Bad Guys (36 page)

Gibbons walked around with his hands in his pockets like a browser in an antique shop. He found his way to the kitchen, and from the living room Tozzi heard him opening the refrigerator. Tozzi wandered in and saw his partner sniffing a quart of milk to see if it had gone sour. He was looking for signs of recent occupancy. Gibbons hunkered down and pulled out the produce drawer.

“The lettuce looks pretty fresh,” he said. “No yellow spots on the broccoli.”

He stood up and opened the freezer compartment. He pulled out a package of chicken breasts and held it at arm's length so he could read the label. “‘Sell by September 6.' That's . . . Saturday, right? She probably went shopping yesterday, maybe even this morning.”

She went shopping last night, Tozzi knew. She always shopped at night.

They moved back into the living room. Gibbons checked the date on the
TV Guide
on the black-lacquered coffee table. It was next week's. Tozzi wondered what he'd say to her when he saw her again. This wasn't a simple betrayal. Under different circumstances, he'd prefer to settle things with her by himself, confront her directly, do what he should've done with Roberta way back when. If there weren't major felonies involved, if this were just a matter between the two of them, he wondered how he'd handle it. Screaming accusations? Mournful disappointment? Righteous indignation? Anguish and pain? Violence? He tried each one on like a hat. There was no perfect fit.

He saw Gibbons standing over the tub in the bathroom. It was a modern cream-colored tub with handles built into the sides. He didn't have to see it; he remembered it.

“There's a little water around the drain,” Gibbons reported matter-of-factly. “The bar of soap's still wet. Somebody took a shower not too long ago.”

Tozzi went to the medicine cabinet, avoiding his own reflection in the mirror, and examined the contents of the second shelf from the
top. It wasn't there, the blue plastic clam, her diaphragm case. Wherever she went, she took it with her. Wherever she was, she was going to be staying overnight. Tozzi looked over the other shelves just to make sure the diaphragm wasn't there, but it was gone. He shut the cabinet and squinted at himself in the mirror.

Gibbons had already moved on to the bedroom. He was looking in the closet, probably looking for the absence of a suitcase. Tozzi could've told him not to bother. Joanne had an array of luggage and overnight bags, too many to use all at one time. But he didn't say anything.

He looked at the quilt hanging on the wall. It was a real Amish quilt, she'd told him. The design was called the log-cabin design. It consisted of varying lengths of black, red, and blue strips set at right angles, but to him it still looked too modern to be called a log-cabin design. He'd said that to her when she first told him about it, but she insisted that it was really a very old design. She said one of the reasons she bought it was because it looked modern yet it was really old. He'd spent a lot of time lying in bed staring at that quilt. By the morning light, it dominated the room. Tozzi looked at the left side of the queen-size bed, the side he slept on, the side with the empty night table.

“Does she always make her bed like this?” Gibbons asked.

Tozzi shook his head. “Only on weekends.”

Gibbons went to her night table. He pressed a button on the clock-radio and the red digital numbers switched from the present time to the time the alarm was set for, 6:55. Gibbons switched on the radio. An alto sax played bebop at low volume.

Gibbons listened for a moment. “Charlie Parker,” he said, then he shut it off and left the radio the way he'd found it.

Next to the clock-radio was a white Trimline phone on top of a Panasonic answering machine. The lights on the answering machine weren't blinking, which meant there hadn't been any calls since she'd last monitored it. Gibbons turned the playback switch to listen to her old messages. The first thing they heard was a hang-up followed by a few seconds of dial tone. Then a man's voice came through the machine.

“This is your father,” the voice said with a self-conscious chuckle. “I guess you've already left, right? Okay, so we'll see you later tonight then. In case you haven't left yet, we may all go down to the casino for a while, but I'll make sure I'm back early. Okay? Drive carefully, baby. There're a lot of nuts on the road. See you later.”

Jules Collesano sounded a lot more coherent than he did the day Tozzi met him. Tozzi stood over the bed, staring at the pastel plaid bedspread. He had a feeling he'd been seeing some terrific acting jobs lately. Unfortunately even the bedroom scenes. The tape kept running, but there were only more hangups.

