Without remorse - Tom Clancy [292]
'How soon?' Burt asked.
'Tonight.'
'Fair enough, boss. Who goes with me?'
'Phil and Mike.' The two new ones were from Tony's organization, young, bright, ambitious. They didn't know Henrу yet, and would not be part of his local distribution network, but they could handle out-of-town deliveries and were willing to do the menial work that was part of this business, mixing and packaging. They saw it, not inaccurately, as a rite of passage, a starting place from which their status and responsibility would grow. Tony guaranteed their reliability. Henry accepted that. He and Tony were bound now, bound in business, bound in blood. He'd accept Tony's counsel now that he trusted him. He'd rebuild his distribution network, removing the need for his female couriers, and with the removal of the need for them, so would end the reason for their lives. It was too bad, but with three defections, it was plain that they were becoming dangerous. A useful part of his operation in the growth phase, perhaps, but now a liability.
But one thing at a time.
'How much?' Burt asked.
'Enough to keep you busy for a while.' Henry waved to the beer coolers. There wasn't room for much beer in them now, but that was as it should be. Burt carried them out to his car, not casual, but not tense. Businesslike, the way things should be. Perhaps Burt would become his principal lieutenant. He was loyal, respectful, tough when he had to be, far more dependable than Billy or Rick, and a brother. It was funny, really. Billy and Rick had been necessary at the beginning since the major distributors were always white, and he'd taken them on as tokens. Well, fate had settled that. Now the white boys were coming to him, weren't they?
'Take Xantha with you.'
'Boss, we're going to be busy,' Burt objected.
'You can leave her there when you're done.' Perhaps one at a time was the best way to do it.
Patience never came easy. It was a virtue he'd learned, after a fashion, but only from necessity. Activity helped. He set the gun barrel in the vise, damaging the finish even before he started to do anything substantive. Setting the milling machine on high-speed, rotating the control wheel, he started drilling a series of holes at regular intervals in the outermost six inches of the barrel. An hour later he had a steel can-body affixed over it, and the telescopic sight attached. The rifle, as modified, proved to be quite accurate, Kelly thought.
'Tough one, Dad?'
'Eleven months' worth, Jack,' Emmet admitted over dinner. He was home on time for once, to his wife's pleasure - almost.
'That awful one?' his wife asked.
'Not over dinner, honey, okay?' he replied, answering the question. Emmet did his best to keep that part of his life out of the house. He looked over at his son and decided to comment on a decision his son recently made. 'Marines, eh?'
'Well, Dad, it pays for the last two years of school, doesn't it?' It was like his son to worry about things like that, about the cost of education for his sister, still in high school and away at camp for the moment. And like his father, Jack craved a little adventure before settling down to whatever place life would find for him.
'My son, a jarhead,' Emmett grumbled good-naturedly. He also worried. Vietnam wasn't over, might not be over when his son graduated, and like most fathers of his generation, he wondered why the hell he'd had to risk his life fighting Germans - so that his son might have to do the same, fighting people he'd never even heard about at his son's age.
'What falls out of the sky, pop?' Jack asked with a college-boy grin, repeating something Marines like to say.
Such talk worried Catherine Burke Ryan, who remembered seeing Emmet off, remembered praying all day in St Elizabeth Church on June 6, 1944, and many days thereafter despite the regular letters and