Killing The Rat (An Organized Crime Thriller) (19 page)

“Okay, boss.”

“Nick?”

“Yeah, boss.”

“This is important. I don’t want to find out that when the shit went down you were playing with your balls, right?”

“Right.”

48.

Falcone left the room and passed Gloria Romano at the doorway. He said hello and she breezed past him, barely registering his presence with a slight nod. She went to her husband, who had lifted his feet from the ottoman and placed them on the floor, like a punch drunk prizefighter playing rope-a-dope.

“Vin,” she said. “It’s time for you to go upstairs. There’s a hot bath waiting. Enough of the hushed conversations and secure phone calls.”

He looked at her then. She rarely interfered with his business. But this wasn’t business, he thought. Could it be that she still had concern for him? That she still loved him after all these years of tempered indifference?

He didn’t know.

And he realized that he didn’t care. He never really knew Gloria. She was bright, funny, charming as hell when she wanted to be. But she was also the most highly compartmentalized human being he’d ever known. There were drawers in her psyche he’d never been able to open.

After a while, he’d simply stopped trying.

He checked his watch.

It was late, but he had no intention of sleeping. He intended to take the bath, relax, then get ready for the arrival of Falcone, the hooker, the suitcase of money, and incriminating evidence the rat Tommy Abrocci had made.

He heaved himself to his feet. Gloria walked with him into the hallway and the foot of the stairs leading up to the master suite.

“I’ll make some tea. Go ahead.”

Once he’d made it halfway up the stairs, Gloria returned to the den, picked up the cell phone and proceeded to have one of those hushed conversations and secure phone calls against which she’d warned her husband.

49.

The sun was sinking slowly in Jack Cleveland’s rearview mirror. Traffic was light on 696, especially the eastbound lanes. It was cool, enough to leave off the car’s air conditioner. Instead, Jack had cracked a window.

His cell phone was at his ear, and he was listening, an act that seemed to be happening with more and more regularity.

Usually, Jack Cleveland got very few phone calls. Solicitors. Old friends. Even wrong numbers. He hardly got any of them. His number was unlisted, naturally, and if he were counting, he probably averaged one or two phone calls a month. In the last few days, he’d received nearly a year’s quota.

The woman on the other end of the line puzzled him. There was something about the voice that he seemed to recognize, that triggered a vague memory that was too far, too distant for him to place. But he knew it wasn’t a wrong number.

The woman told him about a suitcase, about a hooker, and about an errand that Nick Falcone was about to run.

She urged him to beat Falcone to the punch.

Jack listened to the address and then ended the call without uttering more than a monosyllabic grunt.

Jack considered the information. Was it right? Was it a trap? Who would be trying to trap him? What could he lose? Was it the FBI?

He tackled the issues one at a time.

A trap. Not likely. Certainly, Vincenzo Romano had no interest in trapping him. Vincenzo Romano wanted to kill him.

The FBI? Now they would like to nab him. But what could they get him for? Driving by a lawyer’s house? Not likely. Besides, they would want him for murder. And none of the cases they would be trying to pin on him, if they knew about him at all, an issue Jack wondered about, would hinge on a singular cell phone call in which no names were exchanged and no definitive information was relayed.

So it wasn’t a trap.

Was it a set-up? Much more likely. But still not probable. Usually, calls like those were from old friends who were chosen to make the target comfortable, to put them in a setting in which the idea of a hit was the farthest thing from their mind. A phone call from a mystery woman directing him to an unknown house in St. Claire Shores seemed to be a terribly ineffective set-up. Especially for someone like Jack, who would be on guard and would not be taken easily.

So it wasn’t a trap, and it probably wasn’t a set-up to a hit.

Which left only one option.

It was the truth.

50.

“Who’s here?” Ryson asked. He seemed nonplussed by Loreli’s hysteria.

It was almost as if he’d been expecting something like this.

“They are,” she said. A twinge of pain from her knee shot up her back. “Whoever owns the suitcase. Whoever followed me in Ann Arbor. We’ve got to get out of here.”

