Deep (The Pagano Family Book 4) (23 page)

When this night was done, Nick’s days of rolling up his sleeves would be over.

As he walked up to J.J., Nick said, “Tell me.”

J.J. dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out, kicking the butt clear. “We got Church in there and the two guys who did the diner—the two still alive, anyway.”

“You’re sure you got the right guys?”

“Yeah—got some intel. The stiffs left behind were part of a Bosnian crew on Church’s payroll. Always worked together. There were five in the crew, but the fifth is in the hospital, on life support. OD’d two weeks ago. We rounded up the two still walkin’ and leaned on ‘em till they came clean. The big bald guy gave up Church. Got him coming out of the Pink Hole, two men on him. You only said you wanted Church and the guys that did your—the diner, so we took those guys out.”

“Bodies?”

“In the warehouse, wrapped and ready.”

The night would be long—there would be five bodies to lose. But it seemed J.J. had done a perfectly competent job. Nick nodded and headed toward the door. The others fell in behind him.

Inside the wide, bare space, three men were bound. J.J. had done this well, too. Two white men, one large and bald, the other more average, with a receding hairline and a long, thin, brown ponytail, were hanging from big winch hooks of the kind so common in a harbor. Heavy chains led from the hooks into the winch attached to the ceiling.

Their wrists and ankles were bound. They had obviously been leaned on, but neither had been worked over excessively. The constant stress on their arms was probably the worst torture they’d yet experienced.

Again, Nick had to admit to himself that J.J. had not yet screwed up this job—not obviously, at least.

Alvin Church, would-be king of the Rhode Island underworld, was lashed to a steel support beam, his wrists bound around the beam, and his body chained at his throat, shoulders, waist, and ankles. He did not appear to have been touched, other than to be bound.

The Bosnians had been stripped bare. Church had been left dressed, according to Nick’s orders.

All three were gagged, with rags stuffed into their mouths. J.J. had heard that lesson, too—stuffing was a much more effective silencer than tying. And Nick had no need for any of these men to talk. Only to listen. And to see.

After taking a few brief seconds to see his subjects, he turned and walked to his worktable at the far end of the room. Matty followed. When he looked back to see that J.J. had not, he waved him over.

He took off his Armani suit coat. He always wore a suit to work, even work like this, even work like the ambush in Danbury. This was his job, and he was a businessman. Another lesson he’d learned from his uncle and father. Dress like a professional, not like the professional’s hired help. He had ruined a few suits over the years, but he did not revel in his work; he did not play—so, often, he was able to wash his hands, roll his sleeves back down, put his jacket back on, and go home.

Tonight, he saw no reason he wouldn’t be able to do just that. Tonight, he was passing the torch.

He hung his jacket over a wooden hanger and began rolling up his sleeves. “J.J., I want you to get your hands dirty tonight.” He gave him a long look. “Which one had a blade with a bone handle?” Beverly had woken from a nightmare and, sobbing, had gritted out that terrible detail.

“The big guy—why?”

Nick didn’t answer. That fat fuck had cut on Beverly. He was going to pay extra. “Where is it?”

“Here.” J.J. walked over to a trash bag and rooted through it until he came up with the knife. He brought it to Nick.

Nick set it on the worktable with his tools. “He goes second. Make sure he watches what happens to his friend. J.J., you take the friend. Do your thing. I have one requirement: he eats his dick.”

J.J. paled a bit at that but nodded. And they got started.

~oOo~

J.J. did well, with little prodding from Nick. He wasn’t creative, and he did make a mess, but by the time the guy was dead, he had suffered horrors that were sure to have been beyond his own imagining, and he’d died screaming around his own dick. They left his naked body hanging from the hook, the bloody, meaty end of his dick still protruding from his mouth. Picker winched him out of the way, and he and Matty cleaned up the mess.

Not until then did Nick step up to his first subject. Fatso and Church had both spent most of the first man’s death ordeal shouting behind their gags and struggling with their bindings. Fatso was in obvious distress—as heavy as he was, hanging from the hook was probably an agony. He was lucky his shoulders had not dislocated. Yet.

He was probably a hundred pounds overweight, and his belly hung heavily over his genitals. As Nick stood before the goggle-eyed man, he pulled on a pair of heavy latex gloves.

He reached under the blubber and grabbed the man’s flaccid, average dick. The man’s muffled screams intensified, and he tried to kick his bound legs, but the jerking and rocking stressed his shoulders too much. Nick pulled a rubber band from his pocket and wound it tightly around the base of the man’s dick. A tourniquet. He didn’t want this bastard to bleed out and die too quickly. He had another means of death in mind.

Then he took the man’s knife out of his pocket and opened the blade. Again, the man renewed his horrified, terrified screams. Beyond him, Church rattled his chains. Nick knew Church figured that whatever he was witnessing was not as awful as his own end would be.

Dr. Kerr had said he thought the blade was probably too dull; that was why Beverly had been spared the horror of losing her breast. But Nick knew the pain of a dull blade, and she had not been spared that.

The blade was dull, in fact, and pitted, too—the man had not taken care of his weapon.

“Matty. Hold his belly out of my way.”

