Paradise City Read online

  “Come back on your own time, you want to see more,” Terry said, shaking his head with impatience. “For now, we’re here on somebody else’s nickel.”

  They stepped away from the group and wandered through the cool, dark halls. Terry, with his razor-cut hair and trim body, looked more like a high school art history teacher on an outing than a Camorra dealer in search of his score. He usually preferred to work alone, allowing himself ample time to make the cash-for-powder transaction. But this was a short-notice job, spliced together at the last minute to make up for excess street demand, and he was forced to bring in the blocker who walked by his side. Bruno Magro was destined to be nothing more than a minor leaguer with limited skills, a paid gunman who made himself useful on such jobs for the simple reason that he was good with a gun and quick to use it. He was unafraid to spray bullets into a crowd, bringing down anyone who interfered with the making of the deal.

  Men like Bruno were used as sacrifices. They were told very little if anything about the actual operation, content to be allowed in on a Camorra job, always hopeful that it would lead to more work, bigger jobs and eventual entry into the secret society. It would never happen. The men and women of the Camorra were chosen at the earliest age, many as young as six, and trained in their ways until they reached adulthood. They were put through the best schools, educated toward their strengths, and then put out into the real world to ply both their legal and illegal trades. Terry was the son of a Neapolitan streetwalker who handed him over to a local Camorra family when he was two days shy of his seventh birthday. In return for the gift of her son, his mother was allowed to keep her wages for the week. Terry was encouraged to develop his strengths, the prime among them being an intuitive facility with math and geometry. He graduated from high school in Naples, then undergraduate studies in England and a graduate program in New York. By the time he was handed the last of his diplomas, Terry Fossino was a high-level Camorra drug operative, making six-figure buys and moving the cash through an intricate system that went through six different banks in five countries before settling in as clean money in a Camorrista account in Rome. Terry was one of the many poster boys for the Camorra system, a criminal enterprise functioning at its highest levels.

  Terry steered Bruno into a darkened side area, several feet away from the line of passing visitors, both men leaning their backs against a cool wall. “You sure this is the spot they said?” Bruno asked, a nervous twitch creasing the tones of his voice. “I mean, everything looks the same to me in here. How can you be sure?”

  “If they’re not here in five minutes, then we’ll know either I was wrong or they didn’t show,” Terry said, his manner as calm as a surgeon.

  “What happens if that happens?” Bruno asked, gazing up at Terry through the dark shield surrounding him.

  “I’ll have to blame someone for the mix-up,” Terry said, his tone even more casual than before. “Might as well be you.”

  Bruno let out a short, nervous giggle. “Very funny,” he said. “I just love working with a comedian.”

  Terry Fossino stared down at the emptiness around him, his eyes following Bruno’s squeaky voice, and knew that no matter how this exchange played out, the young man before him was the wrong man. If captured by the police, he would fold in the back of the squad car and tell all he knew before the ride to the station house ended. If apprehended by a rival gang, he would give up the drop spot and the names of the dealers and doers minutes into any pressure applied. Within the short span of a few seconds, standing in the cool darkness of a medieval museum, Terry Fossino had made a decision about another man’s life. This would be Bruno Magro’s last job.

  Terry stiffened when he felt the barrel end of a gun jab hard against the side of his rib cage. He took a deep breath; he had been in enough tense situations to know better than to either move or speak. He relaxed his body and waited for the figure holding the gun to make himself known. “Reach for your partner’s gun,” a male voice said, the words spoken in low and calm tones, “with your left hand and let it slip to the ground. And keep this in mind. My gun is already on your flesh. If you move in any way that makes me uncomfortable, I’ll pull on the trigger three times before you can put me down.”

  Terry reached a hand out into the darkness and slid his fingers across Bruno’s waist, grabbing hold of his partner’s nine-millimeter. “What the hell are you doing?” Bruno asked, trying to move away.

  “Let me have the gun,” Terry told him. “And just shut the hell up.”

  Terry held the gun by the barrel and let it fall to the floor, its bounce echoing slightly in the chamber hall. He turned his head toward the voice by his side. “Want mine too?” he asked.

