Don Pendleton: Poison Justice

Grogen backed up, and his men moved away from the transport. He saw Gagliano making faces, holding out his arms.

“What the…You booby-trapped my merchandise?” The Pumpkin was startled.

Backpedaling farther from the truck, Grogen chuckled as he nodded at the forklift driver. “I’m merely establishing my comfort area, in case your driver tips it off the pallet.”

Gagliano scowled and waddled away from the forklift. “You drop it, it’s your ass!” he screamed at the driver.

“By the way, Mikey. There’s been another change of plans,” Grogen said, grinning.

“How come I know I ain’t gonna like this already?”

“Your problem back home?”

“It’s under control.”

“Wrong. It’s now under my control. See, you and me, Mikey, we’re taking this ride to the end of the line.”

“You don’t trust us to fix the problem? You maybe worried about us stiffin’ you on the rest of the money?”

Grogen smiled into the darkness. “No truer words have you ever spoken.”

When United States Department of Justice Special Agent in Charge Thomas Peary considered the stats he reached the same conclusion he had during his first five years on the job.

The future of America belonged to the criminal.

Why bother fighting at all? he wondered. Once upon a time he’d been a devout Catholic, a family guy even, but reality had a strange and uneasy way of making a man a staunch believer only in number one. If there was a God, he thought, he was surely looking away from a world gone mad. Let the wild beasts eat one another.

Peary had problems of his own to solve, and the first of several solutions was sitting right under his roof. Soon, he would be packing up, moving on to a paradise of his own making and choosing. It might as well already be written in stone.

Peary was at the kitchen table, thinking about the culture of crime, when the future downfall of the New York Mafia fell into the late-night routine. Peary nearly bit his cigarette in two when the first chords of the same song he heard every night on VH1 videos blasted from the living room. By now he knew the lineup of hits by heart and had heard the songs repeated so many times the past week that he thought he might go ballistic any moment.

And, of course, every time a favorite was aired Jimmy “The Butcher” Marelli had to crank up the volume until it shook the floor and the walls of the Catskill hunting lodge.

Peary looked at the slab of human veal perched on the edge of the couch. His superiors claimed Marelli was last of the old school Mafia, honor among thieves and all that nonsense. He was a dinosaur among the new coke-sniffing crowd of backshooters and Mob clowns who killed while driving past sidewalk crowds, indiscriminately blasting any and everybody as long as they got their target. A button man who did his work one on one, face-to-face for the Cabriano Family. The Butcher was famous for whacking malcontents, traitors and songbirds, loyal only to the late Don Michael Cabriano. Only what Jimbo purportedly so loathed way back when he had now become.

The Mob was notoriously creative when it came to weaving legends about their own and making myth stick as truth for wise guy, public and G-man consumption. In this instance, the Justice Department had flown Marelli up the flagpole as a marquee hitter with a body count of biblical proportions to his credit. Whether or not that was true, Peary figured the hit man was costing the Justice Department a small fortune in wine and Scotch, cigars and cannoli alone. Not to mention all the veal linguini in white clams and twenty other pasta dishes he concocted and ate around the clock.

How many bodies, Peary wondered, really came attached to this baby-sitting detail on the government’s tab? There were fifty-two kills the FBI and Justice knew about. The Butcher confirmed that during an eighteen-hour Q and A session. All the I’s were dotted, T’s crossed on the Who’s Who of Mafiadom during his three decades of slaughter. There were at least two to twenty other corpses they were guessing had his brand on them, maybe more. Only Marelli enjoyed playing the big shot, stringing them along, feeding them just enough to have the FBI drag a river or dig up some earth in the New Jersey woods. Beyond cold-blooded murder he’d been granted full immunity for extortion, truck hijacking, assault, assault with intent, pimping, pandering and drug trafficking. There was also witness intimidation, tampering and execution. The deal was enough to make Peary wonder if the Justice Department had watched its balls go out the door with the change in administration, but he’d made his own plans well in advance to castrate the whole bull. The time to act, and get the hell out, had just about arrived.

Shaking his head, Peary watched the hit man, decked out in a flaming Hawaiian shirt and white silk slacks, staring dumbly at the blaring television. He wondered what the world was coming to. He was getting sick of being forced to breathe the same air as the pampered killer.

Suddenly Peary felt his hand inch toward his shoulder-holstered USP Expert .45. Ten hollowpoints in the clip, and a nasty little resolution to the noise problem flamed to mind.

“Sir? It’s your move.”

Peary laid an angry eye on Hobbs. The pink-faced kid was maybe two years out of Quantico, attached to the task force at the last moment when some desk-lifer at the FBI had, for reasons unknown, been able to catch and burn up the ear of the Attorney General. FBI, Justice, U.S. Marshals, everybody wanted in on this gig. It was a chance, he figured, a trophy for someone’s mantel on the climb up the pecking order. Problem was, all the headshed wanted to do was make sure The Butcher was coddled and comfortable, practically warning them all to be careful not to upset or press him too much for information on the Cabriano Family. What next? Bring on the strippers? Everybody chip in for the guy’s lap dance? All the big consideration and fawning the murdering asshole got, what happened to paying for your crimes?

Peary watched the FBI rookie shrink into himself under his steely gaze, then checked the board. Back-gammon was the game, and they were playing for a four-hour watch, thirty minutes per win. But the way Hobbs had been rolling double fives and sixes on a whim and bumping him all over the board the past two hours, Peary figured he owed the kid two weeks’ worth of shift duty.

“With all due respect, you need to relax, sir. Don’t let him get to you.”

“What’s that?”

The kid showed a weak smile. “It could be worse. It could be rap.”

Peary hit the kid in the face with a fat cloud that could have choked half a city block.

Hobbs flapped a hand at the smoke, making a face like he would puke. He coughed for another moment, then said, “I mean, he’s a thug, sir, and a pain in the ass, but he can cook.”

“So, he can cook for the troops, Hobbs, that make him a goodfella to you?”

“Well, what I meant—”

“Let me tell you something, son. I operate on the general principle I don’t know a damn thing about another human being until they show me some cards. Just because you’re in love with his spaghetti and meatballs doesn’t mean he’s shown a damn thing to anybody. Let me tell you something else, junior. I’m not in this world to be popular or liked. Fact is, the more unpopular, the more disliked I am the better I stand in my eyes.”

Hobbs cleared his throat, staring at the game. “With all due respect, sir, I think there’s a lot of anger in you.”

Peary bared his teeth at the kid, wondering if he was serious or being a smart-ass. He looked at the board while running a hand over the white bristles of a scalp furrowed in spots by some punk’s bullets long ago. Double sixes might get him back in the game.