Death Wish (6 page)

Phil nodded and pressed his hands tightly against his crotch as he hobbled toward Collucci, his eyes sweeping across Bone and his girlfriend, who had rolled beneath a dilapidated table.

He waved an arm and said, “What about this? Her?”

Collucci slashed an index finger across his throat and said, “Before you leave.”

Phil said, “Up there with them?” He tossed his head toward the secret graveyard two miles beyond the barn on a wooded hill.

Collucci thought for a moment and said, “What was the layout where you picked her up?”

Phil said, “A three-room dump off an alley on Division Street. Condemned houses on both sides of her building.”

Collucci said, “Bone was a notorious cock mechanic. Call Freddie and Marty before you leave and tell them to scrub this joint and plant Bone and the broad in her bed tonight. I can get it on the record and into the papers as an ordinary double murder by a jealousy-crazed undisclosed suspect not apprehended. Let's get out of this stink.”

Collucci locked up the building himself. Stilotti and Angelo had to be helped into Phil's Pontiac.

Collucci let Phil and himself into the roadhouse. While Collucci used the toilet, Phil called Freddie and Marty and gave them Collucci's message. Collucci went behind the bar and poured himself a glass of Courvoisier.

Phil said, “Freddie says Mack Rivers wants to talk to you. He has put together a cinch setup to hit Tit For Tat Taylor.”

Collucci got Mack Rivers on the bar phone. He nodded and smiled as he listened.

After he hung up, Phil asked, “Who and how many guys should I round up? What kinda equipment? Shotguns?”

Collucci said, “Phil, you nuts? You think I'd let anybody share the pleasure of putting that cocksucker to sleep? Get me a fine-scoped rifle before the twenty-eighth of December.”

Phil nodded and went toward the door. He turned and said, “Lollo and Angelo are pretty bad. What if the croaker says they gotta have a hospital. The cops—?”

Collucci cut in. “I'm going straight from here for some of
Hilda's blueberry pancakes on Kedsie. Remember the joint? Then I've got to rush home to keep a promise to Petey. Any problems come up, call me.”

Collucci followed him through the door and locked it. He watched Phil drive down the highway with Angelo and Stilotti. Then he got behind the wheel of his Caddie and sped toward Hilda's House of Pancakes.

Later in the early Christmas evening, Angelo, with his split cheeks bandaged, sipped coffee through a straw with Collucci. He insisted that he felt good enough to drive Collucci to his appointment with Joe Tonelli, but Collucci would have none of it and ordered Angelo to bed.

Collucci felt a persistent uneasiness about the meeting while dressing. He decided that he would try to persuade Olivia to go with him. She was propped up in the bed reading a book.

Collucci leaned over and kissed her forehead and said, “Doll, I'll have to drive myself to the penthouse. How about you and Petey going along to keep me company?”

She lay the book in her lap and smiled up at him. “I can't expose Petey again to that mob Papa invites every Christmas. Petey caught the flu up there last Christmas, and I have a raging headache.”

Collucci said, “The old man is going to be very disappointed.”

Olivia picked up her book and said, “He won't be. I called him and told him Petey and I were under par.”

Collucci went into his closet and got twin double-barreled derringers with lengths of elastic attached. He finished dressing in the bathroom and kissed Olivia and Petey good-bye.

O
n the way to Tonelli's penthouse Collucci stopped the Caddie at a stoplight. He stared at a two-headed python ad, writhing and coiling in a fancy pet store window.
Cocio and Tonelli are human two-headed snakes,
he thought.

He pulled away and passed a honking caravan of wedding cars. He remembered his marriage to Olivia and how Joe Tonelli had tried to strike young Collucci out of Olivia's life before their marriage.

It had been just three days before Olivia was to leave for the exclusive girls' school in the East. He remembered lying in his bed on a dazzling September evening. He was childishly fantasizing the plunder of the Big Dipper pendant blazing in the midnight sky. He saw himself toss it casually at Olivia's feet as a going-away gift so she couldn't forget him for one moment until they got married.

The phone rang and Olivia blurted out her loneliness, “Just come and hold me a little bit. Please come and stay a little while so I can go to sleep. Please! Sweet Jimmy Collucci!”

He said, “But your father is in town. How about a movie tomorrow?”

