by Nancy Martin
Mick took Frankie outside to hitch a ride into town with Bruno, who was hanging with some of the crew at the bottom of the driveway where Mick had posted them to keep the farm safe.
In his usual suit, Bruno stood at the open door of a nondescript SUV and said, “You want me to stick around here?”
“No, leave some guys to keep an eye on things. I need you to keep Frankie out of trouble for me.”
“Sure. You want to drive, Boss?”
“Yeah.”
It was their routine. Mick usually drove. Bruno rode shotgun. Didn’t matter what the vehicle was, since they were all owned by the family. So Mick got behind the wheel of the SUV, but it was Frankie who scrambled into the passenger seat like a kid. Amenably, Bruno got in the back. Mick pulled out of the farm lane onto to the blacktop, and they were halfway into New Hope when a late model Jeep Cherokee pulled out of a driveway and fell in behind them, staying close.
Frankie had turned on the radio and was talking some shit, but Mick watched the rearview. Bruno was already unpacking his .38 when the Jeep pulled out as if to pass them. Mick snapped off the radio and hit the gas, but the Jeep came on fast. The passenger window rolled down. Mick saw the muzzle of a weapon and jammed his foot on the brake, hoping the Jeep would barrel on past.
Bruno said conversationally, “Gun.”
Mick hauled the wheel to send the SUV back across the center line to bump the Jeep, but the Jeep was the heavier vehicle. The concussion was hard, but neither of them lost traction. Mick cut back to the right, hit the brake again and the SUV slewed sideways, then slowed in a spray of the gravel alongside the road. It was almost stopped, but still rolling when Mick lunged across the front seat and hit the door handle. He propelled Frankie out the passenger door at the moment Bruno squeezed off three shots.
Frankie landed in the gravel on his back, wind knocked out of him. Mick landed on top of him and rolled sideways before scrambling to his feet. A second later, Frankie was squawking again--pissed off, but safe.
Bruno clambered out of the SUV and rushed back to them.
“You get him?” Mick demanded of Bruno.
“The shooter, not the driver.” Bruno tucked the .38 back into his belt. His suit was unmussed.
“You know either one of them?”
Bruno shook his head. “You okay?”
Mick brushed gravel from his shirt and jeans. “I’ve been better.”
“Garza, you think?”
“Who else?”
“He moved fast on us.”
Together, they looked down the road. The Jeep was long gone. The SUV had rolled itself into the ditch and sat steady with one front tire against a rock, engine still running.
It only took a few seconds for Mick to start thinking clearly again. He said, “Change of plan. I want a full crew at the farm immediately. The A-team, not those guys we left back there. Everybody takes a shift. Full protection. You, I want keeping an eye on Nora. Don’t let her out of your sight, got it?”
“Sure. You’ll look after Frankie yourself?”
Mick looked over at Frankie, who was fastidiously dusting himself off. “If I don’t kill him first.”
“You want her to know I’m around?”
Mick shook his head—half to dispel the adrenaline that still sang in his brain. A second’s difference, and both he and Frankie would be dead. Probably Bruno, too. He hated being vulnerable to ambush. But Nora was now in equally dire danger—that was his primary concern.
Bruno’s voice was steady, but he was sweating. “I’ll look after her, Boss. She won’t know a thing. Don’t worry.”
Frankie was finally on his feet and yelling like his hair was on fire. Waving his arms and red in the face. “What the hell was that all about? Whad’you go and do that for?”
Mick swung on him. “You hit anywhere?”
“You were the one who hit me, asshole.” Frankie swung a furious punch at Mick’s face.
Mick hit him instead and knocked Frankie down. It felt good to do it. When the idiot was on his back in the gravel again, Mick said to Bruno, “Tell Mad Dog to find Frankie a safe place to stay for a while. If Frankie gets himself killed, Pop will never let me hear the end of it.”
“Got it.” Bruno finally put his gun away.
Mick drove them all the rest of the way into New Hope at a sedate speed. He dropped Frankie at the garage where he’d get protection, and he let Bruno take the SUV. With the two of them dispatched, he walked over to Kuzik’s office, prepared to take a drug test and be on his way.
