“Stick pulls up, starts following the guy on foot. The guy goes into a record store. At that point Stick
remembers he left his piece in his glove compartment. So what does he do? He hops in a hardware
store, buys a number five Stillson wrench, and when the little putz comes out of the record store, Stick
falls in behind him, shoves him in the first alley they come to, and whaps the bejesus out of the guy.
The guy never saw him and never knew what hit him, but he sure knew Stick got his hat back.”
He paused for another moment and then added: “Resourceful, that‟s what Stick is, resourceful.”
I filed that information away, then said to Dutch, “Look, I don‟t want to seem pushy this early in the
game, but I know this Tagliani mob. There‟s something I‟d like to run by your people. Maybe it‟ll
help a little.”
He gave the request a second‟s worth of thought and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “But let me ease you
into the picture first.”
“Anything you say.”
I went over and grabbed a desk near the side of the room.
Dutch, as rumpled as an unmade bed, stood in front of the room.
“All right, listen up,” he told his gashouse gang. “You all know by now what happened tonight. We
lost the ace in the deck and we had a man sitting two hundred yards away.”
He did an eyeball roll call and then bellowed loud enough to wake the dead in Milwaukee:
“Sheiss, we‟re missin‟ half the squad here. Didn‟t they hear this is a command performance?”
“They‟re still out on the range,” a „voice mumbled from the back of the room.
“Hmmm,” Dutch muttered. “Okay, you all know about Tagliani and Stinetto getting chilled. Those
are the two we knew as Turner and Sherman. Well, first, I got a little good news, if you want to call it
that. Then we‟ll talk about who was where and how we screwed up tonight. Anyway, he had the
house bugged and as happens, one of the rooms on the wire was the den, which is where the hit was
made. So I‟ve got the whole thing on tape, thanks to Lange, who did his telephone repairman act.”
Dutch punched a button on a small cassette player and a moment later the room‟s hollow tone hissed
through the speaker.
For maybe two minutes that‟s all there was, room tone.
Then a doorbell, far off, in another part of the house.
Seconds later someone entered the room.
Sounds of someone sitting down, a paper rustling, a lighter being struck, more paper noises. Then a
voice, getting closer to the room:
“Hey, Nicky, bom dia, how ya do at the track?”
It was Tagliani‟s voice; I‟d heard it on tape enough times to know.
“I dropped a bundle.” Stinetto‟s voice.
“How the flick you lose? It was a fix.. I gave it to yuh just this morning. Didn‟t I tell yuh, it‟s on for
the four horse, third heat. Huh?”
“Ya tol‟ me. Too bad the other seven heats wasn‟t fixed.”
Laughter. “I don‟ believe yuh. I give you a sure thing, you turn right aro—”
At that point there was a sound of‟ glass crashing, a lot of jumbled noise, swearing and yelling.
Tagliani: “God—no, no..”
Stinetto: “Motherfu—”
Several shots, from two different gulls.
A man‟s scream.
“Nicky
Brrrddt. A muffled rapid-fire gun, probably a submachine gun. It fired so fast it sounded like a
dentist‟s drill.
Two screams; terrible, terrified, haunting screams.
Two more shots.
Bang.. . bang. Something heavy, a .357 maybe.
Somebody gagged.
Something heavy hit the floor, crunching glass as it fell.
Two more shots, spaced.
Bang... bang!
Footsteps running and the sound of something else hitting the floor.
The something else was sizzling.
A woman‟s voice,
screaming,
getting closer,
entering the room.
Baroomf!
The explosion blew out the mike. Dutch punched the off button.
“That‟s it,” he said.
Charlie One Ear said, “Utterly charming. Too bad about the woman.”
“Too bad about all of them,” Dutch snapped caustically. “They were worth more to us alive than
dead.”
Dutch ran the tape back and played it again. We all leaned forward, hoping to hear something
significant, but there wasn‟t much. I listened to the shots, counting them.
“That one, sounds like a dentist‟s drill I make that some kind of submachine gun,” Zapata said.
Dutch played it again.
It was a chilling tape. Just when you think you‟ve seen it all and heard it all, you run across something
like this, listening to three people die. Mobsters or not, it raised the hair on my arms.
“Definitely two guns,” Charlie One Ear said.
“That‟s pretty good, Charlie. Stinetto‟s gun was still in his belt when we found him,” Dutch said.
“Loaded and clean. The old man was light.”
“Pretty good shooting,” Chino ventured.
“Had to be two of „em,” said Salvatore.
“Or an ambidextrous marksman,” Charlie One Ear said.
“Fuckin‟ nervy one,” Zapata added.
“Any other ideas?” Dutch asked.
I kept mine to myself.
“Okay, now pay attention. We got a man here can maybe shed a little glimmer on the night‟s
proceedings, so everybody just relax a minute. This here‟s Jake Kilmer, Kilmer‟s with the Freeze and
he‟s an expert on this outfit.”
A moan of discontent rippled through the room.
“You wanna listen to him, or stay dumb?” Dutch snapped without a hint of humour in his tone.
The room got quiet.
And colder than an ice cube sandwich.
7
EXIT SCREAMING
The house was a two-story brick and stone structure nestled against high dunes overlooking the bay.
The backyard was terraced, rising from the swimming pool to a flat that locked like a child‟s dream.
There was a gazebo and an eight-horse carousel and a monkey bar set and a railroad with each car just
large enough to accommodate one child.
Two men smoked quietly in the gazebo.
From high above, on top of the dunes that separated the house from the bay, the sound of the child
laughing could be heard, followed by his grandfather‟s rough laughter. Their joyous chorus was
joined by the sound of a calliope playing “East Side, West Side, All Around the Town.” The child was
on the carousel, his grandfather standing beside him with an arm around the boy. The horses, eyes
gleaming, nostrils flaring, mouths open, jogged up and down in an endless, circular race. Below them,
in the pool, an inner tube floated, forgotten.
The figure, dressed entirely in black, crouched as it moved silently and swiftly through the sea grass
on top of the dune to a point above the house. Only the swimming pool was visible. The figure was
carrying a weapon that had the general conformity of a rifle but was larger.
The figure slid to the ground and eased quietly to the edge of the dune, looking down at the old man
arid the child. He waited.
A woman appeared at the sliding glass door at the back of the house.
“Ricardo, bedtime,” she yelled.
The child protested but the woman persisted.
“Once more around,” the old man yelled back, and the woman agreed and waited.
The figure on the dune also waited.
His last ride finished, the little boy ran gleefully down the terrace and then turned back to the older
man.
“Come kiss me good night, Grandpa,” he called back. The grandfather smiled and waved his hand.
“Uno momento,” he called back, and then motioned to the men in the gazebo to shut down the
carousel.
The child skipped to his grandmother arid they entered the house together.