“You’re probably hungry,” the man said, ignoring her mini outburst. “And you must be thirsty, too. There’s a cooler on the floor behind your seat. It’s filled with drinks and a few sandwiches. Help yourself to whatever you want.”
“The only thing I want is to get out of this car,” Paula said.
“That will happen soon enough,” the man said.
“You’ll go to jail, you know,” Paula said, her teenage temper grabbing the lead over commonsense silence. “You’ll get caught and be sent to jail. Are you willing to take that chance? For someone like me?”
The young man looked away from the empty road and stared over at the teenage girl by his side. He admired her ability to choke back the fear and confront him, her grit and anger finding equal footing with the beauty that was only a few short years shy of coming to fruition. “I would take that chance for anyone,” he said to her after a few quiet moments. “Especially for someone as valuable to us as you.”
“Why am I here?” Paula now asked Pete Rossi, watching as he popped the top of the Snapple bottle with the palm of his right hand and loosened the cap.
“I need you to help me,” he said. His voice was calm and soothing, a young man clearly accustomed to the company of children. “And my family.”
“Help you how?” Paula asked, taking a quick sip from the Snapple. “I’m not allowed off the property. I can’t use the phone or send any e-mails. And if I even raise my voice, I’m sure somebody will jump out and put a gag over my mouth.”
“You don’t need to do any of that,” Rossi said, the right side of his face creasing into a slight smile. “Just having you here will give me all the help I need.”
Paula stood, gently pushed the rocking chair she had been sitting in aside, and walked toward a small window that faced out onto an expansive, beautifully manicured yard. “This is about my uncle, isn’t it?” she asked, her back to Rossi.
“What makes you think that?” Rossi said. He was impressed with the girl’s poise and quick grasp of her situation. He was a child of the Camorra, and in that guarded world there was little patience for teen tantrums or mood swings. The early years of a young man, or on the rare occasion a young girl, were expected to move swiftly from child to adult with no stops in between. Each waking hour was devoted to the lessons of the day, all geared to the time when each decision made would affect the success or failure of the Camorra family.
“Why else would you need me?” Paula asked, turning to face him. “What other reason is there to kidnap me and take me out here into the middle of nowhere?”
“You’re a very smart young lady,” Rossi said, his fingers toying with the bottle top. “As I expected you to be. And smart young ladies often understand that it’s sometimes better to stop asking questions and just wait for the answers to emerge.”
“Which means yes,” Paula said, stepping closer toward Rossi.
“Which means it’s time for me to get on with the rest of my day,” Rossi said. “And for you to do the same.”
“He’s better than you,” Paula said, her anger in check, her flushed cheeks the only outward indication that she felt at all uncomfortable. “He’ll figure out where I am and he’ll come and find me. And you won’t want to be here when he does.”
“He may already know,” Rossi said, hands in his suit pockets, smiling down at his irreverent young hostage. “And, taking into consideration travel and time change, he may be in New York, ready to sort through the pieces to get him from where he is to where he thinks you are.”
“He won’t fall for your tricks or be fooled by any traps you might try to set up,” Paula said. “My uncle’s a great cop and he’s been a great cop for a long time.”
“I hope you’re right,” Rossi said, losing the smile and turning serious for the first time since he had walked into the room. “I hope your uncle is all the things you say he is. And when this is all over, I want you to still think of him the way you do now. That will be your only comfort when you visit his grave to place fresh flowers on his headstone. And you’ll be the only one to know, the only one to really know who it was that put him in that hole.”
Rossi stared at Paula for a few brief seconds and then turned and walked out of the room, gently closing the door as he left. Paula stood in the center of the room, hands at her side, body trembling, her eyes moist and her throat dry. She looked to her right, at a four-drawer bureau topped with an assortment of ceramic statues of various Disney characters. She picked up one of the Seven Dwarfs, Dopey she thought, and threw him against the center of the wooden door. As she sat back down on the rocking chair, the ceramic piece shattered, sprinkling the floor with sheared edges.
