Death Wish

  She nodded.

  He went to the washbasin across the room and watched her in the mirror as he soaped the inside of his mouth and washed himself. She lay motionless while he dressed. The instant that he left, she raced up a rear stairway to her apartment front window to see his death.

  20

  Collucci stopped to have one for the road and light chitchat with Mack Rivers at the bar.

  At that moment, Bama was losing his argument with Taylor not to go alone for Collucci. Kong stood in the parsonage living room watching poker-faced. Taylor stood unsteadily on legs weakened by a two-day bout with flu.

  For the dozenth time he demanded from Bama the keys to the Warriors’ supercharged old Pontiac sedan.

  “I ain’t saying it no more. Gimme the keys, Bama,” Taylor said as he waved a flashlight and brushed by Bama in the doorway. “I ain’t forgot how to hot wire a ride,” Taylor flung over his shoulder.

  Bama shook his head and followed him down the hallway to the door to the street. Kong went to the phone in his apartment to tip Mack Rivers. Bama tugged at Taylor’s overcoat sleeve as he went through the door. Taylor ignored him, but stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned.

  Bama threw him the ring of keys and said, “Star natal, fool, you still got the flu. At least take the squad with you.”

  Taylor unlocked the Pontiac at the curb and said before he got in, “Ain’t got no time now, Grandmaw Bama, to roust up no squad and two of ‘em got galloping flu.” Then he grinned and said, “I might chastise you when I get back for shuckin’ and jivin’ away all them minutes. ‘sides, it looks like ain’t but him and one more dago.”

  He started the engine and punched the proper pattern on the radio’s selector buttons to pop up the top of the dashboard. It was the steel box containing an arsenal. He took out a sawed-off shotgun, automatic rifle, and several handguns, and placed them on the seat beside him. After that, he pushed the dashboard lid down and locked it shut with a quick tattoo on the radio selectors, then he rocketed the Pontiac away.

  At that moment, Mack Rivers came away from the phone at the end of the bar. His black face was gray.

  He stood gesticulating mutely in front of Collucci before he blurted, “Mr. C, we got to put out all the lights and steel bar that front door! Taylor is coming to waste you . . . and he ain’t stuck on me.”

  Collucci felt a tiny flutter of fear behind his navel. He was suddenly irritated and angry that Mack Rivers’s fearful face had triggered the one emotion he was most ashamed of, and afraid of feeling himself.

  He said harshly, “Mack, you cunt! Get yourself together!”

  Rivers said, “But Mr. C, that chump is crazy!”

  Collucci buttoned up his overcoat. “He alone?” he said softly.

  Rivers said, “Yeah . . . but . . .”

  Collucci said, “Mack, when I was just a pissy punk, I got the reputation that any ass that comes solo against me gets the bloody shit stomped out of it.” He turned away toward the front door.

  Mack Rivers snapped his fingers for a half-dozen of his gunmen seated around a nearby table lapping up an on-the-house setup of Jim Beam. They looked at Rivers.

  He jerked his head toward Collucci at the door. “Back up Mr. C. with Taylor. Some of you get in them gangways from the comer down, and some of you just shuck and jive like squares on both sides of the stem out front.”

  Collucci whipped himself around, and his teeth flashed in his dark face. “Mack, why, why can’t I get it across that I don’t need anybody out there to help me put a tag on Taylor’s toe tonight?”

  Rivers shook his head and heaved a sigh. He called Lieutenant Paul Porta’s office at Eleventh Street headquarters. Within minutes, Porta’s office radioed him the Taylor info as he cruised with his squad a half mile away from the Voodoo Palace.

  The gunmen picked up their glasses and went, with Rivers, to peek at the street through front-window drapes.

  Collucci stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and struck his lighter to a cigarette. While he lit up, his eyes swept both sides of the block. They locked on a silhouette inside an oncoming car halted by a stoplight at the intersection to his left.

  It’s him! Collucci thought as he plucked the luger from his overcoat pocket and gripped it flat against his thigh.

  Taylor spotted Collucci and stiffened inside the Pontiac.

  Collucci walked to the curb near the front bumper of the bulletproof limo.

  Angelo slid across the seat and lowered the glass. He stuck his head out toward the sidewalk and said, “Everything peaches and cream?”

