Until You Come Back To Me, Book 5 (19 page)

This
angered Sal.
 
“You rest, Tommy.
 
You and Reno regroup!
 
But I am not about to go
 
home and get some sleep while my wife is in
some dark hole somewhere scared and lonely and wondering why I haven’t found
her yet.
 
And I’m trying with every fiber
in my being to find her, to rescue her, before she hates the day she ever met
me.
 
Before she hates me.
 
Before she dies alone and scared and I never
see her again!
 
And you want me to rest
and regroup?
 
I’m going to Phoenix.
 
You and Reno can go to hell.”

They
didn’t go to hell.
 
They went to
Phoenix.
 
Which was one in the same
thing, as far as Reno was concerned, as they sat in the Van Sal’s men had
provided them at the airstrip when their plane landed.
 
They were outside of a quiet-looking brothel
on a quiet, dead-end street after paying the receptionist to give them intel on
Coggan.
 
He was there, she told them, and
would be coming out soon.
 
But it had
been an hour.
 

“We
could be sitting ducks,” Reno said, looking around at the darkness around
them.
 
“She might have tipped him off.”

“She’s
dead if she did,” Sal responded.

“Is
that him?” Tommy asked, and Sal and Reno looked too.
 

When
Sal saw that it was indeed Ted Coggan exiting the building, buttoning his
gabardine coat, he sat erect in his seat.
 
“That’s him,” he said.

Ted
walked out of the white picket fence that surrounded the brothel, and began
heading down the street, presumably toward his own parked car.
 

But
Reno, the driver, cranked up and began driving slowly behind him.
 
Sal looked around, to make sure the coast was
clear.
 

“Say
when, Sal,” Tommy told him.

Sal
looked around again.
 
The coast was
clear.
 
“Now,” Sal said, and Tommy slid
open the Van door, Reno stopped the Van, and Tommy and Sal hurried out.

By
the time Ted Coggan had turned around to see what the noise was about, they
were already upon him.

“What
the hell?” Ted asked, but he was wasting his breath.
 
Sal and Tommy hurried him to the Van, threw
him inside, and got in themselves.
 
Reno
was already speeding off even as they were sliding the door shut.

As
soon as Ted looked up from his tumble on the floor, and got a layout of the Van
and its occupants, his terrified eyes settled on Sal.
 
“Are you out of your mind, Gabrini?” he asked
him.
 
“What’s the meaning of this?
 
Is Gemma aware---?”

“Keep
her name,” Sal said, “out of your fucking mouth.”

“What
do you know about her disappearance?” Tommy asked him.

“I
know you will not treat me this way and expect no return fire.
 
I know . . .” Ted frowned.
 
“Whose disappearance?”

Sal
studied him.
 
Not another brick wall, he
thought.
 
“My wife’s disappearance,” he
said.
 
“What do you know about it?”

Ted
shook his head.
 
“So she came to her
senses and left you, and you want to pretend that I had something to do with
that?
 
You’re more ridiculous than I
thought!
 
Who the
fuck
do you think you’re dealing with?”

Sal
leaned back and shoved his shoe so hard into Ted’s face that the force of the
blow knocked Ted back against one of the side seats.
 
“Who the
fuck
do you think you’re talking too?” Sal asked him.

Ted
sat back up and immediately felt the side of his mouth in horror, as it began
to draw blood.
 
He looked at the man
seated beside Sal, a man who looked more like a legitimate businessman rather
than some thug like Sal, but Tommy wasn’t about to intercede on his behalf.
 
Tommy was wondering why he would even think
that he would.
 
Then Ted looked back at
Sal.

“Now
get your head out of your ass,” Sal said to him, “and tell me what you know.”

“I
don’t know anything about Gemma’s disappearance!” Ted was upset now.
 
“I didn’t know she had disappeared!
 
I’m a lawyer, I’m no kidnapper!
 
If that’s what this is about, you are truly
barking up the wrong tree right now.
 
I
don’t have your wife, I don’t know who has your wife, I don’t know what
happened to her!
 
I haven’t spoken to her
since the end of
Rabina’s
trial a month ago.
 
You have the wrong guy, Gabrini.”

Reno,
still driving the Van, looked through the rearview mirror at Sal.
 
He didn’t want to say he told him so, but he
told him so.
 
He was going off halfcocked
all over America without any strategic game plan.
 
And Tommy, the only man with any real
influence over Sal, had too much love for his kid brother, and hated to see him
in so much pain, that he wasn’t stopping him.
 
But after this excursion Reno was going to put a stop to it. For Gemma’s
sake if for no other reason.
 
Somebody
had to take charge of this train wreck.

Sal,
in fact, looked so defeated to Tommy that Tommy took over the questioning.
 
But not about Gemma.
 
He had already figured this guy didn’t roll
like that.
 
“What about Santino Druce?”
Tommy asked Ted.

It was
only then did Ted show any sign of weakness.
 
Even Sal in his dejected state saw it.
 
“Santino Druce?” Ted asked.

“Cut
the
I know nothing
crap,” Tommy said
to him, “because you know plenty on this one.
 
We’ve already paid Santino a visit.
 
He was very specific with what he knew.”

Ted
was calculating that his intellect was far superior to all three men in this
Van, and he therefore could multiply his own chance of getting out alive by
dividing them.
 
