Bad Guys (3 page)

With the seed money he got from Varga, Vinnie bought himself some inventory—cocaine, heroin, dust, crack—both to sell and to pay the help with. The Clam set himself up in a newly renovated apartment building on Lafayette Street in lower Manhattan, a building full of upwardly mobile types, people with small noses and good posture, the kind of people Vinnie hated. It was a very good place to be, though, because it was convenient to his men working the streets in the East Village and on the Bowery. All Vinnie did was sit on the couch, set up the deals on the phone, give his junkies their assignments, then collect the profits. His only afternoon chore was making out the “payroll,” measuring out what he felt his employees deserved for their labors—he even doled the shit out in brown payroll envelopes—rewarding some guys with purer doses, punishing the ones who got out of line by stepping on their dope a few more times than he normally would. Now and then a bagman would OD on him, but so what? The way Vinnie figured, the average dope fiend normally doesn't have a very long life expectancy, and who gives a fuck about a junkie anyway?
Besides, there was always an unlimited supply of applicants drooling all over themselves for an entry-level position in his company.

And yet, with all the money he had coming in, Vinnie Clams was still nervous. He had it easy, sure, and he was making it up the wazoo, but he still had nightmares about being locked up in that cell. He knew that no matter how cautious he was, there was always a good chance that he could go back there—and for a whole lot longer than six months. He knew that the only way to eliminate that risk was to stop handling shit altogether. That's when he decided to promote a few of his junkies and make them handle
all
the dope.

Ramon Gonsalves, for example, was a coke freak and his best bagman. He ran a small bodega on Avenue C and sold shit out of the store, which kept him going, since not even his own spic neighbors would buy the rotten plantains those people eat, not from that pigsty. But despite his crummy store, Ramon was okay and Vinnie Clams trusted him. But he didn't trust him enough to handle a sizable portion of his inventory. Not yet. The Clam needed some insurance first.

Ramon had a family: Teresa, his wife, and two kids, Ramon Jr. and Wanda, ages eleven and nine. Vinnie Clams started getting chummy with the Gonsalves family. He'd drop by with a couple of six-packs and throw little parties behind the bodega, meet the kids after school and give them rides home in his big Lincoln. The Clam soon found out that like their old man, the kids liked to get high too. He'd slip them joints regularly, and after a while he started adding angel dust to the weed. Within a month, Ramon Jr. and Wanda had developed quite a taste for the stuff, a real craving. As for Teresa, she was an easy mark. An ex-heroin addict struggling to stay clean? Come on. The Clam just showed up with the horse one afternoon when Ramon was out, and Teresa was all ready to ride again.

Now with his whole family hooked on dope, Ramon had no choice but to play it straight with Vinnie Clams. The Clam made it clear that if Ramon fucked around with the inventory, he'd cut them right off, leave the four of them high and dry. Ramon wasn't dumb; he figured out that altogether his family had something like a twelve-hundred-dollar-a-day habit. They needed Vinnie Clams bad. So when the Clam called him up and told him to go to a meet, Ramon did it. And when Vinnie Clams told him to stash the cash at a certain drop, Ramon did that too.

That's why Vinnie Clams was on his way to the Meadowlands right
now. To make a pickup from one of Ramon's regular drops, a very nice pickup, which was a just little overdue, as Mr. Varga had reminded him the other day.

The Lincoln crested a rise in the highway, and like magic, the three massive structures that make up the Meadowlands sports complex appeared on the horizon: Byrne Arena, where the Nets and the Devils play, the racetrack, and Giants Stadium. Vinnie Clams fixed his gaze on the stadium and unconsciously gave the Lincoln a little more gas.

Turning off the highway, the Clam scanned the endless parking lots that surround the Meadowlands. They were empty except for the cars parked in the employee sections. He guided the Lincoln around the ribbons of service roads that led to the stadium and headed for the far end of Lot W. Swinging the long car around, he abruptly threw it into reverse and backed up to the concrete barrier where the lot ended and the tall reeds of the wetlands began. Vinnie Clams never liked to walk too far.

