The Good Guys Read online

  Bureau regulations strictly prohibited agents from drinking on duty, but in those situations in which it would be inappropriate not to have a drink agents have been known to imbibe. Unofficially you do what you have to do and the system looks the other way. Connor ordered a beer, Laura a glass of white wine. As the bartender served their drinks, Connor introduced himself and Russo as FBI agents.

  “For real?” the bartender asked Connor. “Her too. Really?” When Connor confirmed that, he looked at Russo and smiled. His name was Billy Garvey, he said smoothly, “But people call me Gravy.” Sure, he’d be delighted to answer their questions. In fact, he decided, it was more than that—he’d be privileged to answer their questions. He was a bartender—answering questions was an important part of the job. Yes, he had been working the previous night. No, he didn’t know Professor Gradinsky by name, but that didn’t mean anything—lots of people whose names he didn’t know came in regularly. One reason people go to dimly lit bars, he pointed out, was to protect their privacy.

  Russo showed him the professor’s picture. Garvey stared at it hard, then frowned. “Maybe? I don’t know.” He took a deep, thoughtful breath, really focusing on the photograph. “You know, he looks sort of familiar, but it’s not like he’s a regular. Guarantee you that. Why, what happened to him?”

  Finding the answer to that question, Laura explained, was precisely the reason they were asking these questions. “So, Gravy,” she asked, “you see him last night? It’s important.”

  Continuing to look at the picture, Garvey shook his head while inhaling, to emphasize the fact that he really was trying to place the face. “It was real busy. It was ladies’ night. You know, girls drink free. And then one of the frats had a thing for some pledges. Man, I was humping all night.”

  O’Brien repeated the question. “So? Did you see him or not?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I mean, who knows? It’s possible. What can I tell you?” As Garvey returned the professor’s picture to Russo, he snapped a well-practiced “aw shucks golly-gee” grin at her.

  She ignored it, then told him, “Well, apparently he used his credit card in here last night.”

  Garvey pushed back from the bar. “Hey, what do you want me to tell you? If he did, he did. I’d like to help you out, swear to God, but I don’t remember seeing him and I was here the whole night.”

  O’Brien asked about the waitresses. Three girls had worked the floor the previous night, Garvey said. He knew their first names, but not their last names or telephone numbers. He had nothing to do with scheduling, he explained, that was the manager’s job. “And when will he be here?”

  “He’s the manager,” Garvey said, flashing a big smile at his very own cleverness. “He manages himself.”

  O’Brien handed him his card. “Ask him to give me a call when he comes in, okay?” And then he flashed him his biggest and phoniest smile in return.

  Back out on the street O’Brien did a passable imitation of the bartender. “He’s the manager”—big smile—“he manages himself.”

  Laura Russo laughed easily.

  “Let’s go,” he said, jerking his head, “I got a place.”

  His place was El Polo Loco on West End between 98th and 99th. Even that early in the evening it was crowded and noisy. “Hey, Mr. Connor,” a chunky hostess greeted them, “how you doing? Come. Come.”

  They were seated against a wall. Their conversation was carefully professional. When you’d go through Quantico? Who were your instructors? Where’d you go from there? You know so-and-so? Russo was surprised how comfortable she was with him. If he was coming on to her, she decided, he was amazingly good at hiding it. She tried to identify the strange feeling in her chest. It took a while, but finally she realized that it wasn’t what she was feeling, but rather what she wasn’t feeling. And that was anxiety. Connor wasn’t treating her like this was a date; instead, it was just the guys out for a pleasant dinner after a long day.

  He did everything right as far as she was concerned: He didn’t put his hand on her back and try to direct her, he didn’t help her with her coat, he barely even held open doors to allow her to proceed him, and at the end of the meal he accepted her share of the bill without protest. He was the perfect nongentleman, which Laura appreciated and naturally interpreted to mean that he wasn’t the slightest bit interested in her.

