Charlie Opera Read online

  There were two women Charlie guessed were prostitutes sitting in a car in the lot behind a strip joint on Hacienda Boulevard. The one behind the wheel was a tall redhead. The one in the passenger seat was short and wearing a dark wig. He approached the car with his hands held up above his shoulders.

  “I’m not a cop,” he said.

  “Who asked?” the woman in the passenger seat said.

  Charlie stopped a few feet from the car and let his hands down. “Can I ask you ladies a question?”

  “Fifty for half an hourdquo; the short woman said.

  “Thirty for straight head but you have fifteen minutes,” the redhead added.

  “Unless you want us both,” the short one said. “One-twenty for half an hour.”

  “I’m looking for a gun,” Charlie said. “Like I said, I’m not a cop.”

  The driver leaned across her friend and winked at Charlie. “Looks like you been beat up by a few,” she said.

  “They weren’t cops.”

  “How do you know we aren’t?” the short one asked.

  Charlie shook his head. “I don’t know that. How can you prove you’re not?”

  The short one opened the door and turned to face Charlie. She spread her legs and raised the short skirt she was wearing. Charlie saw her bare crotch and turned his head.

  “You’re not cops,” he said.

  “Whatcha need?” the redhead asked.

  “Anything,” Charlie said. “A revolver if you know where I can get one. I’ll take anything, though.”

  The redhead waved him around the car. He walked around the front and she opened her purse for him.

  “It’s a twenty-two but it works,” she told him. “But it’s not a revolver. I can probably get you one, but it’ll take a few hours.”

  “How much for that one?” Charlie asked.

  The redhead shrugged. “Two hundred?”

  Charlie nodded. “Deal,” he said. He peeled off four fifties.

  “Hey,” the short woman said. “Don’t I get anything for the flash?”

  Charlie peeled off a ten-dollar bill and handed it to the redhead. “For her efforts,” he said. “Brava, bravi.”

  “Huh?” the redhead said.

  Charlie hopped a cab back to the Strip, where he examined the Taurus P22 he had just purchased. The small handgun had a pop-up barrel for loading. He slipped the weapon inside the waist of his pants and had the taxi drop him a few blocks from Harrah’s. He stopped at a souvenir store to see if he might find something less dangerous than a handgun.

  He ruled out the silly-looking souvenir knives and found a foot-long baseball bat with “Las Vegas Slugger” engraved on the barrel instead. He used a fresh twenty-dollar bill for the bat and a Las Vegas T-shirt that read: “Lost Wages, Nevada.”

  He took his time walking back to Harrah’s. He had more than an hour before the late checkout time he knew his wife had already arranged for them. As he crossed the lobby toward the hall for the elevators, he noticed an Asian kid watching him from behind a column adjacent to the casino floor.

  Charlie felt his heart beating faster as he watched the kid in the reflection from a pane of restaurant glass. He draped the T-shirt he had bought over the small baseball bat and headed for the elevators. He saw the kid pick up a house telephone in the glass reflection when he stopped to present his room key to the security guard in front of the elevator bank.

  He rode the elevator wondering why they would approach him in such a public place. They had missed a perfect opportunity in a much more remote area near Samantha’s house earlier. He touched the .22 through his shirt but was hesitant to take it out. What if someone saw it? What if he had to use it?

  He was glad he had bought the baseball bat. He gripped the thin end with his right hand as the elevator approached his floor.

  He decided he would look for a housecleaning person once he was off the elevator. He would make believe he hd lost his key and ask to call security to let him in. He didn’t think they would wait inside his room, but there was no point in taking unnecessary risks.

  When the elevator stopped and the doors opened, he saw a tall, skinny kid standing across the hall. The kid’s back was turned to Charlie, except why would anybody wait for an elevator with his back to one that had just arrived?

