• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 981 0

thank you, no wine, I'm driving. Dressed in his CIA suit, well-groomed and sporting a new businesslike haircut, he enjoyed the looks of a few unattached women, and a waitress who positively doted on him, especially with his good manners. The excellence of the food explained the crowded room, and the crowding explained why it was a convenient place for Tony Piaggi and Henry Tucker to meet here. Mike Aiello had been very forthcoming about that. Mama Maria's was, in fact, owned by the Piaggi family, now in its third generation of providing food and other, less legal, services to the local community, dating back to Prohibition. The owner was a bon vivant, greeting favored customers, guiding them to their places with Old World hospitality. Snappy dresser, too, Kelly saw, recording his face and build, gestures and mannerisms, as he ate through his calamari. A black man came in, dressed in a nicely cut suit. He looked like he knew the place, smiling at the hostess and waiting a few seconds for his reward, and Kelly's.

Piaggi looked up and headed to the front, stopping only briefly to shake hands with someone on the way. He did the same with the black man, then led him back past Kelly's table, and up the back stairs to where the private rooms were. No particular notice was taken. There were other black couples in the restaurant, treated the same as everyone else. But those others did honest work, Kelly was sure. He turned his thoughts away from his distraction. So that's Неnrу Tucker. That's the one who killed Pom. He didn't look like a monster. Monsters rarely did. To Kelly he looked like a target, and his particulars went into Kelly's memory, alongside Tony Piaggi's. He was surprised when he looked down and saw that the fork in his hands was bent.

'What's the problem?' Piaggi asked upstairs. He poured each of them a glass of Chianti, good host that he was, but as soon as the door had closed, Henry's face started telling him something.

'They haven't come back.'

'Phil, Mike, and Burt?'

'Yes!' Henry snarled, meaning, no.

'Okay, settle down. How much stuff did they have?'

'Twenty kees of pure, man. This was supposed to take care of me and Philly, and New York for a while.'

'Lot of stuff, Henry.' Tony nodded. 'Maybe it just took them a while, okay?'

'Shoulda been back by now.'

'Look, Phil and Mike are new, probably clumsy, like Eddie and me were out first time – hell, Henry, that was only five kees, remember?'

'I allowed for that,' he said, wondering if he'd really be right about that or not.

'Henry,' Tony said, sipping his wine and trying to appear calm and reasonable, 'look, okay? Why are you getting excited? We've taken care of all the problems, right?'

'Something's wrong, man.'

'What?'

'I don't know.'

'Want to get a boat and go down there to see?'

Tucker shook his head.'Takes too long.'

'The meet with the other guys isn't for three days. Be cool. They're probably on their way here now.'

Piaggi thought he understood Tucker's sudden case of the shakes. Now it was big-time. Twenty kilograms of pure translated into a huge quantity of street drugs, and selling it already diluted and packaged made for sufficient convenience to their customers that they were for the first time paying top dollar. This was the really big score that Tucker had been working towards for several years. Just assembling all the cash to pay for it was a major undertaking. It was an understandable case of nerves.

'Tony, what if it wasn't Eddie at all?'

Exasperation: 'You're the one who said it had to be, remember?'

Tucker couldn't pursue that. He'd merely wanted an excuse to eliminate the man as an unnecessary complication. His anxiety was partly what Tony thought it was, but something else, too. The things that had happened earlier in the summer, the things that had just started for no reason, then stopped with no reason - he had told himself that they were Eddie Morello's doing. He'd managed to convince himself of that, but only because he had wanted to believe it. Somewhere else the little voice that had brought him this far had told him