foot over the curb. “Because today, we can talk about bringing you officially into this thing of ours, that’s been going for hundreds of years. You earned your button last night and I’m proud of you.”
He squeezed one of Richie’s shoulders. It was as hard as a coconut shell and as big as a football. But his face couldn’t handle a smile.
“So tell me,” said Teddy, “what was his last words?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whaddya mean, you don’t know? You pushed the button on him, didn’t you?”
Richie didn’t dare look him in the eye. “Well if you wanna get like specific, Anthony did that part. I was tied up with the old bitch.”
Vin began to cackle. “What’d I tell you, Ted? What’d I tell you? The kid’s got stones.”
A white Atlantic City Police Department car rolled by slowly and Teddy hushed both of them into silence. He stared after the car and wouldn’t allow the others to speak until it was out of sight.
“You mean you let that mutt pull the trigger?” He glared at Richie.
“Either he was gonna do it or it wouldn’t get done.”
“Hey, Ted, you wanted Anthony to do a piece of work,” Vin interrupted. “Why you getting upset about it?”
“I just want to make sure he’ll keep his mouth shut.” Teddy softened his tone. “We gotta be extra, extra, extra cautious from now on. There’s gonna be surveillance all the time now. They do that whenever they got two in a row dead, like this Larry and Nicky, and nobody locked up for it.”
“He’ll keep his mouth shut,” Vin assured him.
Teddy eyed the unmarked blue Chrysler across the street and turned his residual wrath on Richie. “Anthony get rid of the gun he used?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Think so isn’t good enough,” said Teddy. “It’s the little details that can fuck you up .. . Where’d you put the clothes from the last time?”
“Clothes?” Richie looked at Vin, like he needed an interpreter.
“Larry’s clothes, you moron,” Teddy said emphatically. “You got rid of them. Right? I don’t want anybody finding any fucking carpet fibers from the club.”
“Hey, what’d I tell you about calling me a moron, Ted?”
“You said you didn’t like it. So I hope you’re not still driving around with them clothes. There’s a lot of guys got picked up for driving with an expired license and ended up doing time for murder.”
“Well, my license ain’t expired,” said Richie as they turned the corner and came up on the Baltimore Grill, an elegant old restaurant with a red-and-white sign out front.
“Fine,” said Teddy, patting his abdomen nervously, “then we ain’t got nothing to worry about.”
26
PATROLMAN WENDELL LONG never wanted to be part of a modern urban police department. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself as a Clint Eastwood–style state trooper, with mirrored shades, knee-high boots, and a spotless uniform, riding up and down the curving highways of Southern California on his motorcycle. He imagined profiling typical offenders, pulling over young male blacks driving expensive European sports cars. He yearned to use a command voice and tell people to assume the position against their vehicles, so he could search and humiliate them. While others talked about how horrible the Rodney King videotape was, he secretly burned with envy for the LAPD.
Yet every day, he found himself touring the drab province of Atlantic City, looking for some hint of excitement and adventure. On this bleak Tuesday afternoon, he had to settle for pulling over the bull-necked, shaggy-haired Italian-American male driving a navy Impala with a broken taillight down Indiana Avenue.
“What was I? Speeding?” said the Italian-American, who had a monobrow and the body of a steroid addict.
Patrolman Long was prepared to write a routine traffic summons. But when he asked for a driver’s license and registration, the Italian-American first hesitated and then handed over two conflicting pieces of identification.
“Ah shit,” said Richie Amato, making his second mistake of the day so far. “Gimme those papers back. I gave you the wrong ones.”
“Would you get out of the car, please, sir?” asked Patrolman Long.
Stupidly, Richie tried to shove the unregistered .45 semiautomatic further under his seat. He only succeeded in giving the cop probable cause to search the car. Patrolman Long found not only the gun, but the trunkful of bloody clothes in back.
“All right,” said Richie, trying to sound flip even as he swallowed hard and began sweating. “What would it take to make you forget what you just found?”
“Go ahead,” said Patrolman Long, smiling and finally getting to use a phrase he’d only uttered in dreams. “Make my day.”
Richie was brought down to the dungeon-like police holding facility, under the old Masonic Temple on Ventnor Avenue. Flies buzzed past dank stone walls, and the exposed pipes knocked overhead. He was put in a cell and handcuffed to a bench, facing a white alcoholic wife-beater and a ragged black man in a Malcolm X T-shirt. After a few minutes, the black man took out his penis and began to urinate on Richie’s brand-new Tony Lama snakeskin boots.
“Hey! Hey!” Richie strained at his handcuffs and cried out to the guards at the nearby officers’ station. “This guy’s pissing on me!”
The black man finished soaking Richie’s pant cuffs and put his penis away. “Not anymore I ain’t.”
The guards laughed and several hours passed while Richie waited for the paperwork to be filled out so he could call his lawyer. The trouble ahead of him seemed endless, sickening. The cops were sure to find the two outstanding warrants he had for armed robberies, and soon they would realize the bloody clothes in the back of his car belonged to Larry DiGregorio.
If by some chance he did manage to get out, Teddy would have him killed for sheer sloppiness.
A new pair of guards came on duty and for the next two hours they steadily ignored his requests to go to the bathroom. He felt his urinary tract backing up and his liver catching fire from the steroids. If it wasn’t for the pain, he wouldn’t even know where his liver was. At four o’clock, the black prisoner’s penis appeared in his fly again, like the bird coming out of a cuckoo clock, and began to spray Richie’s pants, as though part of a normal routine.
“Oh God!!!” Richie shouted. “Please help me!!”
P.F. walked by a few minutes later.
“Detective,” Richie called out to him. “Can you get me out of here? I need to call my lawyer.”
“Not my case.” P.F. shrugged and started to stroll away.
He’d almost forgotten the conversation he’d had with Sadowsky the F.B.I. agent. Fat chance he was going to implicate himself by volunteering information about Teddy. But here was Richie, begging him to stop and talk. “Wait a sec, wait, wait.”
P.F. paused and half turned toward him.
“How long are they gonna keep me waiting?”
“I don’t know,” P.F. said out of the side of his mouth. “What are you in for?”
When Richie didn’t respond, P.F. went by the officers’ station to check the arrest report. The details about the gun and the bloody clothes brought an immediate smile to his face.
“Beautiful,” he said, coming back to face Richie through the bars. “You must be very proud of yourself.”
“I gotta talk to my lawyer,” Richie insisted. “I didn’t do nothin’.”
“Well now, see, you’re in a situation,” said P.F.
“Whaddyamean?”
“You’re a known O.C. associate with outstanding warrants, and you’re driving around with that shit in your
