Bad Apple Page 18

  He shrugged, resigned. “You just didn’t give a shit about me.” He was trying to get the last word in.

  She pushed the hair out of her face with a quick swipe and put her glasses back on. “You expect me to believe this?”

  “Yes.”

  “You really . . . felt something for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not just that Sunday. I mean, afterward.”

  “Yes!”

  “You were thinking in terms of a relationship? Something that could lead to something sort of permanent?”

  “Yes!”

  “Really?”

  “Yes!”

  “Then prove it. If I’m gonna die tonight, I want to make love one more time, and for once in my life I want to know for sure that it’s for real.” She was trembling deep in her chest.

  “You’re not gonna die tonight, Gina. Get that out of your head.”

  “Don’t try to comfort me. You’re not my father, goddamn it. Just put up or shut up. Unless everything you just said is a load.”

  “It’s not a load. I meant everything I said.” His face was red. His deep-set eyes were smoking.

  “Then kiss me. Make love to me. I want to know that I was really loved at least once in my life.” She was staring into his eyes, her hand clenched around his belt. She was serious.

  “But—”

  No fucking buts, she thought as she put her face in his and kissed him, hard, like a bite. His free hand found its way to her back, then to the back of her neck. She pulled at his belt, grinding her lips into his face, afraid that she’d hear the elevator coming back, and that would be the end of everything.

  He turned his head to the side to escape her kiss. “Slow down,” he said. “Take it easy.”

  “I can’t. Not enough time.” Her throat was constricted. She felt teary, but she wasn’t going to cry, not now. She tilted her head back, reaching out for his lips with hers.

  He pulled her closer, his hand on her back again. He started nuzzling her neck. But he was being too tender. She didn’t want tender. She wanted fire. She squirmed to get to his lips again.

  “Don’t you at least wanna take off your glasses?” he asked.

  “No. I wanna see what I’m doing this time.”

  “Oh.”

  She found his lips and grabbed the back of his head, gripping the hair in her fingers. She wasn’t going to let him go. She didn’t want him to see the tears.

  It was dark when Tozzi opened his eyes. The streetlights outside threw a cold greenish glow into the loft. Gina was staring at him, her glasses shining in the shadows. He must’ve dozed off.

  “Sorry,” he said, clearing his throat.

  “For what?”

  “Falling asleep.”

  She didn’t answer, but he thought she might have shrugged. It was hard to tell with her arm stretched out above her head.

  Her blouse was buttoned, and her pants were on. He started working on his own zipper, putting himself back together, which wasn’t easy with one hand. She reached over and helped him with the button on his pants. She didn’t seem to be mad or anything, which he’d half-expected. But there was no reason for her to be mad. Not if she’d felt the same thing he had. Maybe it was the handcuffs or the thought that this could be the last time he’d ever have sex again, or possibly it was the excitement of doing it when Bells could come back at any moment, but making love to Gina DeFresco was beyond belief. He’d gone to heaven before with a woman, but this time he saw God.

  Too bad she didn’t really like him. That would’ve made it even better.

  After his shirttails were tucked in, he reached over and touched her cheek, hooking the loose strands of hair behind her ear so he could see her face better.

  “Will you do me one favor?” she said. Her voice was low and husky.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t say you love me.”

  “Why?”

  “Just don’t say it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to hear it.”

  “What if I really mean it?”

  “You only think you mean it. That’s why I don’t want to hear it.”

  Tozzi felt her hair in his fingers. “You’re something else, you know that?”

  “Stop. You’re warming up to say it, and I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t mean anything. Men are always in love after they get laid. They’re like dogs. Dogs are so good when you feed them. The rest of the time they just pee on the rug.”

  Tozzi let go of her hair.

  “Nothing against you in particular, Mike. You are what you are. You can’t help it.”

  His jaw tightened. She was ruining what had just been the most incredible sexual experience of his entire life. She was doing it on purpose. She couldn’t just enjoy it for what it was. No, she had to put her spin on it. She couldn’t just shut up and at least let him believe that in the last hours of his life he’d finally found love. Or the beginning of what could have been love. Or—

  Shit. She was making him as loony as she was.

