The Vendetta Read online

  THE VENDETTA

  Thomas Laird

  © Thomas Laird 2017

  A. G. Whitehead has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  1991

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  EPILOGUE

  PART ONE

  1991

  CHAPTER ONE

  The naked man was strapped into the leather swivel chair with duct tape. His neck and waist were strapped to the back of the seat, as were his arms and legs and ankles. He had a full head of bushy, black, well-pomaded hair that reinforced his ancestry. No one could mistake him for anything but his Italian heritage, more particularly his connection to Sicily. His parents had both been born there, but the strapped up, swarthy man had been born in Chicago. And he didn’t speak very much of his parents’ native tongue.

  He was sweating profusely, even though he was nude and even though this sound-proofed basement was chillingly air conditioned.

  Like a meat locker. The confined young man—he couldn’t have been older than his mid-twenties—tried to struggle against the duct tape, but it was hopeless. They left him in the office alone, and he had no idea how long he’d lingered there, but it was long enough for him to have pissed himself and the seat of the leather chair he was tied to.

  Finally, the door to the office opened, and a tall, broad man entered.

  The wrapped up, sweating, soiled young man knew who it was immediately.

  It was Benedetto Rossi. Benny Bats. But no one ever called Rossi by that name.

  He was carrying the origin of that nickname that nobody dared use in front of Rossi. It was a Louisville Slugger, a wooden baseball bat. Thirty-four inches long and forty-two ounces in weight. The type that long ball hitters used in the Major Leagues. But Benny Bats was not a baseball player, never had been an athlete at all. In fact, he’d dropped out of high school when he was sixteen, and then he never came back to school. It was part of Benny Bats’ legend.

  “Hello, Stevie.”

  The duct-taped, naked man’s name was Steven Martello. He was a soldier for Rossi’s crew, and he’d skimmed part of the take in Rossi’s gambling operation on Cermak Road in Berwyn, and now it was time for payback.

  But Stevie would remain mute because his mouth was taped, too.

  “You know what the toll is, right?” Rossi said.

  Stevie couldn’t read his face. There was no rage. There was nothing. Benedetto was known for his poker face, if that was what you could call it.

  “You’re a fucking thief. Can’t have that, Steven.”

  He hauled back the bat, and Martello tried to scream, but the duct tape muffled the sound.

  Ben Rossi broke his right forearm with the initial swing. There was a cracking noise on impact. Stevie’s eyes popped wide with the blow, and then they both rolled back in his head.

  Rossi found a glass at the sink behind the chair and the naked man, and Stevie heard the tap being turned on, just as he rolled back into consciousness.

  Water splashed in his pasty white face.

  Martello tried to plead with his eyes, but it was also useless.

  Rossi hauled back with the Louisville Slugger yet another time, and the bat caught Steven Martello flush on the left arm. Stevie passed out, but shortly thereafter, another glass of liquid hit his face, and he was again restored.

  Both arms were ruined. A surgeon would be severely challenged to repair either of them. Bone arose from the left forearm, and Martello was bleeding profusely from the wound.

  “You made me splinter my goddam ball bat,” Rossi told him.

  The voice was almost soothing, Stevie thought when yet another shower of water brought him back into agony.

  “Can’t have fuckin’ thieves in my crew, Steven.”

  Martello wanted to beg him to end it, but all he could do was sputter and slobber behind the duct tape that encircled the middle of his head.

  Then the Outfit chief drew back the Slugger one last time and the barrel of the bat came rushing at Steven Martello’s face.

  Afterward, Ben Rossi brought in his two pit bulls, Vince Cabretta and Manny Fortunato. They were his bodyguards, his point men.

  “Cut him out of there and then clean up the mess and get rid of this piece of shit. And wait until it’s dark to get him into the trunk. Make sure there’s no body to fuck this all up. Can you two idiots handle that?”

  Cabretta was the tall, gangly one. Fortunato was squat and simian, but he was the stronger and meaner of the two, although Vince was a killer in his own right.

  “Yeah, we’ll take care of it, Ben,” Cabretta said.

  “Take him out into the alley. Can you two figure that out all by yourselves?” Rossi said.

  There was almost a smile on his face.

  Almost.

  *

  “Hey, Nick. I told you to keep that bicycle out of the street. Don’t you ever listen?”

  This time there really was a smile on Rossi’s face.

  There was a streak of white on either side of his head, but the rest of his mane was black, so black that it shone blue in the sunlight.

  Rossi sat on the front porch of his inelegant bungalow in Cicero. It used to be his father’s house when the old man was still breathing, but a gunshot wound to the head by an unknown assassin stopped his clock about ten years ago, just about the time Rossi assumed the reins of his father’s crew. They operated out of Berwyn, a western suburb of the city, and out of the entire southwest side of Chicago. Their ‘kingdom’ ranged from the lake on the east to Oak Lawn on the west. It went from the Near North Side to Beverly on the south perimeter. All of Berwyn and a chunk of Cicero belonged to Benedetto Rossi and his crew, as well.

