by C. J. Box
“Just something that belonged to me,” she said. “Something I had to leave behind.”
“And now?”
“Let’s go back to Penn.”
He waited for a break in traffic, then made a U-turn across both lanes, headed back the way they’d come. She looked out the rear window. No SUV, no one following them.
They passed the all-night restaurant, crowded now, a line at the counter. She’d ask Rathka, her lawyer, to find out the cabdriver’s name, if he had family. If so, she’d figure out a way to get part of the money to them. It was all she could do, but it wasn’t enough. No amount would ever be enough.
“Luis, do me a favor?”
“Sure. What?”
She took four hundreds from her pocket, leaned over the seat, and held them out. “Tell your dispatcher when you got the call to pick me up, there was no one there.”
He looked at the bills.
“You never brought me out here. You never saw me at all,” she said. “Can you deal with that?”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“Can you?”
He hesitated. “I think so.”
“Then that’s good for both of us. Take it.”
He did.
She sat back, looked out the window at the streets passing by, kept one hand on the gear bag.
“Glad you didn’t hang around too long back there,” he said. “That’s a rough neighborhood.”
“I know,” she said.
ROBIN YOCUM
The Last Hit
FROM The Strand Magazine
The thing this younger bunch doesn’t understand is this: it’s just not as easy to clip someone as it used to be.
I’m not making excuses. It’s a fact. Nowadays there are cameras on the freeways, inside of buildings, outside of buildings—everywhere. You’re always on camera. And if you’re carrying a cell phone, the cops can track you by the pings off cell towers. It’s crazy. That’s how they nailed Joey Labitto for the Carsoni hit.
In the old days I could walk down an alley, through a back door, and boom, the job was done. Thirty minutes later Carlo and I would be at Undo’s, eating bucatini with clam sauce, a bottle of Chianti between us. Maybe a cannoli for dessert. Carlo loved cannoli. We would laugh and talk, never about business but about women, baseball, or politics. We would treat ourselves to a nice dinner because we knew the next day the old man would slap our backs, hand us each a wad of cash, and say, “Thanks for your service, gentlemen.” He was a man of few words.
Carlo and I worked together for more than four decades. Every cop and FBI agent in the tri-state knew who we were and what we did, but they could never put a finger on us. That’s how good we were. Half the time I don’t think the cops even tried to solve the cases. If they were honest, they’d tell you they were secretly grateful, because we were not exactly taking out Sunday school teachers.
I was a respected member of the family back then. I got invited to baptisms, weddings, and Sunday dinners, and if I went down to one of the whorehouses the old man ran, I never paid. Never. Of course, I’d tip for exceptional service, but that was it. Do you want to know why I never had to pay? Because I was trusted and respected. Now the old man is gone and the young guns look at me like I’m a dinosaur. There’s no respect for me or the old ways. But let me tell you this: I’m seventy-two, and I’m still taking in oxygen. Most guys in my line of work don’t make it that long, including Carlo.
The kid, they call him Little Tommy, he doesn’t want to listen to anything I have to say. He gets a burr to take someone out, and he wants it done yesterday. I try to tell him that these things take time, that you need to be careful, but like I said, he doesn’t want to hear any of that. “Just get it done,” he says.
Before he died, his dad, Tommaso “Big Tommy” Fortunato, asked me to look after his only son. I promised I would. It’s been six years since the old man stroked out, and I’m an afterthought in the family these days. I don’t get invited to dinner. No one asks how I’m doing. I thought I’d be a mentor to Little Tommy, but that’s not how he wants it. When I think of it, the only reason he hasn’t already shoved me out the door is I know all the family secrets. I know where the bodies are buried—literally.
Every morning I walk down to the diner to get breakfast and read the newspaper. Sometimes in the afternoon I’ll go over to the nursing home and visit Jimmy Nicolosi, who used to run the gambling operation for Big Tommy. Nickels, we called him. We spend some time talking about the old days. I do a lot of the talking, because Nickels doesn’t even know who I am most of the time. I take my dinner at Cardone’s and spend my evenings in front of the television in an old third-floor walkup.