  Charlie saw the kid was Asian about the same time he saw the knife. It missed his chin by inches when the kid swung. Charlie stepped to his right and tossed the T-shirt straight up. The Asian flinched, and Charlie was able to nail him on the forehead with the bat. The sound was distinct and loud. His eyes stared blankly as he backpedaled out of control.

  Charlie saw blood on the Asian’s forehead as he followed through with a second swing, this one aimed at the side of the head. It was another hard blow but not nearly as flush as the first one. The Asian toppled over and crashed into a closed elevator door. Charlie looked around himself, wiped the blood from the bat on the T-shirt, and got out of there.

  Beau Curitan sipped Diet 7UP from a can as he hunkered over the laptop on the small table in his motel room on Las Vegas Boulevard. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his left hand as he adjusted his mouse on the small pad to the right of the laptop.

  “Daddy’s almost home again, honey,” he said to himself. “And I got something sweet for you.”

  He smirked at the screen name he was about to start a private chat with through the CompuServe Internet program.

  He typed with one finger, slowly, as he stared at the keyboard.

  “You can run butt you can’t hyde,” Beau typed.

  He grabbed the can of Diet 7UP while he waited for the reply. His eyebrows furrowed as he spit the last of the soda from his mouth in an effort to cough and yell “fuck” at the same time.

  “Asshole!” he yelled. “I’ll give you asshole!”

  Beau typed furiously then, without any regard for which keys he was striking in the heat of the moment.

  “I ring yure fuckin neck you cont bihgh twat!” he typed. He said the words he meant to type aloud to himself. Then he read ONTHERUN’s response as it appeared on his screen.

  “Fuck off, Beau,” the words read.

  Beau slapped the laptop off the bed. He wondered if it would ever work again or if he had just cost himself another few hundred dollars.

  Carol trembled with fear at her response to her husband’s Internet threat. She hoped her husband had punched the screen or kicked out the plug in anger. She hoped maybe her husband was in the bathtub and managed to pull the laptop into the water with him.

  That was a better image, Carol thought as she nervously packed her laptop.

  She had taken a room in a motel on her way out of Las Vegas when she realized Beau had probably traced her to the phone lines in Samantha’s apartment. The thought of harm coming to her best friend because of her ex-husband forced Carol to engage him one more time, at least for Samantha’s sake.

  She was heading west. She needed Beau to follow her.

  Chapter 28

  The hooker was holding her hand out for another hundred dollars for a blow job. Joey Francone wanted to slap her in the face, but he wasn’t in New York. She could make problems for him in Las Vegas.

  Besides, he still had to deliver her to his boss. The blow job was just a bonus Francone figured he might pick up cheap, except she wasn’t cheap at all.

  “What the hell,” he told hr. He peeled off another five twenties from his money clip. “You might as well while you’re here.”

  The hooker set her bag on the night table beside the bed. “Can I get a drink first?” she asked.

  “Can I take it off the top?” he asked.

  “Nope,” she said.

  “I didn’t think so. What’ll you have?”

  “Vodka tonic. Sprite on the side, please.”

  “Right,” Francone said. He picked up the phone to order the drinks from room service as the hooker excused herself into the bathroom.

  He was doing the math in his he
ad, wondering where the cost for the strap-on dildo he was no longer sure his boss was going to use on some broad was going to end. The hooker had told him stories about men who had asked for sex toys like strap-on dildos and how they almost always wanted the girls to use the paraphernalia on the men themselves. It made Francone a bit sick to think that of his boss, but the hooker seemed to know what she was talking about.

  Actually, she wasn’t so bad once you got past her sarcasm. She had told him she was originally from Kansas, but Francone didn’t believe her. At least he was skeptical. After a while, once she seemed to settle down with him, the hooker did reveal an innocent side of herself. She could have been raised on a farm somewhere. Her father or brother or uncle could have raped her. She could have turned to prostitution for any number of reasons.

  She opened the bathroom door as Francone rubbed his chin from thinking. She had removed her sequin dress. She wore white garter belts with a matching white lace bra.

