whirled. He screamed once before the silenced Beretta took him down. The dog ripped out the first guard’s throat and flew down the stairs ... his charge carried both men coming up the stairs back down—they all tumbled to the second floor, landing in a mess of blood and screams. The kid was working his way up the stairs with a machete, hacking a path toward Wesley, who had switched to a similar weapon.
It was over in seconds. The place was as silent as the tomb it had become. Not a sound penetrated the upstairs chamber where Pet was holding forth.
Wesley snapped “Stay!” at the now-calm dog, and sprang over the bodies to the first floor. He took out a plastic box about the size of a pack of cigarettes and flipped the single tiny toggle switch. A red light flashed on Pet’s desk, readily visible to most of the assembled men.
“Relax!” Pet called out. “That just means we’re giving off too much static electricity and we could get monitored. I’m going to spray this stuff on the floor around your chairs—it’ll just take a second. Remember: please don’t talk.”
Pet walked into the midst of the mobsters. When he reached the back wall near the bar, he began to spray a heavy silicon mixture all over the floor, always being careful, although not obviously so, to spray the area he had just vacated. He seemed to run out of spray when he got to his own area, and took another can off his desk to continue. The whole operation took less than a minute. When he was finished, he pushed a wide, flat button under his desk with his knee and quickly resumed his sentence:
“So like I said, the scumbags can be wasted, but it’s got to be in Times Square, where they hole up. I’ll need at least twenty soldiers.
The hissing of the hidden jets was masked by the hum of the air conditioner. Cyanide is colorless, but the dim lighting would have prevented identification in any case.
After about ten seconds, Salmone took a deep breath and hissed, “Gas!” He leaped from his chair toward the door and fell flat on his face—the surface was as slippery as Teflon. One of the bodyguards clawed his way to a window and battered it frantically with his gun butt—the bars held firm. One of the fat dons swam his way through the grease to the door—it held against all six bullets from his pistol. In another five seconds all the men in the room were on their knees or flattened. Only Salmone remembered what he had lived for. He held his breath and carefully leveled his fallen bodyguard’s pistol at Pet ... but the old man was as safe behind the steel-lined desk as he would have been outside the room.
The door popped open. Wesley and the kid stepped through the slot wearing gas masks with oxygen backpacks. They skidded over to Pet, got a good grip—his part of the floor wasn’t slippery. The kid pulled Pet toward the door and closed it behind him, leaving Wesley inside. He slapped the portable oxygen mask onto the old man’s face and started the compressor. Pet still had a feeble pulse, but his skin was bluish and bloated. Wesley had told the kid you could beat cyanosis with oxygen and adrenalin—the kid found the vein in the old man’s arm, slapped on the Velcro tourniquet, and pumped in five cc’s.
Inside the room, Wesley was hacking his way through tons of flesh with the machete as the triplex continued to pump its deadly fumes. It took almost five minutes before he was sure. He pounded three times on the door. It opened enough to show the kid, holding the grease gun. Wesley held up his left fist and the kid slid the door the rest of the way open. Wesley stepped out. The old man was already sitting up.
“I fucking forgot to hold my breath after I hit the fucking switch.... How the fuck could I...?”
“Shut up!” the kid told him angrily.
Wesley and the kid carried the old man downstairs. When they got to the first floor, Wesley and the old man sat down to wait until the kid returned with the car. Wesley said, “Guard!” to the dog and went all the way back upstairs to the big room.
He shut off the pump and reconnected it to another tank. He threw the switch again and the triplex started throwing raw gasoline all over the building at two hundred gallons per minute. Wesley took a mass of putty-colored substance out of a plastic pouch and carefully molded it to the side of the pump, running a thin trail of the same stuff to a wooden box about ten feet away.
The place reeked of gasoline by the time Wesley got downstairs. The kid pulled into the alley with the car and they gently laid Pet across the back seat. The old man struggled and, with a powerful effort, pulled himself erect. The dog got into the back with him and laid down on the floor.
At 1:20 a.m. the Ford turned down Houston heading for the East River. Wesley reached for the switch on the radio transmitter—before he touched it, he felt the old man’s gnarled hand on his. He looked back at the darkness in the back seat for second. Then they threw the switch, together.
As the car slowed for a light on Houston, the sky above Chrystie fired to a brilliant orange-red. The car purred east.
For the first time, the kid came inside the garage with them to stay. The old man was able to reach his bed by himself. The kid slept right beside him.
Wesley and the dog went to their apartment and they were all asleep within minutes.
59/
The
Minor wars soon erupted among mob factions throughout the city, eastern Long Island, and northern New Jersey. They soon escalated, and bigger people were called in from outside to settle things. Paranoia was running wild, and everyone was so busy distrusting and plotting that even those who knew who had been at the meeting never thought to look for Petraglia. It was assumed he died in the blaze with the others.
A voodoo church that had been meeting in a cellar under one of the movie houses in Times Square was dynamited, with four people killed. The police had more informers than they could pay. Crackdowns on drunks took place from one end of the Bowery to the other. The law said it was okay to be a drunk, but a flaming menace to society was something else.
It was popularly assumed that a wino had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette until some bright boy leaked the identity of the bodies inside the building. The columnists had a field day and the florists felt like they were back in the heyday of Dion O’Banion in the Roaring ’20s.
