The Silver Bear by Derek Haas Page B

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