The bullet had taken the soldato in the neck, impact peeling his throat away from his thorax. It hung off him like insulation being ripped down from an attic. His attempts to breathe sprayed blood from his open gullet.
As Frank watched, vaguely stunned by the demolition he had accomplished with one snap-shot, the man fluttered backwards—feet first questioning him, then betraying him. He backed into the table of a booth. Weakened by the blast, the table’s support gave way and it slanted diagonally under the man’s weight, until it met the floor and was propped up. There the man lay, breathing his last bloody gulps of oxygen, the strength to lift his SMG again flooding the front of his shirt.
Frank abandoned the sight to clock his surroundings. It was the kind of charnalhouse he had grown used to; the kind that was the only suitable home for the monsters the Mafia created. He could see no one standing, no signs of life. Of the thirty-six men from both families that had gone to the peace conference, not one remained alive.
There was no time for satisfaction with what he’d done. Frank would confirm Vincenzo’s death, then exfiltrate. Slinging his jammed G36, he let his G40 lead the way, just in case. A haze of smoke was already building from the scattered flames; the wreckage was quickly becoming an inferno. Frank couldn’t say he regretted the fire. These men didn’t deserve burials. Let them burn.
Coughing heralded the sight of Vincenzo. Frank ducked past a fallen post and saw Vincenzo in the dining area, picking his way through toppled, shattered tables. He was on his belly, pulling himself along on arms that left bloody handprints with each inch he traveled. Someone had taken him in the belly: as he dragged himself forward, he left a swath of crimson behind like a paint-roller. Frank stepped into it, satisfied to have Vincenzo’s blood on his boots.
“Who’s that?” Vincenzo coughed again. “Who’s there?” Sensing he couldn’t get away, he turned over to look at who stood over him.
Frank held his gunhand at the waist level, ready to fire, but there was no need. Vincenzo was already dead, his gut a red ruin.
As if he didn’t know, like he could still surrender, Vincenzo held up his hands. Both were missing fingers.
“This was you?” he wheezed. “You did this? Who are you? Scaglione? Did Vito send you?”
Frank stepped closer. Out of the shifting smoke. He crouched low, close to Vincenzo, and offered his face to the light of the flames.
“You… I know you… you’re that man, you’re that fucking man…” Vincenzo’s voice fell away to a whisper. “The Punisher.”
Frank nodded.
Then Vincenzo did a funny thing.
He laughed.
“Oh! Ha! Oh! This is too much! To die to the Punisher… this is your vengeance, hmm? Not someone wanting power, not a family feud, just you? This? Ha!”
Frank eyed this loathsome man: fat and hairy and bald, all appetite, no redeeming qualities. A dealer in evil, in greed, in ambition.
“Something funny?” he asked, not wanting to give this creature the satisfaction, but feeling compelled to relish his death—to enjoy it on behalf of his victims.
“Look at me, Punisher! Look! I’m an old man. How many years did I have left even without you? And you think I cared about these people, these stupid wops? I would’ve sacrificed them all if it benefited me. I don’t give one shit that you killed them. So what’d you accomplish, huh? I lived a long life. I did all I set out to do. I became don. I lived surrounded by beautiful things…”
A muscle in Frank’s cheek coiled. And it struck him—kept striking him, like a mallet hitting a gong—that this was the man who’d gotten to enjoy Bella’s charms countless times. He hadn’t had to win her, hadn’t had to romance. He’d simply existed, this awful boil of a human being, accumulating wealth and power, until he was able to compel a beautiful woman to be his…
“So you kill me? So what? I’ve gotten far more enjoyment out of my life than you ever will!” Vincenzo continued, laughing until he coughed again.
