Death Wish (4 page)

Collucci's mouth drooped in a bitter half smile. Even after that he would face a problem. Consuella Bugatta, an Italian aristocrat, beautiful but broke, and her infant twin girls lived with Tonelli in the penthouse. Love-whacked Tonelli was certain to marry her when her divorce was finalized in the early coming spring.

His odd yellow-tinted green eyes hardened in the mirror. Olivia's old man would have to be put to sleep before spring. Collucci would put a thousand people to sleep to realize his dream.

He was leaving the bathroom when he heard Petey's excited voice at the Christmas tree downstairs, opening one of his mountain of presents. The rest were to be opened after he returned from early Christmas Mass.

He went into the bedroom and got into bed. Tenderly he kissed Olivia's eyes open. She looked into his eyes for a long moment before kissing him and embracing him warmly.

“Merry Christmas. I love you,” they chorused together and laughed merrily. He opened his nightstand drawer and gave Olivia her major present, an extravagant diamond bracelet from Peacock's. Olivia squealed with joy and smothered him with new kisses.

Collucci left the bed to go downstairs to get his own thrills. Every Christmas he would stand back and watch Petey's radiant happiness to see the rainbow of treasure boxes beneath the tree. And he would remember how bleak Christmas usually was in the countless foster homes when he was a child.

The phone rang and stopped Collucci at the bedroom doorway. He looked right into Olivia's eyes as he went to the nightstand and lifted the receiver. He listened to Angelo tell him in code that Bone was secured in the big combination garage and storage barn behind the roadhouse, and he would come within the hour to take the Colluccis to church.

Collucci said, “Yes,” and avoided Olivia's eyes as he cradled the receiver.

Olivia said in a low voice, “What the hell was that?”

He said with a faint frown of irritation, “Business.”

She sprang out of the bed nude, her long trim body twanging emotion. “What kind of business on Christmas morning, Jimmy?”

“Your father's business,” he said sharply.

“Baloney! Rubber Dick!” she spat.

His face congealed into a hard leering mask. He darted his hand through the front of his robe and jerked out his long, limp organ. Quickly he waggled it violently before her captive eyes and jabbered in Sicilian, “Suck it! Suck it! You old-fashioned hung-up bitch. Everybody on this planet sucks. I'd lay big odds even your goddamn precious Pope sucks. Here! I'll choke you blue with its hardness.”

He turned away and flung over his shoulder, “Olivia, mind your own fucking business. I'm your boss. Don't quiz me again.”

She seized the back of his robe belt and ripped it from his middle. He whirled and glared venomously at her. His fists were knotted clubs shaking at his sides.

“Hit me! Hit me!” she exploded. “You blasphemous, filthy bastard pervert. For twenty years you have brought the stink of your black whores into my house. My legs are still sexy, my ass firm and round to excite the eyes and hands of a handsome lover. To hell with my church vows! I'll squeal like a horny sow in my lover's arms.”

Collucci lunged across the carpet at her with his long, powerful fingers clawing air. She recoiled from his fearsome face and sank to the floor when her knees buckled. He hurled himself down on her. He vised her shoulders with his hands. His biceps writhed and lumped against the terry cloth as he shook her like a doll. Then he banged her head against the carpet until her eyes clouded.

He stuck his face against her shock-dampened face and shouted in a whisper, “Take it back! Take it back! All of it!”

She gasped, “Jimmy, please! I didn't mean any of it. You know I wouldn't let another man know me. Please let me go!”

Collucci released his crushing grip on her shoulders and said in a low, deadly voice, “You realize that Petey will lose his mother? That I will put you to sleep if I ever catch you unfaithful?”

She nodded frantically with blue eyes enormous.

Collucci went on savagely, “You understand that you're going right down to the gray-ass, saggy-tit finish line with me?”

She nodded again, frantically.

Collucci was getting to his feet when he heard Petey sobbing behind him. He quickly reached out to help Olivia to her feet as he shot a look over his shoulder.

Petey, clutching a monstrous wedge of whipped cream-topped coffee cake, stood in the bedroom doorway. Sparkly tears flowed from his big eyes, blue and tragic. A wet web stained the front of his red bunny pajamas.

