Free Bad Guys by Anthony Bruno

faces. They were all FBI agents from the Manhattan field office.
    â€œDid you take these?” he asked Tozzi.
    Tozzi took the pile away from him and shuffled through the photos quickly. He pulled one out and showed it to Gibbons. It was a picture of the two of them seated at a lunch counter.
    â€œWhere did you get these?”
    Tozzi sat down next to Gibbons. “Remember Vinnie Clementi? The pusher?”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œI found them in his apartment after I did him. There are twenty-six pictures here, thirty-eight agents in all.” Tozzi was breathing fast. “And get this, he knew my name.”
    â€œWho knew your name?”
    â€œClementi. The scumbag was standing in my face, begging for mercy, and he called me by my name. He called me ‘Mikey.’”
    Gibbons stared down at the photos scattered over the coffee table. Some of these faces he’d known for over twenty years. “Clementi knew your name was Michael,” he murmured absently, searching for the angle. He looked at his own face in the picture. It was tired and creased, an old man’s face. “Somebody’s been tailing agents,” he said sadly.
    â€œDamn straight. And that means somebody’s been fingering agents,” Tozzi said. “Somebody who knows us. Somebody on the inside.”
    Gibbons’s stomach started to ache. His temper suddenly flared. “What the fuck is this, Tozzi? You go AWOL and turn into a vigilante, and now you’re trying to tell me you’re onto a bad agent? What’re you trying to pull?”
    Tozzi looked him in the eye, then looked away. “I didn’t want to find these pictures.”
    â€œWhy did you toss Clementi’s apartment, tell me that. You did a real job on the place. The guy who did the report on the apartment said the perp was clearly looking for something, looking for something pretty badly.”
    â€œWho did the report?” Tozzi asked.
    â€œWhy do you want to know?”
    â€œAnybody I know?”
    â€œSome new guy—I don’t know his name—just transferred to New York from the Philly office. What were you looking for at Clementi’s?”
    â€œAddress books, ledgers, anything that might lead to his connection.”
    â€œSo you could go execute him too?”
    â€œSince when do you start taking up for drug dealers, Gib?”
    â€œWhen some asshole starts taking the law into his own hands.”
    â€œFuck you, Gibbons. You and I both know this is the only way to get these guys. They’re too big, too smart, they buy the best lawyers. I’ve thought this through. It’s the only effective way to put these guys out of action.”
    Gibbons wasn’t about to argue with that. He let out a slow breath until the testiness ran out of him. “You said you stumbled onto something big. Give it to me. The Bureau will handle it in-house.”
    â€œThe hell they will. Whoever’s responsible is in-house. I’m sure of that.”
    â€œSo what do you think?” Gibbons asked. Tozzi had to have a theory: in all the years they’d worked together, Tozzi always managed to cook up some kind of Sherlock Holmes solution.
    â€œHang on, let me show you something.”
    Gibbons watched Tozzi go through the photos. He picked out two and laid them down next to the picture of the two of them at the lunch counter. He watched Tozzi’s hands, long and quick, gambler’s hands, just as he remembered them. The sweaty forehead was something new, though.
    â€œHere.” Tozzi pointed to a picture of an agent in a heavy overcoat emerging from a car on a busy Main Street somewhere. You could see his breath in the cold. “Dave Simmons, right? Look in the background.” Tozzi pointed to a blurry movie marquee in the background. “See what it says? Terms of Endearment. That movie was released in the fall of eighty-three, I checked. It was the big movie that year, stayed in the