Romeo of the Streets (22 page)

Blinking slowly, he turned to the sound of their laughter and saw that they were already watching him, all three of them smiling like wolves. They’d propped him up in some kind of oversized frozen meat locker—big ropy hunks of iced carcass hung from the silver awnings, around a chilling mist that almost sparkled in the clinical fluorescence of the lights. It was the perfect place to butcher somebody.

“You know,” Sal said, stepping towards him, “I should be mad with you Romeo—or whatever your cop bastard real name is—I have every right to be mad at you, my little friend. But instead I’m just happy. I’m too happy to be mad you see, because instead of you bringing us down—instead of you betraying us after everything we did for you, you rat scum-sucking little piece of shit—instead, we got you first. And now we’re going to make an example of you for any future rat cops who might try to do what you did and abuse our trust like that.”

Romeo flexed his abdomen, tried to see if he could get his hands free, but it was no use. They’d spared no expense in ensuring that his binds would be inescapable.

“What did you do with her?” he asked.

“Who, your
girlfriend
?” Sal mocked, “she’s right beside you, asshole. We’re letting her get some rest for now because later we’re going to have a lot of fun with her. And then… then we’re going to kill her too. But first, you.”

Christ, Romeo thought, turning to see Lana passed out and tied to a chair on his other side, his FBI handler was a pain in the ass sometimes but her heart had been in the right place. Nobody deserved this. It didn’t bear thinking about what they would do to her once they’d dispatched with him. Over the past few months Romeo had learned that there were no limits to the capacity for absolute cruelty and mayhem that festered within each of the three men before him and now that they had an excuse to unleash themselves on a woman like Lana they would hold nothing back. Whatever else took place, he couldn’t let that happen.

“Do you know who she is, Sal?” he smiled. “That’s Lana Smith,
FBI Agent
Lana Smith, as in, Assistant Director Freddy Smith’s niece. That’s right, I brought Freddy Smith’s niece to your shithole nightclub.”

Sal’s face faltered. Yes, of course he knew who Freddy Smith was. Smith had made his name way back with the Guilianno case—back when Sal had been just a low-level foot-solider—and since then Smith’s reputation as the greatest scourge of organized crime the city had ever known had only gone from strength to strength. Romeo could think of few greater insults to enact on a Mafia captain in modern day Chicago.

“
You insolent little bastard
…” Sal whispered. “You bring Freddy Smith’s niece into my club and TRY TO SET ME UP! I ought to tear you open limb to limb, you defiant little bastard!”

Romeo merely shrugged, trying not to show the pain that even this slight movement caused him. “Worse than that Sal,” he said, “it’s
worse
than that. Me and Lana have been building our case on you assholes for months. We already have everything we need, we just thought we might as well keep pushing while the going was good—after all, you can’t have too much of a good thing, right?”

“I don’t believe it,” Sal said, but his face betrayed the falseness of his words.

“Come on,” Romeo smiled, “look in your heart Sal, you know it’s true. Hey Eyeball, help him out like you do. You know I’m right.”

Eyeball said nothing, but now neither he, Ferret or Sal was smiling anymore.

“It’s over for you guys,” Romeo said, “we already have you.”

“Yeah?” Eyeball said, stepping forward from the wall, “well that’s funny because from here it looks the other way around.”

Romeo shrugged again, this time failing to hide the wince. “Oh sure,” he said, “me and Lana, we’re pretty much at your mercy now and I wouldn’t blame a pack of dumb rabid animals like you for lashing out on us, but first you have to stop and ask yourself if that’s really the smartest thing for you to do?”

The guys were uncertain now, he could see that, which meant that they were one step closer to where he wanted them to be. He needed to keep stalling and buy some more time. There could still be a way out of this.

Beside him, Lana groaned through her unconsciousness and Romeo felt a pang of cold dread hit him in the gut. Everything was hanging from the end of a frozen thread here and if he made one wrong move it would mean unspeakable agony for both him and the woman beside him. He had seen snapshots of former moles who’d been ousted as part of his training and it had made him literally sick to his stomach. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to read the accompanying reports—the message was clear enough. And now it looked like he was going to suffer that terrible ordeal himself.

“Aw fuck this, Sal,” Ferret said, “let’s just carve this rat to shreds and get onto the girl. I don’t see why we’re even letting him talk this shit here.”

