Bad Apple Page 14

  But why would she be wearing a wedding band around her neck? Did Bells give it to her? What were they, going steady? Or since it was a wedding band, maybe it was like being engaged? But if that were the case, Bells would buy her a rock, a real engagement ring. Of course, Gina was strange. She seemed to do everything against the grain. She’d never wear a rock. He could just imagine what she’d have to say about something like that. Mousse girls wear rocks, not her. Anyway, she liked antique-looking things. Wearing an antique wedding band around her neck as an engagement ring? Sure, that would be something she’d do.

  But who gave her the damn ring? Bells? She wasn’t gonna tell him if he asked. Not a chance.

  But Tozzi couldn’t help staring at the ring. It was the only thing to look at, except for some loose apples rolling around on the floor near her shoulder. He couldn’t stop thinking about her and Bells. Then as he went over the day in his mind, it all started to add up. Bells getting upset at the jewelry store because Tozzi wanted the bracelet with the purple stones for Gina. Bells flying off the handle at Macy’s when he found them together. Gina not being totally hysterical when Bells kidnapped them. (Was she thinking maybe she could reason with her fiancé?) Gina refusing to tell Tozzi anything about her relationship with Bells. And then there was the call on her answering machine. “Gina, it’s me. Gimme a call.” His voice casual and familiar, like he called there all the time—so familiar he didn’t have to be lovey-dovey on her answering machine. Couples that tight don’t make a big show of it. They’re cool about it. “Gina, it’s me. Gimme a call.”

  The more he thought about it, the angrier he became. Here he was thinking that Bells had gone ballistic because he’d figured out that he was the target of an undercover operation when in fact it was his jealousy that drove him over the edge. Christ Almighty, it was just a lovers’ quarrel gone haywire. Gibbons died because of a fucking lovers’ quarrel. Tozzi couldn’t believe it.

  “Why’d he have to kill my partner?”

  “What?”

  “Bells. Why did he have to kill my partner?” Tozzi’s jaw was tight. He was struggling not to shout.

  “How should I know why he does anything?”

  “Gibbons was the best fucking street agent the FBI ever had, the best. He was good. Even wiseguys knew he was good. That’s why they hated his guts. A shitass like Bells isn’t fit to shine Gibbons’s shoes. Gibbons was the best. The absolute fucking best! And what’d he die for? Nothing! That’s what he died for.”

  “Take it easy,” she said.

  Tozzi was yelling, and he didn’t care. There were tears in his eyes. It was sinking in: Gibbons was dead!

  “It’s not right,” Tozzi shouted. “It’s not right. Gibbons was the best. He shouldn’t have died that way. He . . . he shouldn’t . . .” Tozzi couldn’t finish his thought. He was too choked up, and he didn’t want to break down in front of her. She didn’t deserve it.

  “Hey,” she said softly, turning over on her side to face him. “Take it easy, will ya? Take some deep breaths. Calm down. You’re gonna make yourself sick.” She put her hand on his shoulder.

  Suddenly everything was turned upside-down. His skin tingled under her touch, and her sudden concern made him doubt all his suspicions about her.

  “Just breathe,” she said. “Slow breaths.”

  He nodded. “All right, all right, I’m okay, I’m fine.”

  “Good. You were acting like a real wuss for a minute there. You can’t be a real cop.”

  Her hand turned into a cockroach on his shoulder.

  “Just keep breathing, in and out, nice and slow.” She patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry. It’s gonna be all right.”

  He bit a knuckle on his free hand to keep from yelling. Bitch!

  FIFTEEN

  3:23 P.M.

  “Shhhhhh!” Lorraine leaned toward the speaker.

  “What?” Stanley turned his ear toward the speaker, his gun hand dangling between his knees. “You heard something?”

  “Is it them?” Freshy strained to hear from behind the wheel of the van.

  “Be quiet,” Lorraine snapped. “I’m trying to listen.”

  The quality of the static was changing, raising in pitch. Lorraine thought she could hear very faint voices fighting to get through. She glanced at Gibbons. He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, looking up at the speaker, still as grouchy as an old hermit crab. Lorraine didn’t even want to look at him.

