Silvestri shot her a chilling glance. “No, he doesn’t. I said forget the goddamn ambulance. I’ll have my doctor check him out from top to bottom.”
“Are you sure that you’re all right?” Malaina asked.
“I think so.”
“What’s your name?”
“Cash.”
“Cash, is there anyone you want us to call?” she asked. “A family member? A friend?”
“No. I just need a few minutes to pull myself together.” He smiled weakly. “I’ll be okay.” He regarded Silvestri unhappily and then sank back onto Dead Eyes’ precious vinyl-clad couch.
Chapter 38
“Mike, what the fuck!” Silvestri towered over Michael Orzani, seething with anger after having punched him in the gut and then sending him to the floor with a haymaker to the chin. Dead Eyes was infamous for his violent kneejerk reactions. “You traded in slow and safe for fast and stupid? How the hell—” He was running off at the mouth, his ire fueling his venomous tongue. His fists were still clenched.
Orzani saw that Silvestri was still in the heat of rage. He held his hand up, pleading for Silvestri to stop. He hadn’t even gotten the chance to greet Silvestri when he took the first blow. “I didn’t do it, Anthony. I swear.”
“Fuck you. You didn’t do what?”
He coughed several times before he could speak. “I didn’t hit Linuzzi. I swear it.”
“Come on. What? Are you kidding me?”
“I didn’t do it. Someone else got to him first.”
Silvestri stared at Orzani disbelievingly. “What are you talking about? It’s all over the news. They found Tommy’s body at Transglobal this morning. They said it was a ‘mob-style hit.’”
“You heard it on the news before you heard it from me. Doesn’t that tell you something?” Orzani was still pleading. “Anthony, please, how many jobs have I handled for you? You honestly think this is my work?”
Silvestri was so angry that he couldn’t accept what he was hearing even though his instincts told him that Orzani was telling the truth. He reached down and yanked him to his feet. “First Malaina hits some idiota on a bicycle and now this? Holy shit!” he screamed as his fingers became claws and his hands shook. “What a fucking day.”
Orzani massaged his sore jaw. It was a miracle that Silvestri’s punch hadn’t broken it. “I was waiting for him to come home. I was sitting in my car down the block from his house until three in the morning and nothing. Linuzzi may have screwed up getting rid of the Israeli girl, but the guy’s an animale. I figured I’d pop him after he fell asleep.”
Silvestri raked his fingers through his hair. “Shit. Who else would hit Tommy?”
Orzani shrugged. “No clue, Anthony.”
“I could’ve pinned the whole thing on him. I was almost home free and now this. It was obviously one of the families. Who else would have the balls?”
“I was going to stuff Linuzzi in a fifty-five-gallon drum and sink him in the Sagg Swamp. They’d never find him there.”
“Terrific. Kudos on your fucking ingenuity,” Silvestri grumbled. He sat down at his desk and pointed to the bar. “Pour us a couple glasses of Monkey Shoulder.”
Orzani walked to the bar, rubbing his jaw. “Ice?”
“Neat!”
Orzani poured them each three fingers and sat down opposite Silvestri. “What can I do to help?”
“What can you do to help?” he said, mimicking the enforcer sarcastically. “I don’t know. Jesus, if the cops didn’t suspect me before, they certainly will now. They’ll be snooping around like a pack of starving hyenas. Fucking Tommy, how’d he let this happen? He got whacked in the very same place the Israeli chick worked? Jesus, I’m fucked. On top of that, I’ve got a complete stranger in my upstairs guest room.” He ended his rambling and glanced up at Orzani unhappily. “You’re still here? Go do something, will ya. Make yourself useful.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know. Wash my balls. Anything. I don’t care.”
Orzani gulped his scotch and stood. “Call me if you need anything, Anthony. I’ll stay close by.”
“Wait! On second thought, stay here and keep an eye on the biker. I hate the idea of having a stranger under my roof, but I hate the idea of reporters staking out my house even more. Make sure he doesn’t do anything he shouldn’t be doing.”
