Charlie Stella - Charlie Opera

His lawyer thought about it a moment. “What is it you want?”

“I need a courier to go see another lawyer back East. It doesn’t have to be you, but it should be somebody from this office, to give it some weight.”

“What is it that needs weight?”

Lercasi leaned forward to spea “One of Angelo Vignieri’s captains has a deal with the DEA,” he said. “Put it however diplomatically you want, but that’s the message has to get to this other lawyer back East. For his client’s best interest, of course.”

“Of course,” his lawyer said.

Cuccia considered running. Agent Thomas was busy arguing with two other agents in the hospital parking lot. He would have about an eighty-yard head start before Thomas and the other agents would give chase. Two busy intersections at the corner might provide him with enough cover to escape, but there wasn’t much he could do from the hospital without a car and some money.

He waited for Thomas while he searched for escape routes. The sun was setting. He guessed it would be another half hour before dark.

“I’m out of here in two hours,” Marshall Thomas told FBI Special Agent In Charge Dale Walsh.

Walsh combed a wave of hair from his forehead. “And what if we need to see him?”

“Uh-uh, no way. You’re not pulling this bullshit now. No fucking way. What possible reason could you have to detain Cuccia? This is a DEA case from New York. You already said the guy you needed to lean on Lercasi is dead.”

“For questioning,” a tall man said. He was standing alongside Walsh. He adjusted his sunglasses with both hands.

“Bullshit,” Thomas told the tall man. He turned to Walsh again. “No way. This is horseshit. Nickel-and-dime horseshit.”

Walsh held up his cellular telephone. “I can call Washington if you really need to hear this from somebody higher than myself.”

“I’m wasting time I don’t have to waste,” Thomas said. “I’m taking him back to the Bellagio to try and salvage an operation. Then I’m taking him back to New York, in or out of handcuffs. Unless you intend to shoot me in the back, I’m going to wish you two guys good luck.”

“Thomas!” Walsh yelled. “Goddamn it!”

Thomas flipped Walsh the finger as he crossed the parking lot.

“He’s never going to do this over a telephone,” Cuccia told Thomas.

They were pulling into the Bellagio driveway. Thomas drove the white Ford Taurus around the valet parking line to the front entrance. He checked in his rearview mirror for Walsh and the other FBI agents. He spotted the light blue sedan as it pulled to the side of the driveway.

“Let’s go,” Thomas told Cuccia. He grabbed the mobster by an arm and half-dragged him through the lobby. Cuccia tried to pull back, but his jaw hurt from the jostling.

“You’re fuckin’ killin’ me over here,” he moaned through his rewired jaw.

“Don’t give me any ideas,” Thomas said.

“I’m tellin’ you my uncle will never go for it over the phone.”

“That’s not what you said when we left New York.”

“Because I didn’t want to hear you then.”

“Right,” Thomas said. He pulled Cuccia’s arm as he stepped onto an elevator.

“Ouch, motherfucker!”

A woman holding a plastic bucket full of coins gasped at the language.

“Fuck you, too,” Cuccia told the woman.

Thomas smacked the back of Cuccia’s head. The mobster froze from the pain he felt in his jaw.

When they were inside the hotel room, Thomas walked straight to the windows and handeCuccia his cell phone.

“Make the call,” he said. “Now.”

Cuccia had picked up the binoculars he had used to watch the women around the pool. He set them on a chair and dialed a number in Brooklyn.

“Anthony, it’s Nicky,” he said into the phone.

“Nicky who?” the voice on the other end said. “This is Frank’s Pizza.”

“I know, I know. That thing is ready to go.”

“What thing?” the voice said. “This is Frank’s Pizza. Who do you want? What number?”

“Jersey City. Right. Tonight. Yes.”

“Ba-fongool,” the voice said.

Cuccia turned the phone off and handed it back to Thomas. He picked up the binoculars and feigned scanning the pool area. Thomas turned the phone back on and punched in a few numbers. He held the receiver against his ear and shook his head at Cuccia.

“Nice try,” he said. “Frank’s Pizza. They any good?”

Cuccia was desperate. He swung the binoculars as hard as he could at the side of Thomas’s head. He was shocked when he cracked the DEA agent’s skull. He was stunned to see tiny pieces of bone on the edge of the binocular lens.

Detectives Gold and Iandolli sat in the back of a white surveillance van disguised as a floral delivery service. A third man, dressed in a bright green uniform, drove the van. He wore a microphone transmitter in his left ear.

They were parked across the street from the South of Vegas Motel. Pellecchia had taken a room there. Iandolli was scanning the area for Asian men. So far he hadn’t seen any.

When Joey Francone realized that Anthony Rizzi had skipped out on him, the wannabe mobster threw a fit in the Caesar’s Palace hotel room. He punched at the mattress on the king-size bed over and over. He threw the ice bucket across the room. He forgot about the stitching in his rectum and kicked at the suitcase stand. He flinched from the pain.

He counted his money one more time as he sat on the bed in Rizzi’s hotel room. He had barely enough cash to make an escape and nowhere to go.

Francone was ready to give up.

He stared at the telephone as he tried to compile a list of things he could trade with the FBI about Nicholas Cuccia and the Vignieri crime family. He cried to himself as he realized he didn’t have much to deal for the protection he would need.

Charlie wasn’t sure if it was a short dream or a long one. He had tried to wake himself several times, but the lure of the nightmare was too great. He was sweating when he awoke. He was paralyzed on the bed, straining to remember the dream and concerned about what it had meant.

The villain in Tosca, Baron Scarpia, was caught in a giant spider’s web. Samantha, wearing a hooded shawl, was pacing back and forth across a small room. The spider’s web holding Scarpia hung in one corner of the room. Samantha didn’t see it. Each time she paced, she drew closer to the web, and Scarpia reached out to grab her.

Charlie was somewhere outside the room and couldn’t find a way in. Lisa was suddenly outside the room with him. Charlie did his best to ignore his wife. He heard a chorus from his favorite aria over and over: “ma, nel ritrar costei. Il mio solo pensiero. Ah! Il mio sol pensier sei tu, Tosca, sei tu!”

It meant, “But in portraying this woman my only thought, ah, my only thought is you. Tosca, it’s you!”

He bolted off the bed and splashed cold water on his face. He called Samantha, she hung up on him. He immediately called back, and she hung up again. When he tried a third time, Samantha finally answered.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Samantha remained silent on her end of the line.

“Sam?”

“I feel like you ran out on me,” she finally said.

“I didn’t run out on you,” Charlie said.

“That’s what it feels like,” Samantha said and hung up.

“Fuck,” Charlie said.

He hung up the receiver and grabbed the Taurus P22 off the night table. He held the gun in his right hand and stared at it. Except for target practice at a range on Long Island in New York, he had never fired a gun. It had made him nervous having one in the house. He gave up the sport a few months after buying his first handgun, a Smith & Wesson.38 revolver, because he’d left it out one night after drinking with friends from the pistol range. A handgun accident was something that haunted him for the next few days until he finally sold the revolver to a friend.