Kuzik’s office was a cluttered couple of rooms behind the local police station. Usually some guys were hanging around the waiting room, but this morning Mick was the only one. He figured he’d be in and out in no time. But Kuzik was in a chatty mood. He talked about stuff that made no sense, or maybe Mick’s mind was back on the road with the Jeep and a shooter bearing down on them.
“There’s this new basketball league forming,” Kuzik said, already tying on a pair of new-looking sneakers. “I thought maybe you ought to get in on it. Give you something to do.”
Basketball league? Mick had no time for fun and games—certainly not with someone out there planning mayhem. But there are people in the world you can’t refuse, and your parole officer is one of them.
So Mick dutifully went over to a gym in a local elementary school that had been converted into some kind of community center. The water fountains were still about knee high. Feeling as if he’d walked into a surreal dream, Mick met his new teammates---a doctor, a chiropractor and two college professors who both wore sweatbands around their heads and didn’t have much stamina. They were all over forty, but not exactly codgers. They gave the impression of having been friends a long time. But competitive. Kuzik introduced Mick as a local businessman, but the guys were more interested in Mick’s shooting ability than what he did with the rest of his time. After about ten minutes they started feeding him the ball. He played the game—some kind of preliminary match-up with a bunch of local retirees who were more into razzing each other than seriously playing. The score reflected their inattention. Although rusty, Mick could still put the ball through the hoop. It felt good to sweat, but he was distracted.
As luck would have it, the game got a little rough toward the end, and who got knocked on his ass? Kuzik. And if truth be told, Mick was the one who got too close. Kuzik was rolling on the floor, clutching his nose.
The doctor on the team—Jonathan something—went down on one knee to examine Kuzik. “Yeah, your nose is broken. But it’s your head I’m worried about. How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Lemme tell you what you can do with your fucking fingers,” Kuzik began, making everybody laugh.
Because it was deemed his fault, Mick drove Kuzik’s car over to the hospital. In the waiting room of the emergency department, a couple of cops were hanging around waiting for the docs to finish patching up a robbery suspect who’d accidentally fallen on his face when they took him into custody.
“What’s this?” the first cop asked, seeing blood on Kuzik’s towel.
“I fink by doze is broke,” Kuzik managed to say. He was staggering a little, and Mick had to hold his arm to keep him upright. “And I gotta headache.”
“Oh, yeah?” The cop eyed Mick. “Aren’t you Mick Abruzzo? What did you do? Assault your parole officer?”
Mick knew things were going to go bad, and sure enough, as soon as Kuzik was helped into a wheelchair and rolled off to see a doctor, the two cops began to confer and talk on their radios. Mick figured it was only minutes before he’d be in custody for assault, so he went outside to make some calls. One of the cops came outside to watch him.
Standing in the sunshine and surrounded by cigarette butts on the sidewalk, he phoned Bruno first. “You have Nora?”
“Yeah, Boss, she’s out with her sisters at the farmer’s market in New Hope. I’ve got my eye on her right now.”
“Jesus.” Nora wandering around in a public crowd today of all days
was just about worst case scenario. “I thought she was staying home today.”
“Doesn’t get much more public than this,” Bruno agreed. “But I’ve got two guys, plus me, and we’re watching close. Everything looks pretty normal here. I think she’s about to leave. She’s safe unless she decides to eat the goat cheese. Man, that stuff is bad.”
Mick fought down his concern for Nora’s safety. Nobody was a better operative than Bruno. He probably had sent up a standard two-man surveillance with himself as the third man to cross-check. Short of locking Nora in a tower, there was no way they could stop her from living her life.
Into the phone, Mick said, “Okay, keep me in the loop. I got a situation here with cops.”
“How bad?”
“The cuffs are going to come out soon.”
“Stay in touch,” Bruno said grimly.
