The Exceptions Read online

  He accompanied me for one reason only: mission completion.

  The late-winter, fifteen-hour drive out with Ettore was memorable only because it was not memorable at all. We did speak a few times:

  ME: “Need a couple bucks for the toll.”

  ETTORE: “’Kay.”

  An hour later.

  ME: “Want your order supersized?”

  ETTORE: “’Kay.”

  Three hours later.

  ME: “I gotta hit the head.”

  ETTORE: “Right.”

  It wasn’t until we got a room at a roadside motel a few miles southeast of Mineral Point that he finally talked about the plan.

  We sat on opposing double beds, shades drawn, one sixty-watt bulb lighting the room from ten feet away. As I studied my virgin Beretta, slowly unscrewing and rescrewing the silencer, Ettore put on a pair of gloves and began piling his reserve of weapons on the table between our beds, cleaning one at a time. He pulled them from everywhere—ankle holster, belt holster, two from his duffel bag. When the cleaning was complete, he went through the ritual of putting each in its respective holster, then quickly yanking it out and pointing it at some object across the room. The guy was a caricature of himself. Then again, rituals tend to give strength to disciplines, and Ettore was a proven killer. This wasn’t even his hit; the guns accompanied him on this trip for no other purpose than to act as a collection of steel security blankets. My Beretta? I tossed it on the pillow next to me and turned on the television.

  “This is happening,” Ettore said to me.

  I glanced at him, pursed my lips and nodded a little, then turned back to the TV. There was no way this was happening. Under other circumstances anxiety would have wrapped its hand around me and delivered a squeeze tight enough to crumble me like a saltine. The act of your first premeditated murder comes hard to anyone not belly deep in drugs or sociopathy, mobster or not. But my excuse was far easier; the most talented assassins ever to have been affiliated with the Bovaro crew previously failed at whacking the McCartneys. Ettore and I were hardly a step up. I figured we’d look for the McCartneys for a few days, then return home as an expected disappointment.

  Turns out, though, Ettore and I were not on the same page.

  “This is happening,” he repeated.

  “I know.” I proceeded with the ritual of opening a new pack of Marlboros, shaking one loose, placing the filtered end against my dry lips, lighting it.

  “You ready?”

  I tried to determine what he was really asking, blew smoke over to his side. “Of course.”

  “Don’t get comfortable.”

  I shook my head at the television. “There’s nothing comfortable about this, Ettore.”

  “There should be nothing uncomfortable about this, Johnny.”

  I took a long drag as I watched a Budweiser commercial—young men and women laughing on a California beach, playfully flirting, falling into foamy waves, sunning on a strip of sand and rock. Somewhere, far away from Mineral Point, Wisconsin, people were doing innocent things.

  Ettore came to my side, reached over and grabbed my Beretta, tightened the silencer, added it to his stack of firearms, next in line for a cleaning.

  “This is happening,” one final time.

  I glanced his way. “I know.” This time, just a little, I believed it.

  We were assassins, but not the kind that would do the type of damage where no one suspected we were there; wasn’t the point that people knew we were there, that retribution lit this fuse? If military-trained executioners might be compared to a diamond-tipped saw, slicing a perfect divide into someone’s lifeline, Ettore and I were like a chain saw, cutting a half-inch swath through anything we touched, wood chunks and sawdust flying everywhere. Best wear your goggles around us.

  The following morning we dropped our key on the front desk of the motel along with a wad of cash to cover the room. We loaded the car with our firepower and set on our way. The objective: I was to eliminate an entire family, drop the gun, drive straight back to New York.

  As the clock passed ten on that Saturday morning, Ettore snaked us over the gentle hills, toward the historic section of Mineral Point, avoiding Highway 151 just to the west. From the moment we left the motel, everything seemed surreal. The sky was weighted with fast-moving gray clouds destined to unload a reserve of rain on us at any second. We passed roads with names like Cheese Country Recreation Trail and Merry Christmas Lane. We waited our turn at an intersection in the oldest section of the city, atop the crest of a hill, where the stores were sheltered by trees and wrought-iron lamps were still alight on that cloudy morning. Two families walked hand in hand down the steep hill as they viewed the windows of art galleries and pottery shops and answered questions from their children. It seemed wrong to disrupt this part of the world. In my turf back home everyone sort of has it coming. In Mineral Point, people moved out of the way for one another, nodded at strangers, and perused shops like Papa Pat’s Farmhouse Recipes and Leaping Lizards. Blood should never be spilled here.

  We drove the four miles from the center of the small village to the McCartney residence on the north side, past the welding supply shop and the liquor store, past the Dairy Queen and the fairgrounds, past the open fields, and finally through the farm-rich outskirts. As we drew nearer, I noticed a few manufacturing buildings, one of which seemed likely to act as the temporary employer of the disguised Arthur McCartney.

  Ettore made a series of left and rights—no doubt memorized the map to their house with great precision—and brought us to the edge of a bland street, devoid of trees and sidewalks and, in general, love. This was a flat field that someone had decided would make a good place for five carbon-copy homes, lined up like soldiers, facing and backing a distinct nothingness, a six-year-old’s crayon depiction of rural life.