The Imperial Casino where Tozzi said he had met Jules Collesano was packed. It was almost eleven, and from the looks of things there were a lot of paychecks being blown tonight. Whirring slot machines, clicking big-six wheels, spinning roulette wheels, rolling dice, the soft but steady snap of cards on felt, the nervous silence of winners, the hubbub of losers. Gibbons took in the Imperial's Roman Empire decor, the plaster columns, the statues of the emperors gazing at each other across a battlefield of greed and false hope. Driving in on the Atlantic City Expressway and seeing the huge, brightly lit casinos standing tall over the landscape, Gibbons thought of false idols, of Sodom and Gomorrah. But here in the casino, he could only shake his head and think of the legendary decadence that preceded the fall of the Roman Empire.

Gibbons stood with Tozzi on the carpeted landing that led down to the casino, looking out at the madness. “What does Collesano like to play?” he asked Tozzi.

“He was playing blackjack the day I met him.”

Gibbons grunted. There were about eighty blackjack tables here, and they weren't all in the same place. “What are you going to do if we find him?”

“Ask him where his daughter is.”

“Then what?”

Tozzi sighed and pulled on his nose. “I don't know.”

That was the part Gibbons was worried about. Tozzi was in an evil
mood, and caution had never been his strong suit. “Come on, let's look around,” he said, wishing he knew a good way to keep his partner on a short leash.

Walking through the casino, Gibbons got a sense of the class system of gambling. Poor blacks and retirees played the slots; these were the plebeians. Citizens played the bigger-money games, particularly blackjack. Craps was a man's game; women favored roulette and big six. At the blackjack tables, men preferred to play with men, women with women. The patrician class played baccarat in an exclusive alcove set apart from the hoi polloi.

“Hey,” Tozzi said, indicating one of the roulette tables, “check that out.”

A dumpy housewife type with a terrible dye job was standing over a mountain of chips, betting heavily and winning heavily. No one at the table reacted one way or another, although a small crowd of onlookers had gathered around the table. Gibbons noticed a second croupier at the table, an Oriental guy, arranging stacks of chips with the meticulous care of a sushi chef.

Another small crowd had gathered around an old black man in a crushed ten-gallon hat working two colossal slot machines simultaneously. These machines stood seven feet tall and had computerized screens that simulated the spinning face of a conventional slot machine. He pulled down on the huge arms with cakewalk grace, feeding coins into the giants, then pulling down, moving back and forth in an uninterrupted rhythm. Gibbons noticed that the man didn't even bother to look at the results. Even when he won, he just kept on going. It was only the loud clanking of those heavy casino slugs hitting the stainless-steel trays under the machines that told him he'd won. If gambling was a sickness, this was the delirium.

Tozzi touched his arm and gestured impatiently with his head. He wanted to move on, keep looking. In a way, Gibbons hoped they didn't find Collesano or his daughter tonight. He was afraid Tozzi would get carried away in this bacchanalian atmosphere.

They turned down an aisle of blackjack tables and Gibbons's eye combed the faces. The gamblers weren't all lowlifes, not by a long shot. He was surprised at the number of middle-aged, middle-management types, somber-faced white guys steadily tapping the felt for yet another card, praying for twenty-one, staring at the vicissitudes of the cards and keeping a lid on their emotions, winning some hands, losing
most. They reminded Gibbons of Bill Kinney, and he thought about what it must have been like when he was undercover in the Philly mob, playing Steve Pagano. It must have been hard for him to reconcile the hard realities of a special agent's life with the opulent lifestyles of Richie Varga and his pals. With all those kids of his, he must've been terrified by the looming financial responsibilities he knew he had to face. It must've been very easy for him to be seduced by the luxury, the power, and the comfort that he saw money could buy. Slipping from Bill Kinney to Steve “the Hun” Pagano probably became pretty effortless for him. That's what can happen when guys go undercover. They forget who they really are. Changing personalities probably became so easy for him. eventually he figured he could make it work for him so he could take the best of both worlds and leave the rest. The successful Ivy Leaguer, rising star in the FBI, benevolent patriarch, provider and protector could be bankrolled by the Hun. In his mind it was probably the perfect balancing act. Gibbons could almost understand the guy's motivations.

