For Nothing (17 page)

“You a hero, boy?” Rontego hissed. “Please, be a hero.”

The youth hesitated for a moment and then slammed his knife into the table in front of him. Arms up, he backed away.

Apparently, facial hair doesn’t make a man
, thought the assassin.

Rontego walked to the motionless Aldo. He hadn’t moved except for the increasing ash of his cigarette. “Hel o Rafael,” the taut and weathered lips cracked. “Took you longer than I thought.” Chapter 15

Alex Vaughn was in a dimly lit room. A bed, a nightstand, a dresser, bad carpeting; a hotel room. It was nondescript, but Alex knew this place. It was a safe house used by the undercover units. Vaughn spent many nights here during that first year of narcotics duty.

He sat on the edge of the bed trying to shake the cobwebs out of his consciousness. Ryan Slate came out of the bathroom area and handed Alex a bag of ice.

“Sorry to startle you Alex, but the masks were necessary. None of us feel like getting made.” Alex pressed the ice to his throbbing head.

He was stil confused as to what was going on, but al things considered, he was happy it was his side who grabbed him out of the street. But why had they pul ed him? Ricky Vincenzio or Ryan Slate rather, promised not to let it leak.

“Who are those guys,” he asked, motioning to the other three men huddled and talking in whispers on the far side of the room.

One of the men, seeing that Alex was asking about them, walked over and extended a hand. Alex accepted the handshake. This was al way too confusing.

“They cal me El iot here.”

“Nice to meet you El iot.”

Vaughn studied El iot, his long sideburns and disheveled dark hair looked familiar to Alex. He knew he had seen this man before, but where, he couldn’t tel . It wouldn’t be uncommon in a city as large as Buffalo to come across another officer and not be acquainted. That was even more probable if they were in different divisions.

“Actual y, Alex, El iot isn’t my real name. None of us here use our real names.”

Alex’s radar was going off. What was he into here?

“Wel , I don’t talk to people who know my name but won’t give me theirs.” Alex stood up to leave but Slate grabbed his arm.

“Alex, there is a reason, just hear El iot out.” Vaughn sat back down on the edge of the bed, as El iot gave Ryan a glance and took a deep breath.

“First, let me introduce you to the other two.

Granted, these are their operating names. This one is J.P. ‘Hambone.’”

The larger of the two men, a real brute of a man with an obvious dislike of shaving tossed a wave Alex’s way but remained where he was, posted up near the blinds with a view of the parking lot. This was a guy on edge. Judging by his corded frame and scarred left eye he was also a real bruiser. Alex recal ed having met this guy several times throughout his career. He wasn’t a bad sort, at least as far as Alex could tel . He used his sidearm before, and that was a bonus in the type of operation that Vaughn currently was undertaking.

“And this squirrely bastard is ‘Hi- Def’; we cal him that because he runs al the surveil ance for our little unit. You see we’re al badges in here.” Hi-Def was as skinny as Hambone was large.

Although he was smal , he was not nerdy looking. He was not decked out in glasses and he looked wirier than he did wimpy. There was a tuft of unkempt blonde hair perched atop his head. His ears came out in a prominent fashion. Even if they were not larger than average, juxtaposed as they were against his beady eyes, they loomed large.

He was also carrying various high end electronics. He wore a wireless earpiece for his cel phone and had a computer opened up on the hotel table. Various windows were open and music was humming from the speakers. It looked like something was uploading or downloading at the same time.

Alex leaned forward to get a better look out of curiosity, but Hi-Def locked the screen when he noticed Vaughn trying to sneak a peek.

“Then why al the secrecy with names, and why am I not in cuffs? You guys gotta know I was not authorized to reestablish my cover.”

Alex’s

curiosity

was

piqued

at

this

development. It was also nice to deflect Hi-Def’s slight glare with a new line of thought.

“Jack had more friends than just you,” Hambone made a noise from the window.

