Bad Apple (3 page)

But that was all right, Gibbons figured. He'd been looking for an excuse to shoot the dumb bastard in the foot to keep him from doing something stupid.

“Now, Bert, I have a list of all the undercover men on Shark Bite. Tell me where . . .”

Gibbons was listening, but all of a sudden Ivers's voice started to fade out as another screamer started building up steam. It rumbled through his head like a B-52 coming out of the clouds with a full load. The bomb-bay doors were open, and the fat boys tumbled out, speeding through the sky, zeroing in on Gibbons's tooth. The initial explosion made sweat bead on his freckled forehead despite the November cold; the ones that followed came so fast, they rolled together into one big annihilating wave of excruciating killer pain.

“Bert? Bert? Are you all right?”

Gibbons held on to his jaw and kept his eyes squeezed shut until the pain finally went back to being a manageable dull ache. The first thing he focused on when he opened his eyes was that blue van. It was parked now, as close to Petersen's car as it could get. The back end was open, and two guys were loading themselves down with some kind of equipment. At first, Gibbons thought they might be forensic people from the state, but on second glance, they didn't look right. Leather jackets, jeans, running shoes. One of them had funny-looking gold-rim glasses, too trendy for any bone-picker he'd ever met. Then he saw one of them hoist a video camera onto his shoulder, and he realized who these guys were. A freelance film team, ambulance-chasers who prowl the streets all night looking for juicy disaster footage that they can peddle to the local TV news shows. Fucking bloodsuckers.

Gibbons charged around the white Mercury and started
shouting, “Hey! Hey! Pack up your gear and get the hell out of here.”

The sound man, the one with the trendy glasses, gave him a dirty look and raised his boom mike on a stick as if he were going to defend himself with it. The cameraman, a tall, lanky guy in his early thirties with floppy blond hair, flashed a too-friendly smile and sauntered over toward the yellow tape that the state police had used to cordon off the crime scene.

“What's the problem, man?” the cameraman said. “We're just here to cover the story.”

Gibbons watched the guy's eyes darting to the interior of the car. He was looking for something gory. The worst part about it was that the sneaky bastard was making like the camera wasn't rolling. Who the hell did he think he was kidding?

Gibbons moved in and cut him off, blocking his view of the car. He couldn't take pictures now, for chrissake. The forensics guys hadn't even gotten here yet. “Take a hike, the two of you. Now get going.”

“C'mon, man. We're just doing our job.”

“Do it somewhere else.”

The cameraman ignored Gibbons and pointed the camera around him, going for the interior of Petersen's car.

“Hey, I'm warning you two little shitasses—”

“Bert!” Ivers called from the other side of the car.

Gibbons stepped in front of the video cam and put his hand over the lens. The camera guy reared back, moved to the side, and kept shooting. “Hey, I don't know who the fuck you think you are, man, but we've got a right to be here. Freedom of the press—you ever hear of it?” The guy kept shooting.

Suddenly the B-52 made another run on Gibbons's tooth. It came fast and without warning this time. The pain was beyond
belief. Gibbons clenched his fist, his face twisted, and hammered the car door with a King Kong backswing.

“Get out of the way, will you, man? This is news.”

“He's ruining my reading,” the soundman complained.

Ivers called over the roof of the car. “Let the state police deal with them, Bert.”

The cameraman craned his body over the yellow police tape, shooting into the open window on the driver's side. Gibbons saw red. He went for Excalibur, his prized .38 Colt Cobra, the gun he'd used his entire career as an FBI agent in violation of the standard-issue weaponry rules, and he stuck the muzzle into the lens of the video cam. Gibbons growled, low and mean. “Move on. Now. Or I'll blow your fucking eyes out.”

“Jesus Christ!” The soundman clutched his headset and hightailed it back to the van.

The cameraman dropped the unit to his waist and glared at Gibbons. “What the fuck is your problem, man? We're only trying to get a story.”

“Move on.”

The cameraman started to backstep toward the van. “You're gonna hear from our lawyer, man. This is a clear violation of our freedom of the press rights. A
clear
violation.”

“You can write to Ann Landers for all I care. Just get the hell outta here.” Gibbons kept Excalibur leveled on the two bloodsuckers until they packed up and drove off.

