Charlie toasted her with his club soda. “I’ve been called worse,” he said. “To dinner.”
Samantha was confused.
“Will you go with me?”
Samantha stuttered as she felt her own face blushing. “I-uh, I-uh, I can get fired for that.”
Charlie was leaning forward, both elbows on the bar. “Make it lunch then,” he said. “You owe me if I sang for you.”
A customer sitting midbar held up a hand. Sam said, “I’ll be right back.”
She thought about it as she served a vodka tonic. He seemed interesting. He wasn’t just another drunk hitting on a barmaid. She looked at him over her shoulder. He was watching her right back. She liked his confidence.
“What’s lunch?” Samantha asked when she returned to his end of the bar.
“Setting the parameters?”
“It’s a fair question.”
“Whatever you say it is. And I promise not to sing.”
Samantha smiled as a new customer waved to her. “Let me think about it,” she said.
Francone slammed the telephone down as he shook his head at Allen Fein. “I don’t know what the fuck he’s doin’,” Francone said. “He coughed up blood a few times, but he’s always coughin’ up blood. I figured he went to park the car.”
Fein was middle-aged, short, and fat. He wore a baggy blue and black Sergio Tequini sweat suit. He looked up at Francone from the stool he was sitting on. “What makes you think he might have turned?”
Francone was still shaking his head. “Two fuckin’ days I ain’t been in a gym,” he said. “You guys got a place here I can work out?”
Fein held up a finger. “Joey? What makes you think your friend may have flipped?”
Francone was examining his biceps then. “Huh? Oh, because of the way he was talkin’. It’s been like that since Nicky was upped to skipper. Lano’s pissed he was passed again. He was cryin’ about Nicky the whole fuckin’ trip. He was talkin’ subversive about the thing we came out here to do. Especially the broad.”
“Is it possible he just got sick and checked himself in at a hospital someplace?”
Francone was doing isometric wrist curls. “Who the fuck knows with that guy? He could be at the hospital, he could be at a fuckin’ cigarette sale, or he could be talkin’ with the Feds at an FBI office. He’s got his own agenda lately, thinks who the fuck he is.”
“I don’t need this blowing up in my face,” Fein said, clearly annoyed. “It was a simple accommodation. It shouldn’t become a federal case.”
“I agree,” Francone said as he strained to curl an imaginary dumbbell. “I know Nicky had to reach out for this. And he appreciates it.”
“Yeah, well, his appreciation won &rsuo;t do me any good should this thing turn up on the six-o’clock news tomorrow.”
“Hey,” Francone said. “Nobody wants that.”
Fein took a deep breath. “Why don’t you keep trying to locate your friend?”
Allen Fein had been fronting mob business in Las Vegas for more than three years. He was a certified public accountant as well as a licensed attorney in the state of Nevada. Recently he had stepped up his involvement to broker deals between mob crews visiting Las Vegas and others seeking to invest there.
He occasionally made deals his boss wasn’t aware of. Arranging the surveillance of the Pellecchia couple in Las Vegas was one such deal. He had been contacted through channels. A New York crew was looking for help. Fein had arranged it without the proper authority. It was a dangerous backdoor move.
Setting up the husband at the Palermo construction site was a perk Fein received cash on the spot for. At the time, the five thousand dollars seemed like an easy score.
Now it looked like he would be forfeiting the remaining five thousand dollars. If Jerry Lercasi ever found out about the deal Fein had put together with the New York crew, the five thousand dollars would represent the cost of the accountant’s life.
Dealing with the idiot bodybuilder from New York wasn’t making the problem any easier. He was never impressed with the average intelligence of Las Vegas wiseguys, which was why he had become so confident getting more involved in the day-to-day operations of mob business. Talking with this musclehead, Fein was even less impressed with the pawns of the underworld.
Except his boss, Jerry Lercasi, wasn’t just another wiseguy. Lercasi was the most powerful mobster in Las Vegas. He also was a ruthless killer.
Fein wanted nothing more than to spend some time with the two young girls he had requested through the escort service the Lercasi crew operated in Laughlin. He was told both girls were still in their teens. He was excited about their age.
Now, however, he was forced to deal with a moron in desperate need to lift weights.
He watched the bodybuilder slam the telephone receiver down one more time before deciding to contact a connection with the Las Vegas police. If the police couldn’t find Vincent Lano, there was a good chance the New York mobster was on the run somewhere. If that was the case, he could deal with losing the five thousand dollars.
If Lano went to the feds, it would become a much bigger issue. There would be no place Fein could hide in Las Vegas.
If Lano went to the Feds, Fein was thinking, he would pack his bags and get the fuck out of the country.
Chapter 8
It would be a simple hit. A guy flew out to Las Vegas for a summer vacation. Unless he was an inveterate gambler, he would go for the long walks, visit the theme parks, ride the moving walkway into the Caesar’s Palace shopping mall, watch the Volcano, see the Pirate Show, and maybe have dinner at the top of the Stratosphere.
He might even use one of the escort services one or two times.
Or maybe he’d grab a hooker from one of the casino bars.
Also, sometime during his vacation, the guy would get killed.
Renato Freni watched Charlie Pellecchia drinking at the bar from a roulette table occupied by mostly Asian players. Freni wore a Boston Red Sox baseball cap and a navy blue flower print shirt with black shorts. He was a stocky man of average height. At fifty-nine years of age, his body was still thick from working out with weights. He was well tanned from several years of living in the desert.
He touched the silencer for the Beretta 9mmrcearrying in the waist of his pants. It was deep inside the pouch of the belt he wore around his waist.
He had been watching the man he would kill for little more than an hour. A contact inside the casino had provided Freni with Pellecchia’s location from a casino player’s identification card. He noticed that Pellecchia’s head was bandaged behind one ear and that he wasn’t drinking alcohol at the bar. He also noticed the conversation between his mark and the barmaid. The woman wrote something on a napkin before handing it to Pellecchia. It was after the exchange with the barmaid that Pellecchia finally left the bar.
Freni followed his mark through the casino from a safe distance. He stopped to read a pamphlet advertising a slot machine tournament when Pellecchia turned into the hallway where the elevators were located.
Freni used a phony room key to get past the security guard standing in front of the elevator bank. He waited less than a minute for an elevator door to open. He touched a floor button and smiled at a black couple riding in the car with him. When the elevator stopped two floors below Pellecchia’s, Freni stepped out of the elevator. He nodded at the black couple as he got off.
“Good luck,” they told him.
Charlie was feeling pretty good when he went back up to his room. He had managed to arrange a lunch date with his new friend, Samantha Cole. They were going to a water park where Samantha said she had bought a season pass for the tide pool. Charlie didn’t have a clue what a tide pool was, but he looked forward to learning about it from Samantha the next day.
He had spent a long time at the bar with her. Although she was busy running back and forth serving customers,