Frank Silvestri sat on the park bench near the West 102nd Street underpass, a bag of birdseed by his side, and tossed small handfuls to the ground, watching as a platoon of pigeons swooped down and began pecking at the food. He kept his eyes on the birds as they fought over loose seeds, and ignored the two shadows who came up next to him, blocking the warm sun from his already tanned face. “You’re twenty minutes late,” he said, his eyes staying on the birds. “That puts us off to a bad start. And bad can only turn to worse, at least from your end.”
“I’m sorry for that,” one of the two shadows said. He was well built and young, brown hair hanging close to the edges of his zippered black polyester windbreaker. He kept both hands inside the front pockets of brown Timberland pants and was wearing new construction boots, laces undone. “We caught some traffic.”
“On the subway?” Silvestri asked, not looking for an answer, throwing out a fresh handful of seed to the birds.
“We’re here now,” the second shadow said. “That should be what matters.” He was huskier than his partner, older by a handful of years, his muscular body nicked and pocked by a series of scars, from bullet wounds to knife cuts. He was dressed lighter, too, in a clean white T-shirt, crisp blue jeans, and white Michael Jordan ankle-hugging sneakers, tied tight. He held a baseball in his right hand, moving it around with his fingers, gripping and massaging the stitching, flexing his grip on and off.
“Which one of you holds the leash?” Silvestri asked.
“You can talk to me,” the one with the baseball in his hand said. “I’m Armand. This is my cousin, Georgie.”
“Save the names for the dating service,” Silvestri said. “I don’t need to know anything about you other than the fact you’re going to take a job and not fuck it up. We clear on that?”
Armand squeezed the baseball harder, his pale blue eyes staring at the man in the designer suit. He hated doing business with these old-time wiseguys, most of them talking in short bursts, their whole life run by a set of rules from another century, ones that nobody on this side of the ocean had ever even heard before. They were always preaching patience, their words crammed with examples of loyal soldiers who devoted decades of hard, solid work to their bosses before they earned their way into the power positions. The majority of the young Camorristas bought into that way of thinking, more than content to ease their way up the criminal ladder, with no greater ambition than to one day be an old don. Armand Castioni was not one of them. He was not a gangster who expected even to see old age, let alone be in the upper ranks of the Camorra if he did. He wanted in on the action now and had plans in the works that would accelerate his ascent into the inner circle. At the moment, he was middle-tier muscle and an occasional shooter, drawing a high-five-figure salary to deal with any problems that crossed the old bosses’ desks. If Armand’s plan worked, all that would change in six months.
“Can you hear?” Silvestri asked. “Or am I just talking to the fuckin’ wind here?”
“I heard,” Armand said in a low voice, avoiding eye contact with the older man. “And I got it. Keep the info to a minimum.”
“We’re taking a chance with you two on something like this,” Silvestri said. “Up to this point, from what I’ve been told, you’ve handled every job that’s been tossed your way and walked away clean a
fter it was done. Now that can be because you’re both real good, which from the looks of the two of you is a stretch for me to believe. Or it could be luck. Or it could be you’ve been out whacking tennis balls with baseball bats, standing up to lightweights. This here is a major-league step forward we’re handing you. My advice will be to get it right.”
“All we need to know is where and how soon,” Armand said, brimming with confidence. “You can sleep easy after that.”
“I sleep easy whether you get it done or not,” Silvestri said. “You deliver for us, my boss ends his day with a smile. You fail and then the both of you are the ones having the night sweats. Either way it tags out on a good note for me. You get the full picture?”
“You made it clear,” Armand said.
“The target’s a cop,” Silvestri said, throwing the last of the feed down at the hungry pigeons. “Not one of ours. A visiting badge from the other side. Even so, the brass here’s not going to be too happy. Cop’s a cop, no matter what country he’s from or color he is. Which means there’s gonna be heat on the two of you if it all goes down the right way. So, I hope you like Spain, because that’s where you’re both going to be living for about three months after the job’s done.”
