The Bobby Gold stories - Anthony Bourdain [42]
She worked at Duke's Pizza, spinning pies in the front window. She had her hair tied back with a red kerchief - to keep it from burning in the oven, and she wore a tight white T-shirt that revealed a slight impression of nipple, a long, sauce-stained apron. From across the street, he couldn't see where the bullet had entered. She was spinning pie now, two fists working the dough ever larger, a twirl with the fingertips of the right hand, and then the pie disappeared up and out of frame, reappearing a second later. Nikki looked grimly satisfied as she slung the floppy, white object back and forth between her wrists. A single strand of hair worked loose from the headband hung over her face, giving her an appearance of heartbreaking earnestness. Below the window frame, she ladled sauce, sprinkled cheese, then moved the finished pizza on a long wooden paddle into the back of a deck oven, yanked it free with a hard, unhesitating jerk of the arm, muscles flexing.
He rolled up his window, ducking back as she pushed away the strand of hair from her face, blew out, stared out the window at the empty street, squinting in the midafternoon glare.
Nikki in hiding. New name. New address. She'd snitched him off— as arranged bedside at the hospital — in return for protection. He looked up and down the street and saw no one who looked like a cop or a fed or a U.S. marshal. As arranged, she'd sent him a single postcard, care of a rooming house in Goa, telling him where she was and that she was okay.
She'd had nothing to say - no "direct knowledge" as lawyers like to phrase it - about Tommy Victory. Bobby had been all she'd had to offer and he'd insisted. She'd needed something to pay the toll —and an organized crime "associate" with multiple bodies on his resume had seemed like an easy out. She'd been in the hospital for three months — and physical therapy for a year after that. He'd had to do something.
"Why?" she'd asked him. "Why does it have to be you?"
"Because it's all we've got," he'd said. "Because they might come back. Because what Tommy's people want from you is too high a price for anyone to pay." The person they'd send, if they could find her, would have been someone just like he had once been. A professional. Someone who knew how to hurt people, how to ask hard questions. Someone who didn't flinch when people screamed. Someone for whom another life extinguished was just another day at work.
Because Tommy knew that Bobby was out there somewhere. Because he knew what he was likely to do.
Bobby left town quietly, saying nothing. He didn't call her at the shop. He didn't even wave.
He dropped the car in Tucson, rented another —under yet another name — and made the long, long drive cross-country, New York finally appearing beyond the George Washington Bridge. He bought a banged up .38 Airweight from a Serbian safecracker he'd known upstate and checked into a no-tell motel just across the river in Fort Lee.
Tommy Victory, in a smart tweed jacket, brown turtleneck and pleated slacks, approached his Lincoln town car in the cool autumn Connecticut dusk. A dead leaf stuck to his loafter, and he stopped to peel it off distastefully with a fingertip before standing by the rear passenger door of the idling car. He knocked on the smoked glass window for his chauffeur/bodyguard, and when no response came, opened the door, irritated, and heaved himself inside, mouth already open to chew out his sleeping driver.
He wasn't sleeping. Tommy could see that right away. His head lay on the seat back at an unnatural angle, the neck