Poison Justice

“Covering my assets, that’s what.” Grogen halted, lowered his weapon and studied the engineer of the future.

Mikey “The Pumpkin” Gagliano had broken out in a sweat. He swore as he noticed the corpse dumped by the Hummer and fired off more questions, lacing them all with the “f” word as if he’d invented it.

“Don’t worry about it,” Grogen told him as he made out the first faint buzz of rotor blades to the southeast. “You have my money?”

He waited for Gagliano to make the move, wondering how the capo got his nickname. Figure the fat head with cauliflower ears, a squat walrus frame with a buffet of pasta for a midsection had helped earn him the tag. The capo wasn’t exactly dressed for warfare of any kind, standing there in his silk threads, Italian loafers and five pounds of gold. Typical hood. It was hard for Grogen to believe this was the future of the New York Mob, but the ilk of the Mafia lineage was little more than a long succession of thugs with a lust for money, power and pleasure. Brute animals, more hyena than lion, but still dangerous criminal scum.

“Joey! Bring the case!” the capo ordered.

Gagliano was on the verge of composing himself, squaring his shoulders, face hardening to street tough, when the rotor wash blew a squall over the rise. The hoods were shouting and cursing once again and Grogen was smiling as The Pumpkin jacked up the decibels of outrage at the sight of the winged behemoth.

“You wanna explain what’s goin’ on with that kind of firepower? I thought we had a deal, Grogen, but I’m startin’ to feel you’re ready to break it off in my ass.”

“You just worry about me and my money,” Grogen shouted back.

The capo was unable to take his eyes off the black warbird. It was a fearsome sight, and Grogen completely understood his anxiety. Hovering to the rear of Gagliano’s SUV, Dragonship was a hybrid cross between the Apache and the Black Hawk. Winged pylons housed ten Hellfire rockets. Grogen knew a 30 mm chain gun in the nose turret was ready to cut loose on his word and grind them into puddles of human pasta and marinara.

Grogen grabbed the briefcase from Gagliano’s errand boy and hefted it. “Something tells me you couldn’t exactly pack two million in this,” he shouted.

“You get the balance when I deliver the merchandise.”

“That wasn’t the deal.”

“Neither was your messenger boy tellin’ me to bring space suits if we wanted to check what we’re buyin’.”

“What you’re buying, pal, isn’t any tub of irradiated water.”

“So you better be right.”

“Heads up,” Grogen called to his men. He tossed the briefcase toward the GMC. “Oh, I’m right, Mikey. I’m so right, if the people you’re unloading it to get popped and start singing to the Feds like your boy back home we’ll all be on death row faster than you can suck down a plate of linguini.”

Grogen watched the fear flicker in Gagliano’s cunning eyes. Thugs. Animals. Sociopaths. To do business with such loathsome creatures stung his professional pride.

What had started as his predecessor going for his own pot of gold now dumped Grogen into deep waters already chummed. And there were far bigger man-eaters in this game than a bunch of leg-breaking hoods.

As Gagliano barked the order to roll the forklift down the ramp of the big rig’s cargo hold, Grogen came to understand a little more about the future—what would separate the winners from losers. It all boiled down to survival of the fittest in his mind, but those without conscience or scruples held an edge. With what was on the table for the players in this future they would have to turn two blind eyes and harden the heart still more if they were to use the toxin the way he believed they would when it reached its principal buyer.

Grogen backed up, and his men moved away from the transport. He saw Gagliano making faces, holding out his arms.

“What the…You booby-trapped my merchandise?” The Pumpkin was startled.

Backpedaling farther from the truck, Grogen chuckled as he nodded at the forklift driver. “I’m merely establishing my comfort area, in case your driver tips it off the pallet.”

Gagliano scowled and waddled away from the forklift. “You drop it, it’s your ass!” he screamed at the driver.

“By the way, Mikey. There’s been another change of plans,” Grogen said, grinning.

“How come I know I ain’t gonna like this already?”

“Your problem back home?”

“It’s under control.”

“Wrong. It’s now under my control. See, you and me, Mikey, we’re taking this ride to the end of the line.”

“You don’t trust us to fix the problem? You maybe worried about us stiffin’ you on the rest of the money?”

Grogen smiled into the darkness. “No truer words have you ever spoken.”

1

When United States Department of Justice Special Agent in Charge Thomas Peary considered the stats he reached the same conclusion he had during his first five years on the job.

The future of America belonged to the criminal.

Why bother fighting at all? he wondered. Once upon a time he’d been a devout Catholic, a family guy even, but reality had a strange and uneasy way of making a man a staunch believer only in number one. If there was a God, he thought, he was surely looking away from a world gone mad. Let the wild beasts eat one another.