  That pleased her. It was exactly what she wanted: to be treated as an equal. One complication in her life that she definitely did not need was another relationship with an agent. Another agent? She didn’t need any type of romantic relationship at all. None. And just to make sure she didn’t forget it, she repeated that thought to herself.

  As they left the restaurant, she made a point of holding the door open for him. He didn’t seem to notice. The temperature had fallen several degrees. They stood in front of the restaurant and Laura began listing the things she wanted to accomplish the following morning. He noticed that every word she said was punctuated with a white puff of breath, almost as if she were speaking in cartoon speech balloons. He wondered if it was possible to blow breath rings, remembering his grandfather’s amazing ability to blow concentric smoke rings. He decided to test it, puckering his lips and exhaling slowly. The result was a steady white stream of visible breath. “You know,” he said, cutting her off in midsentence, “there’s something I want to show you.”

  “Excuse me,” she corrected him curtly, “but I was in the middle of a sentence.”

  “Sorry,” he apologized with considerably less sincerity than she would have liked. “But I promise, this is something good.”

  She stared at him, wondering what it might be. Oh, please, she thought, don’t let him screw it up by doing something stupid. “What is it?”

  “Hey, c’mon, gimme a little break here.”

  Reluctantly she nodded in agreement. “Okay,” and then added a bit more lightly, “Legally I have to warn you, though, these hands are registered weapons. Don’t make me use them.”

  As O’Brien drove over the Brooklyn Bridge, he asked if she had ever been to Brooklyn. Once, she said, and only very briefly. Since arriving in New York she hadn’t even had time to explore Manhattan, much less the other boroughs. “Then you’re in for a real treat,” he said, morphing into a tour guide. “They built this bridge in the 1870s ’cause Brooklyn was ready to declare itself an independent city. New York didn’t want the competition. When it opened, the toll was a penny.” There was an old legend, he continued, that if you tossed a penny off the bridge, you would receive an abundance of success.

  “So what do you get for a dollar?” she asked. There was surprisingly little traffic. The views from the bridge enchanted her. She looked over her right shoulder at the brightly lit Lower Manhattan skyline. “Wow,” she said, “double wow.”

  “And when the Mafia expanded out of Little Italy, Brooklyn was right there waiting. There were probably a million Italian immigrants living there who didn’t trust banks. It had the docks, it had trucking, swamps, unions, everything the aspiring mobster needs.” The Mafia, he explained as he drove through Brooklyn Heights and down Flatbush Avenue into Prospect Park, found its home in Brooklyn.

  Brooklyn surprised her. From everything she’d read, even after her brief visit, she’d believed Brooklyn to be one massive drug-ravaged decaying city. She had imagined acres of burned-out and abandoned buildings, filthy streets, and gangs camped on just about every corner. Instead, Brooklyn appeared to be a series of small neighborhoods, some better maintained than others, but almost none of them fitting her apocalyptic vision.

  Almost as if O’Brien were reading her mind, he continued, “Don’t let this fool you. There are pretty rough parts too, just not around here.” He turned onto President Street.

  “Why’s that?”

  He stopped across from 561 President. “Money and Mafia,” he said. “Nobody screws with either one.” He pointed at a well-kept brownstone with a large front stoop. “That’s it.”

/>   The building had a long, narrow front yard with two rectangles of grass separated by a cement walk. The front of the property was protected by a six-foot-high chain-link fence. A small sign warned that the premises were protected by the Silent Guardian, presumably an electronic monitoring service. Unlike similar houses on either side, she noticed, this house had no bushes in front. The entire yard was well lit. Every window in the house was covered with curtains. “What are we looking at?”

  In his best tour guide voice he said, “To your left, ladies and gentlemen, is the home of Robert San Filippo, better known to his fans as Bobby Blue Eyes and Bobby Hats. Mr. San Filippo has lived there with his wife, Veronica, and their ten-year-old daughter, Angela, for nine years.” He looked at her and smiled. “And people say I don’t have an exciting social life.”

