Brothers and Bones (35 page)

“You are so fucking dead,” Colangelo said in his wheezy way, echoing Pantuso’s earlier observation.

“Then I’ve got nothing to lose by putting a bullet in each of your dog-ugly faces, do I? So shut up and don’t move.”

They continued to stare me down. I continued to point the gun at them and sweat. A moment later, the door opened and Sweet Sal Barrone tottered unsteadily into the room. Blood dripped from his nose. The skin around his left eye was already swelling. He sucked a breath through his mouth and I thought he might have lost a tooth. He went back to his chair and sat down heavily.

“Sal here’s a real tough guy, boys,” Bonz said. “Wouldn’t tell me a thing. Now hold still, this will only hurt a second.”

He walked up to Pantuso and slammed the butt of his gun against the back of the guy’s head. Pantuso slumped forward, unconscious.

The other guys at the table tensed.

“Easy, guys,” Bonz said. “Like I said, it will only hurt a second.”

As the wiseguys watched him with rage lighting their dark eyes, Bonz stepped behind each, one by one, and knocked him cold. The kid with the goatee whose name I didn’t know fell sideways off his chair and landed in a heap on the floor. Randazzo went out easily enough, too. It took Bonz two blows to turn off Colangelo’s lights, though, and Pantuso took a whopping four whacks before he hit the mat.

“Charlie,” he said, “why don’t you start duct-taping those guys up, okay? Their hands behind their backs, a piece across their mouths.”

I took the duct tape from our backpack and got to work.

“Jesus, Bonzetti,” Sal said, “if you’re gonna tape us up anyway, couldn’t you have done that without knocking everyone out?”

“Absolutely,” Bonz said as he stepped behind Barrone. “Okay, Sal, you’re the last one. Sweet dreams.”

“You’re dead men,” Sal said, “the both of you.”

Bonz ignored that. “He better be there, Sal. If he’s not, I’m coming back here and snapping your neck while you snooze. Understand?”

Without waiting to hear whether Sal understood, Bonz gave him a sharp blow with his gun, harder than any he gave the others. The sound of Barrone’s face hitting the table masked the sound of the door opening behind us.

THIRTY-SEVEN

“Jesus Christ, Sal, you ever clean that fucking shitter, or what?”

Bonz and I whirled to see Hammer Grossi walking through the door, head down, tucking in his shirt. Under his jacket I could see the glint of the ever-present hammer hanging on his hip. As he walked into the room, he moved with that little hitch he had in his step, his slight limp. He smoothed down his tie, which was the same dark blue as his shirt, and looked up. He had a Band-Aid right between those astonishingly wide-set, ugly little eyes—courtesy of Bonz slamming his face into my apartment wall, no doubt. His eyes widened. I think the last thing he could possibly have expected after leaving the men’s room and entering Sal’s office was to find us—the very two people his boss was after—standing over the unconscious forms of five of the guys who were supposed to go hunting for us.

But Grossi didn’t get where he’d gotten by being dull-witted or physically slow. Rather, he snapped up the situation in a blink and moved like mercury, reaching behind him and pulling a handgun from somewhere as he took long, slightly even, strides right into the room, firing as he came. Fortunately for me, Grossi’s snap assessment of the situation must have told him that Bonz, and not I, was the immediate threat, because he fired in Bonz’s direction. Too stunned by this sudden and unbelievably disturbing development even to move, I stood rooted a few feet off to the side of Grossi’s line of fire as he advanced on Bonz.

But Bonz was just as quick, stepping to his right as two bullets sizzled by him, pocking the wall over Barrone’s desk. In one liquid-smooth motion, he brought his gun up and squeezed the trigger. A bullet tore past Grossi’s head and ripped a chunk out of the doorframe. Like Grossi, Bonz was striding forward, right toward his opponent, who was still advancing himself.

All this happened in the space of four heartbeats. Three shots fired, deafeningly loud in the small office, all misses—though I doubt either of the shooters could be considered a poor shot—before Grossi and Bonz clashed violently together in the center of the room. Suddenly, they were grappling with each other, each clawing for the other’s gun hand, each trying to get off a clear shot. A gun flew from the melee and skittered under the desk. It was Bonz’s. A moment later, Bonz landed an elbow and Grossi’s gun sailed into the wall and dropped behind the sofa.