“Great, Anthony. I’ll take care of it.”
Silvestri dismissed Orzani with a wave of his hand and sank back into his chair. Who? he wondered. Who had the stones to whack Tommy?
Chapter 39
Cabrera sat at the conference table amidst a pile of peanut shells. It wasn’t a neat little pile. It was a huge mess with shells and peanut dust everywhere. It looked like he had just removed fifty-year-old asbestos from the attic of an old house. “So who do you think had the guts to execute Linuzzi?” he asked.
“Who do I look like, the Amazing Karnak or something?”
“You’re the one with the USMC pedigree. Me, I’m just a simple country boy from Bayshore. Didn’t they award you the Elsa Peretti Heart or something meritorious like that?”
I gave him the stink eye. “You wouldn’t be referring to my Silver Star Award for Valor in such a lighthearted way, now would you?”
“Maybe,” Cabrera said. “I’m not too good with details. So what did you do to get something like that?”
I looked at him with a poker face. “I blew my CO.”
Cabrera choked on his peanuts.
“Christ. I’ll get you some water.” I jumped up and rushed out of the room.
I was breaking in a new holster, and it was digging into my hip. I unclipped it and placed it on the table right after handing Cabrera a cup of water.
Cabrera glanced at my rig. “Resigning?”
“No, but I figured you could use the Glock to crack your peanut shells.” No reaction. “My new rig is digging into my hip.”
“I think I inadvertently interrupted you when I abruptly exhaled against a closed glottis.”
I rattled my head. “Dom, what the hell are you talking about?”
“When I coughed,” he explained. “But don’t let me interrupt you again. Please tell me about the time you performed oral sex on your commanding officer and did such outstanding work that you were given an award.”
Douchebag! I gave him a third scathing glance. “Or maybe we could talk shop.”
He shrugged. “If you insist.”
“So Linuzzi worked for Anthony Silvestri, a bad-ass underworld character, but does it make sense that he’d hit one of his own soldiers?”
“Not particularly,” Cabrera said, expanding his pile of insulation.
“We know that Linuzzi was at Transglobal the day Rachel Rabin disappeared, but we don’t know who else he was with. When’s Lorraine coming back in? We’ve got pictures of Silvestri and every known member of his family up on the bulletin board for her to look at.”
“Baby cakes is getting cold feet,” he said. “She’s developed a new respect for the word mobster. I mean, can you blame her? She came in here to do her civic duty and got roughed up the minute she left, and not two hundred yards from our office, I might add.” He crunched a couple of peanuts. “Maybe I’ll take the photos to her.”
“It’s not about the location, Cabrera. She needs protection. I’m sure that Silvestri knows what Linuzzi knew and maybe a lot more. Whether she helps further or not, her life is at risk.”
“I doubt Wallace will have a problem with giving her protection, not on a high-profile case like this.”
“Do you want to talk to him, or should I?”
“You’re the teacher’s pet,” Cabrera said. “You go into the principal’s office.”
I gritted my teeth at him. “Men have died for less.”
“Wallace is a pushover anyway. He’s easy.”
“He’s easy? What world do you live in?”
“Easy for a cop,” he said. “Not Maggie Hollohan behind the bleachers easy.”
/>
“I guess I can handle that.”
Cabrera cracked another peanut. “I’ll bet you can, Gumdrop.” He looked up and once again began to choke.
I followed his gaze and saw Wallace, our CO, standing in the doorway. I didn’t know how long he had been standing there.
Wallace cleared his throat. “Uh-hum. It just so happens that I once dated a girl named Maggie Hollohan.”
Cabrera was still hacking away, trying to clear his throat. “Sorry, boss, I just made up that name because it was convenient.”
“It’s all right, Cabrera,” Wallace said with a wink. “Why do you think I dated her?”
I chuckled enthusiastically. Geez, Wallace must be getting it regular these days.
Wallace pulled up the chair next to me. “How’s it going, Mather? I see Cabrera’s chock-full of good ideas.” He turned and stared at him. “You should write a book, Cabrera, The FBI for Dummies.”