“I can't wait that long. Don't worry about Papa. He's busy playing host to a lot of his Old Country friends. They are having one of those wild drinking and gambling stag things in the front house. Hurry over! I'll lock the Dobermans in the basement and unlock the gate like the last time.”

There was a long silence before Collucci chuckled and said, “Olivia, I should get help for my head.” He hung up.

Collucci slipped clothes on over his pajamas and drove to a side street in Oak Park and parked his new nineteen thirty-eight Buick Limited. He went through the unlocked steel gate and into the bungalow.

Collucci did not know that a Tonelli bodyguard, clearing his head of too much vino on a bench near the bungalow, spotted him and rushed to notify Joe Tonelli.

Five minutes later Olivia grunted naked joy under Collucci's sweet punishment. Soon, under Collucci's deep strokings, Olivia's pleasure yowled the dog-fashioned shadows.

And seeing and hearing all through a tear in a drawn shade was Joe Tonelli. He waggled his head, and his three button men followed him down the walk away from the peephole.

Collucci at that moment climaxed. After a moment he went to the bathroom. He stood relieving himself, and that's where he heard muffled voices beneath the partially open bathroom window. He peered out and saw Joe Tonelli's handsome features contorted into a mask of rage and hurt.

Collucci noticed two of the button men were the two young guys he had seen in the root cellar chopping up and packaging the body of grocer Tarantino.

Tonelli whispered in hoarse Sicilian, “That criminal raper of children must be punished for his crime against my daughter's innocence. You, Antonio, give me five minutes. Knock hard on the front
door like a big emergency. You say I got a bad attack, big pain in my chest. She's got to come right away to my bedroom. I will be very sick. She will not be allowed to come back here to him.

“Emilio, Mario, Antonio, conceal yourselves and get him when he leaves.”

One of the root cellar pair said, “Mr. Tonelli, should we . . . ?”

Tonelli waved his hands in disgust that Antonio had no perception of the need for less than fatal chastisement in the case at hand. “Antonio, we must not be too extreme in this matter.”

He shrugged. “But she must be protected against her weakness for his filthy abuse. Break him up. You know, stomp his face and his private parts to jelly. Change him so all young girls will scream and flee at his approach.

“There is no trouble for me from my daughter. I knew nothing of the burglar discovered on my property. We must be very careful that no suspicion of me will shock her soft loving heart and harden it against me. Understand?”

Tonelli went down the walk and the others faded into the shadows. Collucci heard his heart pounding as he went and lay beside Olivia. He made his decision quickly. He wouldn't hide behind Olivia's skirt for safe conduct out of Tonelli's trap. He would say nothing about her father to hurt her.

He wasn't afraid of the button men because he knew he had a vital edge on them. They were handicapped. They had orders only to disfigure and cripple him.

But young Collucci's decision to ambush the ambushers rather than use Olivia to shield him from harm was really influenced by a deeply rooted terror of personal cowardice. Deadly danger always generated his reflex ferocity to attack, maim, and destroy the enemy.

His fear of cowardice was tied in with his poisonous hatred for his father. Collucci lay embracing Olivia, waiting for Antonio to bang on the door.

As they lay there waiting for the knock, he trembled with
emotion. As always in situations of personal danger, he remembered the awful cowardice of his father. His father's face, dripping sweat. He remembered the terror stink of his father's breath behind a barricaded door in the attic of the Collucci home.

His father held him in a death grip and muzzled his mouth. They listened to his mother and sister begging for mercy. Then he heard them screaming for help. The sex murderer hatcheted them into silence. And then worst of all, after their voices stilled, he heard the fiend grunting joy as he violated the dead. He saw his father feel his way down the attic stairs with his arms locked across his eyes against the carnage. He saw his father go out the front door and disappear forever.

He thought about his first foster home where he was burned with cigarettes and locked in the pitch-black basement for two days because he ate a sausage from the icebox without permission.

Antonio knocked. Collucci patted Olivia to calm her.

She said in a sharp voice, “Who is it?”

Antonio said loudly, “Antonio, Miss Tonelli, your father fights for breath in his bedroom and calls you.”

Olivia went to the door and told Antonio she would come in a minute or two. She kissed Collucci good-bye with a promise they would meet at a downtown theater the next day.

