Paolo Rona was pacing the little office area. He was … unhappy.
“Look, I can’t sit there anymore. This is bullshit.”
The two other people in the room said nothing. One of them was a big black man in a gray suit, sitting on the floor, leaning against the street wall, holding an HK MP-5. The other was a broad-shouldered red-haired woman wearing a Planet Hollywood T-shirt and blue jeans. Rona was working himself up into a snit, a standard fink experience. Both Treasury agents had witnessed far too many of them to get excited about this one.
The noise of the laundry plant downstairs came up through the flooring, and the steam rising up from the cleaning vats was making the room a sauna, in spite of the chunking clatter of the inadequate air conditioner set into the window. The babble and sonorities of the Indio women talking happily over their work floated up through the miasmic atmosphere. Nobody down there seemed to miss Jorge Ragundo very much. Whoever ran the place had made a call—picked up on the wiretap—and now one of the women downstairs was running the place until a new guy arrived. Treasury was letting no calls go out other than the ones Paolo Rona had been making to his lawyer, to Reed Endicott, and even to Janet Reno’s office. (He didn’t get through.) The idea was, business as usual at Quality Industrial Cleaners, where “The Best Deserve The Best.”
Not that the agents guarding Rona knew much more than Rona did. That was Canaday’s way. And Endicott’s, as they were in the process of finding out. So far, Sherry Wolokoff had gathered that the guy they were trying to catch, a man named Crow, was an ex-con out of Angola prison with a background connected to Marine Recon vets in the Philippines, that the guy was playing his own game with Rona, using a request for a phony ID as a way of keeping Paolo Rona in town while the people who owned this laundry—among other things—tried to figure out whether Rona was a federal snitch, and if so, for how long he had been one.
Quality Industrial Cleaners was officially owned by a numbered corporation in Atlanta. This Crow character was apparently some kind of security man for the people behind the corporation. It was all wheels within wheels, and neither Reed Endicott nor Bolton Canaday was talking much.
But for these street-level Treasury agents, this stake-out was just another hot noisy wet hell, and they were cranky, and listening to a snitch whine was not helping.
Rona was here to try to draw Crow in, because Crow had made a mistake; Canaday had made sure that Rona asked Crow for a recent photo, and the guy actually delivered one. A recent one, which your career criminals try to avoid. Old mug shots from Angola, Navy Department photo ID from 1966, none of that was much use. But a Polaroid from last week, well, he would want that photo back, as well as a chance to put some pointed questions to Paolo on behalf of his employers. Staking Rona out in the open like this was risky, especially if the guy detected the trap. That would absolutely confirm to him that Rona was snitching for the feds, and the boys in Atlanta would be cleaning house real fast. If the guy tumbled. That was the gamble today.
Of course, Paolo Rono missed all of this. He was too busy whining.
“Listen, one round through that glass, I’m applesauce. You can’t do this. I want to talk to my lawyer. This is against my constitutional rights. I’m being endangered. So fuck you, that’s it! I’m out of here!”
He headed for the exit door. Sherry Wolokoff caught his arm as he passed her and jerked him backward.
“Sit down, numb-nuts,” she barked.
“I’m not getting back in that chair. You sit there for the next two hours, you bitch! I’m—”
Sherry reached out, casually, extended a hand, and slapped him hard across the side of his head. Rona yelped, staggered backward, holding his head, his face screwed up and wet.
“He’s gonna shoot me, for chrissake!”
“No, he’s not,” said Wolokoff. “He wants you alive. If you’re dead, he can’t ask you any questions. He’s here for the answers, not for you.”
Rona’s face was greenish-white.
“He’s not even around here. Man, you dinks! You coulda had him yesterday! He was right there!”
“Maybe he was,” said Wolokoff, her voice heavy with contempt. “If you hadn’t been jerking us around, we might have nailed him. But you wanted your five bills, didn’t you. You told Endicott four P.M. at the needle. You got there at two-fifteen. You figured to get in there, get your cash, and then walk him into a takedown at four. You played everybody for a clown. You got me to kill a guy, his gun isn’t even loaded. I got to live with that the rest of my life, you little shit. So shut up and sit down.”
“He could be on the roof or something. Why don’t you have guys on the roofs? Snipers! Why don’t—”
“Guys on roofs are easy to spot. You say this man’s not an idiot. The first thing he’s gonna look for are people up on the roofs, windows that are open but nobody’s in them, open doors—”
“He’ll see the cars in the street.”
“Not likely. We’re not a bunch of Cub Scouts. Now shut the fuck up!”
Rona vibrated in place for a full minute, caught between his fear of the Yellow Man, his fear of Sherry Wolokoff, and his hatred of women in general. Especially women who thought they were the law. He turned and tried to appeal to the silent black man sitting on the office floor.
“Look, Sambo, tell this cu—”
Wolokoff stepped forward and shoved him hard. He stumbled back into the square of light by the window, caught himself at the desk.
“Rona, you are not running this. You’ve been jacking us around since we got into this. You’re still playing your own game. Fine, that’s Reed Endicott’s problem, not mine. Luther and I are supposed to see that you stay in that chair. If you can’t get your ass in it on your own, we can strap you down. But either way, you put your ass in that chair. Now.”
Rona moaned softly. Both of the agents were sickened by the fear-smell coming off this man. Rona moved suddenly, sat down with a convulsive shudder, turned his back to the window.
And then he started to cry. Silently. Fat tears began to crawl, sluglike, down his cheeks, leaving shiny trails in the dirt and the sweat.
“Wonderful,” said Sherry Wolokoff, sending the other agent a look. Luther just shook his head and smiled back at her. Sherry groaned and watched Rona sit there, coming apart noisily. The sound of his sniveling and snorting joined the thump and slush coming through the floor, curiously similar. Sherry’s face closed up with a look of disgusted resignation.
“That’s just wonderful.”
“Peachy,” said Luther, who didn’t talk much.
“Yeah,” said Sherry. “Peachy.”