Created, the Destroyer

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Felton dressed slowly in his master bedroom. He snapped the garters onto his black socks. He slipped on his dark blue trousers, then pulled tight the laces on his black shining cordovans. He turned to look at the full length mirror. His chest, encased in an undershirt, expanded full. Not bad for a man of fifty-five.

He stared at his thick neck and solid arms, linked by massive shoulders. He could still bend a ten penny nail in his fingers, still crush a brick in his hands.

Jimmy moved silently into the room, carrying before him, in his large hands, a mahogany box. Felton noticed him in the mirror, standing behind him, a good eight inches taller than himself.

«Did I tell you to bring the box?»

Jimmy smiled broadly. «No.»

«Then why did you bring it?» Felton turned to catch a side profile of himself. He flexed his arms. His triceps swelled large and powerful. He forced his right hand against his left and extended them before him. The view in the mirror was a magnificent display of tanned, rippling muscles.

«Why did you bring the box?»

«Thought you'd need it.»

Felton threw his arms behind him and cocked his head as if glancing at an oncoming bull, the matador Felton, supreme, victorious.

«Need?»

Jimmy shrugged. «It's convenient, boss.»

Felton laughed, laughed with teeth that never had a cavity, showing gums that never gave him a day's trouble in his life.

«Now!» Felton yelled. «Now!»

Jimmy backed away, flipping the highly-shined mahogany box on the bed. «It's been ten years, boss. Ten years.»

«Now,» Felton said, grabbing his last look in the mirror. «Now.»

Jimmy coiled his large frame like a spring. Felton held his right hand behind his back and waved his left in front of him, fingers wide and palms outstretched. He sneaked another look at the mirror and Jimmy sprang.

Felton caught the thrust by throwing his left shoulder, arm straight, into the charge. No finesse. No leverage. Just sheer power.

Jimmy's large Texas frame seemed about to envelop the smaller man but at the height of his rush, Jimmy let out a grunt and stopped moving forward.

Felton's large hand was in his chest. It would not be budged. Felton gave a flick of his wrist. Jimmy flailed his arms and yelled as his body bounced backward.

Like a jungle cat, Felton moved forward, grabbing Jimmy's arms, preventing him from crashing his back into the floor. He roared: «Still got it?»

«You still got it, boss. You still got it. You should've gone into pro football.»

«I leave that for you Texans, Jimmy,» Felton said with a loud laugh, pulling Jimmy's arm with a yank that brought the raw-boned man to his feet.

Jimmy shook his head to clear the cobwebs. «We're ready, boss?»

«We're ready. Bring me the box.» Felton purposely refused to look at the wooden container until he had buttoned a white shirt, put on a black knit tie and gone to his desk and removed a shoulder holster of gray suede-like leather from a drawer.

Then he nodded for the box to be opened. Jimmy carefully lifted the lid. Three gun-metal blue revolvers rested on white suede.

«O'Hara won't be needing his,» Jimmy said. «Can I take two?»

«No,» Felton said. «Is O'Hara's body at the garage?»

«Yeah. Under wraps. Same guys watching it who're looking after Tony.»

«When we get back tonight, we'll get rid of O'Hara and his revolver, and let Tony go.»

«Wouldn't ita been easier, boss, just to report O'Hara as killed? I mean it's going to feel funny getting rid of him like that.»

«And let the locals know my chauffeur got his skull crushed? I don't want this apartment pinpointed as that hooked guy's last stand. No, we have to get rid of our own.»

Felton strapped the shoulder holster on. Jimmy shrugged and removed from an envelope in the lid of the box, six official cards in laminated plastic. They were gun permits. One for New Jersey, one for New York, two each for three men, one of whom wouldn't need his again. Jimmy put the permits on the bedspread. They lay there like penny-pitching cards, old photographs of their owners in the corner.

Jimmy-a sharp, drawn face. Felton-smooth with wavy hair, the bright blueness of his eyes shining even in the black-and-white postage stamp picture. O'Hara-a wide, grinning face that now had a puncture in the skull.

They were special permits, made out to financier and industrialist Norman Felton, and bodyguards James Roberts and Timothy O'Hara.

They were special because the pistols were special. Each permit meant that the ballistics test of the pistol was registered in Washington. A bullet fired through the barrel of each gun carried ballistics markings of the barrel that identified its source as surely as fingerprints. The only time bullets had gone through the barrels on the three pistols were when the ballistics tests were made.

Felton lifted his pistol and Jimmy released a spring switch that slid open a secret drawer in the bottom of the box. There were seven more pistol barrels and a small Allen wrench.

They each put new barrels on their pistols, barrels whose ballistics markings were known only to corpses.

Felton mused aloud. «Jimmy… Moesher was never meant for this business like you and me. He'd have us all living off what we make in the junk-yards.» Jimmy just grinned. Felton playfully punched Jimmy's shoulder and Jimmy pretended to block it. They were both grinning.

