Gone (Michael Bennett)

25
     
    THE MUSIC SUDDENLY SUBSIDED ten minutes later, and the first of the cars triple-parked in front of the ostentatious glass house started down the hill.
    They waited another half hour, until the traffic jam of limos and Jags and Mercs and vintage Porsches and other obnoxious automobiles rolled down, away from the house, before they stepped out of the Cruiser and into the darkness.
    It was only a four-person job this time. The driver, Vida, her most trusted soldier, Estefan, and a pudgy soldier named Eduardo, who was an expert with the materials.
    It took about half an hour to infiltrate. They would have done it much more quickly, but they encountered a thick chain-link fence at the rear of the property’s perimeter that they had to bolt-cut through as slowly and quietly as they could. Past the hole in the fence was the basement door, which Vida scrub-picked herself in less than a minute.
    Then they were actually inside King Killa’s famous Hollywood house, which had been featured on MTV’s Cribs . Vida had watched the episode several times in order to memorize the interior layout.
    They found the utility room next to the one for the swimming pool pump. The HVAC unit was forced air, its blower humming busily as it circulated cool air throughout the house.
    Eduardo knelt beside it and then gave an A-OK sign.
    At the signal, Vida and her men quickly put on the Airhawk breathing suits they’d brought. Then Eduardo shut off the HVAC unit and unclasped the silver hard-pack case containing the material.
    They had used canisters at the mobster’s house in Malibu, but they now used the deadly material in a very fine powder form. Eduardo removed the air filter from the unit and then dusted the filter liberally with the poison. Then he carefully slid the filter back into the unit and turned the blower on high.
    Vida checked her watch as the fan hummed. They sat in the dark, waiting. After ten minutes, Eduardo repeated the process, powdering the filter a second time. Exactly twenty minutes after that, Vida nodded, and they headed up the basement stairs.
    Inside the first bedroom they entered on the top floor was quite a surprise.
    The surprise wasn’t that the room’s occupant was dead. They’d used enough poison to easily kill a hundred people, so of course she was dead. The surprise was that the woman lying in her own blood and snot in a fetal position on the carpet was Alexa Gia, the famous singer.
    Was she seeing King Killa? Vida wondered. She didn’t know. She only knew that the beautiful woman known as the Latina Madonna had recorded eleven number-one dance music hits in the eighties and nineties. Vida had actually danced to one of the singer’s pop hits at her own quinceañera . Go figure.
    Manuel wanted a big splash? Vida thought. He was about to get one. The death of the singer would be huge. About as high profile as it got.
    Vida made sure to get a close-up of the singer’s face with the video camera before they left. Of course, she was filming everything, as per the plan. Why Manuel wanted the grisly footage, she was unsure. She knew better than to inquire.
    Well, if anything, the substance had worked even more potently than it had the last time, Vida thought as she toed King Killa’s cheek, resting on the floor of his bathroom down the hall. The six-foot-six, three-hundred-thirty-pound man had made it only halfway to the toilet before he’d bled out of all his orifices like a butchered hog.
    “OK, that’s it. All the other rooms are empty,” Eduardo said, tapping her on the shoulder. “Time to go.”
    “Wait, one thing. Just a moment,” Vida said, spying something.
    She carefully stepped around the blood pooled around the fallen rap impresario and knelt and removed his sparkling signature twenty-one-carat diamond earring.
    Though it wasn’t part of the plan, she would make sure to ship it out to Manuel first thing tomorrow morning via FedEx.
    Manuel will like that , she thought with a small smile. The only thing he appreciated more than subtle gestures was unexpected gifts.

CHAPTER 26
     
    THE NEXT MORNING—EARLY , of course—we were at Aaron Cody’s farm, getting the milking going, when the old farmer pulled me and the rest of the Bennett boys aside.
    “Gentlemen,” Cody said, looking us over, “I got a call early this morning, and I was wondering if you all might be able to help me with a special assignment.”
    A special cattle-farm assignment? I thought. What could that mean?