Thomas Perry - The Informant

Schaeffer nodded at Salvatore and said, "Thank you," and put it in the pocket under his left arm. Vince said a few sentences in Italian. Schaeffer could see it was an account of the gunfight in the cornfield, which ended in his holding up both hands wide-eyed and counting off eight fingers. The old man laughed and the bodyguards laughed harder. The old man opened the drawer again, selected a banded stack of bills, and tossed it to Schaeffer, who caught it. Then the old man waved his hand in a shooing gesture, and they left.

They went outside, walked to Schaeffer's rental car, and got in. Schaeffer handed Pugliese the stack of bills.

Pugliese looked at him in surprise. "You giving this to me?"

"He paid me for what I did. That was for the story."

Pugliese put it into his coat pocket and patted it to make it lie flat. "Yeah, the old man loves stories where people get killed."

As he drove past, he could see two cars in the circular driveway in front of the house and three more in the garage. Somebody was still living there. It would be Joe, the oldest of the three grandsons. Schaeffer kept going to find the houses of the other brothers. He needed to be sure they hadn't moved.

It was still the middle of the night, and he had driven to look at the houses of the two younger Castiglione brothers. What he wanted to do tonight was going to be difficult. The Castigliones probably had gotten lazy and overconfident by now, but he already had evidence that Vince Pugliese hadn't. Sending men out to motels to kill him before he could make it to town was definitely Vince.

He had shown Vince some things that day so many years ago, when he had killed the eight men who had been waiting in ambush. Vince had shown him some things too-his physical courage, his intelligence, his ability to read and manipulate his bosses. Vince was a stronger, leaner opponent than the others had been. Vince would be aware within an hour or two that four of his men had been killed in the motel. It was possible that he had known they'd be killed, and had been willing to sacrifice them to know where Schaeffer was and when he would enter the city. When he knew, Vince would start moving his other men around, pulling them back toward the center of the city to protect the Castiglione neighborhoods. It was important to be on the inside of the circle before it tightened.

He was almost positive that the oldest brother, Joe, would still be living in old Salvatore's house. The Castle was an important place, a symbol of Castiglione power and legitimacy. He drove past the building and saw that all the lights seemed to be out, but side by side in front of the closed garage were three big black cars, all backed into the driveway so they faced the street. The house was definitely occupied, and the three cars looked as though they belonged to people who thought they might want to get out fast. Joe Castiglione was in the Castle, and Schaeffer was going in after him. The Castle was the hardest target he could have chosen, but that made it the one he had to hit first. Right now, Joe Castiglione would be feeling relieved to be out of Arizona and happy to be back in the big old house where he thought he was safe.

Joe was the oldest of the three grandsons who ran the family now, and he was supposed to be the smartest. The fact that he was still living in the Castle meant that he was still the leader of the three brothers. He looked a little bit like old Salvatore-thin and tall, so his expensive suits hung on him. Everything was loose. Even when he was very young, he was a little bent over, so the resemblance to the grandfather was strong.

His reputation for cunning was earned. The two rivals most likely to kill him and take over were his two younger brothers, but as soon as his father had died, he engaged them in watching his back and overseeing the details of the Castiglione businesses.

Schaeffer drove to the parking lot of a big white hotel a few blocks up Lake Shore Drive from the Castle. He opened the trunk, leaned in, and took apart the shotgun so he could fit most of the barrel and stock into his messenger bag and keep the shotgun from being identifiable from a distance. He put in a box of shells, slung the bag over his shoulder, and set off on foot. He knew it was possible that what he was doing was foolish and that he would be dead before the sun came up. But if he could get the Castigliones, none of the other old men would feel safe.

He felt the weight of the shotgun and shells. He remembered the night thirty-five years ago when he and Eddie had gone after the Mahons in Providence. They had a poker game in the back of a bar called the Pot of Gold. On the roof was a sign, a faint, chipped, and discolored painting of a leprechaun beside a big white vessel that looked like an antique chamber pot. The sign didn't light up anymore, and people just called the place the "Pot."

Eddie took two short-barreled pump shotguns out of a closet and loaded them before he put them in the car trunk.

The boy asked, "Why are you bringing those?"

"Because I don't own a machine gun."

"Huh?"

"There's a reason why a twelve-gauge shotgun is the weapon of choice for home defense. It's a hell of a lot more lethal than anything you can hide in your pants. A double-ought shell has twelve pellets, each of them the size of a. 38 bullet. When you're inside a room, your shot travels maybe ten, fifteen feet before it hits something. At that distance, the twelve pellets have hardly separated at all. It's like getting hit with one big slug. It makes a hole you can almost put your hand through. At fifty feet the pattern is still only ten inches. If you shoot one of the Mahons down, he's going to stay down."

Eddie had specific instructions about everything. "We burst in, you go left, and I go right. We shoot the first ones we see. Then shoot the first one who moves. If nobody moves, just shoot the next one. You do that for six shells-one in the chamber and five in the tube-then drop the shotgun and pull your pistol out. By then everybody who's going to die that day should be dead, but if one's not, send him along. I'd like the whole thing done in ten seconds."

That night at the poker game they had burst in and seen a dozen men-seven poker players and five just hanging around-and at least half of them were in the process of reaching for a gun. The boy had shot six men and dropped the empty shotgun, then pulled out his pistol and prepared to fire, but Eddie had already killed the others. "Nicely done, kid," he said, then snatched up some wads of money from the floor where it had fallen and a few wallets from pockets that weren't soaked with blood. The room was a storeroom for beer and spirits, so it had a concrete floor with a drain in the center. The boy could hear the blood trickling into it as he watched the door. As Eddie had planned, the theft made the police think that someone had wanted to rob a poker game, and then panicked when they'd realized they'd picked the Mahons' personal club, and then killed everybody in sight. It made a good story.

Now, thirty years later, he was walking into the Castigliones' neighborhood again, this time carrying a messenger bag with a shotgun inside. He was eager to test his theory about the Castle. He had always believed that the defenses were concentrated in the front, where there was an electric motor that opened a wrought-iron gate. Beyond the gate was a set of holes in the pavement for anchoring barriers so a car or truck couldn't crash the gate and reach the house.

He walked along the stone fence. He knew there must be an alarm system on the property. As soon as he had the thought, he saw the alarm company's sign stuck in the garden, but it didn't worry him too much. There was almost always some part in every house that was too hard or expensive to wire so it was skipped, and he had a theory about this house. He went over the fence and walked to the side of the house. Then he dropped to his belly and looked in the first basement window. There was a room that held a furnace and hot water heater, but the room beside it looked like a gentleman's study. The overhead lights were off, but there were two night-lights plugged in along the cellar stairs leading to the first floor for safety. He examined the frame of the basement window. It was steel, with a latch in the upper edge. He looked closely at the material around the steel frame. It was solid concrete. There seemed to be no way that the jacketed cable for an alarm system could be run through the concrete to the window frame. He looked across the corner of the basement at the next nearest window. He could see no wires or cables running from the wooden floor above the window, and nothing coming up from below. The basement windows didn't seem to be wired into the system.