Bad Apple Page 23

  Freshy appealed to Buddha. “I know how I can do it. I really do. If Bells is with Tozzi, I can find him.”

  “How?” Buddha’s face turned sour.

  “The transmitter thing Tozzi’s wearing. I can track ’em in the FBI van, find out where they are, sneak up on Bells, and—”

  “No one sneaks up on Bells.” Stanley was absolutely certain about that.

  “Oh, no, no, no, I will, I will. Don’t worry about that, Stanley. I’ll get up right behind him, real quiet, and I’ll stick this gun right in the back of his head, and I won’t wait. No way. I’ll do it fast. Ba-da-boom. I’ll blow him away. Clean. One shot. Right through the brain. Before he can do anything.”

  Gibbons’s chest felt squeezed again. All of a sudden the pickup truck had a cow in the back.

  Lorraine’s eyes were wild. Did she suddenly notice that Gibbons was in distress? Oh, Jesus, he hoped not. He didn’t want her to worry.

  Freshy was smiling like a maniac, sweat pouring off his face. “I wanna make my bones, Mr. Stanzione. I wanna get made some day. Let me make my bones now. I’ll do this for you, Mr. Stanzione. I will. I’ll get Bells for you. Then someday when—I mean if the time comes, I’ll be all set because I already killed for you.”

  A sour Edward G. Robinson expression was frozen on Buddha’s face. He looked up at Stanley. “What the hell’s he talking about?”

  Stanley raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “He’s a wackarino, Mr. Stanzione. What can I tell you?”

  “Drop your weapons,” Jimmy Olson said again, but nobody paid any attention. It was only to convince himself that he was doing something useful.

  “Gibbons?” Lorraine knew something was wrong with him, but Freshy yanked her back and shut her up.

  “Just give me this one chance, Mr. Stanzione. That’s all I want. Just let me try. I know I can find him with that equipment that’s in the van. Just let me try.”

  Buddha put the icebag back on his head and closed his eyes. “You’re giving me a headache.”

  “Please, Mr. Stanzione, please. I can get outta here. If I take her with me, I can do it. These guys won’t shoot as long as I got Mrs. Gibbons. You see what I’m saying? I got a hostage. I’m the only one who can get out. Just let me try.”

  Buddha looked around the room, the ice cubes rattling gently on his head. Freshy was right. It was an even standoff; everybody was covered. Except he had the hostage.

  Gibbons swallowed on a dry throat.

  Buddha shrugged. “Go ’head, do what you want.” He didn’t seem to care. He looked at Gibbons and the young agents. “I can’t stop you.”

  The capo was clever. He wasn’t gonna incriminate himself in front of five FBI agents. Freshy might get lucky and actually pull it off.

  Freshy’s face was underbelly white. “You serious, Mr. Stanzione? Really? I can do it?”

  “I said you can do what you want, kid. Nothing I can do to stop you.”

  Freshy grinned. “Okay, okay. Right. I understand. I got it.” He started backing toward the elevator, dragging Lorraine with him.

  Lorraine reached out. “Gibbons?”

  Gibbons was fuming. He was ready to take off his shoe and hurl it at the little jerk, do anything to keep him from leaving with his wife. He was just about to tell Jimmy Olson to shoot the bastard when Freshy suddenly stopped.

  “Hey, Gib,” Freshy said.

  “Hey, what?”

  “C’mon, get up.”

  “What?”

  “C’mon. You’re driving.”

  “What’re you, funny?”

  “No. I said you’re driving. Now get up.” He jammed Excalibur into Lorraine’s head to make his point. All of a sudden the little shit had balls.

  The ice cubes rattled. Buddha was snickering.

  Gibbons gritted his teeth, held his breath, and bore down on the pain in his chest. Another cow just got in the back of the pickup.

  TWENTY-TWO

  12:39 A.M.

  Tozzi and Gina separated to get by a garbage can left in the middle of the sidewalk. “Bread and butter,” Tozzi said as they kept walking.

  Gina peered at him over the turned-up collar of the inside-out coat, which she held closed under her glasses, covering her face.

  Tozzi immediately felt stupid for having said that. He was just trying to get her to talk to him.

  “So where is it?” she said. “I thought you said it was up here.”

