“Charlie, what’s the deal?” I said over the car to him. It was what an innocent person would say. Unfortunately for me, it’s also what a guilty person would say. At this stage, those two points of view would converge. Even an innocent person would be anxious at what was happening. Even someone with nothing to hide would be nervous about being interrogated and maybe roughed up.
Charlie, I had to concede, had been pretty smart up until now. He’d clearly been planning to confront me. But he didn’t come out and say that while we were driving. He slipped a little bit with the comment about Starlight, but otherwise he’d kept his powder dry. Smart, because I might have had an opportunity to escape. I could have made a move for him while he was driving. I could have jumped out of the car while it was stopped at a red light or, if necessary, while it was moving.
Instead, he’d waited until I was here, and three of his goons were basically surrounding me.
Leather Jacket was holding the door open over in the corner. One of the thugs was directly behind me, the other—the SUV’s passenger—was coming around the front end, and Charlie was coming around the back of the Porsche.
I still had the chance to abort. I could make it past these morons. I didn’t have to win a fight. I just had to make enough of a mess to get away.
“After you,” said the guy directly behind me.
I turned around, not too abruptly but not slowly, either. I stepped right up, face-to-face with this guy. My coat brushed against his. He had probably fifty pounds on me, but he was two inches shorter than me and had to look slightly upward to make eye contact.
His partner, the passenger, hadn’t made it around the SUV yet. Charlie was well back in the darkness. That gave me about two seconds alone with this ape in the relative darkness. Two seconds that might be the most important two seconds of my life. Almost nose-to-nose with the guy, I said, “Hey, Vito, you must have me confused with someone who takes orders from you.”
The thug I had named Vito was momentarily thrown by my comment, but then a wide, sick smile crossed his face. I would have preferred a scowl.
“Go inside, Jason,” Charlie said, pulling up the rear.
I paused. Then I stepped back from Vito, shook my head, trying to show indignation. “Let’s get this over with.”
I walked past Leather Jacket holding the door, into a facility that looked like abandoned office space, space that once had been open to the public. There was a large room with a coffeemaker and a small play area for children. There were several desk areas with chairs on each side. It reminded me of a showroom at a car dealership.
“I’ll check the Porsche,” Leather Jacket said to the others, but I thought he wanted me to hear it, too. He wanted me to know that if I had tried to dump off anything incriminating—say, an electronic bug—in the Porsche, he’d find it.
Vito took the lead. I was next, followed by the other moron and then Charlie. We were headed into interior offices, which was a smart move if you were concerned about people hearing what was transpiring.
Vito opened a door and walked into an otherwise empty room. It was about the size of two offices. There was a single chair in the center of the room. That was it. Floor, ceiling, walls, and a single chair.
“The Kinions aren’t going to have anywhere to sit,” I said.
Nobody thought I was funny. I found myself in the center of the room, near the single chair. The two goons, Vito and his pal, spread out at forty-five-degree angles. Charlie stood in the doorway.
“I’ll give you this one chance to make it easy,” Charlie said. “Just give it up and get it over with.”
“Charlie,” I said, “I don’t know what the hell has gotten into you. You think
I’m
working against you? I’m the best thing that ever happened to you.”
He remained stoic. “Take off your clothes. All of them.”
“The fuck I will.”
Vito’s friend, to my left, began his approach toward me. Apparently, he was going to enforce Charlie’s edict. “Charlie,” I said, holding my hands out. “Seriously, what—”
In mid-sentence, I turned and swung at Vito’s friend. Call him Brutus. Brutus wasn’t expecting it because I was talking. You don’t expect the punch when the other person isn’t braced. But I was braced. I just masked it by looking in the other direction and by talking to Charlie. Misdirection will do wonders in a fight.
Brutus stumbled backward and fell to the floor. He put a protective hand over what was left of his nose. That had to hurt. It wasn’t the hardest swing I’d ever thrown, but it was square on target, and he was completely unprepared for it.
I thought Vito might come at me, too, but he didn’t. He took a couple of steps back and drew a gun.
“This is crazy,” I said. “You think I’m wearing a wire, Charlie? Is that it? You want to check me out? Fine.”
I took off my overcoat and tossed it toward him. Then I removed my suit coat and tossed it in the same direction. I undid my tie, unbuttoned my shirt, threw off my pants, kicked off my shoes and socks. I tossed my wallet, keys, and money clip to him and slid my cell phone across the floor. I was down to my undershirt and boxers. Every other part of my wardrobe was in a pile near Charlie’s feet.
Brutus needed some medical attention. His face looked like a used tampon. He stumbled out of the room as Leather Jacket appeared and whispered something to Charlie Cimino. I had to assume his report was favorable, because the F-Bird was not in the Porsche.
Leather Jacket gathered up my clothes into a small laundry basket he’d brought for the occasion.
“Easy on the starch,” I said.
Leather Jacket thought that was humorous. “Underwear, too, sweetheart.”
“Like hell.”
He walked toward me, but not too close. He wasn’t here for the earlier fun, but he could see a pool of blood where Brutus had been lying and he probably had caught a look at Brutus, too. He reached into his pocket. For a split second, I thought he was going to produce a weapon. Vito already had one trained on me, but two is always better than one.
Instead, he pulled out a balled-up pair of cotton boxers.
“Trade ya,” he said. “But you go first. Take it all off.”
I didn’t really have much of a choice. But I was in role, and in that role, I would be annoyed but ultimately willing to cooperate.
“Normally, you’d have to buy me dinner first,” I said. I stripped off the remainder of my clothes and flung them at his feet. Leather Jacket took only a quick peek, thankfully, just to make sure I didn’t have some wire wrapped around my nuts or something.