  The house belied his wealth, but Ben took a page from Old Man Daly on that one. Both men lived without ostentation in simple homes that became more fancy once you entered the front doors. Inside, it was a different story, but it didn’t pay to flaunt your shit where the cops could see it.

  “I told you to get out of the street with that damned thing. Nicky.”

  The thirteen-year-old zoomed by Rossi on his bicycle, but Nick caught a glimpse of the old man’s icy stare, and he jumped the curb and got back on the sidewalk.
<
br />   “People who don’t listen turn out like those goddamned dinosaurs.”

  The boy jumped off his bike and left it lying on the postage stamp sized front lawn. There was a large backyard, though, where Rossi grilled sausages in the summer. Steaks, too. But Italian sausage was a house specialty at the Rossi’s.

  Nick was Ben and Carmen’s only child. They’d tried for more, but there were problems with Nick’s birthing, and the surgeon had to tie her tubes. The doctor said another one would kill Carmen, so the decision was a no-brainer.

  Carmen Rossi emerged from the bungalow and sat down next to her husband on the two cheap lawn chairs they used to sit on the porch that faced the sidestreet here in Cicero.

  Cicero was the home hunting grounds for Capone, one of the progenitors of the Outfit in the ‘20s. Rossi liked Cicero because it was ‘ethnic.’ There were lots of Italians and lots of Polacks, but now in 1991, the neighborhood, down aways, was changing because the tootsoons were encroaching the territory, the blacks, just as they were all throughout the southwest side, and there was nothing even Ben Rossi could do about the changing color of the ‘hood.

  Carmen Rossi was his wife of eighteen years. She had put on a little poundage, but she still had that voluptuous figure that had attracted him when he met her in his early twenties. Now he was pushing forty, as Carmen was, but she still made his blood pulse in all the right spots, and she damn well knew it.

  Carmen also knew about the girlfriends and the whores that he visited. She never caught him at it, but she knew what men like her husband were up to on their ‘Friday night dates.’ It was something you put up with, but she never really got used to it.

  She had full, pouty lips and long tresses of auburn hair that flowed down to the middle of her back.

  She was wearing a summer dress that didn’t hide what she was carrying, and she knew it pleased her husband. He leaned over to her and kissed her firmly on the lips.

  Nick came tearing back out of the house and burst down the front steps toward the bike on the lawn.

  “You just came in,” Benedetto complained.

  “It isn’t even dark,” the boy replied.

  He was more handsome than his father, and Ben knew there’d be problems with young girls in the near future. The kid sported a bigger weapon, a bigger dick, than the old man, and Ben knew his son would be bait for young things, in a hurry. Carmen took their son to mass every Sunday, but the Church didn’t seem to have an answer for the call of lust, the Outfit prince knew.

  “It isn’t nearly dark,” the boy again protested.

  “Dinner in an hour,” Carmen warned him. “Uncle Marty’s coming over with your cousin Joey. We’re gonna grill some steaks, and you better be here.”

  “Yeah, Ma.”

  “I love you,” she told the teenager.

  “Yeah, Ma.”

  He took off and jumped the curb into the street again, and Rossi rose out of his lawn chair in a lunge that made the aluminum seat fly backward.

  “Sit down, Ben. Whattayougonna do?”

  He looked over at Carmen. The red rage evaporated like spent smoke.

  “We could have a little fun for an hour,” he told her with a sly grin on his dark face.

  “In your dreams.”

  She got up off the lawn chair and opened the screen door and then the wooden entry. They had the air on because it was August and it swampland hot and humid. Ben got up and followed her inside. He grabbed her from behind and squeezed her D-cupped breasts and he jutted his groin against her backside, even before they got through the door.

  “Jesus, Ben. The neighbors!”

  “They can get laid all by themselves.”

  She turned and kissed him, this time with a thrusting tongue that made his blood and everything else rise.

  It was then that they heard the crash and the high-pitched scream of an adolescent male.

  *

  His luck seemed all bad. Erin was gone for a long time, and there was literally nothing on the horizon. The most recent woman in his life, Celia, wound up dead, the result of a hail of bullets from a gangbanger’s bodyguards, and even if she hadn’t been slain, he would have had to arrest her for the killings of a few other gangbangers who’d taken her son Andres’ life out at Cabrini Green, in the projects. And Celia was black. There was that hurdle standing between them. Her race meant nothing to Parisi, but it lurked there in the real world in spite of the passion he’d had for the black nurse. Celia exacted revenge on Andres’ murderers, but in the process she’d become a suspect that Jimmy had to deal with. Her death had thwarted the justice that Jimmy Parisi would have had to visit on the woman he loved.

  She was long gone, as his wife Erin was, a victim of cancer at far too early an age. Beloved spouse. Best friend. He thought he’d got lucky, but then she was stolen from him, just as Celia had been.