But then he saw three eyeless heads, and that could never be forgiven.

He sighed and scanned as many faces as he could see, knowing that this was a useless exercise. He only knew Collesano from pictures. If he saw him here in the flesh, most likely he wouldn't recognize the man. This was all for Tozzi's benefit. His smoldering guinea temper was having a field day with being the betrayed lover. Well, this was as good a place as any to get it out of his system, Gibbons supposed.

But then a face caught his eye. Not Collesano, but a younger man. A huge fat face and a strange body, heavier in the chest and shoulders than in the gut. Then he remembered where he had seen that face. The guy in that black Trans Am parked outside Tozzi's aunt's apartment in Bloomfield, the dogs in the backseat. He'd been eating an ice-cream cone. Gibbons distinctly remembered that he'd thought this guy looked like an oversized baby.

Gibbons stared at the man's impassive face as he threw down chips on a craps table, betting heavily. The dark wavy hair. The cold eyes. It could be him, he thought. It definitely could be Richie Varga.

Standing next to the heavy man, throwing the dice, was a stocky older man. “Tozzi,” Gibbons said. “See the fat guy at that craps table over there? The guy next to him. Is that Collesano?”

Tozzi looked. “Yeah, that's him.”

“The fat guy's Varga,” Gibbons said. “I'll put money on it.”

Tozzi looked at Gibbons, then looked back at the fat man. He was about to say something when he noticed another face in his line of vision. Feeney, the punk from the abandoned warehouse, was standing in the next aisle, and he was staring right at them. There was a white bandage plastered across his hairline. His hand was inside his jacket, and he was wearing a sneer that broadcast sweet revenge. Instinctively Tozzi glanced right and left. Kinney's pallbearers were blocking the aisle.

Tozzi looked back at the pig-faced boy who was chuckling confidently now. He had them hemmed in. They were outnumbered. There was nothing they could do.

Gibbons spotted the pallbearers closing in on them. He looked at Tozzi and didn't like the look in his eye. “There are innocent people here,” he warned.

“I don't give a fuck,” Tozzi said.

“Not here!”

But out of the corner of his eye, Tozzi could see two of the pallbearers coming up fast behind Gibbons. One had his gun drawn, and he was trying to hide it behind his buddy, but Tozzi had already spotted the extended barrel of a silencer.

“Get down,” Tozzi yelled and went for his gun. “Everybody, get down,” he yelled. Then he saw the muzzle flash. A woman sitting at a blackjack table next to him screamed and fell off her stool. Tozzi saw a clear shot and fired at the pallbearers.

“Get 'em,” Feeney screamed as he leapt up on the nearest craps table, drew his gun, and pointed down at Tozzi.

Tozzi wheeled around and dropped to one knee. He saw Feeney's gun and he fired twice. A chunk of Feeney's head flew across the aisle. Blood splattered across a croupier's white blouse. Feeney's knees buckled and he collapsed on the felt, faceup.

Tozzi stood up, gripping the automatic in both hands, ready to take on the pallbearers from the other side, but the sight of Excalibur in Gibbons's hand had apparently dissuaded them. They were nowhere to be seen now.

Gibbons was gritting his teeth. “You're one fucking asshole, Tozzi!”

Tozzi didn't answer. He looked back across the aisle. Varga and Collesano were gone. “Come on. Let's get out of here.”

“Yeah? How?” Gibbons shot back.

Armed security guards were running toward them, guns held high,
pushing their way through the crush of hysterical people fleeing for their lives.

Tozzi spotted a tray full of chips, thousands of dollars' worth of casino chips. He grabbed it and heaved it in the direction of the security guards. The chips flew out over the tables and rained down on the crowd. Gamblers shouted, shoved, and dove for the freebies. More chips fell, pelting their backs as they scrambled on their hands and knees.