The Good Guys Page 24

  An old-timer, Nick Nunzio, who didn’t come around that often, said, “Had to be Mileto or Amato fifteen years ago. Had to be.”

  “Whatever,” Georgie continued. “Sos I called him up and I told him, ‘No concrete.’ Then I called Frankie and I tole him, ‘Don’t bother ordering no concrete for tomorrow, ’cause you ain’t getting any.’ That was the end of that. He seen I had a fucking stranglehold on him, so what the fuck could he do? I mean, you know what I mean?”

  Bobby sat down next to Mickey Fists, who was using the butt of his cigarette to light his next one. “Don’t you know that shit’s bad for you?” Bobby said. “You trying to kill us all?”

  “I’m a fucking attic, Bobby,” Mickey agreed. “I can’t help it.”

  “Addict, you mean,” Bobby corrected him. “You’re a fucking addict.”

  The Duke picked up Mickey’s full ashtray and replaced it with a clean one on permanent loan from Rao’s. “No, I’m an attic. When I was coming up, we all used to go up into my attic to smoke,” he explained. “I swear to God, the smoke was so thick up there the motherfucking rats just rolled over and suffocated, that’s how bad it was. That’s what my lungs are like now, so that makes me a fucking attic.”

  Lenny showed his approval by punching him in the shoulder. “Fucking guy,” he said, impressed. And then he imitated him: “I’m an attic.” Finally he pointed at Mickey’s Camels. “Gimme one a those.”

  The Duke returned with the cappuccino. “Who’s in?” Tony Cupcakes asked, desperate for a card game. Vito V wanted in, and Georgie, Eddie, Mickey. “Bobby, you in?”

  He shook his head. “Later.” Bobby sat there quietly, sipping his cappuccino, leaning over to look at Mickey’s hand, laughing at the right times, occasionally throwing a funny line into the conversation—once he glanced over his shoulder to ask, “So, Benny, how they hanging?”—but mostly savoring the comfort of this place and the companionship of these people. There was a level of friendship and trust, honor and pride, that he had never experienced before in his life. Bobby had been a good athlete, he’d been second-team all-Catholic league in baseball and lettered in baseball, basketball, and soccer at St. Mac’s, so he had experienced the euphoria of being part of a successful, winning group, but this was much more than that. Much more. He was surrounded by people who had made it in a tough, tough world. People who were not afraid to break rules or heads. These were the kind of people you trusted with your freedom and your life. A bunch of very good guys going through life together. Even the Duke and crazy Benny Rags played their roles perfectly.

  Fast Lenny spun a card into the middle of the table. “Stick that baby up your behind,” he said to the table, laying down his winning hand. And then he asked Bobby, “So whattya want to do about that thing?”

  That thing to which Lenny was referring was the ten thousand gallons of fuel. Bobby didn’t have an answer yet. “I don’t know, open a gas station maybe.” He was definitely going to have to do something, there was no question about that. When Franklin Washington Jefferson Lincoln Roosevelt whatever didn’t show up to drive the truck, there was a pretty good chance that the delivery would be canceled. But Bobby doubted that. There was just too much money involved to leave it in somebody else’s hands. And it was real easy to hire another driver.

  Grabbing the truck would be simple, but then what? What do you do with ten thousand gallons of gasoline? You just couldn’t drive into a gas station and ask if they needed ten thousand gallons of high-test. You couldn’t use it yourself—even if you and all your friends were driving ’58 Cadillacs, it would take years to use all that gas. And it wasn’t the kind of merchandise So Solly could stick in his back room until he found a customer.

  But Bobby suspected that he might be able to get more out of that load than gasoline. Potentially that truck was a direct connection to the Russians. What he needed more than cash were some answers—which then might be turned into a lot more cash. There was no question in Bobby’s mind that Cosentino was doing business with them. It certainly seemed possible that the Russians had the professor. And nobody wanted to talk about it. Even Lenny’s Russian connection had faded big-time. These might be completely different Russians, but they spoke the language—money—so they knew the right people.