  Collucci said, “Yeah, Taylor is on the turn . . . stay inside and start the machine.”

  From the corner of his eye he watched Taylor ease the Pontiac across the intersection and pull to the curb at the end of the block and snuff the Pontiac’s lights. He saw Taylor’s silhouette vanish. He was certain Taylor was racing toward him behind the cover of parked cars.

  Let the cocksucker come, he thought as he telescoped himself behind the limo’s grille and peered around a headlamp at Taylor’s form bent over in a running crouch, bumping car sides as he lurched down the street on legs rubbery with flu.

  Collucci smiled as he gazed at Taylor’s feeble gait. He thought, I’ll move up the sidewalk and blow him away when he goes past my cover.

  As he turned to streak for a point of ambush, he noticed a knot of black people had formed behind him and others were at windows and standing in doorways staring at him.

  He thought, What if one of them is a Warrior sympathizer with a gun? Or what if one of them shouts a warning to Taylor that I’m waiting for him?

  He slipped quickly into the limo and said, “Pull out, Angelo, and do no more than fifteen straight-ahead.”

  Angelo pulled away from the curb, and Collucci saw Taylor straighten up and stop fifty yards away for a moment, with sawed-off shotgun dangling in his hands. Taylor turned and scuttled back toward the Pontiac.

  Collucci turned from the rear window and said, “The cocksucker moves like he’s busted up or something . . . Just keep going west.”

  Angelo said, “I got the M16 out of the trunk. Want it? . . . Maybe you can put a round or two in his noggin.”

  Collucci said, “Too much traffic . . .”

  An instant later he saw Taylor suddenly bomb the Pontiac forward.

  Collucci said, “Kick the piss out of this crate!”

  Angelo stomped the gas pedal, and the limo shot forward and regained its block distance from the roaring Pontiac. Collucci slid aside a silver dollar-sized steel cover on a porthole beneath the rear window of three-inch-thick glass. He leaned across the front seat and got the M16 rifle off the floorboard.

  Three blocks east of Taylor, Mayme Flambert was packing her portable possessions as if expecting a visitation from a horde of enemy voodoo demons. She had just moments before seen Porta’s squadron of gangbusters racing after the Pontiac. She knew the odds were now riding with Collucci, and she was red-hot with death.

  Inside the limo Collucci said, “Cut left fast into that alley over there and kill the lights.”

  Angelo swung into the maw and slammed through the littered alley at fifty miles per hour for a hundred and fifty yards without lights.

  Taylor brought the Pontiac into the alley mouth on two wheels and torpedoed it toward the limo’s dark shape.

  Collucci let go a burst from the Ml6 that shattered the Pontiac’s radiator and the windshield just as Taylor screeched the brakes and almost in the same motion flung himself to the alley floor, rolling and firing his automatic rifle at the flashes of flame jetting from the muzzle of Collucci’s M16.

  At that same instant, Porta and his squad careened into the alley and Taylor was bathed in spotlight before he rolled under the Pontiac.

  Porta bellowed over a bullhorn, “Jessie Taylor, this is Lieutenant Porta of the gang squad. Roll out with your hands clean.”

  Taylor rolled beneath the front bumper. He decided he’d spring up and, using t
he Pontiac’s hulk to cover his back from Porta, rush Collucci with a firestorm of automatic rifle. He was past thinking about himself now. He just wanted Collucci dead.

  As he slid his legs out to take his feet for the attack, Collucci leveled down on Taylor’s shadow and a burst of twenty bullets ripped and mangled Taylor from thighs to ankles. The impact blew him into the middle of the alley floor. His kneecaps were blown away, and he lay blacked out with pain and shock.

  Porta put the spot on Taylor’s motionless form, and in the glow saw Collucci marching down the alley toward Taylor gripping the M16 with both hands.

  Porta leaped from the police car and shouted, “Mr. Collucci! Halt! That bandit is our business!”

  Collucci marched grimly on, zombielike, his eyes bulgy and bright.

  A woman screamed from a tenement window overlooking the alley, “For the luvva Jesus Christ! Somebody stop him!”

  Porta leaned into the police car and said, “This may be delicate. I better handle it.” Immediately he turned and double-timed his heavy legs down the alley toward Taylor.

  Collucci reached Taylor and rammed the snout of the M16 against the center of his forehead. Taylor’s eyes fluttered open and hardened as Collucci’s looming figure came into focus.

