The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [19]
He couldn’t take Pierce, though. He couldn’t get ahead of Pierce Oates. He couldn’t do it.
He wouldn’t let Pierce take him either. He couldn’t let that happen now.
“Your hand… Your goddamn hand!” Pierce was suddenly screaming at him.
Stefanovitch didn’t understand—then he did.
He reached out his hand, finally touching Pierce, connecting with him.
The two of them sailed across the finish line together, clutching each other’s hands like teammates. Christ, they were teammates. The wheelchair boys.
Stefanovitch’s brain was screaming. He hadn’t felt anything like this since before Long Beach, before the shootings.
He saw his brother and father in the crowd. He spotted his father, and the old man was smiling, but he was crying, too. In their thirty-five years together, he’d never once seen his father cry, not for family weddings, christenings, or funerals. Not once before right now.
Pierce Oates was hugging him, too. Everything was going to be all right somehow. For one night, anyhow, Stefanovitch was back.
19
Isiah Parker; The East Side
IT WAS A little past nine-thirty and traffic on Third Avenue was getting noticeably lighter, moving at a steady pace. Isiah Parker and Jimmy Burke waited in front of a closed, darkened Doubleday bookstore on the corner of Fiftieth Street.
Both men were dressed in beige linen suits. They looked like any of the businessmen still slouching out of high-rise offices on the midtown avenue. Isiah Parker had often speculated that a mugger or thief who dressed like a successful businessman in Manhattan would probably never get caught, never be stopped and questioned by most street cops, anyway.
When he finally saw the Caddie limo approaching the fancy awning in front of the Smith & Wollensky Steak House on Third, his mind went blank. He concentrated on nothing except what had to be accomplished in the next ninety seconds.
“Let’s walk,” he whispered to Burke, standing at his side. “We’re East Side businessmen. We’ve had a nice supper for ourselves. We do this right, nobody will remember us. We’re invisible men.”
John Traficante and the consigliére James O’Toole were feeling full of the good life after two Steak Wollenskys and several cocktails inside the East Side restaurant. Traficante, a first underboss in the New York Mafia, was also known in the underworld as Johnny Angel, the Angel of Death. This presumably had to do with the number of murders he had committed since growing up in the mob-spawning grounds of Howard Beach and later Canarsie, in Brooklyn. Traficante had been the favored hit man inside the Lucchese family. He had remained “hands-on” as he rose all the way up through the ranks. His murder victims included a federal judge, several New York policemen, a newspaper writer, and potential witnesses, including women, and two young children on Long Island.
O’Toole, the lawyer, pushed open the glass and mahogany doors as they left the steak house. They passed a couple waiting for a cab under the forest green canopy. Caesar DeCicco, their bodyguard-driver, was opening the front door of Traficante’s limo.
“He’s a good boy,” Traficante said of his forty-seven-year-old bodyguard. “Loyal as a pet snake.”
Some jerk in a business suit wasn’t looking where he was going out on the Third Avenue sidewalk. He bumped into O’Toole, then brushed against Traficante’s Gucci suit.
“Hey…hey, easy. Whutcherrush?” the gangster bristled.
“I’m sorry. Excuse me, sir. Sorry,” Isiah Parker said.
The Uzi appeared out of nowhere.
A short burst followed, and the stocky bodyguard, DeCicco, was thrown bouncing up on the hood of the Cadillac.
The couple walking toward their cab dove to the ground, the woman shrieking. Patrons inside the restaurant suddenly stared at the scene in horror. The maître d’ went down on the floor.
A Colt Magnum flashed against Traficante’s mottled face.
“Cop killers,” Isiah Parker hissed at him. “Scumbag.”
The Magnum fired