  She lifted her head and shifted her position so that she was up on her elbow. “What do you think happened to Bells?” She wasn’t talking softly now, which pissed Tozzi off. She was finished with the sex part obviously.

  Tozzi tilted his wristwatch toward the light. “He’s been gone, what? About two hours?”

  “How long does it take to buy tape?” She sounded like she was anxious to get this show on the road. They’d done the sex—let’s get going with the violence.

  Tozzi thought about Bells turning into a bat. “Maybe he has to wait for the moon to come up.”

  “Bells doesn’t wait for anything. You heard him.” She was sullen and resentful, almost talking to herself. “The selfish bastard does whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Always.”

  Tozzi wondered if this was first-hand knowledge. He was dying to know what the hell her relationship with Bells was, but he knew he wasn’t going to get a good answer if he asked. And right now, he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know. The gold wedding band around her neck glimmered dully in the greenish light. Tozzi had a feeling he might not like the truth about them. He balled his fist and yanked on the chain in frustration.

  “Will you stop doing that? You’re gonna pull my arm out of the socket. It doesn’t do any good.”

  Tozzi stared up at the chain. It was shinier than the wedding band. He wondered how much slack there was. Twenty inches? Thirty inches? It was hard to tell. His eyes slid down to Gina’s waist.

  “Let’s try something.” He started to pull the coat through the loop. “See if you can squeeze through the chain.”

  “What?”

  “Like this.” He pulled the coat all the way through so that it was all on his side. “Try to get through the loop. So we can get outta here.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She knew. She was just giving him grief.

  Tozzi spoke to her as if she were a five-year-old. “See this chain right here, the big chain on the radiator? It’s just a loop around the pipe and the handcuff chain. Try to thread your whole body through the loop.”

  “Why don’t you thread your body through the loop?”

  Tozzi was getting impatient with her. She was just being obstinate. “I’m too big. I won’t fit. You might fit, though. What’ve you got, a twenty-eight-inch waist?”

  “Twenty-six.” She was insulted.

  “Great. It should be a piece of cake.”

  “And what about my hips. They’re . . . bigger.”

  “They’re not that big. You’ve got nice hips.”

  “Listen, I’ve got a huge can and I know it, so don’t lie to me. Just forget about it. I won’t fit.”

  Tozzi rolled his eyes. Now he had to be her goddamn psychiatrist. “Gina, there’s nothing wrong with your hips. They’re in perfect proportion to the rest of you. Just give it a try. You’ll fit through. Try it.�
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  “You’re just saying that.”

  “I am not just saying that. You have a beautiful body.”

  “No, I don’t. My tits are too small, and I have a rear end like an elephant.”

  Tozzi squeezed his eyes shut and counted to ten. “Gina, do you want to die?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then do something to save yourself. Try to wiggle through the chain. You can do it.”

  “You didn’t say wiggle before. See, you do think I have a big can. Liar.”

  “I’m getting mad now, Gina. Just give it a try.”

  She frowned up at the chain above her head. “The radiator’s hot. I’ll get burned.”

  “It’s not that hot.”

  “What if Bells comes back? He’ll go nuts if he catches us trying to escape.”

  “Gina, he’s gonna kill us anyway. What else can he do to us?”

  She frowned at the chain again. She was out of excuses. “I’m too big,” she muttered. “It won’t work.”

  “Just try.”

  “The chain’s not big enough.”

  “Take off your pants.”

  “What?”

  “Pull down your pants. You’re wearing those silk satin panties. If it gets a little tight, the panties will help you slide through.”

  “They’re not silk. They’re polyester.”

  “Whatever. They’re slippery.” Tozzi was losing his patience.

  She looked up at the chain again. “All right. But you’ll see. I won’t fit.”

  “Try,” he whispered.

  She clasped her hands together and started to wiggle and squirm, snaking her way through the chain. Tozzi held the back of her thigh, guiding her through.

  “Don’t push,” she said.

  She worked her shoulders through the loop and shimmied until the chain was around her waist. That part went much faster than Tozzi had expected. She must’ve been right about her tits. She kept shimmying, but she didn’t make much progress.

