HE SMALL TABLE, BEDECKED with delicate linen, fine china and fancy silverware, rested on a splendid woven rug. The spread of food resembled a Singapore smorgasbord, the best, most palatable dishes the Three Queens chef’s could offer.
Ritter, freshly showered, and dressed in a tailored suit and casual shirt, stood facing the table, awaiting his cue to enter the room.
“Come in, Mr. Ritter,” Vinnie summoned pleasantly. The wicked smile he wore, however, was more that of a head maitre’d of a fine restaurant about to seat the Queen of England at a back-room bar. “My bet is, you ain’t had a good eat like this in a season or two.”
Ritter took in a mighty whiff and fanned the exquisite smells up in front of his nose. “You’d win ‘at bet, a sure thing,” he replied.
“Please, take a seat.” Vinnie drew a chair from the table.
Ritter peered into Vinnie’s grim face. “Don’t mind if I do.” Then, keeping a cautious eye on his foe, he plopped down onto the decorative cushion.
A swift move and a vigorous shake produced an unfolded linen napkin from the table. Vinnie dropped the cloth in Ritter’s lap. “You might be needing that before we finish,” he said. In scrupulous fashion, he strolled to the side of the table and lifted a silver dome. A plump cut of meat, roasted to perfection, steamed under the lid. Vinnie drew a long butcher knife and a square-shaped shaft from a cutting block and began to polish the knife’s edge. “Prime rib?”
“Fine wit’ me.”
“Help yourself–all you can eat–while I cut the meat.”
Still cautious, Ritter began in earnest to fill his china with the mouthwatering fare. He commented delightedly at each new item he added to his pile. Then, holding up a small vile of translucent liquid that was sitting by his plate, he asked, “What’s this?”
Vinnie grinned with pride. “Aspecial recipe my ol’man concocted a few years back.”
“What you do wit’ it, mate?” Ritter was beginning to feel a bit more at ease.
“You soak your meat in it.” Vinnie lifted a thick cut of prime rib with the heavy knife and lay it atop the mountain of food.
“Just in time, too.” Ritter picked up his fork, about to dig in, when Vinnie intervened. Reaching across Ritter’s wrist with his own fork, Vinnie lowered the other’s hand back onto the table. “Not so fast,” he sneered. “I think the occasion calls for a few words.”
Ritter looked on, bewildered. “Like a blessing?”
“Somethin’ like that. Go on, you say it.”
“I–I guess so . . .” stammered the tramp. “Been a bit, but I think I could manage.” He bowed his head.
Vinnie acted instantly, raising the heavy knife and sinking it’s finelyhoned blade into the table top. Ritter’s hand shot to his stomach; the frantic movement was punctuated by a blood-curdling scream and followed by a string of British vulgarities that would make a pub owner blush.
His face wearing a hideous smile, Vinnie ceremoniously lay the knife horizontally on the table cloth and picked up the quarter-inch tip of Ritter’s little finger. Hoisting it like a trophy in front of Ritter’s gaunt, horror-struck eyes, he placed it neatly on the stack of food. All the while, Ritter, ashen-faced, sat clutching his shortened pinky in his napkin.
“Now, mate,” Vinnie articulated, nonchalantly sampling his wine and returning to the chair opposite the babbling Brit. “That ‘special sauce’ will kill the pain and stop the bleeding. We don’t want to be uncivilized now, do we?” He stuck his pinky in the air as if sipping English tea, then said, “By the way, that was about the best prayer anybody ever prayed to me.”
Ritter dipped his quivering finger in the clear fluid and watched it turn a brilliant red. The distinctively freakish moment was disrupted by an all-too-common sound: a cell phone’s ring. Vinnie pulled his phone from his jacket. “What?” he shouted after checking the caller ID.
Frankie was on the line. “The Feds went in the house,” he mumbled. “They was in a hurry.”
“So?”
“So then they come out again and they’re lookin’ all around. I think they made me.”
“Come back. We have a better way,” Vinnie replied. Replacing the phone inside his jacket, he turned to Ritter and jeered, “You ever screw with me, I’ll cut off more than your pinky.”
