Bad Apple

  BAD

  APPLE

  Also by Anthony Bruno

  THE ICEMAN

  BAD MOON

  BAD BUSINESS

  BAD LUCK

  BAD BLOOD

  BAD GUYS

  For Shuji Maruyama Sensei

  and all the aikidoka of

  Aikido Kokikai International

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ONE

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 23 1:49 A.M.

  Gary Petersen ran his fingers along the grip bumps in the steering wheel as he stared down at the backpack on the floor on the passenger side. It was a kid’s backpack, blue and yellow, made out of some kind of cheap material that probably wouldn’t last a whole school year, not with his kids. On the outside there was a goofy-looking picture of Cookie Monster. Inside there was $130,000 in cash. Petersen’s thumb made a soft tomtom sound on the steering wheel. He kept doing it because it filled the quiet. His wife was right, he thought. He ought to have his head examined.

  He checked his watch again even though he knew it couldn’t be more than a few minutes later than the last time he’d looked at it. It was just something to do while he waited. The parking lot was dark outside. The Vince Lombardi Service Area off the New Jersey Turnpike didn’t get much car traffic in the wee hours of the morning, especially on this side of the lot where the trailer trucks parked. Two rows of eighteen-wheelers were angle-parked, shoulder to shoulder, the truckers inside bunked for the night. A lot of them kept their running lights on—must be some kind of insurance regulation, Petersen figured—so they wouldn’t get broadsided in the dark. That wasn’t very likely here, though. They kept the lot pretty well lit. Except here, where he was parked, way over by the edge of the lot where the seven-foot cattails grew.

  Petersen glanced up at the headlights sailing across the sky on the elevated section of the Turnpike. They looked like UFOs up there. In the rearview mirror he could see the Manhattan skyline across the Hudson. The top of the Empire State Building was lit in orange and yellow for Thanksgiving. He glanced at his watch again. Technically it was already Wednesday. Thanksgiving was a day away. They were having it up at his in-laws’ in Connecticut this year. He hoped to hell he could make it. Whenever you’re on an undercover like this, anything’s liable to happen. Some mob guy calls you on Thanksgiving morning and says he has to see you right away, there’s nothing you can do. Can’t make excuses. You have to go.

  Now that he thought about it, he should’ve made it part of his cover that he had a sick mother or something, something life-or-death that could buy him some personal time when he needed it. It would’ve come in handy with Tony Bells. Bells was fucking crazy. Calls up in the middle of the night, meet me here in twenty minutes, meet me there in a half-hour. And never during the day. The guy was like a fucking vampire. It would be just like him to call on Thanksgiving and say they had to meet that night. Shit. Petersen couldn’t do that to his wife. Bad enough she’d have to drive all the way up to her parents’ alone with the kids, but then she’d have to hear her father’s shit about how she was gonna end up a widow one of these days because of what her husband did for a living. He could hear the old man now: “The FBI’s got desk jobs, haven’t they? Why doesn’t he get a desk job?” What a pain. Next time he’d remember to have a sick mother.

  He stared out at the deserted parking lot again. So where the fuck was Bells? Did he want the money or not?

  It was getting cold out there. Petersen turned the engine back on, and as he reached over to turn up the heat, he caught his own reflection in the rearview mirror, just his eyes. They were dark, evil-looking eyes with thick eyebrows to match. Amazing. He was Irish on his mother’s side, Swedish and German on his father’s side, and he comes out looking like Popeye’s archenemy, Bluto. All he needed was the beard. Every one of his cousins was either blond or redhead, and all of them had light eyes. A couple of dirty blondes, but that’s as dark as they got. How the hell he turned out the way he did, no one could figure. His mother said she thought someone had married a black Irishman a couple of generations back and that’s why he’d turned out the way he did. Who the hell knew? All he knew was that he never looked like a Petersen or a Flynn or a Schmidt. Whenever he went undercover, he was either an Italian or a Greek. This time he was Greek. Teddy Katapoulos.