  “See? I told you I wouldn’t fit.”

  Tozzi reached for the button on her pants, but she slapped his hand away.

  “I’ll do it.” She was gonna be modest now.

  She unbuttoned her slacks and pulled down the zipper. Tozzi pulled them down around her knees.

  “This pipe is hot,” she complained.

  Tozzi touched it. It was hot, but not that bad. “Hurry up and you won’t get burned.”

  “Yeah, like you really care a lot.”

  “You wanna die like Margie?”

  She glowered at him. “Don’t talk about Margie.” She got her hands to her waist and started to push down on the chain as if she were trying to work her way out of a tight girdle.

  “That’s it,” Tozzi encouraged her. “If you got your shoulders through, you’ll get your hips through.”

  “Says who?”

  “That’s what they say about babies when they’re born.”

  “Shut up about babies!”

  Tozzi was stung by her sudden anger. What’d he do wrong now? He wasn’t about to ask her, though. Not now. She was almost through.

  “You’re almost there,” he whispered. “Keep going, keep going.”

  She was straining and grunting, and it looked like she’d cleared one hip.

  “I’m stuck,” she said. “I’m stuck! It hurts!”

  “Don’t panic. Just keep going. You’re almost there.”

  “But the chain’s digging into me.”

  “Keep going.”

  “But—”

  Thunk!

  They both heard it, and they both froze. The elevator.

  “It’s him!” she hissed.

  “Keep going. Hurry up.”

  Thunk!

  “Oh, shit!” Her face was as tight as a knot.

  So was Tozzi’s stomach.

  NINETEEN

  8:13 P.M.

  Gibbons was trying not to stare at Lorraine, but it was hard not to. It was just too weird. He winced against the mounting pain in his tooth as he took another sip of his scotch. He looked down at Lorraine’s drink sitting on the bar. She was having a scotch, too, which was not like her at all. But that wasn’t the weird part. The weird part was that he was sitting here in this dive, drinking scotch with his wife, a Princeton University history professor who usually only drank white wine and never very much at that, and she was talking to a stripper, that young kid behind the bar in the stacked heels and bikini bottom and nothing else. And what was even weirder was what they were talking about: some guy named Boethius, a philosopher from the Middle Ages.

  Gibbons stared blankly at the rows of bottles behind the bar. Maybe the bulletproof vest hadn’t saved him that morning. Maybe he really was dead. Maybe this was the lounge act for hell. It was just too weird.

  The stripper was leaning on her elbows, flipping through a yellow paperback edition of something called The Consolation of Philosophy by this guy Boethius. She had a cute jet-black Dutch-boy haircut that fell forward over her cheeks as she looked down at the book. Her boobs were dangling down over the bar. They were cute, too. He wondered whether Lorraine had noticed that the kid wasn’t wearing anything. She had a way of being oblivious to certain things. When she’d spotted the book on a chair behind the bar, Lorraine couldn’t help asking who was reading it. The Middle Ages was her period, after all, and when the stripper told her she was reading it for a lit class she had to take, Lorraine’s teacher mode kicked right in, and she started unloading everything she knew about this Boethius guy. The kid was eating it up. She knew she was getting a hand-feeding, and Gibbons was willing to bet that Lorraine’s words were gonna find their way onto this kid’s final.

  Gibbons checked the place out. Two old geezers were down at the other end of the bar, clutching drafts and ignoring each other. There must’ve been some customers in the back room because the bartender had brought a tray of drinks back there a little while ago, but Gibbons hadn’t actually seen anyone. It was a good thing the patrons were more interested in drinking than seeing the show. Lorraine’s lecture had stopped the action. Philosophy and T&A don’t exactly mix.

  “So Boethius was really that important,” the kid was saying. “I couldn’t figure out why our professor had us reading him. He’s a little on the boring side.”

  Lorraine took a quick sip of her scotch. “Boethius is very important. He was the main disseminator of Platonic thought in Western Europe.”

