He looked back out the window. “No idea.”
“You know, I wrote more about him in my master’s thesis. My advisor suggested a handful of Morellis I could concentrate on, and I picked Fuscone and you.”
For the first time, Angelo seemed to pay attention. “Is there a dossier on Fuscone?”
“Well, no. He’s dead now. The task force is only interested in live suspects, go figure.”
Another long silence, until Angelo asked at last, “What did you think about Fuscone?”
“He was my example for Cluster B personality disorders in organized crime. Poor impulse control, narcissistic, antisocial.”
“Mm. You’re not wrong. And I take exception to being lumped in with that idiot.”
I nodded sagely. “Hewaskind of dumb. He took an IQ test in his younger years once, when he was incarcerated. Lower than average. Butthoughthe was smarter than most.” I stared out at the bar again, the neon light flickering in the dark. “Bet you’d score high.”
“Ham-handed flattery will not wipe away my memory of the comments you made about me in your so-called profile,” he said.
Itsoundedlike a joke. But I didn’t want to push it. “Hey, I’d write it up different now that I’ve actually met you. And know more about, uh. What you’ve done. I still don’t know the reasons behind it all, though. Like Giorgio Benetti—why wasn’t he just ‘disappeared’ like so many others? Why’d you leave him lying there in a blood-soaked bed?”
I got the feeling he was about to snarl at me, but a new car came driving recklessly into the parking lot. Messina followed it with his eyes. “It’s him.”
“Shit. What do we do?”
“We wait, kid. Same as we’ve been doing all night.”
“But—”
“Then we tail him.”
“Isthatwhat we’ve been doing here this whole time? Waiting for him just so we can follow him?”
Angelo settled back into his seat, watching as four guys piled out of the car and made their way into the bar. “If we had full access to your FBI systems, maybe we could just pull up his last-known address. But there’s no guarantee it’d be correct. Besides, he might head home with some lucky lady tonight. Who’s to tell? But we stay on him until we get him alone.”
“And then?”
“Then I go to work.”
The ham and cheese sandwich I’d eaten as my sad dinner turned over in my stomach.
* * *
What I’d expectedto be a long wait turned out to be pretty quick, because I fell asleep. I woke to the sound of Angelo starting the car, and blinked away my dreams as he drove out of the parking lot after another car.
“He’s on the move?”
“Yep.”
“How long have I been out?”
“It’s coming up on two-thirty.”
I began to wish I’d stayed awake, or at least taken another piss before we’d left. My bladder was kind of painful. “Was he with anyone?”
“Same three guys he pulled up with. If we’re lucky, they’ll drop him home alone.”
Messina was a machine. I was still hazy with the strange sleep schedule, but he looked as alert as he always did. Happily, what Angelo had described came to pass. The men dropped O’Sullivan off at his house in Sunnyside, and Angelo drove around the block once, before coming back to the street and pulling up halfway down the road.
“What now?” I whispered.
