wall appeared, blocking the view of the gated community from the street.
We stopped at Carmine Noccia’s front gate.
Rick pressed the button, and a voice answered, then someone buzzed us in. We crossed the bridge over a man-made recirculating river that could only have existed in Las Vegas, or maybe Orlando. We continued past the spotlit stables and came into the forecourt with its island of date palms outside the massive oak door.
Squint your eyes and you were in Barcelona or Morocco.
The Noccia goon we’d last seen wearing a red shirt was now in a tight black pullover and leather-like jeans.
He opened the door for us, then took Rick’s gun and mine and put them on top of that double-wide gun safe masquerading as a Moorish armoire in the hallway.
The goon took the lead as he had before: through the billiards room, filled with the clacking of colored clay balls, to the great room where Carmine Noccia sat in his leather chair.
This time Noccia wasn’t reading. He had his eyes on the ginormous screen over the fireplace, watching a rerun of the Titans’ flat-out massacre of the Raiders a few hours ago.
He shut off the TV and, as before, offered us seats without shaking our hands.
I was feeling heady.
On the one hand, we’d been warned off by Carmine Noccia and his “family,” and they had good reason to dislike us. I’d snubbed his lawyers, beaten up his guys at Glenda Treat’s whorehouse, and I’d been disrespectful to Carmine’s father, the don.
Now I was back with Del Rio, my loosely wrapped bodyguard buddy, wanting to make a deal. Took some nerve. I had asked Rick to keep his mouth shut, his eyes open, and his ass on the sofa. He’d said, “Yeah, boss,” and I could only hope that he’d firmly chained his loose cannon to the deck.
The pool outside the glass doors reflected waving bars of light across Noccia’s face, making his expression unreadable.
Would he tell me what I wanted to know? I sure hoped so.
“What is it now, Morgan?”
“You saw the game?”
“Call that a game? More like a turkey shoot.”
“I’ve brought something to show you.”
I took the packet of still shots out of my pocket and handed them to Carmine Noccia.
He took the photos with his cool, manicured hand and flipped through them. His eyebrows lifted minutely as he recognized the people in the pictures and realized what they were doing and what it meant to his business.
“How did you come by these photos? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“I shot them myself. But here’s what matters. The game was rigged, and it’s been going on for a while. If we hadn’t intervened, money was going to keep hemorrhaging out of the bookie joints, and you might have bled to death.
“Instead, the Marzullos got it in the teeth. It should set them back for a while. Keep them out of sports betting on the national level. That’s what I think. What do you think?”
Carmine put the pictures down on the table between us. He leaned back in his chair and watched my face. I watched his.
I tried to imagine what he was thinking. Did he believe that I’d done something this enormous that actually benefited him? Was he mapping out a war against the Marzullos? Or was he simply composing a way to tell his father how narrowly they’d avoided a calamity that could have sunk a very important component of the family business?
No words were spoken for a long time. Time expanded beyond the beveled glass windows in the great room, out past the man-made paradise and into the desert.
As I’ve said, Del Rio is a patient man when he wants to be. I needn’t have worried, because he was showing me what he’d proven many times as my copilot in Afghanistan. He was waiting, watching and waiting.
Carmine Noccia finally blinked.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
Chapter 103
Carmine Noccia had asked me what I wanted. It was like a genie granting one of those fairy-tale wishes-you just have to be careful not to wish for a sausage on the end of your nose.
“I’ve shown good faith,” I said. “I cleaned up a mess you didn’t know you had. I want your father to know what we did. Here’s my point in all of this. You’re not going anywhere and neither are we. Let’s accept the reality of that.”
“You want detente. Peace between our operations. Stay out of one another’s way.”
“Pretty much. And I want to know who put out a hit on Shelby Cushman.”
Noccia smiled. It was a small smile, but it seemed real. “No better friend. No worse enemy,” he said.
I’d been expecting him to say anything, anything but that. The words Noccia had just spoken were what the Marines say about themselves.
No better friend. No worse enemy.
Like Del Rio and me, Carmine Noccia had been in the Corps.
“Can I get you boys something to drink?” he said. “Or maybe you’ll be my guests for dinner? We can talk while we eat.”
“Thanks very much for the offer, but it’s late. And I’m flying.”
Noccia nodded, got up from his chair, and asked me and Del Rio to follow him into the billiards room. He said to the men around the table, “Go outside, guys. Take a break.”
The room emptied quickly. There was a score counter over the billiards table, but Noccia walked past it to the chalkboard that hung on the wall. It appeared to be the long-running tally of winning games.
Noccia picked up an eraser from the tray below the board and wiped out some phone numbers that had been written in the corner.
His back was to me as he spoke. “We have a partner in a number of construction projects: a hotel in Nevada, a couple of malls in LA and San Diego. This partner came to us with a request,” said Noccia. “We had no choice except to honor it.”
I was mesmerized as he began to write his partner’s name with a square of blue pool chalk. At first I didn’t get it. I thought maybe he was going to draw a diagram from the partner to the man who had hired the hit.
But that’s not what happened.
Carmine Noccia scratched letters onto the slate and said, “This is who contracted the hit on your friend Shelby Cushman.”
When he was sure that I had seen what he’d written, he spat on the eraser and rubbed the name out.
He put the eraser down and walked me and Del Rio to the door, where he said good night.
And he shook my hand.
Chapter 104
It was past midnight again, and I was back in LA. I had told Del Rio I’d see him in the morning, and he looked at me like he was a dad who’d just put his small son on a school bus for the first time.
“I’ll be okay,” I said.
But would I? Rick was still watching me as I got into my Lambo and strapped myself in. I got on the 10 East and then took the exit toward Sunset.
If I’d been driving a Volkswagen, I could’ve gone faster. It was the downside of owning a fast car. It alerted every cop in the state and every good-doin’ citizen with a cell phone.
