The Iceman (8 page)

Dominick could understand Pat Kane’s relentless devotion to this case. There was something about Kuklinski that was so insidious, so arrogant. Kuklinski’s face had become the last thing Dominick pictured before he went to sleep at night, and it was right there staring at him when he woke up in the morning. There was no question about it anymore. The bastard had to go down; he
had
to. Everyone understood that. But even though Dominick hadn’t gotten the kind of results he’d hoped for at this point, no one else had gotten any closer to Kuklinski than he had. Besides, Dominick had put too much time into this to let the state pull the plug on him now. He could smell Kuklinski. He could feel his presence in
everyone who’d ever met him. In his gut he
knew
Kuklinski. The introduction was only a matter of time.

Walter Kipner had moved over to the poker table to peddle his phony fives. He must have been desperate for a sale because he was handing out freebies now, inviting comparison with the real bills that were scattered on the table. Other bad guys flocked to the table, eager to get a free fin. Dominick noticed that DePrima was by himself. He decided to take advantage of the distraction.

“Hey, Lenny, what’s happening?” Dominick put his hand on the wall and corralled DePrima.

“Hey, Dom,
che se dice
?” DePrima made like he’d just noticed Dominick.

Dominick gave him a dirty look.

DePrima shrugged. “What can I tell you?” he said under his breath. “I’m doing what I can.”

“When, Lenny? When?”

“I’m trying, Dom. I’m trying. I’ve been calling the big guy up, just like I told you. I told him I got this guy here who’s looking for guns in quantity. I offered to set up a meet, the whole bit. But he ain’t biting.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t understand, Dom. You don’t push the Polack. Not unless you’re looking for big trouble.”

“Did you tell him I was okay?”

“Whattaya think? Of course, I said you were okay. I told him we did some deals before. I gave you my Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, Dom. I swear.”

“Did you tell him I was connected?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you tell him I had a customer who wanted to put in a big order? A
real
big order?”

DePrima nodded.

“Then what the fuck is this guy’s problem, Lenny?”

“Like I told you, Dom. You don’t push the Polack. He does
what he does when
he
decides he’s gonna do it, and you do not ask why.”

Dominick glanced at the poker table. Kipner was throwing his fives around as if they were confetti. Everybody was getting a big kick out of it, especially the crooked cop. Dominick turned his gaze back to DePrima. “I think you’re jerking me around here, Lenny. You been bullshitting me from day one. You haven’t been calling him. You’re fulla shit. I’m gonna pull the fucking plug on this whole deal and let you take your chances with the—”

The pay phone rang. DePrima reached for the receiver. “One minute, Dom. Just take it easy and calm down. Okay?”

If he weren’t undercover, Dominick would have made the little bullshitter eat the goddamn receiver.

“Hey, how ya doin’?” DePrima rolled his eyes to Dominick and nodded toward the phone. “You mean Dominick Provenzano? Yeah, he’s still coming around. Why?”

Dominick furrowed his brows. What kind of bullshit was this? Did DePrima really expect him to believe that this was Kuklinski on the phone?

“Well, yeah, he did tell me he could get anything you might want along those lines, Rich.” DePrima was looking Dom in the eye. He looked a little uneasy. “Yeah, sure, I believe him. I know guys who done stuff with him before. He’s solid.”

If that really was Kuklinski on the phone—and Dominick wasn’t convinced that it was—the fish was nipping at the hook. Dominick waited and listened. It was out of his hands now. It was all up to the fish.

“Hey, all I can tell you, Rich, is that he’s always done right by me. We made some good money together, and that’s all I give a shit about. You wanna meet him, you meet him. You want the guy’s fucking résumé, I can’t help you out.”

Dominick drummed his fingers against the wall, waiting for DePrima to get off the phone.

DePrima was shaking his head. “That I can’t tell you, Rich. He
says he can get anything. I don’t know if he can or he can’t.” He looked at Dominick. “He’s here right now, Rich. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

Dominick gave him an evil look. If this was some kind of bullshit stunt, he
would
make DePrima eat the phone.

“Well, it’s up to you, Rich. Whatever you want … Right … Okay. Take it easy.” DePrima hung up the phone.

“Who was that? Richie, I suppose.”

