Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [37]
“What about the machine?” Calise said. “You’re the only one knows how to run the fuckin’ thing.”
“It’ll run itself,” Jimmy said, looking at the two cops.
“All you gotta do is listen. And be there if I need you.”
“Have I ever let you down?” Calise asked.
“Yes,” Jimmy said.
“When?”
“Every time I’ve needed you,” Jimmy said, stepping out of the car.
“Maybe today I’ll fuck up and you’ll get lucky,” Calise said.
“I’m counting on it,” Jimmy Ryan breathed.
He slammed the car door behind him, zippered the front of his black bowling jacket, and raced across the street toward the entrance of the luxury high rise.
• • •
PINS WAS ON his back, in the basement of the high rise, staring up at a thick cluster of phone lines. He held apart the dozen wires connecting the twelfth floor to the mainframe and followed their flow until he found the one leading to Room 1211. He gave the wire a slight tug and unclipped it from the board, killing the line. He checked his watch and clicked on his radio ban.
“How we doin’?” Pins said, holding down the red transmit button.
“Stevie’s in the room,” Calise said, the machine giving his words a grainy weight. “They cleaned him for weapons. Now they’re scopin’ out the bag of cash.”
“How’s our girl?” Pins asked.
“Like ice in winter,” Calise said. “This broad don’t sweat. Dealer tells her about some guy he smoked in Miami just ’cause he felt like it. Know what she tells him?”
“What?” Pins said, scooting out from under the wires and closing the phone system lid.
“She did the same to a guy in a motel in Ohio,” Calise said. “For keepin’ her waitin’. That jammed his balls back in his shorts.”
“I’ll be up there in less than five,” Pins said, heading down a dark corridor toward the dim light of a basement elevator.
“Check in before you go in,” Calise said. “I need you safe, sound, and alive.”
“Didn’t know you cared so much,” Pins said, walking into the empty elevator and pressing the button for the twelfth floor.
“I don’t,” Calise said. “But I put a hundred on you in Sunday’s bowling tournament.”
Pins turned off the transmitter and slid it into a side pocket of his jacket. “Easy money,” he whispered to himself.
• • •
THE EIGHTEEN LARGE packets of cocaine were piled in two neat rows on top of a glass coffee table. The woman in red sat on a couch, lit cigarette in her right hand, bemused look on her face, watching the man with the accent take the bag from the undercover cop to her right. She watched the man’s manicured fingers slowly unzip the black duffel and saw his brown eyes gleam when he flipped it over, emptying a dozen thick pads of cash over the kilos.
“I’m gonna go take a piss,” the undercover, Steve Rinaldi, said. “While you and your boys busy yourselves countin’ out the cash.”
“We don’t need to count it,” the man said, his eyes on the woman, his voice soft. “We trust you.”
“I still gotta piss,” Rinaldi said. “Trust me on that.”
There were three other men in the room.
Two sat at the bar, elbows stretched out, facing the group around the coffee table. The third man stood with his back to the bedroom door, hands hidden behind the folds of a white silk jacket, heavy lids covering albino blues. The man with the accent turned to him, a smile Krazy-glued to his face, and nodded.
The albino whipped his right arm free, a .44 S&W Special in his hand, silencer screwed tight over the smoke end. He fired off three quick rounds, each finding flesh. The first hit Rinaldi in the neck, spraying blood across the blue fabric of the three-cushion couch. The second hit his right shoulder and shattered bone. The third bullet killed him, entering at the temple and lodging at the base of his skull. The force of the bullets jolted Rinaldi’s body forward, his arms dangling at his sides, his face smearing blood and bone over the cocaine packets.
The woman in the red pumps finally lost her cool demeanor, the color fading from her tanned face, eyelids