  Taylor said haltingly, “You spaghetti-gut motherfucking pussy . . . You too yella to pull the trigger even?”

  Collucci jerked his finger violently against the trigger at the instant that Porta kicked the exploding rifle off target. The burst riddled the Pontiac’s side as Porta struggled with Collucci for the M16.

  “Let me finish that cocksucker, Paul . . . Let me finish him, Paul,” Collucci pleaded.

  Collucci stumbled over Taylor and fell backward to the alley floor. Porta twisted the rifle free. He helped Collucci to his feet. At that same moment Porta heard the feet of his men against the gritty alley floor, and he caught a glint of Collucci’s pocketknife blade as he squatted and opened it to slash Taylor’s throat. Porta swung the barrel of the M16 against Collucci’s chest.

  Porta’s voice was low. “It took me thirty years to get that office downtown. Jimmy, I won’t let you coup de grâce even a nigger before five young bastards with assholes itching to move up in the department, any way that turns up.”

  Porta turned a flashlight on Taylor’s now unconscious face and his gaping wounds spurting blood with his every heartbeat. He whispered, “Jimmy, this shine will be DOA at County . . .”

  The squad pounded on scene and stood gazing down at Taylor.

  Porta said, “Yablonski, get back to the car and call a wagon out here.”

  But the screaming woman in the tenement window had long ago called the Wabash Avenue Police Station to report a man downed by gunfire.

  Yablonski, the cop, backed the police car out of the alley to allow the yowling ambulance to barrel down the alley to Taylor.

  Both of the black paramedics recognized Taylor instantly. One of them had a relative who was a Warrior. They fed plasma into him immediately. During the short ride to Provident Hospital’s emergency intensive care facility, Taylor was given the gentlest handling. At the hospital he was prepared for immediate surgery and tranfusions of blood.

  Porta walked back with Collucci to the limo, gouged and dented by Taylor’s rifle. Angelo’s moon face was solemn as he moved a flashlight beam across Collucci’s rumpled clothing, looking for wounds and hand-brushing grit off the back of Collucci’s overcoat.

  Collucci said, “What hospital, Paul?”

  Porta shrugged. “Not to County, that’s a cinch. Those two spades are his fans. They would probably spring out of their own pockets to get him into the nearest and the best . . . Provident is my guess. You got no problems. The guy can’t make it . . . and Tonelli and City Hall want him planted.”

  Collucci got into the limo beside Angelo and lit a cigarette. He blew out a gust of smoke and said, “Paul, if that cocksucker makes it, I’m going to find a way to finish him in there.”

  Porta blew through the air in exasperation and said, “At best, he’ll be a helpless cripple. I’m telling you to celebrate.” He turned away.

  Angelo moved the limo away.

  After frequent glances at his boss’s inscrutable face, Angelo broke the long silence as he tooled the limo toward River Forest. “Jimmy, is everything peaches—?”

  The sudden expression of extreme annoyance on Collucci’s face cut off Angelo.

  Collucci said sharply, “Cut the gab! Alright? I’m kicking around some angles.”

  Then he turned and sat staring through the windshield. He laid out for himself the negatives threatening his giddy dream, the risks and pitfalls, his upcoming complex and dangerous kidnap of Dinzio, Tonelli’s bodyguard.

  His jaw writhed in excitement as he visualized himself moving past the hawkeyed gauntlet of garage guards, past the machine gunner in the dome above the elevator to the penthouse. He watched himself as Dinzio, stepping out into the lounge command post moiling with Tonelli’s torturers and assassins. He smiled, and an ecstatic shiver shook him as he saw himself press Dinzio’s electronic device in his palm that swung open the vault door to Tonelli’s inner sanctum.

  His jaw lumped. The deadliest obstacle would be mass sleep for the other National Commission’s ancient cocksuckers.

  He was led into laying out for himself the positives favoring his dream of succession as monarch of the kingdom of Chicago . . . and after that . . . ? Capo di Tutti Capi! Boss of All Bosses!

  Porta was right. He had finished Taylor. Even if Taylor made it, his bullets had blown away Taylor’s image as a leader. He would be pathetic with his hooligan pride trapped in a wheelchair. Scratch Taylor!

