Sweat

named “Assassins and Tools of the Trade,” he slowed to a snail’s pace. He didn’t want to miss a thing.

Chapter 25

Kate curled up on the canopy bed and took turns outlining the flowers on the wallpaper with her finger and staring out the window of her old bedroom in the Sorrentino mansion. It had been four days since Jake had walked out of a known topless joint with a stripper in each arm. For Kate, the image was still as fresh as the wound. But love, passion, and the loss of both made four days seem like four months. Her cell phone now rang every hour on the hour, down from the fifteen-minute intervals Jake called at the first day after his untimely exit. She kept the black Motorola within reach, and at one o’clock she checked the incoming call number on the small display screen. Jake had stopped leaving messages when her voice-mail became full, but he knew she was checking the phone display. All he needed was one chance to explain himself, to lay on a little charm. He had the truth on his side. He had apologized to the answering machine for acts not done, for causing images of dastardly deeds. In his heart, Jake didn’t believe he was wrong, but he knew if he wanted to see Kate again, he would at least have to admit that he wasn’t entirely right. It was a compromise, the key to relationships. Or so he heard. More flowers, chocolate, and a little poetry were all on deck as backup.

Kate was planning to mope around for a week and participate in a little shopping therapy with her mother on her father’s credit. Staying at her parents’s didn’t affect her daily routine—riding ambulances out of the McLean Gardens station as an EMT four days a week, studying her medical books over coffee in the morning just to keep sharp. Three months was a long time for the soon-to-be-fourth-year medical student to retain the name and disposition of every muscle, bone, tendon, symptom, and illness she had memorized over the last three years. Her drive was remarkable, given the need not to have one at all. Riding ambulances, reviewing old medical books, and hanging out with Jake had been her plan for the summer. There was just something about him that she liked. It was everything.

James “Jimmy” Sorrentino was in the business of breaking impasses. The go-between, mediator, arbiter, and problem-solver. Real estate, construction, and waste removal were still his bread and butter, measurable businesses that kept him legitimate. They certainly looked better on the tax forms to the IRS than “self-employed problem-solver.”

Jimmy Sorrentino had been around the block and had the mental and physical scars to prove it. But like Sampson and Superman, he did have a weakness. And for the tough guy from Providence, Rhode Island, the chink in his armor came in the form of a five-foot-five beautiful brunette named Katherine Elizabeth, his only child, and more importantly, his only daughter. Seventy hours ago Kate had once again taken up residence at the Sorrentino house, spending most of the day moping and shedding the occasional tear. Neither of these bothered Jimmy. But the combination of mother and daughter was like a flame and an open gas valve. His daughter’s presence emboldened his wife, turning her from upper-crust housewife into professional nag. He couldn’t reach for a drink, or smoke his thirty-dollar cigars without someone telling him that he was killing himself.

Mr. Sorrentino gave Kate until the weekend to straighten herself out. She was twenty-six, not a teenager, and he had bought her a condo two years ago in the name of peace and quiet. He would be damned if Kate was going to live at his house again, energizing his wife to run her nails down his psychological chalkboard, and pay thirty-five hundred dollars a month for a condo to boot.

It wasn’t the money, it was the principle. A man of principle up against two women.

With his daughter and wife at the kitchen table, Jimmy Sorrentino gave them the rules for living under his roof.

“Kate, you have until the weekend to mope around this house. Then you are going back to your apartment.”

“Don’t listen to him honey, you are welcome to stay as long as you like,” Mrs. Sorrentino added with daggers in her eyes.

“Ignore your mother. This is my house and these are my rules. You come down with an illness, you can stay. You are in an accident, you can stay. You let me sell your condo in the city, you can move back in. But I will be goddamned if I paid a half a million dollars for a condo so you can sit around my house, tag-teaming me.”

“This is your flesh and blood here,” Mrs. Sorrentino said. “Don’t listen to him, sweetie. He’s full of hot air.”

“Cynthia, don’t test me,” Jimmy Sorrentino said to his wife with authority.

“Blowhard,” his wife responded over her shoulder.

Cynthia Sorrentino grabbed her keys off the kitchen counter and turned toward Kate. “Let’s go shopping, sweetheart. Let him calm down a bit.”

Jimmy Sorrentino had the last word. “Kate, I told you that kid was no good. Just because he’s Catholic doesn’t mean he’s Italian.”

James Sorrentino continued talking to himself and cursing for five minutes after the ladies left. He felt better. A man has to posture once in a while. Beat the chest. Show them he was still the boss.

God, he hoped his daughter would get out of the house soon. ***

Vincent DiMarco had blown the first professional hit of his life and lived to tell about it. It had been a decade and a half since he stepped off the plane in Miami with nothing but a name, an address, and an order. It would have taken ten minutes to confirm the address, to make sure he was whacking the right guy, but it was ten minutes he didn’t feel like wasting. The hit went down within an hour of his plane touching down, and DiMarco was back in Boston before dinner, treating himself to lobster tail.

The hit was easy and as an extra bonus, he was able to follow an old DiMarco credo that stated the better you were, the closer you could get to your victim. A young Vincent DiMarco had done just that. He had walked across the back yard to the dark-haired Italian man tending to his garden and had used the cord from the clothesline to finish the job. His wife of forty years found him three hours later, discolored, dangling, and dead.

The following morning Vincent grabbed a Miami Herald newspaper from a newsstand on the corner of Harvard Square that carried every major paper in the country. Paper under his arm, he headed for a diner down the street, away from the rich kids. He sipped his black coffee and flipped to the metro news section to read the details of his handiwork with pride. The death of a mistaken, innocent man didn’t haunt him as persistently as those who hired him for the failed hit did. On Mother’s Day in 1995, the payback came as he sat down to have dinner with his mom at a posh restaurant in Back Bay. The blood had spurted from his neck with enough force to cover two walls, the ceiling, and his mother. When he arrived at the hospital, he had lost sixty percent of his blood. But he lived, and he had learned a valuable lesson. A little patience and a little planning could make life simple.

Vincent DiMarco blended in with the Saipan locals like a white accountant in a rural Louisiana soul-food restaurant. What his harsh Boston accent didn’t give away, his natural brash attitude did. Things were slow on Saipan, and the ruffian-for-hire was anything but. With beach attire, the scar on his neck was less noticeable than the tattoo on his left arm. The skin art had been a spur of the moment impulse, a Christmas day decision that would last the rest of his life. In a dingy tattoo parlor, he had narrowed down the selection to two choices—a detailed picture of St. Nick, or a ghoulish rendition of the Grim Reaper. The sickle that now crowned the top of his arm, just above the red hat with a white ball hanging on the end, showed he wasn’t above compromise.

The son of an Italian father and South African mother, DiMarco traveled extensively before he could walk. Since his fifth birthday, when his Dad had taken him to see the family in the old country, he hadn’t set foot outside of the continental United States. Until his meeting with the senator, he had never heard of Saipan. Three days after arriving on the sunny island, he found himself not wanting to leave.

He kept a low profile, eating at the cheap restaurants with tourist crowds and high customer turnover. He tried to avoid going to the same place more than once, but the pretty waitress at the Limbo, a dive with character and the largest shrimp he had ever seen, changed all that.

Unlike his Chinese counterpart on the other side of the world, DiMarco didn’t have a face to go with his mark. He didn’t have the benefit of a close-up encounter with the people he was coming to kill. No picture, no useful description.

When the cobwebs of jetlag finally cleared his mind, he drove down to the front of Chang Industries and