"Now, by God," his father breathed. He stood above his huddled
son like a giant.
"Oh, Daddy," Jacky mourned for both of them. And for a moment
his father paused, his face sagged into lines of uncertainty, and
Jacky felt a thread of hope.
Then the face drew up. Jacky could smell the beer, and his father
said, "I'll teach you to sass me," and all hope was gone as the foot
swung out, burying itself in Jacky's belly, driving the wind from
his belly in a whoosh. as he flew from the tree-house platform and
fell to the ground, turning over once and landing on the point of his
left elbow, which snapped with a greenstick crack. He didn't even
have breath enough to scream. The last thing he saw before he
blacked out was his father's face, which seemed to be at the end of
a long, dark tunnel. It, seemed to be filling with surprise, the way a
vessel may fill with some pale liquid.
He's just starting to know what he did, Jacky thought incoherently.
And on the heels of that, a thought with no meaning at all, coherent
or otherwise, a thought, that chased him into the blackness as he
fell back on the chewed and tattered grass of the back lawn in a
faint:
What you see is what you'll be, what YOU see is what you'll be,
what you-
The break in his arm was cleanly healed in six months. The
nightmares went, on much longer. In a way, they never stopped.
THE OVERLOOK HOTEL, THIRD FLOOR, 1958
The murderers came up the stairs in their stocking feet.
The two men posted outside the door of the Presidential Suite
never heard them. They were young, dressed in Ivy League suits
with the cut of the jackets a little wider than the fashion of the day
decreed. You couldn't wear a .357 Magnum concealed in a
shoulder holster and be quite in fashion. They were discussing
whether or not the Yankees could take yet another pennant. It was
lacking two days of September, and as usual, the pinstripers looked
formidable. Just talking about the Yankees made them feel a little
better. They were New York boys, on loan from Walt Abruzzi, and
they were a long way from home.
The man inside was a big wheel in the Organization. That was all
they knew all they wanted to know. "You do your job, we all get
well," Abruzzi had told them. "What's to know?"
They had heard things,, of course. That there was a place in
Colorado that was completely neutral ground. A place where even
a crazy little West Coast hood like Tony Giorgio could sit down
and have a fancy brandy in a balloon glass with the Gray Old Men
who saw him as some sort of homicidal stinging insect to be
crushed. A place where guys from Boston who had been used to
putting each other in the trunks of cars behind bowling alleys in
Malden or into garbage cans in Roxbury could get together and
play gin and tell jokes about the Polacks. A place where hatchets
could be buried or unearthed, pacts made, plans laid. A place
where warm people could sometimes cool off.
Well, here they were, and it wasn't so much - in fact, both of them
were homesick for New York, which was why they were talking
about the Yankees. But they never saw New York or the Yankees
again.
Their voices reached down the hall to the stairwell where the
murderers stood six risers down, with their stocking-covered heads
just below line of sight, if you happened to be looking down the
hall from the door of the Presidential Suite. There were three of
them on the stairs, dressed in dark pants and coats, carrying
shotguns with the barrels sawed off to six inches. The shotguns
were loaded with expanding buckshot.
One of the three motioned and they walked up the stairs to the hall.
The two outside the door never even saw them until the murderers
were almost on top of them. One of them was saying animatedly,
"Now you take Ford. Who's better in the American League than
Whitey Ford? No, I want to ask you that sincerely, because when it
comes to the stretch he just
The speaker looked up and saw three black shapes with no
discernable faces standing not 10 paces away. For a moment he
could not believe it. They were just standing there. He shook his
head, fully expecting them to go away like the floating black
specks you sometimes saw in the darkness. They didn't. Then he
knew.
"What's the matter?" his buddy said.
The young man who had been speaking about Whitey Ford clawed
under his jacket for his gun. One of the murderers placed the butt
of his shotgun against a leather pad strapped to his belly beneath
his dark turtleneck. And pulled both triggers. The blast in the
narrow hallway was deafening. The muzzle flash was like summer
lightning, purple in its brilliance. A stink of cordite. The young
man was blown backward down the hall in a disintegrating cloud
of Ivy League jacket, blood, and hair. His arm looped over
backward, spilling the Magnum from his dying fingers, and the
pistol thumped harmlessly to the carpet with the safety still on.
The second young man did not even make an effort to go for his
gun. He stuck his hands high in the air and wet his pants at the
same time.
"I give up, don't shoot me, it's OK-!'
"Say hello to Albert Anastasia when you get down there, punk",
one of the murderers said, and placed the butt of his shotgun
against his belly.
"I ain't a. problem, I ain't a problem!" the young man screamed in a
thick Bronx accent, and then the blast of the shotgun lifted him out
of his shoes and he slammed back against the silk wallpaper with
its delicate raised pattern. He actually stuck for a moment before
collapsing to the hall floor.
The three of them walked to the door of the suite. One of them
tried the knob. "Locked."
"OK."
The third man, who hadn't shot yet, stood in front of the door,
leveled his weapon slightly above the knob, and pulled both
triggers. A jagged hole appeared in the door, and light rayed
through. The third man reached through the hole and grasped the
deadbolt on the other side. There was a pistol shot, then two more.
None of the three flinched.
There was a snap as the deadbolt gave, and then the third man
kicked the door open. Standing in the wide sitting room in front of
the picture window, which now showed a view only of darkness,
was a man of about 35 wearing only jockey shorts. He held a pistol
in each hand and as the murderers walked in he began to fire at
them, spraying bullets wildly. Slugs peeled splinters from the door
frame, dug furrows in the rug, dusted plaster down from the
ceiling. He fired five times, and the closest he came to any of his
assassins was a bullet that twitched the pants of the second man at
the left knee.
They raised their shotguns with almost military precision.
The man in the sitting room screamed, threw both guns on the
floor, and ran for the bedroom. The triple blast caught him just
outside the door and a wet fan of blood, brains, and bits of flesh
splashed across the cherrystriped wallpaper. He fell through the
open bedroom doorway, half in and half out.
"Watch the door," the first man said, and dropped his smoking
shotgun to the rug. He reached into his coat pocket, brought out a
bone-handled switchblade, and thumbed the chrome button. He
approached the dead man, who was lying in the doorway on his
side. He squatted beside the corpse and yanked down the front of
the man's jockey shorts.
Down the hall the door to one of the other suites opened and a
pallid face peered out. The third man raised his shotgun and the