The Heist Read online

  The coffeemaker hissed, and Tony heard it from the bedroom. He slipped on his shirt and went back into the kitchen, taking a cup from the cupboard and filling it with the steaming brew. He liked it black, a throw-back to his time in the Navy, when an old CPO had told him if he learned to like it black, he’d never miss it if there was no cream or sugar. He tried to limit himself to three cups a day now, a far cry from his early days on the force when he’d need nine to ten cups just to get through a midnight shift. Sipping the strong coffee as he walked back into the bedroom, he was reminded of the first time he’d ever seen Salvatore Costelli.

  It had been a cool spring night, and Tony, who was still considered a rookie, had just gotten his permanent assignment to District Twelve, the wonderfully quaint area around Taylor and Halsted known as Little Italy. The V.A. Building was down the street, along with the massive construction project that would one day be the University of Illinois Hospital and Circle Campus. Lining the streets of the area were all kinds of family-owned businesses: pizza shops, shoemakers, grocery stores. He’d parked his squad-car in the mouth of a nearby alley. D’Angelo’s on Carpenter had the best Italian beef in the city, and he rarely missed a chance to eat there. After devouring the spicy sandwich, he was walking out with his cup of coffee when he heard the disturbance.

  At first it just sounded like loud voices. Nothing unusual for this area. Then a woman screamed. Tony dropped his coffee and ran toward the sound. Down the block, in front of Casio’s Shoe Repair, he saw three figures. Two men and a woman: Mr. and Mrs. Casio and a stranger. The stranger was a short, heavy-set man in a navy-blue, pin-stripe suit. His black hair was slicked back, and he wore sunglasses even though it was dark. Mr. Casio was hunched over, holding his face. Blood dripped from between his fingers and puddled on the sidewalk. The stranger stood in front of them, his right hand concealed by his leg.

  Tony unsnapped his .38 as he ran up and screwed it into the stranger’s left ear.

  “Let me see your hands,” Tony said.

  The stranger turned his face toward him and smiled. It was a fat face, made more massive by the oily pompadour. The man looked to be in his mid-thirties in the glow of the street lamp. On his right cheek was a V-shaped birthmark that descended onto his neck. Tony saw a glint of light, and something scudded onto the sidewalk by the man’s right shoe. A straight-razor. Pushing the stranger roughly over to the wall, Tony told him to put his hands on the building.

  Mrs. Casio was speaking in frantic Italian and trying to tend to her husband, who kept pushing her away with his blood-covered hands. Tony could see that Casio had a cut across the bridge of his nose that was bleeding badly.

  “I’d better call for an ambulance,” Tony said. “You’re going to need stitches.”

  Mrs. Casio said something Tony didn’t understand.

  “No,” Mr. Casio said, continuing in his broken English. “I be all right. No ambulance.” Tony stooped and picked up the straight razor from the sidewalk.

  “Is this what he cut you with?” he asked.

  But instead of answering, Mr. Casio just shook his head and said something to his wife in their native language. The blood was beginning to congeal on his face, but still ran from the wound. Tony took out his handcuffs and reached for the stranger’s right arm.

  “Tony, no,” Casio said, placing his bloody hand on Tony’s forearm.

  “Huh?” Tony said. “This guy cut you, didn’t he?”

  “No,” Casio said. “I fall down. That’s all.”

  “Bullshit,” said Tony.

  “Tony, please,” Mrs. Casio implored. “Let him go.”

  The man had been leaning against the wall with his arms outstretched. Now he relaxed a little and straightened up. Turning, he faced Tony and smirked.

  “Tony, huh? You a paisano?” he asked.

  “Shut up,” Tony said, then turned back to Mr. Casio. “Did he threaten you or something?”

  Still fending off his wife’s probing hands, Mr. Casio looked at Tony for an instant. There was sadness in his eyes, and something else. Fear, maybe?

  “I gonna go back inside my shop now, Tony,” Mr. Casio said. He turned to go. Tony was dumbstruck. He reached for the injured man, just as he felt the stranger’s hand grab his wrist.

  “Hey, goomba,” the man began, his voice somewhat conciliatory.

