packed in dry ice, tongue lolling, to the killer’s fag boyfriend.

The local capo realized Spic had no compunctions about killing anyone whatsoever, for any reason, at any time, and that he would be harder to kill than to absorb. So Spic became a made man, always moving up by killing the man above him, always just before that man realized he was in Spic’s way. Now, at forty-two, he controlled illegal drug sales in four northern states.

His wife called. She sobbed and wailed in Spanish about the death of Manuel, her favorite nephew. Spic consoled her, crying too, promising to come home right away to pray with her for the salvation of poor Manuel’s immortal soul.

While they talked, he heard Alejo behind him, returning with the tequila and limes. As he turned, phone in hand, the muzzle of the Jennings J-22 was pressed by the gloved hand against the bridge of his nose, and he just had time to think, Maria knows that I

As Alejo got out of the car with the tequila, shivering in his sports jacket in the freezing drizzle, the bulky man just coming down the front walk from Spic’s business bungalow tossed a new, heavy overcoat around the skinny Mexican’s shoulders. Alejo dropped tequila and topcoat to run up the walk into the house. As he was doing that, the assassin U-turned his rental car to get back onto Minnesota 3 South which would take him to 494 and, eventually, the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Because of the M.O., Dante Stagnaro got word of the Madrid hit off the FBI wire and was on Northwest flight 350 at 6:45 a.m. He was met around noon by Bob Carman, Agent in Charge of the Minneapolis FBI office. Carman was caricature FBI-blue-black hair, blue eyes, blue suit, blue tie, blue sedan.

“Thanks for bringing me in on this,” said Dante.

Carman chuckled as they shook hands, smile lines creasing his lean cheeks, tanned even in a Minnesota winter. Dante wondered if a sunlamp was involved.

“It was actually Rudy Mattaliano, your federal prosecutor buddy in New York, who gave you a good report card, Stagnaro. The car is this way. The incident occurred over in St. Paul.”

The freeway took them east and then north toward the tract bungalow on Robie Street where Spic Madrid had been a few hours before becoming an incident on an FBI report form. The skies were gray and cold; pockmarked snow lay on the banks flanking the freeway.

“New York feels this ties in with something you’re working on out in San Francisco,” said Carman in an insinuating voice.

“I wouldn’t see Madrid associated with my case in any way, except that he was in Vegas last week at the same time as some of those who might be involved. So… maybe. And from what I heard of the M.O.-small-caliber weapon, one up the nose…”

“Professional hit all the way,” agreed Carman sternly.

He got them off the freeway on Concord, drove a few blocks north and doglegged over to Robie. There was slush in the gutter; frozen footprints between street and sidewalk made walking precarious; Dante got a wet foot.

The frost-crazed walk was slippery with new ice; the February thaw had ended with drizzle and then a freeze the night before. The house, like most of the others in the block, was probably from the 1920s, white frame, squat and narrow, with a veranda and peeling green shutters. A small jet shrieked by overhead on its takeoff from Holman Field beyond the freeway. Their breaths went up in white puffs. Dante was shivering inside his inadequate San Francisco topcoat.

The two men acknowledged the uniformed cop on duty outside the house in greatcoat and gloves, ducked under the yellow crime scene tape; the seals were not yet fixed to the door, so they entered, switching on lights in the early afternoon. The only room used was the living room, its only furnishings a table that had served as a desk, a swivel and two straight-backed chairs, a broken-down couch. Table lamp, telephone with two lines, TV set. The heat was off, it was cold.

“Classy,” said Dante. His wet foot was freezing.

“Local cops tell me Madrid used it only to coordinate the street sales. Just a few years ago this was mostly Latino, but a lot of Hmongs from the Laos highlands have diluted the mix.”