Out on the balcony, he lit a cigarette, watched the gray waves. The wind pulled at him. He looked across at the darkened boardwalk, the gutted carousel house of the Casino. Somewhere, a loose drainpipe rattled and banged. He thought about Frazer.

  After a while, he flicked the cigarette away, went back through the sliding glass door, shut it behind him. He got the Sig from the bureau top, sat on the edge of the bed, pulled the phone into his lap. He felt in his pocket for the slip of paper, touched the rabbit’s foot. He’d forgotten it was there. He pulled it out, turned it over in his hand. Wind shook the sliding glass door.

  He put the rabbit’s foot down, picked up the Sig. He ejected the clip, worked the slide again. The chambered shell popped out of the breech, fell on the sheets. He let the slide clack home, the hammer up.

  He looked at the rabbit’s foot, then snugged the Sig’s muzzle into the soft skin beneath his chin. His index finger slid over the trigger, felt the pull. He could smell the fresh oil.

  He closed his eyes, imagined the path of the bullet. Up through his jaw, his tongue, the roof of his mouth. Then exploding through his sinuses, up into his brain and out. He squeezed the trigger. The hammer fell dryly on the firing pin.

  He sat that way for a while, his eyes closed, then took the gun away, set it on the sheet beside the rabbit’s foot. His hand was slick with sweat.

  He picked up the phone again, dialed the number, punched in his own and hung up. Five minutes later, while he was rinsing his face at the rust-stained bathroom sink, the phone rang.

  He dropped the wet towel on the bed, picked up the receiver.

  “What’ve you got?” the voice said.

  “Meeting tonight.”

  “Again? So soon?”

  “Something’s up. I don’t know what.”

  “Who? Where?”

  “Lindell, Joey, maybe the others. Don’t know where yet. I’m supposed to call later, find out.”

  “No clue what it’s about?”

  “Probably just some bullshit.”

  “Maybe not. You’ve got time. Come by here, we’ll gear you up.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not? We could be wasting an opportunity here. Take five minutes to get you set up.”

  “Too soon. He’s still wary. We could blow the whole thing.”

  “When then?”

  “Next time maybe.”

  “Don’t dick me around, John.”

  “No one’s dicking you around.”

  “We had all this straight down in Florida. That’s why I got you out of that shithole. You want to be back there tomorrow? I can arrange it.”

  “Don’t threaten me.”

  “Then don’t fuck around.”

  “I know what our arrangement is. But I have to run it the way I see it, or neither of us is going to get what they want. I’ll let you know when the time is right.”

  “The time better be right soon.”

  “What have you got on that other thing?”

  “Working on it. Like I told you, it takes time. There’s lots of issues involved.”

  “Now who’s dicking around who?”

  “Don’t like the way it feels, huh? Then I guess my answer to you is the same as yours to me: patience.”

  “Just find him,” Johnny said and hung up.

  He watched snowflakes blow against the windshield, only half listening to what Joey Alea was saying. They were in Joey’s Cadillac Escalade, parked behind the office of a limo company he owned in Plainfield. Tuco was at the wheel, Johnny beside him. Lindell and Joey sat on opposite sides of the wide leather backseat, Lindell reeking of cologne and the faint sweet scent of marijuana.

  “You dreaming up there, John?” Joey said.

  Johnny turned toward him.

  “I heard every word you said.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think you already know what you want to do.”

  Joey smiled, looked at Lindell.

  “Cuts right through the shit every time, doesn’t he?” he said. “That’s what I missed about you, John. It’s good to have you back.”

  Johnny got his cigarettes out. Lindell was looking out the window, as if wishing he were somewhere else.

  “No smoking in the car, homes,” Tuco said.

  Johnny stopped, Camel halfway to his mouth. Tuco was facing forward, not looking at him.

  “I let Denise drive this sometimes,” Joey said. “Take the kids to soccer practice. I let someone smoke in here I’d never fucking hear the end of it.”