  A split-second later Tony’s left fist smashed against the man’s jaw, about where the birthmark was, and the greaseball went down in a heap on the sidewalk. Tony had boxed in the Navy, and had reacted out of instinct as much as anything else. The guy was out cold, as Tony snapped the cuffs on him.

  “Tony, no. You no do,” Casio said, as Tony ignored his pleas and called for a paddywagon. “It’s no good. You don’t know who he is.”

  But he found out. The man’s name was Salvatore Costelli, a small-time crook working his way up the Outfit’s ladder by collecting street tax from all the merchants. Tony charged him with Unlawful Use of a Weapon for having the straight razor and threw in Resisting Arrest for good measure. Mr. Casio refused to sign any complaints. When it got to court a month later, Costelli walked in with a high-priced lawyer who conferred with the State’s Attorney in a low voice. Ten minutes later Costelli pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of Disorderly Conduct, and was given a fine-only sentence.

  Tony looked on in disgust, but felt a tinge of satisfaction upon seeing that Costelli talked through clenched teeth. His jaw was still wired shut. As they turned to walk down the center aisle, the procession stopped in front of Tony’s chair. Costelli looked down at him coldly, then drew the corners of his mouth up in what was supposed to pass for a smile.

  “Hey, goomba,” he said, as he reached out and patted his open palm against Tony’s cheek. “Maybe next time, huh?”

  The next time never came for Tony. Salvatore worked his way up the mob ladder very quickly after that, graduating to made-man, lieutenant, and finally to the top man. It was in December of 1988, during one of the Outfit’s power struggles, that the bodies of his two biggest rivals were found dumped in a field on the South Side, their skulls crushed by what the Medical Examiner termed “blunt trauma.”

  The phone rang, jarring Tony from his reverie. He set the cup down and went to answer it, thinking that the incident with Costelli seemed more like last month than almost thirty years ago.

  “Tony?” It was Arlene Casey, one of the federal prosecutors on the task force.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was just getting ready. What’s up?”

  “I got a call from downtown,” she said. “Court’s been canceled.”

  “Canceled?” Tony said. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Something about a power problem downtown. They were real vague.”

  Tony let out a slow sigh.

  “And we were supposed to have our little meeting with The Mink, too,” he said.

  “That’s why I called,” she said. “I put a call into Reggie’s answering service to see if we can meet with them later.”

  It bothered him when she referred to that asshole defense attorney Fox as “Reggie.” But, then, she was young and didn’t look at things from his perspective.

  “Want me to pick you up?” he asked. He knew that Arlene, who lived in Skokie, hated the hectic drive into the city.

  “And have you drive all the way up here from the South Side? No, of course not. I guess I can take the El.”

  “No, don’t do that,” he said. “I can call Ray to stop by for you. He lives in Roger’s Park.” Ray Lovisi was his partner on the P.D.

  “Oh, that’s okay. I don’t want to bother Ray either,” she said. “I can call Kent and have him pick me up. He’s a lot closer.”

  Kent Faulkner was the third party in their special task-force. An FBI agent. He was handsome, tall, broad-shouldered, and, of course, he was young, too. Young enough, Tony thought, to make a play for her. Something he would do if he were Kent’s age. But Faulkner was either too stupid or too shy to make the move. S
o far.

  “Okay, just promise me you’ll stay off the El,” he said. “It could be dangerous. Remember the kind of people we’re dealing with.”

  “Yes, I promise, Father,” she said, the good-natured sarcasm evident in her voice. “I’ll meet you at the office.”

  He hung up the phone thinking about how much Arlene reminded him—maybe too much—of his Mary. The way she’d looked when they first met and decided to get married while he was home on leave from the Navy. Forty years. It had passed so quickly. Too quickly. If he’d only known then what he knew now.

  The sun was barely coming over the tops of the buildings when Lincoln Jackson trotted up the stack of cement blocks that substituted for stairs in front of his uncle’s “office” trailer. It was sandwiched between two dirty-looking brick buildings, a tavern and a beauty salon, at 115th and Michigan. The metal sign fastened adjacent to the door read: Bartwell Construction.