Frankie, as ordered, turned over the ignition. The Caddy’s motor spun freely and coughed. He looked up to see one of the agents running down the street toward him, his weapon drawn. The thug cranked the motor again. This time the car hesitated, then rocked with an explosion that shook the new leaves from the nearby trees and split the exhaust pipe from front to rear. Safeguarding his partner, the second agent jumped in his own vehicle and sped for the Cadillac, to block the now disabled car’s path. Within minutes, Frankie lay spreadeagle on the asphalt, shellshocked, stripped of his weapon, cuffed like a hog-tied mule.
Halfway across town, Mitch and Smitty walked briskly in the direction of the old part of The Strip. Headed for Three Queens, their target was a certain shiny red sports car, a femme fatale just waiting to take them on a wild joyride. “I’d like to’ve seen Frankie’s face when he cranked the ignition,” Mitch chuckled. He rubbed at his eyes, trying to keep his mind on task and away from the latest 24-hour stretch without a real night’s sleep. “It’d give me even more pleasure to see the look in his eyes when he figures out he messed with the wrong guy. I’ll bet he put Al up to bullying Stef, and Andy was the one stealing credit card applications out of my trash.”
Smitty hunched to the side. Then, nodding, he flashed a frightful stare.
“I’ve got to hand it to you, Smitty, you’ve got a pretty good sense of humor.” He again patted his friend’s shoulder. “I wonder if Nurse is spitting nails. I’ll bet she’s madder than a cornered hen by now, we’ve been gone so long.”
It turned out that Mitch would have lost that bet, for back in the hotel, Nurse and half her Alley Team were asleep–or at least in some cases, trying to sleep. She had commandeered one old mattress pad, while Sound lay on the other. Cap’n and Greg were sprawled out across the living room floor, wrapped in dirty blankets to insulate themselves against the frigid air blowing in through the vent.
Greg lay uncomfortably on his side. He still hadn’t become accustomed to such conditions. The hard floor felt more like a bed of nails. Right then he’d give his little finger for a nice, soft mattress–or even a lumpy car seat. His mind began playing tricks as he drifted in and out of a restless sleep.
From time to time Linda would appear, laughing hysterically and offering her hand to help him up off the cold, hard ice. It was 15 years earlier, their second date, to be exact. Greg had doubled with his best friend and roommate, Clark–and Linda just happened to be Clark’s younger sister. University of Denver, 1987, he was a junior, she a sophomore. It was his first time at the ice rink.
A year earlier he and Clark had finally gone off to school together, that is, after horsing around a year and a half launching their own computer programming business. When his geeky little sister wanted to join them at college, Clark was furious. Then, after she arrived, he became overly protective, chasing off most boys even before they could ask for a date. Greg had almost felt bad for her.
“A mercy date,” is what Clark had called it when he talked to Greg about going to the rink. Later on he’d learned it was a total set-up. Greg had practically been part of the family since the sixth grade– same schools, same church, same interests–and the little sister, who once was his friend, gradually became much more. What joy there had been when they married. Their children would have the same grandparents; they’d love, honor and cherish one another and live happily ever after. . . . Only one problem, Greg was being ousted from the family for infidelity.
Greg rolled over onto his back. The blissful dream had slipped south, leading to another sweaty, agonizing nightmare. Barely conscious, he concentrated on the beautiful face that had shone down on him as he lay on the ice. “Come back, come back . . . Linda, come back,” he mumbled in his sleep.
Nurse lifted her head and listened. The blackness behind the patches on her eyes left her with an eerie, almost supernatural feeling. Her jaw tense, her mind grappled to adjust to the strange surroundings. Cap’n snored from near the kitchen door; Sound could be heard stirring in the next room. She lay her head back down, concentrating on her own rhythmic breathing to lull herself back to sleep.
Greg, in and out of an interminable, early twilight slumber, again found himself lying on the ice, staring up at the same beautiful, innocent face of the only girl he’d ever loved. Her wild laughter had softened to a mild chuckle, and she still held her hand out to help him off the ice. Greg reached up and took hold of her gloved fingers.