I was a loyal soldier. Now, after decades of undying loyalty to the family, Little Tommy treats me like a leper. He used to sit on my lap and call me Uncle Ange. Now he hardly ever calls to see how I am doing.
But he called tonight.
He said, “I need you to do something for me.”
The kid only calls when he needs something. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t interested, but I remembered my promise to his old man. “Sure,” I said. “When?”
“Tonight.”
Of course, no time to prepare. “I’ll be right over,” I said.
I pulled a black suit out of the closet and took a brush to my shoes. Dress like you have some respect for yourself and your job—Carlo taught me that. I always took pride in my work, and I’ve done a lot of different jobs for the family, but my specialty is elimination. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve taken out in my five decades of service to the Fortunato family. In all candor, I’ve lost track. It’s not the kind of thing you log in a journal. I sometimes feel like an old man trying to recall his many sexual conquests. The faces start to blur after a while. I was there, I remember the hit, but did I do the deed or did Carlo? Who knows? But I know my body count is easily north of eighty. It’s all I have done my entire adult life. And I believe every son of a bitch I killed is rotting in hell. I may be headed there too, but I’ll worry about eternity later. In the meantime, it’s no secret that I am on the outside looking in, now that Little Tommy is head of the Fortunato family.
A month ago I stopped by the diner for a coffee and a doughnut. I was sitting at the counter when a guy smelling of Aqua Velva sat down next to me. He wore a nice suit, polished shoes, boring necktie. I didn’t know who he was, but I knew what he was the minute he sat down. There were fifteen empty seats at the counter, but he sat right next to me. As he was reading the newspaper, sipping his coffee, he whispered, “Hasn’t been the same around the ranch since the old man died, has it?”
I didn’t say nothin’. After a minute he slid a business card under my coffee saucer and said, “We’d like to talk to you.”
I put my fingertips on the card, pushed it back under his newspaper, and said, “Christ Almighty, are you trying to get me killed?”
He kept drinking his coffee. After a couple of minutes he dropped three dollars on the counter and pushed the card back under my saucer. “We’ll make it worth your while, Angelo,” he said, and left.
His name was Braddock, Special Agent Lawrence G. Braddock of the Pittsburgh field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I put the card in my jacket pocket. I didn’t call him, but a week later he called me at my apartment. I said, “My number’s unlisted. How’d you get it?”
He snorted. “You’re kidding, right? I’m with the FBI. I can get any number I want.”
On the outskirts of Aliquippa there is an abandoned brick factory where my father worked himself into an early grave. Behind it, nearly smothered by the encroaching brush, is a cobblestone wharf that extends into the Ohio River. That’s where I met him. We were at the water’s edge, tiny waves lapping in the shoals, the smell of oil and mud heavy in the air.
“In the old days,” I said, “when this factory was humming, they used to bring barge loads of clay to this wharf, and my dad and a few of the other grunts would sta
rt shoveling. They’d unload the whole damn barge by hand.”
“Honest work,” Braddock said.
“Fool’s work,” I said. “He’d come home so stoved up and tired he could barely walk. He couldn’t even go out in the yard and toss around the baseball. He died at fifty-seven, his body completely shot.”
“Is that why you got in with the Fortunatos, so you didn’t have to unload barges?”
“What do you think, Sherlock?”
He looked out over the river, picked up a flat stone, and skipped it across the dark water. “We want to make you an offer, Angelo.”
I said nothing.
“In exchange for your help in our investigation of Little Tommy Fortunato, we’re prepared to give you complete immunity and put you in the witness protection program.”
“Are you miked up?” I asked.
This time Braddock said nothing. Of course he was.
“Why would I want immunity?” I asked. “You’re implying that I’ve done something wrong. I’ve never been arrested, not once.”