  Johnny put the cigarette back in the pack.

  “Shit’ll kill you,” Tuco said.

  Johnny looked at him, put the pack away.

  “I need your counsel here, John,” Joey said. “These are rough people. Hard-core scooter trash. I’ve butted heads with a couple of them in the past, but this shit today was bold.”

  “How badly is your guy hurt?”

  “Bad enough. Two broken arms, some cracked ribs. And his eye’s all fucked up. He may lose it.”

  “He use your name?”

  “If he did, I guess it didn’t do him much good. But I’m not worried about him. He knew the risks. There’s a principle at stake here.”

  “If he did say your name,” Tuco said, “shit should have been over with right there.”

  “What’s your history with them?” Johnny said.

  “Couple years back maybe, they moved some product for me,” Joey said. “But they’re unreliable, these people. And once they started producing themselves, they didn’t need me anymore. Fine. Live and let live, you know? What the fuck. It’s a big market.”

  “They say anything to your guy?”

  “He’d just made a drop-off in Keyport,” Lindell said. “They followed him home from the bar, pushed their way in. They busted him up, took the rest of the crank and his money. Told him he best not be moving any more shit unless he was getting it from them.”

  “Guy’s only worked for us, what”—Joey looked at Lindell—“two, three months? I could give a fuck. But there’s a larger issue here. If I do nothing, then the next thing I know it’s not just the crank they’re cutting in on. It’s the pot, the coke, the E maybe. These fucking guys are ruthless.”

  “I thought you wanted to get away from that shit,” Johnny said.

  “I do—and I will. But on my own terms, in my own time. And yeah, six months from now, I might not give a shit who moves meth and where. It’ll be a fucking memory to me, and good riddance. The money’s not worth the trouble. But in the meantime, I’m not going to have it taken away from me by a bunch of white-trash Neanderthals who don’t even bathe.”

  Johnny thought about the thirty-five thousand, how Joey had called fifteen thousand of it a retainer. It hadn’t taken long.

  “When and how?” he said.

  “What?”

  “You want to send a message, right? So it comes down to when and how.”

  The snow was starting to stick. Johnny looked out the window, watched it settle on the parked limos.

  “What are you thinking?” Joey said.

  “How many of them? Altogether.”

  “I don’t know. Ten, maybe fifteen at most. They’re independent.”

  “You know where they operate? Their clubhouse?”

  “Down South Jersey somewhere, I don’t know for sure. But there’s one thing I do know.”

  Johnny turned to face him.

  “What’s that?”

  “I know where they cook.”

  Joey was smiling now.

  “Guy who works for us now,” he said, “used to work for them. Knows the whole operation. Back of his fucking hand.”

  “There you go,” Johnny said.

  “What? You thinking we should go down there some night?”

  Johnny shrugged.

  “Why wait?” he said.

  15

  It seemed like the day had given up. By noon, it was dusk dark and overcast, with the occasional spit of snow. Harry felt sleepy as he drove north, wished he’d had another cup of coffee before leaving the house.

  In Newark, he parked in a Kinney lot off Broad Street, walked the block to the federal building. He went through the checkpoint downstairs, showed his driver’s license and was given a visitor’s card. Saturday afternoon and most of the offices he passed were dark. He rode the elevator up to the ninth floor.

  The Strike Force office was at the end of the hall, door ajar. He knocked twice on the glass. A voice inside called, “Come on in.”

  He went past empty desks, down a short hall to another office. It was small, two desks pushed together head to head, a table, a filing cabinet and a water cooler. A man in jeans and black sweatshirt was going through desk drawers, putting their contents in a brown banker’s box atop the desk. Another box, already full, sat on the table. Harry tapped a knuckle on the door frame.

  “Yeah,” the man said, turning to face him. He was a head shorter than Harry, compactly muscular, short black hair. He wore a laminated Department of Justice ID on a cord around his neck.