“You think it’s funny,” he snickered in his sleep. With a swift tug of the arm, Linda too was sprawled across the ice, halfway on top of him. He laughed softly in his sleep. Nurse, now fully wakened, tossed sideways and mashed her new hairdo between the mattress pad and dirty pillow. Then, inserting a crooked finger in her ear, she hunkered down for a final try at sleep.
Greg writhed on the carpeted floor, basking once again in those strange, wonderful feelings he’d felt all those years before. The girl, dressed in several layers of warm winter gear, pressed up against his chest, laughing. She was almost like a sister to him, but now . . . lifting his head, he pressed his lips against that divine smile. Somewhat unexpectedly, Linda returned his affections in full.
The lingering kiss was interrupted by someone yelling. It was Clark who scurried across the ice and, skidding to a masterful stop, sprayed the both of them with a cold mist of frost. “Hey, what ya’ doin’?” he teased, playing dumb. “Here I’ve been chasing all the boys away to keep my little sister pure for a special guy, and my best friend stabs me in the back!”
Greg laughed, but inside he wasn’t laughing at all. He was completely captivated by the warm, dark brown eyes of his best friend’s little sister. It was like he’d never seen her eyes before, or her lips, or her smile. For that matter, he’d never noticed the way her hair curled under to graze the back of her neck, or how it feathered down on her forehead. It was like meeting a long-lost love for the first time. The spray of frost began to melt on her warm skin, gliding down her nose. When he reached over to wipe away the droplets, Linda pressed her lips to his. Clark’s chatter, the drone of skaters and music playing over the PA was drowned out by a rushing of wind, most likely blood pulsating through his head past his eardrums. Then Linda pulled away, flustered, her face a rosy blush.
“That does it,” Clark had scolded. “I’m going to tell your mothers. . . .”
Mothers. Greg’s mind wandered. The dream again had begun to steer south. Both his own mother and the mother of his bride were beyond upset when his transgressions were exposed. He’d embarrassed his family, his children, his best friend, his boss, and ostracized himself from his religious congregation–all in one fell swoop. The local news media had relished the heyday of charges and countercharges. Reporters had especially jumped on Greg’s claims that he was a victim of credit card fraud. The creditors, however, had lucked out when the tapes of him and Rayna surfaced. Now his bride was back living with her mother again.
Greg fidgeted beneath the blanket, again rattling himself from his dreams. The floor now was harder than ever, the reality of his miserable existence all too vivid. He hoisted his body to a sitting position, propped his head up against the wall, then wiped the sweat from under his chin.
“Dreams,” Nurse whispered. “Sometimes they seem like an open door straight to your heart, don’t they?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You was carryin’ on in your sleep. . . .” Nurse struggled to stand. “Here, boy, help me up. I gotta go pee ‘fore this here ol’ well springs a leak.”
Greg assisted the old woman to her feet and escorted her down the hallway.
“I’d rather be back in my shack, you know? Ain’t hardly slep’ a wink ‘cause a’ Cap’n’s snorin’. Can’t go back yet, though, ‘til we fix a few things. Gonna take a lot a’ hard work if we want t’ put Mr. Vinnie outta business.” Nurse rambled on as if at some point her words would converge into a coherent thought.
Greg gave a nod. “I can’t ever go back to the way it was,” she said, steering her drifting thoughts back to center. He maneuvered Nurse’s hand onto the doorknob. “Here you are.” Then, as a creature of habit, he reached inside the room and switched on the light, an act he’d performed for his children hundreds of times before.
“Don’t need the light, Sunny boy. I got my eyes patched, ‘member? Get my patches off tomorrow. How ‘bout you?”
Greg snuffed out the single overhead bulb. “I can see just fine.”
Nurse dismissed his response with a grunt. “So can I. Just nice t’ have a bit a’ help now and then from someone ‘at can see better ‘an me. . . . Someone t’ hold my hand–let me know they’re here fer me.”
Greg leaned against the wall outside the bathroom to ponder the old woman’s words. In truth, they were right on the money.
Mitch and Smitty hunkered in the alley near Nurse’s shack. Smitty’s small flashlight, its batteries nearly dead, was pressed tightly between his lips, its faint beam directed at the brass lock on the door of the big green power box feeding high-voltage life to Three Queens. The lockpick’s hands wrestled with the tools as he fought to ease the tumblers into place.
