Bad Apple

by Anthony Bruno

  “No. Not there.”

  Stanley didn’t answer.

  “Shit! Shit, shit, shit!” Freshy was suddenly very upset.

  Gibbons was confused. He didn’t like the sound of any of this.

  As the van slipped into the artificial light of the tunnel, the soft crackle of the static began to fade. Lorraine stared at the speaker, then threw her head back and sighed. “Oh, God.”

  TWELVE

  1:22 P.M.

  “Just walk. Keep walking. Just keep on walking.”

  Tozzi wanted to kill the bastard. He and Gina were walking, holding hands and climbing the subway steps like a nice couple, just the way Bells wanted, but the son of a bitch kept giving them orders anyway. He was right behind them, holding his gun on them in the pocket of his overcoat, talking nonstop in that singsong wiseguy drone of his, telling them to keep walking. Tozzi swore to God he was gonna kill this bastard. For Gibbons.

  The image of Gibbons lying on the floor—one leg crooked back, lifeless arms up over his head—was driving Tozzi crazy. He wanted to rip Bells’s fucking heart out. Gibbons. He’d killed Gibbons. The bastard should suffer, suffer a lot. Tozzi wanted to get a piece of Bells so bad, his hands were shaking.

  When they reached the top of the stairs and walked out into the sunlight on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Spring Street, on the edge of SoHo, Tozzi glared at Bells sideways.

  Bells was grinning like a lizard. “You like this, don’cha, Mikey-boy? Holding hands with Gina, strolling down the street. Maybe we should go check out some art galleries while we’re here. That’s your kind of thing, isn’t it, Gina?”

  “Go fuck yourself, Bells.”

  Bells laughed. “You got some fresh mouth, Gina. I don’t know why they call your brother Freshy.”

  Tozzi tried to smother his fury. “Where we going, Bells?”

  “Whatta you care, Mikey? You got the girl. Just enjoy it.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You telling me you’re not enjoying it? C’mon, Mikey, be honest now. You been dying to get Gina in the sack. Or who knows, maybe you done her already. Is that it, Mikey? You had her a couple of times, and now you don’t want no part of her no more? Is that it? What’sa matter? She snores?”

  Tozzi slid his eyes toward Gina, but she kept her eyes straight ahead. He wasn’t sure if Bells was just guessing about them. Maybe he knew about that afternoon at her apartment.

  “Tell me. Is she nice, Mikey?”

  Gina’s glasses flashed as she whipped her head around. “Get off it, will ya, Bells? You’re not funny.”

  “Oh, no? You used to think I was funny.”

  Tozzi tried to catch her eye, but she was looking straight ahead again.

  They passed an old-fashioned barber shop and a jewelry repair shop as they headed east toward West Broadway, where the expensive shops and galleries were. And the crowds. Tozzi had been shitting bricks on the subway, worrying about Bells with that gun in his pocket while they were jammed in shoulder-to-shoulder with dozens of citizens. Tozzi was afraid something might set him off, and he’d start shooting again the way he did in Macy’s. Luckily, nothing happened on the subway, but Tozzi knew he had to keep him away from crowds.

  Tozzi’s head started to throb again from the pistol-whipping. He thought about his black-belt test scheduled for that night, and suddenly he wanted to bite something, he was so mad. Not because he was going to miss it again. That didn’t matter anymore, not after what had happened to Gibbons. What pissed him off was that he’d come all this way, studied aikido for five and a half years, and what good did it do him? Here he was at the mercy of some jerk who had no formal training in anything, just some scumbag lowlife with a gun. He remembered what they always said at aikido practice. A guy comes at you with a gun, just give him what he wants. No martial art in the world can help you against a bullet from across the room. And even though Bells was up close and the gun was in his pocket, which could’ve given Tozzi some leverage, he was handcuffed to Gina, so he couldn’t risk it. He felt totally helpless handcuffed this way. The only thing to do was to just stay calm and relax. Be aware of everything that’s going on all around. Maintain the basic principles of aikido. And hope for a miracle.