  The stakeout is second only to working a listening post when rating the most boring law enforcement assignments. A stakeout consists almost entirely of sitting or standing and watching. Some of the time it means watching an inanimate object, a building, a restaurant, maybe a car. Only if the person you’re watching moves do you move. In the winter it’s too cold, in the summer it’s too hot. If you’re standing outside, you get really tired; if you’re in a car, you get cramped. In the car you can’t keep the engine running because you can’t waste gas. You can’t drink too much coffee to stay awake because then you have to go to the bathroom. Same thing with eating. You definitely can’t read. About the only thing you can do is listen to a transistor radio.

  “What are we doing here?” Russo asked.

  “Nothing really,” he admitted, without taking his eyes from the house. “I just like to know as much as possible about the people I’m investigating.” He glanced at her. “Looks pretty normal, right? I mean, you know, for a mafioso.”

  “Yeah, very.” She watched as O’Brien took his notebook from a jacket pocket and wrote a few sentences. “What happens if they spot us?”

  “Doesn’t matter. What’s he gonna do? Quit the Mafia? These guys already assume we’re everywhere. It’s probably a good thing that they see us every once in a while.” He stopped writing. “In the old days each of the bosses had at least one agent assigned only to them. Some agents spent most of their career watching one person.”

  They sat there for almost an hour, mostly in silence. There were a lot of questions Russo would have liked to ask him, but knowing that in response she’d have to answer similar questions, she kept quiet. O’Brien let her lead. Several lights were on in the house when they got there. After the first twenty minutes a light went off in one room and seconds later a light was turned on in another room. Maybe ten minutes after that, a curtain was pulled back and somebody peered outside for a few seconds, then released the curtain. At that distance it was impossible to see who it was. Several cars passed. One car parked and the driver got out and went into a brownstone farther down the block. Eleven people walked by: four singles, two couples—one of them walking a golden retriever—and a group of three teenage boys. About every four minutes a plane roared overhead, causing Connor to explain, “This is a secondary flight path to Kennedy. They use it when they get backed up.” And that was it, that was all the action. There had been no sign of Robert San Filippo, a.k.a. Bobby Blue Eyes, a.k.a. Bobby Hats.

  “Had enough?” he asked finally.

  “That’s enough for me.” As they started back to Manhattan, she wondered, “Think that was him looking out?”

  “No way,” O’Brien said. “He’s not gonna be sitting home this early. This is business hours. He’s out there somewhere doing his thing.”

  For a few minutes Russo tried to imagine what it might be like to be married to a hood like San Filippo. Not real good, she decided. And for an instant she flashed on her mother, remembering her standing stoically at the kitchen window, waiting hopefully for her husband to come home.

  Connor dropped her off in front of her apartment. “See you in the morning,” he said easily.

  “You got it.” She gave a little wave over her shoulder as she went up the steps. She was pleased that there had been none of that end-of-date uneasiness. But she did notice that he waited in front, watching her, until she was safely inside.

  It was exactly eleven o’clock when he got home. Connor melted into the deep pillows on his couch and turned on the local news. Wind-down time. Well, well, well, he thought, this is an interesting development. He’d had a good time, no doubt about that. And he had the feeling, as in one of the B movies in which the plain-looking secretary takes off her glasses and is transformed into a beautiful woman, that if Russo took off her officious personality, she would be pretty damned interesting.

  His phone rang. “Hey, Con,” Diana Thomas said with a happy bounce in her voice, “whatcha doing?”

  After a momentary hesitation he replied, “Nothing.”

  Laura Russo was luxuriating in her bathtub. She finally had proof that this indeed was a special night: For the first time since she’d been in New York she’d managed to find the elusive balance between hot running water and cold draining water that kept the tub perfectly warm. It was close to a perfect time. The only light in her apartment came from candles scattered around the bathroom. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which she loved although she seemed constitutionally unable to match the correct season to the music, was playing softly on her cassette radio. And her cat, Buck, was stretched across the closed toilet lid keeping her company.

