Authors: Thomas Perry
But there were also genuine bits of information. Anthony Barino, the head of the family in Tampa, had listed a holding company that owned four restaurants as his employer. Jerry Sorrenti from New York had a monopoly on refuse collection in part of the city, and he listed his occupation as "garbage man." If this meeting could be shown in court to be what it was—a meeting of the men who ran the Mafia—these businesses could be broken up or confiscated under the RICO statute.
She used a computer in the outer office to examine the list of men who were on parole and were not allowed to be within speaking distance of other convicted felons. There were a dozen who weren't even supposed to leave their home states without the permission of a judge. There were fifty-six who had been taken into custody with concealed firearms, and over a hundred firearms had been found that hadn't been tied to anyone in particular. Nineteen men had been carrying cocaine and thirteen had medications with false or suspicious prescriptions on the labels.
The count she liked best so far was the telephones. Thirty-seven men had been carrying cell phones that were stolen or were clones of phones registered to other people. That apparently was their current way of keeping their calls from being monitored. But it also reminded her of something she had learned in her first days at the Justice Department. Gangsters were all thieves at heart. A capo who made millions of dollars a year on rake-offs and tributes still couldn't resist a stolen television set that ran on a cable diverted from a neighbor's yard. A case of scotch was a hundred times better if it was boosted from the back of a truck.
By now all of them must have had a chance to make a telephone call so the flights coming into Phoenix for the next twenty-four hours would be delivering the largest influx of legal talent that Arizona had ever seen. But there was still time to find more vulnerabilities in these detainees and more opportunities to ask questions.
There were men in the meeting who had so many policemen, prosecutors, and judges on their payrolls that they would have had to commit massacres in public to get arrested in their home cities, and something more than that to get anything but a suspended sentence. Immunity had made some of them careless, so many of them were going to be in serious trouble for things they habitually did at home—carrying guns and drugs, and spending time with people just like them.
She spent several more hours working with the U.S. attorney's people in the office preparing charges to be filed against the heads of the twenty-six families and then oversaw the work of the staff in filling out the papers for some of the lower-ranking men.
Holman came in looking for her late in the afternoon, and when he saw her, he grinned and called, "Waring!" He rushed up to her and extended his arms to give her a hug, but then restrained himself and lowered his hand to shake hers. "Thank you so much for coming to help us out."
"It's my pleasure," she said. "We hardly ever have too much of a good thing—so many suspects that we can hardly push the paper fast enough."
"That's the truth. I heard you've been at this all day without stopping."
"We all have. But as a result, we're getting down to the simple stuff now—the ones who didn't have the sense to throw away their guns and drugs. Nothing subtle or arguable."
"Thank you very much for doing this. I've been tied up for most of the day processing the crime scene in the Tosca murder and the one up the hill. If we could just tie the bodies to one or two of these guys—"
"I'm afraid that's not going to happen," she said. "The killer is long gone. He got out before the FBI arrived."
"How did he do that?"
"How? Probably he came on foot, avoiding the roads, and killed one of the guards along the crest so he'd be able to leave the same way."
"And where would that put him now?"
"Believe me, if I find out, you'll be the first one I call."
SCHAEFFER AWOKE IN
the filtered sunshine that had invaded his room. For a second he thought he was in Bath, and that he and Meg had been sleeping in the bedroom of his house in the center of town with the wall of glass bricks high above his bed, rather than the darker bedroom in her family manor. But the sun was only streaming through a narrow space in a set of hotel curtains. Then he remembered where he was and felt so disappointed that he could hardly bear it.
It was two o'clock. He had been deeply asleep since around five-thirty
A.M.
He stared at the ceiling and felt grateful to the people on the hotel staff who had spared him the irritating knocks on the door and the reminders that checkout time was noon. He moved his legs tentatively, and felt pain and stiffness in his knees and hips. His feet were sore in some complex way. The many small bones seemed to have been subjected to strain that was separate from the surface damage to the ball and heel from running so many miles over rough ground. As he moved his torso a little to sit up, he learned that the news from his back and arms was not good either.