A bulging plastic bag, filled with soggy wet ash from the colossal bonfire that had reduced Carson’s Body Shop to a pile of cinders, hung from Mitch’s hand. “It’s a tough one, huh?” Mitch asked. The shaft of light bobbed up and down with the answer. “I’ll go start on the railing.” He reached down and lifted a large, scorched wrench from the ground. It, too, had been culled from the body shop rubble. Pacing some 100 feet away to the alley entrance between Eddie’s Gym and Kitty’s Escort Services, he cranked on one of the three huge bolts that affixed the concrete railing to the floor of the parking lot. The structure’s floor stood a good four feet above the alley floor, providing adequate cover for hiding. Occasionally he peered under the voids between the bolts to see if the night watch had started their rounds. The last thing he wanted to have happen was some gung ho guard shoving a gun in his face or plying a hard nightstick to the back of his legs.
A silent tap on his shoulder momentarily made Mitch’s heart skip a beat. Turning, he came face to face with Smitty’s silly yet proud grin. The mute stood holding the brass lock between two fingers, swinging it back and forth like the liberty bell. He swayed to the silent chiming cadence playing inside his head.
Mitch exhaled a gigantic sigh of relief. “I thought I was had,” he gasped, sucking in a new breath.
It took ten minutes to remove the first rusty bolt. The second stubbornly fought back, refusing to budge even as both men threw their entire weight and muscle behind the wrench.
Even in the wee hours of morning, the offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were operating in high gear. Doling out the grease on the proverbial wheels of justice were two separate sources. One, a Federal prisoner named Lawrence Ritter, who, by the grace of the biggest Jersey crime boss wannabe, had been processed and bailed free. The second, less likely source was the crime boss’s cousin, now locked in a Federal holding cell, who went by the name of Frankie. While keeping an eye on a home that had reported a prowler, he’d been nabbed by two of the Bureau’s best.
Out on Maggie’s front porch, Barnes coached a female agent. “Stay with them 24-seven; keep them in sight. We’ll move them to a safe house in the morning.” Certain the agent had understood his instruc-tions, he marched down the concrete walk to his sedan, Horne trailing closely behind. “The young one wasn’t telling us all the truth,” muttered Barnes. “I could see it in her eyes.”
Horne nodded. “What do you think she was hiding?”
“I don’t know. The story just doesn’t pan out. No forced entry, not a mark on her, two guys enter, one flees at first sign of the old woman, no prints, and, at best, a vague description of the one in her room. Then, to beat all, the son of the biggest crime boss in Jersey gets busted for it while the undercarriage of his car is ripped to shreds by a potato bomb. The whole thing smells like the same kid that took out Vinnie’s elevators and disabled two of his guards without so much as firing a shot.”
“Mitch?” Horne opened the passenger door and both men ducked inside.
“I’ve been on the Vegas beat nine years now,” said Barnes as he attached his seatbelt, “and I’ve never seen any criminal pull those kind of stunts. My hunch is he isn’t finished. Someone’s got the thumbscrews to him or something.”
“Why would Vinnie have a price on him?”
“The only thing I can guess is the kid has something Vinnie wants, like maybe Mike’s body. What do you say we go have a chat with Mr. Domenico?”
Barnes and Horne cruised north on The Strip, headed for Eddie’ Gym, while in the adjoining alley Mitch and Smitty lay the last rusty bolt on the crumbling asphalt of the alley. “It’s going to get hairy now. You sure you’re up to it?” Mitch asked his faithful sidekick. Smitty pressed his crooked body between Mitch and the parking structure in an ‘I dare you to try and stop me’ posture. “Okay, okay, lets make some fireworks.”
Both men crept back to the power box and strained to raise the lid. With the jumble of cables and connectors exposed, they stood in awe, not so much at the sight, but from the feeling and sound of the power surging through the massive wires and posts. It was a hum, of sorts, coming from a living entity whose heartbeat they were about to put into cardiac arrest.
