As he got out of the car, I asked if he was going to tell Laura everything.
“No one tells anyone everything,” he said.
CHAPTER 39
Three fire trucks were pulling out of the Med-E-Mart parking lot when I got back. Dozens of people crowded around the front entrance, peering through the plate glass windows, looking like they were waiting for the all-clear to re-enter. A number of them were smoking, including Dante Ryan.
“You missed quite the show,” he said as he got in the car. “Complete and utter chaos.”
“Just the way you like it.”
“Oh, yeah. Alarms going off. Sprinklers sprinkling. Sirens blaring, fire trucks barrelling. Everybody running out of the store except Claudio, Frank and their boys, who were running in.”
“Maybe arson is your future.”
“No way,” he said. “Look what the sprinklers did to my shoes.”
As we spoke, one of Frank’s men rolled a dolly stacked with damp cartons onto the loading dock, followed by Sumita Desai, whose waist-length hair was soaked through-as were her clothes.
“She’s not half bad,” Ryan said, “except for the miserable look on her face.”
“When did they start loading again?”
“Just a few minutes ago.”
I gave Ryan a synopsis of Silver’s story: how he, Page and other independent pharmacists had been drawn- suckered? — by Steven Stone into the cross-border scheme.
“Makes sense,” he said. “You can’t scare the shit out of an organization. You can’t make a head office wet its pants. But independent operators are different. They’re the stragglers we cull from the herd. They always have the option of saying no. But will they say it to someone with a gun?”
“So the hit was ordered to keep Jay Silver from going to the police.”
“It’s more than that. Including the wife and kid makes it a message to the others.”
“They’re right to be worried about him,” I said. “This is not the Rock of Gibraltar we’re talking about here. He’s falling apart.”
“So what’s next?” he asked.
“Silver says the truck’s going to Buffalo. I want to follow. See who takes delivery.” I looked at Ryan, trying to read something-anything-in his dark eyes. “You interested?”
“You asking for my help?”
“I just thought you might be curious.”
“You asking for my help?” he repeated.
“Would it make a difference?”
“Jonah,” he said. “Are you asking for my fucking help or not?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m asking for your help.”
“There,” he said. “Was that so hard?”
When the truck doors were finally closed and locked, Frank got behind the wheel. Claudio eased himself stiffly into the passenger seat. Compared to him, I was moving pretty well. I hadn’t taken Percocet in more than twelve hours now and wasn’t going to until this was over. We pulled out with Ryan back behind the wheel and followed them west on Eglinton to Bayview.
“How much you think the load is worth?” Ryan asked.
I remembered the calculations Winston Chan had done in his office. The truck had taken on sixteen skids of twelve cases each. One-sixty plus thirty-two… one hundred and ninety-two cases. Call it two hundred. Each case holding a hundred and forty-four bottles of a hundred pills each. Close to three million pills.
“At least ten million,” I said. Then I remembered at least one skid had held generic drugs, and revised my estimate up to fifteen. “And it’s all profit,” I told Ryan, “because Silver paid for the inventory, not them.”
“Them who is the question.”
“All Stone told Silver was his silent partners were brothers.”
Something tugged at the back of my mind-too far back to make any sense. I took out a notebook and pen and wrote Vista Mar, staring at the letters as though working an anagram or cryptic crossword, willing them to fall into place and make some kind of sense to me.
Vista Mar.
A view of the sea.
I thought of the stone crevices in Aspromonte where they dumped kidnap victims no one would ransom.
Steven Stone.
A set of keys had been missing from the pegboard in Tommy Vetere’s office at Aspromonte Trucking. The two trucks parked on the lot had just enough space between them for a half-ton like the one we were following. Aspromonte was run by Marco and Marco had two brothers.
Vista Mar.
Run by brothers.
Vista Mar.
Vito Marco.
Vista Mar. Mar for Marco. And Vista, with minor tweaking, for Vito and Stefano, the third brother. The one with an MBA from the University of Western Ontario.
“Ryan,” I said. “What does Di Pietra mean?”
“Fucking misery to most people.”
“In Italian, please.”
“Di is of and Pietra means stone. So Di Pietra is ‘of stone.’”
I said, “Jesus Christ.”
“Don’t you mean oy?”
I told Ryan what I was thinking: that Stefano Di Pietra and Steven Stone were one and the same. That Vista Mar was owned by the Di Pietras. The nursing homes were theirs and so was the prescription drug smuggling operation. Stefano the legit-looking front man, Marco and Vito the muscle behind him.
“Makes sense,” Ryan said. “Any time a product becomes contraband, our territorial imperative kicks in.”
“So with Marco dead, that whole load belongs to Vito.”
“Been a good day for him all around,” Ryan said. “He eliminated his competition for boss and his war chest just got heavier by millions.”
“Would Stefano go along with Vito killing their brother?” I asked.
“What’s he gonna do, throw a loafer?”
The truck turned onto Lakeshore Boulevard, then rumbled up the first on-ramp to the elevated Gardiner, bound for Niagara, Fort Erie and the U.S.A.
Dante Ryan and I were off on a Buffalo jump. Minus the Head-Smashed-In part, I hoped.
CHAPTER 40
Buffalo: Friday, June 30
A scream was building inside Amy Farber and she wasn’t sure she could keep it in much longer. She could feel it swarming her insides, trying to force its way up through her body and out her mouth. She pursed her lips tighter and breathed in through her nose. It was like fighting the urge to vomit. It’s okay, she told herself. You get this way every time. It will be over soon enough. Keep busy, she told herself. Make yourself do something. Come on, girl, get up and go. At least get the table ready. Now!
She walked unsteadily to the dining room, staying close to the wall, keeping her hand on the wainscotting. She knew she shouldn’t have taken a painkiller, an anti-inflammatory and a sedative all at once, but she also knew
