Bad Guys Read online

  He leaned over the expansive pearl-gray leather seats of the Lincoln Town Car and tapped on the horn to get the blonde’s attention. “Yo! Honey babes!” he yelled through the closed window. “How’ja like some salami?”

  The blaring horn turned heads on the bus, including the blonde’s. She reminded Vinnie of a young Joan Rivers, a pinched fox face with heavy makeup. Not bad, he’d had worse.

  Like everyone else on the bus, she squinted to see through the dark-tinted windows of the black Lincoln swerving alongside the bus.

  Vinnie Clams laughed and snorted, delighted that he’d gotten a rise out of the blonde. He waved goodbye to her, then hauled himself back up behind the wheel. He had business to attend to.

  The hood of the Lincoln sparkled in the late-afternoon haze as it sped up the ramp that connected with Route 3. Vinnie was in a very good mood because he felt insulated from the world. It was hot and sticky outside, but the whispering whoosh of the air conditioner kept him nice and cool. Untouched, clean. Get a job where you keep your hands clean, they always said back in the old neighborhood. Truer words were never spoken.

  The Lincoln zipped under the big sign that announced the New Jersey Turnpike turnoff, veering around a jacked-up Chevy Nova flying the Puerto Rican flag from its antenna.

  “Fuckin’ spics,” Vinnie Clams muttered appreciatively. If it weren’t for spics and niggers and jooches, his hands wouldn’t be so clean. But they could be cleaner, and in a few months, if things worked out, they would be.

  A cassette was sticking out of the customized Blaupunkt stereo system the Clam had installed. He pushed the tape in and instantly Olivia Newton-John was singing to him from six speakers Physical. It was the only tape he kept in the car, and that was the only song on the tape he really liked.

  Spotting a pothole in the road up ahead, Vinnie Clams aimed for it on purpose. The front left tire hit hard, and Vinnie frowned at the soft thud he heard. He glanced down at the odometer. Seventeen thousand miles and the suspension’s already shot. A few scratches on the doors, too. It was time for a new car, maybe a Seville this time or a Mercedes. If they’re not too cramped up front. But what the fuck? After this pickup, he could spring for a stretch limo—easy. The Clam smiled.

  Vinnie Clams believed that the secret of his success was caution, and even though it went against his better judgment to jinx himself by getting cocky, he couldn’t help himself today. This was his biggest score to date, three hundred grand, cash. The smile stretched wider across his meaty lips. He’d come a long way from the days of selling nickel bags to high-school kids in Washington Square Park.

  As Vinnie saw it, the turning point in his life came three years earlier when he was busted on a relatively minor possessions charge. Normally his lawyer would have plea-bargained the charge down to a fine plus probation, but that goddamn eager-beaver assistant DA wouldn’t play ball. In his closing argument the asshole made Vinnie sound like some kind of child molester, and that old bastard of a judge sentenced him to six months upstate. When you’re five foot seven and you weigh two sixty-five, sharing an eight-by-ten cell is no fucking fun. By the time Vinnie was let out, he’d lost thirty-seven pounds and swore to God that he’d never ever see the inside of a goddamn jail cell again.

  Just thinking about that prison cell made him panicky. A day didn’t go by that he didn’t remember sitting in that cell, heaving and wheezing for air, promising himself over and over that he was through with penny-ante shit. He would tell himself every single day that when he got out, he’d work big drug deals for big payoffs. It would be less work and he’d be off the streets. He swore that he’d never get caught with shit on the street again. He’d learned his lesson. It was stupid even to be in the vicinity of a dope deal . . . not when you can get someone else to do it.

  The Clam’s plan wasn’t original; it was more or less traditional in his line of work, the established way a street pusher works his way up. A junkie will kiss his connection’s ass, lick it clean, then lap up the turd off his shoes, just as long as he gets his fix. All of Vinnie Clams’s regular customers were like that. So like many others before him, Vinnie Clams figured that he could take advantage of this available labor pool and form a small company of very loyal bagmen, whom he would pay with quality dope. There was only one problem with this: Vinnie Clams worked for the Mistretta family, and Mr. Mistretta, like a few of the other New York bosses, had these stupid old-world ideas about honor and decency. Vinnie thought the old man’s rules were crazy. It was okay to sell dope to dealers; Mistretta just didn’t want his people directly involved with the street action. The families considered selling dope directly to the junkies “nigger business,” even though they handled better than sixty percent of all the dope sold in Harlem.

