of them will stop an RPG – but they don’t handle well.’
Carter doesn’t wait for a response. He’s not discouraged, not yet, but there’s plenty of work to be done. ‘Look, I’m going to check out the warehouse for soft spots. There’s no need for you to be here. I want you to take the subway back to the apartment and work your way through the files. You’ll be looking for the same thing I’m looking for, a soft spot.’
Bobby Ditto holds the phone away from his ear. He never should have taken the call – he’s got way too much on his mind. But Dealie told his secretary that it was an emergency, so when he tried to back off, Evangeline shook her head, folded her arms across her chest and nearly shouted, ‘No way, Bobby. The woman’s nuts, as in whacked-out crazy. You handle her.’
Dealie is short for Delilah, Bobby’s ex-wife, now living in depressed Las Vegas. Back when Bobby was sixteen and horny enough to hump a goat, Delilah had lived up to her name. Not so after she became pregnant, after they married, after she dropped the first and the second little rug rat. Not after she gained sixty pounds, after she developed a fondness for roulette wheels and designer wardrobes. Bobby has a girlfriend – a mistress, really – stashed in Rego Park, a half-hour from his Howard Beach home. He doesn’t intend to let her get five minutes closer.
The emergency of the week concerns Bobby’s oldest, George, age thirteen. Little Georgie’s been fighting in school again, been suspended again, and is again being threatened with outright expulsion. The problem’s Bobby’s fault, of course. If he’d been there for his family, if he’d been a real husband, a real father, little Georgie would be a candidate for Pacifist of the Year.
Bobby Ditto allows Dealie five solid minutes of abuse before he interrupts. ‘You need to get to the point,’ he tells his wife. ‘I got business here, business which I need to conduct if I’m gonna keep sendin’ that good old child support every month.’
Wrong tactic. Before she finally gets to the point, Dealie unloads a torrent of accusations centered on his missing a payment two years ago.
‘Georgie needs a private school, Bobby, along with serious counseling. And I’m not talkin’ about some jerk from the Board of Education. I’m talkin’ serious here. As in real fuckin’
‘When you say private school, do you mean like Catholic school?’
‘No, I’m talking like a military academy in Arizona that specializes in problem kids. They got the program and the counselors.’
At this point, Bobby’s supposed to inquire into the costs, but he’s not biting. Bobby’s thinking maybe he’ll take his kid for the summer. That would be the cheapest way out. But, no, the last time he saw his children was Thanksgiving, and he liked them about as much as they liked him, which wasn’t much at all. Plus, there’s always the possibility that Dealie blew the rent money in one of the casinos and her landlord’s threatening to evict her. Dealie lies at the drop of a roulette ball.
A blinking red light on Bobby’s desk offers the perfect excuse to end the conversation. ‘I gotta go,’ he tells his ex, which is true. ‘Call me next week, give me an update.’
‘But I’m not finished,’ Dealie wails.
Bobby hangs up, but not fast enough to escape a parting threat: ‘I’ll call ya tonight.’
The flashing red light alerts Bobby to an incoming call on his personal phone, which he never answers. He jots down the number on the caller ID screen, picks up a throwaway cellphone that can’t be traced to him and heads off. This is the bad news about the bunker. The walls are too thick for cellphones. If he wants to make or receive a call, he can try the basement outside the bunker, which sometimes works, or go to the yard where the company trucks are parked at night.
Bobby heads for the yard, passing through the outer basement where Donny Thorn greets him with an enthusiastic nod. Thorn’s two companions, Albert Zeffri and Nino Ferrulo, look up, their expressions anything but happy. Ruby’s death left the crew with a vacuum each had hoped to fill. Meanwhile, Zeffri has the brain of a frog and twenty-year-old Nino has yet to master his impulses. Bobby knows for a fact that the kid’s been knocking over liquor stores. And not because he needs the money.
The beautiful spring day catches Bobby off-guard and he stops in his tracks, disoriented. The sky is bright blue and sprinkled with small puffy clouds. The sun is warm enough to erase all memory of a truly miserable winter. For just a second, he imagines himself on Jamaica Bay, the small lush islands covered with grass and brush, the SunDancer bobbing, a hooked bluefish fighting to the bitter end. Maybe there’s a broad along, somebody new, and a cooler full of beer, and a light breeze, and a blazing sunset.
Bobby shakes his head in disgust. Given everything that’s happened over the past couple of weeks – given Ruby and Ricky and Paulie and the Chink, not to mention Paulie’s fucking kid whose name he can’t remember – this is no time for daydreaming. He punches a number into the cellphone and raises the phone to his ear. The man who answers, Elvino Espinoza, speaks English with only a trace of a Spanish accent.
‘Good to hear your voice again,’ he says.
‘You, too.’
‘We’re looking at the weekend. I’ll come by to say hello on Friday morning.’
And that’s it, short and sweet. The deal will be consummated on the weekend, probably late at night. Exact time and place will be revealed to Bobby on Friday morning. Be ready.
Bobby folds up the cellphone and puts it in his pocket. Attracted by the scream of wood on a saw blade, he glances across the street at a custom woodworker’s small factory. The owner’s name is Abel Kousamanis, a Greek immigrant who styles himself a furniture artist. There’s a limo parked in front of Abel’s shop and Bobby can see him through an open truck bay, talking to a woman in a blue business suit.
Back to the cave, Bobby tells himself. He looks around him, at a truck backing through the roll-up door on the front of the warehouse, at a forklift pulling an enormous roll of carpet from the back of a trailer. Bobby’s workers are really hustling. That’s because it’s after four o’clock and they won’t be going home until the trailer’s unloaded.
Bobby, as he trudges off, never thinks to look up at the roof where Carter’s crouching next to a ventilation pipe, only his forehead and eyes exposed. Good thing. If Bobby had looked up, if he’d spotted Carter, he’d already be dead.
TWENTY-TWO
Carter finally makes an appearance at the East Village apartment a few minutes before midnight. He finds Angel and Solly Epstein seated at a dining room table covered with files and cartons of Chinese food. Angel’s hopeful expression fascinates him, as always. She’s relentlessly optimistic. But he’s got little good news, though he takes her in his arms when she crosses the room in search of a hug. Epstein’s grinning from ear to ear as his eyes occasionally drift to Angel’s well-rounded buttocks.
Released, Carter picks up a pair of chopsticks and a microwave-safe container of beef in black bean sauce. His instructors would have called it opportunistic feeding. Take your calories and your sleep whenever and wherever you can – you might be a long time finding another chance. Carter hasn’t eaten since they left the apartment in the morning.
‘Anything good?’ Epstein asks. ‘You’ve been gone a long time.’
Carter responds by snatching a container of rice. He brings the container to his lips and shovels cold rice into his mouth with the chopsticks. The black bean sauce was highly spiced. His tongue is on fire.
‘I told them extra hot,’ Angel explains.
‘Thanks for sharing.’
‘Maybe I should go first,’ Epstein says. ‘What I have to say won’t take that long.’
Carter accepts a glass of water and nods. ‘By all means.’
‘You said to look for a soft spot. We only found one, a kid named Levi Kupperman who sweeps the bunker for listening devices. This information comes, by the way, from Ruby Amaroso. I didn’t work with Ruby, or with the joint task force investigating Benedetti, but I do know that Ruby was facing a couple of hundred years on federal narcotics charges. It seems he was dealing on the side and wasn’t as careful as his boss. Bottom line, he had every reason to tell the truth.’
Epstein pauses long enough to sip at his beer. He looks from Angel to Carter, finds both attentive, then