  Freshy was driving up Kennedy Boulevard, the main thoroughfare in Jersey City, passing huge old Victorians and wood-frame rowhouses set high up off the street. They were heading for the Heights now. They’d swept through the brownstone streets of Hoboken after getting out of the tunnel, then went straight to Bayonne where the DeFrescos lived and cruised the avenues, hoping to pick up a transmission. Bells hung out in Bayonne sometimes, and he had a brother who lived there. Stanley thought maybe he would’ve gone there, but so far they’d gotten nothing but static. High-pitched static, low-pitched static, screaming and fuzzy static, but just static.

  Freshy zoomed through a yellow light. “I didn’t know Bells hung out on the Heights. He got a place up here?”

  Stanley just ignored the question. “Take a right.”

  “Where?” Freshy asked.

  “Anywhere. Right here. Turn here.”

  Freshy did what he was told, veering into the right lane, then making a sharp turn that made everyone in the back hold on to something. “So where’m I going, Stanley?”

  “You know Ogden Avenue?”

  “No.”

  “You know Palisades Avenue?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Odgen is one block over. It’s the street where you can see New York real good. It overlooks the bluffs. Hoboken’s right below.”

  “But, Stanley, we already tried Hoboken.”

  “Just shut up and go where I tell you.”

  Lorraine was confused. Why did Stanley want to go where there was a good view? She looked to Gibbons, but the crab’s face was paralyzed in condemnation. The man of stone. To hell with him.

  As the van wove through the back streets of the Heights, Lorraine could hear the quality of the static changing again. Now it was like a conversation between two different statics. She strained to make out words, but it was impossible.

  A sudden wash of interference startled her. Instantly she despaired that Michael was lost again, maybe forever. But then as Freshy turned the van onto a larger cross street, the conversing static returned. But it was clearer now.

  “I hear something,” Freshy yelped. “I hear something.”

  “Shut up!” Stanley barked. “Go over to Ogden.”

  Out of the sea of static, two faint voices floated to the surface.

  “You didn’t know him. To really understand, you had to know Gibbons. I’m gonna really miss him.”

  “Take some deep breaths. You’re gonna hyperventilate. I’m telling you.”

  “Forget about the deep breaths, will ya? I need my partner back. Don’t you understand? He’s the only guy I could ever work with. I don’t know what I’m gonna do now.”

  “Will you please listen to me? Take some deep breaths. You’re getting hysterical.”

  Stanley looked shocked. “What is he, crying?”

  Lorraine kept her eyes on the speaker. She had a lump in her throat. Michael could cry for Gibbons. Why couldn’t she?

  “You think you’re so tough. You don’t know what it’s like to lose someone that close to you.”

  “For your information, I do know what it’s like to lose somebody close to me. You act like you’re the only one in the world who’s ever had this happen. You’re so typical. Men think when something happens to them, it’s like the first time it’s ever happened.”

  “Do you really believe that crap? Do you know you do this all the time, with these stupid generalizations of yours? ‘Men always do this and men always do that.’ You sound like Jacques Cousteau talking about friggin’ fish.”

>   “But am I wrong?”

  “There’s no use talking to you. I might as well talk to the potatoes. You don’t want to understand anything.”

  Silence.

  “I do want to understand.”

  Static drowned out the woman’s voice.

  Freshy pulled over to the curb and slammed the transmission into park. “That phoney-baloney son of a bitch! Did you hear that crap? He’s putting the moves on my sister, goddammit. That smooth goddamn son of a bitch. He’s trying to make her feel sorry for him.”

  Stanley waved him away. “Shut up, Freshy. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The hell I don’t. He’s trying to get into my sister’s pants, that’s what he’s doing. He’s giving her a big sob story about this guy being dead.” He pointed back at Gibbons. “What a son of a bitch, I swear to Christ. You suck, Mike. You suck!” he yelled at the speaker. “Don’t listen to him, Gina.”

  Stanley shook his fist at him. “Shut the fuck up before I smack the shit out of you. I’m trying to listen.”