Mitch held his plastic bag full of fine, wet ash in one hand, along with a set of license plates he’d stripped from a nearby car. In the other he gripped the big wrench from the body shop. “You might as well climb up on the parking lot,” he told Smitty, “and whatever you do, don’t look at the box. You’ll see spots into next week–could even blind you temporarily.”
Smitty readily obeyed and stretched his long legs to gain a foothold on the upper platform, then swung them up and over the guardrail. Mitch took the wrench in his palm and bounced it up and down, like a nervous pitcher about to hurl a baseball. “You ready?” he asked Smitty, hefting the wrench over and over to gauge its capacity for flight. Smitty nodded from the shadows and turned his back to the box.
With acute accuracy, and using an underhanded motion, Mitch tossed the wrench for real, then turned his back to a cascade of brilliant flashing lights spraying out at him like short bursts from a thousand water balloons on a hot summer day.
The sound of electrical current jumping from one giant electrode to the other crackled and spat, echoing up and down the alley. Mitch glanced to his right across the parking structure toward the casino. Its neon lights flickered briefly–then continued to broadcast their glowing invitation to ‘come and give of your earnings.’
Mitch couldn’t believe his eyes. The wrench had made a solid connection between two electrodes, so why hadn’t it shut the place down?
“Hey!” An angry voice came from across the parking lot. “What’re you doing over there?” It was Tony, the red-faced guard who worked the late-night shift.
Meanwhile, out on the street the two FBI agents stepped out of their car in front of the casino. “Hey, did you see that?” Horne asked as they approached the canopy of Three Queens.
Barnes, wary, answered, “Yeah. The lights flickered.”
“You see any of the other buildings do the same?”
“No, but I wasn’t sure I saw it the first time.” Barnes, suddenly on full alert, made a beeline for the valet, who slouched outside the door. “Where’s your power supply?” he shouted.
The young man lifted his hands and shoulders, bewildered. “Got me.”
Back in the shadows, Smitty lifted his hands in the air, Tony’s gun trained on him. The guard slowly shuffled over to the timid-looking man, yelling into his radio, “I got a guy on level one playing with explosives or something.”
Mitch was crouched in the shadows, on hands and knees, eyeing the power box, wondering what to do next. One end of the wrench appeared to be tightly welded to a terminal. At the other end, however, a small halfcircle of metal had been burned away, keeping the tip of the wrench poised just a fraction of an inch from the opposing terminal. Without contact, the current would remain unbroken.
“I asked you a question,” Tony thundered again.
Smitty just stood there, caught in Tony’s flashlight beam, his hands held high, his back to the power supply, a goofy look of ‘I didn’t do it, Mom’ plastered across his face.
Mitch crept over to Nurse’s shack and crawled under the carpet curtain. Groping about in the dark, his hand fell on the woman’s metal milk crate, filled to the brim with dirty clothes. He parted the curtain and strolled into the alley. “Come on,” he called out to Smitty, coming to a stop in front of the power box, the basket at his waist. “Let’s go get this laundry done.”
The guard stepped to the railing and redirected the flashlight and gun at Mitch’s face. “You!”
“Oh, Tony. Long time no see. Had any trouble with the elevators lately?” Mitch flashed an innocent smile.
The guard reached awkwardly for his radio.
Smitty, still with his hands in the air and his eyes on Tony, waited for his hero to work a miracle.
Mitch kept up his casual conversation. “Hold that thought,” he said to Tony. “Oh, I forgot the bleach”–then he pitched the basket onto the open powerbox and dove for cover. The basket landed on the wrench, nudging it just enough so that it bridged with the opposing terminal. A dazzling flash erupted, casting radiant shadows across the parking garage. After another burst of white light, the box burst into flames, consuming the basket of clothing in a single heated breath.
Tony blinked only once before Smitty, charging, swept low and took the guard’s feet out from under him. As his bulky shoulders careened back towards the concrete, Tony let go of the flashlight. It bounced once, then came to rest in Smitty’s grasp.
A monstrous rush of air was expelled from the man’s lungs as he hit the ground. Then, clawing at his eyes, he cried, “I can’t see!”
Mitch lunged over the railing and kicked Tony’s gun across the parking lot. With their task completed, the pair bolted up the ramp leading to the second level and disappeared into the darkness.