  Tozzi pressed his lips together and slowed down. He and Gina were on foot on Seventy-eighth Street on the Upper West Side, in the middle of the block between Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus Avenue. When their float had stopped on Eleventh Avenue over by the river, they’d hailed a cab, and Tozzi told the cabbie to take them to this block because he was sure the Twentieth Precinct was here. But the cabbie wouldn’t take them down the block because Columbus on the other end was jammed with people out to see the balloons being blown up for the parade, he said, and he didn’t want to get caught in traffic. Gina started to argue with the guy, told him he could back up on the one-way street after he dropped them off, but the cabbie refused. Tozzi didn’t want to waste any more time arguing, so they just got out and walked. But now he just couldn’t figure it out. He was almost positive the Two-Oh was on this block. They must’ve moved it.

  He frowned up at all the brownstones along the street. “I could’ve sworn it was here. Damn. C’mon, we’ll find a cop car.”

  He started toward Columbus, and she followed without any argument, though he kept sneaking looks at her, wondering why she wasn’t giving him any shit about his mistake. He couldn’t figure her out. She’d given him shit about everything else today. What was she, tired?

  Up ahead at the end of the block, Tozzi could see the crowds of midnight strollers milling around the Museum of Natural History—parents with little kids, trendy young couples, packs of teenagers—all here to see the inflating of the giant balloons. He could make out Woody Woodpecker and Underdog beginning to take shape. The half-inflated balloons were like nightmare behemoths springing up from the ground. The whole scene was like Mardi Gras—but New York style.

  They picked up their pace, both of them eager to find some policemen. Though they hadn’t said much since their float had taken them through the tunnel, they were both thinking about Bells, worried that the cops in Hoboken hadn’t stopped him, that he might show up again like the boogie man. Tozzi stared at the shadowy figures walking briskly on the other side of the street, imagining that one of them could be Bells. He tried to be rational about it, though, telling himself that the chances of Bells finding them here in the middle of Manhattan were pretty slim. But then again, Bells wasn’t your average bad guy. He was more than just weird.

  He glanced sideways at Gina. She looked like an Arab woman with her face buried in that coat. He just couldn’t figure her out. You would’ve thought that making love would’ve made her a little chummier with him, but instead she’d sunken into herself, become quiet and distant, lost in her own thoughts. What was the phrase they used these days? Emotionally unavailable? He wondered what she was thinking about. He wondered about this alleged “Sicilian girl.” Could Gina really be pregnant? But who’d the hell want to have Bells’s kid? Except maybe she wanted to have a baby. Maybe she wanted Bells’s. “Gina, it’s me. Gimme a call.” Tozzi tried not to think about it. Getting to a police station and getting the handcuffs off—that’s what he should be focusing on.

  But it was hard to focus when all he could think about was that message on her answering machine, and what would’ve happened if they hadn’t escaped from the Belfry, and the fact that he was freezing his ass off. His handcuffed hand was pink and chapped. Gina kept hers tucked up the long sleeve of the coat, but his fist was hanging out like a frozen Cornish hen. He wished she’d at least hold his hand—just for a little warmth. But even that kind of connection was more than he could hope for with her.

  The dark brownstone stoops along Seventy-eighth made Tozzi nervous, and it annoyed him t
hat his heartbeat was keeping up with their marching footsteps. It was stupid to worry about Bells now. He was probably long gone, heading for the hills to escape the manhunt. But still, Tozzi was edgy. So much for maintaining aikido principles. Maybe it was good that he had missed his black-belt test tonight. He wasn’t ready. You’re supposed to be able to keep calm and centered, at least to some extent, when you’re a black belt. Tozzi sure as hell didn’t feel centered now.

  Logically he knew that Bells wasn’t going to pop out from behind the garbage cans, but of course Bells wasn’t the only dangerous nutcase in the New York metropolitan area. Any old mugger, rapist, crack addict, chain snatcher, demented street person, or plain ole asshole with a chip on his shoulder could show up to give them a hard time, and he still felt vulnerable handcuffed to Gina. If he ended up in a situation where he had to confront an attacker, there wasn’t a whole lot he could do to defend himself that wouldn’t put Gina in danger. Of course the way he was feeling right now, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to defend her. He felt that she was excluding him. After all they’d been through today, why wasn’t she leveling with him about her relationship with Bells? Why did he feel that she was holding something back from him?