  “That it?” I asked, nodding toward a gray rambler tucked at the bottom of a courtless dead end, to which I never received an answer. I’ve been told the look and life of a house is a reflection of its residents. If that’s true, this house reflected death and disinterest. What landscaping remained alive had overgrown the pieces that had long since perished. The paint on the shutters had chipped and begun to drop in hunks down onto the gnarled bushes below. On the two concrete steps leading to a broken screen door sat three planters holding the stiff skeletons of deceased flowers. This house said on behalf of its residents: What’s the point?

  We waited from a secluded distance for an hour, not a word spoken, and the longer we waited the more at ease I became. Who was to say they were even home? I could feel the victory of failure upon us!

  I jumped in my seat when the old wooden garage door of the rambler started to yawn, each framed section jerking as the opener tugged on it with all its might. Ettore sat up, leaned forward a little, and an icy smile came over his face that will never leave my memory, a look that suggested he’d visualized the series of moves leading us to checkmate.

  A rush of adrenaline pumped through me as we watched their Subaru creep out from the shelter of the garage, obscuring them from view. I hadn’t seen these people since I stole glimpses of them on the New York sidewalk that day as a child. They existed in my mind the way they were then, ageless and blameless and healthy. But I could no longer allow my imagination to have that latitude; after all, here we were.

  We followed them to the A&P. And the gray clouds opened.

  I watched them from a sheltered point of view a baseball’s-throw distance away at the far end of the grocery store parking lot. It seemed I was always watching them exit automobiles, the closest thing to time travel I might ever experience. But this time, as they emerged from the Subaru, they looked weathered and worn. The father crawled out first and looked around like he was expecting the bullet already fated for his temple, trying to determine from which direction it would come. Rubbing his neck with one hand and coughing into the other, he walked to the passenger side and opened the door for his wife; she, too, looked around as if try
ing to locate a friend in a large crowd. They were both emaciated, the father having aged two decades in one’s time, the mother thin with clothes hanging off her frame like hand-me-downs from a larger sibling and wrinkles identifiable from our veiled location forty yards away. Arthur scoped the parking lot and through the rain it seemed he lingered on our car. Could he have identified the New York plates from that distance, things might have turned out differently.

  Then Melody surfaced from the backseat—and I stopped breathing. Up to that moment, she’d remained a kindergartner in my mind, an everlasting image of all the innocence we’d so cruelly removed.

  Unless you’ve got a buddy who serves as an expert at age progression photography at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there is no way to anticipate the look a child will get when she transcends adolescence, and even if I’d had the skill, I could not have imagined how Melody matured. We were closer in age now—the four-year gap meaning less than it did long ago—and now I viewed her the way a college senior might view a freshman. She wore her chestnut hair short and tucked behind her ears, her skin an unhealthy white. Though she stood as tall as you would expect of a seventeen-year-old, I might’ve confused her for an older girl. And her size and shape suggested she could regularly raid her mother’s wardrobe. She pushed up the sleeves of a loose blue sweater, put her hands in the pockets of her jeans, stared at the ground, head hanging. I was just as mesmerized as all those years ago, fueled by the same curious interest, but now also with an obsession to understand the effect—the aftereffect—of what the world had done to this family, to this little girl.

  Melody stared without aim, let the rain fall on her with no concern. She appeared as a girl with absolutely nothing to look forward to, a candidate for justifiable depression.

  Ettore said, “When they come out.”

  I could not take my eyes off of Melody. I’d never seen the spirit removed from someone the way it had been pulled from her, and I’d seen some guys really take an emotional beating that surely would have resulted in hopelessness. Gone were the swirling dances and the curious glances at the sky, along with her parents’ flirty kisses. She stood in the lot of the A&P, her face tipped down as though transfixed by the movement of a caterpillar. The look of dread and defeat on their individual faces spoke of permanent damage.

  The cold rain intensified, hammered down on the roof of our car, went from dimes to nickels. Beyond the moving windshield wipers and through the wet window of the grocery store, we watched Arthur and Lydia lumber off in one direction and Melody sit down on a bench at the front of the store and stare out over the parking lot, her body twisted in our direction. She put her arm across the back of the bench, rested her chin over her forearm the way a dog rests its head on a paw.

  The pain of watching them became so unbearable that I thought for a moment they might actually be better off dead. I thought that hardening my heart in the genuine Bovaro manner was the safest direction to turn my life. A hit is easier to understand when accompanied by an excuse of permissibility. They deserved it.

  They had it coming.

  After rubbing my eyes, I returned my gaze to the storefront. Melody had disappeared, no longer behind the window.

  Then came the waiting. Ettore and I sat like a pair of mannequins, stiff and forward-facing, wearing black leather jackets and thin leather gloves and mismatching baseball caps, twins in all but our thoughts. Neither of us could comprehend what was about to unfold.

  Ettore stared at the door, chewing a double-size wad of Juicy Fruit.

  The rain intensified, forced us to kick the wipers into a faster rhythm.

