“Let’s finish it,” Ridley said, propped on his braces, a flicker of pain in his expression from the ride down the potholed road.
“I think the Dio family clap has finally climbed from your dick up into your brain, Sal,” Clete said. “Look around you. You think all these people are going to forget what they see here?”
Leslie Wellstone walked toward Clete, a nine-millimeter hanging from his left hand. He was no longer smiling. I saw him whisper in Clete’s ear and then step back, his eyes glinting with whatever sliver of glass or ounce of poison he had managed to put inside Clete’s system.
“Why don’t you share it with me, Sal?” I said.
“I look like a dead Italian?” he said.
“Yeah, you’re Sally Dio,” I said. “Punks can read books and hire speech coaches, but you’re still the same punk who pretended he was a blues musician or whatever else was in style at the time. You’re a gutter rat, Sal. It’s in your genes.”
“Know what I was telling Clete, Dave? That both of you are about to be dead for a long time. But it’s going to come to you in pieces. Mr. Waxman over there loves his work. There are anonymous mounds all over this country that are silent tributes to his skill.”
“He’s the guy who killed Ridley Wellstone’s wife and stepdaughter, isn’t he?” I said.
“When you’re in the ground, you won’t be dead, Dave. You’ll be choking on dirt and trying to get it out of your eyes and ears and stop it from raining down on your chest. Just before everything goes black, maybe there’ll be a big illumination for you, and you can talk to all the other people he’s killed. You think that’s the way it’s going to come, Dave? That the earth will crush the light out of your eyes and in your last seconds you’ll realize there’s no mystery about life, that you’re just a sorry sack of worm food down there in the hole with all the other sacks of worm food?”
“Do what you’re going to do and be done. Listening to you is a real drag,” I said.
His eyes locked on mine, and for a second I saw his self-assurance slip, as though the ridiculing voice of his father, a gangster who had run all the vice along the Texas coast, was echoing in his memory. Then the glint of cruelty that defined the Sally Dio I had known on Flathead Lake years ago came back into his eyes. The tip of his tongue moved over his lips. “Watch closely.”
He walked to the three men who had been waiting inside the cargo van when we arrived. He rested his right hand — the one that resembled a shriveled monkey’s paw — on the shoulder of a blond man and looked at him. “The woman hit you in the face with a tire iron?” he said.
“I got careless, that’s all,” the blond man said.
“We can’t have broads doing that to us, can we?
You want to do the honors?”
“Sir?”
“Want to pop her? I’m going to let Moo-Moo pop my wife if he wants to.”
“No sir, we were just doing a job, Mr. Wellstone.”
“No, no, when somebody hits you with a tire iron, it’s personal. Come over here, fellows. Jimmy Dale ruined another man’s marriage and deserves a special fate. The woman, however, is just a meddlesome pain in the neck. I think she should receive rough mercy, don’t you?”
The three men from the van followed Sally Dio to the edge of the pit and stared down inside it, looking at one another, looking again into the pit, unsure what they should say next. It was obvious none of them wanted to be there. It was also obvious they feared the man who called himself Leslie Wellstone and did not want to displease him.
Then Sally Dio turned around and said, “What?” He said it as though someone behind him had spoken to him. “Wait here a minute, fellows,” he said, and began walking toward his brother. As he did, he nodded to the man holding the Mac-10.
I had seen a Mac-10 at a weapons exhibition and had even held one in my hands. But I had never seen one fired. I had been told that a Mac-10 could discharge from one thousand to sixteen hundred rounds of forty-five-caliber ammunition per minute. It was difficult to imagine firepower of that magnitude in a weapon so compact it could be held and aimed like a handgun.
Billy opened up, the suppressor eating most of the sound of the discharge, the spent shell casings clinking and bouncing on the ground. In a brief instant, the three victims seemed to stare in disbelief at the reversal of their fortunes, their mouths dropping open, their palms rising defensively. Then their clothes erupted with red flowers, their faces and skulls bursting into a bloody mist. They jackknifed backward into the pit, and I heard them strike the earth heavily, and then it was over except for the sound of the last ejected shells tinkling on the dirt.
Jamie Sue Wellstone was weeping in the background, her arms clenched across her chest, her back shaking, as though she were standing inside a cold wind without a coat.
“Do you want to get down in the pit by yourself, Clete, or do you want our friend Harold to put you in there?” Sally Dio said. “No matter what you do, no matter what you say, the end result will be the same. You can put yourself in the ground, or Billy can shoot you in the legs, and he and Harold can do it for you. But you’re going into the ground, Clete, and you’re going into it alive. Then Jamie Sue and Dave are going to join you. Maybe you and Jamie Sue can have a chat, a last bit of pillow talk.”
“I guess that means we’ll never be pals. So how about we leave it at this?” Clete said. He gathered all the saliva and bile in his mouth and spit it full in Sally Dio’s face.
Dio recoiled. He lifted his shirt and wiped Clete’s spittle off his mutilated face. But before he could speak, his hired man Billy, who had dropped the empty magazine from the Mac-10 and replaced it with a fresh one, clutched his arm. “There’s somebody down the slope, Mr. Wellstone. I just saw him.”
“Nobody came up the road. Nobody could be there. You probably saw a bear,” Dio said.
“No sir, I saw a guy in a hat.”
“Get down there, Moo-Moo, and check it out,” Ridley Wellstone said to the other gunman.