CHAPTER 100
EMILIO CRUZ DIDN’T like it.
This was what was called a “bad job.” Like if a middleweight found himself mixing it up on the street with a heavyweight. The best the smaller guy could hope for was not to get killed.
Cruz understood that Jack had to do this job for Noccia. The guy was lethal. He was vindictive. He killed people. And he got away with murder.
Not only was Cruz doing this for Jack, he was doing it for his partner.
Rick was over forty. He was stiff. He was slow. He was going to have to scale walls. In the dark.
Scotty picked up some of the slack for Del Rio. He could do one-armed cartwheels and run like a cheetah. But Scotty was a former motorcycle cop. He’d never gone outside the law like this, and doing a job for a mobster was against everything that had made Scotty a good cop.
Right now, while Rick cruised around looking for a parking spot, Scotty was sitting behind Cruz, jouncing his knee, sending shocks through the front seat.
Cruz said again, “Rick, we should go in through the back wall. I don’t like the roof. At all.”
Del Rio said patiently, “We know what Scotty scoped out. If we go through the wall, we don’t know what we’re going to find. Could be heavy crap stored against it. We could hit pipes.”
Now Del Rio was swearing because Boyd Street, where they’d parked before, was locked in. Not an empty space on either side of the block.
Cruz said, “Ricky, I’m telling you. I don’t like this.”
Del Rio said, “There.”
And he parked in a “No Parking Anytime” driveway that maybe wouldn’t attract the attention of a random drive-by cop at this time of night. Maybe.
Before the car had come to a stop, Scotty was out the back door. He crossed the street in his black duds, his ski mask in hand. When he crossed Artemus, he ducked into the shadow of the pottery’s outside staircase and, as he’d done before, rattled a window until he set off the alarm.
The alarm screamed out over a couple of square blocks, and Cruz knew that it also alerted the techs at Bosco Security Systems’ control center through the phone line.
The same people who had manned the phones twenty-four hours ago were very likely on duty now. They’d received three false alarms from this address, and team Del Rio was counting on Bosco to tell the building’s owner and the cops that the alarm indicated a system failure, not a break-in.
The Private investigators waited for a police response that didn’t come.
Fifteen minutes later, under the pale light of a new moon, Cruz, Scotty, and Del Rio crossed Anderson and proceeded into the narrow gap between the Red Cat Pottery and the auto parts building next door.
Employing a rock-climbing maneuver called “bridging,” they inched up the brick crevasse between the buildings.
Two cars hissed past on slick pavement as the Private guys slowly ascended to the Red Cat Pottery’s roof.