TWENTY-NINE

Leon Sphinx carefully raised his scorching mug of coffee to his lips and took a sip. The taste in his mouth was strong and bitter, which was just the way he used to like it. It had been a long time between coffees; two years, to be exact. The buzz he felt from the caffeine was almost instantaneous. He always had enjoyed a nice cup of coffee before a kill. And this kill would be among his most glorious.

Even though Leon held up his newspaper in front of his face to make it look as though he was reading it, his eyes actually never left the front entrance of the café. He had to be sure that nobody found the C-4 explosives he had set up earlier. At least not until he was fully ready to commence his work.

Leon had been sitting alone in the corner of the café for the past half hour. It had been a relatively quiet morning so far; Leon had only seen a dozen or so people passing by along the sidewalk outside, and this suited him just fine. Fewer witnesses would make his job all the easier.

All five of the faces Leon had spent the previous night memorising from photographs were inside the café now, and they were seated in a wall booth right across from him. They had arrived within minutes of each other, just as Leon’s client had said they would. After all, this was an inside job.

Leon studied each of his four targets carefully, along with the one man he was meant to let escape. The man on the far left was Moe Carmonte, who looked like a bar room brawler. He was a capo, or captain, in the Paravinchi crime family; the lowest priority on Leon’s hit-list.

The next man along in the booth was Jamie Trappatoni, who was said to be a wise man and sixty-four years of age. Despite his apparent physical weakness, Trappatoni’s position within the Paravinchi family was one of great importance. He served as the chief advisor and right-hand man of Don Paravinchi himself.

The third man seated at the booth was Salvatore Angelo. Lean, mean, and looking a rather generous fifty-five years of age, Angelo was a man who liked to get things done. Whenever there was a problem for the family that needed to be dealt with, or a man that needed killing, Angelo was the guy Don Paravinchi entrusted with the responsibility to fix everything.

The next man along was the one Leon had been ordered to spare, the only non-Italian at the table. He was Japanese, and had a face which always appeared to be smiling. Ichi Fujita, an inside man who was working on behalf of his clients.

And finally there was the big fish of the group, Don Fabian Paravinchi himself. The man’s face was gaunt and leather-like, his black but greying hair was slicked back tightly to his scalp. Paravinchi was a man who oozed with both confidence and power wherever he carried himself. He was also said to have an incredibly short fuse. His colleagues seemed to hang on his every word as he sat there in the cafe sprouting foul-mouthed promises of retribution against whoever it was that had been murdering members of the city’s underworld without his permission over the past few days.

“And I don’t care if it’s those micro-dicked Kojimas, the inbred Haitians, an inbred hooker with two penises, or Mickey fucking Mouse!” Paravinchi roared in a highly animated fashion, banging his fist down onto the table so hard that it shattered his plate. “Just find me the bastards responsible and bring me their fucking balls with a side of spaghetti made from their whorish mothers’ intestines!”

At that moment, right on schedule, the Japanese man Ichi Fujita politely stood up to excuse himself from the table, telling the group he needed to use the bathroom. Despite appearing none too pleased at the request, Don Paravinchi granted his oriental guest permission to leave, motioning him away as though he were shooing a mosquito.

After watching Fujita cross the restaurant and disappear out into the safety of restrooms in the back, Leon’s mind quickly went over the Paravinchis’ security setup one last time, just to make sure he hadn’t overlooked anything before he began his assault. There were nine armed bodyguards stationed around the café. Two of them were seated at a table just a few rows down from Leon, three more in a booth three bays up from their bosses, and four stood on guard out the front. All of them would no doubt be carrying some kind of new model, hi-tech and overly-expensive submachine gun beneath their coats.

Leon also knew, from one of his employer’s inside sources, that the Paravinchis had a six-man backup team watching over the meeting place from across the street. They were parked in a blue van and on stand-by for any funny business. The men inside the van, Leon figured, would definitely be packing a heavier arsenal — most likely assault rifles or heavy-duty shotguns. They would be a little tougher to take down, but still more than manageable for a man of Leon’s talents, assuming of course he dispatched all the others as quickly and easily as he was expecting to.

No point overthinking his tactics; Leon figured he would just wing it.

Okay, time to go. He set his newspaper aside and stood up, opening his trench coat and bringing up the laser-sighted SMG he had concealing there. His movements immediately attracted the attention of one of Paravinchi’s guards seated a few tables over. The guard rose to his feet, reaching under his coat for his hidden Uzi, but Leon was simply too quick; by the time the guard’s fingers had found the butt of his weapon Leon had already fired, blasting him off his feet.

A second Paravinchi guard, who was sitting with his back to Leon at the same table, had just been about to take a sip of his freshly brewed coffee when Leon’s next burst struck him in the back of the head, blowing his brains out into his cup. A torrent of coffee and blood splashed across his lap.

Two down. Leon moved forward with calm, measured steps as screams and chaos erupted all around him. He shifted his aim to the left, where three more bodyguards were seated in a wall booth. His rounds quickly chewed up the table and cutlery all around his targets, and they jerked and thrashed around violently, explosions of scarlet breaking out all over their torsos.

Without even realising it, Leon was laughing; he had missed all this so much during his two years spent locked away in his own personal purgatory. The muzzle-flash of his SMG lit up his mad eyes as he shifted his aim again, firing away at the two guards at the front counter. The first guard got off a single burst from his Uzi before Leon’s trail of fire ripped across his chest. The second caught three rounds to his throat and he collapsed to the floor in a crimson cloud, minus half his jaw.

Several gunshots came roaring back across the café towards Leon, but he crouched down, keeping himself below the table-line and out of sight as he moved.

