The Good Guys Read online

  The man ran his hand thoughtfully over his impressively bald head. Bobby couldn’t remember ever seeing such a perfectly bald head, with the possible exception of Mr. Clean on the commercials. The guy’s skin was stretched tautly over his skull, and Bobby guessed it was being pulled tight by the weight of the fat under his chin. He looked really carefully at the guy’s head: There wasn’t one single dot of stubble fighting through. And then he realized what was so strange about him: The guy had a glass eye. His left eyeball didn’t move. It was locked in place, precisely in the middle of his eye socket, staring straight ahead. The guy’s right eyeball was darting from side to side, maybe looking for an advantage, but that left eye just bored into Bobby. He’d heard stories about people putting an informer’s head in a vise and tightening it until his eyes popped out of his head, and he knew that Sammy Davis Jr. had a glass eye, but he had never seen one this close. It was almost mesmerizing. “You the law?” the bald guy with the one glass eye asked.

  It was Bobby’s turn to smile. “Do I look like the law?”

  “Legally, if I ask you, you gotta tell me. Otherwise nothing I say counts. You know that, right?”

  Bobby was getting bored with this game. “What are you, Perry fucking Mason? I gotta tell you, you’re starting to piss me off now.” He waved a cautionary finger. The guy’s right eye followed it. The left eye didn’t move. It just kept staring. That was disconcerting. “I promise you, you don’t want to do that. So I’m asking you nice, who you buying this load from?”

  The guy shrugged. “Some Russians. They come around with the product and they give me a good price. That’s the whole deal.”

  “What do you mean ‘some Russians’? Gimme some names.”

  “You’re kidding me, right? Boris and Morris. What the fuck do I know names? They’re selling gas, I’m buying gas. What else do I got to know?”

  “So they give you a real good deal?”

  “Fuck yes, they do.” The bald guy sighed in frustration. “So is this a robbery or what?”

  Bobby was honest with him. “I haven’t decided yet. So how do they afford to do it? What kind of scam they running?”

  “This is fucking bullshit,” the bald guy said, moving toward his desk.

  Bobby reached him in two steps and shoved the barrel of his gun under the guy’s chin, pushing his head backward. “You wouldn’t be the first,” he warned.

  The bald guy with one glass eye finally got the message. “Oh, wait a second. Who you with?” he asked.

  “I told you, Smith and Wesson.” Bobby held the gun there. For the first time he saw fear in the man’s eye. “No names, remember? The next time you open your mouth it better be answers coming out. Got it?” He pushed the barrel so deep into the guy’s chin that the front sight disappeared completely into layers of fat, like a rock sinking into quicksand. “Got it?” he repeated.

  The man nodded. Gently he grasped the gun with his thumb and forefinger and moved it away.

  “Now, tell me the story.”

  “Don’t flatter me, there’s no big story. I mind my own business. Guy comes in here one day and wants to sell me a few thousand gallons thirty cents cheaper than I can get anywhere else. Pay after delivery. You don’t got to be no fucking genius to know that’s a good deal. I’m an independent. I don’t have no contract with a brand. I buy on the open market. The truck shows up, the gas is good, I pay him, everybody’s happy. He comes by every couple of weeks for like a year now.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Beck. Mike Beck.”

  Bobby lowered his gun and took a couple of steps backward. He moved to Beck’s left, partially out of his eyesight. “Okay, so let me ask you this, Mike. How the fuck can they afford to do that?”

  “Hey, I don’t need to look a gift horse up the ass to know there’s some shit there. Truth is I don’t give a flying fuck. Maybe it’s my good looks. I don’t ask them no questions, they don’t give me no answers. Everybody goes home happy.”

  “Yeah, but Mikey, just between you, me, Smith, and Wesson, you got to have an idea. A bright guy like you, you didn’t get all this”—he indicated the gas station—“by not paying attention. So come on, what do you think?”