He considered flopping back down on the bed, but he had slept so long that he was sure the inactivity had contributed to the stiffness. He also sensed that he didn't want to waste the effort it had taken to sit up the first time.
He walked to the shower and ran the water to heat it up, and then stood under the strong stream for a few minutes. He moved his arms, then swung them, and finally raised them over his head and stretched. With a bit of trepidation he bent over to touch his toes, stretching his tight muscles under the hot water. After fifteen minutes of attention to the various strained regions of his body, he began to feel better.
Every stitch or kink or abrasion brought back to him the motion that had caused it. Both of his hands had a soreness across the palm, where the nylon cord from his poncho had been attached to the homemade handle. He had gripped the handles hard, keeping the loop as tight as he could around the sentry's neck. It had been a very long time since he had strangled a man, and the muscles had gone soft. He had gone soft.
He was over fifty years old. If, by some miracle, the life he had led in the United States had not been interrupted—had not been ended by his client's betrayal and attempts to kill him—he would still have retired by now. He wouldn't have spent last night on a mountain in Arizona strangling and knifing people. It would have been impossible for anybody to stay in the killing trade for that long without being killed. The only old hit men were people like Little Norman in Las Vegas, making the rounds each day to check his sources and be sure nothing had come in off the desert to disturb the tranquil atmosphere of the casinos. Norman wasn't a killer anymore. He was a weather man. Each day he would reassure the dozen or so powerful old capos in town that the weather in Vegas was still just fine.
When Schaeffer was very young, Eddie Mastrewski had warned him to make himself strong. "Now is the time to train yourself. Today you can make yourself the winner of whatever happens thirty years from now. If you die in that fight, it's because you didn't work hard enough today." Eddie had been strong. He was a Pennsylvania Polack from the coal country. He always corrected that. "I'm a Ukrainian." When he had taken the boy on a visit to his hometown in Pennsylvania, everybody for fifty miles around seemed to be built like a pile of rocks. Whichever godforsaken place in the Balkans their parents came from, they must have had to fight their way out because there weren't any weaklings. There were only people who had been injured or worked themselves into old age.
Eddie had drilled him in all of the basic techniques of depriving an enemy of his breath and heartbeat. He had also taught him the rest of the trade—how to read the signs in a neighborhood to tell whether the job was going to be a simple walk-in or a risky, drawn-out battle for the victim's life. What had happened last night was that he had fallen back on Eddie's most important lesson—that everything that went on was only a series of steps to his inevitable victory.
Eddie never permitted the idea of failure to enter his consciousness. "We're the wolf, they're the deer. Are they going to eat us? No. It might take a while to get them, but the universe isn't going to change so they win."
He was still the wolf. He had gone to get Frank Tosca, and so Tosca was dead. But his exhaustion today was disturbing. He wasn't the same as he had been. Time had gone by and he hadn't noticed, but it had still gone by.
He wanted to rest and recover, but it was time to get out of Phoenix. He packed his small suitcase and turned on his laptop computer. He made a plane reservation from Tucson to Houston in the name Charles Ackerman and a hotel reservation for the next two nights at a hotel he knew near the Astrodome.
As he passed the front desk, he left his checkout card and key in front of a clerk who was on the telephone and went outside. He got in his rental car and drove to a bank not far down the street in Scottsdale. He rented a safe-deposit box and paid three years' rent in advance. He opened the box in a small windowless room and put in the pistol he had taken from the dead sentry and the extra magazine and the knife he had used to kill Tosca.