Collucci was a blur of silent motion. He speed-dressed and chain-bolted front and back doors, then he drew a giant kettle of scalding water. He found a nearly full half-gallon container of bleach and quickly emptied the bleach into the kettle with the water. Next, he found a heavy industrial wrench under the kitchen sink.

He eased the front door open and stepped out on the front porch with the kettle. He threaded the end of a bath towel through one of the holes in the latticed walls enclosing the porch, then he tied the kettle by its wire handle near the top of the porch roof.

He chinned himself to the roof and reached down and got the kettle. Then he went silently across the roof to the rear of the
bungalow. He got on his belly and peered over the rim of the roof at the three button men. They crouched among lilac bushes on both sides of the steps leading from the back porch. All three had baseball bats.

Mario, a muscular giant, on one side, Antonio and Emilio on the other side. He stood and hurled the scalding contents of the kettle down in a sweeping motion. The trio's screeches of pain reverberated in the night like mass murder.

In one motion he slipped the wrench from his belt and plunged down. Emilio and Antonio were screaming and scrambling out of the bushes. Emilio, fleeing the bushes behind Antonio, stumbled and fell on his knees on the lawn.

Collucci's rage was at its uncontrolled peak. He gripped the wrench with both hands, raised it high above his head, and sighted for the top of Emilio's shiny skullcap of hair. Then he growled for velocity and whistled the wrench down. Emilio's eyes were phosphorescent. He rolled to his side and flung his arm up to shield his head.

His elbow took the crunch of the steel blow, and the arm burst blood and shards of bone. Collucci swung the wrench rapidly, breaking Emilio's wrist on his other arm and his right ankle.

Collucci saw Antonio fifteen feet away with a wicked-looking forty-five automatic in his hand. He waved it aimlessly as he frantically wiped the back of his other hand across his eyes to clear them of the scalding bleached water.

The stench of Emilio's loosened bowels pulled a spurt of vomit from Collucci's guts. He leaped across the unconscious Emilio toward Antonio. But, too late, he saw the shadow of Mario on his right swinging the baseball bat. The blow struck the wrench upraised at the side of Collucci's head.

The bat splintered and banged the wrench against the side of Collucci's head. His legs went rubbery for a moment. He viciously backhanded the wrench at Mario's throat and busted his jaw instead. Mario fell and rolled into the lilac bushes in agony.

Collucci smashed down Antonio's gun arm as he was leveling it. The automatic skittered across the grass. Antonio, dangling his useless arm, bombed his foot at Collucci's crotch. The toe of his shoe sank into Collucci's navel and doubled him into a knot on the grass. Antonio rushed and snatched up the wrench with his good arm. He grunted as he brought it down. Collucci turned a saving fraction in time. He heard the whoosh and dull impact of the wrench against the grass.

Collucci reached up and seized Antonio's broken wrist. He twisted it and wrung it like a chicken's neck. Antonio's hand hung crookedly on tendons and skin. He whimpered and staggered away toward the main house. Collucci got to his feet. He gripped the wrench and went in pursuit. Antonio screamed for help.

Olivia sat on the side of Joe Tonelli's bed stroking his temple. She heard the scream above the bedlam singing of an old Italian Army marching song.

She flipped the floodlight switch and saw the scene. Collucci was wild-eyed, chasing Antonio. Mario pussyfooted thirty feet behind Collucci, gripping a length of lead pipe. Olivia screamed the house quiet. Tonelli's guests followed her to the yard.

Collucci knocked Antonio senseless. Mario was swinging the pipe down on Collucci's head when Olivia screamed, “Jimmy, behind you!”

Collucci threw himself forward, and the pipe struck only a glancing blow. Collucci whirled and grappled with Mario. Mario fell and pinned Collucci to the ground with his great weight. He fumbled a stiletto from his pocket and stabbed down at Collucci's throat. But the point missed and sank into the flesh above Collucci's collarbone.

Olivia flung herself over Collucci's face and chest and screamed, “Stop it, Mario! I love him! I love him!”

Louis Bellini snapped his fingers and a gang of his button men and bodyguards pulled Mario away. Joe Tonelli came slowly on a cane to the scene. He held his hand over his heart.