  Scratch Cocio within mere days! Suddenly as Angelo pulled into the mansion’s driveway, heady jolts of power and euphoria trembled him.

  He stepped out of the car and said across the seat, “Angelo, have a good night’s sleep . . . Everything is peaches and cream.”

  21

  Ida Schmidt opened the door of her Gold Coast apartment to let out a stout cheapskate wearing a vicuna overcoat. Standing there in the soft shadowing hallway light and smiling her economical fifty-buck smile, the one that didn’t show her imperfect teeth, Ida Schmidt was more than a fair ringer for the young Olivia Tonelli Collucci.

  She moved beneath the living-room chandelier, and brassy Roman candles streaked from her mane of blond hair. But purer ones showered from Olivia’s golden fleece.

  She went to the bathroom where she stripped off her nightgown and stood before the washbasin. Putting one foot on the commode cover, she dabbed a soapy washcloth at armpits and crotch. Then she brightened her makeup for Cocio, who was Larry Fillmore to her, she let him think.

  Her face close up in the mirror was stained with whiskey blotch. The feet and fists of her pimp, who OD’ed the week she met Cocio, had rashed her face with scars.

  As she blotted her lipstick, she remembered that Cocio had been so excited by his first sight of her, he slammed on the brakes. Hazarding life and limb, he leaped from his car and sprinted through the heavy traffic.

  She was properly indignant to force apology for the crudeness of his sidewalk approach to a lady. Then she let him con her into his car. She was glad she had let him muscle into her life. She had to admit old Larry Fillmore had the weirdest hangups of all her johns. But he was the best, buckwise, she thought as she went into the bedroom with her trademark sway of sexy hips and butt double dimpled.

  She took a nun’s habit, stained with semen, from the closet and quickly returned it. For tonight’s date she remembered she had been told to wear the bridal gown. Her nose crinkled at the rank odor of the semen-encrusted gown. Nevertheless, she wiggled into it. It was an expensive replica of the peach peau de soie gown Olivia had worn at her wedding and at the reception on the Tonelli estate that night her beauty broke the rhythm of Cocio’s heart.

  Ida adored herself for a moment in the dresser mirror, cocooned in the new blue mink maxi Cocio had orgasmed her with on her t
hirtieth birthday.

  She gazed at a group picture on the dresser of herself at fifteen with her ma and pa and brothers and sisters, towheaded and tattered on the stoop of the cedar chopper’s shack down in Walberg, Texas. Holy Toledo, I was pretty that year the trucker brought me here, she thought as she turned away.

  She felt suddenly very tired as she locked her door and headed for the elevators. Halos of frozen fire glittered on her fingers as she pressed the “down” button. Quickly she jerked her eyes from her haggard reflection in the elevator door glass.

  A twinge of pain razored her hip and her right leg buckled and went dead for a long moment.

  I’ve got to be the loneliest, ass-draggingest hooker in Chicago, she thought as she rode down to the garage.

  • • •

  Two of Spino’s terrible Bomato assassins from Sicily watched for the highway approach just outside Chicago of Cocio’s Jag. They peered from the office of one of Cocio’s chain of motels, darkened except for a pale desk-lamp light.

  They did not expect or fear discovery. They trusted the renowned casing skill of Collucci’s undertakers, Marty and Freddie Rizzo.

  They learned from the undertakers that Cocio always closed down the motel for his dates with Ida. He gave his employees a day and night off, with a bonus and instructions to stay off the motel grounds. On those occasions, Cocio needed absolute privacy with Ida to act out, suffer, and enjoy his love-hate fantasies about Olivia Collucci.

  The fox-and-bull team of Bomatos tensed and grinned at each other as they ducked down into the office murk.

  Cocio’s Jag pulled off the highway into the motel driveway. He coasted to the steel gates of the ten-foot chain-link fence. He didn’t notice, as he turned his key in the lock on the gate chain, the metal-painted putty on a sawed-through link of the chain. But then, neither had he spotted the Bomatos’ sedan hidden in a stand of trees down the road.

  He pulled the chain through to swing open the double gates. Then he pulled the Jag inside the fence and sat smoking a cigarette as he watched the highway in the rearview mirror. On his second puff he spotted Ida’s silver El Dorado approaching. She drove inside the fence, and Cocio relocked the gates. Ida followed the Jag to the end of the most distant row of rooms.