Bone in the Throat - Anthony Bourdain [63]
The chef sat there, shaking his head and blinking.
"Get him to talk to me," Al continued. "He's your good buddy. Spell it out for him. Tell him it's either that or he gets a subpoena. Tell him if he lies to the grand jury he's gonna go away for sure. He doesn't talk to us and I don't even want to think about all the problems the two of you are gonna have. It's just too depressing to contemplate."
"What if I talk to him and he still doesn't want to talk to you?" asked the chef.
"Then I guess you're fucked, for one. NYPD gets their case back. You get to eat American Regional out there at Rikers. Tommy gets to grab his ankles upstate. That's if his uncle and his pals don't turn him into fertilizer first."
"So, I have to get Tommy to come in and rat on his uncle," said the chef. "Nothing less . . ."
"That, my friend, is exactly what you gotta do."
Twenty-Eight
WHEN THE ALARM WENT OFF, Tommy sat up blinking in bed. He looked over at the empty space next to him, remembered that Cheryl was away for a week, visiting her parents. He went into the kitchen and put on coffee, wandered idly over to the TV set and turned it on. He channel-surfed around the dial, waiting for something to catch his interest. After fifty-one channels, he turned off the TV, rolled a joint for later, and went back into the kitchen for his coffee. The milk in his refrigerator had gone sour, so he had to drink it black. He put his robe on and went to the window.
There was a softball game going on in the small playing field down the street. He smelled eggs cooking and home fries from the Greek coffee shop around the corner on Hudson Street. He looked up and down the street for the van. He didn't see it. The Jeep was gone, too . . . Maybe they'd changed cars.
From what Al had indicated, from all he seemed to know about Tommy, it was a sure thing he was being watched . . . Tommy looked up at the windows of the front apartments across from him. He tried to see past the trees into the playground next to the softball field. He looked at each parked car, each truck, each pedestrian visible from his window and saw nothing out of the ordinary.
That guy Al had really upset him . . . Thinking about it now made his palms sweat. They really were following him. Al had talked about a file. He even knew where Tommy ate breakfast. Tommy looked over at the phone and wondered if it was tapped. He imagined a room full of cops, their jackets off, shoulder holsters exposed, crouched somewhere in a dark room opposite him, looking into Tommy's place, looking at him now through long lenses, taking pictures, big reel-to-reel recorders ready for him to pick up the phone. He wondered if they could hear him, too. They had those big parabolic jobs, didn't they, they could just point one at him from a block away and listen. He had read in a book where they could even bounce a laser beam off your window; turn the glass itself into a microphone. He hadn't seen his next door neighbors in a while, the old Ukrainian couple . . . Maybe they had moved out, maybe the cops moved them into a hotel so they could skulk about in the apartment next to his, driving probes through the walls, little cameras.
Tommy poured the coffee into the sink, unable to drink it. His stomach felt sour from all the worrying. He wished Cheryl was here. Not that there was anything he could tell her . . . There was a loud bang as a newspaper was delivered across the hall, hitting a door, and Tommy jumped.
He went into the bathroom, showered, and shaved. While he shaved, he realized how much he wanted to tell somebody. But there was no one he could tell. Cheryl was in Rhode Island; the old school pals he'd known in the old neighborhood, the ones most likely to understand a situation like this, they were