He was right. Nick nodded and turned toward the school. Vio walked in with him, holding a cloth to his shoulder.
“They’re set up as planned. This is your play, Nick. I’ll back you.”
Too focused for words, Nick again only nodded. He straightened his tie and suit jacket, feeling Brian’s blood wetting his hands.
Bound and gagged, lying on the ground in the rubble of the cannibalized old school gymnasium, Emilio Zapata, Jaime Rojas, and Jackie Stone awaited their fate.
Rojas and Zapata bore the signs of struggle. They had been in the fight. Stone, though, had tried to flee, leaving his men behind. He’d been caught and dragged back. Other than the heavy sweat of fear that drenched his shirt, he looked nearly clean enough for Sunday church.
Nick moved to the center of the room and then nodded at Matty, who was solid, though obviously exhausted and freaked by the various events of the day so far, and what he knew was yet to come. Matty went immediately to Zapata and pulled him up to a seated position and removed his gag.
Nick squatted at his feet. “I am Nicolo Pagano, underboss of the Pagano Brothers of Rhode Island. Behind me is Silvio Marconi, underboss of the Marconi Family of Connecticut. We have representatives here today from all the families of New England. We are allied. We are in accord. And we are resolute. New England is our neighborhood—our turf. There is no corner in our neighborhood for Colombian drugs.”
Zapata, calm, said nothing. Nick respected that—there was nothing, at this point, for the man to say. He knew that Nick had not laid his cards down yet.
He turned and waved Sal DiNapoli forward, and he came, bringing a large, army-green duffel. Stone made a ruckus behind his duct-taped mouth. Nick ignored him.
“This is the cash Stone was meant to give you. One-point-five million dollars. And we have control of the drugs, as well. Here are the terms. You may take your drugs, and Stone’s cash”—again, Stone yelled, and Nick looked up at Matty, who knocked him out with the butt of a shotgun. What Nick needed from Stone came later. He would have liked to make him watch the rest of this exchange, but he could fill him in on the docks.
“You may take Stone’s cash. We want no proceeds from this business. But you sell your wares elsewhere, and you recognize that New England is sealed. We left Jaime here alive because we know he is your son-in-law and dear to you. Consider him, and the money, our good-faith gesture.” He stood. “There will not be another.”
Now Zapata spoke, his voice showing no signs of distress and very little accent. “And if I tell you no?”
“Then we keep the money, destroy the drugs, and send another kind of message to your brother Ramon. And your journey ends here on this floor. Several difficult hours from now.”
“Do you honestly think that you can keep us out of all New England? Are you some kind of crusader?”
Nick squatted down again. “No, Emilio. I am a businessman, like you. We run a different kind of business and show our power in a different way. Your drugs get in our way. Think of it this way: with this money”—he patted the duffel—“and your life, we are buying out New England from your conglomerate. I honestly don’t give a fuck where else you sell. Have the rest of the country—the rest of the world. But New England is ours.”
He stayed down, nearly eye-level with Zapata, and waited. The seconds passed. And then, Emilio Zapata nodded.
~oOo~
Back in Providence several hours later, Nick stood in the middle of an empty Pagano Brothers Shipping bay. Jackie Stone hung from the ceiling by a heavy hook on a winch line. Chi-Chi Rinaldi was still in his box.
The box was an old, military-regulation footlocker, about four feet by two feet by two feet. Chi-Chi was five-ten. He’d been in there, bound and hooded, for about eight hours. That itself was medieval-level torture. If he was still alive when Nick was ready, then he had an even worse fate waiting for him. Nick had no need to interrogate his former soldier. He had Jackie Stone for that.
He’d been working on Stone for about an hour. He had broken after about twenty minutes, but most of what he’d offered was background and names. Getting details about Church specifically or his future plans was proving more difficult. Stone had run at the fight; it wasn’t toughness giving him the strength to hold out. It was fear.
Nick had not yet decided whether he would end him or set him free. But Stone was flagging hard after an hour of Nick’s attention, and it was time to make the decision.
There were benefits and challenges to either approach: end him, and, with the dozen or so men he lost today, his entire enterprise would go down in flames, closing off a major supplier to Church—a supplier of more than drugs. That hurt would hamstring Church. But Stone was Church’s friend and close ally. Ending him could galvanize an already fractious opponent. If Church could pin it on the Paganos.