"A hint? A clue? Back-fence gossip? Give me something, Figgy."
"I heard they was freebies."
"Yeah? That means somebody is trying to muscle his way in."
"You'd think, but it wasn't that way. It was just five or six giveaways, and it was just the one time. If somebody wanted to take my business he would have unloaded a whole shitload of cheap junk."
Remo looked dejected.
"It has got to be the Latinos," Figaroa said.
"It's not the Latinos. I questioned Jorge Moroza this afternoon, and he said it was you. Eat your dinner." Figaroa was dismayed when Remo Vu pushed a second plate of tepid pasta in front of him. "I'm full up," he complained, but he dug in.
"You think you got problems?" Remo said. "Upstairs has got me out here playing freaking Columbo. They've got more computer hardware than the IRS, and Smith puts me on the street to try to figure out what's going down."
Figaroa listened desperately, looking for any tidbit of information that would tell him who this man was and what he wanted-and how he did what he did. So what did this mean about Upstairs and computers? The guy had to be a Fed, right? But not like any Fed that Figaroa had ever heard of.
"And all I get for my trouble is a bunch of ethnic attitude from you and Moroza," Remo continued. "You two are a real pair of curly-lip slimeballs. The only way to tell you apart is by the accents."
Figaroa gagged. He had been likened to Moroza once before, and the fool who made the comparison was compost. This time he decided to let the insult pass.
Remo was on a roll. "Cripes, between Moroza's favorite restaurant and this place I've got a coating of grease in my lungs that'll take me a week to hack up. And you know what the worst thing is? All this effort is for nothing. 'Cause when it comes to providing me information, you're just as useless as he was."
Figaroa caught the past-tense reference and knew with certainty that his archenemy Moroza was dead. That should have made him happy. It didn't. He knew who was next on Remo Vu's list. He slurred something through a mouthful of meatball.
"Don't talk with your mouth full."
Figaroa forced himself to swallow the partially chewed mush. "I know something."
"No, you don't."
"I do! I swear I got something that'll help you break this thing open!"
Remo rolled his eyes, seeing right through Figaroa's bluff. So Figaroa was going to die.
Then came salvation. It appeared in the form of Angelo Vichensi and Franco Ansoti, his right-hand men. They had sensed trouble when they came in the first time, and now they were back to put things right. They emerged silently from either side of the booth with their weapons aimed at Remo Vu. Can't-miss shots. Remo Vu wasn't even looking in their direction
"Shoot him!" Figaroa bleated.
The shots never happened. Remo Vu reached up as if to scratch his right shoulder. Angelo Vichensi and Franco Ansoti fell over.
"Oh, my God!" cried the waitress, who stopped dead as she emerged from the kitchen.
"We'll need clean forks for Mr. Fig," said the man whose name was Remo.
Figaroa half rose from his seat so he could see the bodies of his bodyguards. One inch of a fork handle protruded from a tiny wound in Angelo's forehead. Franco had a nasty opening in his throat where his Adam's apple had been.
"My men."
"Killed by cutlery," Remo said. "I could hear those two tromping around in the kitchen like a pair of walruses. But don't worry about it. You don't need them anymore, Fig."
"I don't?"
"Eat up."
Figaroa didn't even consider disobeying. He used his hands.
"Hello? Forks?" Remo said to the paralyzed waitress. "And whatever happened to that cherry pie?"
Chapter 3
Greg Grom pulled the rental Buick to the curb and extracted the photocopied newspaper article. The editorial from a concerned citizen was titled Nashville's House Of Shame.
"The Nashville Police Department has raided the house ten times in eight months. When will they put some of these resources behind a long-term solution?"
The concerned citizen had included the address of the building in hopes of embarrassing the owner into taking action, such as locking the place up. It didn't help. Nothing helped. The dilapidated three-flat continued to serve as a flophouse for crack users and sellers.
Just what Grom was looking for.
The building was a trash magnet, the sidewalk piled with soggy paper and other unidentifiable filth. Guess the residents don't have much civic pride, Grom joked silently to relieve his own tension.
He was startled when one of the trash heaps moved, looking at him with baleful eyes.
The human ruin that he had mistaken for a pile of garbage began to lose interest when Grom just sat there. The head swayed and the eyes narrowed to slits as catatonia reclaimed him or, possibly, her.
Grom lowered the window four inches and called out, "Hello, you there. I have free samples."
The eye slits became as round as quarters and the heap of trash staggered to its feet. At the same time a head emerged from the half-open front door and shouted, "D'you say free samples?"
"Free samples," Grom said.
The human trash pile reached out one shaking hand, and Grom fed a small package through the window opening. The hand snatched at it, and Grom withdrew his hand in panic. The human trash pile missed the little package and fell to the ground, scrambling for it.
The woman from the building was eyeing him suspiciously and approaching Grom's car with her arms crossed resolutely. She was black, twenty-something, and her limp clothing and sallow skin showed the effects of dramatic weight loss.
"Why you giving free samples?"
"It's a method of damaging the local narcotics traffickers' hold on market share."
"You doin' what now?"
Grom winced. "I want a piece of the action," he said, the words sounding stilted.
She sniffed disdainfully. "You think Fumar is gone like you taking some of his what-choo-call 'market'?"
"That's between me and Fumar."