Examining the shifting cattails in the rearview mirror, the Clam decided that they'd grown at least another two feet since he'd last been here a couple of months ago. He pushed the door open and wedged his big belly out from under the tilt steering wheel, rolling out of the cool car into the oppressive heat. He coughed up some phlegm, slammed the door shut, and spat. “Fuck.”

He pulled a crumpled handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his face as he peered across the lot to get his bearings. Two, three, four, five, six, seven—he mentally counted the lampposts from the right-hand corner of the lot—eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Lucky seven times two. He squinted and showed his teeth, then stuck the handkerchief over the sweaty flab under his chins as he walked toward the fourteenth lamppost.

He stepped carefully over the low concrete barrier and minced down the embankment with his arms outstretched like a tightrope walker. His heart was pounding when he got to the bottom. “You need a fuckin' machete down here.”

There were reed stalks everywhere, crowding him like prison bars. And mosquitoes and flies, the big black ones that bite. The fat man got excited and started swatting at the reeds, fighting to make room. Shit . . . where the fuck is it? He looked all around, but nothing looked familiar. Maybe I counted wrong . . . shit. His breathing became short; he wanted out of there fast. But then he spotted a path of recently
broken reeds, and his panic subsided. The oil drum, Ramon's path to the oil drum.

Vinnie Clams headed down the path, fearless now. He could see it in his mind. That rusty old oil drum half-buried in the wet dirt, the rim jutting out like an iceberg on the water. His greed got there before he did. Just reach around through the rusted-out side and he'd feel it. A Hefty bag, a heavy-duty Hefty bag full of cash—
Madonn'!
Vinnie Clams was running now, light-footed for a fat man, his feet barely leaving an impression on the soft, moist earth.

I'm coming to get you, baby, I am here for the—

Up ahead a lean muscular figure glanced over his shoulder and looked at the fat man. The back of his black T-shirt was tiger-striped by the reeds.

The Clam stopped dead in his tracks. “Hey! What the fuck're you doing here?”

Tozzi stared at Vinnie Clams, his eyes dark shadows under the ridge of his brow. “I'm taking a piss,” he said indignantly. “What're
you
doing here?”

The Clam looked down. The fucker was pissing on the oil drum! Pissing on the cash!

Tozzi didn't move, but he kept his eyes on Vinnie Clams, waiting for an answer.

The Clam felt stupid and obvious. He had to say something so he wouldn't look so suspicious. “I'm taking a piss too,” he said.

“So take a piss.”

Vinnie Clams didn't like the way he said that. He didn't like this guy at all. And besides the fact that he was standing right over the oil drum
and
pissing on it, there was something vaguely familiar about this asshole. Vinnie Clams had a feeling he knew this guy from somewhere.

Reluctantly the Clam turned his back on him, unzipped his fly, and pulled out his dick, trying to remember where he knew this guy from. He started to relieve himself and then it suddenly dawned on him—those pictures Varga had sent him a long time ago!—and he peed on his shoe. This guy's a fucking fed! One of those two FBI guys who were on his ass all last winter trying like crazy to get something on him. Damn, he'd thought they'd given up on him. Goddamn.

The Clam didn't move. Slowly he reached into the side pocket of his jacket for his gun. Sweat was running into his eyes. Son-of-a-bitch.

Vinnie Clams clicked the safety as he turned, leveling the small automatic at—

Where the fuck—? The guy was gone.

The Clam quickly dropped down on one knee and stuck his hand into the oil drum. Empty. The humid smell of the fed's piss was in his face and on his hand. Vinnie Clams stood up and angrily wiped his hand on his pants.

“Where are you, you cocksucker!”

The reeds stared back at him, whispering in the stagnant breeze, closing in on him again. He thought he heard something to his right and squeezed off two quick shots. Then he listened. The reeds were still talking about him.

Heart pounding, he barreled through the overgrowth, hoping to find the bastard doubled over holding his bleeding gut. But there was nothing. The Clam wheezed and coughed, gazing bug-eyed all around him. Nothing but those fucking reeds.