  Lorraine wrinkled her face, straining to hear her cousin and this woman Gina. She tried to imagine where they were. It had to be someplace private. Michael wouldn’t be so open with her otherwise. But if they were in private, where was Bells? She glanced over at Gibbons’s stony face and wondered what he was thinking. Michael could confess his feelings for Gibbons to Gina DeFresco. So why couldn’t Lorraine express hers?

  She strained to see out the passenger window in the cab. From where she was sitting, she got a glimpse of the uptown end of the Manhattan skyline. The sun was shimmering off the slanted top of the Citicorp Center. The apartment buildings on the West Side were beginning to cast long afternoon shadows. On the Jersey side of the river, the streets of well-kept brown-stones gradually gave way to warehouses, factories, and stark brick projects below the palisades on the poor side of Hoboken. Where in God’s name could Michael and Gina be? Were they safe?

  Lorraine sighed and dropped her head to her chest. Gibbons’s black wingtips shone in the dark, and she stared at them, stewing in her own guilt. She could fret so easily for Michael. Why not for Gibbons?

  The speaker crackled, and the conversing statics returned. Lorraine leaned into it, waiting for the voices to emerge, but the only thing she could make out was her cousin’s voice saying “. . . a good man . . .” Then a snowstorm of interference buried him again.

  “Drive,” Stanley ordered. “They must be near here.”

  Freshy put the van into gear and pulled away from the curb. No one said a word as they listened for another clear transmission. Lorraine looked at her husband, wondering what they’d do if they found Michael, Gina, and Bells. But then she glanced at the gun resting on Stanley’s thigh, and it dawned on her that there was very little they could do because they weren’t the hunters here.

  Gibbons was pissed and he was in pain. His head felt like it was wrapped in cotton. His chest was throbbing, and now it was really beginning to hurt. The pain-killer was wearing off, but he still felt dopey from the side effects. He tried to sit as still as possible so he wouldn’t keel over, but Freshy’s cuckoo driving didn’t make it easy. Lorraine making cow eyes at him didn’t help much either. What the hell was her problem? Things were fucked up enough without him having to worry about her feelings.

  A rain cloud of dizziness passed over him. He closed his eyes and put his hand against the wall of the van until it passed. When he opened his eyes again, Lorraine was giving him the cow eyes again. Jesus. This had to be the most fucked-up day of his entire life.

  First it was his goddamn tooth and the fact that it kept him up all night. Then there was Gary Petersen’s shooting, and having to put up with Ivers and those snotty film guys at the crime scene. Then Tony Bells shoots him in the chest and leaves him for dead in Macy’s. Then friggin’ Stanley here hijacks the surveillance van and makes him and Lorraine come along for the ride while this goddamn little piece of shit Freshy has his gun Excalibur. And on top of everything else there’s Tozzi, who usually manages to fuck things up even when he isn’t doing anything. But today he’s really outdone himself, getting kidnapped by Tony Bells, handcuffed to Freshy’s sister, and now he’s trying to make time with her. What a piece of work! Freshy was right on the money about that. Tozzi was working on her sympathies, trying to wear her down. Would serve him right if she yanked his crank right off, the stupid bastard.

  Gibbons didn’t appreciate the bullshit eulogy either. If Tozzi was really sincere about missing him and all that weepy crap, then he was a sap. But if he was just saying it to get into Gina’s pants, then he was a friggin’ dirtbag. Either way, Gibbons didn’t like being talked about that way. When you die, you die. One day you’re breathing, the next day you’re fertilizer. Just put the stiff in the ground and move on. But from the way Lorraine had been looking at him all day, he knew she wasn’t gonna see it that way when he kicked the bucket. She was gonna blubber and cry and carry on, just like all her other goddamn Italian relatives. You can always count on guineas to turn a funeral into a circus. They love it when people die. Gives ’em an excuse to act up.

  Then something suddenly occurred to Gibbons. Why do people always assume that the husband will go before the wife? He wasn’t that much older than Lorraine.

  “Whatta’ya doing?” Tozzi’s voice suddenly crackled through the speaker. “Leave it on.”