“They’re making a lot of advances in DNA research. Sooner or later someone is going to make a link to you and one of the corpses that you and Carlo left all over the tri-state. All it takes is a little blood, maybe some saliva or a hair follicle. You didn’t cap all those guys without leaving some kind of evidence behind.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Besides, you’d have to have my DNA to compare it to.”
Braddock smirked. “We’re the FBI, Angelo, remember? Do you seriously think we don’t have your DNA?”
I gotta admit, that made my ass pucker.
“We want to take down Little Tommy,” Braddock said. “He’s a bad guy, Angelo, a real bad guy. In the old days, when Big Tommy was in charge, you guys were just running the illegal gambling and the whorehouses. No one cared. But Little Tommy’s bringing heroin, meth, and cocaine into the area in truckloads. We can’t have that. We want him off the street, and you’re the key. We know you’re on your way out of the organization. It’s a win-win.”
“You get Little Tommy, but what do I get?”
“Along with revenge on the guy that ran you out?”
I nodded.
“You get a new identity, a nice little place in the sun. I heard your lungs aren’t so good. The dry air in Arizona or New Mexico would be good for you. And we’ll get you a very generous stipend. You’ll be able to buy yourself a new Buick.”
I turned and started up the wharf. “I’ll think about it,” I said. When Big Tommy was around, I would never have considered such disloyalty.
“Don’t think too long, Angelo. My bosses are impatient men. You’re not the only guy we’re trying to flip, and the first guy to the door gets the deal. In the meantime, we’re still working on that DNA. There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
* * *
It’s a thirty-minute drive from my apartment to the Fortunato compound on the far east side. The property is encased by a black iron fence with a fleur-de-lis at the top of each post. Red brick pillars stand sentry at the entrance to the driveway. A matching brick drive snakes around to the rear of the house.
When I pulled up in my Buick LeSabre, Big Tommy’s widow was in the garden.
“Hi, Rosebella,” I said. “Picking yourself some daisies, I see.”
She stared blankly for a moment, struggling to caption the image in her mind’s eye. It didn’t come. “Yes, picking daisies,” she finally said. “I like daisies. Have you seen my Tommaso?”
Tommaso, of course, had been dead six years.
“I haven’t seen him lately, Rosebella.”
“I’m starting to worry. I can’t imagine where he’s gone.”
“If I see him, I’ll send him right over.”
She smiled. “I’d like that very much.”
She had the Alzheimer’s something terrible. For forty years I ate nearly every Sunday dinner at her home. Her husband and I were like brothers. Now I am nothing but a nameless character passing through the last chapter of her life—another sign that my best days with the family are behind me.
There were three guys, young like Little Tommy, sitting on the veranda. They were talking in hushed tones, most likely about me. They sniggered, and I overheard one of them say, “The fossil has arrived.” They were wearing Hawaiian shirts, hideous floral things that hid the snub-nosed .38s they had tucked in the waistbands of blue jeans, and penny loafers without socks. The blue jeans, by the way, had holes in them when they were bought. Explain that one to me, please. They looked like they were on vacation in Key West instead of working at the Fortunato compound. No respect.
Before I could get to the shade of the overhang, the tubby one, the one called Gummy, got up and walked inside. Gaetano and the Tipplehorn kid, the harelip who heads up the drug operation, continued to sit; they acknowledged my presence with the slightest of nods. Tipplehorn had a glassy look in his eyes. He was high on something. That’s one more thing that would never have flown when Big Tommy was in charge.
The drug game is a cancer on our society. That probably sounds odd coming from a guy who helped run Big Tommy’s whorehouses and who puts tunnels the size of shooting marbles through people’s brains, but that’s the way I feel. The gambling and prostitution game was just supply-and-demand economics. The mill rats all demanded a place to squander their paychecks or step out on the old lady. The drugs, they turn people’s brains to mush. But whether I like it or not isn’t important. It’s now the family business, and Little Tommy makes more money in six months than the old man made in five years. None of that is my concern. Little Tommy gives me a job and I do it. End of story.