  “You Rane?”

  “Yes, thanks for seeing me.”

  The man put out his hand.

  “Vic Salerno. Ray called yesterday, but I told him today would be better if this was going to be informal. Fewer people around. Just give me a second here.”

  He put a bronze fishing trophy in the box, a framed photo of a man and woman on a small boat, smiling at the camera.

  “I was sorry to hear about your partner,” Harry said.

  Salerno shrugged.

  “I knew Sully twenty years, partnered with him for six. Right here in this office. And this is what it all comes down to. Somebody throwing all your shit in a cardboard box. Someone will do it for me someday.”

  “Was he ill?”

  “I played one-on-one with him just last week, over at Rutgers. He ran my ass all over the court. He’d just turned forty-two. Three years younger than me, but in better shape than I’ve ever been in my whole life. You know what they say—in thirty-five percent, or something like that, of heart disease cases, the first symptom is sudden death.”

  “I’m sorry. He have kids?”

  “Two girls, nine and ten. Divorced, but he and the ex were talking about getting together again.” He gestured at a chair by the filing cabinet. Harry rolled it over, sat down.

  “You always think you’ll have time,” Salerno said. “To put your affairs in order, get your shit together. Fix things in your life that aren’t going well. But you don’t always get it. It’s like, every day, life goes on. And then one day it just goes on without you.”

  He sat down.

  “So how is Ray?” he said. “I talk to him occasionally, usually when he needs something. But I haven’t seen him in months.”

  “He’s fine. Doing well. Asked me to say hello.”

  “And Edda?”

  “She’s fine too. Their daughter’s at Cornell now.”

  “I heard. Smart kid. My son’s seventeen. He’ll be lucky if he gets into Fairleigh Dickinson. You got kids?”

  Harry shook his head.

  “Can’t blame you. The way the world is now, it’s like, why the fuck would you want to? It has its rewards, though.”

  “I guess.”

  Salerno looked at him for a moment.

  “Stop me if I’m out of line,” he said. “But I’m curious.”

  “About?”

  “You ever catch any fallout over what happened to those two whyos? The ones from Paulie Andelli’s crew?”

  Harry shook his head.

  “You closed a lot of case files when those two went down, you know that? Saved a lot of people a lot of work.”

  Harry said nothing.

  “Sorry,” Salerno said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “It’s okay. I just don’t know how to respond.”

  “You don’t need to. Like I said, I shouldn’t have brought it up. So, Ray was pretty cryptic on the phone. Said there were some people you wanted to ask me about, off the record.”

  “Joey Alea.”

  “That little shitbag? You involved with him?”

  “Not really. This has to do with a client of Ray’s.”

  “And this person is mixed up with Joey Alea?”

  “Secondhand. What can you tell me about him?”

  “Well, you know who he is, right? I mean, who his uncle is?”

  “No.”

  “Tony Acuna. Tony and Joey’s mother were brother and sister. Joey’s father—Sam Alea—ran a shy operation Down Neck for many years. That was the bone Tony threw him, I guess—I hear Sam was no genius. You know what happened to him, right? Joey’s father?”

  Harry shook his head.

  “He got nabbed by the Feds on extortion charges, must have been in seventy-two, seventy-three. He cut a deal, agreed to testify against Tony and his people. Supposedly they’d already made a place for him in the WitSec program—state, not federal. This is all before my time, of course.”

  “What happened?”

  “Pretty much what you’d imagine. Every skipper Tony had on his crew was going batshit, waiting for the ax to fall. There was a lot of pressure on him to do something. He didn’t want to, brother-in-law and all, but he had no choice. Supposedly the word came from the Commission itself, via Carlo Gambino. So Sam disappears, and a couple years later they’re digging up a chicken farm down in Jackson Township that a friend of Tony’s used to own and what do they find? Joey had to be a kid when all this was going on, though. I mean, we’re going back more than thirty years here.”