“Why Spain?” Armand asked. “Why can’t we just go back to Italy?”
“You might be right,” Silvestri said, standing, his massive frame towering over the two men. “Why the fuck should we send you to a place where nobody knows you and nobody will even think of looking for you? When we could just send you back to your little hometown, where everybody knows you, including the cops.”
“How much time do we have?” Armand asked, brushing aside the comment, bringing it back to business. “To get it done?”
“You take longer than a week, I’m going to worry,” Silvestri said. “If we start getting close to two weeks, I’m gonna come hunt you both down myself.”
“Where’s the package?” Armand asked.
“That’s the first good question you asked all day,” Silvestri said. He folded the empty birdseed bag and handed it to Armand. “I’m gonna leave and you’re gonna sit down and wait ten minutes, have a smoke, shoot the shit, whatever. Then, you walk out of the park, heading east. When you get to Fifth, tear open that bag and read what’s written on the inside. That’ll bring you to the package. Everything you need you’ll find in there. The rest is up to you.”
“We won’t let you down,” Armand said, sitting on the bench, watching Silvestri move with slow, deliberate strides out of the park. “Me and Georgie, we’re like money in the bank.”
“That’s too bad,” Silvestri said, glancing over his shoulder at Armand and his silent cousin. “I bet my boss five thousand that the cop would take you both out the first move you made to make him dead. I figured I was looking at a sure thing. Makes me sad to think I might be wrong.”
Armand waited until Silvestri was out of the park and was well beyond hearing anything he had to say. “I’ll take out the cop,” he said to his cousin. “And then one day I’m gonna be the one that takes out Pete Rossi’s pit bull. And I’m gonna make sure to shove five thousand dollars in the asswipe’s mouth. Make him sit there and gag on it, just before I put a bullet in his head.”
“And then we feed him to the pigeons,” Georgie said, free to speak now that Silvestri was gone, gazing down with disgust at the feeding birds. “He likes these flying rats so fuckin’ much.”
Pete Rossi walked down the center aisle of the freezer room, 250-pound hindquarters of prime beef hanging on thick hooks lining both sides. He was holding a steaming container of hot coffee in his right hand, his left slapping at the sides of beef as he walked past. In the rear of the room, he could see the man bound to the reclining chair, two of his crew standing over him, glaring down at him, waiting for Rossi’s orders.
“Give us a few minutes,” he told them when he got closer. Both were young, their biceps thick as thighs, veins bulging like cords down the sides of their arms. Rossi figured they spent as many hours juicing up as they did lifting, which would soon damage both their brains and their bodies, rendering their services totally useless to him in a few years’ time.
He watched as they nodded and walked toward the thick freezer door leading out of the room, the sawdust from the floor sticking to their Puma sneakers. Then Rossi turned his attention to the man tied to the chair. He was in his mid-thirties, with a handsome face and a close-trimmed beard topped by a thick head of brown hair. He was in decent physical shape and had a light tan and manicured nails. “I told you when you first came to me about your troubles that this is how it would end,” Rossi said to him. “I said to you, ‘Charlie, don’t get yourself into this because there’s no way out for you.’ But you said I was wrong. That you would make it work. And now look at where we are.”
“I thought the money would come in faster than it has,” Charlie said. “And I’m up to date with the payments. I haven’t missed one since I borrowed. It’s just the interest that’s killing me. Nobody, not even fuckin’ Donald Trump, can keep up with seventeen percent a week.”
“But that’s part of the deal, Charlie,” Rossi said, taking a slow sip of his coffee. “I don’t make money just by giving you money. If that were the case, I’d be working the losing end. Then, I’d be the one in the chair with all the problems.”