Ivers came up behind him. “Put your weapon away, Bert. That was uncalled for.”

“No, it wasn't.” Gibbons holstered his gun and turned on him. “Gary Petersen deserves better than twenty seconds' worth of footage of his bloody car seat in a stupid TV report that doesn't say anything about anything sandwiched in between some garbage about what Madonna had for lunch and a commercial
for Ex-Lax. The guy's got a wife and kids. He's a decent guy and a damn good agent, but nobody's gonna say shit about that because nobody gives a shit about the guy who takes the bullet. It's always the other guy, the one who pulls the trigger, who gets all the press. The victim is always just a prop for the bad guy in these things.”

Ivers took off his half-glasses. “I agree with you entirely, Bert. But that cameraman was right, too. The First Amendment guarantees his right to cover this event as a journalist.”

Gibbons was looking around on the ground, grumbling. “Yeah, well, maybe the Supreme Court will get around to fixing that, too.”

“What?”

Gibbons found his icebag on the pavement by the front of the car. “Never mind.” He brushed off the bag and put it back on his cheek.

That was the goddamn problem with this country, he thought. Everybody knows his rights, even when it's wrong.

Tozzi's arm lay on the table in front of him like a dead fish. The squeezed lime wedge in the glass of dark rum in front of him looked like a dead fish, too, a little green one. He stared down at his watch. It took a few seconds for the time to register in his brain. Twenty minutes to four. In the morning. He closed his weary eyes. This was nuts.

The place was called Joey's Starlight Lounge, but the only light in there came from behind the bar, and it gave everybody who got near it a sinister Phantom of the Opera kind of look. Joey's Starlight Lounge was a peek-a-boo bar where topless dancers in g-strings shook their booties with their hands over their nipples. When a patron at the bar gave a girl a buck, he'd get a peek. For five, he could have a gander. For ten, he could get up close. For twenty, he could touch. But right now there was hardly anyone there, and Annette, the only girl on duty, was sitting in a folding chair behind the bar, wearing a Seton Hall warm-up jacket to cover her assets, reading a paperback copy of
King Lear.
She had jet-black hair chopped at the collar, and she said she was studying acting at Juilliard. She worked here, she said, because she refused to waitress, and the tips were a lot better.

Tozzi finished off what was left of his drink, which was pretty
watery now that all the ice had melted. That was okay. He was just thirsty.

He looked into the bottom of his empty glass and saw his reflection under the little dead lime. The dark hair was getting thinner every day, but it still covered what it was supposed to. The dark deep-set eyes were tired, so they were even more deep-set and that much more suspicious. Heavy brows, Roman nose, slightly thick lips—a thug if there ever was one. But not a bad-looking thug. He wasn't DeNiro, of course, but he wasn't a toad either. Not on a good day.

Tozzi leaned out of the booth where he was sitting and squinted into the gloom in the back room. It was even darker back there, but in the dim light of a wall sconce he could make out the two figures huddled over a table, clasping their glasses in front of them. He couldn't see the muscle, but he knew they were back there, too, four of them, all bruisers. The thin guy was Tony Bells, the loan shark. The little guy was his boss, Buddha Stanzione. Tozzi knew what they were talking about. Him.

Tozzi scanned the bar, looking for his “partner,” but the only person at the bar was Stanley Sukowski, Tony Bells's driver. Stanley wasn't a made guy and never would be because he was half-Polish. He was what they called a “mob associate.” Stanley was the loan shark's right-hand man, and he was friendly enough, considering that his primary function was collection agent, which meant legbreaker. Tozzi had first met him last summer at a picnic Bells had thrown for a few of his associates, and Stanley had been wearing a T-shirt he said his daughter had given him for his birthday. It had a big picture of the Tazmanian Devil on the front, that hairy evil-looking cartoon charcter with the teeth and the big slathering jaws who was always trying to eat Bugs Bunny. Stanley, with his pronounced underbite, nonexistent neck, and squat build, actually looked quite a bit like the
Tazmanian Devil, Tozzi had thought at the time, and now he always thought of that T-shirt whenever he saw Stanley.

