“That’s right. It’s mostly for show-gives him a way to launder money coming in. But he keeps a few trucks on hand, half-tons and cube vans, to haul slot machines, cigarettes, booze, whatever. He runs a sports book out of the place and hosts high-stakes Hold’em tourneys. Sucks in fools who think they can play ’cause they’ve seen it on TV. It’s as close as anything he has to an office. He turns up most days at some point or another. Let’s start there and see what’s what.”
“Would he be there this early?”
“No, he’s a night owl. But there’s a guy, Tommy Vetere, kind of runs the place: answers the phones, takes bets, hands out gas money to the truck drivers, like that. He’s usually there by nine. And he might know when Marco’s coming.”
“He would tell us?”
“He would tell me. Remember how nice I can ask?”
“What if he’s not there?”
“We’ll scout it out. See if there’s some way to use the long gun. Can you shoot?”
“Me?”
“It’s your gig, man. Also, I can distract Marco. Show myself. Chat him up. Lead him outside. You can’t do any of that without him taking a body part as a souvenir.”
I pictured Roni Galil standing over me as I lay on my belly, sighting down the barrel of an Israeli sniper rifle called a Tessler during training. “If you have to shoot someone, Yoni, I hope he’s big like a house because that’s all you going to hit. Should 1get you a slingshot like our King David used against Goliath?” But that was early on in my training. By the end I had become a decent marksman.
“I can shoot,” I told Ryan.
“There’s a fence around the property. Bushes along most of the sides and trees at the back. Trucks parked here and there. Maybe we can set up a blind where you can take him out as he’s getting out of his car. With his arm in that cast, moving like he is, he’ll present a beautiful target, don’t you think?”
“A stunner,” I said.
A few minutes later, Ryan turned off Highway 7 onto Minden Road. He pointed to a red and white sign up on our right. “That’s the place. Aspromonte Trucking. Little joke of Marco’s.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Aspromonte’s in Calabria. In the old days, that’s where the ‘Ndrangheta hid kidnap victims while they waited for ransoms to be paid. They’d stash them in a cave if they were giving them back alive. Dump them in a crevice if they weren’t.”
Aspromonte Trucking sat on a wide, dusty asphalt lot. Its immediate neighbours were a retailer of farm implements and a lumber yard. The entire property was surrounded by an eight-foot cyclone fence topped by three strands of barbed wire; the only entrance visible from the road was a gate, front and centre, that hung halfway open. The building was one storey, about the size of a service station, half the frontage given over to a large garage door that was rolled down shut. There were two half-ton trucks parked to one side, with enough space for a third between them. A black Escalade was blocking the front door.
“Christ,” Ryan said. “That’s Marco’s.”
“He’s here this early?”
“Or this late. Maybe they had a poker game last night.”
“Would it still be going?”
“Not with no other cars here. But maybe we caught a break. If it went real late, he might have crashed here. There’s a room at the back with a bed in it.”
He drove a few hundred yards past the gate and turned into the lot of a company that made wooden shutters in a California style. There were only a few cars scattered in its lot and we parked as far as we could from the entrance, partially blocked from view by a cedar hedge.
“You think Phil and Tommy are with him?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
I sat in the stolen Altima, my mouth feeling dry. I had not taken Percocet this morning, wanting to keep my head clear. My side ached but the real discomfort lay elsewhere. In the next few minutes, three men might die: Marco, Phil and this Tommy Vetere. And that was if we got lucky and neither one of us joined in. We were talking about men like pieces on a game board. I had signed onto this mission to practise tikkun olam, to repair a part of the world that badly needed it. Save an innocent life. And maybe we still would. Maybe we’d save the entire Silver family. But how many lives could pile up on the other end of the seesaw before it slammed down to the ground and sent our end lurching up?
“Tell me about Vetere,” I said.
“What’s to tell? He’s been in Marco’s crew for years. Before that with Vinnie Nickels. He’s no altar boy, if that’s what you’re worried about. He’s broken his share of bones. He’s fired his guns. He’s never affronted me personally, so I have no feelings for him pro or con. But if he’s in there with Marco and this is our chance, then I say he has to go. It’s the life he bought into, just like me.”
“Isn’t there a way to make Marco come out alone?”
Ryan thought about it and said there was. I didn’t like the way he smiled when he said it.
“Go on,” I said.
“I go in alone. I tell him I have something in the trunk for him.”
“And that would be?”
“You.”
CHAPTER 35
I had to say this much for the Altima: it had a roomy trunk for its size and the owner kept it clean. Nothing in there but a Sunday golf bag with half a dozen clubs and a putter, and a set of jumper cables. The carpet was coarse and the overall smell was of grease and metal, but I couldn’t complain.
Not that I didn’t at first.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” I’d yelled.
“Admit it,” he said. “You don’t trust me. After all we been through, the way I’ve put my ass on the line for you, you think I have another agenda.”
“What do you want from me? I was raised to think the goyim have it in for Jews. So a guy like you tries to talk me into the trunk of a car-”
“Goddamn it,” he barked. “I keep telling you, you dumb fuck, if I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. How many opportunities do I need? Your apartment Monday night, I could’ve put two in your head right there and been done with your dumb ass. Drunk the whole bottle of wine by myself. Tuesday in the park, all I had to do was keep my trap shut and Marco would have stabbed you in the heart. But no, I stuck my neck out and warned you but this you somehow forget. Which brings us to Wednesday. Where were we Wednesday? Oh yes, a soundproof room full of fucking guns. I could have done it then. Or this morning, while you were having a bad dream, moaning like a broken-down whore, I could have popped you right in your bed with a pillow on your face and nobody would have heard a sound.”
His voice was strained, his eyes dark, his fists curled tight. Then it came to me: he was hurt. Dante Ryan was genuinely hurt by what I’d said. He’d shoot me dead on the spot if I suggested as much but there it was. I slowed my breathing until my weight settled and my anxiety passed.
“Sorry,” I said. We made eye contact and bumped fists, our hands encased in tight black leather.
We spent a few minutes making me look roughed up. Shirt untucked and smeared with dirt. Face too. Hair all over the place, like Lyle Lovett on a windy day. I got in the trunk with Ryan’s metal gun case and the canvas bag that held the Remington rifle. I put my hands behind me and Ryan wound coarse yellow rope around them loosely, so it would give way with a good yank. We ran through it a few times to make sure.
“There’s three ways this can play,” he said. “One, I don’t like the odds-say there’s just too many guys inside for us to handle. I give Marco some bullshit story about setting up the Silver hit for tonight. You stay in the trunk and we drive away. Two, the odds seem in our favour. There’s no more than one or two guys besides Marco. I get