  Cooperation was the wave of the future, and people like him were either going to rise with it or get drowned by it. The one thing he knew for sure was that this load was owned by the Russians. If he was smart enough, it could be his passport into their world. He had nothing to lose, and the least he would gain was ten thousand gallons of gas. And it had occurred to him that the first sound of “dollar” was da.

  When the hand ended, Little Eddie had gone to the bathroom. On his way back to the table he had this great idea. Hanging on the back of the bathroom door was a dartboard with six long-nosed darts embedded in it. Grabbing those darts, Little Eddie stood eight feet in front of Benny Rags and warned him, “Don’t fucking move!”

  “You’re fucking crazy, Eddie!” Benny screamed at him. “That ain’t funny. C’mon, somebody help me.”

  Eddie’s first throw bounced off the wall about a foot to the right of Benny’s head. His second throw was short and again off to the right. “Shit,” Eddie muttered disgustedly, then ordered, “Hey, Benny, spread your legs wide as you can.”

  Benny’s eyes opened wider than a hooker’s purse on Christmas Eve. “Hey! Hey!”

  Lenny was laughing so hard he was having trouble breathing. Bobby yelled above the laughter, “Hey, I get it. I know, I know. You’re William Don’t Tell ’em Nothing!”

  Lenny suggested loudly, “I’d spread ’em if I were you, Benny.”

  Eddie closed one eye and reached back with the dart two, three, four times. The tip of his tongue poked out of his mouth. He aimed right between Benny’s legs and . . .

  Benny Rags was pushing against the wall with his hands and feet as hard as he could. He was screaming, “Don’t you fucking dare.” Finally his shirt ripped open and he dropped straight to the ground. He covered his head with his hands as the dart kind of drooped way over his head, bounced off the wall, and landed right in his lap. He grabbed it and angrily heaved it sideways at Eddie, who was laughing so hard he had to rest his hands on his knees. The dart flew well wide of its target.

  Benny was terrified. He scrambled to his feet and took out his wallet. “Here’s your fucking money,” he said, throwing two twenties at Eddie.

  “Oh man, I can’t breathe,” Eddie gasped, trying to stop laughing long enough to catch a breath.

  “It ain’t that funny,” Benny Rags said, picking up his carton of velour tops and heading for the door. “Fucking bastard ruined a good shirt.”

  Eddie picked a dart off the floor to throw at Benny, but he was laughing too hard. The laughter continued for a long time, reinforced two or three times by people imitating Eddie telling Benny to spread his legs. “I swear, Eddie,” Mickey said, “I thought that was it for me. I couldn’t fucking breathe. I thought I was going to die.”

  When the laughter finally ended, Bobby carefully laid out his plan for the night. He went through it in detail. Who was going to do what when. And while there was some complaining, eventually everyone went along with it. A few of the people didn’t exactly understand Bobby’s reasoning, but Bobby was Bobby, and that was good enough for them.

  According to the truck driver, who was lying in a ditch under a blanket of leaves and now covered by the first snowfall of the season, the load was scheduled to leave the Staten Island storage terminal at about nine o’clock. That would get the truck to the first gas station in Queens after it closed at eleven, which was the way the owner wanted it. Bobby figured that by the time the dispatcher realized that the driver wasn’t showing up and found a replacement, it would be a whole lot later than that. But just to be certain, they got to the terminal a little after eight.

  Lenny was driving the car. Tony would drive the truck. Bobby would close the deal and Eddie was there just in case. Just i
n case of anything. Vito followed them in the backup car.

  None of them had ever been near an oil storage depot before, so they didn’t know what to expect. That was okay. Bobby’s plan did not require gaining access to the tank farm. With millions of gallons of highly flammable fuel and valuable equipment just sitting there, he assumed the front gate would be heavily guarded. And if the side gates weren’t manned, at least they would be locked and security cameras would be scanning the entire area. Knowing the route that the truck was going to follow, he planned to wait until it got clear of the depot before making a move.