El iot pursed his lips in a half grimace, a bit of his pain at the mention of Jack’s name flashed through.

“We al want to find whoever took Jack out. “ Alex looked around the room at these new friends of his. Some things were not adding up. Ryan friends of his. Some things were not adding up. Ryan Slate was fidgeting in the corner, and seemed lost in his own thoughts.

He was able to discern the need for fake names, after al , no one knew who the rat was that was getting cops kil ed. But some things needed immediate answering.

“Ok, if we are al here to get the guy that took down my best friend, why the hel did you grab me off the street? If anyone saw that, then I might as wel walk away or shoot myself right now because going back under might be seriously fucked.” At that point, Hi-Def came over and pul ed out a tiny digital recorder. “Because if we didn’t keep an eye on you through this then you might have walked right into this mess,” he said.

He could hear chairs in a room sliding around, fol owed by a shriek of pain and then the unmistakable retort of gunfire blasting out of the speakers. A voice whispered through the ensuing silence.

“You a hero, boy? Please, be a hero.” A few moments later, footsteps were fol owed by another voice, older. “Hel o Rafael. Took you longer than I thought.”

Then there was static and final y silence again.

“Who is Rafael?” Alex had not heard of him.

“A ghost,” El iot interjected. “Everybody knows
of
him, but nobody knows
him
. We were closing in on getting a visual of him thanks to some work Ryan has done infiltrating Ciancetta’s crew.

Ryan, why don’t you fil Alex in?”

El iot sat down and began fidgeting with a smal Zippo lighter. He would flick it, igniting a smal flame and extinguish it with a flick of his wrist causing the lid to clamp shut around the heat.

Ryan shook off whatever was bothering him and flashed a mischievous grin. He started in on the conversation, as if on cue, with the eager hand waves that fit in with his Long Island accent.

“I don’t know if it was something you said to your guys, Alex or if it’s this war going on, but either way Joey Ciancetta has been opening up to me lately. He isn’t that bad of a guy either, he just gets swept up into what his pops does. Anyway, we are over at his Dad’s place, Rumors, and we’re shooting a little pool. I can kick his ass at pool, but I always let him win. Fucking makes me sick to do that, I don’t know why. Whatever. So he says to me that things are getting nuts. Apparently this war is heating up.

He tel s me this and that and says something about how a lot of hitters for Don Ciancetta are getting their tongues handed to them, and are disappearing on boating trips and showing up in meat lockers, if you catch my drift. Jesus, one guy al they found was an ear!”

Alex brought a hand up to his ear as Ryan went on.

“But there is this one old school gangster who is stil kicking. He not only avoided a hit on him, but took out not one, not two, but three of the hitters in his own apartment. This guy is none other than our guy.”

“Rafael,” Alex interrupted.

Hambone let out a low whistle. “Every time I hear it, I stil don’t believe it.”

Ryan tossed them both a look and then continued. “So, anyway, this guy has been sent, solo, to go and deliver a message right into the den of Joe Falzone’s crew at Wizeguyz. Once I heard that, I got on the horn with El iot here, and we got the team together. Only thing was, we were too late and we saw you right outside of that place. That’s when El iot decided to make a move to grab you out of there.

We didn’t know how to get to you without exposing ourselves and then fortunately, you walked right over to us.”

“That was because I thought I recognized the van, I just couldn’t place it.”

Alex was stil a little unclear about why the van looked so familiar. It must be like every other surveil ance van he has ever seen, unmarked and ugly.

Hi-Def hit a button on his computer, open again on the crude synthetic wood table the hotel provided. Another button later and the computer began to slide a photograph out of a side compartment. He handed a grainy photograph to Alex Vaughn.

“This is the one photograph anyone has been able to get of this guy.”

Alex studied the color picture. It was grainy and the face was obscured by a fedora.