  Linc opened the door and went inside. A burly looking black man stood behind a desk made out of two-by-fours and plywood. Papers were strewn over the top of it, and Henry Bartwell was hunched over, sorting through them. To his left was a grease-spotted Dunkin’ Donuts bag. On his right was an extra-large Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee.

  “Morning, Uncle Henry,” Linc said.

  “You seen that invoice for them pipes?” the big man asked without looking up. Sweat was starting to form on his bald head.

  “No, sir, I haven’t,” Linc said. He stopped in front of the desk and watched the man’s thick black fingers rifle through the stacks of papers. His uncle looked up over a pair of half-glasses perched on the tip of his nose.

  “Well,” he said with exaggerated impatience, “you gonna help me look for it, or what?”

  Linc grinned as he began sifting through the loose sheets. He was a big man, too, in his late twenties, with a short-cropped fade hairstyle, and skin like cream-colored coffee. He grabbed a piece of paper and held it out to his uncle. “This what you looking for?”

  Henry glanced at it, snorted, and grabbed the paper.

  “You wanta tell me what it is you want?” he asked.

  Linc grinned again.

  “What makes you think I want something?”

  “Because I know you,” Henry said, lowering his huge body into a leather swivel chair. It was the only bit of luxury he allowed himself in his trailer-office. The chair squeaked loudly as he leaned back. “When you come in here, nice as you please, and give me that, ‘Morning, Uncle Henry,’ you always wants something.” He stared at Linc over the flat-topped rims of the glasses. “That shit might have worked when you was in the Marines, but don’t try to bulljive me. Now, what you need?”

  “I need,” Linc said slowly, “a favor, I guess.”

  Henry’s left eye narrowed slightly, but he said nothing.

  “I need a little time off today,” Linc said.

  “Time off,” his uncle repeated. “Busy as we is, you want time off.”

  “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

  “What’s more god damn important than us meeting our deadline?” Henry’s voice boomed. “This is the Deep Tunnel Project. It ain’t gonna dig itself, boy. You know how hard it was for a minority-owned-firm to get a piece of that action?” When Linc neither spoke nor flinched, his uncle seemed to relent slightly. “Oh, hell. How much time you need?”

  “Just an hour or two. I gotta take Rick down to the V.A. hospital.”

  Henry’s brow creased and he pulled in a deep breath through an open mouth.

  “That white boy again? Why can’t his own people take him? And besides, don’t he have a car? Where’s that Eagle Talon I seen him driving?”

  “It’s in the shop,” Linc said. “I sort of promised that I’d help him out.”

  “You know, I done what you asked. I gave him a job when you two came home from the Marines last February,” Henry said. “And all that motherfucker’s done since I hired him has been to call in sick every other week. He ain’t given me but a half-dozen good day’s work since I hired him. Now he’s got you running around playing his nigger for him.” He paused intentionally, as if to gauge Linc’s reaction

  “It ain’t like that, Uncle Henry. We been through a lot together. And now he’s just sick, that’s all. It ain’t his fault.” Linc’s voice hardened. “And I ain’t no man’s nigger.”

  Linc saw that his fierce flare of pride brought a smile to Henry’s lips. He’d been testing him after all. Henry had always taken a special interest in him when Linc’s mother, Henry’s sister, had died.

  “Okay,” Henry said, taking in a deep breath, and letting it out audibly. “I guess it’d be all right. But you gotta promise you’ll make up the time. And, boy, I’m telling you right now, I can’t keep carrying your friend on the books if he don’t get better fast. Hell of a note, anyway, keeping a white boy on when there’s brothers standing in line wantin’ work.”

  “Any of them save my life?” Linc asked, defiance creeping into his voice. That night in Israel flashed before him: the ferry overturning, men screaming, the cold water reaching out to engulf him. Flailing arms, panic, more screams. The dark water seemed to be pulling at his legs, forcing itself into his mouth. He’d never learned to swim, and in that second, when the ferry capsized, he knew that he was going to die. Death by drowning. Blackness seemed to be crowding out all the light. Then, all at once, he felt an arm snare his head, snaking around his neck. His face feeling the air, and a voice telling him to be cool, as he felt himself being propelled through the water. When they got to the dock someone hoisted him upward, and for the first time he got a clear glimpse of the person who’d rescued him. A white guy pushing off into the water again, going after another drowning marine.