“Then you might as well kill me,” Charlie said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I’m better off dead than trying to scramble for the rest of my life just to pay you off. And you can take my share of the business too, for what the hell that’s worth. And then I’d be finished with it, and even with all that you’ll still be short the money you put out. So nobody wins. Not me and not you.”
Pete Rossi tossed the container of coffee to the ground, the hot liquid quickly absorbed by the mounds of sawdust. “There are a lot of ways to die, Charlie,” Rossi said, each word spoken slowly and with great care. “A couple of bullets to the head would be the easiest, but then that’s only if I want to let you off light. Which I have no intention of doing. You lied to me. You gave me your word and you lied. And that bill is going to cost you a lot more than two bullets.”
Charlie looked up at Rossi and swallowed hard, the cold of the room chilling the sweat on his forehead and damp shirt. A fearful panic filled his eyes, his lower lip trembling, his teeth chattering. “This is between you and me,” he said in a soft voice. “It doesn’t need to go beyond that.”
“You’re the one that took it there, Charlie,” Rossi said. “Not me.”
“What are you going to do?” Charlie asked, his voice reduced to that of a little boy cowering in a corner of a dark room.
“What you’ve forced me to do,” Rossi said in a voice cold enough to frost the walls of the chilled locker. “My job.”
“Give it another week, Pete,” Charlie said, tears starting to edge down the corner of his eyes. “I’m begging you as a friend. One more week and I’ll get you all the money plus all the interest. Please, Pete! Oh, Jesus! Please!”
Rossi stood in front of Charlie and looked down at the withering man, hands in his pants pockets, his eyes cold as a winter morning. “There are men inside your apartment right now,” he said to him. “They’re taking anything of value, anything that can be turned into fast cash. Your wife is there with them. When they’re through with the jewels and the clothes, they’ll start on her and they won’t stop until they’ve had enough.”
“You bastard!” Charlie hissed, his eyes wide with anger and fright. “You have a family of your own! How can you do this to somebody else? How can you live with yourself?”
“There are other men in your downtown warehouse,” Rossi said, ignoring the questions, holding his look on Charlie. “You got a full inventory in there, fresh shipment just came in late last night. They’re going to torch it all and burn it to the ground. The insurance check you’ll get from the fire will be signed over to a third party and be used to cover the rest of your loan to me.”
Charlie coug
hed up bile, spitting some onto the sawdust by his feet, letting the rest run down the front of his drenched shirt. He was sobbing now, his eyes closed, tears coating his face, the cold air giving it an icy sheen.
“I’m going to leave now and send the two men who were with you earlier back in here,” Rossi said. “They’ve been instructed not to kill you, even though you may ask them to. They’ll come very close and leave you wishing they had finished the job. You’ll spend the night locked in here and, maybe, if you have any luck left in your life, you’ll freeze to death. At some point early in the morning, if you’re still breathing, you’ll be dragged out and dropped off at the nearest hospital. From that moment, it ends between us. You won’t owe me and I won’t owe you.”
“I’ll pay you double what I owe,” Charlie said, trying to make the most of whatever seconds he had before his future would be sealed. “And you won’t have to wait. I can get it all to you by tomorrow.”
Rossi ran a hand along a side of beef, the fat thick as a man’s waist, and looked back at Charlie, for the first time showing a hint of anger. “You couldn’t pay me what you owed on a weekly,” he said. “But now you have enough to hand over twice what you owe? You draw a Win Five since you been locked in here?”
“It’s not my money,” Charlie said, the sweat running down his face at garden hose speed. “It belongs to one of my partners. But I have access to it. I can pull out as much of it as I need in an emergency.”
Pete Rossi nodded and strode closer to Charlie, careful not to step in the vomit that had blended into the sawdust. “Do you have to be there?” he asked. “Or can it all be done with a phone call?”
“Either one,” Charlie said, his voice reduced to a whimper. “All I have to do is call our principal banker and give him the code number. That gets me into the account. From there, I just tell him where I want it wired and how much is needed.”
“How much is in the account?” Rossi asked. “Total?”