Private (Private 1)

The goon took the lead as he had before: through the billiards room, filled with the clacking of colored clay balls, to the great room where Carmine Noccia sat in his leather chair.

This time Noccia wasn’t reading. He had his eyes on the ginormous screen over the fireplace, watching a rerun of the Titans’ flat-out massacre of the Raiders a few hours ago.

He shut off the TV and, as before, offered us seats without shaking our hands.

I was feeling heady.

On the one hand, we’d been warned off by Carmine Noccia and his “family,” and they had good reason to dislike us. I’d snubbed his lawyers, beaten up his guys at Glenda Treat’s whorehouse, and I’d been disrespectful to Carmine’s father, the don.

Now I was back with Del Rio, my loosely wrapped bodyguard buddy, wanting to make a deal. Took some nerve. I had asked Rick to keep his mouth shut, his eyes open, and his ass on the sofa. He’d said, “Yeah, boss,” and I could only hope that he’d firmly chained his loose cannon to the deck.

The pool outside the glass doors reflected waving bars of light across Noccia’s face, making his expression unreadable.

Would he tell me what I wanted to know? I sure hoped so.

“What is it now, Morgan?”

“You saw the game?”

“Call that a game? More like a turkey shoot.”

“I’ve brought something to show you.”

I took the packet of still shots out of my pocket and handed them to Carmine Noccia.

He took the photos with his cool, manicured hand and flipped through them. His eyebrows lifted minutely as he recognized the people in the pictures and realized what they were doing and what it meant to his business.

“How did you come by these photos? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I shot them myself. But here’s what matters. The game was rigged, and it’s been going on for a while. If we hadn’t intervened, money was going to keep hemorrhaging out of the bookie joints, and you might have bled to death.

“Instead, the Marzullos got it in the teeth. It should set them back for a while. Keep them out of sports betting on the national level. That’s what I think. What do you think?”

Carmine put the pictures down on the table between us. He leaned back in his chair and watched my face. I watched his.

I tried to imagine what he was thinking. Did he believe that I’d done somethin

g this enormous that actually benefited him? Was he mapping out a war against the Marzullos? Or was he simply composing a way to tell his father how narrowly they’d avoided a calamity that could have sunk a very important component of the family business?

No words were spoken for a long time. Time expanded beyond the beveled glass windows in the great room, out past the man-made paradise and into the desert.

As I’ve said, Del Rio is a patient man when he wants to be. I needn’t have worried, because he was showing me what he’d proven many times as my copilot in Afghanistan. He was waiting, watching and waiting.

Carmine Noccia finally blinked.

“Tell me what you want,” he said.

Chapter 103

CARMINE NOCCIA had asked me what I wanted. It was like a genie granting one of those fairy-tale wishes—you just have to be careful not to wish for a sausage on the end of your nose.

“I’ve shown good faith,” I said. “I cleaned up a mess you didn’t know you had. I want your father to know what we did. Here’s my point in all of this. You’re not going anywhere and neither are we. Let’s accept the reality of that.”

“You want détente. Peace between our operations. Stay out of one another’s way.”

“Pretty much. And I want to know who put out a hit on Shelby Cushman.”

Noccia smiled. It was a small smile, but it seemed real. “No better friend. No worse enemy,” he said.