  Beck eyed Bobby, trying to figure the upside. “I don’t know for sure, I’m telling you this straight up. But if they ain’t draining it out of the tanks, then the only thing I can figure is that they’re not paying no taxes on it. I mean, figure it out, what else could it be? People don’t know it, but there’s like seventy cents taxes on every gallon you put in your car. If you don’t got to pay that”—he exhaled in admiration—“that’s a lot of fucking moolah.”

  Cheating the government? Now, there was a concept Bobby could appreciate. “Those fucking commies,” he said with great respect. “Didn’t take them long to figure out capitalism, did it?” He actually laughed at the thought. Waving his gun casually, he asked, “So how do they do it?”

  “Magic. How the fuck should I know?”

  While listening to the guy, Bobby was running numbers in his head. Without knowing the details—how many gallons times how much per gallon they were putting in their pocket—it was impossible to reach any kind of valid conclusion. But if the Russians really did have access to a substantial amount of gasoline and had figured out a way to sell it without paying taxes on it, then they had discovered the mother lode. Whatever the number was, it had a lot of zeroes backing it up. Millions of dollars, easy. Tens of millions. “Sorry to have to tell you this, Mike, but tonight’s delivery is going to be a little late.”

  “Like how late is late?”

  “Probably never.” These were potentially the kinds of numbers that mob guys only dreamed about on Christmas Eve. This is incredible, Bobby thought. We’re busting our humps to earn a few thousand bucks, while these commie motherfuckers are making millions. Things were beginning to make sense.

  “Shit,” Beck muttered. “You’re killing me here, pal. You’re making me buy from those legitimate bastards. Those no-good fucking thieves.”

  Bobby laughed. “Hey, don’t blame me. You lay down with hookers, you’re gonna get fucked.” Beck did not appreciate the joke. “One more thing I want to know,” Bobby continued. “Those Russians who show up to get paid? Tell me about them.”

  “Ugly fuckers,” he said, shrugging. “A big guy and a small guy. The big guy’s got this scarred-up face . . .”

  “Yeah, I know,” Bobby said. “I know. Lemme guess. I bet they’re driving like a gray Firebird too, right?” Small world, small fucking world.

  “You got ’em.”

  Bobby shook his head. If all this was true, it was no fucking wonder why Cosentino went outside his crew for this job. He didn’t want people to know what he was doing. It was amazing. When it comes to a couple thousand dollars, he does the right thing: He shares like a good guy, the way he’s supposed to. But when there’s millions of dollars up for grabs, he wants to keep it for himself. Maybe he’d share a few bucks with his people. Unfuckingbelievable.

  One thing he still couldn’t figure out was exactly how the professor fit into the whole operation. But he figured he must be getting close. Cosentino was doing business with the Russians, it made sense for him to have a Russian speaker he could trust. So what happened to make the professor disappear? Maybe the Russians happened.

  Bobby put his gun back in his pocket. “Hey, Mike,” he asked nicely, “you know my name?”

  Beck shook his head from side to side, his chin swaying gently.

  “Know where I live?”

  Again Beck shook his head.

  “Think about that before you go shooting off your mouth to anybody. Know what I mean?” For an instant he considered cleaning out the cash register, then just as quickly decided against it. Holding up gas stations wasn’t his style. He didn’t see any reason to make the bald guy with one glass eye and the hanging chin of Babylon’s life any tougher. So he backed out the door, being careful to stay to Mike’s blind side. He watched Bec
k watching him through the front window. Now, that’s funny, he thought, he’s keeping an eye on me—which, considering his condition, was the very best he was capable of doing.

  No question, that glass eye creeped him out. Walking back rapidly to Lenny’s car, he ran through as many applicable phrases as he could think of: Keep your eye on the ball. The eye has it. Eye eye, sir. Well, that was two eyes. She’s the apple of my eye. By the time he got back to the car, he was stuck on An eye for an eye.

