Tod Goldberg - The End Game

Flex? At some point, Nate started picking up words from gangster rap and movies where people turn their guns sideways to shoot each other.

“We’re not invading Iran,” I said. “No one is going to capture you.”

“What’s your cover?”

Sam had a buddy of his dummy up some street credentials for me-which means, essentially, if anyone goes looking for information on Tommy the Ice Pick, they’re likely to hear he’s Las Vegas mafia with Chicago backing. The Sicilians think of the American mafia, if they’re not from the original five families, like perpetual rookies. For someone like Bonaventura, the mere idea of checking me out would be admitting that he’d lost a notch.

“Tommy,” I said.

“Just Tommy?”

I didn’t want to tell Nate about the Ice Pick part and I didn’t really want Gennaro to hear it, either. He was already sweating.

“From Vegas.”

“Tommy from Vegas?”

“Right,” I said.

“So we’re in from Las Vegas. Muscling into this action. Getting our piece.” Nate was near giddy.

I turned around and looked at Gennaro. “It’s going to be fine,” I said. “He won’t be speaking.”

It was just after five when we pulled up to Bonaventura’s gate. There were still a good half-dozen men on the other side of it. When they saw us pull up, they opened the gate and one of the men walked up to the car and tapped on the driver’s window.

“You’re at the wrong place,” the man said. Sam was right: He looked like a Marine. Even the way he was standing, like he was trying to figure out how to kick down the door of the limo and start shooting.

Surprisingly, Nate just stared forward and didn’t speak.

“I got Gennaro Stefania in the back to see the big guy,” I said. I was staring forward, too. Just a profile with sunglasses.

The man craned his head into the car and made out Gennaro in the back.

“You weren’t expected today, Mr. Stefania,” he said.

“I didn’t know I was coming,” Gennaro said, just as I told him to say. Whatever questions anyone had, his answer was the same: He didn’t know.

“I can let you in,” the man said, “but your detail has to stay out here. That’s orders.”

“We’re not his detail,” I said. “You tell the big guy that Tommy the Ice Pick is out here, and either he lets us in with Mr. Stefania or we start removing Mr. Stefania’s nonvital organs.” I pulled my sunglasses down and turned to face the guard. Let him see my face. Let him see my eyes. Let him know I wasn’t scared in the least. “You know what the spleen does, Jarhead? Does it have an actual purpose? Because that’s the only detail you might want to consider.”

The guard kept his eyes on me but didn’t show any emotion. “One moment,” he said, and walked back through the gate, shutting it behind him.

“Tommy the Ice Pick?” Nate said.

“Tommy Two Toes doesn’t exactly scare people,” I said. The guards were clustered behind the gate now and were checking their guns and readjusting their Kevlar.

Not a good sign.

“Is this going to work?” Gennaro said.

“Yes,” I said.

“What’s the protocol if they start shooting?” Nate said.

“They’re not going to start shooting,” I said. Though I wasn’t 100 percent certain of that declaration, it seemed reasonable to me that a firefight on the most expensive street in Key Biscayne would probably bring the kind of bad publicity people tend to shun, even people like Christopher Bonaventura, at least while on American soil.

Jarhead stepped away from the group and talked into his Bluetooth for a moment. He nodded twice. He turned and stared at the car. From his facial expressions, you’d think he was trying to decide whether he wanted a latte or a mocha. I could tell he was concentrating, but that he was also assessing the entire situation going on around him.

This was not his most difficult experience involving cars, men and guns. You could almost see him standing in Kabul at a roadblock. The funny thing is that I had the odd sense that I had seen him in Kabul.

Not funny like it was amusing, but funny like I was starting to wonder if I was walking into something much larger than myself.

A few moments later, Jarhead stepped back through the gate and stood by Nate’s window. “Thank you for your patience,” he said, his voice flat; friendly even. He looked from Nate to me-maybe a moment longer on me-and then back toward Gennaro. Made eye contact with each of us, let us know he was in control of the situation. “Mr. Bonaventura would be happy to meet any friends of Mr. Stefania’s. However, you pull through this gate and make a single move I determine to be threatening? We will light you the fuck up. We understand?”

I had to hand it to Jarhead. He knew how to play the game. “That’s what I like to hear!” I pounded my hands on the dashboard. “You get tired of this yes-man shit, you got a job with Tommy the Ice Pick, Jarhead.” His eyes flickered slightly. Either he didn’t like being called Jarhead or he was silently filing away my name. Either way was fine with me. “Let me correct myself: Mr. Jarhead,” I said, and put up my hands. “No disrespect. Don’t light us the fuck up, okay?”

Jarhead didn’t say another word. He just stepped away from the window and waved open the gates.

“Nice guy,” Nate said after he put his window back up.

“That’s why I don’t want you talking,” I said.

Surprisingly, Nate didn’t argue the point. Maybe it was because we were pulling past the phalanx of guards, each of whom looked at us with nothing short of boredom in their eyes, which was a touch disconcerting since they had their guns pointed at us, too. Jarhead and two other men followed behind us in a golf cart.

“I didn’t think the Mafia hired out,” Nate said.

“It’s a recent development,” I said.

If you’re a decent crime boss, invested in staying a crime boss who rules from a mansion, not a prison cell, you take note of changes in law enforcement. It used to be easy to kill off your competition by bashing them to death with a phone and then burying them in a field somewhere or tossing them into a river.

That was before DNA testing and the advent of forensic crime scene investigation.

Beat someone to death with a phone and you’re going to leave a million clues for investigators, everything from skin cells to hair fibers to microscopic bits of plastic that contain their own fingerprints from their production cycle. Hit someone on the back of the head with an old rotary-dial phone and forensic experts will be able to trace one slice of plastic molding all the way back to the day it was poured.

Beat someone with your fists and you might as well just leave your social security number on the body, too.

Likewise, if you dig a grave in a cornfield, you’re going to leave footprints and fingerprints and hair follicles and skin cells from your car all the way to the grave, and unless you’re wearing a hazmat suit, there’s an excellent chance you’ll drop fibers from your car, your home, your victim’s clothing and your Doberman’s chew toy along with it all.

If you want to kill someone these days and want to avoid capture, you hire a professional.

Not a hit man.

A professional. Trained by the government in espionage and assassination. A person who not only knows how to kill but knows how not to leave evidence or, better, only leave evidence that points in the direction you want it to point. When investigations consisted only of a detective pounding on doors, you could afford to be brazen-pay off enough people above him and it wouldn’t matter what he found.

But today you’d need to pay off scientists in the basement of a university maybe five hundred miles away. You’d have to know what every single piece of evidence was to figure out which labs were being used.