  The night had confused her. Connor O’Brien had turned out to be both less and more than she had originally pegged him. Russo was just beginning to explore her reactions when she heard the unmistakable sound of someone trying to open her front door.

  One of the first things she’d done after moving into the apartment was screw a thin piece of metal to the door frame. It didn’t prevent the door from being used, but when the door was opened or closed, it scratched against it. Anyone who didn’t know it was there would assume the sound was ordinary wear and tear, the settling sounds a house makes, and wouldn’t even notice it. But to anyone listening for it, the sound was unmistakable. The cat, Buck, had heard it first. His ears suddenly cupped with curiosity, then he sat up. That had gotten Laura’s attention. She turned off the water and the music and heard it too.

  The apartment was a floor-through. The front door opened onto a narrow hallway. To the left, after entering the apartment, were the kitchen and living room. To the right was her bedroom. And almost directly across the hallway was the bathroom.

  Whoever was at the door was having great difficulty getting it open. That was obvious from the ticking sound the plate made each time the door was pushed or pulled. She had installed a Medeco lock and a security chain the day she moved in, and she had also replaced the existing tumbler, so it would require extraordinary smithy skills to break in. Either that or simple brute force. She wasn’t sure she had remembered to chain the door; usually she did, but not always. That didn’t really matter. If someone wanted to get in badly enough, they could get in.

  There was no one who could help her. The building had only two apartments on each floor and her neighbor, Ginger Snaps as she referred to herself, loved to party. She was out every night. Not that Ginger could provide any real help if she were home. In fact, it was probably better she wasn’t home. That way she couldn’t get hurt.

  Laura moved deliberately. She got out of the tub and blew out all the candles. Then she stood still for several seconds, letting her eyes become accustomed to the darkness. She took several deep, calming breaths. Laura Russo took great pride in her ability to maintain her composure in stressful situations. Not many things frightened her. But even she would have to admit that her heart was pumping big-time.

  She focused on her primary objective, her only objective, which was to get hold of her weapon. She knew exactly where it was: in its holster under her bed, where she’d kicked it out of view when she’d stripped for her bath. She grabbed a large bath towel and wrapped it around her body. Then she let the to
wel drop onto the floor, deciding if she had to move quickly, it might inhibit her. And if it fell, she didn’t want to be distracted when automatically grabbing for it.

  She felt around the bathroom sink. As she did, she almost knocked over her toothbrush holder, a ceramic mug from San Jose that she’d bought to commemorate a successful job working undercover in a Medicare fraud investigation. But she caught it, preventing it from crashing to the floor. She placed it gently on the sink counter, then continued feeling around until she found the large bottle of mouthwash she knew was there. She unscrewed the cap and put it in the sink. Mouthwash wasn’t much of a weapon, but if necessary, she’d splash it in the intruder’s eyes, which would buy her a few precious seconds. Then, purposefully, she walked out of the bathroom.

  As she passed the front door the intruder pushed hard against it. She heard him grunt with the effort. She stopped and waited. A few seconds later she heard a slight scratching sound she recognized instantly—he was trying to pick the lock. Her eyes were adjusting to the dark now and she could move around a lot more easily. She went back into the bathroom and retrieved the towel, then laid it on the floor next to the front door. Anyone coming into the apartment wouldn’t notice it; they’d trip or their feet would get entangled in it. That would give her a little more time.

  She reached under her bed and grasped her weapon, the standard-issue 9mm SIG. It fired sixteen shots—fifteen in the clip, one in the chamber—rapid, accurate, and deadly. She slid it out of its holster and switched off the safety. The moment she wrapped her palm around its handle she knew she had control of the night. The telephone was on the far side of her bed. She started to move around the bed, intending to call 911, then stopped. Fuck you, she thought, I got my gun and the darkness. Fuck you. You’re trying to bust into my house. I win.