Read Online Shattered by Jay Bonansinga - Free Book Online

Splet, the same stare last seen by over three dozen mob enemies targeted for assassination by the Chicago outfit. That same empty, curdled stare proved to be the last thing each victim saw before expiring. “What do you want, dickhead?”
    Henry casually opened his briefcase. Fifteen feet away, the guard stopped biting his nails and watched. Henry pulled out the tape recorder and the carton of Camel straights. The guard watched with mild interest. Henry gave the guard an earnest, questioning look, pointing at the cigarettes. The guard shrugged, then went back to his cuticles.
    â€œThose for me?” Milambri inquired, smacking his lips, a negotiation pending.
    Splet pushed the carton across the tabletop. “They’re all yours.”
    â€œYou gonna turn that thing on?” Milambri was pointing at the tape recorder.
    Splet smiled. “Actually…no.”
    Milambri waited.
    Splet went on: “There’s a photograph sealed inside that carton.” Splet didn’t point, didn’t look at the guard, didn’t even take his eyes off Milambri, just kept smiling his courteous frozen smile. “Go ahead, take a look.”
    Milambri frowned, furrowing his brow skeptically. “What the hell is this about?”
    â€œGo ahead.”
    Milambri sighed, turned the carton over, and thumbed the cellophane open where it had been carefully steamed off and then reglued. He tore the seam and noticed a foreign object pasted to the underside of the packs. Milambri glanced up, looked around, looked at the guard, then looked back down at the cigarettes.
    There was a wallet-size photograph nestled inside the carton. It was a Xerox carefully trimmed and glued onto card stock, probably taken from a JPEG off a public Internet web site. The picture was of a slender, handsome black man in his early forties.
    Splet kept smiling. “Mr. Milambri, meet Special Agent Ulysses Grove.”
    The big man looked up. “Who?”
    â€œGrove. Ulysses Grove. He’s a criminologist, a psychological profiler for the Bureau.”
    After a long moment the hit man said, “And why the hell do I give a shit about this?”
    Splet lowered his voice slightly, his tone becoming faintly conspiratorial. “You should care because I will pay good money to have this gentleman…eliminated.”
    Milambri cocked his huge head. “Eliminated?”
    Splet licked his lips. His smile faded. “‘Whacked’ is the word, right? Whacked?”
    Â 
    Three hundred miles to the north, at that very moment, Chicago was sweltering in an August fever. The heat from a high pressure cell off the prairies had slowly, incessantly, drew across the city like an invisible shroud. It was only 10:00 A.M. , and the mercury had already risen to ninety-five. Asphalt along the Kennedy Expressway simmered and cooked. The neighborhood directly east of the highway, a gray enclave of New Deal tenements gone to rust known as Uptown, cooked in the humidity like a fragrant pot of dirty socks.
    On the eastern edge of the neighborhood, just off Clark Street, an odd clicking noise pierced the customary rhythms of the street—the traffic, the birds, the sirens, the distant car alarms. This incongruous sound might easily be misidentified by harried passersby as a ticking engine or a loose gate banging in the breeze. But upon closer observation this click-click-click-clicking noise was revealed to be the tip of a wooden cane tapping the surface of a slate porch.
    The cane belonged to an elderly Kenyan woman who was currently sitting on her porch rocker, waiting in the heat for an airport taxi to arrive, a shopworn valise at her feet. The woman gave off an air of broken-down royalty, like some lost queen of a forgotten banana republic. Her porch was crawling with ivy, riotous with trumpet-pitcher vines and herbs and dried medicinal flowers. The cane itself was a doozy: a long spiral length of shellacked wood from a baobab tree, its