Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

from Muzzie’s platform.
    Clear, Soldato asked nobody what he could do.
    Angie got his meet at two thirty in the morning at Sal Rossi’s on Houston Street with six feet of poured concrete named Bobo. Him and his giant melon coming out of the kitchen and Angie wondered if he’d made the right play.
    Adjusting his sunglasses, Bobo passed on the handshake and said, “What?”
    Angie was no pigeon. “It’s about propriety,” he said.
    Bobo went, “Uh?”
    “He put the
puttana
two blocks from a school. Muzzie’s is the place. It used to be a nice restaurant. Long row of brownstones around the corner. Two, three generations in the same building.”
    “Muzzie’s.”
    “Now you got mothers going by with their little kids, teenagers hanging around . . . It’s not a class move and people are thinking it’s you.”
    “Me?”
    “The family.” Jesus.
    “Yeah, right, and . . .”
    “And the cops come, and the newspapers,” Angie said, “and soon they’re closing down the York Motel and half the whorehouses on Tonnelle Avenue. In time, it blows over and he moves in on your territory.”
    Bobo thought. Then he said, “Who is this guy?”
    “Soldato. Right now he’s under the protection of nobody. But after he makes his move, he seeks an accommodation . . .”
    “And you got a hard-on for this guy why?”
    Angie sat back and lifted his palms. “Why?” he asked, feigning surprise. “Because he figured
this
. You and me. So he tells some guy he doesn’t want to see me anymore.”
    “Maybe you hop a Greyhound or something.”
    “No good. Not for the long run.”
    Bobo agreed. Then he rubbed his chin. “You want in?”
    “Hell no. It’s yours and God bless you.”
    “But what?”
    “One, Muzzie’s goes back to scungilli and calamari.”
    “Two is . . . ?”
    “Nobody misses this guy.”
    Bobo couldn’t decide on his own, Angie knew, but how the big guy left the table told him he was going to get his way.

    H E WAITED UNTIL “Mala Femmina” ended on the jukebox and joined Turnip at Sal Rossi’s horseshoe bar.
    “So?” Turnip asked.
    “It’s done. You’re off the hook. Drive in peace.”
    Turnip smiled his relief.
    “So what happens?”
    Angie said, “Stay out of the Grotto until I tell you.”
    They wandered onto Houston. Traffic to the FDR was backed up to Mulberry Street.
    “Ang, I’m surprised at that guy, to tell you the truth.”
    “How so?” They turned up their leather collars in unison.
    “If he gives you a hard time, I’m sitting there,” Turnip said. “I can put two between the third and fourth buttons before he knows what hit him.”
    “Not likely,” Angie said as they headed toward the garage on Elizabeth Street. “The guy at the bar with the wavy hair, black suit, resoled loafers? Playing with his onyx pinkie ring?”
    Turnip frowned. “Three stools down? You’re shitting me.”
    “Carrying double. On the right ankle and the ribs.”
    “How’d you — your back was to him. How’d you make him?”
    “My guy’s sunglasses,” Angie said. “Plus your guy got up when the genius scratched his chin.”
    Turnip shook his head in wonder. “How you like that.”
    As they walked in silence toward the Camaro, Turnip pondered how much his friend could achieve if he had a speck of ambition.

    P INHEAD WENT PAST the bar and poured himself a big cup of hot clam broth, dropping in a couple shots of Tabasco. Screaming at the widows gave him a scratchy throat, so he threw it down, thinking a Schlitz chaser.
    “Yo, Pin,” said Milney, the night bartender. He wiggled a crooked finger.
    Pin said, “What?”
    Milney leaned over. “The senior center on Fourth Street,” he whispered. “Some bullshit in the lounge. Take a cab, but go.”
    Pin understood and he threw Sally B a fin.
    Milney slipped it over the half a yard Turnip gave him a half hour ago.
    Outside the Grotto, Pin flagged the first cab that rolled the corner. He didn’t notice Angie behind the wheel.
    Soon, they were on their way toward the Jersey City end of the viaduct, taking the cobblestone road behind the last horse stable in Narrows Gate.
    “Angie, you got some set of
coglioni
on you, you know that?” Pin said. “But I admire that. I do. Tells me we can do something, a guy like you.”
    Angie looked in the rearview, seeing if the barbed wire he’d used to tie Pin down was making a mess of the vinyl seat.
    “Pin, there are five stages of receiving catastrophic news,” he said. “You blew through