  He kept looking at his eyes in the rearview mirror, turning his face one way, then the other, examining himself. Something wasn’t right. He wondered if he looked scared or tired or what. He sat back and frowned, wondering why the hell he was wondering this. He wasn’t tired and he certainly wasn’t scared. He’d done lots of undercovers before. This was by no means his first. And there was nothing to be nervous about, not tonight. He’d been alone with Tony Bells before—that wasn’t it. Sure, the guy was creepy, but so what? That’s just the way he is. Sort of like that actor, Christopher Walken. Creepy, but smooth about it. Bells would be perfect as Dracula, somebody like that. It wasn’t like he or Walken sucked blood in real life—they just made you believe that they could. In reality, Bells was just another scumbag mob loan shark. That’s all. A creepy-looking, scumbag Mafia loan shark. But very smooth.

  Petersen glanced down at the Cookie Monster backpack on the floor. It used to be his daughter’s favorite when she was in kindergarten—she used to sleep with the damn thing. It was baby stuff now, though. She was nine going on twenty-one and heavily into Ren and Stimpy. Whoever the hell they were.

  He focused on Cookie Monster’s googly eyes and remembered when he used to tiptoe into his daughter’s bedroom to take the backpack out of her bed. There really was nothing to be nervous about tonight. He was gonna be giving Bells what he wanted. $130,000 at half a point a week. Bells would turn around and loan it to someone else for a point, point and a half a week. In a year, Bells could clear sixty-five grand off that money. He wanted this cash. Loan sharks are always on the lookout for “investors” like “Teddy Katapoulos,” guys who want to get a good return on their money but who don’t want the hassles of loan-sharking it themselves. It works out nice for both parties.

  Except in this case.

  Tony Bells didn’t know that the money he would be getting was courtesy of the FBI, and that “Teddy Katapoulos” was one of a dozen undercover agents taking part in Operation Shark Bite, a special task force targeting loan-sharking in the New York area, coordinated by the Manhattan field office’s Organized Crime Unit. Undercover agents had infiltrated the loan-sharking activities of two crime families so far, the Luccarellis and the Giovinazzos. Some agents were working for loan sharks, some were borrowing from loan sharks, and some, like Petersen, were working with loan sharks, lending them money to “build their books.”

  For a change, Petersen was on the safe end of this operation, relatively speaking. The undercover guys who were taking out loans with the intention of not paying them back in order to elicit threats and violence from their shylocks, they were the ones holding the shitty end of the stick. They were the guys who had to watch themselves. Still, Petersen didn’t feel completely at ease waiting he
re in a parking lot in the middle of the night. He could never be at ease with Bells. No one could.

  Supposedly, Tony “Bells” Bellavita wasn’t even a made man. The FBI and NYPD both had him classified as only a “Luccarelli associate.” But unlike most mob associates, Bells didn’t work under a soldier. He was connected directly to a capo, Armand “Buddha” Stanzione, and from the few wiretaps they had of conversations between these two, they seemed pretty tight. Bells didn’t seem to bow and scrape to Stanzione the way most underlings did with their captains, which was very unusual. But of course that was why Bells had been targeted by Operation Shark Bite. He had a direct line to a capo. No middlemen. If they got the goods on Bells, there was a good chance they could take down Buddha Stanzione with him.

  Petersen remembered one of the tapes they had of Bells talking to Buddha at a “social club” in the Down Neck section of Newark. There were a lot of long silences on that tape, the kind of gaps that give you accida thinking that the equipment malfunctioned and you’ve lost everything. But that wasn’t it on this one. Stanzione was definitely a man of few words—that’s why they called him “Buddha”—and Bells could be just as bad. He would do this thing where he’d just look at you. Wouldn’t say a thing, just look at you. Creepy as hell. When Petersen first listened to that tape, he could just see Bells giving Stanzione that look, and after he went over it a few times, Petersen noticed that every time Bells didn’t talk on the tape, it was Buddha who’d started up the conversation again. It seemed strange that a mere associate would be able to pull this kind of shit with a capo, especially a cutthroat mother like Buddha. But Bells seemed to get away with this kind of disrespect. Very strange.

