Shock Waves(47)

A frigging duck conviction, for cryin' out loud, and it had followed him these twenty years, until it didn't make him see red anymore when someone called him Ducks. He laughed it off now, and hardly gave a thought to ripping out the driver's lungs.

But there was no surefire security, not any more. The Feds were everywhere, and even granting that the brotherhood's worst enemy, that bastard Bolan, had gone up in smoke a few years back, the syndicate had never quite recovered from the damage it sustained when he was still alive and kicking ass.

Minelli's meeting was designed to fix all that and put the territories back together, better than they were before. And Fiorini knew that Jules was skeptical — of Don Minelli's leadership, at any rate — but still, you had to give the guy his due for putting all of it together.

Patriarcca was an old-style capo, and he shied away from new ideas unless they made him plenty money with a minimum of risk. He had begun to see Minelli's rise as some kind of a threat to his own West Coast empire, and while Fiorini didn't really grasp the logic of it all, he had been smart enough to keep from thinking for himself, to keep on playing smart and taking orders.

From his entry to the brotherhood, Fiorini realized that he had not been marked by destiny to ride the throne. His role as Patriarcca's regional commander fit him fine, and he was glad to do the old man's bidding, but damn, he hated traveling.

The crew chief swiveled ponderously in his seat and craned to look across his shoulder, past the gunners in the back seat, through the broad rear window of the Continental. Running close behind them, four more tanks were bearing gunners to the meeting, bringing in the cavalry to make Don Patriarcca feel secure.

It would make Don Minelli as mad as hell, but the crew chief thought his boys could hold their own if it came down to any kind of heavy action. He had picked them with the same discerning eye he had for women, passing over those who showed a trace of weakness or reluctance when it came to dirty work.

But Ducks was hoping that it would not come to killing there, on foreign soil, where his connections stood for nothing and he had no place to run in case it all went wrong. Back home, around Seattle, he could count on grease with cops and politicians, on his capo's help, but here...

The crew chief shook his momentary doubts away and sat up straighter in his seat. The old man would have told him if a war was in the wings. This little bit of flexing would establish Patriarcca as a man of substance, nothing more, and if Minelli didn't like it, well, the upstart don could just go screw himself. He was a kid, when you came down to it, still wet behind the ears, no matter if his family was twice as large as Patriarcca's, man for man. He didn't have the strong connections Jules had, up and down the coast back home.

"So, how much farther is it?"

"Couple of miles," the wheelman told him. "Ought to see it soon."

The crew chief checked his watch and sighed.

Another couple of miles. Six long hours on his butt had made him stiff.

Tommy Fiorini settled back, puffing busily on his cigar, and concentrated on the darkened road ahead. A few more minutes, and he could relax... or really start to sweat.

* * *

Ernesto Minelli tapped a fork against his wineglass, waited for the murmuring of voices to die down. When it was silent, he stood up, surveying faces ranged along each side of the extended conference table.

On his left and right, close by, the other New York dons were watching with a mixture of distrust and curiosity. He gave up looking for a message in the faces, realizing all of them had suffered losses through the day, aware that some suspected him of being at the bottom of it all.

D'Antoni, from New Jersey, glowered through a screen of thick cigar smoke, big hands clenched together on the table, fingers working nervously. The hands were bandaged, making Minelli wonder just exactly what form Bobby's "accident" that afternoon had taken... but he pushed it out of mind, glancing around the table, reading faces, moods.

No thaw from Patriarcca or his shadow, Cigliano — but the New York capo had expected none. They would resist him, almost certainly, no matter how he broached the subject on his mind, and he would have to deal with their hostility later. Soon, now, he thought. Quite soon.

The others watched him noncommittally, adopting outward attitudes of wait and see. Chicago's Paulo Vaccarelli sat near Santos Bataglia, out of Boston, both men smoking and staring at him, faces impassive. Across the table, Miami's Jerry Lazia was stationed next to Vince Galante, speaking for the Kansas City-Cleveland axis. Finally, and closest, Aguirre of the New York end, were representatives of old Don Narozine's Baltimore contingent, waiting for the show to start.

The audience was in, and it was up to Don Ernesto to win them over... or, at least, to stall the hostiles long enough to give himself some breathing room.