“You’re a reasonable
man,” he said to Tommy.
  
“Why would you
care?
 
You have places to be and things
to do.
 
You don’t want to ruin your
entire life by hanging out with guys like this.”
 
He motioned at Sal when he said it.
 
“You’re a man of means.
 
You aren’t the scum of the earth like him.”

Tommy
leaned back and kicked Ted in the face.
 
But unlike Sal’s kick, Tommy kicked him just beneath his chin as if it
were an uppercut punch, causing double the pain.
  
Ted fell against the seats again, in agony,
then looked at Tommy stunned that a man who looked like him could be capable of
such violence.
 

“That’s
my brother you’re talking about,” Tommy said to him.
 
“Watch yourself.”

Tommy’s
blow left Ted so woozy and in so much pain that he knew he had miscalculated
the man badly.
 
He had to come clean,
because Santino had undoubtedly already spilled the beans.
 
He had to hope that Sal was too broken up
about his wife’s disappearance to give a damn about some tape that he already
retrieved months ago in Taiwan.

Ted
sat back up.
 
And got serious.
 
“Santino videotaped you killing some people,”
he said, “and I paid for that tape.
 
Yes,
I did.”

“Why?”
Sal asked him.

“Because
Rabina
killed her boyfriend while in Vegas and she
fled the scene and called me.
 
A warrant
for her arrest was to be issued soon, and I knew everything would hinge on our
connections in Vegas, of which I had none.
 
At least not the kind of connection I would need.
 
The only connection
Rabina
had in Vegas was a gangster called Santino Druce, who used to be a bouncer in
one of her houses in Beverly Hills.
 
‘Santino
was dirty as dirt,’ she said, ‘and always money hungry.
 
He now worked for Salvatore Gabrini, and he
was a badass with a badass reputation.
 
If he had some dirt on Sal,’ she told me, ‘Sal could be our man.’”

Tommy
looked at Sal.
 
He knew how much he hated
disloyalty.
 
But Sal was staring at Ted.

“That
was what
Rabina
told me,” Ted continued.
  
“It was Santino who told me about your wife,
and how she was a Vegas attorney.
 
He
thought she would be the perfect foil.
 
She would be the perfect cover if we needed one.
 
But first
Rabina
had to set up that initial meeting with you, and show you the tape.
  
Which she did.
 
But it nearly backfired.
 
You almost killed her.
 
But she convinced you that if she died, that
tape would go public.
 
She claimed the
people who had it would be in touch with you over the next several months and
let you know exactly what they wanted.
 
And with that seed planted, she turned herself into the Las Vegas
authorities to face charges in the murder of her longtime boyfriend, Lester Llewellyn.”

“Your
ass lying,” Sal said.
 
“That kill run I
conducted didn’t happen after Chen murdered that man.
 
It happened before she murdered him.”

“That’s
right,” Ted said.
 
“What’s your point?”

Sal
studied him.
 
“Are you telling me Santino
already had that videotape?”

“Hell
yeah, he already had it,” Ted said.

“Fucking
bastard!” Reno said.
 
He hated disloyal
people even more than Sal did.

“Fucking
genius, I thought,” Ted responded to Reno.
 
Then he looked at Sal again.
 
“It
was Santino’s trump card in case you tried some shit with him.
 
It was his insurance.
 
But every man has a price.
 
Santino’s was half a million.
 
So I bought it from him.
 
And it became our insurance.”

“What
were you trying to insure?” Tommy asked him.

“That
Sal Gabrini would put his considerable authority behind tampering with
whichever jurors we felt were the leaders of the pack and could persuade the
other jurors.”

“To
vote not guilty at
Rabina
Chen’s trial?” Tommy asked
him.

“Precisely,”
Ted said, and then smiled.
 
“And it
worked like a charm.
 
Rabina
was set free, and Sal took a trip to Taiwan and retrieved his tape.

“Why?”
Sal asked again.
 
‘’Why would you care
about Chen being free?
 
You love her like
that?”

“I
don’t love her at all,” Ted lied, “give me more credit than that.
 
My heart is with the sisters, my African
queens.
 
I don’t cross the color line
like you Gabrinis so famously love to do.
 
You’re the fucking Kardashians of the Mob!”

“Why
would you pay half a million to spring
Rabina
Chen?”
Sal asked again.

“Because
she’s my runner.
 
She’s my
middle-man.
 
I run that trafficking
operation you thought those Asians ran.
 
But that’s my operation.
 
I run
that.
 
I needed
Rab
free to keep my hundred million dollar operation running smoothly.
 
Giving some creep like Santino Druce a half a
million of that hundred million was a good purchase.
 
Good insurance, if you like.”

Sal
looked at Ted with nothing but disgust in his eyes.
 
“So all of those hoops you had me jumping
through, including that trip to Taiwan to get a tape you could have handed over
right here in the states, and the way we had to kill every Asian sonafabitch in
sight after we retrieved that tape, was about what?”

“It
was a clever way to give you that tape,” Ted proudly said, “and to make you
feel that the enemy, your enemy, the mastermind behind the tape, had been
eliminated.
 
It was a way to make you
feel that you could sleep at night knowing you got rid of the vermin that would
deign to blackmail you.
 
So to speak.”

“You
mean vermin like you?” Sal asked, pulling out his gun.