“Now, now Ferret,” Sal said, his eyes still thoughtfully locked on Romeo, “ain’t you ever heard of last requests? The kid’s entitled to have his say, even if it is all just desperate bullshit.” He nodded to Romeo. “What’s your point? And make it quick, because I’m just about losing my patience with you…”

“The point is,” Romeo said, preparing himself to give everything he had to what might now be his final pitch, “you kill us, torture us, whatever—they’ll know it was you, even if they never find the bodies.”

“They won’t,” Eyeball cut in, his voice low and calm. “I promise you that, they won’t find the bodies. There’ll be nothing left.”

“Nonetheless,” Romeo said, feeling even colder than the icy temperature of the room, “they already knew we were there at the Eden and considering the amount of irrefutable evidence we’ve already built up on you, killing us now would only ensure that you spend the rest of your lives in a cage. Your lives end with ours,
capice
?”

“
Capice
,” Sal muttered, “
capice
—what is this,
Capice
? Are you even Italian you little snake fuck?”

“Well be that as it may,” Eyeball said, ignoring his Capo and rubbing his chin slowly as he considered Romeo, “if they really do have all that evidence they could probably send us away for twenty years or more regardless, no? After all—and I say this with all due respect—you really got into everything we had going for ourselves, didn’t you? You really did a number on us, you rat bastard.”

“Guilty as charged,” Romeo smiled, “but it doesn’t have to go like that—maybe there’s a way out of this for everybody.”

Sal and Ferret both looked perplexed now, like the dominance and control they’d so relished moments earlier had slipped from their hands without either of them having any idea how. Eyeball on the other hand smiled knowingly as he scratched his pale chin.

“Ok,” he said, “ok, so what you’re saying is what—we let you go and turn ourselves in and in return you give us an official pardon or some shit?”

“You’d have to agree to testify,” Romeo said, “but yeah, you do that and you can all walk free.”

“Fuck that!” Ferret spat, with a distaste that was vehement. “Sal, let me do this traitor right now, please!”

“Wait a second,” Sal muttered, waving his hand and obviously curious to see where Eyeball was going with this.

Good, Romeo thought, so they were willing to listen to reason at least. Talk was better than torture any day.

“Ferret’s right,” Eyeball said, “we ain’t rats. And giving up on this thing would be no different from giving up our lives and going to prison anyway. This thing of ours
is
our lives. Sorry pal, there’s no way out for you.”

“Then there’s no way out for you either,” Romeo said. His body tensed in anticipation of the torture that now almost surely awaited him. He just had to
stall
…

Beside him Lana began to murmur as she stirred to waking. As he looked at her, Ferret’s eyes lit up with lust and Romeo felt chilled to the bone.

“By the way,” Eyeball said, “you know it was me who figured you out in the end, don’t you?”

Romeo smiled. “Who else? Those other two wouldn’t have copped if I’d sent them the memo myself, dumb bastards.”

“Shut your fucking mouth!” Sal barked, “it’s over for you sunshine.”

They stepped towards him and Romeo shouted for them to wait, laughing now, wildly, the adrenaline coursing through his veins like the pure Colombian cocaine that had made a lowlife like Sal into a millionaire before he was thirty. “Wait fellas,” he said, “just wait a second, ok? Aren’t you going to tell me how you did it? Aren’t you at least going to rub it in my face?”

“Fuck you man, this ain’t no James Bond movie,” Sal said.

“Yeah,” Ferret chipped in, “and you ain’t no James Bond neither Romeo—no matter how much you might act like it.”

Eyeball held up his hand, a thoughtful, considered gesture in the face of the avarice and hatred of the other two. “Well hold on a second,” he said, “I don’t see what harm it’d do. We still have to wait for Lou anyway, right? And I
would
like to see this bastard’s face when he finds out what gave him away…”

“
Well yeah
,” Ferret protested, his voice like that of a spoiled child who’d just been informed that the fairground would unfortunately be closed that day, “
but I wanted to make my mark on him before we got out of here
.”

“You can carve him up when we get back from that other thing,” Sal said, “he’ll probably be dead by then but still—at least you can have the girl. Now go ahead Eyeball, I want to show this fuck that he ain’t so smart after all.”