Little Tommy walked out the back door and made a slight move of the head, indicating that he wanted me to follow him away from the crowd. We walked past his mother, who showed not the first sign that she recognized her only son, and stopped at the edge of the paver bricks. “You’re taking Gaetano with you tonight,” he said.
I could feel the heat building under the collar of my dress shirt. I hated that little punk. His name wasn’t even Gaetano. It was Harold or Harvey, or something like that. He began calling himself Gaetano to make himself sound more Italian. Give me a break. He was one of Little Tommy’s favorites and the one designated to someday take my place. That hadn’t been said, but I know what I know. He had gone with me on the last three jobs. The first two I made him wait in the car. The last one he got to watch. If it bothered him seeing a gangbanger named Lucius get his brains scrambled, he didn’t show it.
I took a few calming breaths; Little Tommy knew having a shadow didn’t sit well with me. I’d been a solo act ever since Carlo bought it. “You know I prefer to work alone,” I said.
“It’s not an option,” Little Tommy said. “Look, I don’t want this to come out the wrong way, but you’re not going to live forever, Uncle Ange. I need to have someone waiting in the wings who knows the ropes. You’re the best in the business, the absolute best, and I want him to learn from you. Besides, what’s this ‘I prefer to work alone’ stuff ? You worked with Carlo for years.”
“That was different. We were a team. I trusted Carlo. This one, Gaetano, he’s not ready for this. He’s careless.”
“I want him on this one.”
“I see what’s happening here, Tommy. You have me train the kid and when he’s ready I’m never going to get another phone call.”
“Uncle Ange, please, that’s not so.” He raised his right hand alongside his face. “My right hand to God, as long as you’re around, you’re my guy, my number one. I swear.”
There was no sense in arguing. “Who’s the mark?” I asked.
“Gaetano has all the information.” He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed once. “I want him getting involved. I need to know if he’s got the stomach for this.”
I nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”
The mark, I assumed, was another gangbanger. I had dropped four of them in the past two years for encroa
ching on the family’s traditional turf. For the most part the other crime families respect boundaries. That’s not the case with the gangbangers. Respect is just another word they can’t spell. They come into town with their loud music and gold jewelry and think they’re going to take over. There’s no talking to them. The only thing they understand is a bullet to the head.
Gaetano knew he would be going with me and was already cutting across the lot. “Hey, Pops, ready to rock?”
His disrespect scalded me to my marrow. If he had called me Pops in front of Big Tommy Fortunato, he would have eaten half his teeth. But those days are just a speck in the rearview of my dying LeSabre.
“I’ll drive,” he said. “I’m afraid that bucket of bolts of yours will never make it.”
I grabbed the handle on his garish yellow car. As I opened the door, I watched Little Tommy help his mother in from the garden. It was a tender moment that I didn’t think the boy was capable of. Uncle Ange, I thought. He called me Uncle Ange for the first time in years. I watched until they disappeared under the shade of the veranda.
“Pops, you coming?”
I slid into the passenger seat. “What kind of car is this, other than a mark for every cop between here and Altoona?” I asked.
He laughed. “You’re funny, Pops. It’s a Camaro. Sweet ride, huh? They call it the Bumblebee.”
“Yeah, sweet.”
He squealed the tires as he pulled onto the main road. I glared at him and he eased off the gas.
“You have to be discreet in this business,” I said. “We’re not like the gangbangers. They roll into town with those Jap cars all jacked up with the big wheels and the music blaring. They want everyone to see them. That’s not the way we operate. We work in the shadows. We get in, we get the job done, and we get out. If we do it right, nobody even knows we were there. Sometimes the poor son of a bitch we are going to see doesn’t even know. Get yourself a boring car, brown, gray, something that mixes in with every other car on the street. That way, if the cops ask somebody what they saw, they don’t remember the car. You drive this thing, they say, ‘Yeah, I remember a car, it looked like a big damn bumblebee.’” This made Gaetano smile. “I’m serious, boy.”