“Cabrera’s very helpful, especially if you’re planning to visit the elephant exhibit at the zoo.”
Wallace studied the pile of shells. “Yeah, what’s up with the mess, Cabrera? You making your own mulch or something? You do know the director has a peanut allergy, don’t you?”
“He does?”
Wallace nodded. “Imagine him sitting down exactly where you’re sitting now and breathing some of that peanut poison into his lungs. How do you think that would play out?”
Cabrera looked horribly guilty as he swept his mess into the trash pail.
“All joking aside, Mather, you picked up one hell of a case. You’ve got a murdered foreign national and a dead Cosa Nostra enforcer. We’re bringing in the witness to look at the pictures of Silvestri and his known associates, aren’t we?”
“She’s got cold feet, boss,” Cabrera said. “This Linuzzi tracked her down and threatened her life after she came in the other day.”
Wallace pulled in his chair. “So from what I heard of your conversation—and by the way, I am not easy—you want to put our witness into protective custody.”
“We’re dealing with some heavyweight criminals. I don’t think there’s any question that her life is at risk,” I said.
“You’d better roll on that,” Wallace said. “I’ll okay the expenditure. Soft-pedal it to the witness if that’s possible, and see how soon you can get her to look at the photos. Silvestri is very well insulated. Getting past his army of attorneys won’t be easy.”
Cabrera sucked a peanut fragment out of his teeth. “You mean, he’s not going to volunteer a DNA sample so that we can match it with the semen the ME removed from the dead Israeli girl?”
“Doesn’t seem likely.”
Wallace stood. “Anything else?”
“It doesn’t make any sense that Silvestri would kill one of his own men, not unless Linuzzi was skimming or had his own action. If a rival family killed him, well then, we’d better buckle up. Things are going to get pretty bumpy around here.”
“I agree,” Wallace said. “In fact, I just heard something that’s going to throw you a real curveball. The crime lab called. That scorch mark on the floor near Linuzzi’s body came from a flash grenade. The last time I checked, that wasn’t exactly standard operating procedure for the mob.”
A flashbulb went off in my head. “Someone was brought in from the outside, someone Linuzzi was unfamiliar with.”
“Very good, Mather, you go to the head of the class,” Wallace said. “The question remains. Who?”
Chapter 40
Twelve hundred miles south of New York, Gaetano Abate picked up the phone and smiled when he recognized Michael Orzani’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Gaetano, come stai?” Orzani said.
“Michael, nice to hear from you, kid. What’s going on in New York?”
“You heard the news?” Orzani asked.
“Heard? Are you kidding? I’ve had the giggles all day. What a fucking mess. I know that wasn’t your work.”
“No way, Guy. Someone got to Linuzzi before me. That prick Silvestri hit me in the face like I was some kind of punching bag, and I had to stand there and take it from him.”
“Jesus. He’s a dumb son of a bitch. Shake it off, kid. It’ll come back to you in spades after the new order is established.”
“I tell you, I wanted to put a bullet between his two ugly eyes.”
“But you didn’t, and you won’t! Get your anger in check, or you’ll fuck up everything. Understand?”
“Sure,” Orzani grumbled unhappily.
Abate picked an olive out of his martini glass and crunched it between his back teeth. “What happened to Linuzzi? I thought he was supposed to be a sharp guy.”
“Beats me. All I know is that Silvestri’s been out for blood ever since that girl’s torso washed ashore. Knowing Silvestri, he’s had enough and doesn’t want to deal with it anymore. Anyway, like I said, I was supposed to take out Linuzzi, but someone got to him before I could pull the trigger. He was supposed to be Silvestri’s scapegoat, but now that he’s been rubbed out …”
“So he figured he’d hang Linuzzi for the girl’s murder to get himself off the hook. Silvestri’s smart enough to have a fall guy for everything.” Abate munched a second olive. “Like I said, just hang in there. Every cloud has a silver lining.”
