contacts? How many hit men worked for him? Did he do the background research on his own or did he have subordinates? How did he dress? How did he carry himself?
I tried to answer the ones I knew and guessed at the ones I didn’t. Pooley was entirely nonjudgmental throughout; in fact, he was fascinated. He asked to see my weapons, and I showed him the pistols, how the racking chamber worked, how to load a clip, how to conceal it on my body.
“I could do it,” he finally said after we had fallen silent for a while, listening to the heavy motor of a snow- plow rumbling down the street.
“I don’t know, Pooley. Killing a target—”
“No, not the killing part. I don’t have the stomach for it. But I could be your fence. Do what Vespucci did.”
My wheels were turning before he finished his sentence. “How would you go about—?”
“I don’t know. Start from scratch, I guess.”
“I’m not sure—”
“I was pretty damned resourceful at Waxham, Columbus.” He let the name out slowly, like his voice was thick with it, a smile on his face. In fact, from that point on, he never called me by my real name. Only the name Vespucci had given to me, my killing name. He continued, “I’m serious. I am detailed, I blend in, I survive. I negotiated Juvey like a chameleon, all five-foot-nine of me; I was practically running the place before my release. I can get you the details you need to continue doing what you do. I’ll pick up where Vespucci left off. I’ll be better than him.”
“Where would you even begin to make contacts? It’s not a field that invites newcomers. ‘Hey, you look trustworthy. Wanna kill someone for me?’”
“You let me worry about that.”
“I can’t. I’ll be worried, too.”
“Whatever. Just give me six months. Between what you have and what I have, we don’t have to earn another dime for at least a year. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, we’ll have plenty of time to call it off. Start flipping burgers or packing beer trucks or whatever else it is Waxham graduates do.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time. Just pulled on my beer, my back against the wall, tossing it around in my mind. Finally, I looked over at him. He was grinning, his eyes shining.
“You sure you want to go down this road?”
“As sure as you were when you dropped that sewing machine on Cox’s fucking head.”
I reached my hand over so we could clink our bottles together. “Then let’s do it.”
Three weeks later, they came for me.
“THREE men just stepped out of a Mercedes.”
“What?”
Pooley was sitting on the sofa, his neck craned, shielding his eyes from the sunlight as he peeked out the small window. He just happened to be looking out at exactly the right time.
“They’re splitting up, one out front, one heading to the steps, one moving toward the back. Black guys in suits.”
Black guys. Suits. Mercedes. Three things that didn’t add up for this dilapidated efficiency in Framingham; three things that might as well have been a warning light on top of a lighthouse tower.
I didn’t need any further information. In an instant, I was up and throwing open the case that held my weaponry. Five more seconds and I had two clips popped in place, Glocks double-fisted, racked and ready. Pooley scrambled off the sofa and I tossed him two empty clips. Like lightning, he had a shell-case open and was popping bullets into the clips as though he had been doing it all his life. I would have stopped to smile, appreciate the way his fingers maneuvered the bullets into place like a piano virtuoso working the keys, but I was all business now.
I crept up to the apartment door, and crouched beside it, then brought one of my guns to the center of the door, holding it out so the barrel pointed at the wood. Pooley lay down and put his head on the carpet so he could look through the small space separating the bottom of the door from the baseboard. A shadow crossed through the sliver of light in the hallway, and then he spotted two burgundy dress shoes approaching the door.
Pooley didn’t hesitate, he nodded his head, giving me the signal to shoot, and I pulled the trigger seven times, blowing holes through the wood, the smell of gunpowder and smoke and blood immediately redolent in my nostrils.
I swung the door open and leaped into the hallway, over the bullet-riddled body of the black man who had come to kill me. He stared vacantly at the ceiling, a look on his face . . . Surprise? Confusion? I didn’t stop to puzzle over it, but headed down the corridor for the stairwell that led to the alley behind the building.
A second black man was rushing up the steps just as I reached the landing, and he fired first, catching me in my right shoulder and spinning me backward, knocking me off my feet. He came up to finish me but made the mistake of pausing for a moment over my slumped body. Pooley shot him in the head, at close range, a fountain of red mist spraying the wall and splattering my face like I had showered in blood. He hadn’t figured on me having company, hadn’t bothered to scout me, to find out if I had any surprises waiting for him. In fact, the amateurish way these shooters had already botched this contract made me think Vespucci might not have sent them. Or if he had been forced to give me up, he maybe held out, did me a favor, gave me one last professional nod. If he had been forced to hire some guys to go after me—if the connected families in Boston had gotten to that olive-skinned Italian—well, at least he sent some minor-league hitters to the plate and gave me a fighting chance.
I kicked in the door on a first-floor apartment where I knew the tenant, an electrician, worked on weekdays and wouldn’t be home. His apartment had a window facing the front of the building, and Pooley and I squatted next to it to take a look at the third shooter, who was checking his watch, stamping his feet in the cold, and looking impatiently up to my window with increasing concern.
Pooley popped the clip from my Glock, reloaded it, racked it, and placed it in my good hand. Then he cracked the window half an inch, just enough for me to wedge in the barrel of my gun. The third shooter pulled out a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket, checked the address, checked his watch, checked the address again, furrowed his brow, and then . . . wham . . . my first and only shot caught him in the center of his head, shattering his nose and caving in the front of his face. He stuttered backwards, and then dropped onto the snow-covered asphalt.
Pooley and I quickly gathered my gear, everything we could fit into one large trash bag, and headed into the parking lot for my car. The third shooter still lay dead in the snow, his blood congealed like a halo around his head. The building was tucked into a small street off the main highway, where traffic was nonexistent this time of day. Luck was with us, no one had driven into the lot in the five minutes it had taken us to get up to my apartment and gather our possessions.
I looked at the dead body, and then noticed the paper still clutched in his hand, the slip he had pulled from his inside jacket pocket.
“Let’s go, Columbus. Now, before our luck changes.”
Pooley was right, I should have jumped behind the wheel of the Honda and gotten us out of there, but I wanted to know if that paper had something on it, some clue that would tell me who was trying to kill me and how I could stop it from happening again. I was only being cautious.
I grabbed the paper and sure enough, scrawled in pencil in a barely legible hand was my address here in Framingham, the target’s residence, nothing more. At least I thought there was nothing more until I flipped it over.
Scribbled on the other side in that same masculine hand was another address.
Pooley must have seen the color drain from my face. “What is it?”
“They have Jake’s address.”
I didn’t talk. I had the Honda’s accelerator mashed to the floorboard, ripping up the highway toward Boston like a missile locked on its target. I was racing blindly, ignoring the increasing amount of pain in my shoulder, my mind focused on one thing, only one thing: getting to Jake. I wouldn’t have slowed if God