The fight was savage and blindingly fast. Elbows flew, feet kicked at shins and insteps, hands sought throats, fingers sought eyes. Neither said a word, though they grunted now and then with exertion or in pain. Now and then Grossi appeared to be reaching for the hammer hanging at his side but Bonz wouldn’t let him get a hand near it. Grossi looked to be at least six years younger than Bonz, twenty pounds heavier, a little stronger, and just as well-trained in hand-to-hand combat, so I wasn’t surprised, though I was terribly dismayed, when the tide of the battle seemed to turn in Grossi’s favor. He was pushing Bonz back, getting leverage. Bonz seemed to be expending less effort on offense and more on keeping Grossi from landing a crippling blow. Bonz’s face was twisted with a dark rage. Grossi’s ugly face was made even uglier by his red-faced straining as the two staggered across the floor, Bonz backing up, Grossi pressing forward. It looked a lot to me like Bonz was losing.

I had finally recovered from the switchback change of direction this trip to the restaurant had taken and decided to do something to help Bonz, like shoot Grossi with the gun that I only just then remembered was still in my hand, when the fighters stumbled suddenly over the unconscious Goatee Boy lying on his back and lurched sideways as one, slamming right into me, knocking me to the floor and the gun from my grasp. Then I heard a terrible, guttural cry and looked up to see Grossi backing away from Bonz, his hand clamped to the side of his head, blood running through his fingers. Blood dripped from Bonz’s lips. He spit something onto the floor. It was the lower half of an ear. Bonz grinned a wolf’s grin and tensed to spring when a voice came from the door behind him.

“What the fuck—?”

In the doorway stood yet another thug. He wore a yellow golf shirt, navy khakis, and an expression of complete, uncomprehending shock. Bonz growled at him, lips pulled back from blood-covered teeth, and the sight jarred the man from his stupor. He, too, reached behind his back, presumably for a gun. Bonz snapped his head around in Grossi’s direction, looking like he was torn between irrationally trying to finish off Grossi despite the new threat, or face the more immediate danger of a newcomer with a gun. Then he let loose a terrible, inhuman cry, turned his back on Grossi, and charged the new guy as the other raised a gun. Bonz reached him before the gun reached waist level, lowered his shoulder, and plowed into the man, driving him into the far wall of the narrow hallway. I heard either ribs or wall studs crack. Then Bonz looked off to his right, into the restaurant, and cursed.

“Come on, Charlie!”

I took a last look at Grossi where he leaned panting against the desk, at the blood streaming down the side of his head, at the look of depthless hatred in his eyes, and sprinted after Bonz. A stream of obscenities, bellowed in rage and pain, followed me out the door, as did something else. It sailed just past my ear and bounced heavily off the wall as I skidded around the corner. Sprinting off down the hall, I realized it had sounded like a hammer.

We ran out the back door and up the alley toward the street. I was surprised to find our backpack dangling from my hand as I ran. I didn’t remember scooping it up as I bolted from Barrone’s office. I checked my other hand, hoping that I’d also snatched up the gun I’d dropped, but no such luck.

As we reached Prince Street, I half expected to be shot at from the front door of the restaurant, but either Bonz had incapacitated all the Mafia men in the place or those left standing were no longer standing and were, in fact, running in our tracks, following our route out the back door and would be tearing up the alley in a few seconds. We didn’t stick around to find out as we sprinted down the street—away, I noticed, from the Firebird we’d stolen from the motel clerk—and deeper into the Italian heart of Boston.

THIRTY-EIGHT

The streets of the North End were alive, as they always are around dinnertime—alive with diners trying to choose from the panoply of top-notch restaurants, and alive with the aroma of the best Italian food outside of Italy’s boot. Bonz walked with his long, surprisingly fluid strides, covering ground quickly but without running. As I hurried to keep up with him, I saw a fierce, frightening intensity in his eyes. Equally frightening was the blood from the now one-and-a-half-eared Grossi still smearing his lips. He’d dropped his gun during that fight but he snatched one off the last guy he knocked out, the one he drove across the hall and into the wall. He checked the gun for bullets as we walked, oblivious to the scared looks on the faces of passersby.

“No time to waste at all,” he said.

