Bad Guys (10 page)

This is outrageous, he thought.

“I, ah, think I better get going,” she said with a throaty laugh, then ran her tongue over his lips.

“You been saying that since seven o'clock this morning.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Tozzi glanced up at the elderly gentleman glaring down at them
from his balcony. He had that pissy look of someone who'd paid two hundred grand for his small two-bedroom condo and for that price didn't need two hot bods down in the parking lot showing him what he wouldn't be getting anymore, if he'd ever gotten any in the first place. Tozzi was a little concerned, though, that the old guy might call the cops, and that kind of attention he didn't need.

“Well,” he said, “I guess you're right. We better break this up before your neighbor up there has a coronary.”

She didn't bother to look up at the neighbor, just pressed her weight against Tozzi and ground her lips into his, her tongue going like mad. The springs of his cousin's car squeaked under the weight of that incredible kiss. Tozzi suddenly remembered the term “soul-kissing” from high school.

When they finally let go, she ran her hand affectionately over his cheek, kissed him once more lightly, and said, “I have to go.” She turned and walked away.

“Hey,” he called after her, “Joanne, can we—will I be seeing you again?”

She turned and smiled coyly as she kept walking, her heels keeping time. “That's up to you, Phantom. You know where to find me . . . Mr. Thompson.” She dug her keys out of her shoulder bag and unlocked the door of a maroon Saab 900 Turbo. It looked new. The engine had a nice quiet purr as she pulled out of her space, waved to him in the rearview mirror, and took off for work.

He waved back and got off the fender of his cousin's silver Nissan. If Bobby only knew that he had his precious car, he'd go nuts, Tozzi thought. But he'd never find out, not unless he checked the odometer. Tozzi imagined fat Bobby coming home from his regular business trip to California, unlocking his garage, starting up the car, letting the engine get warm, then staring down at the mileage and having a shit fit, wondering how the hell they got into his garage, took his car, clocked over a thousand miles, and got it back in as if it'd never been touched.

Tozzi reached into his pocket for the universal ignition key he'd “borrowed” from the Bureau and opened the car door. The day was already getting hot, so he took off his jacket and leaned inside to toss it in back. That's when he sensed that something wasn't right. It smelled different, like a cigar smoker's clothes. Bobby chain-smoked cigarettes, not cigars, not those shitty little crooked ones from Italy, the ones
that smelled like this. Tozzi glanced through the windshield. That old man was still glaring at him from his balcony.

He backed out of the car carefully and crouched down to look under the dash. Then he contorted his body and tried to get a look under the seat. He noticed a bend of yellow wire that shouldn't have been there.

Tozzi stood up and backed away from the car, considering his alternatives. Call the cops to check it out, and he loses his wheels. Worse, they trace the registration to his cousin and the Bureau will automatically assume he took it. They check out who lives in the building and make the connection with Joanne Varga. No good.

But he couldn't just abandon the car. In a couple of days, the building superintendent would call a tow truck, and some dumb kid would get behind the wheel and get his ass blown to kingdom come. No, he couldn't just leave it here.

Shit. There was only one solution, which really wasn't much of a solution at all.

Tozzi backed away a few more steps to the hedges at the edge of the lot where he found a broken half of a cinder block in the dirt. He picked it up, weighed it in his hand, then remembered the old guy who was still up there watching him.

“What're you looking at, you old bastard? Get the fuck inside,” Tozzi yelled up at him.

Tozzi could see him bristling. “I said, get inside and mind your own fucking business!”

The old man sputtered something Tozzi didn't understand.

“Stubborn asshole,” Tozzi muttered, and then gave the guy the finger, which sent him scuttling back inside, shouting indignantly that he was calling the police.

“Good, you do that,” Tozzi murmured as he took aim with the piece of cinder block, swinging it nice and easy. He pitched it into the car like a horseshoe.