  Francone swallowed hard from how sexy she looked. “Holy shit,” escaped from his mouth.

  The hooker shifted her weight onto one leg. She turned to the side and asked Francone if he liked her lingerie.

  Francone swallowed hard a second time. “Ah, yeah,” he said. “Who the fuck wouldn’t?”

  She licked her lips as she smiled. Francone hardly noticed. He seemed stunned by her beauty. He wondered for the second time since he had met her if hookers could change into normal broads. He wondered if there were any you could ever change enough to take home and maybe settle down with.

  Charlie stopped in his room to grab his suitcase and as much as he could pack in a few minutes after beating the Asian kid unconscious outside the elevators. He figured he had at least a few minutes before someone discovered the unsuccessful assassin. He guessed he had another five to ten minutes after that before somebody might try his room.

  He packed quickly. He tossed whatever clothes were hanging in the closet into the suitcase. He grabbed his cigarettes and airline tickets from the table. He packed the baseball bat in with his clothes. He ignored the toiletries except for his bottle of Pavarotti cologne. He stood at the end of the bed to give the room a once-over look when he noticed the message light blinking on the telephone.

  There were three more messages on his voice mail. Charlie played them back. The first two were hang-ups. The last message was from his wife’s boyfriend, John Denton.

  Denton’s voice was telling Charlie that he had been visited by one of the men who had assaulted Lisa. The man had given Denton the names of the men responsible for the assault. Denton wanted to talk to Charlie. Denton wasn’t sure if he was going to the police.

  Charlie remembered that the DEA agent had given him a card. He took it out of his wallet but could only stare at it. The agent was the same clown who had told Charlie that he was safe.

  He heard a commotion in the hallway and pressed his ear against the door. He could the sound of a radio. Then he heard someone talking into the radio.

  “We need an ambulance,” he heard someone say. “Someone was mugged outside the elevators. I think he’s unconscious. He’s bleeding pretty bad.”

  Charlie figured it was safe to leave the hotel again. He went back to the telephone to call Samantha first. As he reached for the phone, it began to ring.

  Lano reached Francone at the room they were supposed to be sharing at the Bellagio. He tried to whisper into the telephone, faking an occasional cough when it wasn’t a real one.

  “Where the fuck you been?” Francone asked in his best angry voice.

  “The hospital,” Lano said through a hoarse whisper. “I was spitting up blood soon as I left you. I couldn’t breathe. I came to the hospital. They kept me here for tests.”

  “And you couldn’t return our beeps?”

  “No,” Lano said. “They put me through the emergency room. They took all my stuff to give me tests. I was naked, for Christ sakes.”

  “I hope you still got that five grand.”

  “Yeah, I got it. I put it away in the car before I went in the hospital. They put me to sleep with these fuckin’ drugs. I’m at the hospital now. I’m gettin’ released in a few minutes.”

  “It’s those fuckin’ cigarettes. They finally caught up with you.”

  “I know. You were right. I think I got cancer. They want to do a biopsy tomorrow. They got a big spot on my lungs on the X-ray thing. Like a softball, the doctor said.”

  “You throw away your cigarettes yet?”

  “I will now. I have to.”

  “Yeah, right,” Francone said with a laugh. “In the meantime, get your ass back over here. Nicky’s fuckin’ crazy we didn’t know where you were.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as they release me,” Lano said. He waited for Francone to hang up. Lano held the receiver to his ear until the line was dead. He held down the receiver for a new dial tone, then said, “And then I’ll shoot you right in the fuckin’ face.”

  “Sorry for the interruption,” Francone told the hooker.

  “I usually don’t spend so much time with a client,” the hooker said. She was stroking Francone’s chest hairs while he talked on the telephone. They lay beside each other on the bed.

  Francone pushed the hooker back gently so he could turn toward her. “With that face you could charge me a million,” he said.

  “You’re nice,” she said. “Most of my clients aren’t so nice. Most of them I don’t even talk to.”