He was right. We’d left six Mafia guys unconscious at Sal’s place—no, wait, seven, counting the first guy, the one at the back door—plus there was Hammer Grossi, who might have to change his nickname to “Half-Ear,” whom we left railing in a bloody rage. Grossi didn’t know the purpose of our visit to Sal’s place, and as long as Sweet Sal didn’t wake up from his pistol butt–induced nap soon, he wouldn’t until it was too late. But he knew we were on their streets. Cell phones would ring all over the city, spreading the news of our arrival in the North End, and one of those phones might belong to Big Frank D’Amico. He didn’t know we were coming specifically for him yet, but we didn’t want him even thinking about us. We had to have surprise on our side. Fortunately, we were no more than a two-minute walk to Paulo’s, where D’Amico was supposed to be dining, waiting for Barrone to give him today’s illicit take before Barrone headed out to join the search for Bonz and me. The odds favored Sal still unconscious and Grossi having no idea where we went. He probably thought we’d leave the North End, like any sane people would do. But if they were trying to track our movements by gauging what sane people would do, they’d be forgetting they were dealing with Bonz.

Our plan hadn’t changed. Find Big Frank, make him tell us what he knows, if anything, about that tape of Siracuse’s, then go underground as we tried to decide the best way to get the evidence we’d need to either prove that Siracuse was guilty of whatever was on that tape, or, failing that, gather enough evidence or information to piece the story together credibly enough to bluff Siracuse into thinking we had the tape and that it was time to negotiate for our survival and the disappearance of at least the physical evidence connecting me to Angel Medina’s murder. The circumstantial evidence would still be there, of course—Angel dead in my apartment, me leaving the scene splattered with blood—but the gun, my tux shirt with the blood and my DNA on it, they’d disappear. Uncle Carmen would undoubtedly be suspicious that we didn’t go right to the authorities with the tape if we truly had it, but we’d blackmail him just to make him think we were as greedy as he probably expected everyone around him to be.

But while our plan, such as it was, hadn’t changed, the speed with which we had to implement it had. We now knew that two dozen Mafia thugs—minus a half a dozen or so that Bonz had temporarily incapacitated—were looking for us at that very moment. It would only be a matter of time before they found us. I definitely wasn’t having any fun. I looked over at Bonz and wondered if he felt the same way. I doubted it. His eyes crackled with a life I hadn’t seen in them since we met. His bloodstained lips were distorted in a half grimace, half grin.

“Got his ear,” he said, “the motherfucker. Half of it anyway.”

I nodded. Not much I could say to that.

“I had him beat, Charlie. It was a little dicey for a while, but in the end, I had that piece of shit beat. Would’ve finished him if it hadn’t been for that last mook surprising us.”

Dicey, he said. From where I was standing, Bonz was the one who nearly lost, until he managed to make a snack of Grossi’s ear. I looked over at him and only then did I see the tear in his coat, on the outside of his left arm, near his bicep. Underneath I could see an angry, four-inch red crease cut across the skin.

“Bonz, were you shot?”

He looked down at his arm. “Looks that way. Fucking Grossi.”

No doubt, the guy was tough. Probably chewed nails instead of gum, preferred battery acid to beer.

“We should slip into a drugstore and get some first-aid supplies. Get that cleaned up.”

“No time.”

The fire burning in Bonz’s eyes looked to me to be on the verge of raging out of control. I knew he’d been balancing on a knife edge of sanity for years, and his return visit from mental darkness to the light had, thus far, been brief. How much force would it take to push him back into that abyss? Would it require a firm shove or would a mere nudge do the trick? In fact, had it already been done?

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I’m still with you.”

“Okay, good, because I need you thinking straight.”

“But not too straight. If I think too straight I lose my edge.”

I hoped he’d find a happy medium.

Ten seconds later we found ourselves in front of Paulo’s, yet another quaint little Italian restaurant—maybe nine tables inside, a heavenly aroma pervading the place, hand-painted ivy crawling up the brick walls. Bonz peered in the front window and nodded.

“He’s in there, just like Sal said. Two of his guys at his table, one right inside the door cleaning his fingernails with a steak knife. You wait out here. Could be dangerous.”

“Could be dangerous out here, too.”

“Good point.”

Sirens sounded in the distance. Without hesitation, Bonz opened the door and walked past the guy just inside, who looked at Bonz uncertainly as he passed. Bonz never slowed for an instant. He walked past a few tables of unsuspecting diners—mostly couples, one family with two kids maybe eight or nine years old—and right up to Big Frank’s corner table in the back. I stayed a few steps behind.