  “I understand. So what happened to Joey after that?”

  “Well, here’s the funny thing. And again this is just what I’ve been told. Tony took him under his wing, but he was dead set against Joey getting involved in the Life. I mean, he went out of his way for the kid. Even sent him to college—Montclair State. The family never wanted for anything.”

  “Guilt?”

  “Maybe. But maybe something more than that. Tony’s an interesting guy. How much do you know about him?”

  “Not much. I know he’s semiretired.”

  “Yeah, pretty much. Tony’s a legend, you know? But he always kept a low profile. And when the young Turks started coming to power—Gotti over in New York, Scarfo down in Philly—and people started to get whacked all over the place, Tony took a dim view of it. He thought it would be the ruin of Their Thing. And he was right. It was the beginning of the end for most of them. Look at where they all are now. The Scarpettis are away on long federal jolts, Paulie Andelli’s got so many indictments on him he can barely afford to pay his lawyers. Gotti died in prison and Little Nicky probably isn’t far behind him. But Tony’s still out there. I’ve met him a few times. And you know the weird thing? I like him.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, he’s a product of his environment, you know? He, the Scarpettis, Andelli, they all grew up in the North Ward, in Newark. Not too far from here, actually. And most of them were Calabrese, just like my family. From the Mezzogiorno. Their families were poor there, they came across the ocean looking for opportunity and they ended up poor here too. My grandfather was a tailor, had a shop down on Sheffield Street. He knew of all those people. And back in the thirties, it wasn’t so much an Italian thing. It was mostly Jews running the show—Longy Zwillman, people like that. Dutch Schultz came to Newark after Dewey chased him out of New York. Schultz got clipped about a half mile from here, on Park Street. Used to be the Palace Chop House back then. Now it’s a bagel shop, fittingly enough. Sorry. You’re not really interested in all this, are you?”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Personally, I’m fascinated by this shit. I consider myself a student of it. Sully used to say there was a great book to be written about the New Jersey mob someday.”

  “Maybe you should write it.”

  “You kidding? I type up a 10–14 report, I have a headache before I’m done.”

  “So you like Acuna?”

  “Well, as far as it goes, you know? Met him four, maybe five times. Always a gentlemen. You know, for fifty years people like me have been trying to put him away and not one of us ever succeeded. He beat every case ever built against him. And he had no taste for violence. I mean, when someone had to go, they had to go, and I don’t think Tony ever had a problem pushing the button on them, but in general he’d go to it only as a last resort. And that’s one of the reasons he flourished the way he did, quite frankly. Guy ran the port here—controlled almost everything that went in and out of it—from the sixties on and no one ever touched him. It’s when bodies start turning up that the heat comes down, state and federal. So Tony avoided all that.

  “And you know, he was what he was. But he’s got three kids—two daughters and a son—and who knows how many grandchildren. His kids never even had a whiff of the Life. The son’s a doctor in Millburn. Tony’s thing was he always wanted something better for his kids. He felt the same way about Joey too, you know? Why it didn’t take, who knows?”

  “Joey worked for him?”

  Salerno shook his head.

  “No, never. Tony wouldn’t have it. So instead, Joey started hanging out with other wiseguys, running errands. College boy, you know, totally out of his league. But trading on his uncle’s name. I think they humored him, threw him some bones here and there. No one took him seriously. Plus, nobody ever forgot his father was a rat.”

  “Was he ever made?”

  “In his dreams. He ran a few places, probably still does. Turned out to be a pretty good businessman, from what I remember. Owned some strip clubs, a porn shop, that type of thing. Rumor was he was in the video business, financed some skin flicks. And he dabbled in other things too—meth, I’m sure. Coke when it was big. He came across our radar a few times, but that’s it. Last time we were looking at him it was in connection with a shitload of Ecstasy tabs that ended up at Rutgers. Nailed the kids that were distributing it, but couldn’t work our way up the ladder, so the case stalled out.”