Tozzi nodded at Stanley, who nodded back, and wondered where the hell his “partner,” Mr. Fuckhead DeFresco, had gone. Bobby “Freshy” DeFresco and he were supposedly in the porno distribution business. Freshy knew Bells from their old neighborhood in Bayonne, and he was the one who was going to get them their “business loan” from Tony Bells. It was all “in the bag,” Freshy kept saying. “In . . . the . . . bag.”

In the bag, my ass, Tozzi thought. Nothing was in the bag. Bells didn't know shit about “Mike Santoro,” Tozzi's undercover name, and the loan shark must've had some doubts about him, otherwise he wouldn't be having this meeting with Buddha. They were asking to borrow $150,000 at a point and a half a week, which was not the preferred bad-guy rate. What Tozzi couldn't figure out was why Bells needed Buddha Stanzione's okay on this. As far as Tozzi knew, Bells had a free hand to loan money as he saw fit. Why all of a sudden was this case different?

Either Bells was nervous about lending to a partnership where he really didn't know one of the partners, or he felt that Freshy, the other partner, was such a fuck-up, he couldn't be trusted with that much money. But that was why Tozzi was sitting here, drinking a drink he didn't need, waiting for the dawn's early light. He was waiting to hear what Buddha Stanzione's decision would be. If they said yes, Operation Shark Bite would be one notch closer to hauling in a big one, a capo in the Luccarelli family. If they said no, Tozzi will have wasted a lot of time for nothing.

Staring into the gloom, cradling his face in his palm, Tozzi let out a tired sigh. This was really fucking nuts when you thought about it. Going undercover was nuts. Who in his right mind would ever depend on a screwball like Freshy DeFresco for anything?
Who in his right mind would play around with someone as violent and short-tempered as Buddha Stanzione? Who in his right mind would come within fifty feet of that nut Bells? Who in his right mind would go undercover inside the Mafia, intending to borrow money from them and not pay it back,
hoping
that they would threaten to shoot out his kneecaps? He had to be nuts. That's all there was to it. He was nuts.

His eyes drooped, and he almost started to doze. This
was
crazy. He needed to get some sleep. Maybe “Mike Santoro” the pornmeister could stay up all night waiting for a couple of wiseguys to make up their goddamn minds, but Mike Tozzi had another life, a real life, and he needed to get some sleep. That night, just about sixteen hours from now, he was finally going to be testing for his black belt in aikido, and he'd be damned if he was going to miss it this time. The last time Sensei came over from Japan to preside over testing, Tozzi had been limping around on a cane after having been shot in the leg in the line of duty. That was eight months ago. After five and a half years of martial arts training, working his way up through the ranks,
kyu
by
kyu
, Tozzi had had to wait eight more months before Sensei came back and he could test for his black belt. Eight more months. It wasn't the worst thing that had ever happened to him, and when he was philosophical about it, he felt that maybe it was a good thing that he'd had to wait. That it built character, gave him a little humility, gave him a chance to sand off some of the rough edges in his techniques. But deep down, he knew that was bullshit. He wanted to test, badly. And to be absolutely honest about it, for the last eight months, he'd felt like a kid who'd been kept back and had to repeat a grade. It wasn't fair. In fact, it sucked.

As he started to doze off, he imagined how his test would go that night. The gym would be crowded, at least a hundred and
fifty people in white
gi
uniforms sitting along the edges of the mats. After all the lower belts were finished testing, the black-belt tests would begin. Tozzi's name would be called, and he'd run out to the middle of the mat. After Sensei tested his posture, Tozzi would then run through all the formal techniques with a partner, dealing with all kinds of attacks, including
tanto-tori
, knife attacks. After that he would perform
bokken kata
, a formal movement exercise done with a wooden sword. Then at last the big part of the test would come, the part that everyone both dreaded and looked forward to at the same time:
randori
, freestyle against multiple attackers.

To earn the rank of
shodan
, the first level in the black-belt ranks, you had to take on five opponents simultaneously. But unlike other schools of aikido, where the guy being tested had to make eye contact with his attackers before they could attack, thereby assuring that they came at you one at a time, in Tozzi's school, Aikido Kokikai, they attacked at will, using any of the various attacks that were used in technique practice.