  Tozzi sighed. Why bother studying any martial art when all you have to do is plunk down a couple hundred bucks for a handgun, and you’ve bought yourself total control? It wasn’t fair. Sure, he knew aikido training was supposed to be a constant ongoing thing, something you did for life. You were always a student, no matter how long you’d been doing it, and no one ever “mastered” it, not even the masters. Besides, aikido was supposed to be life training, not combat training. There was a lot more to it than just fighting. Tozzi knew all that, but it wasn’t very reassuring right now. All he knew was that he was almost a black belt, and Bells, who only wore a belt to keep his pants up, had the upper hand. And all he had was a goddamn gun. Christ.

  Tozzi’s temper started to simmer down. Getting mad never helped anything. He felt Gina’s fingers in his hand. They were cold. She was gonna catch pneumonia. It was pretty chilly out, and she was only wearing slacks and a blouse, but she wasn’t complaining, not about that. The wind blew her hair across her face and into her glasses. He wondered what she was thinking. He wondered what was really going on between her and Bells. She was too quiet, angry but not outraged. Sure, she was tough, but wouldn’t someone being kidnapped at gunpoint be a little more hysterical? Maybe she felt guilty about something she’d done to Bells. Maybe she thought she deserved this. Why wasn’t she putting up more of a fuss? Why didn’t she seem scared?

  But that got Tozzi thinking about how he looked. Was he reacting like Mike Santoro the pornographer or Mike Tozzi the FBI agent? Maybe he should be a little more hysterical. Maybe he should try to weasel his way out of this, the way Mike Santoro would, profess shock and innocence at what was going on, grovel a little. Maybe he was being too stoic for the greaseball he was supposed to be.

  Yeah, but what if Bells already knew that he was an undercover agent? Freshy could’ve told him. Tozzi wouldn’t put it past that little shit. If Bells knew, maybe he was thinking he could use Tozzi as a bargaining chip to negotiate his way to freedom. The problem was, he didn’t know what Bells knew, and Bells wasn’t saying anything. Obviously Bells knew Gibbons was the law, or he wouldn’t have shot him. But how much else did he know? Tozzi glanced over his shoulder at Bells’s face. It was disturbingly placid under the circumstances, almost as if he were meditating. You could never tell what this guy was thinking, what set him off. Tozzi had to get him talking.

  “Why me, Bells? What’d I do to you? I don’t get it.”

  Bells didn’t answer. They were walking together at a nice clip, but Bells was in his own world now.

  “Talk to me, Bells. Lemme help you. We’ll figure something out.”

  Bells started to laugh. It started as a private little hiss, but it soon snowballed into near-hysterical belly laughs.

  Gina parted the hair out of her face and looked back at him. “You’re sick. You know that?”

  “C’mon, Bells. Listen to me. Lemme help you out here. Take the cuffs off. C’mon.”

  Gina smirked. “How’s he gonna do that? He doesn’t have the key.”

  She was right. Bells hadn’t taken the security guard’s keys when he knocked the guy out. Still, Tozzi had to keep up the chatter. He had to get Bells talking. Bells had to realize his hostages were people, not props.

  “Bells, you’re not listening to me. I wanna help you out.”

  Bells slowed down their pace. He was laughing so hard, he was in tears. “Help me out? How’re you gonna help me out? You’re a fucking rat, Mikey. You don’t wanna help me. You wanna screw me.”

  The word hit Tozzi like a dagger in a tree trunk. Rat. Bells did know.

  “Whatta’ya talking about, Bells? Whatta’ya mean, ‘rat’?”

  Bells was out of control, laughing like he was on laughing gas. “You’re a rat, Mikey-boy, a big fu
cking rat. That old guy I shot at Macy’s? The one with the swollen face? You met him out in front of the candy store in Bayonne this morning. You told me he was just some guy looking for a dentist or some shit. Well, I saw him on TV, Mikey. He’s a fucking fed, my friend.”

  Was a fed, Tozzi thought.

  “You’ve been working with the feds, Mikey-boy. That ain’t nice.” Bells wasn’t laughing anymore.

  Tozzi’s gut turned to concrete. He was afraid to deny it. Bells might go berserk. But if he admitted that Bells was right, Bells would kill him for sure.

  “Is that true?” Gina glared at him.

  “What?”

  “That you’re working with the government. You were trying to get my brother in trouble, weren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Liar.”

  “Gina, I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t rat on anybody.”

  Bells was hysterical again, getting a real charge out of their arguing, but Tozzi was shitting bricks. He never liked being on the defensive, having to make excuses. It made you sound like a liar even if you weren’t. He had to give her a direct answer, and denial was his only choice.