Liam watched from the checkerboard. He went still and tried not to look at Loreli. He picked up two of the checkers and held them in his small hands.

Carl looked at Liam, then at Loreli. He said, “Hold on a minute.” He got up, and returned with a newspaper. He opened it and paged through until he came to the story he was looking for.

“Dominic Abrocci?” he asked Loreli. “Ever heard of him?” Loreli shook her head.

“We don’t have time for this!” she said.

Carl brought the paper over to her and showed her the picture. She read for a moment and then took a sharp breath. Carl took the paper back and read aloud. “Dominic Abrocci, twin brother of known Mob associate Tommy Abrocci, was found shot to death in the Prescott Hotel in Ann Arbor. Tommy Abrocci has reputed ties with Detroit mob boss Vincenzo Romano.”

“Vincenzo Romano?” Loreli asked.

Carl nodded. “You don’t want to mess around with him. On the bright side, at least we know whose money it is.”

“Oh my God,” Loreli said. “You mean that’s a mob guy sitting out there in that Taurus? What’s he waiting for? Oh my God. What are the odds? My first…appointment…in two years and I end up with some guy who works for the head of the Detroit mob?”

“You want to know even crazier odds? What are the odds that you’ve been working for Romano, too?”

Loreli looked at him.

Carl Ryson, attorney-at-law, slid a handgun out from beneath the rest of the folded paper.

The gun looked huge to Loreli.

Liam dropped the checkers to the carpet. Loreli crossed the room and took him in her arms. She could feel the dampness of his tears through her shirt. She kicked out at the checkerboard in anger. The pieces went flying across the living room carpet.

“Sorry, Loreli,” Ryson said. His silver hair seemed to shine in the ambient light of the room. His face looked strong, the lines deep. His eyes shone with a malicious glint. “But Gibraltar Enterprises? That’s the dummy corporation I set up…no
, we
set up...for Mr. Romano. Unfortunately for you, Vincenzo Romano pays the bills around here.”

“No, you can’t...”

“Come now, Loreli, don’t looked so shocked! After all, you’re a bit of a criminal yourself, correct?”

Loreli felt her face go red. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Ryson laughed. “Do you really think I wouldn’t take the time to find out as much as I could about my new secretary? That I wouldn’t check your record; both official and unofficial?”

For about the tenth time that day, Loreli realized just how stupid she’d been.

“ I specifically picked you because I thought it might be good to have a secretary who isn’t afraid to break the law. Unfortunately, you went too far with it. You broke the law, and stole from Vincenzo Romano. Bad, bad girl.”

“Gibraltar Enterprises?”

“I figured you might find out who really owns it, who I really work for. Who
we
really work for. A good secretary sees and hears a lot. Hiring you was a little extra insurance that if things went bad and the cops came around, you’d be willing to work with me. Unfortunately, all this had to happen first.”

Carl eased back the hammer on the pistol.

“You can’t do this, Carl. You can’t kill us!”

“I have no intention of killing you,” he said. “Vincenzo Romano may have his own intentions, however.”

“You kept this all from me. From us.”

He looked downright melancholy when he said, “Chalk it up to attorney-client privilege.”

51.

Agent Macaleer made his move without much hesitation. He’d taken money from Vincenzo Romano. He’d given him information.

And now he was ripping him off.

Well what did the jackass expect? He was a criminal, right? Cops planted evidence, coerced confessions, broke the law all the time. And most of the time, they were rewarded for doing so. After all, justice sometimes worked with a heavy hand and a blind eye.

He moved across the street to the woman’s Camry. He’d followed her. Watched her. The suitcase was still in the trunk.

He tried the driver’s window but it was locked. So far, no motion lights had gone on, no alarms.

Macaleer pressed his elbow against the driver’s side window, brought it back and crashed it against the window. A stab of pain went through his arm.

The window remained intact.

Macaleer got to his feet and, bent low, raced to the edge of the house to a stone landscape border. His fingers dug out one of the paving bricks and he brought it back to the Camry.

This time, the glass shattered.

He reached through, unlocked the door and opened it, then found the trunk release lever near the floor.