  “I would,” the voice said. “If you had one. But you haven’t strapped on a gun in over twenty years. And I don’t think you’d pick a museum as a good place to start.”

  “So what do you want, then?”

  “Your clothes,” the voice said. The shadow shifted slightly out of the cool darkness and into the slants of light, his face and portions of his upper body revealed. “Along with the fifty thousand in cash in the side pockets of the Armani.”

  Terry glared at the man’s face, searching it for any signs of fear or trepidation. He found none. “You won’t be able to spend it,” he said in a low voice. “I’ll make sure you’re dead before you can even crack a twenty.”

  “I don’t plan on spending it,” Lo Manto said, stepping further into the light. “I’m going to give it to a charity. And not to worry, I’ll make the donation in your name.”

  “The money’s not mine, either,” Terry said. “And the man whose pockets it came out of hates charity.”

  “Just another of Pete Rossi’s many weaknesses,” Lo Manto said, smiling. “Now lose the clothes. Both you and your friend.”

  “We could say no,” Terry said.

  Lo Manto moved the gun against Terry’s elbow. “It’s no to the clothes or no to your arm. And put this in your thoughts. If I pull the trigger, I won’t want the soiled jacket.”

  Terry, his angular face red and trembling with anger, nodded and eased one of his shoulders out of the jacket. Lo Manto stepped back and waited as it was handed to him. “Now take off the rest of them, both of you, and kick them over toward the corner,” he said.

  “You got the money,” Terry said. “That should do you.”

  “I haven’t been here long,” Lo Manto said. “And you guys have had me on the run since I got off the plane. So, because of that, I haven’t had any time to shop. Between the two of you, I should find something nice to wear.”

  “I’m not taking my clothes off,” Bruno snarled. “I’d rather you kill me than leave me here naked.”

  Lo Manto stepped closer to the shorter man, stared at him for several quiet seconds, and then slammed the butt end of his gun against Bruno’s lips, the strength and speed of the blow chipping three of his front teeth. He then whirled the gun away from Bruno and jammed it under Terry’s chin, forcing his head to thud against the stone wall. “I’m late for lunch,” he told them. “And I’d hate to leave without the clothes.”

  Terry unbuttoned the front of his trousers and let them drop to his knees. Bruno, thin lines of blood running down his jaw and onto his neck, tossed off his shirt and put it on top of Terry’s jacket. Lo Manto stood back two feet and watched. Once the two men were naked, he handed Bruno a museum shopping bag. “Put the clothes and the shoes in there,” he ordered. “Don’t bother folding them. Except for the jacket. I’m going to wear that now. This way I get to go to lunch in style. My line of work, I can’t afford to buy Armani.”

  “I’ll see that you get buried in it,” Terry said, his brown eyes glaring at Lo Manto.

  “My mother would like that,” Lo Manto said. “She always complains about the way I dress.”

  Lo Manto held the gun against his waist, took the shopping bag crammed with clothes and shoes, and walked toward the lit area of the museum. “Be careful on your way out,” he
warned the two naked drug dealers. “The floors can get a little slippery. I would hate to see you get hurt.”

  Frank Silvestri stared at the young man standing across from him nervously sipping a container of coffee, his navy blue J. Crew shirt drenched through with sweat and smeared with stains. “You lost the shipment how?” Silvestri asked, his thick fingers gripping a thin ballpoint pen. “Tell it to me slow. I don’t want to miss any of the important parts.”

  They were alone in the rear stall of an empty stable, two men in tan jackets guarding the front entrance. It was nearing dusk and shadows filtered across the stacks of hay and piles of blankets and saddles spread throughout the large space. Silvestri’s men had picked up the courier as he ran in a panic along Fort Washington Avenue, his feet bare, the small leather satchel in his hand emptied of the drugs he had been given earlier in the day, filled now, instead, with bottles of hand cream. The young man was doing all he could, using the last ounces of what remained of his strength, not to cry.

