Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

In the car on the way home, he said, “How serious are you about getting the scumbags who killed your grandparents?”

It surprised the shit out of me so badly I couldn’t say anything for about a minute.

“That’s pretty much why I’m alive,” I finally said.

“That is so fucking stupid,” he said. “I know it’s why you went to Sandhurst, [18] Oops, I said it. and why you became friends with Adam. But it’s bullshit. You can back off of it. You should back off it. And I know you want to.”

“What happens to me if I don’t?”

Locano swerved to the side of the street we were on and slammed on the brakes.

“Cut the tough guy crap,” he said. “I don’t threaten people. I’m a lawyer, for fuck’s sake. And if I did threaten people, I wouldn’t threaten you.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’m just telling you—you’ve got a lot to live for. And to stay out of trouble for. Adam loves you. He respects you. You should listen to that.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you hearing me?”

“Yes.”

I was, but I was still stunned.

“And you’re stuck to this thing?”

“Yes.”

He sighed. Nodded. “All right, then.” He reached into his jacket.

I almost stopped him. I was thirteen months into eight hours a day of martial arts training. It would have been easy to block his gun arm, push his chin till his neck broke.

“Relax yourself,” he said. He pulled out his appointment book and a pen. “I’m gonna see if I can get you a contract.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll see if I can hook it up for someone to pay you to do this.”

“I won’t take money for it.”

He looked at me. “Yes you will. Otherwise you’re a rogue, and they’ll put you down like a dog. We’ll start a rumor that whoever these scumbags are, they’re talking too much—bringing down more heat than they’re worth. Maybe they’re someone’s nephew’s nephews or something, but it shouldn’t take too much. Are you understanding this?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. Are you gonna need a gun?”

They were brothers. Joe and Mike Virzi. Like the cops had thought, they’d done it to get jumped into the mob.

I didn’t just take Locano’s word for it. For one thing I followed them, for weeks.

The Virzi brothers were a pair of violent dicks who got crazed with boredom pretty much nightly, then took it out on whoever they could find. They’d pull some poor schmuck out of a nightclub or a pool hall or whatever by the hair, telling everybody else to shut the fuck up, this was mob business, then leave the guy in a puddle of teeth and blood out in the alley. Sometimes they’d beat the guy to the point where it looked like he was going to get maimed or killed, or they’d pick a woman, and I’d have to anonymously call the cops.

Here’s the weird part: I watched them get made. I was following them pretty much every night, but it still surprised me when it happened.

It was in a Temple of St. Anthony, in the basement of the activities building attached to a church in Paramus. You could see in through the bars of the sunken window, which was open to let the heat out. There were three shitty buffet tables set up in a “U,” with old mobsters seated around it and Joe and Mike Virzi standing in the center naked, repeating after the geezer in the middle.

I couldn’t hear too much of it, but there were parts in Italian, Latin, and English, and the Virzis kept promising to go to hell if they betrayed the mafia. At one point a couple of geezers from the ends of the table, looking particularly ridiculous with medallions and felt hats on, set slips of paper on fire and dropped them onto the Virzis’ palms. I tried this at home later. It didn’t hurt at all.

The squalidness of the whole thing enraged me. I couldn’t believe my grandparents had died for this bullshit. I left before it ended to go drive by the Virzis’ house.

It was a little one-story with an attached garage. As usual when they were out, the garage door was open.

Cause who was gonna rob them?

The next morning before school—it was early March, and it was freezing out—I went into the woods near Saddle River to practice shooting, and found out why hitmen use .22’s.

The first shot out of each gun sounded like someone slamming a stapler closed. The second sounded like the warning bark of a dog. The sixth and seventh sounded like low-flying jets, and by that time the insides of both silencers were actually on fire, with black smoke and blue flames coming out of the barrels. The paint on the barrels was bubbling.

Still, the work those bullets did was intriguing. The one time I managed to land shots from both my right hand and my left hand on a single tree trunk—not so easy when the kick made it feel like I was hauling myself up a swimming pool ladder every time I pulled the triggers—there were four-inch chips in the bark where the bullets had gone in.

And two-foot satellite dishes of sawdust out back.

I chose a weekend right before spring break of my junior year.

I’d rebuilt my silencers. I’m not particularly anxious to divulge how to do this, but suffice to say that it helps to already have the metal cylinders, as well as some fiberglass insulation and a stack of full-inch washers. And that, even in the days before the Internet, it wasn’t too hard to find instructions.

I knew the Virzis never locked the door between their garage and their kitchen. I’d been through it a dozen times, been through the whole scumbag house, with all its Cindy Crawford posters and prints by that guy who did the covers of the Duran Duran albums.

On the night I’d decided to kill them I followed them to a club, then went to their house and locked the kitchen door. Then I stood to one side of the open garage door and waited for them to come home.

A professor of mine in med school claimed that the sweat glands of your armpits and the sweat glands of your groin are controlled by entirely separate parts of your nervous system, so that it’s nervousness that makes your armpits sweat, while it’s heat that makes your groin sweat. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I can tell you that standing waiting for the Virzis to get back I dropped enough sweat from both my groin and my armpits to fill my shoes. My entire body was slick inside my stifling overcoat. The heat and the nervousness were hard to tell apart.

Eventually there was a bang on the sidewalk and the Virzis’ racing-stripe Mustang heaved into the garage beside me, putting out a wave of hot exhaust and rubber.

They got out loud and clumsy, the one in the driver’s seat pressing the remote on his visor so the garage door started closing. The one from the passenger’s seat stomped up the two steps to the door to the kitchen and tried the doorknob, then shook it.

“What the fuck?” he shouted over the noise of the garage door.

“What?” the other one said.

“Door’s fuckin locked.”

The garage door came to a stop.

“Bullshit.”

“It is!”

“So fuckin open it.”

“Dick, I don’t have a key!”

“How about just turning around?” I said. “Slowly.” My voice sounded distant even to myself. Something—the exhaust, the stress—had made me light-headed, and I was worried I would fall.

They turned around. They didn’t look scared. Just stupid.

One of them said, “What?”

The other one said, “Who the fuck are you?”

“Cooperate and you won’t get hurt,” I said.

For a second no one said anything. Then the first one said “ What? ” and they both started laughing.

“Fucker,” the other one said, “you are fucking with the wrong two guys.”