In Too Deep (15 page)

‘There is a big wide world full of dark-haired beauties, but stop torturing yourself. And, for Christ's sake, stop torturing me, okay?'

She finished her Scotch in a rush. ‘Don't you think I blame myself enough for what happened? Don't you think my world came apart the same as yours did when I heard the news, Doug? You're my only son. A better mother would have stopped you from going, would have found a way of getting you to Canada or Mexico. Knowing that has eaten a hole inside me. But what's done is done. The world won't change for wishing. You've earned the right to be bitter, God knows, but hating every single turn of the world won't help you to live in it. At least you're alive. You might not think that's much of a consolation, but it is. Believe me, it is.'

A waiter floated into view again, ready to freshen the drinks once more. She leaned back and let him take the glasses. Her hands shook visibly on the table, and to busy them she began to worry the white lace fringe of her napkin.

‘Just give it some time. Nothing can turn back the clock, but if you'll just sit back you'll realise that there are other things in life besides that.' She took her third Scotch from the waiter without the slightest acknowledgement of the young man's presence, and sipped from the glass, sluicing the whiskey not quite silently through her teeth and holding it a long moment on her tongue before swallowing.

‘Of course, I can't very well stop you if you're absolutely determined to go off travelling, but running isn't the answer. Just give it a year or so. You don't have to go to work with Denny. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to push you. I just thought, well, I'm not sure what I was thinking. That a job might help you get your mind off things, I guess. But forget about that. You'll have your pension. Maybe you might feel like trying a college course or something.'

He slept for an hour, maybe two, a tossed, broken sort of sleep that was about as good as it got for him anymore. Spokes of pale light made it through the window from the poolside down below, and he lay back in the strange hotel bed and wondered how many lovers had held one another under these sheets. Images flickered through his mind, but they were nothing new, the edges of their terror tempered by familiarity. He knew what was real and what was not, because what was real was worse.

It was wrong to pray for death; he knew that without having to be told. In the hospital, they had tried to have a chaplain speak with him, hoping that something good might come of it, but what could any priest or rabbi have said that would make things better? The chaplain had been a young man of probably mid- to late-twenties, tall and stoop-shouldered, unaccountably nervous in his mannerisms. He had spoken in a slightly rote way about God's reasons being a mystery, but his voice was reedy and full of grace notes, and a lot of what he said felt like lip service. ‘Faith is easier to keep when the hand being dealt is a pat one,' he had said, just before he left, which was about the only thing really worth saving from his twenty-minute visit.

Everything felt different now. The war had taken in a young kid and sent home a feeble old man, or not even that, but the shell of a man. A husk. At twenty-three, he should have only been beginning to live, but what stretched out before him now felt like waiting time. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't imagine how things would be for him two years from now, much less twenty. But he no longer cried about it. There was that, at least.

The image of the dark-haired girl flushed through his mind. Not as she had been on the beach, all gentle curves and revealed flesh, but the way she had looked in the dining room at dinner. Her hair pulled back, careless and carefree, to sharpen the beauty of her face; her large dark eyes still innocent but just beginning to learn; and her perfect body ripe and ready in that sleeveless pale blue cotton dress. He imagined how it would be to kiss her, deciding that a kiss from her couldn't be all that different from the kisses of other girls that he had known. Yet, for some reason, he knew that it would be different. As the fantasy-her drew back slowly from him, her smile locked itself in and awakened a distant ache that could do nobody any good, but the darkness made him vulnerable to such feelings and there was nothing he could do but lie there and wait for its passing.

His mother was right: running was not the answer. The truth was that there were no answers. His clammy skin caught a hint of draught from the open window. It wasn't much, but he tried to make the best of it. This hurt was his to bear, and the pain would either subside in time, or it wouldn't. The trick, a soldier had told him, back in the hospital, was to clear your mind of bad thoughts. ‘Try thinking about lawnmower engines, or football, or give praying a try.' An old soldier with a long, drawn face, pasty skin and the sad eyes of a beaten dog. ‘In time, your mind will stop obsessing about it, and you'll feel better in yourself.' The operation was all about containment now.

Doug held to the stillness of the night for as long as he could bear, then struggled free of the bed sheets, sat himself up and snapped on the reading lamp that craned up and out from the locker to his right. He peeled off his T-shirt and tossed it across the room. It caught the back of the desk chair and held for just a moment before losing its grip and tumbling to the floor. He stared at the puddle it made there and out of habit ran one hand across his stomach, the tips of his thumb and index finger tracing the nest of scars. Then, without thinking much, he closed his eyes and slid open the locker's drawer.