“Yo! Fat man! Over here!”

Vinnie Clams fired wild and ran even though he wasn't sure where the voice was coming from. “Where are you, you rat bastard?
Where's my money?”

The Clam ran hard, thinking about all that cash in a big pile on the living-room carpet in his very air-conditioned apartment, trying very hard to ignore the pain that seared through his chest. He fired again without thinking. Then suddenly he saw something flying over his head. The green Hefty bag sailed through the sky in a high arc and then disappeared in the reeds.

Vinnie Clams went after the money, thinking about Richie Varga's warning about being late, thinking about those two dogs of his. “Get away from that garbage bag, you fucker! Just clear out, you hear me!” He thought he was shouting, but his voice was little more than a hoarse whisper.

He plunged through the reeds, then slipped and fell, dropping his gun. The Clam was wheezing and wincing as he hauled himself up, grabbed the gun, and kept on running and running. All he found, though, were more reeds.

Jesus Christ Almighty! I
need
that cash. People got to be paid. Varga wants his cut. Shit, fuck, piss—“I want that dough, man,” he said. A terrifying image flashed through his mind—the empty eye sockets of three heads on a silver platter—and panic filled his gut.

The Clam swatted furiously at the reeds, his throat constricting, the
pain like a crowbar being bent around his chest. Suddenly a sharp pain spiked his lower back. It wasn't until he was down on the ground that he realized he'd been kicked from behind.

“It's all over, fat man.”

Fucking wiseass, Vinnie Clams thought as he rolled over, ready to blow the fucker's head off, but suddenly a lightning bolt went through the Clam's chest and his hands went numb. His eyes shot open, and a purple-blue tongue was trying to jump out of his mouth. His vision blurred. He didn't recognize the black hole of the muzzle right in front of his face.

“Oh, no, Clams. You can't have a heart attack on me now,” Tozzi said. He hauled Vinnie Clams to his feet by the lapels as if he were a featherweight. “No, that's much too kind for a slime like you.”

The Clam made a noise like a balloon with a slow leak.

“No, Clams, no. It's got to really hurt when you die. It's got to hurt you the way you hurt those kids, man, those kids you turned into junkies. You know what I'm talking about, Clams, I know you do. I've been wise to you for a long, long time. You thought you were beyond the law, but no one is immune forever. Your time has come, pal.”

Vinnie Clams's face was like a Jersey tomato—red, ripe, and about to burst. Then his vision cleared enough to recognize the pig-snout muzzle of a .44 Bulldog. He felt the barrel sinking into his waterbed belly.

Tozzi breathed in his face. “I hope this hurts.”

The Clam gasped for breath. There was some feeling coming back into his hand, and he realized he was still holding his gun. “Hold on a minute, Mikey,” he slurred. “Just hold on—” He jerked his hand up as far as he could, squeezed the trigger, and blew a hole in the mud next to Tozzi's foot.

Tozzi acted instinctively, firing the .44 point-blank. The explosion ripped through fat and flesh.

“That's for the Gonsalves kids,” he whispered. “This is for the Patterson boy.”

A second blast shattered bone.

“And this is for the Torres kids.”

The final slug penetrated bloody mush, nicked the spinal column, and passed out the other side.

The bloated corpse dropped to its knees, then toppled sideways.
Tozzi, his eyes wide and wild, pulled a folded piece of paper out of his back pocket, crumpled it up into a ball, and forced it into the Clam's open mouth, ramming it in tight with the barrel of his gun.

Breathing hard, he stared down at the obese drug dealer's gray-blue face, replaying the last thirty seconds in his mind.

“How the fuck did you know my name, you bastard?” he asked out loud. Then he turned and disappeared into the reeds.

Gibbons waited as Brant Ivers, Special Agent in Charge of the Manhattan FBI field office, finished paring his fingernails. Most people just clipped or cut their nails; Ivers
pared
his.

Gibbons didn't say a word—didn't ask why he'd been called in, didn't initiate any kind of conversation. Ivers would get around to it eventually, and anyway Gibbons had plenty of time. He was retired.