  Margie’s wedding ring was something else that bothered him. How did Gina get it, and why did she wear it around her neck? Was it supposed to be like wearing a cross to ward off the vampire? Apparently it didn’t work with Bells. It was pretty ghoulish if you asked Tozzi. What the hell was it supposed to mean? Maybe Gina was into headgames even more than Bells was. Maybe she was playing with Bells’s head. Maybe Gina wasn’t so innocent. Maybe Bells got fed up with her messing with his head, messing with his wife’s head. Maybe Gina was the one Bells really had it in for, not him. Maybe he was just a side dish for Bells. Maybe it was Gina who was the meat.

  He watched her glasses glinting under the streetlights as they walked. “Gina, it’s me. Gimme a call.”

  Tozzi had made love to her twice, and for a while today he’d thought he understood where she was coming from. But he didn’t understand shit. If anything, he understood less than he did before.

  He wondered if Bells felt the same way about her, if he was just as confused and aggravated by her. He wondered if Bells understood her any better than he did.

  He wondered how many times Bells had been to bed with her.

  Then his face got hot as he became angry with himself for even thinking this. He was a born paranoid, a conspiracy theorist before they even had a name for people like him. He was always looking for the shady side, for the ulterior motives. It was probably what made him a good organized-crime agent, but it was also what kept him from ever having had a single decent long-standing relationship with a woman in his entire life. He didn’t know how to trust people. Gibbons was the only one he could really trust. And now Gibbons was gone. Who was he gonna trust now?

  Tozzi sighed on the cold air, and his despair flew off into the night, like a bird heading south. Couldn’t worry about all that now, he thought. There were more immediate problems to take care of. He curled his wrist around the cold steel handcuff. Unfortunately his life couldn’t be fixed with a hacksaw.

  As they approached the end of the block, Tozzi breathed a little easier. Columbus Avenue was brighter and full of people. They’d be able to find a cop there. He looked at her again, searching her face for a clue, but the streetlights glanced off her glasses, and he couldn’t see her eyes. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t read her even when he could see her. He scanned the area around the back end of the museum, looking for a cop car in the roving mass of people.

  They were almost at the corner of Seventy-eighth and Columbus when suddenly she stopped walking, and his arm was jerked again. She nodded at something down on the ground, her face still covered. A homeless person wrapped in plastic bags and newspapers was asleep in the shadows of a stoop, the legs sticking out in the streetlight. Tozzi’s heart started to pound. What? Did she think it was Bells? Immediately he was annoyed with himself for being so paranoid. It was a homeless person. It wasn’t Bells. How the hell could it be Bells?

  “How’s it going, Mikey-boy?”

  Tozzi jumped when he heard the voice right behind him. He turned his head to see Bells standing there, grinning in his face. He was holding a gun down low, aimed at Tozzi’s back. Tozzi’s heart was in his throat.

  Gina’s eyeglasses flashed. She didn’t say a word.

  “Shouldn’t leave without saying good-bye to the host, Mikey-boy. It’s not polite.”

  Tozzi turned around all the way to face him, tugging on the cuffs and forcing Gina to do the same. Bells backed up a half-step, keeping the gun leveled on Tozzi’s midsection. Tozzi forced himself to stare at the son of a bitch’s laughing eyes.

  Tozzi could not believe this. “How?”

  Bells shrugged. “Must be magic.”

  Tozzi was speechless.

  But Bells was enjoying himself. “So whatta’ya say we all go back to my place and carve up some turkeys? How’s that sound, Gina?”

  She snarled from behind the collar of the coat. “Why don’t you do it right here? With all these people around.”

  Bells rolled his eyes toward the edge of the crowd out on Columbus twenty feet away, then he grinned at her. “They’re not that close. We have enough privacy here. I could do it here if that’s what you want, Gina. Whatta’ya think, Mikey? Think I could get away with it?”

  Tozzi didn’t answer. He was unarmed, handcuffed to Gina, dead tired, on a shadowy side street—of course Bells could get away with it.

  “I’ll bet you fi’ dollars I can shoot the both of you and be halfway back to Jersey before anyone even notices.”

  Tozzi started to nod to himself, thinking Bells was absolutely right. He could do it. Then all of a sudden Tozzi was very calm. He knew Bells could kill him if he wanted to, and under the circumstances there was nothing Tozzi could do about it. And so he really didn’t give a shit. He wasn’t afraid anymore.

