He got up, went into the kitchen, and was listening to the chef’s proposal to remove Dover sole from the menu becauseof its inflated price, when he noticed that several of his kitchen staff had collected at the rear door.
He held up a hand to halt the complaint about the cost of fish. “What’s going on back there?”
The chef glanced over his shoulder. “They’re giving leftovers to the homeless.”
Roland just stared at him, expecting a punch line and a burst of laughter, because surely he was jesting. When he realized the man was serious, he stepped around him and walked the length of the kitchen until he reached the group of workers.
“Move.” Immediately they parted, clearing the doorway for him. He stepped out into the alley behind the restaurant where a ragged pack of homeless were huddled under the eaves to get out of the rain.
Roland pulled a carry-out carton of food from the grubby clutch of the man nearest him, opened it, took an appreciative sniff, and then emptied the aromatic contents onto the grimy pavement of the alley.
“Get the hell away from my door. If you come near my place again, I’ll exterminate you like the vermin you are.”
He hadn’t even raised his voice, but they had gotten the message. They scuttled away, moving off in both directions down the alley. Roland turned and reentered the kitchen, where his employees were standing stock still. Even a faucet continued to run because no one had had the courage to move in order to turn it off.
He walked over to it, stuck his hands into the stream, and washed them with disinfectant soap, then lifted a fresh towel from the shelf above the sink. He took special care to dry around his signet ring and polished the red stone with the towel before folding it and setting it aside.
He turned off the faucet, then faced those who depended on him for their livelihoods and, in many cases, for their lives.
“You know what happens when you feed a stray? It keeps coming back. You never get rid of the fuckin’ thing. You think my clientele want to wade through human garbage to get to the entrance? You want to ruin my business by performing good deeds?”
He picked up a meat cleaver. “If I catch any one of you giving my food to those bums, you’ll be fired…afterI cut off your hand.” He made a vicious chopping motion with the cleaver, then set it down on the metal countertop so gently it didn’t make a sound.
“Do you understand me?” There was a unanimous nodding of heads. “Good. Now get back to work before I get mad.”
Outside in the alley, one of the homeless shuffled along behind a few others as they made their way in the opposite direction of Esplanade Avenue. He’d blended in with the other “vermin” so well, Roland Malone never would have suspected that he’d taken the food carton from the hands of Mitch Haskell.
Chapter 10
Mitch and Roland Malone had stood eye to eye, nose to nose, toe to toe. Mitch in holey, filthy sneakers now freshly spattered with lasagna, and Malone wearing polished Italian leather loafers. Malone had had no idea he had been face-to-face with an enemy who was dead set on a reckoning.
When Mitch reached the end of the alley, he separated himself from the others and turned down a side street where the traffic was much lighter than on Esplanade. He avoided eye contact with what few pedestrians there were, and, fearing panhandling, all gave him a wide berth.
He walked the now familiar circuitous course that he’d mapped out for himself over the past six months. It wove through the darkest back streets and sinister-looking alleyways to the rear parking lot of a thrift store, which, according to the sign in the window, had gone out of business three years earlier.
Weeds sprouted up through cracks in the buckled asphalt, so his means of transportation for these nocturnal round tripsto New Orleans looked right at home there. The pickup truck was a holdover from his days of undercover work for the DEA. It looked like a patched-up, rusted-out piece of shit with bullet holes in the bumper. But the engine and brakes were new, and the battery was kept charged. He used it exclusively for these excursions to the city.
He’d initiated them shortly after his meeting with Jim Tucker when he’d first told him about Roland Malone, seeming restaurateur, actually a drug dealer’s right-hand man and executioner.
Sensing the interest he’d stimulated in Mitch, Tucker had admonished him not to go off on a “wild hare” that would cause more trouble for himself. But that had also been Tucker’s way of telling Mitch not to do anything that would alert Malone to the DEA’s interest in him and his extracurricular activities.
Mitch had made no promises and, within days of that conversation, had begun his self-commissioned undercover work. Since, he tried to go to the city two or three nights a week to surveil Malone’s restaurant in the guise of one of the homeless population, which had its own societal hierarchy and rules of conduct.
In order to avoid any kind of altercation that would draw attention to him, he’d been careful not to breach anyone else’s territory or even appear curious about their stuff. Nor did he buddy up to anyone. Giving mumbled, unintelligible answers to direct questions, he’d eventually been accepted as a loner and now was generally ignored.
He hadn’t staked out a permanent spot for himself, but on each visit had taken up a different position along the street that had given him a vantage point from which to observe the goings-on at Roland Malone’s establishment.
Few tourists happened upon Ristorante Italiano, but the place had a loyal following made up of locals, and it hadn’t taken him long to mark the regulars. Some he’d recognized as people who held positions of power, while others were minor celebrities of one stripe or another, wannabes, or has-beens. Using the smallest camera possible, he’d surreptitiously taken photos and now had an extensive file.
He’d paid close attention to the customers Malone personally welcomed with demonstrative affection or deference, and then bade goodbye in a conspiratorial manner. He’d paid just as much attention to those Malone observed with a speculative scowl or overt disfavor as they left.
Each night toward closing time, Mitch had ventured into the alley behind the restaurant, where sometimes food from eateries along the avenue was given away on a first-come, first-served basis. The service door to Malone’s restaurant had always remained closed except for employees going in and out, hauling garbage bags to a dumpster.
But tonight, as Mitch had entered the alley and seen a ragtag group already clustered at Malone’s door, he had rushed to join them, elbowing his way to the front in the hope of catching a glimpse into Roland Malone’s domain.
He’d no sooner grabbed the proffered carry-out box from a benevolent kitchen staffer than Roland Malone himself had appeared in all his greasy glory.
Mitch’s heart had lurched. Until that moment, he’d seen Malone only from a distance. Suddenly, he was looking straight at the man from no more than a foot away. Only from having years of practice doing undercover work had he managed not to reveal his shock and near irresistible impulse to go for the man’s throat and kill him on the spot.