  Sitting in jail, the Clam had worried that this would be a problem, but by the time he got out things were different. It was a whole new ballgame. After Richie Varga everything was different. It was incredible. The families had made Varga a prince, but the guy ended up screwing them all. What balls! Turned state’s witness and fried their asses. When the Clam got out, the families were in chaos, their people scattered, their power just about gone. And with all the capi di capi either in jail or about to go, New York belonged to the small-timers, guys like Vinnie Clams. When Varga’s testimony ruined the families, things really started to percolate in New York. Before long, disorganized crime swept through the city like a plague. And it was still going strong.

  But for guys like Vinnie Clams, the disruption of the families was both good and bad. Sure, it freed him to operate the way he wanted to without all that outdated Code of Honor bullshit, but without the backing of the Mistrettas, he had nothing to start up with, no connections, no cash, no credit, nothing. So with no family affiliation, Vinnie Clams found himself out on the street again, an ex-con scrounging around his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, Gravesend, fencing hot VCRs and TVs. But that’s when he got a call from a certain interested party, someone who wanted to invest in Vinnie Clams’s drug expertise, someone who was getting in touch with a lot of the poor schlumps who were left high and dry without the families.

  This interested party told Vinnie that he was taking in the best men left from the three families so that he could start up his own family. He told Vinnie that he could put him in touch with reliable suppliers and that he could provide him with seed money, just as long as he pledged his allegiance and, of course, agreed to cut the new family in for a piece of his action. He told the Clam that if things worked out, down the line there might even be something better for him in the organization, something safe without so much risk, like gasoline hustling or insurance scams. That certain interested someone was Uncle Sam’s little rat, Richie Varga, who said he was going to run the whole thing by remote control from the Justice Department’s Witness Security Program. It was fucking beautiful. The Clam heard opportunity knocking, and he accepted Varga’s offer gratefully.

  With the seed money he got from Varga, Vinnie bought himself some inventory—cocaine, heroin, dust, crack—both to sell and to pay the help with. The Clam set himself up in a newly renovated apartment building on Lafayette Street in lower Manhattan, a building full of upwardly mobile types, people with small noses and good posture, the kind of people Vinnie hated. It was a very good place to be, though, because it was convenient to his men working the streets in the East Village and on the Bowery. All Vinnie did was sit on the couch, set up the deals on the phone, give his junkies their assignments, then collect the profits. His only afternoon chore was making out the “payroll,” measuring out what he felt his employees deserved for their labors—he even doled the shit out in brown payroll envelopes—rewarding some guys with purer doses, punishing the ones who got out of line by stepping on their dope a few more times than he normally would. Now and then a bagman would OD on him, but so what? The way Vinnie figured, the average dope fiend normally doesn’t have a very long life expectancy, and who gives a fuck about a junkie anyway? Besides, there was always an unlimi
ted supply of applicants drooling all over themselves for an entry-level position in his company.

  And yet, with all the money he had coming in, Vinnie Clams was still nervous. He had it easy, sure, and he was making it up the wazoo, but he still had nightmares about being locked up in that cell. He knew that no matter how cautious he was, there was always a good chance that he could go back there—and for a whole lot longer than six months. He knew that the only way to eliminate that risk was to stop handling shit altogether. That’s when he decided to promote a few of his junkies and make them handle all the dope.

  Ramon Gonsalves, for example, was a coke freak and his best bagman. He ran a small bodega on Avenue C and sold shit out of the store, which kept him going, since not even his own spic neighbors would buy the rotten plantains those people eat, not from that pigsty. But despite his crummy store, Ramon was okay and Vinnie Clams trusted him. But he didn’t trust him enough to handle a sizable portion of his inventory. Not yet. The Clam needed some insurance first.

