"Hey, Nola," he said. "I forgot to say good-bye. Hope you don't get into any trouble. See you."
See you? Picking up the phone, Nola punched in*69, a service that allowed her to track the source of the last call. An automated voice spit out a number and Nola dialed it.
"Brother's Lounge," a gruff voice answered.
Nola knew the place. It was a stone's throw from the Acropolis and was a real dump. "Lemme speak to Frank," she said.
"Lots of guys named Frank here, lady."
"Frank Fontaine."
"Describe him," the bartender said.
Nola did. The bartender seemed to know exactly who she was talking about.
"Hey, Frank, you still here?" he bellowed across the bar. Coming back on the line, he said, "Sorry, lady-he's gone. I can take a message if you like."
"No, thanks."
Nola ate her sub and watched Road Runner cartoons with the sound muted. She couldn't stop thinking about the call. It was so crazy, yet typical. A real guy thing. Women apologized when they won big at her table; men liked to rub her face in it. She made a mental note to call the phone company and get her number changed.
Soon the sub was nothing but a pleasant memory and she was sprawled facedown on the couch, counting sheep.
Nola awoke to the sound of a battering ram taking down her front door. She rubbed her eyes, thinking this was TV mayhem, but it was a real SWAT team that burst into her living room. Before she could sit up, a half dozen automatic weapons were pointed in her face.
"On your stomach," one of the SWAT team shouted. He was big and had the letters LVPD stenciled in blazing white letters across his Kevlar vest. Nola hit the floor.
"You've got the wrong house," she protested. "The crack lady lives three doors down."
"Shut up," the officer replied angrily.
Nola kissed the carpet as her wrists were hog-tied behind her back with a set of plastic cuffs. While her rights were being read, her house was torn apart. More police poured through her open front door while the precious air-conditioning escaped into the stifling afternoon.
Soon she was sitting on the couch, dripping perspiration. She watched an officer come into the living room and drop a bag of pot, some prescription medicine, the message pad that sat beside the phone, and a stack of unopened mail onto her coffee table. She finally found her voice when her diaphragm hit the growing pile of her belongings.
"I want a fucking lawyer!"
When she didn't shut up and her protests became too loud, she was hoisted to her feet and led outside past a crowd of gawking neighbors, including the mail carrier. Then she was shoved into the back of a cruiser, where she began to sob uncontrollably.
A dark sedan pulled up her driveway. Through her tears, she saw Wily and Sammy Mann get out and walk across the lawn, still joined at the hip. They stopped to stare at her, before entering her house. Their faces, normally warm and friendly, were openly hostile.
Only then did Nola have an inkling as to what kind of trouble she was in.
3
In his dream, Valentine is a young man and his body still knows how to sprint. It is winter and he is running down the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, his lungs gripped by the wet bronchial cold of the sea. He passes Mel's Famous Foot-Long Dogs and the shuttered cotton candy stand. It is a moonlit night, and down by the shoreline, he sees a gang of men taking turns kicking a fellow police officer, who is lying in the sand. The officer is his brother-in-law, Salvatore, and he jumps the railing and draws his gun, firing in the air. The gang scatters.
"Oh, Jesus, Sal," Valentine says.
His brother-in-law is spitting up blood. Valentine kneels in the sand and cradles Sal's head in his arms. Soon the flow of blood stops and Sal's breathing grows tortured. Valentine gently shakes him, but his brother-in-law does not respond. Something warm seeps from Sal's body, and Valentine realizes it is Sal's soul he has encountered.
Voices fill the air. The gang has reappeared on the Boardwalk. Their leader, the notorious Sonny Fontana, jumps the railing and approaches him. He is holding a gun and makes Valentine drop his weapon. Then he makes Tony get to his feet.
Valentine has been hunting Fontana since the day the casinos opened in Atlantic City. Fontana has committed dozens of crimes, and now he can add murder to his resume.
Fontana smiles at him, like Sal's passing is no big deal. He puts his hand on Valentine's shoulder.
"You and I need to come to an understanding," he says.
Valentine cannot help himself. He knocks the gun out of Fontana's hand, then puts his hands around Fontana's throat. The gang members jump the railing, drawing their weapons.
Valentine squeezes hard, Fontana's eyes bugging out of his ugly face. It is suicide, but Valentine cannot stop himself.
It is a dream in which he has no control.
"What's up?" Valentine said, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he unlatched the screen door. Embarrassed, the freckle-faced FedEx driver stepped onto the porch and stuck a padded envelope into Valentine's hands.
"Sorry, Mr. Valentine, but I found this floating around my van," the driver explained sheepishly. "I rang the bell a few times. When you didn't answer, I got worried."
"Why?" Valentine asked crankily.
"You're the biggest customer on my route. I don't want to lose you, Mr. Valentine."
Lose me? The driver's knocking had ruined his nap, and Valentine was too groggy to come up with a clever comeback and fire it off, so he said, "Glad to hear it."
The driver handed him a clipboard and said, "If you'll just sign on the bottom line, I'll let you get back to bed."
"Won't sign anything I can't see," Valentine replied, fitting his bifocals on. "And I wasn't in bed. I was in the living room, working. Am I really the biggest customer on your route?"
"Just about."
Signing the form, Valentine asked, "Got a name?"
"Ralph Gomez," the driver replied.
Valentine stared at the driver's milky white arms and checkerboard face. "You don't look like a Gomez. I would have pegged you as a Murphy or an O'Sullivan, not a Gomez."
"What's a Gomez supposed to look like?"
"I don't know. Spanish, maybe Mexican. You've definitely kissed the blarney stone."
Gomez realized he was being complimented, and a thin smile creased his face. "My mom. Dad was Cuban-came over in the fifties. So what are you? Italian?"
Was he Italian? What kind of question was that? Even in his earliest baby pictures, Valentine looked Italian.
"No," Valentine snapped, "I'm Mongolian."
"Beg your pardon?"
"Chinese, like the fortune cookie."
Gomez's smile disappeared and his freckled face twisted in puzzlement, then outright confusion. The joke had flown right over his head and off the screened porch and was now spinning somewhere high above the stratosphere.
"Your mom or dad?" he inquired.
The envelope contained a surveillance tape from a casino in Reno, plus another frantic note from a pit boss. Every day across America, casinos were getting ripped off, the losses totaling millions of dollars. So much work, so little time.
Going to the kitchen, Valentine fixed his third cup of coffee of the day. Normally, two was his limit, but he'd slept so hard that he didn't think he'd fully wake up if he didn't get some caffeine into his system. Filling his cup from the tap, he poured the contents into the back of the Mr. Coffee maker, then placed his cup directly on the hot pad.
Thirty-five years married and you still act like a bachelor, Lois would say, watching the ritual each morning as she fried his egg and blackened the bottoms of his English muffins.
It's effective, he'd reply.