“Pull around him,” Banger said.
But A. J. was decelerating, saying, “Guy runs out of gas on this road, he could get eaten by a bear.”
But the car in front of them wasn’t running out of gas. It was crawling, giving a Chevy in the left lane, headlights off, a chance to catch up and pull alongside the van.
“What the fuck is this now?” A. J. said, staring at the Chevy six inches from his door. “What’s this asshole doing?”
“Brake. Brake!” Banger yelled. “Pull around him.”
A. J. Romano leaned on the horn, but it had no effect. Their van was hemmed in, being shunted toward the Pintura exit, and he had to either slam into the car beside him or barrel down the ramp.
A. J. jerked the wheel to the right, sending the van down the exit ramp, while Banger was digging under his seat for his piece. Next thing, metal was grinding against his door and the van was off the exit, forced onto some kind of spur road.
Banger was yelling, “You mother,” as A. J. stood on the brakes. The van skidded in dirt and plowed through a wire fence into the middle of fucking nowhere, dust shutting out the view and filling the cab.
Car doors banged shut in front and behind. Banger gripped his piece with one hand and undid his seat belt with the other, ready to bolt out the door, but a man’s face was in the window, a punk he’d never seen before, yelling, “Grab the ceiling.”
A. J. had his hands up. “Banger,” he yelled, “do what they say.”
Banger pulled up his gun from below the window opening. There was a bright flash and a loud report. Banger slumped, exhaled, and didn’t move again.
Inside his head, A. J. screamed, Oh, my God. They killed Banger. A. 45 was pointed at his left ear.
“Listen to me,” A. J. said. “I don’t know you. I didn’t see nothing. Take what you want. I got six hundred bucks-”
A. J. didn’t even hear the gun go off. He twitched, but that was all.
THREE
The van’s rear cargo door blew open, and Rudy Giordino jumped down from the back. His right leg buckled, but he had played ball in high school and had good balance. He came out of the stumble into a dead run.
His head was clanging from the tossing he’d taken in the back, but his instincts were intact. He ran under a black sky, across the flats and parallel to the road.
His blood whooshed across his eardrums and he still felt the aftershocks of gunfire.
Christ. Guns had gone off in the cab.
They’d been jacked.
Rudy Gee ran, flashing on his gun, lost under the cascade of boxes in the back of the truck. He thought about Marisa and Sparky and how he wasn’t supposed to die yet, not gunned down out fucking here. He had so many plans. He was still a kid.
It felt good to run. He was making distance, could almost hear the cheering in the stands.
Behind him, a guy name of Victor Spano took careful aim with his. 45, bracing against the side of the van. The dude was making it too easy, running in a straight line.
Victor squeezed the trigger, felt the kickback as the round found its mark. The guy making a break for it stopped running like someone had called his name. Then he dropped to his knees and did a face-plant in the dirt.
Victor walked up to the dead guy and put a shot into the back of his head just to be safe. If you fired a gun and no one heard it, had you still fired the gun?
Yes. Definitely.
“Is he dead?” Mark called.
“He says he wants to go have pizza with us,” Victor yelled.
“Get back here, okay? We need help with these two.”
Victor helped stash the first two dead guys in the Chevy. Mark backed up the car, and Victor and Sammy stuffed the third stiff in with the other two.
Then, as planned, Victor got behind the wheel of the transport van, and all three vehicles motored off the dirt road and back out to the highway.
Ahead of him, the Chevy peeled out, taking off toward Highway 56 and Panaca, Nevada. Victor Spano, a guy with a future, headed for LA, and Mark, in the Acura, for Cedar City. From there, Mark would be doubling back to Chicago.
It had been a good night. The jacking had taken a total of nine minutes including the cleanup.
He’d kept his mind on the business until this minute. Now, as the van made good time toward LA, Victor Spano started to think about his paycheck.
He was a millionaire and a made man.
This had been the most incredible day of his life.
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
The car was waiting for me at LAX. Aldo was out at the curb, holding a sign reading, “Welcome Home Mr. Morgan.”
I shook Aldo’s hand, threw my bags into the trunk, and slid onto the cushy leather seat in the back. I’d done six cities in three days, the return leg from Stockholm turning into a twenty-five-hour journey through airline hell to home.
I was wiped out. And that was an understatement.
“Your packet, Jack,” Aldo said, handing a folder over the divider. The cover was marked “Private,” the name of my private investigation firm. Our main office was in LA, and we had branches in six countries with clients all over the map who demanded and paid well for services not available through public means.
I had worried lately that we were growing too big too fast, that if big was the enemy of good, great didn’t stand a chance. And most of all, I wanted Private to be great.
I tucked the folder from Accounting into my briefcase and as the car surfed into the fast lane, I took out my BlackBerry. Unread messages ran into triple digits, so I chose selectively as I thumbed through the list.
The first e-mail was from Viviana, the stunner who’d sat next to me from London to New York. She sold 3-D teleconferencing equipment, not exactly must-have technology, but it was definitely interesting.
There was a text from Paolo, my security chief in Rome, saying, “Our deadbeat client is now just dead. Details to follow.” I mentally kissed a two-hundred-thousand-euro fee good-bye and moved to texts from the home team.
Justine Smith, my confidante and number two at Private, wrote, “We’ve got some catching up to do, bud. I’ve left the porch light on.” I smiled, thinking that as much as I wanted to see her, I wanted to shower and hit the rack even more.
I sent Justine a reply, then opened a text from Rick Del Rio. “Noccia wants to see you pronto, that prick.”
The text was like a gut punch.
Carmine Noccia was the scion of the major Mob family by that name, capo of the Las Vegas branch, and my