DePrima lowered his voice. “I swear on my mother’s grave, Dom. That was him. He wants to meet you. Right now. The Dunkin’ Donuts over by the Shop Rite. He says he needs something, and I told him you could get it for him.”

Dominick was suspicious, but he wanted to believe it. “So what’s he need?”

“Cyanide.”

A warm breeze blew through the Shark’s open window as Dominick Polifrone cruised across the old steel girder bridge and crossed the river. The sun was peeking through gray clouds, and the sky was blue on the horizon as the rain tapered off. The hiss of tires on the wet blacktop came in through the open window, but Dominick was oblivious to the sound. He was thinking about Richard Kuklinski, focusing on his mark, trying not to outpsych himself for the meet, just trying to be himself. That was the key to good undercover work: Just be yourself.

Dominick had learned from experience that elaborate cover stories and aliases just get you into trouble on an undercover. You can’t hesitate when you’re in with bad guys. If it takes you a second to answer to your cover name, they may get suspicious. And bad guys seldom sit on their suspicions. You slip up once, you can get hurt. You slip up with the wrong people, it could mean your life.

That’s why Dominick Polifrone wasn’t that different from his cover, “Michael Dominick Provenzano.” He’d told the guys he’d met at “the store” that some of his
wiseguy connections in the city knew him as Sonny, but he told everyone just to call him Dom.

The address on his driver’s license was a huge high rise in Fort Lee, and that, he’d say, was his girlfriend’s apartment, his
goomata
’s place.

Michael Dominick Provenzano was a tough kid from a lower-middle-class section of Hackensack, New Jersey. So was Dominick Polifrone.

Michael Dominick Provenzano ran numbers when he was a kid. So had Dominick Polifrone.

Dominick Polifrone might have ended up being just like Michael Dominick Provenzano if he hadn’t gotten a football scholarship to the University of Nebraska. Not that football or the Midwest turned his head around. Far from it. Dominick blew into Nebraska like an Italian-American twister. Coming from the East, he was easily the hippest guy on campus. He wore bell-bottoms before the farm kids even knew they were the fashion. Whenever he returned from school vacations, he brought back a suitcase full of the latest albums, stuff that wouldn’t be in the stores in Nebraska for weeks. If Dominick was cocky in Hackensack, he was a wild man in Nebraska. By his sophomore year trashing bars on Friday nights had become his weekly ritual, and spending the night in jail was starting to become part of that ritual. That’s when a sergeant on the Omaha police force took a special interest in this young pain in the ass from New Jersey and hauled him back to campus to have a little talk with Dominick’s coach. It was that meeting with the coach and the sergeant that turned Dominick’s head around. They put it to him straight: Either you calm down and start acting like a civilized human being or go back to Hackensack for good. The sergeant, however, felt that the warning by itself wasn’t enough, so he strongly suggested that Dominick drop his current major, physical education, and take up a new one, law enforcement. The coach concurred. That Saturday afternoon
meeting in the coach’s office set Dominick’s life in a new direction.

He still raised hell now and then, and he continued to play football and box with a vengeance, winning the Southeast District Heavyweight Golden Gloves Championship in 1969. But in his mind he knew who he was now. The bad guy in training was gone. Dominick Polifrone thought of himself as one of the good guys now.

And that was what made him so outstanding as an undercover agent. He could talk like a bad guy, look like a bad guy, and act like a bad guy because that was all a part of him, but deep down he knew he was one of the good guys.

That’s why Dominick wasn’t concerned with his undercover image as he drove across that bridge, heading for the Dunkin’ Donuts. He knew he was convincing. What he was concerned about was meeting Richard Kuklinski by himself without any backups.

The situation had come down too fast to call in for help. Kuklinski was supposedly waiting for him. It was a five-minute drive to the doughnut shop from “the store.” If he took too long getting there, Kuklinski wouldn’t wait, he was sure of that. The guy was cautious to a fault. If anything made Kuklinski suspicious about Dominick, he would disappear, and Dominick could forget about ever meeting him again. That’s why this first meeting was important. Dominick would know in the first five minutes whether he could pull this off or not. The important thing was control. He was a bad guy, and he wanted something. No matter how much he wanted to get close to Kuklinski, he could not kowtow to him. It would destroy his credibility as a player. And if Kuklinski thought he was bullshit, he’d have nothing to do with him.