Peary had problems of his own to solve, and the first of several solutions was sitting right under his roof. Soon, he would be packing up, moving on to a paradise of his own making and choosing. It might as well already be written in stone.

Peary was at the kitchen table, thinking about the culture of crime, when the future downfall of the New York Mafia fell into the late-night routine. Peary nearly bit his cigarette in two when the first chords of the same song he heard every night on VH1 videos blasted from the living room. By now he knew the lineup of hits by heart and had heard the songs repeated so many times the past week that he thought he might go ballistic any moment.

And, of course, every time a favorite was aired Jimmy “The Butcher” Marelli had to crank up the volume until it shook the floor and the walls of the Catskill hunting lodge.

Peary looked at the slab of human veal perched on the edge of the couch. His superiors claimed Marelli was last of the old school Mafia, honor among thieves and all that nonsense. He was a dinosaur among the new coke-sniffing crowd of backshooters and Mob clowns who killed while driving past sidewalk crowds, indiscriminately blasting any and everybody as long as they got their target. A button man who did his work one on one, face-to-face for the Cabriano Family. The Butcher was famous for whacking malcontents, traitors and songbirds, loyal only to the late Don Michael Cabriano. Only what Jimbo purportedly so loathed way back when he had now become.

The Mob was notoriously creative when it came to weaving legends about their own and making myth stick as truth for wise guy, public and G-man consumption. In this instance, the Justice Department had flown Marelli up the flagpole as a marquee hitter with a body count of biblical proportions to his credit. Whether or not that was true, Peary figured the hit man was costing the Justice Department a small fortune in wine and Scotch, cigars and cannoli alone. Not to mention all the veal linguini in white clams and twenty other pasta dishes he concocted and ate around the clock.

How many bodies, Peary wondered, really came attached to this baby-sitting detail on the government’s tab? There were fifty-two kills the FBI and Justice knew about. The Butcher confirmed that during an eighteen-hour Q and A session. All the I’s were dotted, T’s crossed on the Who’s Who of Mafiadom during his three decades of slaughter. There were at least two to twenty other corpses they were guessing had his brand on them, maybe more. Only Marelli enjoyed playing the big shot, stringing them along, feeding them just enough to have the FBI drag a river or dig up some earth in the New Jersey woods. Beyond cold-blooded murder he’d been granted full immunity for extortion, truck hijacking, assault, assault with intent, pimping, pandering and drug trafficking. There was also witness intimidation, tampering and execution. The deal was enough to make Peary wonder if the Justice Department had watched its balls go out the door with the change in administration, but he’d made his own plans well in advance to castrate the whole bull. The time to act, and get the hell out, had just about arrived.

Shaking his head, Peary watched the hit man, decked out in a flaming Hawaiian shirt and white silk slacks, staring dumbly at the blaring television. He wondered what the world was coming to. He was getting sick of being forced to breathe the same air as the pampered killer.

Suddenly Peary felt his hand inch toward his shoulder-holstered USP Expert .45. Ten hollowpoints in the clip, and a nasty little resolution to the noise problem flamed to mind.

“Sir? It’s your move.”

Peary laid an angry eye on Hobbs. The pink-faced kid was maybe two years out of Quantico, attached to the task force at the last moment when some desk-lifer at the FBI had, for reasons unknown, been able to catch and burn up the ear of the Attorney General. FBI, Justice, U.S. Marshals, everybody wanted in on this gig. It was a chance, he figured, a trophy for someone’s mantel on the climb up the pecking order. Problem was, all the headshed wanted to do was make sure The Butcher was coddled and comfortable, practically warning them all to be careful not to upset or press him too much for information on the Cabriano Family. What next? Bring on the strippers? Everybody chip in for the guy’s lap dance? All the big consideration and fawning the murdering asshole got, what happened to paying for your crimes?

Peary watched the FBI rookie shrink into himself under his steely gaze, then checked the board. Back-gammon was the game, and they were playing for a four-hour watch, thirty minutes per win. But the way Hobbs had been rolling double fives and sixes on a whim and bumping him all over the board the past two hours, Peary figured he owed the kid two weeks’ worth of shift duty.

“With all due respect, you need to relax, sir. Don’t let him get to you.”

“What’s that?”

The kid showed a weak smile. “It could be worse. It could be rap.”

Peary hit the kid in the face with a fat cloud that could have choked half a city block.

Hobbs flapped a hand at the smoke, making a face like he would puke. He coughed for another moment, then said, “I mean, he’s a thug, sir, and a pain in the ass, but he can cook.”