“I will, Gaetano. I will.”
Abate sucked down the rest of his martini. “Thanks for calling, kid. Just lay low. We’ll speak soon.”
~~~
Carolyn Abate was sprawled out on the sectional, watching TV. In the days since Maltisse had been murdered, Ellen DeGeneres had become her frequent companion. Her husband had not spoken a solitary word to her in all that time. There were no arguments over her transgression, no small talk, not so much as a nasty stare. He had simply chosen to ignore her. Carolyn was on her best behavior and knew better than to challenge her husband.
She had mentally prepared for a life of incarceration and for the near term was content just to be alive. Having heard stories about her husband, she knew that he was capable of much worse. She had not yet grown restless, and although she knew that she couldn’t keep the act up forever, she was momentarily satisfied with the new status quo.
She snapped to attention when he entered the room and was surprised to see the old man smiling. He paused just within the doorway. This is big, she thought. This is good. He’s ready to open up.
He sat down next to her. “I have wonderful memories of my childhood,” he said. “I can still picture the family sitting around the table on Sunday afternoons eating and drinking. It was a great time in my life. I think we should spend some time in New York. You know, like the old days. Why don’t you call the travel agent and book us a flight … first class.” He stood up and left the room as suddenly as he had entered.
Oh my God, I’m getting out of Florida and away from this hellhole. A change of scenery is just what I need. “Who-hoo,” she cheered as a wicked smile spread across her face.
Abate retired to his bedroom, quite pleased with himself, and decided to soak in the tub. As he began to undress, he thought about the masterful way in which he had orchestrated his return to New York. It was like a game of chess, a game at which he was a master.
He could picture his wife frolicking downstairs, aware of the mischief she was contemplating. New York would not be a vacation for her. There would be no trysts and no opportunities for her to fool around. He grinned at himself in the mirror. “Keep your mouth shut until you get to New York. Let it fall on her like a boulder.”
He’d give her ample opportunity to get her hopes up, but New York would be nothing more than a change of venue, a transfer from one prison to another. Her sentence was far from over.
Chapter 41
Malaina opened the guest room door to check up on the man she had injured. Silvestri’s doctor had visited and assessed no serious injuries, so the level of her anxiety had been greatly relieved and had been replaced with an overwhelming sense of relief. She felt respons
ible for her victim and would never have been able to forgive herself if something more serious had resulted from her carelessness.
She studied him as he lay sleeping. The sun was already low in the sky. The last few persistent rays of sun washed over his face with a soft amber glow. She thought that he looked so handsome lying there, his dark hair and olive skin in sharp contrast to the ivory bed linen. The shadow of a beard now covered his square jaw, making him look rugged. In his biking gear, every facet of his tiger-muscled physique was detailed and accentuated. She placed a tray of food on the end table while stealing furtive glances at the wounded cyclist.
He stirred, stretched, and looked up at her. “Were I to die right now, I’d go gladly, knowing that my life had been taken by someone as beautiful as you.”
She tried not to blush but couldn’t suppress her feelings. “Oh, you’re awake. How are you feeling?”
He moved around a bit to test the extent of his discomfort. “A little achy. Other than that, I don’t seem to be too bad.”
“I’m glad to see that you’re better. So, your name is Cash?”
“Yes, that’s right, and yours is Malaina, correct?”
“Yes. So what do you think? Do I know how to pick up a guy or what?”
“You made an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he said and grimaced as he tried to find a comfortable position.
“I’m so embarrassed, but I’m really glad that you’re okay.”
“It’s a big house. How many rooms do you have filled with injured bikers?”
He’s funny. She smiled weakly. “Okay, still very embarrassed over here.”
He looked at her inquisitively, almost wistfully. “What did you bring me?” He redirected his gaze toward the serving tray.
“I thought you might be hungry.”
“I am. Healing makes me ravenous.” He sat up, ready to receive the tray.
Malaina handed it to him.
Cash placed it on his lap and uncovered a dish of steaming pasta. “Wow. You made this?”
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