Matty did what he was told, and Nick, his way clear, pushed the knife in and through the skin just to the outside of the tourniquet. The man’s screams became an undulating, unending, sobbing wail, each wave more hysterical than the last. Nick drew the blade forward. The dull edge required that he use a sawing motion to get through the tissue. The tourniquet and Nick’s slow pace intensified the pain and controlled the blood loss so well that he barely had spatter even on his hands.

When the blade was clear, Nick had sliced the man’s dick in half, lengthwise, leaving two anatomy textbook cross-sections, albeit with rougher edges. When he stepped back, and Matty let go of his belly, the man’s bladder went, urine coming from the point at which the urethra was still intact, and the man shrieked and lost consciousness.

Nick turned his back and walked away, pulling the gloves off, turning them inside out as they came off his hands. “J.J., wake him. Use the ampules in my kit. You and Picker get him down from the hook. Matty, I want the Daughter.”

“Fuck. Really?”

Nobody but family, and Dr. Kerr, knew the details of what had been done to Beverly. Still, Nick would not countenance being questioned for his tactics here. He stopped and turned back to Matty.

He said nothing, but Matty stepped back. “Yeah. Of course. Sorry.” He turned and went toward a door in the corner, behind which was a smallish closet.

Sometimes Nick’s job required speed and subtlety—a hit, fast and clean. Sometimes, it required brutal finesse—an interrogation. Sometimes, the pain itself was the intention—revenge. For three decades, Nick had been learning how to hurt people, how to kill them. He’d never stopped learning. For two decades, his primary job had been to turn that education into practice. Those who dwelled in their world knew that when Nick Pagano came into a room like this one, unfathomable horror and pain would ensue.

His reputation had become a powerful tool. Because he didn’t always kill his subjects—in fact, he preferred not to—there were people alive who had experienced the things Nick had learned. To foster the development of that reputation, he had studied a wide range of methods for torture and execution over the ages of history. Some methods were fascinating in their complexity; others in their simplicity. Nick favored simplicity. He had made, or had commissioned, his own versions of his favorites. The Scavenger’s Daughter was one such device.

The premise was elegantly uncomplicated: force the subject to fold over himself in a kneeling position. Then apply slowly, continually increasing pressure until the body collapsed in on itself, organs, muscles, tissues bursting, blood oozing from every available pore and orifice.

A slow, massively painful death.

Henry VIII had commissioned an elaborate metal device, but all that was required was the position and the weight. Nick had devised his own version from otherwise workaday materials—a thick slab of wood. Chain. The winch.

Once Fatso was awake and moaning listlessly, Matty, J.J., and Picker wrestled him into the position—curled forward on his knees—and Matty, the only of the three who’d seen this method in action before, got it set up.

The man’s size worked against him—or for him. He died fairly quickly, in less than half an hour.

Nick’s eyes never left him as he suffered. He wanted to remember this death, this retribution.

Matty and Picker prepared that body for disposal and cleaned up the rank mess it had left behind. Then they took down his friend and prepared his body as well.

And then there was only Alvin Church. The man who had ordered all of the mayhem perpetrated on the Paganos in the past eighteen months. The death of Anthony Naldi, nephew to the family consigliere. The beatings of Nick’s cousins, Luca and John, and of Luca’s wife, Manny. The shooting of his cousin Carmen and her unborn daughter. The fire at a Pagano & Sons construction site, and the death of an innocent worker. The bombing at Neon and Jimmy’s death. Brian’s death. His father’s death. Donnie’s disfigurement. And Beverly. The loss of her light.

The man responsible for all of that was bound to a beam, ten feet from Nick. Revenge he’d planned, waited for, needed, was right before him. He would have it this night.

He watched Matty disassemble the Daughter and clean it with bleach, then pack the innocuous parts away. He turned and studied the stack of four bodies, stripped, weighted, and prepped for a deep-sea deposit. He watched Picker stoke the fire of the old boiler so clothes and identification could be burned away.

The men who’d hurt Beverly were dead. They had suffered for what they’d done. But Nick felt no ease. He felt no satisfaction. He had never before been so vividly invested in his work, and he had never before felt unsatisfied by its product. But now, standing in the middle of the warehouse, he felt the same burning restlessness he’d been feeling simmer since the day of his father’s funeral, and which had come to a rolling boil on the night of Beverly’s attack.

He faced Church again. His enemy had soiled himself, front and back. He was weeping. And Nick knew there was no torture that could sufficiently avenge the harm this stinking piece of trash had caused.

He turned and walked back to the worktable. At its side was a utility sink; though he had avoided any spatter, he scrubbed his hands and arms thoroughly. Then he unrolled his sleeves, fixed his cuffs, and slid back into his jacket. Matty, J.J., and Picker stared dumbly. Curious though they might be, they knew better than to speak.

From a locked drawer under the worktable, he took a suppressor. Pulling his Beretta from his shoulder holster, he screwed it into the barrel. Then he turned, strode toward Alvin Church, and shot him in the eye.

“Prep him. Then let’s get moving. I want to get back.”

~oOo~

They dropped the bodies in the ocean, scattering them over the deep sea, leaving them on the bottom for the fish, big and little, to eat. Church was the last to go down. Nick watched the ocean open for him, then close over him, swallowing him whole.

He didn’t know what to do with his new fury. He had tortured and killed the men who’d hurt Beverly. He had killed the man responsible for that and for the deaths of his father and his best friend. He had taken his pounds of flesh and more, and that fury had not been assuaged.