«No sir,» Jimmy said, wrenching tight the barrel of his revolver. «You gotta love your work.»

«I don't love it, Jimmy, but it's necessary. It's something natural, very natural, that some of us do.» Felton thought a moment, then said: «It's natural and necessary. This is a jungle, Jimmy. Nobody ever gave us anything.»

«Nobody gave us nothing, boss.»

«The world made us what we are. You know I could have been a doctor, a lawyer, even a scientist.»

«You would have been the greatest,» Jimmy said.

«I would have been good.»

«Everything you do, boss, is good. Honest.»

Felton shrugged. «It has to be. Who'll do it for us?» He bounded over to the long closet near the full-length mirror and slid two closet doors in opposite directions.

The closet extending the full sailboat length of the room held a row of suits that for quantity might put a Robert Hall's to shame. In quality, it was Saville Row.

Felton kept thumbing through the blue suits looking for the jacket that matched his pants. The only way he could tell was by finding one without pants. After eight suits, he said to hell with it, and took the jacket.

«Jimmy?»

«Yeah, boss.»

«You're a good man.»

«Thanks, boss. What brought that on?»

«Nothing. I just wanted to say it.»

«You ain't afraid something's going to go wrong with Viaselli?»

«No. Not Viaselli.»

«That hooked guy?»

Felton buttoned the blue jacket that matched perfectly with his pants, except he knew it didn't belong with those pants.

Jimmy knew better than to press the point. When Felton was ready to talk, he would talk and not before. Jimmy put the revolver inside his jacket pocket.

Later that night, Felton was in a talking mood. Jimmy was at the wheel of the pearl gray Rolls Royce Silver Dawn, subbing for O'Hara. He drove over the George Washington Bridge, its high-wired lights glinting like an Italian festival, its span stretching onward to New York like a great aqueduct of ancient Rome, except it carried people, not water.

«You know,» Felton said, staring at New York from the back seat. «I was sorry I missed World War Two.»

«We had a war of our own, boss.»

«Yeah, but World War Two was a war, a big one. It's a hell of a thing that somebody's gotta go to an engineering school on the Hudson to learn how to run a war.»

«You could've done it better, boss.»

Felton frowned. «Maybe not better on the war side, but I would've known enough to look out for the Russians.»

«Didn't we know?»

«We knew, but I would've known better. I would've looked out for England, France, China, the works. That's what the game is, Jimmy. Outside the family, you got no friends. There's no such thing as friends. Only relatives.»

«You're the only family I ever had, boss.»

«Thank you, Jimmy,» Felton said.

«I mean it. I'd die for you or Miss Cynthia.»

«I know it, Jimmy. You remember how that hooked guy came on?»

«Yeah, boss. I was right behind him.»

«Ever see a guy move like that before?»

«You mean at you?»

«No. No, not that so much. Just the way he moved. He came without telegraphing that he was coming on.»

«So?»

«Do fighters telegraph punches?»

«Not good ones.»

«Why not?»

«They're taught,» Jimmy suggested.

«That's right.»

«So?»

«So, who's teaching?»

«Guys can learn it lots of places,» Jimmy said. Felton was silent for a few moments.

He asked, «Seem more difficult lately to make a hit?»

«Yeah, kinda.»

«Is it the fault of the help? They getting worse?»

«About the same. You know, young punks, got a gun, they'll foul it up if you don't lead them by the nose.»

«But what was their big trouble?»

«They said their targets were getting tougher to hit.»

«But what else?»

«I don't know. Nothing else.»

«No. There's something else.»

Jimmy turned onto the West Side Drive heading for downtown New York. He eased the car into the right-hand lane. It was a Felton order. When on a job, obey the misdemeanors. No littering, no loitering, no speeding or double parking. It had always worked well.

«There's something else, Jimmy.»

«You got me, boss.»

«First they were hard to hit. And second, they never hit back. None of those mugs we hired ever got shot or even hurt.»

Jimmy shrugged his shoulders and looked for the 42nd Street exit. The conversation was beyond him. The boss was working on another one of his ideas.

«Why weren't any of these guys armed?» Felton asked.

«Lots of people don't carry guns,» Jimmy said as he turned into a ramp that led down from the elevated highway.

«People checking into Viaselli's operations or mine?»

«So they're stupid.»

«Stupid? No, they've got a pattern. Patterns and stupidity don't mesh. But that guy with a hook was a change from the pattern. If we thought that hooked bastard was fast, watch out for what comes next. I feel it. I know it.»

«You mean they're going to get better.»

«I don't think we're going to see much better. I don't think there is better. But watch out for teams. Killer teams.»

«Like we had in the forties?»

«Like we had in the forties.» Felton leaned back in his seat.