Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,63
of that. They do dope, the Newark guys. A lot of it. Not weed, the hard stuff. They’re the ones you want, not me.”
“Doug Sansone,” Lucas repeated. “How do we know you’re not putting us on somebody you don’t like, just to get us off your back?”
“Don’t like? I hate that motherfucker,” Romano said. “Listen, if those shooters only wanted to kill you, they could have knocked on your motel room door and said, ‘room service.’ You open the door, they’re standing there with a gun aimed at your chest and they pull the trigger. You got no chance. They didn’t do that. They waited until you were headed for my place. They wanted to take both of us down, to get rid of you and to hook me up for murder. They wanted somebody for the FBI to blame. I mean . . .”
“What?”
“The fuckin’ can that the dope supposedly came in. I threw it in my dumpster? Do I look like a moron? No—it was somebody who wanted to get rid of me almost as bad as they wanted to get rid of you. There’s only one guy who fits the bill: Dougie Sansone.”
“I’ll think about that,” Lucas said.
Romano tapped him on the chest, “He’s an evil one. Evil. He’d kill you for a dime and the people he works with are just as bad. Evil motherfuckers.”
“You ever hear of a John Cattaneo?”
“Jack? Sure. If you’re looking at him, you’re looking in the right place. He’s one of Sansone’s men now. Maybe . . . two steps down, but it’s a big operation, so he’s a heavy. There’s another guy they work with . . . mmm . . . Jimmy. He kills people. That’s what he does. Or he fixes it.”
“That’s it? That’s everything?”
“What the fuck you want? You want me to go arrest them myself? What I told you, that’s a big thing. I ain’t wrong about this, either. That fuckin’ Sansone. For him, killing those Coast Guard guys would be like stepping on bugs. He wouldn’t even think about it afterward. Probably went out for a Starbucks latte.”
He started away, then turned and said, “I’d tell you I’m sorry about your friend being killed, but I didn’t know him, so I guess I’m not. My attorney told me about you. You personally. I don’t want to be on your bad side. You want to get even? Kill that mother-fuckin’ Sansone.”
* * *
Tennan, the Mafia expert, told Lucas that most of what Romano said was probably right, that the Newark organization was moving south on Staten Island, pushing Romano’s loan organization out of the best bars where they did their loan sharking business. And, he said, the Newark group was rumored to have gotten into the drug distribution after the new boss, Douglas Sansone, pulled together the fragments of older organized crime groups that had gone out of business.
“What are you going to do about it?” Weaver asked Lucas.
“Dunno. Give me some time.” Lucas thought about it for a day, then got back to Weaver and said, “I’m going home.”
“You’re jumping ship?”
“I’ll be in touch. I need to think about this Sansone guy, this John Cattaneo. I need to talk more with Tennan. I need to go to a funeral in Louisiana. I need to read a lot of your organized crime files. You and I . . . we need to put a surveillance team on this Cattaneo, figure out who’s who in the Sansone group,” Lucas said. “I’ll be back. I’ll be talking to you. A lot. Count on it.”
JANUARY
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Brill’s Deli was a good one, smelling of fatty meat, crusty bread, mustard, and pickles in vinegar. Sixteen feet of wall space was dedicated to coolers filled with Coke and Pepsi and beer and root beer and ginger beer and near-beer and lemonade, limeade, and sports drinks. The Mexican tile floor was cracked and worn, the tabletops scarred from three decades of use. The place even had a sandwich man named Lou.
Jack Cattaneo wandered in at one o’clock on a bright afternoon in mid-January and immediately spotted the cool dude and dudette sitting at a table across from his regular booth, which was empty. Dude and dudette were his private terms for middle-aged people who were trying too hard to stay young, and these two were trying hard. You saw a lot of that on the Beach, right up to ninety-year-old women still getting work done on their turkey necks.