Collucci rushed to the boy and lifted him as tenderly as a mother comforting her new baby. “Petey, Petey, don't cry anymore. Livvy and Daddy were only play acting. Look at Livvy smiling. See, she's not hurt or mad,” Collucci said in a gentle voice.

“We were fighting just like the game we have played together. Remember? You would hit me with a strong punch, and Daddy would play knocked silly?”

Collucci sat down on the bed beside Olivia with his considerable burden. While he rocked Petey in his arms, Petey swung his eyes to and fro between the fake togetherness beaming on the faces of his parents.

Finally Petey's eyes were dry, and he was chattering gaily about Christmas. And shortly they all started to dress for church.

•  •  •

Angelo pulled up at the curb as throngs of worshippers were going into the triple-steepled old church. Collucci, riding beside Angelo, touched his wrist lightly and got out himself to open the car door for Olivia and Petey.

After he helped Olivia to the street, she raised her lips. As he
pressed his lips against hers, she whispered through her teeth, “Happy, happy with her, Rubber Dick,” and knifed his bottom lip with the sharp edge of her upper front teeth. Then she moved toward the church.

He helped Petey from the car, squeezed him close, and whispered huskily, “I love you, Petey boy. Light a candle and say a rosary for your old man.”

Petey kissed Collucci's mouth and said, “Sure. Wanta know two big secrets?”

Collucci nodded.

“I love you, Daddy dear. I'm very, very glad you and Livvy were only play fighting. Hurry home please so we can play with my toys like every Christmas, will ya?”

Collucci squeezed Petey close and said gently, “I'll be home before noon. That's a promise, Petey.”

Petey sprinted away after his Livvy.

•  •  •

The Caddie was only a half mile from the roadhouse before Angelo broke the heavy silence. “Mr. Collucci, I oughta—”

Collucci cut him off. “Start over, and remember you don't call me Mr. anything. Angelo, you've been my best friend for forty years, so when none of the others are around you can call me ‘lupo' even.”

They laughed together at the sound of Collucci's kid gang moniker.

Angelo said, “Jimmy, what I was gonna say . . . Maybe on the eight kilos, Mack Rivers is makin' Bone the patsy for some reason . . . and some kinda way . . . Rivers is slick and tricky . . . Maybe if it comes out Rivers conned him . . . You could give Bone a break. He—”

Angelo was cut off from a further mercy plea for Bone by the grim expression on Collucci's face.

Collucci said, “Angelo, forget it! Bone was dead yesterday. Mack Rivers told me a Mexican broad was dealing pure coke on Sixty-third
Street. That was three days after those jigaboo dope jackers muscled Mack and Bone while they were delivering the eight kilos to South-side wholesalers.

“Rivers is old and already nigger rich, as they say. That punch-drunk jack-off was getting paid to protect Rivers and the merchandise. Bone used my trust to tear me off . . . That was dirty . . . So, I put him to sleep dirty.”

Collucci stared sternly at Angelo and intoned,
“Capisce?”

Angelo said, “Sure, Jimmy, I understand . . . He should get the worst.”

Collucci continued. “Believe me, old friend, every guy and broad that you have to put to sleep is really the guilty, responsible one. No pun intended, but I've convinced myself to the bone that it is and will always be the goddamn stupid bastard who is slain and not his slayer who bears all guilt and responsibility.”

B
one's sister Mayme, exotic dancer and secret priestess of voodoo, leaped awake in her apartment atop Mack Rivers's Voodoo Palace. Her gray cat eyes were wide in the elfish black face. Had she heard screams of terror through the funky pound of the jukebox downstairs where Mack Rivers was throwing a private party? Or had the sounds been the keening voices of the Loas, her voodoo gods?

A moment later, Mayme heard someone stumbling up her back stairway leading to the cabaret. Someone banged on her back door. She slid out of bed and went and opened it on chain.

Mayme peered out at ebonic Mack Rivers. His arms were loaded with presents. His lemon suit, shirt, and shoes were a noisy symphony draped on his cadaverous frame. His long head was swathed in bandages. He and his chauffeur-bodyguard, Love Bone, had four days before been pistol-whipped and robbed by killer bandits, known throughout Chicagoland as the dope jackers.

Rivers pushed his gullied face against the door crack and flashed his solid gold grin. “Merry Christmas, Lady Fine Frame.”