Frank leveled the G40 on him. He tried to bring himself to fire, but he wanted more than a simple gunshot. Something for Bella… something to begin this bastard’s trip to Hell…
Vincenzo spat out blood. “What do you have to live for, Punisher? You’re alone! Hunted! You have the cops, you have the Mob… and you have no one! Just yourself and this pointless fucking vendetta! Go ahead! Kill me! It won’t change shit, before or after! I still had a picture-perfect life, you motherfucker! And there’ll be a new don as soon as I’m gone! You don’t mean anything, not anything, you stupid frocio—”
Frank saw a winged corkscrew lying on a nearby table. He picked it up. It looked silver; felt nicely solid in his hand. He stood over Vincenzo, kicking him fully onto his back.
“What are you doing?” the mob boss asked, his cocky expression screwing up in confusion.
Frank straddled him, knees pinning him down so he couldn’t roll away or crawl away.
“What’s the matter with you, you fucking mostro? You can’t let me die in peace!?”
With his off-hand, Frank took a fistful of snow-white hair and jammed Vincenzo’s head back against the floor. With the other, he held up the corkscrew.
“Minchia! Stop it! Leave me alone!”
Frank thrust the corkscrew into the bridge of the man’s nose. It bit deep into his sinuses, the tip digging through the tender tissue until the curve of the spiral blunted its impact and arrested its descent.
Vincenzo went cross-eyed looking at his murder weapon. “Stop! Stop! I’ll pay you! Just let me die in peace! I have money, money—”
Frank grasped the corkscrew’s handle and twisted it hard. The corkscrew drilled between his eyes, bringing blood bubbling to the surface as the curling metal wound its way through his nasal cavity and into his brain.
Vincenzo screamed: “Money! Money! Money!”
Frank kept turning the handle. The corkscrew bore deeper, its passage reducing his septum into ragged chunks of cartilage and skin. Then it hit his brain.
The gray matter gave easily—a far less robust grade of meat than that of his face. Frank barely had to touch the corkscrew; it seemed to turn by itself. Lobotomizing Vincenzo by degree. His dying words fell away to a mutter… “money, money, money”… and his eyes became limpid.
Finally, the corkscrew could extend no further. Vincenzo was all but a vegetable, his eyes unstaring and unblinking, his mouth only moving to stir the drool coming out of it.
By now, the wings of the corkscrew had risen high. Frank grabbed them with both hands and forced them down. With a horrible squelch, the countermotion pried Vincenzo’s frontal lobe out through the wreckage of his nose.
Frank picked the corkscrew up and, succumbing to a wave of curiosity, sniffed at the contents of Vincenzo’s skull.
“Bad year,” he pronounced, and popped the impaled morsel into Vincenzo’s mouth, to taste as he enjoyed his last moments.
***
Bella laid awake. She had plenty of books to read and at first, she’d torn through them, almost grateful for all the free time to really focus on a thing instead of being bedeviled by endless distractions. Now she just wanted to get to sleep—sleep until Frank got back. But there was no sleep, no relaxing, no distracting herself from the simple binary before her.
Either Frank would come back and free her or she would stay here until she starved.
Bella’s mind was sucked into scenarios. If they captured Frank and tortured him and got him to talk… only he didn’t seem like the type who could ever be broken. If he were fatally wounded and told someone where to find her. But then, what if he got the address wrong in the shock of his dying? What if whoever he’d told didn’t believe him or didn’t care?
There were a million questions, checkpoints on the downward spiral that could only end with Bella screaming her sanity away. The only cure was not to think about it, but the only way not to think about it was to sleep. And she couldn’t sleep.
She’d like to say it was simple self-preservation that was prodding her in this Chinese water torture—she even did, spoke it aloud to be sure she could still hear and that she wasn’t dead already—but it wasn’t. The worry wasn’t for herself. It was for Frank. She hated the thought of him dying and hated the thought of being trapped here and those two thoughts melted together until these scenarios she conjured to comfort herself… where Frank was killed but she was still saved… managed to injure instead. She couldn’t stand the thought of him being hurt, tortured, gone. Even if it led to her rescue, who would she be without him?
Who was she with him, even?