  Petersen turned down the heat and checked the time again. It was almost quarter after two. He wondered if he should just call it a night and take off because it didn’t look like Bells was coming. Just as well, he thought. He’d rather meet him in daylight to tell the truth. Friggin’ Bells, though, he likes to do things at night and always on the road somewhere. Says he’s gotta have privacy, total privacy when he does business. Well, next time Petersen was gonna insist on meeting during the day. After all, he was the one providing the cash. No more coddling after this.

  He switched on his headlights and reached for the shift when he noticed a pair of moving headlights in his rearview mirror. The approaching car had just turned off the access road and pulled into the lot. Petersen felt a ghost hand clutch his stomach. Was it Bells? He half-hoped it wasn’t.

  The headlights swept the lot, moving slowly, heading toward him. The car pulled up right behind his, and because the high beams were on, Petersen had to turn away from the glare in his rearview mirror. He glanced into his side mirror, which wasn’t quite as bad. He heard the car’s engine shut off, but the headlights stayed on. Petersen kept his engine running.

  The driver’s-side door opened and the driver got out, but in the glare of the high beams, Petersen could only see the approaching silhouette in a long overcoat, his breath visible on the cold night air. Count Dracula makes his entrance, Petersen thought wryly. Frigging scumbag.

  Petersen looked down at the armrest in his door and hit the automatic door locks, unlocking the passenger side for his guest. He turned to his right, expecting to see Bells coming around the back of his car to the passenger side, but he was startled when he saw the dark overcoat right next to him on the other side of the driver’s window. Petersen hit the button and lowered his window. He squinted and bent his head down so he could see the man’s face above the roof line.

  “I was just about to take off. What happened?”

  No answer.

  Then he saw the hand coming out of the overcoat pocket, and that other hand in his stomach squeezed hard because in that split second he sensed what was coming. The first shot sounded like a balloon popping. Petersen didn’t even hear the next two, they came so fast. He didn’t even see the gun.

  Slumped across the seats, he knew he’d been shot, but he didn’t know where. He was aware of the car door opening then, and he did feel a hand leaning on his hip, but he couldn’t move. He was all clenched up, his whole body.

  Shit, he thought, grinding his teeth. His father-in-law was really gonna bust his wife’s balls now. Shit!

  He blinked with watery eyes as the royal-blue blur of the Cookie Monster backpack was dragged over the transmission hump. He thought about going for the gun in his belt just before he blacked out.

  TWO

  3:11 A.M.

  “Bert, are you all right?”

  FBI Special Agent Cuthbert Gibbons took the icebag off his cheek and glared at his boss, Brant Ivers, over the roof of Gary Petersen’s white Mercury. “I’m fine,” he growled.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  The assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Manhattan field office just looked at him. “You look like you’re in a lot of pain, Bert. Go home if you’re not feeling well.”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  Ivers furrowed his brows as he pulled up the zipper on his tan suede jacket. He let out a sigh, and his breath materialized over his head like a dialogue balloon in the funny papers. “We have enough problems here tonight, Bert. Let’s not make it any worse, shall we? Why not just go home and see a dentist first thing in the morning? I don’t want to have to order you to go.”

  Then don’t, Gibbons thought.

  He put the icebag back on his face and held his tongue. Not because Ivers was his boss. He never had any problem telling off this aging preppy shitass. He was keeping his yap closed because his tooth was killing him, one of the back molars on the bottom. Without warning it would start hurting like a bastard. There was a dull, throbbing pain that was pretty constant, and that he could put up with, but when it started to scream—like right now—all he could do was clench up his face and bear it until it passed.

