“This bothers me.”
“I’m more bothered about you up on top, looking at three to one. About the assholes down here being tipped by the Jersey assholes after the FBI assholes screw it up.”
“I’m thinking about that,” Rae said.
* * *
Regio and Lange watched them leave the apartment.
They were sitting a block down Hollywood Boulevard and followed the battered Subaru, two blocks back, until Willy and Ally turned up I-95, headed north. Regio did a U-turn and they drove back to the apartment.
Lange had started to annoy the others with his suspicions about Willy, and Behan and Cattaneo had told them to take a closer look. Regio had spent time as a thief before he became organized, and he slipped the crappy apartment’s crappy lock with a pocketknife.
They spent fifteen minutes methodically going through the place. “Why does Willy have all these suits?” Regio asked, after a couple of minutes of looking around.
“Not his,” Lange said. “Look at the sizes on them. I think they stole them, Jack said something about it.”
“Who would they even fit?” Regio asked, holding up a sport coat.
“I don’t know, man. Tweedledum, maybe. Humpty Dumpty.”
“Why would they have all this weird shit?” Regio asked. “What’s this rug? It’s two feet wide with a big fuckin’ hole in it.”
“Practice putting carpet. They must’ve hit a golfer,” Lange said. “They got all this shit because they’re stupid burglars. They went into a place, the alarm went off, they grabbed everything they could in two minutes and ran. I did that myself, when I was about fourteen. They’re like a lot of dopers, they never grew up. We oughta mention that to Jack.”
In the fifteen minutes of searching, they found nothing that seemed out of place. They did find a much-folded snapshot of Ally in a tiny pink bra and even tinier pink thong. “She’s a hooker, or was one,” Regio said. “Look at this.”
“Got the body from hell,” Lange said. “I’d take a piece of that. You know, if my wife would let me.”
“Wonder where the cash is?” Regio asked, peering around, as though the cash might jump out from behind a curtain.
“They take it with them. Would you leave a hundred grand in this place, with nobody to watch it? I’ll bet you a thousand dollars that they have those cheap nylon money belts and keep the cash around their waists. They’re not going to leave it sitting around.”
Regio opened a closet door, sniffed, said, “Jesus Christ, it smells like they’re shittin’ in the closet.” He closed the door again.
Lange lifted the edge of a blanket that covered the couch. “Gun,” he said.
Regio went over to look: a Smith and Wesson snub-nosed .38 that might have been manufactured in the 1930s, rust on the cylinder and barrel, chipped grips. “Junk. They must’ve found it laying on the sidewalk,” Regio said. He pushed the thumbpiece to release the cylinder, looked at the ammunition. “The ammo looks older than the gun. Anyway . . . put it back.”
* * *
“What do you think?” Lange asked when they got to the end of the search.
“I don’t know. I swear to God, Ally’s a ghetto chick. And Willy isn’t a cop,” Regio said. “One thing about cops, even undercover cops, is that they’ve got this edge, they’re like . . . authoritarian. Willy couldn’t give orders to a ham sandwich. But . . .”
“But what?”
“Sansone’s boy is in the wind. Or somebody grabbed him. Some shit could be coming down. These two are loose ends.”
“Be nuts to do anything about it,” Lange said. “Give them plane tickets to Idaho, tell them to lay low. We’re gonna need Willy.”
“Could do that,” Regio said. “But then . . . they’d always be out there.”
Lange said, “Not my problem. Or maybe it is, but I’m not going to do anything about it. I like the guy. I like Ally, as far as that goes.”
“It’s up to the boss man,” Regio said. “Whatever he decides.”
“Well . . . I dunno. Killing them . . . it’s bad business. Bad for business. Jimmy killed those two chicks and that Elliot guy, and man, word gets around. I think a lot of guys were . . . set back. I was. Didn’t want to hear about it.”
“Matt . . . you’re a criminal,” Regio said.
“I know, I know. Some people need to get put down,” Lange said. “That’s not always a solution—sometimes it makes everything worse.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
The SSG team assigned to track Paul Curry had picked out his house in the New Dorp neighborhood. Lucas rode with a team member named Jim Ochoa to Burbank Avenue, and Ochoa pointed out a handsome redbrick corner house with a black Ford F-150 parked in the driveway.
“An apparently humble pickup truck, which you don’t often see with the wise guys,” Ochoa said. He spoke with a New York accent, way up in his sinuses. “You have to know your pickup trucks to understand that it’s a Limited, which is the highest trim you can get in an F-150. You’re looking at a seventy-five-thousand-dollar pickup truck.”
“Who in the hell would spend seventy-five thousand dollars on a pickup?” Lucas asked. “For that price, you could get a nice BMW SUV.”
“Which would tend to attract the eye,” Ochoa said. “Nobody pays attention to a pickup, unless it has thirty-five-inch tires.”
They continued down the street, past a humble Toyota Tacoma: “That’s our lookout,” Ochoa said, as they passed the truck. “Stuck in a taco. Don’t tell anyone I called it that.”
“What? Why not?”
“Sorta racist,” Ochoa said. “That’s the truck driven by every Mexican gardener in California, which is a lot of Mexican gardeners.”
“Could be short for ‘Tacoma,’” Lucas said.
“Yeah, but it ain’t, at least not in California,” Ochoa said. “Wanna go around the block?”
“Sure, but let’s go down the side instead of the front.”
They did that. A tall, heavy hedge ran down the side yard, but Lucas could see a blue crescent above the hedge and said, “Aboveground pool. Big one. Wonder if the kids are still with him? Or if there’s a grandchild?”
“Could be, but we haven’t seen any young people coming or going—nobody but Curry and his wife. We don’t know enough about Sansone’s people. Even after watching them for a month. They won’t tell you this back at the task force, but Sansone was never really billed as a heavy hitter. The OC guys were kind of surprised that he could wrangle this much heroin. Anyway, that’s what I’m told. Sansone’s gang isn’t an old-line Mafia outfit. Most of them have some college—Sansone’s got a degree in finance—and you don’t have to be Italian to be a boss. Curry, I don’t know what kind of name that is, but it’s not Italian.”