Chapter 97
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, he was in position. Now here was the funny thing: He’d done this same kind of commando raid when he was just a kid. He and Jimmy Hats and Tony Mullino had climbed a rickety fire escape on Seventy-eighth, then sprinted over the tar-papered rooftops to a building near the social club. In broad daylight. No fear.
They were “dropping in” on a girl Tony knew in the building attached to the social club. The chick’s name was Annette Bucci. Annette was a hot little Italian number who used to put out for her boyfriends when they were all of thirteen, fourteen years old. They’d watch Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, like the idiots they were, smoke cigarettes and weed, drink her father’s vodka, screw their little brains out. Nobody had to use a rubber because Annette said she couldn’t have babies, which made the three boys the luckiest bastards in the neighborhood that summer.
Anyway, this present escapade was a lot easier, since it was nighttime and the moon was almost full. Of course, he wasn’t here to screw Annette Bucci, either.
No, he had very serious business with Junior Maggione, unfinished business that probably went all the way back to Maggione Sr., who had bumped off his pal Jimmy Hats. What else could have happened to Hats? So this was about revenge, which was going to be so sweet that the Butcher could almost taste it. He could see Junior Maggione dying.
If the plan worked out tonight, they’d be talking about it in the neighborhood for years.
And, of course, there were going to be pictures!
He was pumped as he hurried across the old rooftops, hoping that nobody on the top floors would hear him and maybe come up for a look, or even call the cops. Finally, he made it to the brownstone attached to the social club building.
Nobody seemed to know he was up there. So he hunkered down on the roof and caught his breath. He let his heartbeat slow down, but he didn’t lose his anger. At Maggione? At his father? What the hell difference did it make?
As he sat there, Sullivan wondered if maybe he was suicidal at this point in his life. On some level anyway. He had a theory that people who smoked had to be, and a*sholes who drank and drove too fast, and anybody who got on a motorcycle. Or killed his own father and fed him to the fish in Sheepshead Bay. Secretly suicidal, right?
Like John Maggione. He’d been a punk all his life. He’d come after the Butcher. And now look what was going to happen to him.
If the plan worked.