Buffalo jump

CHAPTER 34

Believing one should never commit one’s first premeditated murder without a nutritious breakfast, I took Ryan to the Family Restaurant. He had bacon and eggs and I had the same heart-stopping ham-and-eggs special I’d had the day before.

At a quarter to eight, I dropped him at the long-term parking lot at Pearson International Airport, then parked his Volvo in the short-term lot and waited. Eighteen minutes later he pulled up in a black late-model Altima. He got out and handed me a pair of thin leather driving gloves. “Don’t touch anything in or on the car without these on,” he said. “Case we have to ditch it unexpectedly.”

He transferred his metal photographer’s case from the trunk of the Volvo to the Altima, along with a brown canvas sports bag.

“A long gun,” I said.

“Not just a long gun. A Remington 700 PSS. The weapon of choice of better police services everywhere. If it’s good enough for an FBI sniper, it’s good enough for me. Accurate, reliable, comes with a scope and takes a suppressor if you need one. Plus the recoil is manageable if you stay away from magnum rounds.”

“And we need this because…?”

“In your haste to rid yourself of Marco Di Pietra, and the burden he has become, you fail to consider one important factor.”

“Yes, Professor?”

“Call it the carnage factor. Unless we can find Marco alone, we have to take out whoever we find him with, be it a bodyguard, a hooker or anyone else. How many people you prepared to kill?”

He was right. Shit. My focus had been on eliminating the threat Marco posed to me and everyone around me. I had to start seeing the bigger picture.

“You want to keep casualties to a minimum?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“The closer we have to get, the messier it’s going to be. The long gun gives us a chance, understand?”

God help me, I did.

We left the airport via a narrow road where a work crew was regrading a roadbed in the fierce heat, images of the men rippling above the hot asphalt like waves in a mirage.

“Where are we likely to find Marco?” I asked.

“He’s no nine-to-fiver but he has a few regular stops.”

“Where’s his house?”

“The new part of Woodbridge. A big pile his father-in-law built him, all floodlit pink brick inside a ten-foot fence.”

“I thought he lived in Hamilton.”

“His father does, him and the other old-timers,” Ryan said. “The guys who wanted to run Toronto without actually having to live in it. But our generation prefers Woodbridge or maybe Guelph if you want something more rural. Cara’s-my house-is in Woodbridge, and I got to your place last night in under thirty minutes, Highway 7 to 404 and down the DVP. It’s the best of both worlds. Close to downtown but the houses are new and you get space for your money. Anyway, hitting Marco in his house is out of the question. There’s always people around, including his wife and kids and his mother-in-law, plus the usual armed entourage.”

“Marco has children?”

“Unfortunately.”

“And he could still have Lucas Silver killed? How many children?”

“Three with the wife, two boys and a girl. Couple more outside the friendly confines.”

“Five kids. The bastard doesn’t deserve a single one.”

“Hey, for all I know he likes dogs too.”

“Where else does he go?”

“There’s places he eats, drinks, goes to get laid, watch people get beat up. Again, you’re always going to have too many witnesses.”

“So what’s left?”

“One of his so-called businesses is a trucking company just off Highway 7, a few minutes from here.”

“The one where the Ensign smokes were headed?”

“That’s right. It’s mostly for show-gives him a way to launder money coming in. But he keeps a few trucks on hand, half-tons and cube vans, to haul slot machines, cigarettes, booze, whatever. He runs a sports book out of the place and hosts high-stakes Hold’em tourneys. Sucks in fools who think they can play ’cause they’ve seen it on TV. It’s as close as anything he has to an office. He turns up most days at some point or another. Let’s start there and see what’s what.”

“Would he be there this early?”

“No, he’s a night owl. But there’s a guy, Tommy Vetere, kind of runs the place: answers the phones, takes bets, hands out gas money to the truck drivers, like that. He’s usually there by nine. And he might know when Marco’s coming.”

“He would tell us?”

“He would tell me. Remember how nice I can ask?”

“What if he’s not there?”

“We’ll scout it out. See if there’s some way to use the long gun. Can you shoot?”

“Me?”

“It’s your gig, man. Also, I can distract Marco. Show myself. Chat him up. Lead him outside. You can’t do any of that without him taking a body part as a souvenir.”

I pictured Roni Galil standing over me as I lay on my belly, sighting down the barrel of an Israeli sniper rifle called a Tessler during training. “If you have to shoot someone, Yoni, I hope he’s big like a house because that’s all you going to hit. Should 1get you a slingshot like our King David used against Goliath?” But that was early on in my training. By the end I had become a decent marksman.

“I can shoot,” I told Ryan.

“There’s a fence around the property. Bushes along most of the sides and trees at the back. Trucks parked here and there. Maybe we can set up a blind where you can take him out as he’s getting out of his car. With his arm in that cast, moving like he is, he’ll present a beautiful target, don’t you think?”

“A stunner,” I said.

A few minutes later, Ryan turned off Highway 7 onto Minden Road. He pointed to a red and white sign up on our right. “That’s the place. Aspromonte Trucking. Little joke of Marco’s.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Aspromonte’s in Calabria. In the old days, that’s where the ‘Ndrangheta hid kidnap victims while they waited for ransoms to be paid. They’d stash them in a cave if they were giving them back alive. Dump them in a crevice if they weren’t.”

Aspromonte Trucking sat on a wide, dusty asphalt lot. Its immediate neighbours were a retailer of farm implements and a lumber yard. The entire property was surrounded by an eight-foot cyclone fence topped by three strands of barbed wire; the only entrance visible from the road was a gate, front and centre, that hung halfway open. The building was one storey, about the size of a service station, half the frontage given over to a large garage door that was rolled down shut. There were two half-ton trucks parked to one side, with enough space for a third between them. A black Escalade was blocking the front door.

“Christ,” Ryan said. “That’s Marco’s.”

“He’s here this early?”

“Or this late. Maybe they had a poker game last night.”

“Would it still be going?”

“Not with no other cars here. But maybe we caught a break. If it went real late, he might have crashed here. There’s a room at the back with a bed in it.”

He drove a few hundred yards past the gate and turned into the lot of a company that made wooden shutters in a California style. There were only a few cars scattered in its lot and we parked as far as we could from the entrance, partially blocked from view by a cedar hedge.

“You think Phil and Tommy are with him?” I asked.

“Does it matter?”

I sat in the stolen Altima, my mouth feeling dry. I had not taken Percocet this morning, wanting to keep my head clear. My side ached but the real discomfort lay elsewhere. In the next few minutes, three men might die: Marco, Phil and this Tommy Vetere. And that was if we got lucky and neither one of us joined in. We were talking about men like pieces on a game board. I had signed onto this mission to practise tikkun olam, to repair a part of the world that badly needed it. Save an innocent life. And maybe we still would. Maybe we’d save the entire Silver family. But how many lives could pile up on the other end of the seesaw before it slammed down to the ground and sent our end lurching up?

“Tell me about Vetere,” I said.

“What’s to tell? He’s been in Marco’s crew for years. Before that with Vinnie Nickels. He’s no altar boy, if that’s what you’re worried about. He’s broken his share of bones. He’s fired his guns. He’s never affronted me personally, so I have no feelings for him pro or con. But if he’s in there with Marco and this is our chance, then I say he has to go. It’s the life he bought into, just like me.”

“Isn’t there a way to make Marco come out alone?”

Ryan thought about it and said there was. I didn’t like the way he smiled when he said it.

“Go on,” I said.

“I go in alone. I tell him I have something in the trunk for him.”

“And that would be?”

“You.”