  “C’mon, Mikey. Bet me. It’s only fi’ dollars.” Bells inched forward, the gun still leveled on Tozzi.

  Gina let go of the collar. “For God’s sake—”

  Bells glared at her. “I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to Mikey-boy.” The grin wrapped around his face like a boa constrictor. “So what’s it gonna be, Mikey-boy? You gonna take me up on it?”

  “You know, Bells, I really don’t care what you do. It’s all in your hands now. I can’t stop you. There’s not a thing I could do.” Tozzi was centered. His pulse was even.

  Bells frowned. “Whatta’ya mean, it’s all up to me?”

  “It is. You do whatever you gotta do, Bells. It’s outta my hands.”

  The shadows etched deep lines around Bells’s mouth as the wiseass grin gave way to a scowl. Tozzi had taken the joy out of it for him. There was no fun in killing if the victim wasn’t scared. Tozzi had turned the situation around and thrown it back in Bells’s face. It was pure aikido.

  Bells’s face transformed again, the snake grin slithering back. “What is this, Mikey, some kind of reverse-psychology thing? Do you really think you can psyche me out? Think again, my friend.”

  Tozzi just shrugged. He looked bored.

  The grin on Bells’s face drooped. So did the gun in his hand.

  Tozzi didn’t hesitate. He swatted Bells’s hand, and the gun clattered to the sidewalk. Tozzi kicked it into the shadows under the stoop where the homeless person was sleeping. A metallic clank rang out as the gun hit a garbage can.

  Bells turned toward the noise, and in that second Tozzi went to knee him in the groin. But Gina beat him to it, kicking him in the nuts with her foot. Tozzi’s knee caught him in the face as he doubled over with pain from Gina’s blow.

  “Bread and butter,” Gina yelled, and Tozzi knew exactly what she was thinking.

  They stepped forward, one on either side of Bells, and hooked their handcuffed wrists under his chin, yanking him up and over, slamming him down on his back on the concrete
sidewalk. Bells groaned, curling up on his side and clutching the back of his head.

  Tozzi smirked at her. “Why couldn’t you cooperate like that before?”

  “Why couldn’t you?”

  “Never mind. Let’s find the gun.”

  They started for the shadows, but Bells suddenly shouted “Stop!” and Tozzi felt something slash his calf. He high-stepped out of the way and saw Bells on the ground with his pantleg rolled up, a shimmering blade in his hand. “Back off,” he ordered, and slashed a wide circle around himself, forcing them to get away from him. He scooted on his butt into the shadows under the stoop, feeling with his free hand for the gun.

  Gina tugged on Tozzi’s arm, ready to bolt. Tozzi felt his leg. There was no pain, but his pants were sliced, and he could feel the wetness of blood.

  “C’mon!” Gina urged. “Before he gets the gun.”

  Bells was reaching into the shadows around the sleeping legs when suddenly a zombie face sprang out of the dark. “It’s mine!” she declared in a sandpaper shriek. The woman was a fire-eyed, wool-capped, Thorazine-deprived demento used to defending her space.

  Bells brandished the knife in her face. “Move, bitch.”

  She pointed the gun in his face. “You move!”

  Bells backed off on all fours like a retreating spider. He looked up at Tozzi and Gina, then glanced at the woman. He stared Tozzi in the eye and grinned, holding the knife pointed up. It glinted like a candle. “So who needs a gun?” Slowly he started to haul himself to his feet, wincing with pain.

  “Come on!” Gina yanked on the handcuffs.

  But Tozzi was unmovable. His first instinct was take Bells on, confident that he could handle a knife attack—then he remembered that he and Gina were Siamese twins. He’d never done aikido for two, and it was no time to experiment.

  Reluctantly he started to backstep toward the crowd on Columbus, led by Gina’s tugging, but he didn’t like this. Bells was crazy, and he was out for blood. There were people all over the place. No telling what Bells would do. They couldn’t just run away. Bells liked to take hostages, and there were plenty to choose from in this crowd. All Tozzi could imagine was Bells snatching some little kid, a toddler, a baby from its stroller, and holding the knife to the kid’s throat. He and Gina couldn’t just run away to save themselves. He was going to have to keep Bells on the string and lead his mind, keep him following them until they could find a cop, a couple of cops, a lot of cops with a shitload of guns so that they could take this sick fuck down.