  Ramon had a family: Teresa, his wife, and two kids, Ramon Jr. and Wanda, ages eleven and nine. Vinnie Clams started getting chummy with the Gonsalves family. He’d drop by with a couple of six-packs and throw little parties behind the bodega, meet the kids after school and give them rides home in his big Lincoln. The Clam soon found out that like their old man, the kids liked to get high too. He’d slip them joints regularly, and after a while he started adding angel dust to the weed. Within a month, Ramon Jr. and Wanda had developed quite a taste for the stuff, a real craving. As for Teresa, she was an easy mark. An ex-heroin addict struggling to stay clean? Come on. The Clam just showed up with the horse one afternoon when Ramon was out, and Teresa was all ready to ride again.

  Now with his whole family hooked on dope, Ramon had no choice but to play it straight with Vinnie Clams. The Clam made it clear that if Ramon fucked around with the inventory, he’d cut them right off, leave the four of them high and dry. Ramon wasn’t dumb; he figured out that altogether his family had something like a twelve-hundred-dollar-a-day habit. They needed Vinnie Clams bad. So when the Clam called him up and told him to go to a meet, Ramon did it. And when Vinnie Clams told him to stash the cash at a certain drop, Ramon did that too.

  That’s why Vinnie Clams was on his way to the Meadowlands right now. To make a pickup from one of Ramon’s regular drops, a very nice pickup, which was a just little overdue, as Mr. Varga had reminded him the other day.

  The Lincoln crested a rise in the highway, and like magic, the three massive structures that make up the Meadowlands sports complex appeared on the horizon: Byrne Arena, where the Nets and the Devils play, the racetrack, and Giants Stadium. Vinnie Clams fixed his gaze on the stadium and unconsciously gave the Lincoln a little more gas.

  Turning off the highway, the Clam scanned the endless parking lots that surround the Meadowlands. They were empty except for the cars parked in the employee sections. He guided the Lincoln around the ribbons of service roads that led to the stadium and headed for the far end of Lot W. Swinging the long car around, he abruptly threw it into reverse and backed up to the concrete barrier where the lot ended and the tall reeds of the wetlands began. Vinnie Clams never liked to walk too far.

  Examining the shifting cattails in the rearview mirror, the Clam decided that they’d grown at least another two feet since he’d last been here a couple of months ago. He pushed the door open and wedged his big belly out from under the tilt steering wheel, rolling out of the cool car into the oppressive heat. He coughed up some phlegm, slammed the door shut, and spat. “Fuck.”

  He pulled a crumpled handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his face as he peered across the lot to get his bearings. Two, three, four, five, six, seven—he mentally counted the lampposts from the right-hand corner of the lot—eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Lucky seven times two. He squinted and showed his teeth, then stuck the handkerchief over the sweaty flab under his chins as he walked toward the fourteenth lamppost.

  He stepped carefully over the low concrete barrier and minced down the embankment with his arms outstretched like a tightrope walker. His heart was pounding when he got to the bottom. “You need a fuckin’ machete down here.”

  There were reed stalks everywhere, crowding him like prison bars. And mosquitoes and flies, the big black ones that bite. The fat man got excited and started swatting at the reeds, fighting to make room. Shit . . . where the fuck is it? He looked all around, but nothing looked familiar. Maybe I counted wrong . . . shit. His breathing became short; he wanted out of there fast. But then he spotted a path of recently broken reeds, and his panic subsided. The oil drum, Ramon’s path to the oil drum.

  Vinnie Clams headed down the path, fearless now. He could see it in his mind. That rusty old oil drum half-buried in the wet dirt, the rim jutting out like an iceberg on the water. His greed got there before he did. Just reach around through the rusted-out side and he’d feel it. A Hefty bag, a heavy-duty Hefty bag full of cash—Madonn’! Vinnie Clams was running now, light-footed for a fat man, his feet barely leaving an impression on the soft, moist earth.

  I’m coming to get you, baby, I am here for the—

  Up ahead a lean muscular figure glanced over his shoulder and looked at the fat man. The back of his black T-shirt was tiger-striped by the reeds.

  The Clam stopped dead in his tracks. “Hey! What the fuck’re you doing here?”