Next, Mick phoned his lawyers, Cannoli and Sons. The Cannolis had been Abruzzo lawyers for three generations, and Mick knew he could trust them all unless there was a competition for pastry. The youngest Cannoli was maybe his closest friend now—they’d gone on a couple of fishing excursions before Cannoli’s wife put her foot down and said he needed to spend more time home with their kids. Today, Cannoli said he’d toddle along as soon as possible.
Assured he’d have legal representation soon, Mick hung up and decided he’d better call Nora while he was still a free man. He dialed her cell.
She picked up, sounding windblown, and he guessed she was in a car with one of her crazy sisters. When she was with her sisters, she got a certain tone in her voice—harried and desperate, but something else, too, which he had decided was unconditional love. Hearing that note in her voice made him feel better about the conversation to come.
Trying to sound normal, he asked her about her day, and she gave him a cheerful report about going to the farmer’s market. Just listening to her talk, he felt his pulse steady.
“Anything else?” he asked when she was finished.
“A little something else,” she said on a happy kind of laugh. “But we can talk about it when I get home. Are you at the farm now?”
No use sugar-coating the situation, so he said, “Uh, no. And it looks like I may not be there for a while.”
She was quiet for a second. “What’s wrong?”
“The thing I had to do this morning? Kuzik wanted me to play basketball with some guys he knows. Nice guys, good game.
“But?” she asked, trying to sound light.
“Kuzik’s not exactly a great player himself. He’s a little slow, and his grasp of strategy is—anyway, the bottom line is I kinda knocked him on his ass. Not his ass so much as his head.”
“Oh, Michael!”
“It was an accident.” Mick rubbed his forehead, trying to get rid of the tension in his temples now that his adrenaline had dissipated. “He knows it. Everybody knows it. He was bumbling around, and somebody was going to hit him eventually, but it was my fault that it was me. I was driving the ball around him, but he stepped wrong and—anyway, I brought him over here to the emergency room. He’s getting some kind of head scan at the moment.”
“He has a concussion?” Nora asked, her voice going up half an octave.
“Maybe it’s just a bump. But his nose is looking a little funny.”
She must have guessed how he felt, because she said, “I’m sorry he’s hurt.”
“Yeah, me, too. Thing is, the police were there for other business, and they got interested.”
“Oh, no.”
“Right. I think they’re gonna arrest me for assaulting Kuzik. At the very least, they’re going to take me into a room for a bunch of questions. And until Kuzik can explain his side of things, it doesn’t look great for you and me having lunch together. Or dinner, either.”
“Please don’t say you’re going back to jail.”
“Hell, no, not for this. But until Kuzik can talk to the cops, I’m in limbo.”
“Have you called Armand?”
“Who?”
“Cannoli,” she said, exasperated.
“Oh, right. Yeah, I called him. He’s on his way.” He tended to think of all the lawyers as Cannoli and hadn’t bothered with first names for as long as he could remember. But Nora clung to her polite ways, and he reminded himself that part of his self-rehabilitation was paying attention to the things she found important. More gently, he said, “Listen, when you get back to the farm, you’ll see I fired the old crew. There will be a couple of extra guys around today.”
Again, the slight pause, and then her voice warmer with concern. “Are we in danger?”
“Don’t worry.” There was no time to say more, because the two cops were outside and headed his way. One of them had his cuffs out, and the other kept his right hand on the butt of his gun. “I gotta go now,” he said to Nora. “I’ll call you when I know more.”
“I love you,” she said.
There was no time to answer her.
They took him to the state police barracks, not the local cop shop, which was a surprise that didn’t bode well. Something was—to use Nicky Severino’s word—hinky. Mick spent the afternoon alternately alone pacing in an interrogation room or surrounded by cops who didn’t have a focus to their questions. Mid-afternoon, Cannoli showed up with a sandwich and decent coffee for him, which was welcome indeed.
When they were alone, Cannoli could not hide his incredulity. “What the hell are you here for? Assaulting your parole officer at a pickup basketball game? What kind of bogus police work is going on here?”
Mick lifted his palms. “It’s what they tell me.”
