Frank Lazzaro was a big man, six foot four, tipping the scales at 270. Much of that bulk was fat, but enough of it was muscle. He might have hit the half-century mark on his last birthday, but he hadn’t gone soft. In his business a man couldn’t afford to get soft.
His head was small and oval, bullet-shaped, cushioned by a pillow of fat at the back of his neck. He had his hair shaved close in a crew cut once every two weeks by a barber named Angelo who told dirty jokes and kept a stash of Penthouse magazines for his customers. Frank’s hair had been thick and black in his youth, but as he’d gone gray, he’d cut it shorter and shorter, until now it resembled a thin spread of iron filings. Even his eyebrows were gray. They flickered over small eyes tucked away inside wrinkled folds of fat.
Those eyes were narrowed in worry now, as he drove south to Devil’s Hook.
For the past few days, his nephew had been pestering him with voicemail messages, insisting he had something important to talk about, something that required a face-to-face. Frank had ignored the kid as long as possible. Alec was always getting enthused about something. Mostly he wanted to get in on the action, join the organization, an option Frank had steadfastly refused. He was a good judge of talent, and he knew his nephew didn’t have the stuff for that kind of life. He would never be a player, only a wannabe.
Probably the recent spate of calls was about the same fugazy bullshit. It made his head hurt just to think about it. But he hadn’t been able to dodge his nephew forever. Today he’d agreed to a sit-down after the kid got back from the cottage; they would connect by phone and work out the details of a meet.
But Alec hadn’t called, hadn’t answered Frank’s calls, hadn’t returned Frank’s messages. This was troubling. There was no answer at the cottage, and according to news reports, the island had been completely evacuated. Frank was going there anyway.
Frank knew the cottage well. He’d bought it himself and given it to Alec. The transfer was not an example of his largeness of heart. It was basically a ruse. If the feds ever came after him with that RICO shit and tried to seize his assets, it wouldn’t hurt to have some property tucked away in another person’s name.
Cohawkin Bridge, the main causeway to the island, had been blocked off with a row of huge trash bins to prevent looters from taking advantage of the storm, but Frank found a smaller bridge obstructed only by a parked police car, currently unoccupied. He slipped the Mercedes into low gear, dug his bumper into the cruiser’s side door, and bulldozed the offending vehicle out of his way. There would be some damage to his car’s front end, but he had a mechanic who owed him a favor and would fix it at cost.
With the car butted aside, the way was clear—well, as clear as it could be in the midst of a fucking hurricane.
It was weird, passing through miles of desolation, a chain of ghost towns with boarded-up windows and sandbagged yards. Weirder still to know that a lot of this real estate would be gone, washed away, before Sandy was through. The bars and diners were all closed, the rows of 1950s era motels abandoned, the Army and Navy surplus stores shuttered. Over one town loomed a water tower sporting an image of two happy dolphins at play. It looked out of place, like a clown at a funeral.
The weather was rapidly deteriorating. Driving south along the main drag on Devil’s Hook was like taking a trip through one of those drive-through car washes. Sheets of rain rippled across the windshield. The wind gusted with enough force to knock both sideview mirrors off kilter.
Frank didn’t care. He’d been through many kinds of hell. By his standards, a hurricane hardly even registered as an inconvenience.
Half an hour after crossing over, he arrived at the cottage. Alec’s Porsche was out front, a bad sign. The kid should have been gone hours ago, along with everybody else.
From a gym bag in the Mercedes’ trunk Frank retrieved a Ruger .22. He kept it cocked and locked as he explored the cottage.
The front door was ajar, another cause for concern. The power was off, naturally. Every traffic light Frank had passed on the island had been dead, not that it had mattered, since nobody was on the road.
Gusts of windblown sand lashed the windows. Through the rippling glass he could see a bloom of whitecaps on the ocean. The walls trembled; pressing his palm flat against the plasterboard, he could feel the fury of the wind.
In the kitchen he discovered a flood tide of water and an open door to the cellar. Down below, the water was waist-high and still rising.
He had a feeling Alec was down there, and his feelings rarely steered him wrong. He stripped to his briefs and waded into the chilly black water. It took him five minutes of searching, guided by the beam of a big steel flashlight, but in the end he found his nephew, afloat in a corner near the plumbing’s main shutoff valve.
Frank had seen a lot of death, and he wasn’t troubled by the sight of a corpse. The fact that it was his nephew disturbed him in a distant way, like the first faint rumble of thunder that announced the approach of a storm. The rumble grew distinctly louder when he flipped the kid over and his flashlight pinpointed two holes in his chest.
Those holes had stopped leaking blood a few hours ago, but Frank had no difficulty identifying them as bullet holes—.38 caliber, he estimated—a pair of them, nice and neat, the work of a pro.
“Fuck,” he whispered. “Fucking fuck fuck.”
His bare foot trod on a wrench that lay on the cellar floor. Evidently Alec had been trying to close the shutoff valve. Frank didn’t need a wrench. With one hand and only modest effort, he cranked the valve shut. He’d never lost an arm wrestling contest or failed at any other test of strength.
Then he muscled his nephew’s body into his arms. The dead man’s clothes were sodden and heavy, and the high water impeded movement, but Frank barely noticed the strain of carrying his burden across the flooded room and up the dripping stairs.