  Tozzi stared at Vinnie Clams, his eyes dark shadows under the ridge of his brow. “I’m taking a piss,” he said indignantly. “What’re you doing here?”

  The Clam looked down. The fucker was pissing on the oil drum! Pissing on the cash!

  Tozzi didn’t move, but he kept his eyes on Vinnie Clams, waiting for an answer.

  The Clam felt stupid and obvious. He had to say something so he wouldn’t look so suspicious. “I’m taking a piss too,” he said.

  “So take a piss.”

  Vinnie Clams didn’t like the way he said that. He didn’t like this guy at all. And besides the fact that he was standing right over the oil drum and pissing on it, there was something vaguely familiar about this asshole. Vinnie Clams had a feeling he knew this guy from somewhere.

  Reluctantly the Clam turned his back on him, unzipped his fly, and pulled out his dick, trying to remember where he knew this guy from. He started to relieve himself and then it suddenly dawned on him—those pictures Varga had sent him a long time ago!—and he peed on his shoe. This guy’s a fucking fed! One of those two FBI guys who were on his ass all last winter trying like crazy to get something on him. Damn, he’d thought they’d given up on him. Goddamn.

  The Clam didn’t move. Slowly he reached into the side pocket of his jacket for his gun. Sweat was running into his eyes. Son-of-a-bitch.

  Vinnie Clams clicked the safety as he turned, leveling the small automatic at—

  Where the fuck—? The guy was gone.

  The Clam quickly dropped down on one knee and stuck his hand into the oil drum. Empty. The humid smell of the fed’s piss was in his face and on his hand. Vinnie Clams stood up and angrily wiped his hand on his pants.

  “Where are you, you cocksucker!”

  The reeds stared back at him, whispering in the stagnant breeze, closing in on him again. He thought he heard something to his right and squeezed off two quick shots. Then he listened. The reeds were still talking about him.

  Heart pounding, he barreled through the overgrowth, hoping to find the bastard doubled over holding his bleeding gut. But there was nothing. The Clam wheezed and coughed, gazing bug-eyed all around him. Nothing but those fucking reeds.

  “Yo! Fat man! Over here!”

  Vinnie Clams fired wild and ran even though he wasn’t sure where the voice was coming from. “Where are you, you rat bastard? Where’s my money?”

  The Clam ran hard, thinking about all that cash in a big pile on the living-room carpet in his very air-conditioned apartment, trying very hard to ignore the pain that seared through his ches
t. He fired again without thinking. Then suddenly he saw something flying over his head. The green Hefty bag sailed through the sky in a high arc and then disappeared in the reeds.

  Vinnie Clams went after the money, thinking about Richie Varga’s warning about being late, thinking about those two dogs of his. “Get away from that garbage bag, you fucker! Just clear out, you hear me!” He thought he was shouting, but his voice was little more than a hoarse whisper.

  He plunged through the reeds, then slipped and fell, dropping his gun. The Clam was wheezing and wincing as he hauled himself up, grabbed the gun, and kept on running and running. All he found, though, were more reeds.

  Jesus Christ Almighty! I need that cash. People got to be paid. Varga wants his cut. Shit, fuck, piss—“I want that dough, man,” he said. A terrifying image flashed through his mind—the empty eye sockets of three heads on a silver platter—and panic filled his gut.

  The Clam swatted furiously at the reeds, his throat constricting, the pain like a crowbar being bent around his chest. Suddenly a sharp pain spiked his lower back. It wasn’t until he was down on the ground that he realized he’d been kicked from behind.

  “It’s all over, fat man.”

  Fucking wiseass, Vinnie Clams thought as he rolled over, ready to blow the fucker’s head off, but suddenly a lightning bolt went through the Clam’s chest and his hands went numb. His eyes shot open, and a purple-blue tongue was trying to jump out of his mouth. His vision blurred. He didn’t recognize the black hole of the muzzle right in front of his face.

  “Oh, no, Clams. You can’t have a heart attack on me now,” Tozzi said. He hauled Vinnie Clams to his feet by the lapels as if he were a featherweight. “No, that’s much too kind for a slime like you.”