  He’d gone out with women, a few of them for a substantial time. But they had all come to naught. And now there was no one, and Jimmy suffered the universal pain of loneliness.

  He tried to concentrate on Mike and Mary, his two children, but they were getting older. Mike was a freshman at St. Rita High School, and Mary went to an all-girls Catholic secondary school on 87th Street on the southside. She was a junior.

  Jimmy wanted to immerse himself in the kids, but they had their own lives and interests. And Mary was now beginning to date. She had just turned seventeen, and Mike was fourteen. His boy was not yet in the grip of all of his hormonal bent, but it wouldn’t be long. Mary was social, but she wasn’t boy-crazy, thank Christ. Jimmy had no idea how he would handle it when their pots started boiling over. Body chemistry was a monster at their ages, and Jimmy had another reason to mourn Erin. She could handle their romantic difficulties, but Parisi didn’t have a clue.

  *

  Doc Gibron, his partner in Homicide, picked him up at the curb in front of Jimmy’s brick dwelling. They took turns driving to work in order to save a little on gas, which was becoming more dear by the month. They alternated weekly in their car pooling.

  They got the message as soon as they entered Parisi’s cubicle with the window that overlooked Lake Michigan. The window was Jimmy’s highlight, here at Headquarters in the Loop.

  He put down the phone and looked at Gibron.

  “Shit, Doc. It’s a thirteen-year-old kid. A boy.”

  Parisi could see Doc’s eyes drop to the floor. Gibron hated investigating the death of children. A case of a drive-by shooting of two young black girls on the west side had almost ruined his partner. It took a two month leave of absence to rebound from that one.

  The accident happened in Cicero, but the Cicero police called Chicago for assistance. When Parisi heard whose son it was, he understood the need for reinforcements from the city.

  “I’m afraid this guy is going to go for the driver’s throat,” Lieutentant Bill Macy of the Cicero PD told Jimmy and Doc. “I know you’ve been looking at Rossi in the city for all kinds of shit, and I just thought you ought to be a presence on this one. We’ll handle all the formal crap, but I just thought you two should have a head’s up.”

  “Who’s the driver?” Parisi queried.

  Doc couldn’t look at the crumpled body of the boy. The photographers were still shooting photos of the scene, and Doc looked like he wanted to bolt, Jimmy feared.

  “You can wait back in the cruiser,” Jimmy offered.

  “No fucking way.”

  Macy was a big man with an imposing height of about six-six. He had to go close to three hundred pounds. He looked like he could give the Bears a hand at tackle.

  “Rossi give you any trouble?” Jimmy asked.

  “That’s what scared the hell out of me, out of all of us,” Macy replied. “He never said a goddam word. It was his eyes that iced me, Jimmy. Never saw a look like he gave the driver, but he never took a step toward him. The guy’s name is David Johansen. Shit, he lives just four doors down. The kid just appeared out in the street. He was riding the sidewalk, and th
en he bolted out into the street and crashed right into Johansen’s grill. The boy was dead on impact. Crushed his skull, broke his neck. Never knew what hit him, the ME says.”

  “Where’s Rossi?” Doc said.

  “At the house with his wife. She’s a mess, like you’d expect. Inconsolable…You want to come with me when we talk to them?”

  “I think we’ll take a pass. Thanks for the offer, though. And thanks for letting us in on everything. It looks like just one of those things. No?”

  “I don’t think that matters to Rossi, I’m afraid. I think if I were this poor son of a bitch Johansen, I’d be looking to get out of the Western Hemisphere,” Macy pronounced.

  “We can only come at Rossi when he crosses into Chicago, unfortunately,” Parisi apologized.

  “Yeah. Too bad. This could get very messy, Jimmy.”

  Parisi wanted to get his partner the hell out of there. The scene was marred by a lot of blood, and they were only just now getting out the body bag. He patted Gibron on the back, and the two Homicide detectives walked back slowly to their unmarked cruiser.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cabretta and Fortunato sat across the desk in the sound-proofed basement office that was located beneath the Italian-American Café on west 95th Street in Oak Lawn. It was Rossi’s center of operations. The room was cleaned immaculately after the mess with Stevie, and Rossi was very particular that they’d bleached all the surfaces in the cubicle. The swivel chair had been thoroughly sanitized, and any evidence had been obliterated by the thorough purge.

  Ben Rossi sat in that same chair where Stevie met his demise, and it didn’t seem to bother Rossi that he’d murdered a man in a savage fashion precisely where he now sat. Ben was a fan of old movies, however, and the ending of Casablanca made him weep like a child, every time he watched the VCR tape, and he’d watched the film at least a hundred times. He always viewed it alone, and he never sat with Carmen or anyone else in his den at the house in Cicero.

  “You take this fuck Johansen out, and you do it very quietly because they’re gonna know it was me who gave the order. I want every trace of that piece of shit to disappear from the planet. Am I being completely clear to you two?”