  Back in the car, all he told Lenny was that the Russians were running some kind of gas scam. That was absolutely true, if not complete. Not telling Lenny wasn’t a business decision—he wasn’t trying to get over on him—but until he knew a lot more, he decided to keep quiet. He didn’t need people talking. They drove straight up to the parking lot in the North Bronx where the tanker was supposed to be dropped. It was after 1 a.m. by the time they got there.

  The lot was packed with trucks of all types, although only a few of the cabs were rigged to trailers. It was pretty much a transit station, a secure place for independent truckers to park for a couple of days while waiting for their load. But unlike the fuel terminal, this place had extensive security. It was surrounded by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with the new kind of razor wire. Nobody was going to climb over that fence without leaving a large slab of skin as a souvenir. High-intensity neon lights spaced on poles about twenty-five feet apart were directed inside the lot, and scanning cameras were mounted on every third pole. The front gate was locked and manned by a security guard, who responded to Bobby’s shouts for some help.

  Again Lenny had parked out of sight.

  Bobby saw immediately that this guard took his job seriously. He was a young, good-looking black kid. His rent-a-cop uniform was immaculate, down to the sharp crease in his pants. The guard approached the gate with a professional smile on his face and a steel club in his hand. “Yes, sir?”

  Standing in shadows outside the locked gate, Bobby informed the guard that the tanker scheduled to arrive about that time wasn’t coming. “So you just hold on to that money,” he said, assuming the guard was supposed to pay the driver. The guard wasn’t sure what was going on. Without making a big show of it, he took a couple of steps backward, spread his legs a comfortable distance apart, and began gently tapping the club into the palm of his left hand. There wasn’t too much Bobby could do to change the situation. They were on Candid Camera; he wasn’t about to pull a gun on the guy just to get a few answers. “Now, calm down, okay? There’s just a couple of things I want to ask you.”

  The guard stood there impassively.

  Bobby reached into his back pocket. The guard tensed but did not make a move. Bobby pulled out his wallet and took a fifty-dollar bill out of it. He curled it up and stuck it in the fence. The guard didn’t move to take it. “Whattya need?” he asked.

  “Like I said, just a little information. These people who own this truck. How many deliveries like this do they do every week?” Bobby was just trying to get some idea of the scope of the operation. He was guessing two or three runs a week.

  The guard considered the question. “I’m not supposed to give out that kind of information,” he said, but he said it with a lack of conviction.

  “Yeah, I know,” Bobby said, holding high a second fifty-dollar bill. “But I figure you can go back inside and rewind this tape so nobody sees this.” He curled the second fifty and stuck it in the gate. They were standing about fifteen feet apart, separated by the fence. From a distance it might have looked a bit like an Old West shoot-out—except it was negotiations at ten paces.

  “They run three trucks out of here,” the guard finally blurted out. “Every truck makes at least four or five runs a week.” Then he volunteered, “They use a lot of different drivers. They don’t want anybody knowing too much about their business.”

  “You got a phone number for them, don’t you? I mean, you’re supposed to call them when the trucks show up.”

  The guard shook his head. “I can’t give that to you.”

  Bobby stuck another fifty in the fence.

  “I can’t,” the guard said.

  “All right,” Bobby agreed, “that’s okay.” He made no move to take back his money. “Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to call that number and tell them somebody took their truck. Tell them the delivery didn’t get made tonight. Then you tell them that if they want their truck back, they should call this number tomorrow around noon.” Bobby always carried a pen and scrap paper in his pocket. He wrote down the number of the phone in the social club. There was no way the Russians could trace the location of that number. It was bootstrapped, meaning the calls to that number were relayed from the original phone listed in the name of an old Chinese lady who lived on Doyers Street in Chinatown. It was the same system used by every bookmaking operation. “Now, you sure you got that?” Bobby was always careful to make sure his messages were clearly understood.

  The guard repeated the message.

  “That’s good,” Bobby said, sticking a last fifty in the fence. Bobby turned to leave, then paused. The guard hadn’t moved. Bobby pointed to the security cameras. The guard nodded. “It’s all good,” Bobby said to himself as he walked away, “all good.”