  “No. I don’t want it,” Gina said.

  “Don’t be stupid. Leave it on.”

  “I don’t like it. It makes me itch.”

  “Leave it on. You have to wear it. You’ll get sick.”

  “I’m not gonna—”

  Freshy slammed on the brakes and whipped around in his seat. “I can’t believe this. My own sister! My mother would die if she ever heard this. What the fuck’re you doin’, Gina?” He shook his hands at the sky.

  Stanley scowled. “What’re you talking about?”

  “What’m I talking about? Can’t you fucking hear? He’s wearing a rubber, and she’s taking it off ’cause she says it itches. She’s so stupid, that sister of mine. No fucking brains. None.”

  Stanley wasn’t paying any attention to Freshy. He was staring out the window and pulling on his lower lip. Gibbons wondered what the hell he was doing, taking in the view? Stanley turned around then, his mouth a long flat line across that big jaw of his. “Freshy,” he said. “Go to the Belfry.”

  Freshy whipped around in his seat again. He looked like someone had just told him his mother had died. “The Belfry! Why there? Bells wouldn’t go there unless—”

  “Shut up.” Stanley cut him short.

  “But, Stanley—”

  “Drive. We’ll just cruise by and see if they’re there.”

  Freshy turned back around and gave it some gas. “Bells wouldn’t take them there,” he fretted under his breath. “Not there.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

  Gibbons’s voice croaked from nonuse. “What’s the Belfry?”

  Lorraine and Stanley looked at him as if he’d just risen from the dead. Freshy was going bug-eyed in the rearview mirror.

  “Freshy, what’s the Belfry?”

  Stanley answered. “It’s nothin’.”

  “Gibbons, are you all right?” Lorraine asked.

  “I’m fine. Freshy, what’s the Belfry?”

  Freshy’s googly eyes were rolling all over the mirror. “Ah . . . it’s, ah . . . nothing really.”

  Gibbons wished the little shit would watch the goddamn road. Freshy made a sharp turn onto an old cobblestone road with a steep decline, and the tires thumped like crazy on the cobblestones. They were heading down into Hoboken. When the street leveled out and the pavement went back to blacktop, Freshy hung a left onto one of the narrow one-way streets that make up Hoboken’s grid. They sailed past run-down tenements and burnt-out brick buildings, seedy-looking corner bodegas, dangerous-looking bars, and car repair shops housed in cramped little garages where half the work was
done out on the curb. This was the other side of Hoboken, not the gentrified part near the river, where all the brownstones had been renovated and the kids from the suburbs had fistfights with the locals on Saturday nights for parking spaces near the rock clubs and upscale gin mills. This was the tough part of town, the real part of town, the part where the guy who steals your Lexus goes to find a chop shop so he can score some crack.

  Tozzi lived in Hoboken, right on the borderline between the two sections. That figured. The guy never could make up his mind about where he belonged. Gibbons knew where he belonged, though. A padded cell, that’s where.

  As Freshy headed north, he passed a housing project where young mothers watched their preschoolers in a fenced-off playground while young bums hung out in the asphalt courtyard looking for trouble. Gibbons noticed that the hissing had stopped coming out of the speaker. He knew it hadn’t gone dead, though. The static would’ve been deafening if it had. Nobody was saying anything. Tozzi and Gina were being quiet, as hard as that was to believe.

  “C’mon, don’t take it off. Leave it on,” Tozzi said. The transmission was very clear now.

  “I don’t want it. I told you, it itches,” Gina said. “You wear it.”

  “What the—?” Freshy caught Gibbons’s eye in the rearview mirror.

  “Wear it, I’m telling you. You’ve got a hard head just like your brother.”

  “Screw you, Tozzi!”

  “Shhh.” Lorraine scowled at Freshy.

  “Don’t talk about my brother. You used him. You took advantage of my brother.”

  “That’s right. You tell him, Gina.”

  “Shut up!” Stanley yelled.

  “No, no, no, no, no. You’ve got it all wrong. Freshy’s the one who takes advantage. Freshy watches out for Freshy first. That’s why he decided to work with us in the first place.”