  “This lady came up to me inside the museum,” the young man said, his words rushing out in a nervous burst of energy. “Told me she was lost. Asked if I could help her find her way out of the museum. Show her how to get back on the highway heading downtown.”

  “And this you did, despite being told by all involved not to talk or look at anybody, not even the pickup team?” Silvestri said. “Did I get all that right?”

  “We were right near the exit,” the young man said. “I didn’t think it would take no more than three, maybe four minutes.”

  “When did she pull the gun?” Silvestri asked.

  “How do you know she had a gun?” the young man asked, curiosity nudging aside his fear.

  “Because if she didn’t have a gun and you handed over fifty grand worth of smack to a pretty face all because she told you to, it’s going to go down for you a lot uglier than you can even imagine,” Silvestri said.

  “When we got close to her car,” the young man said, sweat pouring off his body as if released from a stream. “She jabbed me in the spine with the barrel, took my pack and tossed it in the back of her car.”

  “You get a make and model?” Silvestri asked. “A partial plate number? Any fuckin’ thing I can use to find this bitch?”

  The young man shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I just wasn’t thinkin’ the right way. She caught me off-guard, wasn’t expectin’ anything like that to happen.”

  “No shit you got caught off-guard,” Silvestri said. “I would have been better off sending that retard from Rain Man to make the drop. At least he woulda come back to me with some numbers.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” the young man said, anticipating his sealed fate. “I screwed up real bad. Believe me, it won’t ever happen again.”

  “That’s right, Raymond,” Silvestri said. “It won’t ever happen again. Least not with you holding the stash.”

  Silvestri reached out an arm and put it around Raymond’s thin shoulders and walked him closer to the rear of the darkening stable. The young boy dragged his feet as they moved, sneakers kicking up small mounds of dust and strips of straw. “Give me another chance, Frank,” Raymond pleaded. “I’ll do right by you. I swear to it.”

  “There’s no hurry,” Silvestri said, reaching a hand into his jacket pocket and pulling out a knife with a curved six-inch blade. “We need to close this deal first before we talk about doing another.”

  “What’s there left to do?” Raymond asked.

  “The make-good,” Silvestri said. He jabbed the blade deep into Raymond’s chest cavity and held the young man up with one arm, staring into his eyes, watching and waiting as the life slowly seeped out of his body.

  18

  CHARLIE SUNSHINE WAITED inside a dark corner of the stairwell, a set of brass knuckles wrapped around his right hand. He kept a small-caliber handgun wedged down the back of his right boot and a jagged-edged knife closed and dangling from a thick chain around his neck. His hair was slicked back, gelled and packed with enough grease to lube the underside of an SUV. His breath came in rapid spurts, his frail chest reacting to the painful throbbing of a recent asthma attack. The right side of his body was heavily bandaged and taped, the fifteen stitches running across his rib cage, the result of the slash job done to him by Ben Murphy’s broken bottle, slow to heal.

  Sunshine knew Murphy had moved his heist money, he just wasn’t sure where the new hiding spot was or who had picked it. But he did know that the first person to follow him into the bar the day of their confrontation was the homeless kid, Felipe. Sunshine knew the kid worked the bar on occasion and it wouldn’t be out of place for him to be there on a quiet morning before the regulars started to stream in. So, had he stayed a few hours and walked out of the place dirtier than when he had come in, with maybe a few extra dollars in his pocket for the work he did, Charlie would have dismissed any notion of the homeless kid being involved. But the word from his eyes on the street put the boy in the place less than an hour and then saw him split minutes before the EMS truck arrived to tend to Murphy’s wounds. That was more than enough to put the kid under Sunshine’s scope, following his moves, watching to see if his behavior had shifted since the day in the bar, looking for any signs to indicate the boy had even come near a major score.

  The kid had also been spotted around the neighborhood in the company of a cop, further fueling Sunshine’s suspicions that the boy had fallen on top of a score. The cop was a new face to Sunshine, tabbed as an export by the whispers on the street, no doubt tipped to the boy’s play and cut in for a slice of the cash action. The cop’s main function was to be Felipe’s shield, his brace against any attempts to zone in on the money, a perfect cover to keep the dust of a predator from his feet. But no cop, especially a badge from a foreign zip code, could protect Felipe Lopez twenty-four hours a day.

