Title: Moving like a hurricane ready for landfall, slow, deliberate, destruction on his mind, Boots Minelli paused at the door
Author: Chester
Company: Village Properties

Moving like a hurricane ready for landfall, slow, deliberate, destruction on his mind, Boots Minelli paused at the door. With that innate sense of the totally committed, he felt the payoff almost within his grasp. After years of chasing down false trails and blundering up blind alleys, he would soon see the terror in the traitor’s eyes. The bastard who had nearly wrecked the Vicario “family” no longer had his days numbered. It was now only a matter of hours.
The thin metal pick looked like a toothpick in his beefy hands, and though he hadn’t used the gadget in years, Boots wielded the thin metal pick with the ease of a locksmith. Pulling the heavy, wood-paneled door open, he squeezed through. Not that the doorway was any narrower than normal, but Boots had the size and demeanor of a snorting bull. 
In his black outfit, he could have passed for an undertaker, which wasn’t that far off the mark. He lingered in the slate-floored foyer, stared into the living room, noted the faint lemony odor of a cleaning spray. It led him to suspect the room’s tidy, vacuumed appearance was the result of a housekeeper’s recent visit. The only thing out of place was a folded piece of paper on the floor.
The effort of stooping to pick it up left him panting, mouth agape, like some dumb-ass hound he might have chased off to fetch a stick. Ridiculous, he thought. Maddening. But that was the way a lousy fate had treated him lately. A big man in his middle fifties with abundant black hair, he had a bloated face, a joyless twist to his thick, pursed lips, and a body that made him a prime candidate for by-pass surgery.
Boots unfolded the paper and tilted it toward the light from the window. A heading identified the sheet as the itinerary for Lovely Lane United Methodist Church’s “LLSS New Orleans Tour.”
Beneath that was a list of dates and times for the week, starting with Monday:
“7:30 a.m. Board Bus, Depart Lovely Lane.
“1:00 p.m. Lunch at Barnes Crossing, Tupelo, MS.
“2:00 p.m. On to Natchez, MS, to spend the night.”
The gold Rolex on Boots’ massive wrist showed not quite seven a.m. A little earlier, parked in his rental car a short distance up the quiet suburban street from the red brick ranch, he had watched the man who called himself Bryce Reynolds pull out of the driveway in a four-year-old charcoal gray Buick. If Reynolds was leaving on the church bus at 7:30, Boots had a detailed schedule of where the man could be intercepted along the way to or from New Orleans.
But Boots had worked too hard and too long to risk any slip-ups. He needed a positive ID. Shoving the paper into his pocket, he launched a quick search of the house. Three-bedrooms, two-and-a-half-baths. One of the bedrooms had been furnished as an office. He pulled on a pair of sterile gloves and began to probe about the desk with surgical precision. He found a few utility bills, brochures promoting investment newsletters, an ad for a music CD club. Mostly he spotted Post-It notes stuck everywhere. It resembled a mini-billboard jungle–reminders of bills to pay, events coming up, checklists of things to do. One note confirmed Reynolds’ plans to be on the New Orleans bus tour. He’s in his seventies, Boots thought, tends to forget things if they aren’t written down.
Though certain Reynolds was not the man’s real name, Boots found nothing around the desk that would hint at a concealed identity. Next he turned to the family room. He found strictly masculine furniture, heavy wooden pieces informally placed. But he had an odd feeling that something was missing. Then it hit him.
No pictures.
Not a single photograph was displayed anywhere in the house, the mark of a man with a hidden past.
As he shifted his gaze about the wood-paneled room, Boots thought of the years of searching that had finally paid off. He finally had a current name and address for the man whose testimony at the big New York Mafia trial in the early nineties had decimated the Vicario stronghold.
Though there were no photographs, Boots noticed the walls had been decorated with paintings. They included a tranquil mountain village draped in snow, a melancholy lighthouse beside foaming breakers, a drab old grist mill amidst a fiery display of fall foliage. Boots had no taste for art, but he guessed these were real paintings, not knockoffs turned out in some assembly line operation. The traitor had money. He could afford the real thing.
Boots stared at the grist mill, but his thoughts strayed to the contact he had employed in Tennessee to dig into Reynolds’ background. There was little to be found. The man kept to himself, made no close friendships. He had bought the house in Madison, an unincorporated suburb on the northeastern side of Metropolitan Nashville, in 1995. His only slip had been a mention that he came from Tulsa.
A check in Tulsa turned up records of a Bryce Reynolds who had gone bankrupt in 1992. He started drinking heavily, and his wife left him. He disappeared from the radar screens shortly afterward. Presently he would have been in his early sixties. Boots’ source said the Madison Reynolds was likely over seventy.
The bright colors of the leaves around the grist mill slowly dragged Boots’ attention back to the painting. Then he had an idea. He walked over and pulled the frame away from the wall enough to peek in back. Nothing. He checked the lighthouse, in a smaller, vertical frame. This try rewarded him with the outline of a cutout panel.
The thump of excitement in his chest triggered a brief return of breathlessness. Boots took a moment to catch his breath then removed the painting from the wall. He pried the panel open with a pocket knife, revealing the combination lock of a wall safe. Probably an old one, he thought, put in when the house was built back in the sixties. A simple “box job.” Safecracking was a skill he had learned from a fellow student during his happily brief sojourn at a New York facility for the education of the criminally inclined, otherwise known as the state prison at Attica.
He flattened a large ear against the safe and gingerly twisted the dial. In the silence of the room, he listened to the soft click as the tumblers landed in position. He had the door open quickly. Inside lay a stack of “C notes,” crisp hundred-dollar-bills bound with rubber bands, probably a few thousand bucks’ worth. The safe also contained a handgun, but what caught his eye was a photograph and a long, thin case. He checked the picture first.
Bingo! A man and a woman, with two smiling younger men. He immediately recognized Patrick Pagano, his wife, Ellen, and their sons, Paul and Phillip. He knew what was in the case before he had it open. A star-shaped medallion with the word VALOR beneath an eagle’s outstretched wings, attached to a blue ribbon emblazoned with white stars. On the back was engraved “Sgt. Patrick O. Pagano, December 22, 1944, Bastogne, Belgium.”
The Congressional Medal of Honor. A flag-waving patriot despite his problems with the government, Tony Vicario had proudly bragged about having a Medal of Honor winner on his payroll.
Boots mustered the first genuine smile he had allowed himself in ages. He had withheld details of Pagano’s new identity from his boss until he could be certain he had the right man. Now he would tell Vicario he had accomplished the seemingly impossible.