Dominick reached into his pocket and felt the butt of his gun, a Walther PPK 380 automatic. Despite the balmy temperature, Dominick wore the leather jacket. It was part of his undercover uniform and served to conceal the bulge of his weapon. Considering
Kuklinski’s reputation, he planned to keep his hand in his pocket with his finger on the trigger.

Kuklinski was reputed to have taken part in dozens of murders, but the police had never been able to come up with enough evidence on any one crime to arrest him. Dominick had a gut feeling that the killings they knew about were only a fraction of Kuklinski’s total body count. From all indications he was just too proficient at killing.

Sometimes Kuklinski killed alone, and sometimes he brought help. Sometimes he worked as a killer for hire; sometimes the killings were his own doing. Sometimes it was business; sometimes it was just blind rage. He was known to have used weapons as small as a two-shot derringer and as large as a twelve-gauge shotgun. On at least two occasions he’d killed with hand grenades. He’d used baseball bats, tire irons, rope, wire, knives, ice picks, screwdrivers, even his bare hands when necessary. And for some reason that no one could quite figure out, he kept one of his victims frozen solid for over two years before he dumped the body, which earned him the nickname Iceman in New Jersey police circles after he became the prime suspect in that murder. But according to state police reports, one of Kuklinski’s favorite methods was cyanide poisoning. Dominick knew from sixteen years of working undercover that you never take any criminal lightly, but Richard Kuklinski was unlike any other bad guy he’d ever encountered. He was not a demented serial killer; killing apparently did not satisfy any kind of psychosexual need for him. Sometimes he killed weeks apart; sometimes he waited years before taking his next victim. He didn’t smoke, drink, gamble, or womanize. He fitted no easy pattern, and there was no single word to describe what he was—except
monster
. Dominick let out a slow breath and took his hand out of his pocket.

A traffic light up ahead turned red, and Dominick quickly pulled the long black Lincoln into the left lane and stopped behind a white police car. He noticed the cop behind the wheel looking at
him in his side mirror. Dominick glanced ahead at the Dunkin’ Donuts on the other side of the intersection. A paranoid chill crept through his stomach. What if these two cops decided to pull him over? He hadn’t signaled when he pulled into the left lane. What if he fitted the description of some other meatball they were looking for? Kuklinski was supposed to be waiting for him at the Dunkin’ Donuts. If Kuklinski saw the cops questioning him, he’d probably scram. Worse than that, it would lower Dominick in Kuklinski’s eyes, make him seem like a street hood, some jerk the cops could push around just for the hell of it. Kuklinski wasn’t interested in little guys, and Dominick had gone to great lengths to establish himself as someone with solid connections to the mob families in New York. After seventeen months of hard work, rubbing elbows with some of the worst scum imaginable, he didn’t want to blow his one chance to finally meet the Iceman, not like this.

The cop behind the wheel kept looking at him in the side mirror, and his partner was turning around now, staring at Dominick through the security grille that separated the unit’s front and back seats.

Dominick gritted his teeth.
Not now, guys. Please, not now
.

The light turned green. The cars in the right lane started to move, but the police car didn’t budge. The driver was staring at him.

Christ Almighty, not now
. Dominick glanced at the orange, pink, and white Dunkin’ Donuts sign across the intersection. He stared at the unit’s brake lights.

Please
.

Dominick considered going around them, but that could have been what they were waiting for. Maybe they wanted to get a look at his profile as he passed, then they could pull him over. Goddammit. He knew he had to do something. He couldn’t just sit here acting suspicious.

But just as he was about to go around the cruiser, its brake lights suddenly blinked off and it started to move forward. Dominick let
out a long breath as he pressed the accelerator and went through the intersection. He switched on his left directional. The doughnut shop was just ahead.

There were only three vehicles in the Dunkin’ Donut’s small parking lot: a black Toyota pickup truck with hot pink Oakley windshield wipers, a beige VW Rabbit with a bashed-in fender, and a blue Chevy Camaro, at least six or seven years old. Dominick pulled up next to the Camaro. From what he knew about Kuklinski’s size, Dominick had a feeling his target wouldn’t be coming in an imported compact.