At home, he kept a gun there, had done so ever since his father's passing. Jesus, that was almost ten years ago now. His mother had never liked the idea of a weapon in the house but, as the man of the family, he felt that he had to do what was best for them all. So, he had moved it from his father's bedside locker to his own. In truth, he wasn't all that sure that the thing would even fire if ever called upon, but simply knowing that some sort of protection was within easy reach did help to sate the worst of his fears during those first long wintry nights when every settling floorboard and contracting water pipe seemed like the determined creep of an intruder.

Since then, it had remained tucked away in that drawer, in amongst the general clutter of letters, a long-abandoned stamp collection, a few creased old baseball cards and various other little souvenir nothings of his teenaged years. An old Beretta Jetfire. Occasionally, a long way into some sleepless night, he liked to reach out in the darkness and slip his hand inside the drawer, to fumble his knowing way past the crumpled cards and papers and just settle his grip over the gun to find comfort in that familiar shape and weight, in the cold, oily touch of all that killing iron. This was a hotel room, though, just a place by the sea a long way from home, and when his hand made it inside the drawer now there were no papers or postcards to meet his touch, no chunk of handgun either. He rubbed his fingertips slowly along the bottom of the drawer, feeling the grain just an edge above true smoothness, until in towards the back his touch bumped the waxed-leather spine of a Gideon Bible. With hours of time to kill until dawn, he lifted it out and let his hands enjoy the cracked touch of the moulded blue covers. Then he lay back down in the bed and opened the book to a random page. He didn't know anything about lawnmower engines, and baseball had always been his game, not football.

Everyone had gotten away clean. We followed the plan, went our separate ways and got busy laying low for a while. But something somewhere had gone wrong and, on the third day, Johnny Cassano turned up dead.

Since Monday, the headlines had been full to splitting with details of the heist. CNN had just about fallen over themselves to deem our job ‘the most audacious raid in American banking history,' and the
New York Times
devoted seven full pages of their Tuesday edition to analysing this ‘modern-day Jesse James adventure'.

Virtually round the clock for two days and nights, every so-called expert in the fields of security and economics was dug up and made to sit in plush studios to debate the crime, and though their voices were sober and measuring, holding with discipline to the facts as they saw them to be, they seemed, to a man, to glow with awe at the sheer magnitude of what had happened. They were impressed, everyone was; it simply beggared belief that a gang of five men could walk into Manhattan's largest bank, dressed in blue overalls and wearing clown-face make-up but armed with nothing more evident than a slip of paper, and in less than ten minutes, carrying sacks crammed nearly to spilling with tens of millions of dollars, stroll back out and just disappear into the height of rush-hour traffic. No alarms had been raised, no one had lifted a hand to try stopping their escape. Surely, such a stunt had to be impossible, and yet that is exactly what had happened.

The note was brief and straight to the point: ‘This building is wired. Empty the vaults or we detonate.'

Nobody bothered to argue with that.

I followed the news reports because I needed to do something to help kill the time, and also because this spinning out of the whole saga did make for enjoyable viewing, but I refused to let myself buy too deeply into all the Hollywood-styled hyperbole, and I did my best to keep my head from swelling too much.

Predictably, the figures bandied about on screen and in the papers were wildly divergent from one another, with the most conservative estimates (
USA Today'
s) putting the stolen tally at $112 million, a full third higher than the true amount. It was as clear as a ringing bell, to me anyway, that we who had gotten our hands dirty were not the only thieves in this game. Everyone steals from everyone else, right on down from the very top.

Then came the business with Johnny Cassano, and that changed everything. What had until then been audacious and impressive, suddenly became a sordid, bloody mess.

I caught the story on the late news. At first, he was just a piece of incidental gossip, a man found garrotted in a Wal-Mart parking lot down in Freehold. They had a name, Cassano, and reports placed him as a loose affiliate of the Gambino Family. But within an hour, somebody in the research department had unearthed a more solid crime-syndicate link, and from there it was only a matter of time before Cassano would be connected to the week's major news headline: the New York bank heist.

He had refused to stick to the order. When he was supposed to be lying low, the stupid son of a bitch was spotted down in Arlington, at the track, throwing around five-grand bombs on the longest shots he could find. And good losers were a flashing neon sign; they raised eyebrows in a hurry. We all knew that the Feds would be watching, and that they wouldn't be limiting their attention to any list of most likely suspects, either. On a job of this magnitude, they'd have eyes for everyone who had ever stretched out to vacation in the pen, anyone who had ever even nodded hello to the wrong sort of people. There was one simple rule to follow: don't attract attention. Don't be seen overspending on as much as a loaf of bread; don't go working the champagne-shift at one of the uptown nightclubs; don't even jaywalk, for Christ's sake. A month of lying low wasn't too much of a hardship, not when you considered the reward. A month or maybe six weeks, tops, and then we were all home free. We all knew the score, and it should have been the simplest thing in the world to just lie low and daydream of pots of gold at the ends of rainbows. But Johnny had screwed even that up.