  The kid’s eyes widened between the wings of her haircut. “Our professor never told us that.” She had one of those sweet, ingenuous voices that reminded Gibbons of girls who wore bulky turtlenecks and corduroy skirts out in the sun. Not g-strings by the cool blue light of a jukebox.

  “The works of Plato were unknown to Europe in the Middle Ages. The Arab world knew Plato, and it was through Arab interpreters of Plato that Boethius formulated his philosophy. If it weren’t for him, the importance of Plato and his followers might never have influenced Western thought. And can you imagine what would’ve happened then?”

  Gibbons’s eyes slid toward his wife over the rim of his glass. A world without Plato. Perish the thought.

  He gritted his teeth in a grin of pain as a flurry of throbs shot through his jaw. He flipped his wrist over to look at his watch, then glanced at the front door. He’d called in to the field office for the fourth time a half-hour ago, and they gave him the same old shit: Stay put, men are on the way. It had been almost three hours since Buddha Stanzione threw him and Lorraine out of the surveillance van and left them on the street. You’d think Ivers would’ve sent some guys right out, pronto, considering the situation. Well, they could take their goddamn time now. The trail was stone cold. Bells might’ve been in the area three hours ago, but he was long gone by now. They could count on that. Gibbons drained his glass and motioned to the scurvy-looking barkeep to do him again.

  Lorraine pointed at her empty glass, too, but she didn’t miss a beat with the kid. She just kept on yapping. “I’m sure
your lit professor told you about the Wheel of Fortune. Fate personified as a woman? Lady Luck, she’s sometimes called. She’s often portrayed wearing a huge wheel on her body with tiny mortals caught in the spokes. The ones at the top of the wheel are joyous, while the ones at the bottom are in misery. Chaucer spoke of the Wheel of Fortune in several of his poems, if I remember correctly. Well, this popularization of human fate being cyclical and out of the individual’s control comes directly from Boethius.”

  The stripper nodded, raven hair bouncing like the beautiful Breck girl. She was taking down notes on cocktail napkins. A small stack was piling up on the bar. Gibbons still couldn’t believe this—Lorraine oblivious to the whole scene here, acting like this kid with the nice gazongas was one of her students and this was her office down at Princeton. Maybe this was how she was dealing with the whole trauma thing. First she sees him getting shot, then she sees Tozzi getting kidnapped, then she gets kidnapped herself—maybe this was like denial for her. Still, it was very weird. Never in a million years would he have thought he’d ever see his wife in a place called Joey’s Starlight Lounge. Never.

  Gibbons glanced at his watch again. What the hell was taking them so long? Apprehending Bells was supposed to be top priority. Two agents—no, three if you counted him—had been assaulted by this guy in less than twenty-four hours, and this is the kind of response you get? Frigging Bells had shot him and left him for dead. Same with Petersen, and for all Gibbons knew, Petersen might have croaked in the hospital sometime today. And Tozzi? Well . . .

  He looked down at the bar in front of him, and as if by magic, a fresh drink was sitting there, waiting for him. He picked it up, took a long sip, and basted his bad tooth in liquor for a while before he swallowed. He’d been trying not to think about Tozzi because he didn’t like what common sense was telling him was most likely true. If Bells had had no compunction about taking nearly point-blank shots at FBI agents twice today, what was he gonna do with the one who was actually wearing a wire on him, the one he had handcuffed like a prisoner on a chain gang? It was time to face reality. Tozzi could be dead.

  Gibbons stared down into the amber liquid in his glass, and the bar and the jukebox and the kid with the tits and even Lorraine flew out into the stratosphere, leaving him alone in an empty black hole, just him and the bartop and what was left of his scotch. Tozzi dead. He felt like pulling into himself and grabbing onto whatever he could. Tozzi dead. Things wouldn’t be the same. He wouldn’t be able to work anymore. Couldn’t deal with a new partner and wouldn’t last ten minutes on a desk job. Tozzi dead. Lorraine would be different. She’d blame him, blame the Bureau, which would amount to the same thing. Tozzi dead. It could never be the same. None of it. Nothing. Tozzi dead. Just pull back and hang on to what’s left.