Macaleer popped the trunk, raced back and grabbed the suitcase. He paused briefly and decided he’d better be sure. He set the suitcase in the trunk and popped the latches. The sight of the money and the cassette tapes took his breath away.

He grabbed the suitcase and raced across the street. He climbed into his car, started the engine and was about to drop the gearshift lever into Drive when the arm came from nowhere and clamped around his neck.

Moments later, Special Agent Macaleer lost consciousness.

52.

Nick Falcone looked at the Camry’s broken window. The shards of glass seemed to wink at him from their spot on the driver’s seat. He looked around the surrounding houses, as if he would be able to spot which neighbor had broken into the car, even though he knew that it hadn’t been a neighbor or a passing vandal.

“Goddamnit,” he said.

Filling Tommy Abrocci’s shoes was going to be a very tough job if he had to keep going back to Vincenzo Romano with bad news. The thought sent a tremor down Falcone’s spine. He pictured the Boss’s face when Falcone told him that
someone else
had stolen the suitcase with the money. Shit, he thought. Things were getting worse! How could he put a positive spin on this? He had to figure something out to take to the boss.

He went into the house, passed through the lawyer’s fancy-ass foyer and went into the living room, where two of his men were holding Ryson, the bitch and the little punk at gunpoint.

They’d already been through the house with a fine toothed comb. He couldn’t afford to waste any more time.

He signaled for his men to take Ryson and the boy into the next room. The boy cried and whimpered as he was pulled away.

“Mommy!” he called.

“Liam it’s okay. Go.”

She looked at Falcone, the meaning in her eyes. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Falcone thought she looked tough and strong. He brought the gun out from his pocket and placed it against her forehead.

“Tell me where the money is. Please. I’m telling you, you do not want me to take you back to Vincenzo Romano’s house. I’ll have to tell him that the money is gone but that I’ve got you. He’s going to be mad. I’ve seen him mad. You haven’t. I once saw him chop a guy’s tongue off, and it was no big deal. So for both our sakes, just tell me where the cash is and we don’t have to go through it.”

“It’s in the trunk of my car. If you can’t find it, then someone else took it. Maybe Carl.”

This was no good.

Falcone stood up.

“I don’t know why you want to do this to me,” he said.

53.

Loreli struggled against the duct tape, but it was no use. Whoever had done this to her had done the same thing to other people. And probably lots of times. The bastard was probably the duct-tape-people-to-chairs world champion. The chair was a basic wood straight back. Loreli’s arms were pulled behind her, her ankles were taped to the front legs of the chair.

A strip of tape was over her mouth, as well.

She looked again at her surroundings. A dank basement. Chipped linoleum tiles. Pipes overhead. Twenty-year old paneling on the walls. Directly beneath the chair, she could just see the edge of a drain. With a sinking feeling, she realized why the chair had been positioned over it. It made sense. There would be a lot less blood to mop up this way.

Loreli thought again of Liam. Once, about a half hour ago, she thought she’d heard his voice. Her heart had leapt at the sound. It sounded like a laugh, and she prayed to God that it had been. Loreli didn’t know much about the Mob. She vaguely remembered that they supposedly left women and children alone. But then again, she remembered a story about some mobsters in New York who had ambushed the sister of an informant as she dropped her kid off at daycare. They’d shot her five times in broad daylight.

Suddenly, Loreli didn’t like her chances.

She strained against the duct tape again, but it seemed to only tighten her bonds. There had to be a way. She thought about tipping over the chair and trying to smash it into pieces, then getting free. But as she strained against the chair, she didn’t feel the slightest give in its joints. It was solid and well-built. They obviously knew what they were doing.

Loreli looked around the basement, struggling to find anything she could use to free herself.

There was nothing.

And then the light went on.

The stairs creaked as several men, speaking in hushed tones, descended the basement steps. Loreli’s eyes were still adjusting when the men separated, the larger, heavyset man went and sat in the darkened corner. The younger man, in a tight black silk T-shirt that showed off his heavily muscled arms stood in front of Loreli.