Meanwhile, the four guards who had been stationed outside the front entrance of the café before all the shooting started now came pouring inside. Leon watched their feet closely from beneath the cover of his bullet-shredded table. Two of the new arrivals ran straight over to their bosses, who were still trapped and cowering there helplessly in their booth. They began escorting them outside while the other two provided cover fire.

Calmly reloading another clip into weapon, Leon charged forward, diving across the floor. He landed on his knees, using the momentum to slide along the smooth tile floor like it was a waterslide, firing back at the shooters on full-auto. One of the gunmen took multiple bloody hits to the chest and dropped like a bag of bricks. The second one spun around rather theatrically as a bullet pierced right through his jaw, flipping him over the top of a chair.

With the two covering shooters out of commission, Leon sprang back up to his feet and charged after the fleeing mob bosses just as they reached the front entrance. Outside, four members of Paravinchi’s backup team were racing across the street to meet their bosses out front.

With a satisfied smirk, Leon stopped moving and lowered his weapon. He took out his small remote control trigger from his front coat pocket. “Ka-fucking-boom,” he howled in delight as he flipped the switch.

At that moment a massive explosion of C-4 rocked the front of the café, obliterating the entranceway in a wave of flames and shattering glass. Outside, the four arriving Paravinchi gunmen were all hurled back out across the street. Inside, the bodyguard who had been nearest to the door was lifted up off his feet and blown back thirty meters, his flaming carcass flying through the air and crashing back through several stacks of tables, before coming to a painful end atop the legs of an overturned chair. The four mob bosses and their other remaining bodyguard were all knocked off their feet, sliding back across the tile floor, their hands and faces cut to shreds by glass, splinters and tile fragments.

Moving silently through the smoke as the echo of the blast finally subsided, Leon Sphinx approached the first of his injured prey — a barely conscious Moe Carmonte — and promptly severed his spine with a short burst of his SMG.

A smouldering, groggy Salvatore Angelo got up from the floor next. He saw the bandaged Guerrero coming for him and weakly reached into his coat for a sidearm, but Leon calmly took aim and emptied the SMG clip into his body.

Out across the floor, the sole surviving bodyguard, who was now lying right beside the lifeless mass of his boss Paravinchi, had just come to his senses and started to reach for his Uzi. Also, the two final gunmen from the Paravinchi’s backup team were racing out across the street now to join the fray; they charged in through the thick layer of smoke and flames at the front entrance, their assault rifles blazing away blindly as though they didn’t care who the hell they hit.

Amateurs! Leon thought to himself. He took out another clip for his SMG, reloading, and hosed down the two incoming gunmen with a raking burst of fire. He twirled around then, firing two quick bursts straight through the head of Paravinchi’s bodyguard on the floor, splattering his brains all over the white tiles.

Silence.

Leon turned his attention down to the groaning Fabian Paravinchi. He was just about to finish him off when suddenly he heard a sharp crack of broken glass behind him. He turned to find Jamie Trappatoni, Paravinchi’s right-hand man, rising painfully to his feet. The man’s eyes were blinded through a veil of his own blood.

“Foolish,” Leon tsked as he shifted his sights. “You should have just stayed down and pretended you were dead!” Then he pulled the trigger. There was very little left of the old man as Leon finally stopped firing and his carcass splattered to the floor.

By the time Leon turned back to his primary target, Don Paravinchi had risen to his feet. The mob boss shrieked in terror as he saw Leon’s eyes acquire their target through the smoky veil. He backed away, his legs shaking with fright as the Guerrero strolled casually towards him.

“W-Who are you?” Paravinchi stammered, his voice faltering badly. He backed up against an overturned table and stopped, realising only then that he had nowhere else to go.

Leon offered him no response.

“You’re a professional, right?” Paravinchi asked him. “You’re doing all this for the money, yes? Well, just think this through for a second. Whoever the fuck your client is, I can outbid him. I have over fifty million dollars, and it’s all yours if you want it. Just look the other way; let me go this one time.”

In response Leon Sphinx simply walked over, drew his knife and stabbed Paravinchi through the centre of his throat. “It’s not about money,” he hissed. “It never was for me.” He extracted his blade and the mob boss collapsed to the floor, writhing around in his final fits of life.

Leon shoved his SMG back under his coat and waited, watching his victim closely until he was sure the man was stone-cold dead.

With Paravinchi now out of the picture, Leon drew his Colt from his holster and moved around the bullet-riddled restaurant, putting a round through the brain of each of the five cowering waiters and waitresses. No witnesses; those were his instructions. He then reloaded his spent rounds and moved into the kitchen where he found four chefs. One came at him with a knife while the others all stood back in shock. Regardless, they all shared the same fate.

With his mission accomplished and nobody left to kill, Leon Sphinx turned to leave, disappearing out through the wall of smoke at the front of the restaurant.

He had a reward to collect, and some long-awaited revenge against Sierra Rico now fast approaching.

...

Soon after Leon Sphinx had left, a grinning Ichi Fujita finally emerged from the restroom out the back of the restaurant. Looking as satisfied as he scanned the room’s carnage, he took out his phone and dialled a number.

“It’s me,” Fujita said jovially as he heard the man on the other end of the phone pick up. “Just letting you know that the meeting you set up went exactly as planned. All the targets are accounted for. Saito Kojima extends his gratitude.”

Even though the man on the other end didn’t say anything, Fujita could hear his breathing deepen just slightly.

“Congratulations,” Fujita continued. “I guess this means Princess will be left in charge of the Paravinchis.” He paused for a moment, before correcting himself with a deliberate chuckle. “No, what I should be saying is, you get to control the Paravinchis now. Isn’t that right, Lupo?”