The cinder block skinned the edge of the door, hit the steering wheel, and landed on the driver's seat, which was just enough pressure to depress the concealed spring plate under the seat and make contact with what's generally known as a loose-floorboard bomb. Tozzi was already facedown on the asphalt with his arms over his head. The explosion made his ears pop. When he looked up, the inside of Bobby's 300ZX was a furnace, flames curving out the windows and licking what was left of the roof.

Shit. Bobby was gonna be pissed.

Tozzi stood up, brushed himself off, and started to walk away fast. Walk, don't run, just get away from the scene, pronto.

He looked over his shoulder and stared at the burning wreck for a moment. Well, that's why God made insurance, Bobby.

Gibbons had just bitten down on an Oreo when the phone rang. He closed the book he'd been reading on his finger and chewed thoughtfully. The book was a scholarly work on the influence of the Teutonic barbarians on their Roman conquerors, how their alien culture seeped into the empire and persevered despite all Roman efforts to eradicate it. Gibbons saw many parallels with the present.

The phone kept ringing. Gibbons sat up on the sofa and reached for the receiver, dropping his book in the process and losing his place.

“Hello,” he said, still chewing.

“It's me.”

Gibbons recognized Tozzi's voice, even though it sounded like he was underwater with traffic in the background. “What's up?”

“Someone tried to kill me this morning.”

Gibbons picked up another Oreo. “No kidding.”

“Bomb under the driver's seat.”

“You get hurt?”

“No, but there could be problems.”

Gibbons paused to swallow. “What kind of problems?”

“The car can be connected to me. It's my cousin's car. He's in San Diego on business and won't be back for another couple of weeks. But if they connect me with the wreck and where it is, it could fuck things up. Hey, your phone's not bugged, is it?”

“Hope not.”

“Okay, listen. My cousin's name is Benedetto not Tozzi, so the connection won't be obvious right away. Plus, it happened in Jersey, out in Morristown, so if the Bureau gets called in, it'll be the Newark office, not ours.”

Ours:
Gibbons took note of that. “You sound paranoid again,” he said. “Even if the New York office did get wind of it, how could a burnt-out wreck lead them to you now?”

“That's not what I'm worried about. The car was parked outside Joanne Varga's apartment. If they canvass the building, they'll find out Richie Varga's ex lives there. It's not a connection I want them to make.”

“I don't get it.”

“Neither do I. Not yet.”

“You think she set you up?”

“I don't know. I don't think so. We were together sitting on the fender for at least twenty minutes, a half hour.”

“Doing what?”

“Use your imagination.”

Gibbons picked another Oreo out of the package and held it near his mouth. “You'll never learn, will you? Don't trust her.”

“If she was setting me up, she wouldn't have hung around the way she did.”

“Don't trust her,” Gibbons repeated. “Just remember who the hell she is and where she comes from.”

“I know, I know. She seems legit, but who knows? I just need to string her along for a while. I have a feeling she might be able to lead me to Varga.”

Gibbons listened to Tozzi trying to sound like a hard guy. He knew damn well that Tozzi was sleeping with the broad and enjoying it too. He was getting sweet on her, the stupid asshole.

“Listen,” Tozzi said, “I've been trying to make sense of all this. It's the sequence of events that bothers me. First, Varga double-crosses his father-in-law and feeds inside information to Mistretta, Giovinazzo, and Luccarelli, in effect giving them Atlantic City. Then Lando, Blaney, and Novick. Then Varga turns on his three godfathers and rats on them to the grand jury. Organized crime in New York is
supposedly
dealt a fatal blow, but in no time the heavy business gets worse than ever. Now what I want to know is who's fronting the money for these freelancers? Small-time dealers are buying in volume now—where are they getting the cash? They haven't been in business long enough to have that kind of capital. Guys like Vinnie Clams. How did he get so big so fast?”

“I give up, how?”

“I think there's a new boss, somebody we don't know, somebody working very cleverly behind the scenes. Maybe all the heavy action on the streets isn't random, maybe these guys aren't freelancers at all. Maybe this is a whole new family, a very powerful family who's got a monopoly on New York now that Mistretta, Giovinazzo, and Luccarelli are out of the picture.”

