“1 want the whole damn bunch off the street. I don?t care if you do it or I do it or we do it together.
They?re the cockroaches of our society.”
1 looked at Charlie One Ear. “You ask me is it personal? I got five years invested in this bunch. In the
whole rat pack only Costello and Cohen are clean. The rest of them have rap sheets that?ll stretch
from here to Malibu and back.”
I started pacing. I had lost my temper for a moment, not because of Charlie One Ear or because Dutch
Morehead?s hooligans didn?t trust me. I was used to that:. It was because of Cincinnati. I stopped and
looked at each of them in turn.
“Yeah, fuckin?-A it?s personal,” I said. “One of my partners on the Tagliani job was Harry Nome,
Wholesome Harry we called him. Best inside man I ever met. He was undercover in Chevos? dope
operation. Nance tumbled him. They took him for a ride and Nance stuck his gun up Harry?s nose,
ripped it off with the gunsight-.--I mean he ripped it off. Then he tossed Harry out of a car doing
about fifty. Harry came out of it a paraplegic.
“We had another man, on loan from the Drug Enforcement Agency. He tried to burrow into the
operation at the New Orleans end. We never saw him or heard from him again. Nothing. He just
disappeared. That?s been three years now.
“1 had an informant, a hooker named Tammi. She was eighteen years old, recruited by Stizano, who
hooked her on horse when she was fifteen. They had her working interstate and she wanted out, so she
agreed to talk to the attorney general about how hookers are moved around on the national circuit,
who runs it, that sort of thing. Very strong stuff. Nance got her away from us. He cut off her nose and
both ears, stuffed them down her throat, and strangled her with them. Costello—Mr. Clean? He was
Nance?s mouthpiece. The bastard wasn?t even indicted.”
I paused for a minute, letting it all sink in.
“Naw,” I said, “it isn?t personal. It?s never personal, right? I mean, why should I be pissed? I was
lucky. When they took a shot at me, the bullet went in my side, here, just below the ribs, popped out
my back, and went on its merry way. The bullet hurt, but not like the arsenic it was soaked in.”
I sat down.
Not bad, I thought. Not bad at all. Save up the rough stuff until the end.
Nobody said anything else for a minute or two.
I didn?t know it at the time, but there was another name I should have added to the list that night:
Longnose Graves.
I would get to know him well in the next few days. I would get to know a lot of people well in the
next few days, very damn few of them for long.
