Deep (Pagano Family #4)(42)
“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 f*ck 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.
Letting him go, but turning him—if he could be reliably turned—could give them information and opportunities to do further damage.
As Chi-Chi had done.
Nick made up his mind. “To be clear, Jackie, the choice you’re making here is whether to die now, quickly, or much later, slowly.” He put the gouge on the absorbent pad next to his kit. The key to this work was developing ways to prolong and intensify pain without doing mortal damage. You wanted blood, but not too much. You wanted to avoid internal damage as long as possible. Some men who did this work preferred big tools and big damage and would cauterize as they went, causing more pain and staving off mortal blood loss. But that approach risked sending the subject into shock, and it was difficult to pull a body back from that.
Sculpting gouges were among his preferred tools—they were precise instruments, small and sharp. They cleanly sliced skin away in long lengths without exposing organs and overly weakening the body. The pain they left behind was extreme, however. A little salt or hot sauce in the wounds made it worse. Stone’s bare chest, belly, and thighs were crisscrossed with seasoned gouge wounds. He was also missing eight teeth and all of his fingernails.
But he was flagging more quickly than Nick would have expected, and it was shock they were trying to hold back now. Nick wondered whether Stone had heart problems.
Through his bloody, swollen mouth, Stone whined, “I don’t know what more you want from me.”
“You do. As close as you are to Church, I don’t believe you know so little about him.” He lifted the tray out of his kit and took one of his larger tools—a set of blacksmithing tongs that he’d had modified. “Get his shorts off.” Matty did, and Nick walked up and snapped the tongs a few inches from Stone’s flaccid dick. “Back in the Spanish Inquisition, the priests used breast rippers on female heretics. Nasty things—did just what the name says. I made myself a junk ripper.”
Stone hadn’t wet himself until now, but now he very much did, and Nick stepped back out of the splash zone.
“The Armani is ruined, but I’m hoping the Bruno Maglis make it through the day, Jackie. C’mon.”
“You guinea fag.”
Nick grinned and grabbed hold of Stone’s junk with the tongs. Stone screamed as the claws dug into the meat around his trio—dug in, but did not yet break skin. “Not smart to insult your host, Jackie. Not smart at all. Last chance here, or I give this a good, hard tug, and you bleed out hanging from a hook, with your jewels on the floor. It’s slow going, trust me. I’ve seen.” For emphasis, he squeezed the tongs a fraction more, and Stone’s eyes bugged out.