Deep (Pagano Family #4)(66)

Sometimes Nick’s job required speed and subtlety—a hit, fast and clean. Sometimes, it required brutal finesse—an interrogation. Sometimes, the pain itself was the intention—revenge. For three decades, Nick had been learning how to hurt people, how to kill them. He’d never stopped learning. For two decades, his primary job had been to turn that education into practice. Those who dwelled in their world knew that when Nick Pagano came into a room like this one, unfathomable horror and pain would ensue.

His reputation had become a powerful tool. Because he didn’t always kill his subjects—in fact, he preferred not to—there were people alive who had experienced the things Nick had learned. To foster the development of that reputation, he had studied a wide range of methods for torture and execution over the ages of history. Some methods were fascinating in their complexity; others in their simplicity. Nick favored simplicity. He had made, or had commissioned, his own versions of his favorites. The Scavenger’s Daughter was one such device.

The premise was elegantly uncomplicated: force the subject to fold over himself in a kneeling position. Then apply slowly, continually increasing pressure until the body collapsed in on itself, organs, muscles, tissues bursting, blood oozing from every available pore and orifice.

A slow, massively painful death.

Henry VIII had commissioned an elaborate metal device, but all that was required was the position and the weight. Nick had devised his own version from otherwise workaday materials—a thick slab of wood. Chain. The winch.

Once Fatso was awake and moaning listlessly, Matty, J.J., and Picker wrestled him into the position—curled forward on his knees—and Matty, the only of the three who’d seen this method in action before, got it set up.

The man’s size worked against him—or for him. He died fairly quickly, in less than half an hour.

Nick’s eyes never left him as he suffered. He wanted to remember this death, this retribution.

Matty and Picker prepared that body for disposal and cleaned up the rank mess it had left behind. Then they took down his friend and prepared his body as well.

And then there was only Alvin Church. The man who had ordered all of the mayhem perpetrated on the Paganos in the past eighteen months. The death of Anthony Naldi, nephew to the family consigliere. The beatings of Nick’s cousins, Luca and John, and of Luca’s wife, Manny. The shooting of his cousin Carmen and her unborn daughter. The fire at a Pagano & Sons construction site, and the death of an innocent worker. The bombing at Neon and Jimmy’s death. Brian’s death. His father’s death. Donnie’s disfigurement. And Beverly. The loss of her light.

The man responsible for all of that was bound to a beam, ten feet from Nick. Revenge he’d planned, waited for, needed, was right before him. He would have it this night.

He watched Matty disassemble the Daughter and clean it with bleach, then pack the innocuous parts away. He turned and studied the stack of four bodies, stripped, weighted, and prepped for a deep-sea deposit. He watched Picker stoke the fire of the old boiler so clothes and identification could be burned away.

The men who’d hurt Beverly were dead. They had suffered for what they’d done. But Nick felt no ease. He felt no satisfaction. He had never before been so vividly invested in his work, and he had never before felt unsatisfied by its product. But now, standing in the middle of the warehouse, he felt the same burning restlessness he’d been feeling simmer since the day of his father’s funeral, and which had come to a rolling boil on the night of Beverly’s attack.

He faced Church again. His enemy had soiled himself, front and back. He was weeping. And Nick knew there was no torture that could sufficiently avenge the harm this stinking piece of trash had caused.

He turned and walked back to the worktable. At its side was a utility sink; though he had avoided any spatter, he scrubbed his hands and arms thoroughly. Then he unrolled his sleeves, fixed his cuffs, and slid back into his jacket. Matty, J.J., and Picker stared dumbly. Curious though they might be, they knew better than to speak.

From a locked drawer under the worktable, he took a suppressor. Pulling his Beretta from his shoulder holster, he screwed it into the barrel. Then he turned, strode toward Alvin Church, and shot him in the eye.

“Prep him. Then let’s get moving. I want to get back.”



oOo



They dropped the bodies in the ocean, scattering them over the deep sea, leaving them on the bottom for the fish, big and little, to eat. Church was the last to go down. Nick watched the ocean open for him, then close over him, swallowing him whole.

He didn’t know what to do with his new fury. He had tortured and killed the men who’d hurt Beverly. He had killed the man responsible for that and for the deaths of his father and his best friend. He had taken his pounds of flesh and more, and that fury had not been assuaged.

It was perhaps a good thing that Nick would no longer do this work himself. This work required perfect control. And Nick was losing his.

He turned away from the ocean. “Let’s head back. It’ll be light soon.”



oOo



The dawn light was just easing into the night sky when Nick slid into the flowery blue and green room in his uncle’s house. Beverly was lying on her back, sleeping heavily—in the nights since the attack, she’d slept heavily through a few hours of the pain medication’s greatest power, then woken terrified when it wore off.