Someone had caught up with him, at great risk to themselves, and dragged a piece of cheese wire through his windpipe, right there in a Wal-Mart parking lot. I knew that, even as the news spun its latest twist in the tale, the police were probably pouring over reams of surveillance tape, interrogating anyone who might have fallen within a fifty-mile radius of Freehold in the day in question, and slowly, methodically, drawing up a list of known associates. They didn't give a dime-store damn about him personally, of course; in their eyes, a man like Johnny Cassano was scum and deserved every stinking slice of bad luck that fell his way. No, their interest in him was purely mercenary. Someone had wanted, maybe needed, to shut him up, permanently, and they just had to know why. So, he had become the chump bait that could possibly snare a multimillion-dollar catch. For the first time in his entire rotten life, he had become a valued member of society.

By the Thursday morning, CNN had been pushed into a leap of faith. They announced a second gangland slaying; this time, Giovanni Mezzo, better known in underworld circles as ‘The Driver'. Apparently, gunshots had been reported at a building in the Bronx, and police had arrived on the scene to find Mezzo dead in the service elevator, shot seventeen times at point-blank range. Listening to the report, I knew that the newsreader, a hot blonde with a smoky tone, was flying high by the seat of her delectable and perfectly-filled pants; that the ropes she spun to connect ‘The Driver' with Johnny Cassano were as thin as cobweb and just about as full of spider's shit.

According to Miss Pretty Fine, Cassano and Mezzo had both once been pulled in for questioning over a Vegas execution. Fourteen years ago, that was, and neither had been officially charged. It was a shakedown, nothing more, one of those routine but relatively minor irritations that filled a regular gap in the course of a wiseguy's daily toil, but even tenuous links could be implied to mean something. The blonde beauty on the screen was selling snake oil, her words saying one thing, her demeanour and her knowing silences adding the critical details, the ones that nailed coffin lids shut.

I knew that there was nothing to the reporter's claim. The truth was that our job had been crafted down to the most minute detail over two solid years. Every angle had been covered and great care was taken to ensure that none of the five men were in any way acquainted, not by blood, not by circumstance, not even by reputation. Each man had been recruited for a particular skill as well as for calmness during a big game, and each was solidly reliable in a pinch; they were drawn from cities all across the country, nominated for consideration by their respective Families. There was no room for loopholes, and no nooses that might be used to hang anyone connected with the job. CNN, maybe under duress from the Feds, were making news out of a few scattered jigsaw puzzle pieces. They were blowing hot air, and yet, somehow, and probably without even realising, they had happened on something decidedly close to the truth.

Yet suddenly, just four days after the event, our number had been reduced to three. I knew that the others would have been following the news reports with a diligence close to my own, and I believed I knew what they'd be thinking. Someone was taking out the gang, one at a time, either because the idea of sharing the loot no longer seemed so appealing, or because whoever had organised all of this was worried that the hands-on witnesses might be persuaded to talk, given enough of a squeeze. Two men were already dead, and any one of us could be next.

But what was there to do? A phone call now might trigger exactly the wrong response, especially when anxiety would have already entered the picture. And besides, there was no telling who might be listening. I watched the latest updates spin themselves new strands, each adding a little more colour than the last, and decided that it might be best if I gave things twenty-four hours. That would be enough time for the situation to settle down, and for common sense to prevail. I made spaghetti and meatballs, put on some music and resolved to sit tight.

At four a.m. the phone rang. I hadn't been asleep, but I didn't hurry to answer. A call at that hour wouldn't be full of joyous news, and the longer I delayed in picking up, the more time I'd have to fill with blissful ignorance. But it couldn't be ignored forever, and this caller was insistent and stubborn. Ten chimes, then fifteen, a pulsing metallic quiver that made splinters of the night. When I could bear it no longer, I lifted the receiver.

‘Yeah.' I stood in the darkness, gazing out through the window at a lost world. The ocean was out there somewhere, and a breeze, which had kicked up some time in the last few hours, sent scuds of cold rain lashing against the glass.

‘Cobb's dead.'

I inclined my head and closed my eyes, just for a moment. When I opened them again, the room seemed to have bled a little brightness from somewhere. Everything was shades of grey.