  At that moment, in the silence between us, a clarity of my existence dropped upon me, weighed me down, and the pressure pushed all the air from my lungs. How had I become the exact thing I didn’t understand—and hated most—in all my father did?

  I had become one of the minions.

  Should I throw this entire operation, Ettore would stool it right back to Pop; then the disappointment, the shaking of the head, the comment to someone out of my earshot: “How could my own flesh and blood do this to me?” To which I would never get to counter with the question: “How could my own flesh and blood have asked me to do this?”

  Everything about the A&P fit the scene; what was about to happen really should have occurred no other place. People stopped loving this store long ago. The nearly empty parking lot exposed the cracks and rain-filled potholes in the pavement. Rain cascaded off the roofline where a hunk of gutter drooped like the jowls of an aging face, and the wide front window had lost its seal long ago, the inside of the double pane patterned with irregular swirls of dust and grime. This store possessed nothing in common with the new Kroger we had passed on the way from the south, with its parking lot full of BMWs and Eddie Bauer sweaters and double incomes. Melody and I were in the same image, a hopeless snapshot of history. If a building could cry, this one would not be sobbing, but shedding a tear with its final whimper. The A&P was about to die. And now so were its customers.

  Ettore kept his dim eyes on the door of the grocery, chewing in time with the wipers, his heart likely pumping a cool sixty beats per minute. He looked like he was doing nothing more stressful than waiting in line to buy the Times.

  Want to know what the detailed plan was? Kill them. Walk up to them and take them out one at a time, drop them like mail sacks, then jog back to the car. From there, Ettore would drive us back to New York. Just once you’d think our approach to taking down a building would be wiring it carefully with explosives, clearing the area, imploding the structure into a nice hill of rubble; instead, we had one solution only: Come in with a wrecking ball and start making big holes.

  Then, through the streaky windshield, I saw the elder McCartneys shuffle from the store, both with a pair of plastic grocery bags in each hand.

  At that very second I wanted so badly to revel in evil, wanted to be enraged at the actions of these people, wanted to want them to pay for troubling my father and family, and to taste the strong bitterness of revenge. To become a legend, to honor my father, to become feared and respected among those around me.

  Instead… nothing.

  Arthur struggled with the trunk, yanking on the patch of horizontal surface above the license plate. He put his bags down on the wet parking lot. Lydia shrugged her shoulders in some attempt to shelter herself from the strengthening rain. Melody remained out of sight.

  I held my Beretta in my hand loosely, and were I not wearing gloves, a thin layer of sweat would’ve coated its stubbly grip. I gently tightened the silencer against the barrel of the gun.

  The parking lot remained empty but for a smattering of vehicles, and the rain acted as a secondary shield of reasonable doubt for any potential witnesses. I pulled my baseball cap down over my forehead, flipped up the collar of my jacket.

  Arthur yanked up twice, then the trunk opened—and that was it, the final piece in place for the perfect hit, the trunk lid offering one final defense against unexpected onlookers and a mild sound deflector. I reached for the door handle and tugged it with all the strength of a toddler.

  Ettore turned my way. He knew as well as I did that this was the moment. All the years of hunting, all the attempts to eliminate the McCartneys, all the anguish of the past coupled with all that lay ahead if we failed now, came down to me opening the door of our Impala. I took a deep breath and let it out heavily enough to fog the window of my door. I tried, hoped, even—most despicable—prayed I could take life that day. Alas, the spirit didn’t move me. Despite Ettore’s repeated attempts at the power of positive thinking, bad news was coming his way: This was not happening.

  MR. ROBOTO: “Take ’em.”

  ME: “I can’t get the shot.”

  “Hell you mean? Get out of the friggin’ car!”

  Then, more honestly, “I can’t take the shot.”

  “Get out of the friggin’ car!”

  “Where’s the girl? We can’t—”

 
; Ettore quickly tightened his gloves, grabbed the gun from my incapable hands, opened his door so quickly it slammed back into his side as he bolted. That moment, as my cousin departed my side and without fear navigated around the few cars between us and the McCartneys, my breathing became short and clipped, adrenaline now in flood. The wipers could not wipe away the rain fast enough for me.

  Ettore moved up to Arthur from the side of the Subaru, Beretta at his side, out of clear vision from Lydia. Arthur stood back at full height, slammed the trunk down, and as Ettore stood before him, Arthur smiled a little at the stranger—until the barrel of the gun was leveled at his head.

  Arthur did not try to run. He did not try to duck. He did not cover his chest or face.

  He took two steps to his right to move in front of his wife, to shield her one more second from death. He raised a shaking crooked finger and pleaded, “Okay… wait…”

  And with the pop of a muted firecracker, Arthur tumbled facedown on the pavement, his wife left with a red mist across her forehead. Lydia winced and stumbled back as though a car had just driven through a puddle and splashed her. Her eyes gone soft, head trembling like taken by a sudden onset of Parkinson’s, she did something that haunts me to this day: With quivering hands, she reached up and pulled the top flaps of her coat together and nervously buttoned them, as though she knew death was upon her, so that once she’d fallen to the ground she would not appear immodest. Lydia slowly went to her knees—she did not collapse—as though preparing for prayer.