“You don’t need a lawyer. You need an agent. Someone to help you make this into a comedy routine. You should do stand-up at a club.”
“Great career suggestion. I’ll get right on it.”
They talked about fishing for a while before cops came back. Cannoli listened to questions about Kuzik’s basketball injury and laughed off any possible charges.
“Why are we really here?” he asked at last. “Are you going to charge my client with something? Anything? Why are we wasting everybody’s time? I’m the only one being paid by the hour, right?”
Early evening, a last cop came into the interrogation room, and he wasn’t local or state. He was ushered in by the state trooper, Ricci. Ricci was in uniform, the new guy not. Ricci turned off all recording devices that were spread out on the table.
While he worked on the electronics, Ricci said to Mick in an undertone, “We were going to come get you today. You made it easy on us, Abruzzo.”
“What the hell is going on?”
Ricci shrugged, unwilling or unauthorized to explain. Then he leaned into a corner of the room and folded his arms over his chest, his face impassive.
The new cop wore a suit and sat down across from Mick with a folder four inches thick with papers. “My name is Erlanger. Let’s talk.”
“About me knocking my parole officer on the floor?”
“No, about Enrique Garza.”
Cannoli said, “Who?”
Well, it had been coming. Erlanger had to be DEA.
Mick said, “I don’t know Garza.”
“No, you don’t. But we do, and we’d like to tell you about him.”
Cannoli sat back, silent and intrigued. Ricci pretended to study his fingernails. Mick said nothing and observed that Erlanger didn’t want to make eye contact.
Erlanger opened his folder. “You poked a hornet’s nest, Abruzzo. Enrique Garza’s nest. Does it surprise you to find out you’re going to get stung before you can run away?”
Mick shot a look up at Ricci, who shrugged. No help.
Mick said, “My only interest is in Garza’s girlfriend. She’s a friend of mine. I want her to be safe.”
“Mick--” Cannoli began.
“It’s okay.” Now that things were rolling, Mick hated to shut down the flow of information.
But Cannoli said, “I need some time alone with my client.”
Erlanger spread his hands. “We’re just talking here.”
“My client and I need a few minutes. To get me up to speed.”
“Sure,” Erlanger said.
When they were alone, Cannoli folded his arms, frowning. “Shoot.”
Mick tossed his empty coffee cup into a basket and told Cannoli what he knew, what had happened, what was still to come.
Cannoli demanded, “Why get mixed up in this shitstorm? It’s not family business. It’s not even personal. Or is it? This woman—Liz. Are you seeing her?” He couldn’t control his disapproval. “You’re stepping out on Nora?”
Mick smiled. Lawyers always talked funny. Stepping out. “Of course not. But I gotta do this.”
“Let’s figure a way to do it without you going down for a crime,” Cannoli said. “Or getting killed.”
They batted around some ideas for a while, but eventually Erlanger came knocking with Ricci right behind, and they all got serious again.
“Let’s get back to Enrique Garza’s girlfriend,” Erlanger said. “You fucking her?”
“Nope.”
“You want to put her somewhere so you can start fucking her?”
Mick knew he was supposed to get steamed, but he let the taunt pass. “I just need to know she’s okay. She’s got a baby coming.”
“Yeah, we heard. Is it yours?”
Mick shook his head. “I haven’t seen her in a couple of years. Not until last week.”
“Going to see her was real stupid,” Erlanger said. “But we already know you’re not that smart.”
Another clumsy goad. Mick asked, “How long have you been keeping an eye on Garza?”
“Eight years.”
“Eight?” Mick said. “You haven’t nailed him in eight years, and you’re making judgments about my intelligence?”
Erlanger had no choice but to let the crack pass. He re-adjusted the papers in his folder. “Our goal is to convict Garza, not kill him.”
“That’s your first mistake. If you killed him, he’d be gone. But then, you’d be putting yourselves out of a job, right?”
Erlanger tapped one finger on the stack of papers, still not meeting Mick’s gaze.
From the corner, Ricci said, “Stop with the pissing contest and get on with it.”
