The Silver Bear (11 page)

“Say, kid . . .”

“Hey, Ponts. Can I get on a parlay this weekend?”

“How much?”

“Double up, catch up.”

He let out a low whistle. “Forty-eight?”

“Might as well make it an even five.”

“What say you give me the forty-eight you already owe, and we’ll go from there?”

“Come on, Ponts . . . you said a five-grand credit line.”

“But, kid—”

“Forty-eight is not five.”

“Yeah, but you want to go in for ten—”

“Not if I win—”

“I don’t know, kid.”

“Fine . . . I’ll just put two hundred on a three-way parlay . . . B.C. getting three, the over, and Virginia Tech over Michigan.”

“You just want two hundred?”

“I want five dimes, but you said you’ll only give me two potatoes.”

He looked at me sideways and pulled out a small notepad. “The kid wants five dimes . . . I’ll give the kid five dimes. Five to win fifteen on the parlay. Let’s just hope your luck turns, buddy.”

“I got a feeling this time.”

He smiled and winked. “I hope so.”

 

 

I
hit the B.C. game but lost both Tech and the over. Now, I owed Ponts and Gorti ninety-eight hundred and I would get my first impression of how they ticked when wound up. I stayed away from Antonio’s for two weeks, just to get their engines into the red. Maybe they thought I’d run out on them. Maybe they thought I wasn’t coming back.

When I showed up at the bar, Ponts’s mouth disappeared into a thin line. All hints of camaraderie and companionship were gone. I was not his friend; this was business.

“Where’s the ninety-eight hundred?” he said as I sidled up to the bar. Gorti took a position on the other side of me.

“Let me finish my beer.” I was playing the spoiled college kid for all it was worth.

Ponts took the beer bottle out of my hand and downed it in front of me in two quick gulps. “Now you’re finished. Where’s my money?”

I pulled out a roll of bills from my pocket. “I got five large here. If you’ll just let me place it on tonight’s game . . .”

The fat man snatched it out of my hand, quickly handed it to Gorti, who began to thumb through it. After a quick count, he nodded back to Ponts.

“You got five days to come up with the other forty-eight.”

“Come on . . . why so hostile . . . ?”

“You think this is hostile? Hostile is Friday morning if you don’t have my money.”

“Jesus. I went out of town for a few days. Here I am and I paid you.”

“You paid me half.”

“I don’t see why . . .”

And then my voice trailed off, the words choking in my throat. The last thing I was expecting, and the very thing Vespucci had warned me about, rose up and stung me.

Jake walked into the bar with a friend of hers.

Now, my plan had been to show up on Friday and ask for an extension, to claim poor, to see how physical Ponts would get with me when I didn’t have the money. I was beginning to understand why Vespucci preached making a connection with the target; it was my job to seek out the
evil
in people. Everyone has a dark side, and once I find that dark side, it is my job to home in on it, manipulate it, exploit it, enlarge it. I must see the evil in the target, taste it, put my finger in it the way Thomas did to the wound of Christ, so that the act of killing becomes diminished, becomes necessary. It is a trick of sorts, an illusion created by the mind to keep the horrors of the job at bay. I wanted to see what Ponts would do to me, so that when I killed Levine, I would understand what he had done to others. Then I could walk away from it like a vigilante instead of a hired gun, at peace with my decision to take someone’s life.

But all that changed the moment Jake walked into the bar and saw me.

She immediately made a beeline over to where I was standing and kissed my lips, saying my name . . . a different name than what I had given Ponts and Gorti.

I started to say something to get her to walk away, but Ponts read me like a book and interrupted before any words could come out of my mouth, addressing Jake directly.

“Hello, there! I’m Ponts and this is Gorti . . . we’re friends of your boyfriend. What’s your name, beautiful?”

She turned to them warmly. “Jake. Jake Owens.”

Ponts grinned so large I thought he was going to swallow her. “You go to school here, Jake Owens?”

She nodded. “Almost finished at B.C. How do you boys know each other?”

“We’re old friends from way back, aren’t we?” and he said my name, the one Jake had handed to him.

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “You know, Jake . . . let me finish up with these fellas and I’ll come sit with you.”

“Okay,” she said, like she knew she had interrupted something she shouldn’t have.

“It was nice meeting you, Jake Owens from B.C.” Ponts said, holding the words like he didn’t want to let them go.

As soon as she was gone, his eyes hardened. “I don’t care you gave us a bum name, I don’t care you think you’re so fucking smart you can game us like a couple of fruits. What I do care about is the forty-eight big you owe us. Now you know that we know about Jake Owens from B.C. We get the money on Friday or somebody’s day gets ruined. We understand each other?”

I nodded. “Yeah . . . sure, Ponts.”

“Don’t do anything dumb again, kid.” He patted the side of my face and turned back to the bar like the conversation was over.

 

 

I
was sweating. I sat in my apartment, the window open, a nice breeze blowing in off the water, and yet I was sweating, like the room had nothing but stale air trapped inside.

I had ignored Vespucci’s advice, I had kept up my relationship with a girl who loved me, and now she was involved. Two low-level bag men for my primary target knew her name and even worse . . . knew mine.

I was going to have to rectify the situation. Rectify it myself, without telling Vespucci what I planned. And I felt it had to be as soon as possible, money or no money. I didn’t know what Ponts and Gorti would do to warn me, to send me a message even before Friday’s deadline, so I had to compress my six weeks into that moment.

I sat in the shadows of a neighboring stoop, watching the front door of Antonio’s. An intermittent rain was falling, and drops pooled on the lid of my black baseball cap before collecting into a puddle at my feet. My eyes were sharp, hard, focused. I waited, ignoring everything but the front door of the restaurant, not even stamping my feet to shake off the chill wind blowing in from the east.

