Bad Guys (9 page)

Tozzi stared out the window and mumbled into his fist. “I keep thinking about Nina Lando. And the two girls. The older one must be in high school now. He was my first partner in the Bureau. He used to look out for me, have me over for dinner, that kind of stuff. Even tried to fix me up with his sister-in-law once. He was the kind of guy you could talk to about real things . . . Good man . . . I was supposed to have that undercover . . .”

Gibbons stared down at the pictures. “Lando, Blaney, and Novick fingered by another agent . . . that's a pretty serious charge.”

“I've considered every other possible alternative.” Tozzi shook his head gravely. “It's got to be a bad agent. How else would a flea like Clementi have pictures like this? It has to be.”

Gibbons's head was throbbing. “If the mob knows who we are and they have known for almost three years, why haven't they tried to get rid of all of us?”

“Why? Because it would be stupid, that's why. If they started gunning down agents, the Bureau would just replace them with new men the mob wouldn't know. But as long as they know who the feds are, they can watch out for us, keep us at arm's length, run us around in circles. It's the perfect situation for them.”

Tozzi did it again. He kept saying “us” when he referred to the Bureau. Gibbons rested his elbows on his knees and stared at his shoes. “The perfect situation,” he murmured. “But what good did it do them? The Varga trials crippled the Mafia in New York. Luccarelli and Mistretta have been convicted and sentenced, and Giovinazzo is locked up in a hospital room playing possum and getting bedsores while his lawyers keep prolonging the agony. All their key men are serving time, and the few who got away are in hiding. So what the fuck good did it do them? Some perfect situation.”

“That's what I keep asking myself, Gib, and you know what?”

“What?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Huh?”

“What does matter is that there's a bad agent somewhere in the Bureau, and we've got to nail him.”

“What do you mean ‘we'?”

“We can't turn this over to the Bureau. You don't know who we can trust there.”

Gibbons shook his head. “You are one paranoid son-of-a-bitch, you know that?”

Tozzi's face contorted in contained fury; his fists were trembling. “Will you fucking listen to me, man? The shit these punks on the street are pulling is getting worse everyday. There are shootouts out in public practically every week. A lot of innocent people are getting hurt. It's like Dodge City out there. So how do we know the bad guy in the Bureau isn't selling his info to the freelancers, huh? To guys like Clementi. These fleas out there now aren't as weird and ritualistic as the families were, but they sure ain't showing the kind of restraint the families did either.”

Gibbons stared at the photos again, the faces he knew, men he'd worked with, men who kept framed color pictures of their families on their desks back at the field office. “Specifically what are you suggesting, Tozzi?”

“I have a few hunches, but I need room to move.”

“In other words you don't want the Bureau on your tail. You want me to run interference, stay between you and them.”

Tozzi nodded. “I'll also need access to Bureau files.”

Gibbons sighed. “Great. Criminal use of confidential federal files should add what?—at least another ten years to our sentences when they catch us.”

“Not if we catch them first.” Tozzi was flashing that big nervous smile again.

Gibbons glanced at the pictures one more time. “If I were to help you—
if
—I don't want to be kept in the dark about what you're doing, understand?”

“We're partners, Gib. We always were.”

Gibbons looked past him to the picture on the end table, the little kid on the Shetland, the monkey in a Daniel Boone outfit sitting on a pony. He knew this was wrong, that helping Tozzi would make him a renegade agent too. There was a heavy feeling in his chest. But Tozzi was right, there was no other way.

Finally Gibbons nodded slowly, and Tozzi laid a grateful hand on his shoulder. Gibbons glared at it. He didn't like being touched.

“So tell me, Sherlock. What's your hunch?”

“Okay. Lando, Blaney, and Novick worked for different families, but were obviously killed in the same hit. Very uncharacteristic for the mob. That kind of cooperation is almost unheard of. The families may have been tipped off about the undercovers at the same time, but why would they get together for the punishment?”

“I give up. Why?”

“I don't know,” Tozzi said, “but I do think there's someone who may know, someone who was intimately connected with Luccarelli, Mistretta, and Giovinazzo.”

“Richie Varga?”

“You got it. He was their golden boy before he ratted on them. They loved him. I've got a feeling Varga may know something.”

Gibbons laughed out loud. “Boy, are you whistling Dixie! You ever try to question someone under witness protection? To do it legit, you've got to put your business in writing, then submit it to the Justice Department. Then, when and if they get around to it—”

“Fuck the Justice Department,” Tozzi said, grinning. “I've got my own channels.”

Gibbons shook his head and smiled slyly. “I don't doubt it,” he said.

Joanne Collesano Varga stuck her tongue in Tozzi's ear. “Wake up, Mr. Thompson,” she purred. “I've got to get to work.”

Tozzi stretched under the sheets, then rubbed his nose. The clock-radio on her side of the bed was tuned to a classical station. The volume was low—a string quartet playing something modern and atonal—just loud enough to be annoying.

“Turn that shit off,” he groaned.

“Don't tell me you're the type who listens to rock first thing in the morning.” She seemed mildly disappointed.

“No.” He was lying. He could really go for some Springsteen or maybe Dire Straits right now. That and another go-round with Joanne.

He turned toward her, pulled her close, and kissed her, and again he was surprised by the tobacco taste in her mouth. He didn't smoke himself, but he could live with the taste. Considering what came with it, who wouldn't?

He palmed the back of her head, felt the glory of her thick dark tousled hair, and grinned under that kiss. She was the first really Italian-looking woman he'd ever slept with.

She pulled away from him slowly. “I've got to go to work,” she whispered.

