“Eat, Jack,” my wingman said. “You take the room upstairs. Don’t fight me on this. It’s dark up there, and if you try, you can sleep for nine hours.”
“I can’t take your room.”
“Look,” he said. He opened the lid of an ottoman. It folded out into a bed. “Take the bedroom. You’ve got a full day tomorrow.”
“Colleen.”
“Colleen for sure. And you got my text? You’ve got an appointment first thing. Carmine Noccia is coming to see you.”
CHAPTER 11
My assistant, Cody Dawes, stopped me at his desk, said, “Morning, Jack. We need to go over some things-”
“Just the red flags, Cody. I’m still dragging my tailpipe.”
“Sure, okay, uh. I’m giving you my notice.”
“What? What’s the problem? I thought you were happy here.”
“I got a speaking part in a Ridley Scott film. I’ve got lines.”
He grinned broadly, clasped his hands together, and maybe jumped off the ground. I stuck out my hand, shook his, and said, “Good for you, Cody. Congratulations.”
“I’m not leaving you in the lurch. I’ve lined up people for you to see. I screened them all myself.”
I sighed. “Okay. What’s next?” It was half past eight a.m. in Los Angeles, meaning it was half past five p.m. in Stockholm. My circadian rhythms were still on Central European time.
“Mr. Noccia is here. I had to put him in your office.”
“I thought I’d have a little time before he got here.”
“He was waiting at the curb, Jack. Inside a Mercedes with three other guys you wouldn’t want to marry your sister. I opened the front door. He said he wanted to come in, so I brought him upstairs. Judgment call.”
“Do you still do coffee?”
“Yes, I do,” Cody said with a grin.
I went into my office.
It’s got two sections; my work space at one end, a seating and meeting space at the other. Carmine Noccia was sitting in a chair by my desk.
“Carmine,” I said. I shook his hand, went around my desk, took my seat. All the phone lines were flashing. A three-inch-high pile of paper was stacked to my right. My schedule was up on my computer monitor, just waiting for me.
“You’re looking good, Jack. Like you spent the night in a gym locker.”
“Jet lag,” I said, “feels just like that.”
Noccia smiled. He was a handsome guy, midforties, perfect teeth, salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a custom-made suit and hand-stitched Italian loafers.
Carmine was what a modern-day Mafia rock star looked like. You looked at him and saw the Ivy League-educated businessman, not the son of a sitting don, the Mafia capo and killer.
Cody brought in a large silver thermos of coffee and a plate of biscuits, and when he left, I said, “Del Rio told me you had to see me urgently.”
I tried to keep it out of my voice, but what I was saying was, What the eff do you want?
CHAPTER 12
Carmine Noccia said, “It’s a fucking disaster, Jack. One of my transport vans was jacked in Utah. Three of my guys were killed, dumped in the desert. I don’t think the cops are going to help me recover my property-which needed to be done yesterday. It’s a good thing I’ve got you in my corner.”
I don’t do business with mobsters.
Make that past tense. I didn’t do business with mobsters until my identical twin brother, Tommy Jr., racked up a six-hundred-grand gambling debt and I paid it off to keep Tommy’s sweet wife from becoming a widow.
A few months ago, Del Rio and I had flown to Vegas to see Noccia in his over-the-top, Spanish-style manse complete with racehorses and a man-made recirculating river located about five miles from the Vegas Strip.
I’d brought a cashier’s check for the full amount of my brother’s debt, and Noccia and I had exchanged favors. We realized that day that we’d both been in the Corps. As marines liked to say about themselves, “Never a better friend. Never a worse enemy.”
Carmine Noccia and I had shaken hands on that.
Now Noccia poured coffee for himself, used the cream, passed it to me. He said, “My guys were good. The highway robbers were better. And that’s all I know about the sons of bitches.”
“When did this happen?”
“Last night,” Noccia said. “Our van was coming west from Chicago. We had a tracking device in there. No one knew anything was wrong until the van passed Vegas and kept pinging until it got to LA. The jackers must have discovered the GPS and trashed it when they stopped to check the inventory.”
“So you think the van is in LA?”
“I would say yes. LA is a big distribution hub. It’s a valuable cargo, Jack.”
“Drugs?”
He nodded. “Prescription variety.”
“How much?”
“Street value of thirty million.”
Now I understood why Noccia had been waiting for me before our doors opened. In the past, the Mob had frowned on the drug trade, but pharmaceuticals were a fast-growing and highly profitable business, just too good to pass up.
Pharmaceuticals were also easy to steal at any point along the distribution chain. Even a mom-and-pop store with a twelve-dollar padlock on the gate could have a hundred fifty grand worth of Oxy in stock on any given day.
Every pill was a tiny profit center, 100 percent FDA approved. The largest tablets of OxyContin were 80 milligrams. At a buck a milligram, one 80 mg pill was worth eighty bucks, and they came in bottles of a hundred. That meant one little bottle was worth eight thousand dollars. A truckload-thirty million or more.
Noccia had a big problem. He was desperate to control the damage and at the same time he couldn’t let anyone know he was dealing in pharmaceuticals. So instead of turning his own crew loose on the underground, he’d come to me.
More people died from illegal prescription drugs than all the street drugs combined. This was a very bad business and I wanted no part of it.
Noccia leaned in toward me, fixed me with his big brown eyes. “I’ve been waiting thirty years to say this, Jack. I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
CHAPTER 13
I gave Noccia a smile I didn’t mean and said, “Carmine, I don’t do drug-recovery missions. We do corporate work. Government contracts. You know.”
“You do more than that, Jack, but that’s your business. I’ll give you ten percent of the street value. That’s three million dollars-cash. All you have to do is find the merchandise. With your connections, it’ll take you a few days, tops. Three million dollars, Jack. How many cheating husbands do you have to tail to make that?”
Cody buzzed me on the intercom. “Mr. Morgan, your nine o’clock is here.”
I said to Carmine, “I wish I could help you, but this isn’t my kind of work.”
I ran my eyes over my schedule; my appointments were stacked up like incoming aircraft at LAX, every half hour to the end of the day. I thought about Colleen, lying on a cold slab, the medical examiner slicing her open from her collarbone to her bikini line.
As I sat here, cops were going through my house, putting my life under their Slap Chop while Carmine Noccia dangled millions of dirty dollars in front of my face.
I lifted my eyes and looked at the mafioso with a big future, a future that had now been compromised by the loss of a monumental inventory and three men.
Carmine’s expression was cold. No more kiddin’ around with Godfather lines. He interlaced his manicured fingers on my desk.
“I’ll double your take to twenty percent,” he said. “Tax free, six million in cash.”
The bigger the offer, the more I wanted nothing to do with it-or him.
“Thanks, but I’m not interested, Carmine,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’ve got another meeting.” I got to my feet.
Noccia also stood up.
We were the same height.
“You misunderstand me, Jack. You’ve got the job. What you want to tell me is how fast you can recover my merchandise-because very soon those goods will be all over the country and I’ll be out thirty unacceptable million. Call me when you have the van.”