David Drake - Balefires

The black Cadillac got a final dab before Tullio's chauffeur folded the chamois and stepped back. Every Sunday morning he parked squarely in front of St Irenaeus to let out two bodyguards and his employer: Tullio had not missed mass or made confession in thirty-seven years. By now people knew not to take Tullio's place at the curb. People knew-or they learned, like the owner of the red VW was going to learn. The chauffeur spat a gobbet that dribbled down the suitcase lashed like a dorsal fin to the Volkswagen's roof.

The small bomb behind the altar of St Irenaeus rattled the Sunday quiet and shivered the rose window on the street side. The chauffeur's jaw trembled. He dropped the cloth and jumped in to crank the big, silent engine of the Cadillac. The church doors slammed back, the bodyguards fanning to right and left with pistols in their hands. Tullio stumbled out behind them, his thin face yellow except where spatters of the priest's blood had marked it. The trio scuttled down the steps, their eyes darting about the street like lizards' tongues. Ruthless elbows and gun butts had ripped the gangsters through shocked churchgoers, but now the doors spilled out net-veiled women and men in dark suits.

The directional mine on the Volkswagen's roof sawed them down with over a thousand steel pellets.

Tullio's chauffeur hammered at his door, wedged by the force of the explosion. The four-inch glass of the windshield was fogged with shatter marks. The church facade was a haze of powdered stone; fresh splinters raised a hundred rosettes against the dark wood of the doors.

The steps of the church were an abattoir. In the middle of it sat Enrico Tullio, screaming like one of the damned. Much of the blood splashing him now was his own.

"Seventeen fucking bodies," screamed Big Tom Mullens, "and you didn't get Tullio! He'll use an H-bomb on us now if he has to!"

"Tullio won't use anything," Nick said unconcernedly. He opened his black eyes and stared full at Mullens. The heavy gang-boss felt the impact. His stomach sucked in and he used the back of his right fist to wipe spittle from his mouth.

"Tullio lost his guts through the holes that Claymore put in him," amplified Smokie Joe from the chair he had leaned back against the wall. "Sure, he'll live. He'll set up somewhere else, maybe go back to Chi and crawl to the boys who backed him for the takeover here. Butyou've seen the last of him, Big Tom. Every time he hears your name he'll remember the blast and the blood pouring down the stone beside him. When you play for keeps, you play the man; and Tullio knows now he can't play as hard as you."

The phone rang, loud and terrible in the silent room. Danny Mullens bit blood from his lower lip and backed against the wall. Big Tom stared at the phone as if it were a cobra clamped on his leg.

"Go ahead, Big Tom," rolled Smokie Joe's smooth voice."It can't be worse than you're already thinking, can it?"

Mullens shot him a glance full of violence. He had no one to back a play, though, beyond a terrified sixteen-year-old and a bookkeeper shock-stoned to immobility. He turned his anger on the caller instead, snarling, "Hello!" into the receiver. His red Irish face changed as he listened, moving through neutral blankness to beaming, incredulous triumph. "Sure," he boomed, "but you got one hour. If you can't get through the hospital bullshit by then, then God have mercy on you, Tullio-because I sure as Hell won't."

Whooping, Big Tom slammed down the receiver and swung over the table as if it were a vaulting horse. His arms embraced the two torpedoes. In his bubbling happiness he did not notice that they were still as coldly aloof as when he thought he had been tongue-lashing them for failure.

"Time to talk about payment, isn't it, Big Tom?" suggested Smokie Joe easily.

"Pay? Oh, Christ, yeah," Mullens said with startled generosity."Look, what do you guys really want for what you done?"

"What you promised," said bone-pale Angelo. "Half the take my girls pull in."

"And half of what I turn from skag," Nick added. "That'll be plenty when a few kids get strung out and start pushing it to their friends."

"Huh?" Big Tom said. "Jesus, nobody could get hooked on the shit that gets out here. It's already been cut fifteen to one."

"I've got contacts in Asia," Nick grinned. "What I move'll be pure as Ivory Soap."

His words jogged a scrap of newsreel in Big Tom's memory."You were in Viet Nam, weren't you?"he asked."That's where you learned to use one bomb to set up the real one out in front."

"We were in Nam," Angelo agreed with a smile that would have made a shark flinch. "We were sort of instructing there."

Lod Mahoney stepped to Mullens' side and caught him by the wrist."Tom," he pleaded, "for the love of God, you don't mean to go into heroin? There's money, there's all the money we need in numbers. You know the people you got to deal with in drugs and whores."

"Money?"sneered Smokie Joe from the other side."Peanuts! If you stick with that, you'll be a set-up for somebody else like Tullio who knows what can be done by a guy who's willing to. And if you welsh on us now, Big Tom, you won't have our help the next time it happens. What'll it be?"

Mullens tongued both corners of his lips, looking from Mahoney to the expectant violence of the two torpedoes."I gave my word," he said at last."I'll back anything you need to set up."

Their smiles dreadful reflections of one another, Nick and Angelo stepped to either side of the whimpering bookkeeper. "Smart cookie," said Smokie Joe. Nick's fist smashed Lod beneath the breastbone. As Mahoney doubled over, Angelo punched him in the back with enough power to pop a rib audibly. The plump man writhed on the floor like a crushed dog.

"He ain't dead," Nick said."He ain't even unconscious. But his spleen's busted and he'll bleed out in ten, twenty minutes."

Danny Mullens turned his face to the wall and vomited.

"Get rid of the meat, boys," Smokie Joe ordered. "Never trust somebody who gets religion," he added earnestly to Big Tom as Nick and Angelo carried Mahoney out the door."They're worse than the ones who've been goody-goody all the time. They think they've got something to make up for, and they don't mind putting your ass in the hot seat if they decide it's the 'right' thing to do."

The forelegs of Joe's chair thumped the floor as he stood. He tapped Big Tom playfully on the shoulder. "Come on, give us a smile. We're going places." Big Tom shook himself, a great bull of a man tearing loose the jaws of an emotion that troubled him. He forced a bloodless smile. "Yeah, up." "In a manner of speaking," said Smokie Joe.

"I can't believe this," said Big Tom Mullens, shoving the account book across the scarred table.

"You think I'm cheating you?"asked Smokie Joe without rancor."I'm not. And Nick and Angelo will keep their part of the bargain."

"It's not that I think you're dragging me down," Mullens admitted, frowning perplexedly at the slim figure. Smokie Joe had proven as perfect an accountant as he had been an operations man before Lod's-death. "It's-well, Hell, Joe; I don't see how Nick could bring in thismuch, starting from scratch with no street organization. And Angelo running a cat-house in a college town-Christ, he could sell ice to Eskimos."

Joe laughed in a satisfied way, a father preparing to explain to his son how he has gotten the stalled lawnmower to work."There's no secret about Nick," he said. "Sure, people push skag for money; but the best pushers are the ones who've just been turned on to it themselves. They're riding the crest, they're happy, and they want all their friends to be up there with them. God's a white powder to them, and they've got just as much enthusiasm as Paul the Apostle did."