The Kill (2 page)

“I brought my own security. That is how a Fuccini family member handles things. If you have a problem with that, talk to my father.”

There was a moment of silence before Phil responded. Vincenzo lifted his glass and sipped the whiskey. As soon as he did it, he judged the sip to be weak, feminine. He needed to hold their stare, not back down, and especially not sip his beverage as it smacked of nervousness, which meant weakness to these men.

Shit, I wish I could walk in the fucking door again and do this all over.

“We have no issue with security. Look around you.” Phil gestured with a wave of his arm. “I have security everywhere. What we have an issue with is you have defied the terms of our meeting. We made sure every family knew the terms. This meeting was to broker peace among us. We hire a joint security force, unbiased to any family. Our drivers wait in their cars. The location was only announced hours ago and was distributed through your store in Mississauga. That’s it. Any other guns or security detail would be considered hostile and the family member who brought them would be expelled from the meeting.”

Okay, now you’re talking to me like I’m a baby.

“Look, Phil, my men were here to watch my back, that’s it. They weren’t hostile.” Vincenzo pointed his finger at Phil. “Killing them was a mistake. That was hostile. You will have to make good to my father.”

Phil laughed.

“What the
fuck
is so funny?”

“We won’t have to make good to anyone. Your father knew the terms and he agreed to them. It is you who will have to make good, and you’ll have to do it to everyone in this room.”

Vincenzo had no idea what to say. Losing his temper right now would go a long way to kill any sort of deal for the Fuccini family, and that would go against his father’s wishes.

“We watched,” Phil continued, “as you slowed your car and pretended to piss on the road, your headlights turned off so that your two guys could run and hide. What do you take us for, amateurs? We have men posted ten kilometers in every direction. A fucking Cessna couldn’t get within a hundred meters of this building without being blown back into the last century. Maybe you’re not ready for this. Is it possible your daddy sent the wrong man?”

Vincenzo had heard enough. Two good men were dead. He needed this deal because if peace could be brokered, the families were supposed to work together in a more financially connected way. Within a year, his father had told him, they would be three times richer than they already were. But he wouldn’t sit there and be talked down to by some asshole who just had two of his men clipped for the crime of protecting him.

He stood up, swallowed the last of his whiskey and slammed the glass down hard.

“We’re done here.”

“I don’t think so,” Phil said. “The meeting hasn’t even started. But it won’t start until you tell us how you will make good on your disrespect.”

Vincenzo scanned the faces of the other men present. He looked up and examined the faces of the security detail closest to the foursome. What were they thinking, challenging him like this? He had done nothing wrong, yet he wouldn’t bow down to these men like he was a pussy. No way. They would always remember this night. If he caved, years from now the word on the street would affirm that anyone could push the Fuccini family around.

But he couldn’t leave without the peace deal in hand.

There had to be another way.

He reached in his jacket and pulled out his pack of cigarettes, flipped one out, placed it on his lips and started patting himself down for a lighter. He came up empty. The nearest guard watched him. Vincenzo stepped around his chair and walked up to the guard.

“Got a light?” he asked.

The guard shook his head in the negative.

Vincenzo turned back to the three men watching him. He reached in to his pocket and touched his keychain. “Ahh, here it is.”

He yanked the keychain out and grabbed the guard’s hand at the same time. The Kubaton was about the size of a regular Bic pen, but it was made of steel and twice as thick. Vincenzo slapped the Kubaton on top of the guard’s wrist and twisted up with force, snapping the wrist bone.

The guard screamed and dropped to one knee in front of Vincenzo. In that moment, he flipped the catch on the Kubaton and slid the hidden knife out. Knowing another guard might attack him at any second, he spun on his heel, and in the same motion, sliced the knife along the exposed neck of the guard, deep enough for a killing blow.

He was still turning back to the men in the leather chairs as the guard gagged on his own blood and fell to the floor of the hangar.

Vincenzo grabbed the huge elephant gun off the wall and aimed it at the nearest guard.

“Everyone, be cool. Stay cool or more people die.” He had to aim it at someone, lest a guard use his M16 to redecorate his face. “There will be no
making good
from me. It is you three who will make good
to
me and my family.”

All the men standing along the perimeter of the building edged closer. Phil raised a hand and the men stopped.

“Enlighten us. Why do we have to make good to you?”

They seemed all too calm. “For killing the men I brought with me.”

Phil smiled and looked around at the other two bosses, who smiled along with him.

In that moment, Vincenzo wanted to use the first bullet to erase that fucking cocky smile off the man’s ass of a face.

“Put that weapon away and sit down before you get yourself killed,” Phil said.

“Are you threatening me?”

Cars pulled up out front. For the briefest moment, Vincenzo looked at the open door and saw headlights pass across it.

Who else was invited?

He looked back at the three bosses in the middle of the room. Phil’s face had turned to stone.

“Put that fucking gun down now,” Phil said. “Or you bear the consequences.”

“You motherfucker. How dare you—”

Rapid-fire gunshots from outside cut him off. Vincenzo dove to the floor as more shots rang out around him. He raised his gun and searched frantically for who was shooting. The portable lights flickered and went out, plunging the windowless hangar into pitch black.

He covered his head with his hands. Gunshots popped off like firecrackers at a Canada Day celebration. Flashes of light interspersed with gunfire as the guards stood in their fortified positions and shot at whoever was attacking them.

