Joe's children had apparently all grown up and moved out. But it was odd that there weren't any bodyguards asleep on the second floor. He had seen cars in the space in front of the garage. It occurred to him that it was possible Castiglione wasn't at home. He might have been held for some infraction at the ranch in Arizona or decided not to be available to reporters.
Schaeffer returned to the servants' staircase and climbed to the third floor. As soon as he opened the door into the hallway, he knew this floor was inhabited. He heard snoring. There were two bedrooms at his end of the hall, and a single door at the opposite end, which he guessed was a master suite that took up one wing.
Between the ends of the hall there was one huge room with big windows facing the lake, and a wide-open portal. The room must once have been an upstairs sitting room because it offered a spectacular view. In the morning, it would be filled with sunlight. In the afternoon, when the sun was on the other side of the house, it would be a good place to look out at the boats on the lake. Probably parties had been held up here.
But this end of it had been transformed into what looked like a barrack. There were eight sets of bunk beds set up in two rows. The bunks didn't look like a recent development, something someone would do just for a couple of days. It would be too much trouble. A number of times over the years the Castigliones had been involved in rivalries and struggles for dominance. There must have been times when they gathered a group of their soldiers into the Castle to defend it and themselves. He heard more sounds of snoring and deep, unconscious breathing and stepped closer, studying the bunk beds from different angles. There was a man asleep in the big room.
Before he did anything else, he needed to clear the rooms by the back stairs to be sure his escape wouldn't be blocked. He opened the first, and it looked like a hotel storeroom with shelves full of linens and blankets and paper goods. The second was a large bathroom remodeled for multiple people, with toilet stalls and a shower room with three stations. He moved quietly back into the big room.
He looked down at the sleeping man in the bunk. The moment that he started the killing, all of this silence and stillness was going to shatter, and he would have to be in motion. He prepared himself.
He aimed the shotgun at the head of the man in the bunk and fired. The roar was deafening, and the man's body jumped on the springs, but there wasn't much left of his head.
Schaeffer's left hand was pumping his shotgun as he ran for the single door at the end of the short hall. He knew that the less time he took, the better his chances were, so he lifted his right foot and stomp-kicked the door. The door swung inward, splinters flying, and he dashed in after it, his shotgun aimed at the bed. He flicked on the overhead light.
There were two people in it, a man and a woman. The man was Joe Castiglione, but the woman was much younger, probably her mid twenties, with long bleach-blond hair. Castiglione was in the middle of a half roll, reaching into a drawer in his nightstand.
As Castiglione fumbled to get the gun in his hand, Schaeffer shot him in the back of the head. The woman screamed, her hands clawing at the sides of her head like talons.
'Shut up,' he said.
She took a deep breath to scream again so he shot her, and she sprawled backward on the bed, her arms spread like wings.
He picked up the ejected shotgun shells in the bedroom and then the one he'd fired in the big room, and then went down the back stairs. He climbed out the basement window and pushed it shut behind him, and then took his shotgun apart and put it in his messenger bag. He walked quickly away from the house along Lake Shore Drive toward the parking lot where he had left his car, put the bag in the trunk, and drove off toward the next house.
The point would not be made without the other two brothers. The second one was Paul, and the youngest Sal. He knew he had no more than an hour or two to do the rest of the job and get out of town.
When he arrived in Paul's neighborhood, it was three A.M. The night air was cool and fresh, just a stealthy breeze flowing onto the land off Lake Michigan. In the evening it had seemed hot, but as he walked along the street, the air felt alive to him. It filled his lungs and gave him new energy.
Paul Castiglione lived only a couple of minutes from his older brother. His house was an old redbrick two-story cubical building that had a white wooden porch in front with Doric columns. It wasn't quite a mansion, but the sort of house that had probably been built just after the Great Chicago Fire and painstakingly restored by whomever Paul had bought it from.
Schaeffer drove past and scanned to be sure there were no clusters of cars and that the street behind looked about the same as the last time he'd been here. He parked just around the corner, where he could reach his car quickly, but where it couldn't be seen from the house. He opened the trunk, took the two Beretta pistols, and put them in his jacket. He closed the trunk, walked up to the house, and looked into the window of the garage. There were three cars inside, a black Cadillac, a black Corvette, and a black SUV that seemed to be about seven feet tall. Even though he'd been in the United States ten years ago, the sight of those big SUVs still startled him with their ugliness and impracticality. But he was pleased. The three cars looked as though they represented three moods of Paul Castiglione-pretentious, childish, and stupid.
He walked around the building, examining window latches through the glass, testing doorknobs. Through the window near the front door he saw that there was an alarm system. It probably wasn't the kind that rang in the office of a security service or a police station because Paul Castiglione wouldn't want to give the cops a legal excuse for bursting into his house, but he was sure it would make noise. He could see the keypad lights glowing on the wall. He thought it probably wasn't necessary, but in case he made a mistake, he went to the rear of the house, opened the phone junction box, and disconnected the telephone wires.
There had to be a way around the alarm system because there always was. As he continued around the house, he found it. Set in the wall beside the kitchen door was an old-fashioned milk delivery box. There was a small wooden cabinet door with a weathered brass latch on the outside so the milkman could put the bottles of milk in it. Inside there would be another door that opened inward so the cook could bring the milk bottles into the kitchen.
It was a long-obsolete feature. Nobody now would have a little door set into the brick facing like that. The renovators must have left it there because antique details reminded people that this house was the real thing and not a copy. He reached up and turned the little knob and the milk door opened. He pushed on the inner door, but it was locked. He looked in and he could see four small brass screw heads flush with the surface of the door. He looked at the inner side of the outer door to compare, then used his lock-blade knife to unscrew the four screws. When he pushed the door inward, it moved. He jiggled it a bit, moving it inward until he could get his hand in and pull the latch free.
He studied the dimensions of the milk door. In the years since he had left the trade, he had aged, but he was still relatively flexible, and he judged that he could fit his middle through the two-foot square. He took off his jacket, heavy with his two pistols, and hung it on the brass handle on the door. He ducked to get his head and arms into the opening, turned sideways to get his shoulders in, and then pushed against the inner wall to slide in to his hips. He could reach a counter to his right now so he used it to pull himself the rest of the way in and get his left foot on the floor and then the right.
Turning to reach outside, he grasped his jacket and brought it in with him. He put it on, closed the milk door, stood with his back against the wall with the two pistols in his hands, and listened. There were only the tiny, barely audible sounds of a house-the refrigerator compressor, the air-conditioning system.
He moved forward into the kitchen. He had always preferred to take a great deal of time so a listener would not connect one of his moves or sounds with another. Tonight he had to bend time in the opposite direction, moving from place to place more quickly than anyone would expect. He had to find and kill Paul Castiglione, and then get inside Sal's defenses before he knew his brothers were dead.
He was halfway across the kitchen when Paul Castiglione materialized in the doorway in a big, loose-fitting bathrobe and bare feet. Castiglione took a couple of steps and opened the refrigerator door. The light spilled out of it onto the floor and splashed the walls.
Castiglione leaned over and squinted into the refrigerator, and then the sight he'd seen in his peripheral vision as he'd turned registered in his brain, and he jerked his head and looked. 'Holy shit.'
'Hello, Paul.' The two pistols came up in Schaeffer's hands, so that Castiglione saw not only the shape of a man in his kitchen, but also a vaguely familiar face staring at him above the dark, gleaming muzzles of the two Berettas.
'It's you. What would you come to me for? I can't save you.'
'I never asked.' He shot Castiglione. In the light of the open refrigerator, he could see that the single shot
