Ponts took the beer bottle out of my hand and downed it in front of me in two quick gulps. “Now you’re finished. Where’s my money?”
I pulled out a roll of bills from my pocket. “I got five large here. If you’ll just let me place it on tonight’s game . . .”
The fat man snatched it out of my hand, quickly handed it to Gorti, who began to thumb through it. After a quick count, he nodded back to Ponts.
“You got five days to come up with the other forty-eight.”
“Come on . . . why so hostile . . . ?”
“You think this is hostile? Hostile is Friday morning if you don’t have my money.”
“Jesus. I went out of town for a few days. Here I am and I paid you.”
“You paid me half.”
“I don’t see why . . .”
And then my voice trailed off, the words choking in my throat. The last thing I was expecting, and the very thing Vespucci had warned me about, rose up and stung me.
Jake walked into the bar with a friend of hers.
Now, my plan had been to show up on Friday and ask for an extension, to claim poor, to see how physical Ponts would get with me when I didn’t have the money. I was beginning to understand why Vespucci preached making a connection with the target; it was my job to seek out the
But all that changed the moment Jake walked into the bar and saw me.
She immediately made a beeline over to where I was standing and kissed my lips, saying my name . . . a different name than what I had given Ponts and Gorti.
I started to say something to get her to walk away, but Ponts read me like a book and interrupted before any words could come out of my mouth, addressing Jake directly.
“Hello, there! I’m Ponts and this is Gorti . . . we’re friends of your boyfriend. What’s your name, beautiful?”
She turned to them warmly. “Jake. Jake Owens.”
Ponts grinned so large I thought he was going to swallow her. “You go to school here, Jake Owens?”
She nodded. “Almost finished at B.C. How do you boys know each other?”
“We’re old friends from way back, aren’t we?” and he said my name, the one Jake had handed to him.
“Yeah,” I mumbled. “You know, Jake . . . let me finish up with these fellas and I’ll come sit with you.”
“Okay,” she said, like she knew she had interrupted something she shouldn’t have.
“It was nice meeting you, Jake Owens from B.C.” Ponts said, holding the words like he didn’t want to let them go.
As soon as she was gone, his eyes hardened. “I don’t care you gave us a bum name, I don’t care you think you’re so fucking smart you can game us like a couple of fruits. What I do care about is the forty-eight big you owe us. Now you know that we know about Jake Owens from B.C. We get the money on Friday or somebody’s day gets ruined. We understand each other?”
I nodded. “Yeah . . . sure, Ponts.”
“Don’t do anything dumb again, kid.” He patted the side of my face and turned back to the bar like the conversation was over.
I was sweating. I sat in my apartment, the window open, a nice breeze blowing in off the water, and yet I was sweating, like the room had nothing but stale air trapped inside.
I had ignored Vespucci’s advice, I had kept up my relationship with a girl who loved me, and now she was involved. Two low-level bag men for my primary target knew her name and even worse . . . knew mine.
I was going to have to rectify the situation. Rectify it myself, without telling Vespucci what I planned. And I felt it had to be as soon as possible, money or no money. I didn’t know what Ponts and Gorti would do to warn me, to send me a message even before Friday’s deadline, so I had to compress my six weeks into that moment.
I sat in the shadows of a neighboring stoop, watching the front door of Antonio’s. An intermittent rain was falling, and drops pooled on the lid of my black baseball cap before collecting into a puddle at my feet. My eyes were sharp, hard, focused. I waited, ignoring everything but the front door of the restaurant, not even stamping my feet to shake off the chill wind blowing in from the east.
At midnight, Ponts and Gorti shuffled out of the bar. They weren’t stumbling; I’d noticed neither man ever drank more than a couple of beers the whole time they were at Antonio’s. They wanted to look like they were there to have a good time, but Antonio’s was a job to them, as mundane as any cubicle at any office in America. So when they left the bar, they were both sober.
From casing them over the last couple of weeks, I knew they both rode together in a four-door Oldsmobile, the kind of car only the elderly and ex-cons purchase with any regularity. As soon as they both settled into the front seat, I flipped open the rear door and slid in behind them.
They both spun to get a look at me, surprised.
“What’ya doin’, kid?” Gorti asked, a moment before I shot him through the passenger seat. He gasped for air—the bullet shattered his left lung—but I was no longer concerned with him, I just turned the gun on Ponts, who was hunched uncomfortably behind the steering wheel, breathing raspily.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, kid, don’t shoot me.”
“Just drive.”
“I got a wife at home—”
“I said drive.”
“Sure, kid. Sure.”
He turned on the ignition and put the car into gear, then slowly pulled it out onto the street. Little Italy was dark and empty at this time of night, the cold and the rain keeping the pedestrians at bay.
“Take the highway south. I’ll tell you when to get off.”
PONTS tried to make small talk along the way. Told me it was only five grand and he could chalk that up to sour business. Told me his wife was talking about finally having a baby this year. Told me he didn’t even remember my girlfriend’s name if that was what this was about.
I let him talk as much as he wanted, until he finally gave up and drove the car in silence. I stayed out of his sight-line in the rearview mirror, allowing the danger to expand like noxious fumes in his mind. He didn’t know where the gun was, where my eyes were, when the shot might come.
I gave him a few directions until we ended up outside the abandoned Columbus Textile Warehouse, where I had last taken Pete Cox’s life and emerged, like a phoenix, with a new one of my own.
Inside, the warehouse was much as I had last seen it. No police tape, no evidence bags, no fingerprint dust. Cox’s body and any sign of foul play had been meticulously erased by Vespucci’s men.
I directed Ponts to a chair at an old sewing desk. His legs were shaky, but he managed to make it this far without passing out, even if his breathing grew progressively more labored, like a dog’s pant after a hard run.
“What we doin’ here, Columbus?”
So it was back to the name I had given him originally; that was a good sign. I pulled out some paper and a pencil I had tucked away in my pocket before I left my apartment.
“You’re going to draw me a map.”
He started to say something but then just waited for me to continue. “I want an exact layout of Richard Levine’s house: bedrooms, living room, kitchen, shitters, laundry room, where he eats, where he sleeps, where he takes a dump. I want Xs marking where his guards sit, where they head when they take their breaks, where they