Mayme recoiled from gusts of rank whiskey breath. She wrinkled her nose and said almost pleasantly, “Merry Christmas, Mack.” Then she said sharply, “Why the hell did you wake me up?”

Rivers flinched. He sweet-talked, “So I could give the beautifulest lady on the Southside all this pretty stuff . . . Lemme in!”

Mayme said, “Mack, I thought we had an understanding . . . I will accept from you only my weekly salary as star and producer of the shows downstairs.”

Rivers's bloodshot eyes narrowed. “Why? . . . 'cause I ain't young? . . . or maybe 'cause I ain't white?”

Mayme slit-eyed him and thought,
The time is here to put old Baboon Face in his permanent place.
She said wearily, “Mack, you're not the worst, I guess . . . but you're a damn fool to dream you could hook Mayme Flambert to that daisy chain of chippies you abuse in that bedroom downstairs.”

His fat bottom lip quivered. “You cold-blooded black bitch, lemme in there or I'll fire you!”

Mayme laughed in his face, “Mack, you're full of shit. The owner . . . The
real
owner told me a week after I started that only he could fire me. Which means you are only fronting as owner of the Palace, right, Mack?”

His face ashened. “Mr. Collucci ain't told you no motherfuckin' lie like that!”

Then Rivers stared into Mayme's amused eyes for a long moment before the truth hit him. He staggered back with fearful eyes. “Mr. Collucci fuckin' you?”

Mayme said, “No! But he's still trying. So get out of my face and stay out, Mack. Maybe I can get you fired without Mr. Collucci having me . . . You think I don't know my shows pull into the Palace more big white spenders than any black cabaret in South-side history?”

She started to ease the door shut in Rivers's face.

He screamed, “Mr. Collucci ain't gonna take no! I hope he rapes you with a baseball bat—rolled in barbed wire!”

Mayme slammed the door shut and went to a front window. She looked down on bleak Forty-seventh Street. She felt frigid wings of danger and death flutter up her spine.

Mayme remembered how her friends, the all-knowing voodoo spirits, had banshee'd alarm to her about her brother the year before in the mountains of Haiti. She had rushed to Chicago to save Bone from nearly fatal exploitation in the fight game by manager James Collucci and trainer Angelo Serelli. They had, too quickly, thrown Bone into the canvas pit with a tigerish World's heavyweight contender. She had only napped for a week in a chair at Bone's bedside. Before he came out of his coma, she had stood up to Collucci and forced Bone's retirement from the ring.

Mayme moved toward the double-locked steel-barred walk-in closet that served as her temple. She unlocked the door and swung it open, then paused at the threshold and gazed into the murk of the temple. It was lit by a red bulb inside the shriveled head of a mad witch doctor. The head was shrouded with layers of webbing spun by a black widow spider nesting inside it. The head sat on a small altar covered with the skin of its owner. This scarf was fringed with the spines of cobras.

Her lips shaped a cold little smile as she remembered how the maroon eyes had oscillated inside the living head that steamy summer afternoon long ago in the mountains in Haiti. She had pulled her body, already lushly rounded at twelve years of age, from a cool pond. She remembered standing naked and spellbound in the stare and caress of the most feared of all sorcerers,
Poteau!

His toothless mouth gibbered excitement as it explored her incredibly unique sex nest.

That very night Poteau had visited the family hut. Mayme remembered the shocked eyes of her parents in his awful presence.
Poteau claimed that in the past the Flambert hut had been protected against demons and death only by Poteau himself. Poteau's soul had suffered an invasion of love for Mayme. Soon Poteau's soul would be seized and tortured by demons unless they gave him Mayme for his wife. Only this gift would prove their good faith necessary to continue Poteau's gift of protection.

Now, again, Mayme saw her father's defiant eyes as he refused Poteau's request in his polite peasant manner. He threw Poteau from the hut when Poteau tried to seize Mayme and escape into the night.

Poteau screamed curses on the Flambert hut until daybreak.

On a late afternoon only a week later, Mayme and four-year-old Larry returned to the hut from Port-au-Prince where they sold trinkets made by their parents to tourists. They found their parents dead at a clawed-out hole in the hut wall. Their fingertips were shredded and bloodied. Their parents' faces were frozen hideous with terror. Poteau had apparently conjured up a spectacle of such horror that the elder Flamberts had been frightened to death.