At midnight, Ponts and Gorti shuffled out of the bar. They weren’t stumbling; I’d noticed neither man ever drank more than a couple of beers the whole time they were at Antonio’s. They wanted to look like they were there to have a good time, but Antonio’s was a job to them, as mundane as any cubicle at any office in America. So when they left the bar, they were both sober.

From casing them over the last couple of weeks, I knew they both rode together in a four-door Oldsmobile, the kind of car only the elderly and ex-cons purchase with any regularity. As soon as they both settled into the front seat, I flipped open the rear door and slid in behind them.

They both spun to get a look at me, surprised.

“What’ya doin’, kid?” Gorti asked, a moment before I shot him through the passenger seat. He gasped for air—the bullet shattered his left lung—but I was no longer concerned with him, I just turned the gun on Ponts, who was hunched uncomfortably behind the steering wheel, breathing raspily.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, kid, don’t shoot me.”

“Just drive.”

“I got a wife at home—”

“I said drive.”

“Sure, kid. Sure.”

He turned on the ignition and put the car into gear, then slowly pulled it out onto the street. Little Italy was dark and empty at this time of night, the cold and the rain keeping the pedestrians at bay.

“Take the highway south. I’ll tell you when to get off.”

PONTS
tried to make small talk along the way. Told me it was only five grand and he could chalk that up to sour business. Told me his wife was talking about finally having a baby this year. Told me he didn’t even remember my girlfriend’s name if that was what this was about.

I let him talk as much as he wanted, until he finally gave up and drove the car in silence. I stayed out of his sight-line in the rearview mirror, allowing the danger to expand like noxious fumes in his mind. He didn’t know where the gun was, where my eyes were, when the shot might come.

I gave him a few directions until we ended up outside the abandoned Columbus Textile Warehouse, where I had last taken Pete Cox’s life and emerged, like a phoenix, with a new one of my own.

Inside, the warehouse was much as I had last seen it. No police tape, no evidence bags, no fingerprint dust. Cox’s body and any sign of foul play had been meticulously erased by Vespucci’s men.

I directed Ponts to a chair at an old sewing desk. His legs were shaky, but he managed to make it this far without passing out, even if his breathing grew progressively more labored, like a dog’s pant after a hard run.

“What we doin’ here, Columbus?”

So it was back to the name I had given him originally; that was a good sign. I pulled out some paper and a pencil I had tucked away in my pocket before I left my apartment.

“You’re going to draw me a map.”

He started to say something but then just waited for me to continue. “I want an exact layout of Richard Levine’s house: bedrooms, living room, kitchen, shitters, laundry room, where he eats, where he sleeps, where he takes a dump. I want Xs marking where his guards sit, where they head when they take their breaks, where they come in, where they go out. I want you to write down every detail you can think of about that house and all the people in it.”

“Fuck. You’re the guy. The hired gun.” He looked up at me in awe, like I had just pulled the greatest magic trick of all time right in front of him.

I let my eyes go hard in answer. “Start writing.”

 

 

IT
was about an hour to daylight when Ponts and I started walking up the front porch of Levine’s house. I knew cameras were covering us, but I had a gun in his ribs and my ball cap pulled down tight over my head. Knowing where the cameras were positioned helped me keep my face off the security screens. And I knew we were coming about twenty minutes before the guards changed shifts. There is no man who isn’t tired at 5:30 A.M., especially when he knows he’s heading to a warm bed after a long, boring, rainy night.

We arrived at the front door, and Ponts rang the bell. An intercom affixed to a support column on the patio barked to life.

“What you doin’ here, Ponts?”

“I got a favor to ask of Dick.”

“Come back after breakfast.”

“This can’t wait, Ernie. This is my sister’s kid I got with me. He works first shift on the docks, but he’s looking for some fries on the side. I already told Dick about it; I know he’s up reading the
Daily Racing Form
. . . come on, we’ll be in and out.”

“Levine knows
you’re
coming?”

“I mentioned it to him a couple weeks ago. He said he’d work it in ’cause it was me.”

Despite the fact that I had told him he would live through this if he just played his part to the end, the last sound Ponts ever heard was the door clicking open. He had served his purpose, and I didn’t want to put off shooting him.

 

 

THE
whole thing took eight minutes. I pulled the trigger on Ponts and kicked the door back at the same time, smashing it into the first guard who was coming to frisk me. As he fell backwards, I shot him in the head, sending the back of his skull into a potted begonia in the foyer. The silencer attached to the pistol’s muzzle kept the report from sounding like anything more than a small cough.

I didn’t care about the dining room to the right, so I stepped left and shot the two guards seated around the kitchen table before they could even get their guns up. Two chest shots, and their blood poured into their blue starched shirts, a pair of purple ovals where their front pockets used to be.

Without breaking stride, I moved up the back stairwell, my legs like pistons as I attacked each step, moving quickly now, reloading my pistols as I went. First, I shot the guard sitting sleepy-eyed on a stool at the top of the staircase reading his
USA Today
, a face shot, so that all of his features became an indistinguishable red mask. Another guard emerged from a bathroom, a fat guy, an extra guy, the one Ponts hadn’t told me about. I figured there would be some sort of play Ponts would try to make, a last piece of information he would hold for himself, so he could wait and use it when I would be surprised, vulnerable. But Ponts was dead and this poor player had the misfortune of taking his end-of-shift shit right as I was coming up the stairs. He didn’t have time to exhale before I shot him in the heart.