  He assumed wrong. The facility was surrounded by a six-foot-high chain-link fence that was not even topped with barbed wire. The light posts were set about twenty-five yards apart, but they were the old type; they still used dull incandescent bulbs rather than the much brighter neon. Even then several of the lights weren’t working, having either been broken or simply burned out and not been replaced. Rather than illuminating the yard, about the only purpose these lights served was to make themselves visible. The front entrance was open wider than a bookie on Super Bowl Sunday. The gate itself was tied back. There was a guardhouse, but there was a light on inside, so it was easy to see that there was no one there. It was unbelievable, there wasn’t a guard in sight. And if there were any surveillance cameras, no one could spot them. And these were people used to finding the cameras. “How could this be?” Lenny wondered. “These people must be nuts.”

  “Well, big guy,” Cupcakes pointed out, “it ain’t like people are coming in off the street to steal five gallons of gas. How many people you know got their own tank truck?”

  Bobby wasn’t comfortable with the situation. If there was a Bible of organized crime, the First Commandment would probably be “Nothing is that easy.” Deals, women, life, everything has a price. And to his experienced eye this looked way too easy. So while Tony and Lenny waited in the car, Bobby and Little Eddie strolled through the front gate, easy as tourists walking into a theme restaurant.

  They walked into a world of shadows. It was as if they were moving across a checkerboard, from light square to dark square. Long fingers of light from the posts on the perimeter poked between the tanks to illuminate dull gray rectangles of gravel. When they stepped into that light, they cast their own long shadows that faded into the darkness. And when they moved into the shadows, they might just as easily have been walking in a cave. But even in that darkness it was difficult not to be awed by the size of the tanks. Walls of steel towered above them. “Gees,” Bobby said, “I feel like fucking Gulliver.”

  “What’s that?” Eddie asked, looking around. “Tell you what, these things are pretty fucking big,” he added, greatly impressed. Then, always the consummate professional, he decided, “You know, you could drop a stiff into one of these things and nobody’d ever find it.”

  The storage facility was laid out in a grid. The tanks were aligned in long rows, front to back, side to side, equidistant from each other. In the darkness it was sort of like being in a maze; no matter which way they walked, everything looked pretty much the same. It was a world almost completely devoid of color. All of the tanks were painted the same pedestrian white, the ground was covered with blue-gray gravel. Those patches of night sky visible between the tanks were as grim as the bottom of a burned pot. The only actual color in the whole place was the red airplane warning lights on the top of the tanks in the distance, blinking as brightly as Rudolph’s nose.

  Bobby’s jobs had taken him to a great variety of places, from the back room of a run-down strip club on 42nd Street to the sixty-fifth-floor suite of the CEO of one of America’s most successful brokerage houses. He’d been on a yacht in the Caribbean and inside a tenement in Spanish Harlem. He’d been in hospital rooms and locker rooms, factories and showrooms; he knew how to move around the private rooms in the terminals at JFK as easily as the stalls at the Fulton Fish Market. Wherever it was, he’d been there, from the Top of the Sixes to Calvary Cemetery out in Queens. But this was one of the most unusual places Bobby had ever been. It felt like he was out for a stroll on some distant, mostly deserted planet.

  The tank farm appeared to be completely unguarded. At one point they saw a man about seventy yards away walking purposefully between two storage tanks. He was wearing a yellow hard hat. The man spotted them, but rather than being alarmed or even curious, he waved pleasantly to them with the clipboard he was carrying and continued on his way.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” Eddie decided. “Come on, Bobby, let’s get the fuck outta here.”

  Bobby ignored him. With the excitement of an explorer who had just discovered a world of potential riches, Bobby was simply taking it all in. Later, when he had more time, he would try to figure out how to exploit it. Where there was money to be made, there was a way. Suddenly, though, as they moved into a patch of dim light, they heard people talking. Then laughing. They stopped and listened. But the voices were much too far away to be intelligible. “Come on,” Bobby said.

  They walked toward the voices. As they rounded a storage tank, three rows over they saw the spotlight illuminating a tanker truck being filled. The truck that brings the gas to the gas station was getting gas. Bobby smiled at that thought. They stood in the shadows and watched. Two men were standing next to the tanker, both of them holding clipboards. One of them was wearing a baseball cap, the other one a yellow hard hat. “That’s got to be our truck,” Bobby said.

