trying to reach it, but he was just too tired. Something warm dripped into his left eye.
CHAPTER TWO
“Are you fucking kiddin’ me?” Tony Zello screamed, nose to nose with Ray, spit spraying across Ray’s face.
They stood in the storeroom behind the second-floor bar. Tony and his boy Rocco had dragged Ray up the stairs and shoved him into the storeroom as soon as the four armed robbers left. Tony wanted to find out firsthand what had happened. So far he had not liked what he had heard.
“Let me get this straight,” Tony said. “Four guys waltz in here with guns, rob us blind, kill Vincent’s son, and all you did was lay down like a bitch?” Looking disgusted, Tony turned away and pressed the heels of both hands into his eyes as if he were trying to keep them from popping out.
Then he spun back around and threw a punch. Ray tried to duck but he wasn’t quick enough. Tony’s fist caught him just above the left eye and bounced his head off the wall.
Tony stared at Ray and flexed his right hand. “Is that how you acted when you was in the joint? I bet you just bent over and took it up the ass, didn’t you?”
Ray looked back and forth between Tony and Rocco, biting back the rage that welled up inside him. He wasn’t going to provoke Tony, not here. Tony stood in front of him in his charcoal-gray, hand-stitched Italian silk suit, wearing it over a cream-colored shirt and burgundy tie, his feet encased in a soft pair of Bruno Magli loafers. The whole thing was worth an easy fifteen hundred bucks. Tony Zello, the man everybody called Tony Z. He was forty, just a couple years older than Ray, a real up-and-comer, the right-hand man to the guy who ran the House- Vinnie Messina.
Tony spit at Ray’s feet and turned away. Ray figured he was disappointed that Ray hadn’t tried to hit him back. Tony looked at Rocco. “You believe what a fucking pussy this guy is?”
Rocco just nodded. He was big and dumb and never said much. He had on a nice suit, too, but he couldn’t pull off the look the way Tony did. Rocco always looked like he had trouble stuffing himself into his clothes, like maybe they were a size too small. The two of them were always together, just in case Tony Z. needed someone’s leg broken or a skull cracked.
The storeroom door stood open and Ray could see a few employees milling around on the other side of the bar, peeking in and listening to what was going on. Tony liked to have an audience. Somebody called out. “Tony, the cops want you downstairs.”
Tony Z. nodded to Rocco. “Let’s go. This punk’s making me sick.”
Ray heard Tony tell everyone to go downstairs. After everybody left, Ray walked out of the storeroom. He found a towel behind the bar and wrapped some ice in it. His head had stopped bleeding, but he could feel his left eye starting to swell. The second-floor casino was deserted.
As soon as the gunmen had left and before anyone called the cops, Tony and Rocco had shown all the gamblers the back door and reminded them they were never here. Then they did the same thing on the third floor, except it had taken a little longer since a lot of the customers weren’t dressed. The girls had been told to stay in the rooms and keep quiet.
“Shane!” someone shouted from the stairwell. Ray walked over and looked down. Rocco stood halfway down the stairs, one hand on the rail, the other cupped next to his mouth.
“Yeah,” Ray said.
“They want to talk to you.”
“Who?”
Rocco took a couple of steps up. “The cops,” he whispered, but still loud enough for everyone to hear.
Ray followed the big moron downstairs. Cops were all over the first floor-uniformed officers, detectives, crime-scene techs, and a photographer. Near the front door, two coroner’s assistants leaned against a gurney. Their postures reminded Ray of a couple of vultures perched on a branch, waiting for the lions and hyenas to finish, waiting to pick up what was left of the body.
Since the first floor of the House was mostly legit, the customers had been told to stay. The police had shoved a bunch of chairs into a corner to form a makeshift waiting area and herded the customers into it. A couple of detectives were making the rounds and taking preliminary statements.
Standing on the bottom step of the stairs, Ray peered over the top of the bar. Pete’s body still lay on the floor where it had fallen. The only thing different was the ring of crime-scene tape the cops had strung around the bar, three-inch wide, plastic yellow tape with big black letters that read POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS repeated over and over again.
Ray was always surprised at the chalky white color of fresh corpses. They looked fake, like wax dummies. The blast had caught Pete in the face and bowled him over onto his back. His legs were folded under him at crazy angles. Painful, if Pete had been in any condition to feel pain.
The short range hadn’t given the shot much time to scatter. The stripper onstage must have caught the one buckshot pellet that missed Pete. Instead of being peppered with individual holes, Pete’s face looked like it had been scooped out with a hand shovel. There was nothing left of it but a bloody crater that started just below one eyebrow, cut across mid-nose, down under the other eye-which was still in its socket-then back under the mouth, and up between the cheekbone and the ear. Ray remembered reading somewhere that an adult’s body held roughly a gallon of blood. If that was true, then most of Pete’s blood was on the floor, well on its way to congealing.
A loud voice said, “If it isn’t Ray Shane.”
Ray recognized the voice. He turned his head and saw Detective Carl Landry standing ten feet away, wearing a cheap, rumpled suit. It had to be Landry who caught the case, the last cop on earth Ray wanted to see.
Ray nodded to the detective. “What’s PIB doing here?” He knew the Public Integrity Bureau-the department’s name for Internal Affairs-only investigated cops.
“I’m not with PIB anymore,” Landry said.
“What happened?” Ray asked. “You got tired of bum-rapping policemen and putting them in jail?”
Landry ignored the jab. “I’m in Eighth District Homicide now.”
Two more detectives walked over, young fresh-faced kids who looked to be straight out of a patrol car. Ray didn’t recognize either one. He pressed the bar-rag ice pack more firmly against his eye.
With the two young detectives flanking him, Landry pulled a small pad and a pen from his inside jacket pocket. He aimed the pen at Ray. “I don’t know if you guys know Ray Shane here. He used to be a detective in Vice before he got sent to federal prison.”
Both detectives stared at him.
Landry clicked the ballpoint pen and looked down at his pad like he was about to start taking notes. Like an afterthought he added, “Ray just got home.” Landry looked up at him. “You’re on parole, right?”
Ray nodded. One condition of his parole- supervised release the feds called it-was that he cooperate with the police should they question him. It would be just like Landry to report him to his P.O. for failing to cooperate.
Landry wrinkled his forehead like he was trying hard to remember something. “What’d you get, five years?”
Ray nodded, knowing the former PIB man was trying hard to make him look like an asshole, playing to his two-man audience of rookie detectives. Ray also knew there was nothing he could do about it. “I did fifty-one months.”
Landry whistled. “That’s what, about four and a half years?”
“Just about,” Ray said.
“I guess it was pretty rough in there, huh? A skinny white boy like you. Guess you ended up as someone’s bitch.”
Ray was tired of this bullshit. “It wasn’t too bad, Carl. I had your dad to keep me company.”
Landry’s jaw went slack, and his face burned bright red. He dropped his pen and pad and charged. Ray threw his hands up and bicycled backward. The last thing he wanted his P.O. to hear was that he got into a fight with a cop, but Landry got a hand around Ray’s throat. “Shut your filthy mouth, you piece of shit!” Landry shouted as he shoved Ray against the bar. Ray dropped his ice-filled towel and grabbed Landry’s wrist with both hands. As he
