Beat the Reaper: A Novel by Josh Bazell Read Free Book Online Page A

three shitty buffet tables set up in a “U,” with old mobsters seated around it and Joe and Mike Virzi standing in the center naked, repeating after the geezer in the middle.
    I couldn’t hear too much of it, but there were parts in Italian, Latin, and English, and the Virzis kept promising to go to hell if they betrayed the mafia. At one point a couple of geezers from the ends of the table, looking particularly ridiculous with medallions and felt hats on, set slips of paper on fire and dropped them onto the Virzis’ palms. I tried this at home later. It didn’t hurt at all.
    The squalidness of the whole thing enraged me. I couldn’t believe my grandparents had died for this bullshit. I left before it ended to go drive by the Virzis’ house.
    It was a little one-story with an attached garage. As usual when they were out, the garage door was open.
    Cause who was gonna rob them?
    The next morning before school—it was early March, and it was freezing out—I went into the woods near Saddle River to practice shooting, and found out why hitmen use .22’s.
    The first shot out of each gun sounded like someone slamming a stapler closed. The second sounded like the warning bark of a dog. The sixth and seventh sounded like low-flying jets, and by that time the insides of both silencers were actually on fire, with black smoke and blue flames coming out of the barrels. The paint on the barrels was bubbling.
    Still, the work those bullets did was intriguing. The one time I managed to land shots from both my right hand and my left hand on a single tree trunk—not so easy when the kick made it feel like I was hauling myself up a swimming pool ladder every time I pulled the triggers—there were four-inch chips in the bark where the bullets had gone in.
    And two-foot satellite dishes of sawdust out back.
    I chose a weekend right before spring break of my junior year.
    I’d rebuilt my silencers. I’m not particularly anxious to divulge how to do this, but suffice to say that it helps to already have the metal cylinders, as well as some fiberglass insulation and a stack of full-inch washers. And that, even in the days before the Internet, it wasn’t too hard to find instructions.
    I knew the Virzis never locked the door between their garage and their kitchen. I’d been through it a dozen times, been through the whole scumbag house, with all its Cindy Crawford posters and prints by that guy who did the covers of the Duran Duran albums.
    On the night I’d decided to kill them I followed them to a club, then went to their house and locked the kitchen door. Then I stood to one side of the open garage door and waited for them to come home.
    A professor of mine in med school claimed that the sweat glands of your armpits and the sweat glands of your groin are controlled by entirely separate parts of your nervous system, so that it’s nervousness that makes your armpits sweat, while it’s heat that makes your groin sweat. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I can tell you that standing waiting for the Virzis to get back I dropped enough sweat from both my groin and my armpits to fill my shoes. My entire body was slick inside my stifling overcoat. The heat and the nervousness were hard to tell apart.
    Eventually there was a bang on the sidewalk and the Virzis’ racing-stripe Mustang heaved into the garage beside me, putting out a wave of hot exhaust and rubber.
    They got out loud and clumsy, the one in the driver’s seat pressing the remote on his visor so the garage door started closing. The one from the passenger’s seat stomped up the two steps to the door to the kitchen and tried the doorknob, then shook it.
    “What the fuck?” he shouted over the noise of the garage door.
    “What?” the other one said.
    “Door’s fuckin locked.”
    The garage door came to a stop.
    “Bullshit.”
    “It is!”
    “So fuckin open it.”
    “Dick, I don’t have a key!”
    “How about just turning around?” I said. “Slowly.”