  She let go of his hand and tried to pull it away, forgetting that they were cuffed. “You’re a real jerk, you know that? You sweet-talked me and fed me all that bullshit about liking me, when all you really wanted was information about my brother. You came up to my apartment that day just to see if you could get something on my brother. You didn’t give a shit about me. I can’t believe this.” There was venom in her eyes.

  The sweat was dripping down Tozzi’s back. Oh, shit . . .

  Bells stopped laughing. His mouth was a straight line, his eyes were dull and flat. Tozzi could feel his motor revving. “You screwed her?”

  “Bells, listen to me—”

  He looked at Gina. “You slept with this guy?”

  She turned her face away and didn’t answer.

  Bells was nodding. His face was like a dark house. “This is nice. You’re sleeping with this rat, and he’s trying to fuck me over. Very nice, Gina. I like this.”

  “It was only once,” she snapped.

  But Bells wasn’t listening. He was talking to himself, running it down out loud. “They got my face on TV, and a million cops are out there looking for me, and you went to bed with this guy. Wonderful.”

  The back of Tozzi’s shirt was drenched under his coat. “You’re jumping to conclusions, Bells. It’s not what you think. Talk to me.”

  But Bells didn’t hear. His face was empty; he was in another world. Tozzi followed his gaze to a Korean grocery store on the corner across the street. A truck driver was unloading crates of lettuce from the back of an open panel truck.

  “Hey!” Gina yelped as Bells suddenly grabbed a fistful of her hair and pushed her across the street. His gun hand was still in his pocket, and Tozzi could see the bulge of the barrel through the fabric. They moved toward the cab of the truck like a dysfunctional conga line. Keeping his grip on Gina’s hair, Bells stepped up on the running board, glanced inside, then stepped down all in one motion.

  “Leggo,” Gina yelled, but he shoved her toward the back of the truck, dragging Tozzi along with them.

  Tozzi didn’t resist. The gun was pointed at Gina’s back, and he knew that Bells wasn’t shy about shooting in public.

  The Korean man unloading vegetables glanced up when he heard Gina’s complaining. The automatic flew out of Bells’s pocket and was in the man’s face, making him cross-eyed.

  “Keys,” Bells ordered.

  The man sputtered in Korean.

  “Keys to the truck.”

  The man shrugged and jabbered. He didn’t understand English.

  Bells backhanded him across the temple with the gun barrel. The man staggered back, and suddenly another Korean in a white apron rushed out of the store with a sawed-off shotgun in his hand. Bells let go of Gina and moved right into his face, jamming the automatic into his throat and beating him to the punch. The trembling man raised his arms in surrender, and Bells slapped the shotgun out of his hand.

  “Keys. I want the truck keys.”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, okay,” the Korean grocer said. His accent was thick, but he understood what Bells wanted. “In pocket.” He pointed to the stunned truck driver who was sitting on the sidewalk, tendering his head. “In pocket.”

  Bells tipped the grocer’s chin up with the gun barrel. “Get them. Get the keys.”

  “Okay, okay, okay. I get for you. I get.” The grocer hunkered down and fished the keys out of the driver’s jacket. He dangled them in his fingers, holding them up at arm’s length, straining his neck muscles against the muzzle digging into his throat. “You want money, I get money. No shoot me. Please. I get money for you.”

  Bells ignored the offer and knocked the squatting grocer to the ground with a bump of his hip. He turned the gun on Tozzi and Gina. “In,” he said, nodding into the back of the truck.

  Tozzi couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. It had flashed by him as if it were on a movie screen. The way Bells had moved was unreal. His focus and execution were extraordinary. There was no emotion or hesitation in his attack. Bells didn’t think, he just acted. It was the kind of spirit Tozzi had seen only in the very best aikido practitioners, the real masters. The whole incident had taken fifteen, twenty seconds tops, but it wasn’t until it was over and Bells was ordering them into the back of the truck that Tozzi realized that he’d been mesmerized by the spectacle. If he’d had the presence of mind to act, he might have been able to do something to get Bells’s gun away from him while he was threatening the Koreans. But Tozzi hadn’t done a thing. He’d just watched. It gradually materialized in Tozzi’s mind, like a Polaroid developing as he watched, that despite all his FBI training and all his aikido training, he was probably no match for Bells.

  “In.” Bells pointed into the back of the truck with the gun.