The route to Tucson was flat, straight, and easy to drive. He passed a prison crew in orange jumpsuits working on a weedy patch along the highway under the eyes of a guard with a lever-action .30–30 rifle like a movie cowboy would have used. It reminded him of something else Eddie had told him. "One thing we have to do is stay out of jail. A lot of the guys we deal with spend half their lives getting in or getting out. It's something between a religious retreat and a family reunion. They've got old friends, cousins, and in-laws in there. And half of the rest of the place is people who want to suck up to them, including the guards. If you go in, there will be people who knew somebody you killed. There will be people who want you to kill somebody in there for them, and others who want you to kill somebody when you get out. There will be guys so crazy they want to know what makes you so tough so you have to kill them to show them."
The speed limit was sixty-five, so he went sixty-five, going faster only in the stretches where the rest of the cars did and a slower car would have stood out. He never stood out. He had always dressed neatly and conservatively, and since he had been in England he had been forced to replace his clothes gradually, so he had the wardrobe of a man of Meg's social level. He could stand close inspection without raising suspicion, but he had perfected his pose of the taciturn American husband. He had good manners and a smile, so there was little scrutiny. People paid attention to the beautiful and lively Lady Meg Holroyd, but less to her husband. It was simply a new version of the way he carried himself in the United States. He was a master at being the one the eye passed over in a crowd.
He arrived at the Tucson airport two hours early, returned his rental car, and rode the shuttle to the terminal. He bought a newspaper and sat in the middle of a crowded waiting area. He pretended to read the paper, but devoted most of his attention to the people around him and the people walking past on the concourse.
There, as soon as he looked, was the short, stocky shape of Mickey Agnoli walking along in a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of tan slacks, his shoes a pair of topsiders with no socks, looking as calm as though he had stepped off a yacht into the Tucson terminal. There seemed to be nobody with him.
As soon as Agnoli had passed and gone on along the concourse, Schaeffer got up, folded his newspaper and stuck it under his arm, and followed at a distance. Agnoli walked on the right side of the concourse so Schaeffer stayed on the left side, moving against the flow of people but a few paces inward so he wouldn't meet anyone head-on.
He had seen Agnoli from a distance on the ranch last night and had studied him for a moment before turning away to avoid him. He had looked very happy and prosperous, standing just outside the conference room. Agnoli had been a Strongiolo soldier in Miami since he was about nineteen, but over the years he had grown up a little. He had saved the money his crew picked up on their regular business of stealing luggage from airport baggage claims and selling fake tickets to cruises, and he bought parking lots. Ten years ago he had already been the parking king of Miami.
Schaeffer had met him on one of the worst nights of Agnoli's life. Agnoli's brother Jimmy had been found in a Dumpster behind one of their parking lots. Mickey had sent word up the ranks in the Strongiolo family that he wanted revenge. The response was a torn scrap of paper with a telephone number on it. He called the number, and a week later he met Schaeffer in a small Italian restaurant near the ocean.
They sat in a booth at the back of the dining room. Agnoli was a broad, short man, and he nearly took up the whole side of the booth that faced the wall. Schaeffer could see he'd been crying. Agnoli said, "Thank you for coming to see me. I've heard you're a busy man and don't like to spend a lot of time talking."
"I heard about your loss. I'm not in a hurry. If you want to talk, I'll listen."
Agnoli was surprised. "I didn't think you'd be ... I don't know. So human."
Schaeffer's face showed nothing.
Agnoli's eyes widened. "I'm sorry. I should have said you're a decent guy and then shut up."
"I'm not a decent guy. A decent guy wouldn't be much use to you."
"No, I didn't ask you here to insult you. Even if I feel like committing suicide, this isn't the way I wanted to do it. I want to hire you."
"You already have. Mr. Strongiolo sent me a retainer, or I wouldn't be here. Tell me who I'm going to see."
"Three weeks ago a Cuban named Montoya came to my office and said he represented a syndicate of investors who wanted to buy a fifty-one percent share of the parking business. I said, 'How much?' and he said, 'Twenty grand ought to be enough,' and I said, 'I've got six lots, and each of them is worth ten times that. Maybe you have my company mixed up with another one.'"
"What did he say?"
"He said he knew all that. He said I was just resisting because I didn't know who he represented. He works for Hektor Cruz."