  It was almost four o’clock in the morning when Bobby finally got home. Ronnie and Angela were long asleep. He looked in on his daughter, who was lost in dreamland. Ronnie stirred when he sat on the side of the bed and started getting undressed, but said nothing. She’d stopped asking him about his days, and more pointedly his nights, years earlier. She had pretty much figured out his pattern: If he took a shower before getting into bed, he’d been with another woman. If he simply undressed and got into bed, he’d been working. The truth was that in either case she was no longer curious about the details.

  He sort of shimmied across the bed and curled himself up against her body. She barely moved. She was wearing flannel pajamas, which he really hated. The feel of a woman’s skin still thrilled him, even his wife’s. He cupped his hand over her flannel-covered breast and wrestled with sleep, wondering how it was possible to be so close to a person yet feel so far away.

  Most civilians probably have some difficulty blending their work life and home life, but usually there is some overlap and they can talk about it with their wife or husband, and that person can at least relate to some aspects of it. But in this business—and this is equally true for people working in law enforcement—people have to live two completely different lives. There is no overlap between life with the Family and life with the family, and there was very little about life outside the home that a wiseguy could discuss with his wife. There was a real sense of discordance when either world intruded upon the other.

  Bobby lay there with his eyes closed, but his mind was doing laps at Indianapolis. He knew he’d grabbed something big by the tail, but he couldn’t be certain exactly what it was he was holding on to. Whatever it was, it was definitely a lot bigger than he had originally believed. And it was a lot more important than finding some missing teacher. The problem was that the bigger things were, the more dangerous they tended to be. The one thing he knew for sure was that he needed to be careful, real careful, that this thing didn’t suddenly turn around and bite him.

  Somehow, though, the professor was in the middle of all of this. And the fact that Cosentino needed him to be found by Thursday night was pretty strong evidence that something important was going down that night. He wondered, how would his life be affected if he woke up Friday morning and the professor hadn’t been found? Or maybe, what would it cost him if he didn’t find the guy? That was only one of the many questions it was impossible to answer without knowing a lot more facts, like the value of a friendship when a million dollars is involved.

  Sometimes it seemed to Bobby that the bed must have no right side, because whichever side Ronnie got up on, it was always like it was the wrong one. But she was in a particularly surly mood the next morning, which was just about th
e last thing he needed. He paid the minimal attention necessary to know when to agree and nod his head, which he did convincingly. Something about visiting his parents on the holidays, problems with her car, play dates for Angela. He caught some of the familiar phrases—“the things I do for you,” “no consideration for anyone else,” “have to do everything around here myself,” “don’t know what it means to give,” and the big one, “she’s your daughter too!”—and resisted the urge to respond. He was smart enough to know that there were some battles he couldn’t win if he had George S. Patton and the entire fucking U.S. Army on his side.

  He still kissed her good-bye when he left, though, and most of the time he still meant it. Comfort counted.

  The Duke, Little Eddie, and the kid, Vito V, were the only people in the club when he walked in. He rarely got there that early, and the thin shafts of sunlight angling through the exposed top of the front windows gave the place an unusually cold feeling, but it still had that warm familiarity about it. The Daily News and the Post were lying on the card table, and as he waited for the phone call, he read both of them. It was a slow news day; even the regular bullshit was bullshit. That was one of the things he loved so much about New York: It was always the same but constantly different.

  Every few minutes he glanced at the clock. When the Russians called, he intended to set up a meet for later that day at some public place. Probably the Tic Toc. Eddie would be his backup, Lenny the outside man. He wasn’t going to play tough guy, no threats, no demands. The thing that these guys had that he wanted was information. In return he could offer them their fuel truck—and his cooperation. He knew the streets and he had hooks into some people who knew some people.

  Eddie was trying to figure out the Jumble in the News when the phone rang. It was a few minutes after noon. Mostly out of habit now, the moment it rang he immediately looked at the Duke to see if he responded. Just a little quiver was all the evidence he needed. But as always, the Duke didn’t move.