  Linc and Rick Weaver became inseparable after that, living in the same bunker for the next six months in the Saudi desert. They found out they had a lot in common: both were big and bad, both came from Chicago, and both had the same MOS, advanced recon, attached to the combat engineers unit. They spent the war waiting to go, champing at the bit, after having seen action in Panama.

  And then it was over in little more than a hundred hours.

  They were given a parade when they got back to the States. But six months after they’d come marching home, the Corps told them they were being “RIFed.” Reduction In Forces. Conversion to a peace-time world. After nine years in the Marine Corps, the government had suddenly decided that warriors were no longer needed. They couldn’t believe it. Discarded. Like yesterday’s newspaper after the job was done. It was a bitter pill to swallow. They’d seen more than a few of their comrades die in the Corps. Was this all it meant to America? Was this all that they’d meant? Maybe it was time for a payback. . . .

  When Henry had given Linc a job in the family construction business, Linc talked his uncle into hiring Rick too. It seemed like a good way to pay him back. Then Rick started to get sick.

  “They still ain’t found out what’s wrong with him?” Henry asked, his voice penetrating the perimeter of Linc’s thoughts.

  “They’re saying now it might be some kind of parasite. Something he picked up in the desert.”

  “Well, I’m just glad you didn’t get it. Check in with me when you get back.” Henry turned his attention back to the invoice, and picked up the phone. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I gots a business to run.”

  Linc smiled broadly, and flipped up the collar on his Desert Storm field jacket as he turned to go. For all his gruffness, Uncle Henry was really just a big pussycat.

  The phone rang in the den of Salvatore Costelli’s River Forest home. Salvatore, called Vino because of the reddish birthmark on his right cheek that was roughly shaped like a wine glass, leaned forward in his easy chair and stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray. He picked up the receiver and listened intently as the voice on the other end spoke.

  “That coat’s going on sale.”

  “When?” Vino asked. He brushed some cigar ash off the front of his gold-colored
satin bathrobe. He felt the birthmark flame to red.

  “Don’t know yet,” the voice answered.

  “Okay. Keep me posted.” He hung up and stood. Vino Costelli was not a tall man, but he made up for it in bulk. In his younger days he’d been as strong as a bull. Sort of like Rocky Marciano: short, but with big arms and hands. Even now he still had a chest like a barrel. He clasped and unclasped his hands as he thought of his most trusted lieutenant, the Mink, going over to the other side. Bending over and spreading his cheeks for the “Gee.” His mouth twisted down into a scowl as he crossed the room and snatched the Louisville Slugger baseball bat from the rack on the wall.

  It was made of finely polished ash, the heavy tape wound around the handle now dirty-gray with age. Vino sighted down its length, a faint smile tracing his lips. Then he crouched into a batter’s stance, leaning forward just like he’d done as a boy in the Catholic Youth Leagues. It was the same bat he’d used as a kid to hit the home run to win the citywide championship. And it was the same bat that he’d used years later to hit “the Grand Slam,” as he always called it. The night three-and-a-half years ago when he’d bashed in the skulls of Maxie Campo and Bugsy Volpone. Just like Big Al, Scarface himself, had done in the twenties to those pricks who’d dared to cross him. Right at the dinner table, the blood splattering all over that white tablecloth. The Mink had been his right hand man in those days, setting up the whole thing at his own house, no less. And now the rat bastard was selling out.

  I can’t fucking believe it, Vino thought.

  He snapped the bat in a wide arc, imagining a ball streaking far into left field. In his mind’s eye the ball bounced in the green grass, and, as it rolled to a stop, it became something else. It became Johnny the Mink’s head.

  CHAPTER 3

  Monday, April 13, 1992

  7:15 A.M.

  When Linc got back to the apartment Diane was sitting at the kitchen table sipping a cup of coffee. She was in her bra and pantyhose and he grinned broadly as he saw her.