“Ok,” Eyeball said, stepping towards Romeo with the relish of a bard about to explain the greatest, most eloquent riddle in his repertoire. “Well the moment I saw your face outside the diner that day, I could tell something was definitely not right—you could say that the game was up right then—I just had to find out exactly what it was you were up to…”

“You looked like you’d seen a fucking ghost my man,” Sal said, “I mean, I know Ferret’s ugly, but nobody’s
that
ugly.”

“Something about the broad didn’t look right neither,” Eyeball continued, “I mean you wouldn’t be the first wiseguy to get himself a piece of upmarket pussy—this thing of ours makes us very attractive to a certain type of lady after all—”

“Agreed,” Sal said.

“Ain’t that right,” Ferret chipped in, and even through his intense dread, Romeo had to shake his head a little.

“—but there was something different about this one. Maybe she was walking just a little too tough to be that kind of dame, I don’t know what it was, but something didn’t sit right. Not that I acted on it straight away. I thought it over for a bit before I even mentioned it. There were other things too, like Lou’s sister… You had a serious boner for her, didn’t you? Admit it.”

Beside him, he heard Lana mutter: “
I knew it
,” just loud enough to be heard by him and him alone—as far as the others were concerned she was still out cold. Well it was nice to know that she’d held onto her sense of humor in all of this anyway. Good for her.

Romeo remained stone-faced. Whatever happened he was not going to let them bring Sandy into this mess.

“Well that doesn’t matter now anyway, does it?” Eyeball said, “It was enough for me to bring it up with Sal and it took a bit of persuading but—”

“No,” Sal cut in, “no, I had that feeling myself too. I was just waiting for you to say it.”

“Uh, right,” Eyeball continued, “well anyway, I brought it up with Sal and he did a little digging on you Romeo. Started making phone calls about you back in New York and then we knew it was worse than any of us had imagined. You see, at first we thought maybe you was just informing on us to save your own skin, but now—well how come nobody but Chuckles Bonanno seemed to have ever even heard of you in the first place? How come that, if you was supposed to this big connected guy up in New York?”

“Chuckles, that fucking rat,” Sal said shaking his head. “He’s not going to be a problem for anybody anymore now though, my friend, heed my words on that one.”

Romeo winced with a dismay that felt almost physical. Chuckles Bonanno was as much of a psycho as these other guys but even still—with how the mob dealt with their leaks—he didn’t want to bear any responsibility for that kind of suffering.

“That was when we knew you was an undercover cop,” Eyeball said, “and admittedly it freaked us out a little, but when you and little Miss Sara here called us up with that half-baked story of yours…”

“
So stupid
,” Sal mocked and Romeo was momentarily glad that Lana was awake to hear that bit at least.

“Well we thought maybe the least we could do after letting you get in so close was dispatch of our own mess,” Eyeball said, “and so now, here we are.”

“It’s only a shame we’re going to have to leave it up to Lou,” Sal said, “because unfortunately we’ve got some other business that needs taking care of. Otherwise we’d be cutting you to shreds ourselves right now.”

“Can’t go back upstairs drenched in blood, unfortunately,” Eyeball said, “wouldn’t sit right with the customers.”

“Unfortunately,” Ferret repeated.

There was a big banging thud on the door and Sal smiled. “Well I guess there’s your little playmate now,” he said.

Lou looked pretty shaken up when he entered the freezer. His eyes were wide and glassy and he was making a point of looking anywhere but at Romeo and Lana. “Sal,” he said, “I came as soon as I got your message. I had no idea…”

“Well,” Sal shrugged, “don’t beat yourself up about it kid, he had us all fooled pretty good.”

Romeo watched them closely. Surely Sal hadn’t been serious when he said that he was going to leave them with Lou alone, had he? With Sal and the others he had been destined to die in the most horrible way imaginable, but with Lou—at least he would have a chance. It all depended on how betrayed his friend now felt.

“But still,” Lou said, “I was the one who brought him in. All this, this is on me.”

“You’re damn right it is,” Ferret spat but Sal held up a hand to silence him.

“That’s true,” he said, “but at least you’re willing to own up to it. Now listen, this is your chance to make it all right again. Me and the boys have to go, but this rat was your responsibility from day one so it’s up to you to snuff him out once and for all. Do this for us—prove your loyalty—and that’s it, when the books open next you’ll be a made man.”