He tossed me the boxers, which I quickly put on.
“Sit in the chair,” Leather Jacket said. I was going to do that, anyway, because I figured they were going to need time to search my clothes.
Once I was seated, Leather Jacket showed me handcuffs and walked behind me. “Don’t give me trouble,” he said. “Give me your hands.”
“This is ridiculous,” I said, but I complied. He cuffed my hands behind the chair, through one of the bars, so if I tried to stand, I’d have to pick up the chair, too. Score one for them.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now, you wait.”
Charlie walked out of the room. Leather Jacket followed, holding a basket full of my clothes.
Vito kept the gun on me all the way to the door. “Cheap shot,” he said to me.
“Sorry about his face,” I said. “If I realized you two were boyfriend-girlfriend, I would have hit him in the stomach.”
He gave me that same creepy grin, just like the one he flashed when we were nose-to-nose in the garage.
“See you soon,” he said. He closed the door behind him and locked it.
56
THERE WAS NO WORKING CLOCK IN THIS ROOM, BUT
by my estimate I spent the next ninety minutes wearing only boxers in an unheated room in the dead of winter. I did my best to stay in role, both because you always stay in role—you never know when they might be watching—and because if I let my imagination run wild here, I might come to the conclusion that I was royally fucked.
Either way, I was royally cold, and an uncontrollable shiver was working its way through my body. If they were trying to determine whether I was working undercover against them, they would have been smart not to subject me to these conditions. The kinds of tells, the giveaways you look for in a liar are harder to detect when the subject is already trembling from the cold.
But it occurred to me that maybe they had passed that stage. Maybe they were convinced that I had joined the other side, and now they just wanted to know how much the G knew before they put a bullet in my brain. In that state of affairs, putting me through this was a smart move.
Or maybe I was just overthinking this, but I didn’t have a lot else to do right now.
Except to stay in role. Above all else. No matter what.
The door opened slowly. Vito peeked in, confirmed I was still handcuffed to the chair, and walked in, still in that long coat, still smiling broadly and still pointing a gun at me. I thought, for a beat, that this was it, that all the forks in the road I’d tried to forecast, all the potential drama, was a fantasy; he was just going to shoot me and be done with it.
I think that’s what he wanted me to think. He didn’t like the way I chested up to him in the garage, or the number I did on his partner. But he wasn’t in charge, and he hadn’t had authorization to retaliate. He didn’t have authorization to shoot me, either, at least not yet, but he enjoyed the chance to make me think otherwise.
Vito handed the gun to Leather Jacket and squatted down, so we were face-to-face. “That wasn’t very nice, what you did to my friend.”
“He wasn’t paying attention. Tell him next—”
Before I could finish, Vito’s right forearm clocked me in the kisser. My head snapped backward. Stars danced inside my eyelids. Everything went black for a count of one, two, before I opened my eyes and saw the floor below me.
“You mean like that, he wasn’t paying attention?”
I spit blood. My teeth felt like they’d been rocked from their roots. My jaw was intact, thankfully, but not by much. My head was ringing. A sharp pain radiated down my neck.
“Who said you could do that?” It was Charlie’s voice. It hurt to move my head, but my eyes peeked up at him. He was watching me. It was hard, in my state, to read his face. He looked unsure, I thought, which I took as a good sign.
“We’ll handle this,” said Leather Jacket.
“Fuck you,” I said. “Uncuff me and let me go.”
He didn’t speak, but he slowly shook his head.
“I’m freezing,” I said.
“Give him a coat,” Charlie said.
“No, pretty boy’s doing just fine,” said Leather Jacket. Then, to me: “Why were you at the federal building yesterday? Four o’clock.”
“Yester—I had a motion to compel that I filed yesterday. I delivered a copy to Judge Graves’s office. She likes courtesy copies.”
I answered quickly, no equivocation. Charlie had put a tail on me. I was followed. He’d been wondering about me. I didn’t know why.
“What’s the name of the case?” asked Leather Jacket.
“
United States v. Guevarra.
Illegal possession of firearms.”
“What’s the docket number?”
I spit more blood. “I don’t have the fucking docket number committed to memory, dumbshit. Show me any lawyer who does. Look up the damn case. It’s public record.”
“Why did you want to know about Starlight Catering?” he asked.
“I already answered that.”
“Not to me, you didn’t.”
I looked up. Charlie had left the room. It was just me, Leather Jacket to my left, and Vito to my right.
I spit again, a thick mixture of blood and saliva.
Another blow, harder than the last one, to the right temple. A soft, vulnerable part of the skull. It was Vito’s forearm again. My neck hurt more than anything. It was being knocked around like a pinball.
“Answer,” said Leather Jacket.
“We’re shaking down the whole field of state contractors,” I said,
“and we give this one a pass. I was just asking. I don’t give a flying fuck about Starlight whatever.”
He was quiet a minute. All eyes were on me. I thought I was doing okay. Relatively speaking. I’d rather be sipping margaritas on a beach. I’d rather be giving myself an enema.
“What the hell is this? I work my ass off for Charlie and we’ve got a good thing going here. What happened?”
I said it to the floor. My head was hanging. I was woozy and struggling to maintain not just consciousness but clarity of thought.
“Dick Baroni is what happened.” It was Charlie’s voice again.
Dick Baroni. The guy Charlie told me about—even spelled his name for me so I could Google it. The guy who crossed him and got his office torched, with him in it. He lived to tell but apparently didn’t tell. I was supposed to take a lesson from that.