“It's an interesting theory,” Gibbons said. “You think you can sell it?”

“Too early to tell. The important thing now is that we find the rotten apple in the Bureau. I have a feeling that once we find him, everything else will start to fall into place. Including who killed Lando, Blaney, and Novick.”

“What do you want me to do?” Gibbons picked up a blunt pencil and looked around for a pad. He rummaged through the piles of books on the coffee table, the books he'd been meaning to read for years. The pad was lost. Fuck it, he'd remember. What else did he have on his mind these days?

“Check the files on Varga,” Tozzi said. “See who he worked with when he turned state's witness—you know, feds, prosecutors, marshals, everybody. Poke around for anything peculiar. Also, try to get a list of all the agents who worked undercover in the families in the past five, six years. It's possible that our rotten apple went over to the other side while he was working inside the mob.”

“You got it,” Gibbons said.

“I'll be in touch—”

“Hold on. I want to know one thing.”

“What's that?”

Gibbons grinned into the phone. “Was she good?”

“What do you think?” Tozzi said just before he hung up.

The dial tone droned in Gibbons's ear, but he ignored it. He studied the Oreo he'd been holding and then ate it whole.

The next day Gibbons lucked out. It was Friday and Ivers wasn't going to be in that day. The New York SAC was taking a long weekend to pick up his son at summer camp in Maine. Gibbons had discovered that Ivers had an annoying habit of popping in unexpectedly when he was working with the computer and reading through files. He may have given Gibbons free access to the files, but he never said he'd keep his nose out of the investigation. Ivers wanted Tozzi's ass on a hook, and Gibbons was sick of giving him evasive answers, quoting him procedural chapter and verse on just what he was doing, how he was doing it, and what his goals were. Today, thank God, he'd be able to work in peace, and he planned to take advantage of the situation and get a lot done.

By one o'clock his eyes were burning. His cubicle in the File Room was stacked with the transcripts of Richie Varga's testimony at the federal grand jury hearings. The CRT screen tilted up from the desktop and glowed green at him. His head was throbbing, but he couldn't stop now. He was beginning to get a feel for what Tozzi suspected. Varga was intimately linked to three mob families in New York, a unique position for anyone. The three bosses of these families obviously had to have agreed on killing Lando, Blaney, and Novick, so if anyone was privy to such a pact, Varga certainly could have been. And if Varga had known about the plans for the hit, it was possible that he also knew who fingered the three agents.

Gibbons had put together a list of agents from the New York office
who had worked undercover in the three families during the last ten years. Besides Lando, Blaney, and Novick, there were sixteen others—four in Mistretta's family, five in Giovinazzo's family, and seven in Luccarelli's. Gibbons studied the names. He knew some of them pretty well, the younger guys he didn't know at all. But that meant nothing. The rat could be your best friend, the most inconspicuous guy in the world, the one no one would ever suspect. It could be any one of these guys. Gibbons stared blankly at the yellow legal pad where he'd written the names down in a column with the Italian cover name each man had used in parentheses.

Before tackling the volumes of courtroom testimony, Gibbons had decided to read through the FBI standard file on Varga. Richie was born in Havana, Cuba, on September 3, 1949. Gibbons counted the years; Varga would turn thirty-seven in two weeks. His father had been some kind of gofer for the American mobsters who controlled the Havana casinos. Emanuel “Manny” Vargas, Richie's father, adored gangsters because they were macho and they were American. When Batista fled Cuba in 1959 and Castro's revolution drove the mob off the island, Vargas moved his wife and son to Philadelphia, where he found work with the mob, specifically running an after-hours gambling club in the basement of a bar called the Peppermint Lounge across the river in Camden, New Jersey. Like most of the Cubans who fled their homeland, Manny Vargas became a superpatriot in his adopted country, openly and frequently praising the United States, the great enemy of world Communism. He was very proud of the fact that his only son had the same first name as the great anti-Communist champion, then Vice President Nixon.