  Gina looked totally put out, but she started climbing in, crawling onto the edge on her knees. She jerked Tozzi’s handcuffed wrist. “C’mon!” Her voice was like new chalk on a blackboard.

  “Go ’head, Mikey. Get in.” Bells was smiling again, back under control. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  Reluctantly Tozzi climbed up onto the tailgate. He jerked Gina’s arm without meaning to, and Gina jerked back, tit for tat. They stood up together and looked down at Bells, Tozzi feeling stupid and helpless.

  “Have fun,” Bells said as he grabbed the hanging strap and pulled the overhead gate down with a rattle and a crash.

  Standing there in the dark, they could hear the clatter of Bells padlocking the gate.

  Tozzi looked around as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. A sliver of sunlight penetrated the emptiness from a crack in the seam of one of the side walls. It was uncomfortably cool and damp back there, and there was a faint smell like something about to go bad.

  “Shit,” Gina said. “This is all your fault.”

  “Mine?”

  “Yes, yours. You got him mad.”

  “I got him mad?”

  The truck engine turned over then, and Tozzi heard the parking brake being released. The truck took off with a jerk, and they both were thrown back.

  “Sit down,” Tozzi said, squatting down and feeling around for something to sit on.

  “Don’t tell me what to—”

  The truck suddenly braked hard, and Gina was thrown forward, nearly yanking Tozzi’s arm out of its socket.

  “Sit down!” he repeated, annoyed with her hard head.

  “Don’t tell me what to do.” She settled down without his help and found a place for herself, keeping as far from him as possible. “Now what?”

  “Whatta’ya mean, ‘now what’?”

  “Now what? That’s what I mean.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Great.”

  They didn’t say anything. Only the sound of gears grinding and whining filled the gloom. Tozzi was thinking about what Bells had done to t
hose two Koreans back there, how smooth and efficient his movements were, how detached and unemotional he was when he was hurting someone. It was terrifying.

  “Goddamn it!” Gina suddenly yanked his arm again as she tried to get up. “Yuck!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m sitting in tomatoes, dammit.”

  “Oh.”

  As she shifted her position, Tozzi felt around to see what he was sitting on.

  Potatoes.

  THIRTEEN

  1:34 P.M.

  Lorraine stared at the speaker, lulled by the soft hiss of the static. The interior of the van was dim and solemn. Traffic was backed up inside the Lincoln Tunnel, heading toward New Jersey. Craning her neck, she could see through the windshield. The taillights of the cars up ahead reflected off the tile walls, like long unfurling neon-red streamers. It made her think of Chinese New Year.

  Traffic slowed, and brake lights flashed on, one after the other. The red glow gave Freshy’s pale face some color. He looked anxious, but Lorraine suspected that this might be his standard expression.

  Gibbons was leaning against the wall in the rear of the van, his head tipped back, face shrouded in shadow. His eyes shimmered through the dark. He was staring at Stanley.

  Half of Stanley’s face was shaded, the other half tinged with red. His huge jaw made him look like the Tin Man, only stouter and more menacing. His eyes shimmered, too, under half-closed lids as he stared back at Gibbons. He held his gun on the flat of his thigh.

  No one had said anything since they’d slipped into the tunnel. The strange light and shadow had hushed them. Even the static coming out of the speaker seemed more subdued.

  Lorraine looked at Gibbons, hoping to catch his eye, but he kept his stare leveled on Stanley as he rubbed his chest in slow rhythmic circles. She wished he’d look at her, acknowledge her, acknowledge that he wasn’t angry with her, even though it infuriated her that she was feeling guilty like this. He was the one who had been acting like an ass, using his toothache as an excuse for being Attila the Hun. But she did feel guilty, and she couldn’t help feeling that way because after he’d been shot and he was lying there and she thought he was dead, she did not cry. She wasn’t distraught; she wasn’t sad. She was simply resigned and, in her heart of hearts, maybe even relieved. Not happy that he was dead, but relieved that something she’d been secretly dreading had finally happened, and now she could let her breath out and get on with the next phase, whatever that was. Widow? Widowed professor? Old schoolmarm widow? Fifty-ish white widow, Ph.D., seeking stimulating companion for chess, Chaucer, long walks on the beach, fine wine, and low-fat cheese at sunset. Smokers and men likely to be shot to death in the line of duty need not respond.