Deadlock

She never thought anything was safe again, and had come not just to accept that rock-hard fact of life, but to embrace it. That was how you lived and stayed alive. The edge worked magic. It was, after all, what led her to Ambrosi Gallo.

“You finished with that?” Ambrosi asked, pointing a chopstick at her shrimp.

“Go ahead,” she said, and watched his graceful moves. Ambrosi Gallo gestured like a symphony conductor. Italians spoke with their hands. Ambrosi sang with them.

Soon they would be in bed, and his moves would continue to sing. Anne would make her own music, the kind that drove him wild. She had never met Ambrosi’s wife, and never would. But she was sure Mrs. Gallo would never mean what Anne meant to Ambrosi.

They’d met at a club in the Village. She’d seen this dark stranger circling her from across the dance floor. Just after midnight the move was made. The man slid next to her at the bar and immediately whispered in her ear, “You been scoping me. You serious about it?”

It was no secret who Ambrosi was, a made guy for the Calibresi family, which had moved into the five-borough vacuum created when the feds put Gotti away. The feds knew who he was – Anne knew the people to ask – and they suspected him of eight murders. But they’d never been able to put a case together. Ambrosi Gallo had beaten two raps. Nobody, but nobody, would testify against him.

“You want to go see a show or something?” Ambrosi asked.

“I don’t want to go to a show,” Anne said, feeling heat building in her. “I want to go to our place.”

“You got it, babe,” Ambrosi said.

They had a studio apartment in Gramercy Park, the place Ambrosi crashed when not at home in Queens. He was not often home. His wife, he assured Anne, was like all Mafia wives. She knew, she accepted, and she got nice things. No questions asked.

Outside the restaurant window, Anne could see a portion of the passing parade that was the foot traffic in Times Square. She couldn’t help wondering how easy it would be for Ambrosi to dispose of any one of them. And then she thought, what he did with guns she did with political clout. They weren’t really so different after all.

“What’s it like?” she asked.

“What?”

“You know. Whack.”

Ambrosi’s eyes darted toward the adjoining table. “Hey, keep it down, will you?”

That only made Anne smile. “You like to live dangerously, don’t you?”

“I also like walking around.”

“So tell me.”

“What do you want to know for?”

“Part of my education.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Plus it will make me very excited, if you know what I mean.”

Ambrosi’s straight white teeth gleamed between his lips. “Siete del diavolo.”

She frowned.

“You little devil.”

Anne suddenly felt oddly upset. Something about the word devil as applied to her. She shook it off.

“It’s no big deal, after the first time,” Ambrosi said. “You ever see that movie, the one where DeNiro plays a Mafia guy and that other guy, what’s his name, the little comedian, plays a shrink?”

“Analyze This.”

“Yeah, that’s it. And the shrink says it’s good to hit a pillow when you’re feeling stressed out, so DeNiro whips out his gun and shoots a pillow. And the shrink says, ‘Feel better?’ and DeNiro says, ‘Yeah, I do.’ I cracked up. But that’s what it’s like.”

“Really? Shooting a person is like shooting a pillow?”

“Once you get used to it.” Ambrosi nabbed another piece of shrimp and sent it into his mouth.

“Don’t you ever worry about someone finding out?”

“How would they?”

“What if I was wearing a wire?”

Ambrosi looked at her, unconcerned. “You wouldn’t be alive if you were,” he said, as smoothly as if ordering Peking duck.

Anne’s body filled with electricity. There it was. The edge. She realized at once she and Ambrosi were truly one. Killers both, in their own way. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, tingling all over. “Now.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

1

Charlene watched as Beau Winsor circled her client. People sometimes called lawyers sharks. In Winsor’s case, it was apt, though he did not once raise his voice or seem upset with Sarah Mae. It was not the sort of cross-examination one saw on TV shows. This was a surgery in which the patient hardly notices both legs being amputated.

“Now, Sarah Mae,” Winsor said, sounding like he was addressing his own daughter, “when you went into the clinic that morning, you knew they performed abortions there, didn’t you?”

“I guess so,” Sarah Mae said.

Winsor gave a quick glance to the jury. “Now, we don’t want you to guess, Sarah Mae.” Her name dripped like molasses off his tongue. “You need to tell us what you know for certain. Now, did you know they performed abortions?”

“Yeah.” In her innocence, Sarah Mae did not look overly frightened. In fact, she seemed almost trusting of the man in the blue suit with the fatherly gray hair.

“You had been thinking about having an abortion, hadn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“And that wasn’t an easy decision, was it?”

“Oh, no.”

Charlene watched and listened carefully. Winsor was spreading some sort of net, and priming Sarah Mae to stroll right into it.

“So would it be fair to say, Sarah Mae, that you had really gone over and over this in your mind?”

“I didn’t want to,” Sarah Mae said, her eyes suddenly wide.

Winsor put his hand up, as a comforting uncle would. “We’ll get to what you wanted in a moment, Sarah Mae. I understand you’re nervous. So I’ll ask my questions really simply, and you just do your best to answer them, okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’re just interested in the truth here,” Winsor added. Charlene almost objected, but didn’t. How could anyone object to that? While it was technically an improper use of cross-examination –