Things quieted for a few seconds. Vincenzo patted himself down to look for wounds but found none. Moving blind in the total darkness, he flipped onto his back and listened. He detected movement to his left, about where that cocky bastard Phil had been. He closed his eyes and lifted his weapon. Listening as best he could, he moved his weapon toward the movement and fired.

A grunt told him he hit his mark. The thump of dead weight confirmed it.

He thrust himself forward with his feet, sliding along the hangar floor on his back, trying to get some room between him and the four chairs that circled the coffee table.

After another bout of heavy machine-gun fire from outside, Vincenzo made it to the outer wall, unscathed.

“You in there,” someone shouted on a bullhorn. “We have the hangar surrounded. Come out or we’ll storm the building. I repeat, you are surrounded. You have one minute to come out.”

Shit, shit, shit.

Someone grabbed him from behind. He couldn’t help himself as he shouted out.

“Shhh. Take this.”

A cold metal object landed in his palm.

“Put them on. You’ll see better.”

Vincenzo felt around the surface of the object in his hands and found the cloth backing strip. Goggles of some kind. He pulled the elastic-like cloth out and placed it on his head, the goggles over his eyes. Instantly, the blackened hangar came to light in a green haze.

“There’s a lot of men out there and we need everyone here to do their part,” the guard said.

“Their part?”

The guard with the M16 looked down at him. “Our orders were, if the meeting is interrupted for any reason, all enemies die. That includes the Gambino family members who are out there right now. The police had guaranteed we wouldn’t be interrupted.”

Gambino family?

“Why is the Gambino family attacking us? On second thought, why weren’t they invited?”

“Those are questions I can’t answer. I have no idea.”

Through the green lens, Vincenzo watched as the guard stood, aimed through a small hole in the corrugated metal wall and carefully aimed his weapon. Vincenzo searched the wall and found a similar hole. He stared out at the men lined up in pairs behind the cars and vans.

The guard beside him began firing.
Boom, boom, boom
. Just like that, men dropped one by one. A few lucky assholes ducked in time, but then the guard switched guns. Vincenzo saw that it was another elephant gun. As the guard fired, each round was like a cannon, and the vehicles were taking most of the hits.

A van exploded.

Vincenzo, blinded by the fireball, dropped to the floor and ripped off his goggles. After his eyes cleared, he placed the goggles back on and surveyed the hangar. Two other guards pumped bullet after bullet out of their respective holes in the walls. Three bodies were sprawled out on the floor by the coffee table.

The bosses of the other families are all dead. Holy shit!

The Fuccini family was the only surviving member of the peace accord, with the Gambino family making a major power play outside.

What the hell had happened? How did it get so bad, so fast? Now the four top crime families would be at war after all, and it was the Gambino’s who had started it
.

He stopped the pity party, turned around and began firing his gun out through the hole in the wall. What a waste of bullets. He hit nothing and saw no one outside anymore.

He pulled his weapon back in. The guard three feet to his left was reloading.

Vincenzo aimed his weapon at the open area on the guard’s neck. He closed his eyes to avoid the blinding flash as he pulled the trigger. He opened his eyes again as the guard fell to his knees and then the ground, dark liquid shooting from his neck.

Vincenzo looked back at the two remaining guards. They still stared through their holes.

Good, fuck ’em.

He crawled over and unstrapped the hand cannon from the fallen guard and then chambered a round. With the resolve of a Fuccini family man, he stood, wiped the sweat off his forehead and aimed at the guard on his right, at least twenty feet away.

Vincenzo fired and then fired again, the recoil knocking him back a step each time.

The second shot wasn’t necessary. The first knocked into the man high in the chest area, throwing him at least five feet in the air before he fell, a clump of human waste.

Damn that recoil. Didn’t expect that.

He turned to the other guard who watched him now, his weapon leveled at Vincenzo.

“Don’t make me fire, Vinny,” the guard pleaded. “I have orders to keep you four safe. You are not the enemy. They are.” He pointed to the outside wall. “I will fire to save my life, but I don’t want to. Let’s walk out of here together.”

He needed to wipe sweat from his forehead again, but resisted, letting it slide down, tickling him as it went.

“Okay, you’re right. Let’s leave. Can you drive?” Vincenzo dropped his aim.

The guard lowered his weapon. “Yeah. I’ll drive.”

In that second, Vincenzo lifted his gun back in place and fired round after round into the guard. The man had no chance.

Alone inside the hangar, Vincenzo walked over to the guard and looked down at him as he gasped for breath. Blood pooled around the man’s mouth.

“Next time, don’t call me Vinny.”

He chambered a round, aimed at the guard’s face, and fired from one foot away. The man’s head exploded and disappeared in a wet mush of human skin and bone. Vincenzo looked back down at the body and the dent in the hangar floor where the head had been.

A shame. A fucking shame.

He headed for the only open door in the hangar. No one remained alive in the building and it didn’t sound like anyone was alive outside either. Not a single bullet had been fired outside or inside since he’d killed the guard who had given him the goggles. Nothing else came from the bullhorn. Only the crackling fire from the fully engulfed van.

As he neared the door, he removed the goggles and stepped up to the edge of the door frame. He dropped the guard’s gun. In all his thirty-eight years, he had never seen this many dead men. A major battle had taken place and he was the only man left standing. His father would be so proud. Not a scratch on him. That was what family bosses were made of.