“Why would they have all this weird shit?” Regio asked. “What’s this rug? It’s two feet wide with a big fuckin’ hole in it.”
“Practice putting carpet. They must’ve hit a golfer,” Lange said. “They got all this shit because they’re stupid burglars. They went into a place, the alarm went off, they grabbed everything they could in two minutes and ran. I did that myself, when I was about fourteen. They’re like a lot of dopers, they never grew up. We oughta mention that to Jack.”
In the fifteen minutes of searching, they found nothing that seemed out of place. They did find a much-folded snapshot of Ally in a tiny pink bra and even tinier pink thong. “She’s a hooker, or was one,” Regio said. “Look at this.”
“Got the body from hell,” Lange said. “I’d take a piece of that. You know, if my wife would let me.”
“Wonder where the cash is?” Regio asked, peering around, as though the cash might jump out from behind a curtain.
“They take it with them. Would you leave a hundred grand in this place, with nobody to watch it? I’ll bet you a thousand dollars that they have those cheap nylon money belts and keep the cash around their waists. They’re not going to leave it sitting around.”
Regio opened a closet door, sniffed, said, “Jesus Christ, it smells like they’re shittin’ in the closet.” He closed the door again.
Lange lifted the edge of a blanket that covered the couch. “Gun,” he said.
Regio went over to look: a Smith and Wesson snub-nosed .38 that might have been manufactured in the 1930s, rust on the cylinder and barrel, chipped grips. “Junk. They must’ve found it laying on the sidewalk,” Regio said. He pushed the thumbpiece to release the cylinder, looked at the ammunition. “The ammo looks older than the gun. Anyway . . . put it back.”
* * *
“What do you think?” Lange asked when they got to the end of the search.
“I don’t know. I swear to God, Ally’s a ghetto chick. And Willy isn’t a cop,” Regio said. “One thing about cops, even undercover cops, is that they’ve got this edge, they’re like . . . authoritarian. Willy couldn’t give orders to a ham sandwich. But . . .”
“But what?”
“Sansone’s boy is in the wind. Or somebody grabbed him. Some shit could be coming down. These two are loose ends.”
“Be nuts to do anything about it,” Lange said. “Give them plane tickets to Idaho, tell them to lay low. We’re gonna need Willy.”
“Could do that,” Regio said. “But then . . . they’d always be out there.”
Lange said, “Not my problem. Or maybe it is, but I’m not going to do anything about it. I like the guy. I like Ally, as far as that goes.”
“It’s up to the boss man,” Regio said. “Whatever he decides.”
“Well . . . I dunno. Killing them . . . it’s bad business. Bad for business. Jimmy killed those two chicks and that Elliot guy, and man, word gets around. I think a lot of guys were . . . set back. I was. Didn’t want to hear about it.”
“Matt . . . you’re a criminal,” Regio said.
“I know, I know. Some people need to get put down,” Lange said. “That’s not always a solution—sometimes it makes everything worse.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
The SSG team assigned to track Paul Curry had picked out his house in the New Dorp neighborhood. Lucas rode with a team member named Jim Ochoa to Burbank Avenue, and Ochoa pointed out a handsome redbrick corner house with a black Ford F-150 parked in the driveway.
“An apparently humble pickup truck, which you don’t often see with the wise guys,” Ochoa said. He spoke with a New York accent, way up in his sinuses. “You have to know your pickup trucks to understand that it’s a Limited, which is the highest trim you can get in an F-150. You’re looking at a seventy-five-thousand-dollar pickup truck.”
“Who in the hell would spend seventy-five thousand dollars on a pickup?” Lucas asked. “For that price, you could get a nice BMW SUV.”
“Which would tend to attract the eye,” Ochoa said. “Nobody pays attention