  “Don’t consider me a client,” Francone said. “Take the money, but don’t consider me a client. I sure don’t consider you a whoah.”

  Chapter 29

  Lano had called Francone from a pay phone on the Strip. He had baited the punk for a reaction that might hint at what Cuccia’s plans were, but the muscle-bound wannabe seemed preoccupied. Francone’s only real concern was about the five thousand dollars Lano had run off with.

  Now Lano craved another hit of nicotine. He was anxious to get to Cuccia and Francone before they got to him.

  Lano headed south on the Strip. He was thinking about Francone. He would take care of the pretty boy first. Maybe shoot him in the chin Francone was always scratching when he made believe he could think.

  Then he would find their skipper, Nicholas Cuccia. Lano planned on shooting the young boss in the mouth. Hopefully, when he jammed the gun in Cuccia’s mouth, he would rebreak the bone Charlie Pellecchia had fractured in the New York nightclub.

  Lisa Pellecchia awoke in the late afternoon after having undergone a third oral surgery. She felt dehydrated and exhausted.

  She was hooked up to several intravenous tubes. She assumed that that was how she would be fed until her mouth healed. Lisa was aware of what had happened to her, but she wasn’t clear about the damage inside her mouth.

  She knew she was missing at least one upper front tooth. She could feel the gap with her tongue if she dared press it against her teeth. When she did brave the pain, the gap felt bigger than one tooth.

  So far it had been like a nightmare. She wondered if Charlie was safe or in danger or alive or dead. The man who had punched Lisa was one of the men in the nightclub back in New York. She had recognized him just before her brain could process the information in time for her to defend herself at the motel.

  She felt the stitches inside her mouth with her tongue again. She could still taste the blood. She wondered if John was with her at the hospital, if he was resting somewhere in the lobby, or if he was with the police. Lisa was too drugged to move anything except her eyes and tongue. She wished she could move her arm to the remote control to call for a nurse. When she turned her head to find the remote, a streak of pain raced through her head.

  She closed her eyes and lay motionless.

  Agent Thomas couldn’t make his wife understand the demands of his job. She was fed up with him not being home. She was tired of sleeping alone. She was sick from worrying.

  Thomas told his wife things would get better as soon as he finished with the case he was work
ing.

  “Another few days,” he told her. “No more than a week.”

  They had been married a little more than three years. When she hung up on him, Thomas wasn’t sure if they would make it to their fourth year.

  So far the indictments back in Brooklyn were falling around Anthony Cuccia. Two captains directly under the sixty-five-year old underboss were charged with federal racketeering violations. Thomas didn’t know the specifics of the indictments except for the leverage that RICO statutes carried.

  Ten years was a long time. Mobsters were trading information for a lot less than ten years. It was added pressure for Thomas. If either of the two captains indicted were to cut a deal of their own with the organized crime task force, his potential drug case against Anthony Cuccia could fall apart. The last three weeks of his surveillance would have been for nothing.

  Thomas wished his wife could understand his situation better. It was bad enough trying to baby-sit a wiseguy in Las Vegas. Now he had to sweat out indictments against two mob captains facing a minimum of ten years each. The least his wife could do was show some compassion for his situation instead of breaking his balls.

  His eyes were growing tired from watching the television screen when his cell phone rang. He was expecting updates from his supervisor back in New York, but it also could be his wife calling back to haunt him some more. He thought about not answering the phone.

  When he heard Charlie Pellecchia yelling at him, Thomas was caught completely off guard.

  Chapter 30

  Charlie used a pay phone near a men’s room in the casino to call Agent Thomas of the DEA. When the agent picked up on the second ring, Charlie said, “It’s Charlie Pellecchia. Your boy just took another shot at me. I was lucky. The punk they sent is on hiay to the hospital. I just wanted to thank you for all —”

  “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” the DEA agent yelled. “Talk to me. I just observed —”