Cross (Alex Cross 12)

Chapter 49

MISTAKE. BAD ONE.

A New Jersey mob boss and former contract killer named Benny “Goodman” Fontana was whistling a bouncy Sinatra tune as he strolled around to the passenger side of his dark-blue Lincoln; then he opened the door with a flourish and a one-hundred-kilowatt smile that would have made Ol’ Blue Eyes proud.

A bosomy blond woman got out of the sedan, stretching her long legs like she was auditioning for the Rockettes. She was a former Miss Universe contestant, twenty-six years old, with some of the best moving parts money could buy. She was also a little too classy and hot for the mobster to have snagged without some cash having changed hands. Benny was a tough little weasel, but he wasn’t exactly a movie star, unless maybe you counted the guy who played Tony Soprano as one.

The Butcher watched, mildly amused, from his own car parked half a block down the street. He guessed that the blonde was setting Benny back five hundred or so an hour, maybe two grand for the night if Mrs. Fontana happened to be out of town visiting their daughter, who was tucked away in school at Marymount Manhattan.

Michael Sullivan checked his watch.

Seven fifty-two. This was payback for Venice. The beginning of payback anyway. The first of several messages he was planning to send.

At eight fifteen, he took his briefcase from the backseat, got out, and crossed the street, staying in the soft shadows of maple and elm trees. It didn’t take much waiting time for a blue-haired woman wrapped in a fur coat to come out of the apartment building. Sullivan held the door for her with a friendly smile and then let himself inside.

Everything was more or less the way he remembered it. Apartment 4C had been in the Family for years, ever since opportunities had started opening up in Washington for the mob. The place was a perk for anyone in town who needed some extra privacy, for whatever reason. The Butcher had used it himself once or twice when he was doing jobs for Benny Fontana. This was before John Maggione took over from his father, though, and began to shut the Butcher out.

Even the cheap Korean dead bolt on the front door was the same, or close enough. Another mistake. Sullivan jimmied it with a three-dollar awl from his workshop at home. He put the tool back into the briefcase and took out his gun and a surgical blade, a very special one.

The living room was mostly dark. Cones of light spilled in from two directions—the kitchen on his left, a bedroom on his right. Benny’s insistent grunting told Sullivan it was somewhere past halftime. He swiftly padded across the living room rug to the bedroom door and looked inside. Miss Universe was on top—no surprise—with her slender back to him.

“That’s it, baby. That’s what I like,” Benny said, and then, “I’m gonna put my finger—”

Sullivan’s silencer popped softly, and just once. He shot the former Miss Universe contestant in the back of her hairdo, and the woman’s blood and brains splattered all over Benny Fontana’s chest and face. The mobster yelled out like he’d been shot himself.

He managed to roll himself out from under the dead girl and then off the bed, away from the nightstand, also away from his own gun. The Butcher started to laugh. He didn’t mean to disrespect the mob boss, or disrespect the dead, but Fontana had done just about everything wrong tonight. He was getting soft, which was why Sullivan had come after him first.

“Hi there, Benny. How you been?” the Butcher said as he flipped on the overhead light. “We need to talk about Venice.”

He took out a scalpel that had a special edge for cutting muscle. “Actually, I need you to send a message to Mr. Maggione for me. Could you do that, Benny? Be a messenger boy? By the way, you ever hear of Syme’s operation, Ben? It’s a foot amputation.”

Chapter 50

MICHAEL SULLIVAN COULDN’T go right home to his family in Maryland, not after what he’d just done to Benny Fontana and his girlfriend. He was too riled up inside, his blood boiling. He was hot-flashing scenes from his old man’s shop in Brooklyn again—sawdust stored in a big cardboard barrel, the terra-cotta tile floor with white grout, handsaws, boning knives, meat hooks in the freezer room.

So he wandered around Georgetown for a while, looking for trouble if he could find the right kind. The thing of it was, he liked his ladies tucked in a little. He especially liked lawyers, MBAs, professor-librarian types—loved their glasses, the buttoned-down clothes, the conservative hairstyles. Always so in control of themselves.

He liked helping them lose some of that control, while blowing off a little steam of his own, relieving his stress, breaking all the rules of this dumbass society.

Georgetown was a good pickup place for him. Every other chippie he spotted on the street was a little too tightly wound. Not that there were so many to choose from, not at this time of night. But he didn’t need that many choices, just one good one. And maybe he’d already spotted her. He thought so anyway.

She looked like she could be a trial attorney, dressed to impress in that smart tweed outfit of hers. The heels ticktocked a steady rhythm on the sidewalk—this way, that way, this way, that way.

In contrast, Sullivan’s Nikes didn’t make much noise at all. With a hooded sweatshirt, he was just another Bobo jogger out for a late-night run in the neighborhood. If someone peeked from their window, that’s what they’d see.

But no one was looking, least of all Miss Tweedy. Tweedy Bird, he thought with a grin. Mistake. Hers.

She kept her stride city-fast, her leather purse and briefcase tucked like the key to the Da Vinci Code under one arm, and she stayed to the outside edge of the sidewalk—all smart moves for a woman alone on the street late at night. Her one mistake was not looking around enough, not taking in the surroundings. Not spotting the jogger who was walking behind her.

And mistakes could kill you, couldn’t they?

Sullivan hung back in the shade as Tweedy passed under a streetlamp. Nice pipes and a great ass, he noted. No ring on the left hand.

The high heels kept their rhythm steady on the sidewalk for another half block; then she slowed in front of a redbrick townhouse. Nice place. Nineteenth-century. From the look of it, though, one of those buildings that had been butchered into condos on the inside.

She pulled a set of keys from her purse before she even got to the front door, and Sullivan began to time his approach. He reached into his own pocket and took out a slip of paper. A dry-cleaning ticket? It didn’t really matter what it was.

As she put her key into the door, and before she pushed it open, he called out in a friendly voice. “Excuse me, miss? Excuse me? Did you drop this?”