“You're a vice president. They won't can you if you're late. Call in sick and we'll spend the day in bed.”

She shook her head and grinned. A stray lock of raven hair curled up salaciously under her eye and gave him another hard-on.

“It's a tempting offer, Mr. Thompson, but . . .”

“But what? You never had it so good. Admit it.”

Under the sheets she ran her fingernail up the length of his dick. “Not with Richie, that's for sure.”

“Poor bastard,” Tozzi said. “Married to you and out of commission. Tragic.”

“Unfortunately, he didn't exactly see it that way.”

“No?”

“Hope always sprang eternal, even if he didn't. We'd try it, he'd fall down on the job as usual, then he'd slap me around to work off his frustrations. It didn't happen often . . . but often enough.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“Only once.”

Tozzi shook his head. Those violins were driving him nuts. “I can't believe your father would let him get away with that. I'd have thought ole Jules'd make him live to regret the day he laid a hand on his little girl.”

“Richie was the golden boy, the heir apparent. Jules Collesano just told his little girl to go back home and try harder, that it would all work out, don't worry. My father took for the bastard.” She turned on her back and looked at the ceiling. “Richie was like a little dog, always eager, always loyal, ready whenever my father wanted him. That's why he loved Richie, because he never disappointed him. Until the shit double-crossed him, that is. But before that my father considered Richie the ultimate ‘nice boy.' Christ, he'd known Richie since he was a little kid.”

“Yeah?”

She pushed the curl out of her eye. Tozzi wished she'd left it.

“Richie's half-Cuban,” she said. “Did you know that? His father worked in a casino my father owned down in Havana before Castro took over. When Batista was in power.”

“No, I didn't know that.” Tozzi stared at her as she stared at the ceiling and talked.

“When the revolution came Richie's family left Cuba and came to America. They were pretty desperate, apparently, when Manny—that's Richie's father—went to see my father. Manny had always been a good guy as far as my father was concerned, so he gave him a job running one of his bars in Camden. Nothing very glamorous, but my father-in-law was honored to work for Jules Collesano. You know, all that beholden Latino ‘I-am-forever-indebted-to-you' crap. By the
way, Richie changed his name, did you know that? It's really Vargas. After his father died, he dropped the
s
so it would sound more Italian.”

“No shit.” Tozzi wished the fuck those violins on the radio would drop dead.

“Anyway, Manny pushed Richie into the business, always making a big show out of his kid paying respect to my father and his mob buddies. My father ate it up with a spoon. After Manny died, my old man took Richie under his wing, the son he never had. After a while it was just sort of understood that we'd get married.”

Just like Ricky and Lucy. “How long were you married?” Tozzi asked.

“I told you, technically we're still married. I suppose I could divorce him now, but with him in hiding it hardly seems worth the effort. And can you imagine what an incredible hassle it would be trying to take him to court, with him in the Witness Security Program?”

“While you were married—together I mean—did you ever get an inkling that he wasn't on the up-and-up, that he really wanted to fuck your father over?”

She glared at Tozzi and squeezed his dick hard. “Why are we talking about him? I'm not about to take the morning off just to talk about that asshole.”

Tozzi grinned and got up on one elbow. As he kissed her again, running his tongue over her teeth, he reached over and spun the dial on the radio. He found a stronger station and David Bowie blared across the room. Quickly Tozzi turned down the volume and started to mumble-sing along with the radio. “
Let's dance, ba-da, ba-da, bum, bum, bum, ba-da-dum, dum, dum. Let's dance
. . .”

He cupped her ass in his hands, buried his face in all that beautiful hair, and bit her earlobe. Bowie would do just fine.

He felt her reach down and take his balls in both hands. She started to guide his rigid dick into her, arching her back to meet him. He was surprised to find that she was already wet and satiny. Suddenly he was in up to the hilt and she was pulling him closer, grinding into him, gyrating her hips around him.

“Get up on your knees,” she whispered.

When he did, she wrapped her arms around his back and pulled herself up into him, thrusting again and again with sweet, slow deliberation. She kept up the rhythm, twisting just a little with each thrust to change the angle of projection and drive him crazy.

Then he felt it rising in him, and he tried to stop it, straining to keep from coming before she did.

“Don't hold back,” she said, licking his lips. “Let it go.”

Her hips slammed against his and he couldn't hold it any longer. It was like coming over the crest of the scariest part of a roller-coaster ride, a rush in the pit of your stomach as you go over the top, then falling fast out of control, rushing for the thrill. As it was happening, in the blur of ecstasy, he vaguely realized that he'd never experienced anything like this with a woman before. Not even remotely close.

The phone rang while Tozzi was in the shower. Joanne answered it in the kitchen.

“Hello?”

“What's going on in there?”

She paused and took a sip of coffee from a deep blue mug. “He's in the shower now. I'll get him out of here in a half hour.”

She could hear his breathing on the other end. She knew he was mad.

“I think he's in love with me,” she said, grinning into the phone. “We did it twice last night and once more this morning.”

“I hope he's got AIDS.”

She laughed. She knew he'd be pissed, and she loved it. Richie was so proprietary.

“Everything's all set,” he said. “Don't take all day.”

“Don't worry. We'll be out soon.”

She hung up the phone, picked up her mug, and headed back to the dressing room to finish putting on her makeup.

It was a little after ten, and they were standing in the parking lot behind her building making out like teenagers, him sitting on the fender of his cousin's 300ZX, her in a navy-blue business suit leaning over him with her arms draped around his shoulders. They both wore shit-eating grins.