  Gibbons’s wife had told him to go to the dentist when it started to give him trouble, but he’d been too busy to take the time off. Now he wished he had listened to Lorraine. Of course, he’d never admit to her that she might have been right about something. When it came to being right, Gibbons believed that women should never be encouraged. It could just lead to other things.

  “Go home, Bert. We can handle things here.” Ivers was giving him the fatherly routine now. That was almost funny since Gibbons had at least five years on him, maybe more.

  When Gibbons didn’t answer him, Ivers switched to a motherly tone. “Now, Bert, don’t be so stubborn.”

  Gibbons tried to ignore him. He hated it when people called him “Bert” because he hated his first name, which was actually Cuthbert, and he had always hated it. He was Gibbons, just Gibbons, and he must’ve told that to Ivers at least a hundred times over the years, but he wasn’t gonna say it anymore. His tooth hurt too much, and this self-absorbed, self-promoting asshole was just too dense to get it. Besides, compared to what had gone down here tonight, Ivers’s deliberate stupidity about Gibbons’s name wasn’t worth mentioning. An agent had been shot tonight, an agent on a sensitive undercover. That was what mattered to Gibbons right now. Not his name or his tooth or his stupid boob of a boss. An agent had been shot.

  Gibbons peered through the Mercury’s passenger side window at the bloodstained seats. He stepped back to see if there was anything in the backseat, and the glass mirrored his own face. Gibbons inspected his reflection. His face was pretty swollen on one side. Didn’t make him any uglier, though. He was pretty ugly to begin with. Mostly bald, with small mean eyes. Nose like a big chili pepper hanging over thin bloodless lips. The beginnings of a baby turkey wattle starting to grow under his chin. He pulled his open shirt collar together, then let it go. He’d forgotten to grab a tie when he ran out of the house, and he always felt naked without a tie. Unlike shitass Ivers, Gibbons had come up through the ranks when J. Edgar was in charge, back in the days when FBI agents did not go anywhere without a tie, a suitcoat, shined shoes, and a hat. Wearing a tie was a habit Gibbons had
never gotten out of. It was a habit that a lot of the younger agents, particularly the undercover jockeys, had a hard time getting into. Gibbons glanced over the roof at the assistant director in charge in his crewneck sweater and wondered what his excuse was.

  Ivers was standing with the two New Jersey state troopers who had been the first ones on the scene. He looked real cute taking down notes on a clipboard in his tan suede jacket, bottle-green Shetland sweater, pressed jeans, and oxblood tassel loafers. If he didn’t have that big square head of his and that phony-looking dye job with the artfully graying temples, he’d look like a Ralph Lauren ad. What an asshole.

  Ivers was just wasting those troopers’ time with that stupid clipboard because Gibbons had already gotten all the particulars when he first got there. A trucker from South Carolina named Nelson had been asleep in his rig when he heard somebody leaning on his horn. He ran out with an aluminum baseball bat intent on bashing some Yankee head in when he found Gary Petersen slumped against his steering wheel, bleeding all over the place. The trucker ran back to his rig and called for an ambulance on his CB. Petersen was semiconscious when the trucker got back to the car. He said he opened the door and hunkered down next to the wounded man, held his hand, and kept him talking until the rescue squad got there. The trucker also said he didn’t see a soul in the parking lot when he first came out with the bat.

  Gibbons had gotten all this directly from the trucker, and he’d already told Ivers, but Ivers was the big cheese here, and he had to look like he was in charge. The clipboard was a good prop for a big cheese.

  Gibbons winced as another wave of screaming pain carved its way through his jaw. It was the kind of pain that made him think of power tools—lathes and routers and crap like that. He tilted his head back and looked straight up at the sky, holding the icebag to his face and blinking at the glare from the pole lights until it finally subsided. The damn tooth hurt like a bastard, but he had no right to complain. Not when Gary Petersen was in an emergency room, fighting for his life.