  After standing there for several more minutes watching absolutely nothing happen, Eddie decided, “This is certainly a big thrill.”

  They returned to Lenny’s car and waited. Bobby actually closed his eyes and caught a few minutes’ sleep. Finally, at about eleven o’clock, preceded by two long blasts from the air horn, the fully loaded tanker barreled through the front gate. Lenny gave the truck a big jump—there was only one good road out of the storage yard—then took off after him. Vito V followed close behind.

  It took less than a minute to grab the truck. Ba-da-bing . . . The driver stopped at a traffic light. Before he realized what was happening, much less had the chance to get on his radio to call for help, Bobby was standing on the step pointing a gun at his head . . . ba-da-boom. The driver immediately put up his hands and yelled to Bobby, “Whatever you say.” He wasn’t about to risk his life for a load of gas.

  Tony slid behind the wheel. If it had an engine and tires, Tony could drive it. Eddie tied the compliant trucker’s hands behind his back and put him in Vito’s car. The only thing the guy said was, “I haven’t seen nothing and I don’t know nothing.” Vito would ride around for a while, then drop him. Tony was going to park the truck up in Hunts Point, near Yankee Stadium.

  Bobby’s first stop was the gas station on Queens Boulevard. Lenny stayed in the car, parking around a corner to make sure that nobody in the station could identify his car. The station was closed. Bobby banged on the front door. Eventually an inside door opened and a shining bald head appeared. “I’m closed,” the bald head yelled.

  “You expecting a fuel delivery?” Bobby yelled right back.

  The bald man was yawning as he unlocked the front door. By the time it dawned on him that there was no tanker sitting outside waiting to be unloaded, it was too late: Bobby was inside, one hand deep in his jacket pocket. The bald guy had been in the business long enough to know what was going on. “Hey, pally,” he explained calmly, “I don’t keep much cash around here.” He started moving toward his desk.

  One summer in high school Bobby had pumped gas for dating money. He knew how it all worked. Customers paid mostly by credit card. If the guy was lucky, there was two hundred bucks in the register. He would pay for the delivery by check—no way he was going to keep that much cash around. It didn’t matter what brand of gas he put in his tanks, whatever the sign out front said; nobody knows the difference, and it was all pretty much the same product anyway. And he also knew that the owner kept a baseball bat, a steel rod, or maybe even a gun behind his desk
for just such nighttime visits as this one. Running a gas station that stayed open at night was a tough business that attracted tough guys. “Hey,” he ordered sharply, “stay the fuck away from the desk. Just stand right there. I want you to answer me some questions.”

  The bald guy took a deep breath. He was prepared to be robbed, not answer questions. “What?” he asked. He seemed a lot more angry than frightened.

  Bobby was holding loosely to the butt of his pistol, but he saw no reason to show it. The guy was cooperating, there wasn’t any reason to escalate the situation. For the first time Bobby got a real good look at the guy. There was something strange about him, something weird, besides the fact that a ball of fat hung limp under his chin like a suspended flowerpot, but Bobby couldn’t figure out precisely what it was. “You the owner?”

  He nodded, his several chins slightly trailing the rest of his head up and down. “Yeah, so?”

  That answer surprised him. Not necessarily what he said, just the way he said it. He’d pretty much figured the owner had to be Russian, but this guy was pure New York. His accent came right off the city streets. That just didn’t fit. Bobby was still trying to figure out the scam the Russians were running; his best guess was that they were stealing gas from the terminal and delivering it to gas stations they owned, or selling it to other Russians. It was basic economics: get free, sell high. One hundred percent profit. That scenario made a lot of sense to him.

  But this guy wasn’t Russian, and back at the terminal it didn’t look like they were busting anybody’s balls. “Who are you buying this load from?”

  The guy smiled at that question. “Who the fuck you think you are to ask me that?”

  Bobby took his hand out of his pocket and let his gun hang at his side. “Well, see, actually it isn’t just me that’s asking the questions. I got my friends with me.” He held up the gun for inspection, purposefully not aiming it at the guy. “You know, Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson. So you tell me, who do you want to talk to? Me or my friends?”