The Iceman by Anthony Bruno Page A

headaches. He had a feeling he was due.
    He left the bathroom and headed for his office downstairs, passingthe huge, gilt-framed oil painting of a vase full of flowers that hung in the foyer. He shut the office door behind him and glanced at his desk. The red light on the telephone answering machine was blinking. He switched on the desk lamp and saw that he had one message. He pressed the play button.
    “Rich, it’s ‘Tim.’ I gotta talk to you. Today.”
    The hang-up was a curt bang. It had an attitude. “Tim” had an attitude, a bad attitude. “Tim” was the name John Sposato used on the phone just in case anyone was listening in. Sposato thought a lot of himself. He was under the mistaken impression that he was a somebody, that he mattered, that he could tell people what to do. He was wrong.
    Kuklinski sat down at his desk. By rights John Sposato should have been dead by now, he thought as he reached over and picked up his attaché case from the floor, setting it on top of the desk. He opened it and took out his knife, a heavy-duty hunting knife with a curved six-inch blade. There were ten notches in the wooden handle, eight on one side, two on the other.
    He left the knife in its leather sheath, held it in one hand, and slowly ran his thumbnail down the eight notches, one after the other. When he got to the bottom notch, he started again at the top.
    Nobody got away with the kind of shit Sposato tried to pull. Not with Richard Kuklinski. That fat-ass slob had had the nerve to come to his house last month.
His house
. Came with two goddamn Puerto Ricans to collect money.
Came to his home
.
    He had watched them from the upstairs window. Sposato sitting in his car like he was some kind of king while the spics came to the door and hassled Dwayne. They asked Dwayne where his father was, said they didn’t believe him when Dwayne said his father wasn’t home, said they wanted to come in and look for themselves. Kuklinski stood at the top of the stairs and listened to all this shit. He had a gun in his hand, and he was ready to shoot the two of them if they showed their faces inside the door. His home and hisfamily were sacred, and anyone who messed with them was asking for trouble. Big trouble.
    But Sposato didn’t know how lucky he’d been that day. The spics didn’t press their luck with Dwayne. They weren’t stupid. They were probably afraid “Big Rich” was in there waiting for them.
    Standing there, listening, he’d heard the two greaseballs telling Dwayne they’d be back later. He went to the window and saw them going back to their car. Kuklinski was ready to rush down and follow them in his car, run them off the road, shoot that bastard Sposato right through his fucking thick head. But a police car happened to pass by, and the cops stopped to see what these scumbags were doing in a neighborhood like this. Kuklinski stayed upstairs. If the cops hadn’t shown up, Sposato and his two Puerto Ricans would be rotting together someplace right now. Sposato didn’t know how lucky he’d been.
    Later that day he had gotten Sposato on the phone and told him point-blank, “You do not come to my house. You do not talk to my family. You do not
look
at my family. Ever!” He threatened to go down to Sposato’s place in south Jersey that very night to show Sposato he wasn’t kidding.
    That put the fear of God into Sposato for a little while because the fat slob knew Kuklinski would do it. But Sposato remained a problem. Sure, they’d been making money together, but Sposato seemed to feel that he was the senior partner from the way he’d been acting lately. He thought he could talk any way he wanted to Richard Kuklinski. He must have figured he had enough on Big Rich that he could throw his weight around. He was very wrong about that.
    Sposato was going to die. There was no question about it. But not right away. Once again Sposato had gotten lucky.
    As he ran his thumbnail down the notches in the wooden knife