  Sunshine wedged his body tighter against the cold edges of the wall when he heard the entrance door open. He turned his head enough to glance down the shaded corridor and see the boy sitting in a corner of the vestibule, his head down, slowly tearing away the cellophane wrapper on a bologna and American cheese sandwich. Sunshine waited two minutes, making sure no one else was following Felipe into the building, and then, with quiet steps, came out from the shadows. He walked as if in the center of a cloud, his flat, torn black boat shoes barely registering a mark as they moved across the stained marble hallway floor. “I hate to eat alone,” Sunshine said to Felipe. “Bet you feel the same way, no?”

  Felipe looked up, careful to hide his fear and surprise, disguise the anger he felt for allowing himself to be nabbed off-guard. He prided himself on his ability to stay a step ahead, to survive on the harsh streets with natural instincts and the skill to read the signals on any potentially dangerous situations. He knew in an environment such as the one he lived in, the one factor he needed to always depend on was keeping his safety antennae on high alert. “I don’t mind,” Felipe said, his voice calm and in control. “It gives me some time to think things out.”

  “Looks like you got yourself a good sandwich there,” Sunshine said, spreading a smile exposing small rows of brown, crooked teeth. “That must have put you back a wagonful of empty cans.”

  “It’s only money,” Felipe said with a slight shrug and a quick bite of his sandwich. “Besides, you gotta eat, right?”

  “And you gotta live, too,” Charlie Sunshine said. He leaned his body closer to Felipe, his thin shadow eclipsing the boy’s, shrouding him from the sultry glare of the encroaching sunlight. “So, you go ahead and finish that sandwich you got for yourself. It looks way too good to let waste. While you do that, you keep your ears perked and listen up to what it is I gotta say to you. That seem easy enough to follow?”

  Felipe nodded. “You talk,” he said. “And I eat.”

  “That bartender Murphy passed something on to you that I’m pretty sure belongs to me,” Sunshine said, his foul breath raining down on Felipe, who was slowly munching away at what was left of th
e sandwich. “You hand it over and I let you live the rest of your days free of me. And who knows? There might even be a reward in it for you. Which is a lot more than that old drunk would have done.”

  “What kind of a reward are we talking about?” Felipe asked, downing the final piece of the bread, his eyes casting about, looking for any escape options.

  “Five hundred dollars,” Sunshine said, face and eyes disappearing into the cool shadows of the vestibule. “Maybe even a thousand if there’s more there than I think.”

  “And what do you think is there?”

  “Don’t fuck with me, you little shit,” Sunshine said, his anger kicking into high gear. “The bartender was sitting on his cut of a long-ago heist. A cut he was supposed to hand over to me. Instead, for reasons I have yet to figure out, he gave it to you. Now none of that is gonna matter, not so long as you put it back where it belongs. In my hands.”

  Felipe shook his head and stared up at Sunshine, trying to make out his features in the sharp light. “If I had what you think I have,” the boy said in tones as calm as he could manage to keep them, “then why would I bother sticking around here, waiting for a guy like you to come along and stake his claim? I’d be drilling an umbrella into the hot sand down in PR. Not sitting in a ratty hallway, eating a stale sandwich and breathing your snake breath.”

  Sunshine reached down and slapped Felipe hard across the right side of the boy’s face, turning the skin red, the edge of the brass knuckles raising welts on the dark flesh. “I start with the hand,” he said through gritted teeth that looked loose enough to topple with a soft flick. “Then I’ll move to the knife if I have to. So save yourself some pain and tell me what I need to hear.”

  “What you need to hear is that I don’t know anything about any heist money,” Felipe said. His right eye had begun to tear and the slap caused his ear to ring. “Any money Ben Murphy gave me was cash he owed me for working the place. And if that’s what you’re after, I can’t help you there either. I already spent it.”