Also in the warehouse: Nick Pagano. Donnie Goretti. Tony Cioccolanti. Jake Amante. Angie Corti. Another man Alex didn’t know, but who’d been standing with Angie at the hospital all night, so a Sacco man.
And Alex himself. Was he about to be trussed up and beaten, too?
Is that what Nick had meant about seeing justice and understanding?
He stood back, irrationally hoping the don would forget about him.
“Do we know which one killed my daughter?”
“I’m sorry, don,” Tony said. “Neither one has spoken yet.”
“But you know they’re from Cuccia?”
Jake stepped forward and pulled a white cloth from his pocket. He handed it to Nick, who unfolded it.
From where he stood, Alex could see what the cloth held: a piece of skin, about the size of the don’s palm, with ink.
Nick turned then and looked straight at Alex. He tipped his hand so Alex could see the ink clearly: an elaborate, old-fashioned C with a crown of thorns hooked over the top. “This is Cuccia’s crest. His capos wear this ink.” Turning back to the other men, he asked, “Only one had it?”
Jake nodded.
“Which one?”
Alex didn’t see the answer; he’d gone temporarily blind from the bloody rush of relief. He wasn’t a target tonight. He was a student.
He heard Nick say, “Get everything they know. Every last thing.” He turned back to Alex. “You watch them. You learn. But do not get in their way.”
“Capisco, don.”
~oOo~
He watched.
He learned.
He stayed out of the way.
For more than an hour, he watched and learned. And if the night had not already been such a nightmare, he might have lost his mind.
Angie and Tony did most of the work, and they did it nearly in tandem, as if choreographed. They hung these Cuccia men from hooks, just like Alex had once been, when he’d been suspected of treason.
But he understood now that on the night that still haunted his dreams, Angie had been nearly gentle with him. Now he saw what Angie could do, would do, to another human being, and believed he hadn’t yet seen the limit of his willingness to make pain.
Tony was the same; he’d learned, after all, from Angie, and they’d worked together for years. It showed in their techniques—not identical, but certain things were similar.
Jesus, he’d been watching this so long he’d taken to critiquing technique?
All the other men stood silently, watching. Were they, too, so much more seasoned than he, thinking similar thoughts? Was it possible to become accustomed to this?
Angie and Tony carved and sliced, punched, pulled, twisted, removed, inserted. Fire. Ice. Sharp. Blunt. They worked until they got ready answers to every question; they worked until these hardened men cried for mercy with breaths they could barely muster. When they learned that the one Tony was working on had shot Donna Sacco and the one Angie had had killed Elisa and shot Trey, Tony and Angie switched targets and went back to work.
Three times, Alex saw Tony turn to Nick, and Nick shake his head. Three times, Tony went back to his work.
Angie never faltered. They ran out of questions and kept going. They’d both stripped to their bare chests, and their sweaty skin gleamed in the harsh warehouse lights. Alex had forgotten how scarred Tony’s back was.
“Enough,” Nick finally said, and Angie and Tony both stopped.
It occurred to Alex that Angie was a Pagano man again. He’d gone over to the Sacco Family under terms Alex was far too insignificant to understand, and he was no longer one of Nick’s men, except for right now. Right now, disassembling the body of the sniper who’d shot his wife and nearly killed her, Angie was Nick’s chief enforcer again.
“We have our memento mori,” Nick said. “Are you ready to finish it, Ange?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you want to do it?”
Angie turned to his blood-smeared table of tools. He set the serrated knife he’d last been using down and plucked what looked like an extra-thick ice pick in his latex-gloved fingers. He walked up to the flaccid, gasping body—which now more resembled a side of beef than a human being—and shoved the pick through the man’s throat. He’d picked a place low on the neck, near the shoulder. Where Donna Sacco had taken his bullet.
When he pulled the pick out, blood spurted up like a fountain. Angie let it spurt. He walked away and faced Nick. “I’m done.”
The man was still alive, struggling through his death throes, but Angie’s back was to him.