Useless
, he thought. “Christ, you might have wel shot it in black and white. How is it that this day wel shot it in black and white. How is it that this day and age we can’t take a real picture of a known gangster?” Alex looked up from the photograph; he noticed a slight hint of offence creeping up on Hi-Def. “I mean, at least we have this one, but what’s the story?”

“The problem is that this guy just crept up onto our radar. Frankly, it is a bit of an embarrassment.

Al of the ‘family trees’ constructed of these guys, and this guy never came up. Not once. That means two things. One, he is smart and two, he is smart.

This guy has been right under our noses for over two decades.”

El iot was in awe and frustrated at the same time. It always seemed like guys in this line of work were torn between admiring the fantasy and clinging to their morality.

“What does any of this have to do with who kil ed Jack,” Alex wondered out loud.

El iot did that thing where he pressed his lips together again.

“Nothing. Maybe everything. From what Ryan told us, this guy Rafael is
known
by everyone. They cal him “The Ghost” or “Il Fantasma” in Italian.”

“So why are you tel ing me al of this?” Vaughn was not against being part of a helping hand to this unit but he did not want to be bound to them either. After al , he was out for blood.

He wanted to find the guy that kil ed Jack, and strike him down with the hand of justice. As he thought, he patted his pistol tucked in the smal of his back.

“Listen, we al know your motivation to catch these guys is great. We just want to direct that energy to not only catch the guy that took Jack from us, but also to get deeper into the Ciancetta family.

With Ryan in with Joey Ciancetta, and you in with the Falzone crew, we can break this thing wide open.” El iot was getting excited as he spoke. No doubt promotions and medals were jumping around in that cranium of his.

“I won’t wear a wire, if that is what you’re asking.”

Alex was no fool. Wires got people kil ed.

“Not asking that, just want you to keep those eyes open, let us know what you know. Anything big comes your way, toss us a line. You can get to me through a secure line at the department. I wil authorize them to put you through to me.”

“What is in this for me?” The idea of being a

‘Johnny-on-the-Spot’ did not sit wel with Alex.

“For one, you won’t be acting without authority.”

They had him there. Alex nodded his head in agreement. It would be nice to be on the good guy’s side again, on the official record anyway.

“Also, you get some help as far as actual y investigating this case. You have just been running around and frankly, you’re too deep in to get out and do real detective work. Things you think of but can’t get to, cal into Hi-Def and Hambone. They wil be on standby to do some of the investigative aspects regarding Jack’s death.”

At first Alex was offended at the notion that he hadn’t done enough investigating. But as he thought about it, he realized that El iot was close to the mark.

It took him days just to get to Inhaled Imports. Alex agreed to the terms. In fact, he liked them. He had his own ‘Johnny-on-the-Spot’, two of them. A nice turn of events.

“Good then.” El iot extended his hand which Alex Vaughn shook in mutual accord. “I have to get going, but stay a few minutes and get the numbers for the secure line from Hi-Def. I think this wil work out nicely.”

Hambone took a peek out of the blinds, and then motioned to El iot it was clear to leave. Without hesitating, El iot walked out of the room. Once he was gone, Hambone dead bolted the door and looked at Alex. “So, how do you propose we get the guy that kil ed my boy?”

Vaughn flashed an arrogant smile and sat down to get acquainted with his new crew.

*

Rafael Rontego stood in front of Aldo Marano; both of them looked at each other unblinking. The only sign of life between them was the slow burn of Aldo‘s cigarette and Rafael‘s Sobranie.

The assassin mused for a moment about this relic of a man. He was always old, as far back as Rontego could remember. The odd thing was he never aged. The white goatee he wore was in stark contrast to his brown and weathered face. He didn’t seem like much. A single punch to his face seemed seem like much. A single punch to his face seemed like it would disintegrate him, sending him back to the dust from whence he came.

Rontego was scared of no man, so it must have been respect that stayed his hand. Respect or common sense. The connections that Aldo Marano had were strong and deep. The moment passed, and Rontego broke the silence.