‘What the hell are you doing? This phone could be covered.'

Farina sounded far away. A second's delay seemed to fall between every phrase. Dumb guinea, I thought, suddenly weary to my very bones. He suffers a bout of panic and I get compromised. In ten minutes flat, I'd need to blow this place, try to hustle my way to another safe house. That time delay was a bad sign.

‘Did you hear what I said. Cobb's …'

‘I heard. Now, what's your problem?'

That delay again. Then: ‘Jesus, Paulie. He's the third one. Now there are only us two left. And you took so long answering the phone, I thought, well … Jesus.'

Anger swelled up inside of me, a consequence no doubt of having been cooped up for days in this crummy bed-sit apartment. ‘What the hell's the matter with you, huh? You got wood for brains? Bad as this place is, it keeps the rain off my head. Now, thanks to you and your case of the jitters, I have to bail out. If you want some free advice, you might want to think about doing the same.' I sighed, hard. ‘I don't get it. Everyone said you were a stand-up guy, that you wouldn't come apart no matter what kind of shit came down on you. And yet, here you are, bawling like a kid with a skinned knee.'

That was the kind of talk that, under normal circumstances, would have put him in a hard spin. Right about then, it wouldn't have surprised me to catch the hiss of his fuse burning down. But he was scared and it was as if my words didn't so much as touch him.

‘Three of us down. Don't you see what that means, Paulie? Two to go. There's just you and me, and the bullet could be coming from any direction.'

There was no use in arguing. He had set his mind to it, and I knew his type well enough, had been around men like him my entire life, just about. So I listened. What else could I do? Words built on words, one thing leading to another.

He was hesitant in saying the last part of what was really on his mind and I had heard enough to know that pushing him would be a colossal waste of good escape time. I put up with a good five minutes of panic-talk, all the while packing my case one-handed and keeping a close watch on the coast road outside. A gun lay on my pillow, an untraceable stub-nosed Colt, loaded and cocked, already dressed for the party. Loud and messy, it was a beautiful weapon. The first sign of a visitor and I could be away in a hurry, and if necessary spraying all manner of hell before me.

‘Listen Paulie, I've been doing some thinking, you know. You and me, we're in the same fix, don't you think? Whoever took out the others will be wanting to pay us a visit too.' Farina paused, and then plunged headlong over that cliff. ‘What would you say to the two of us teaming up?'

‘The plan was to lie low and not to make contact with one another. Under any circumstances.'

‘Screw the plan,' he roared. ‘I'd say the situation has changed a little. Wouldn't you?'

I thought about that. ‘Go on.'

‘The way we are now, whoever wants us dead can come and pick us off whenever he wants. But together, we'd be a different proposition. We can still lie low, but together we'll be able to watch each other's back. What do you say, Paulie?'

He was running scared, all right, but that didn't mean to say he wasn't making a good point. And he was right about one thing: the rules had changed.

‘I'll need to make a call,' I said at last.

‘I don't think that's such a hot idea. Look, I don't know who's behind this, but whoever it is, they want us all out of the picture. Now, I'm not pointing any fingers, and it could just as easily be my crew plotting this as yours, but I think that, for now anyway, we should give serious consideration to playing this one close to our chests. A week under every radar, maybe we'll dig up a few facts. Maybe we'll even smoke out whoever it is that wants us dead.'

I took a few seconds to think. Out on the coast road, I caught the distant glimmer of headlights rounding a corner. Just a flash, and then they were either doused or were smothered by another twist in the road. I snapped my suitcase shut and picked up the gun.

‘All right. Meet me in two hours.'

‘Where?'

‘That place, out by Trudy's.'

‘The yard?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Two hours.'

I showed up early, checked out the site for possible ambushes. We'd used the place before, a vacant lot cluttered up with a couple of rusted-out cars, some heaps of rubble, a spew of broken glass and a lot of weeds. I parked and slouched low behind the wheel, keeping the silence. Dawn broke unseen; the bank of rain cloud was too well settled and the cold kept everything on a knife-edge.

Just before seven, a coffee-coloured sedan floated by. It circled the block, slowly, and I appreciated the effort. Maybe I'd misjudged Farina, maybe he had just been spooked. Well, he had a right to be. And at least now he seemed to be thinking clearly again. Caution was an admirable character trait. A couple of minutes passed, then the sedan reappeared, and this time eased in off the road. He drew up close, parked snugly on my left, and killed the engine. I hesitated, gave myself the small assurance of the Colt barrel's chill touch in my jacket pocket, then stepped out and hurried around to his car's passenger side.