Free Bad Guys by Anthony Bruno Page A

theaters all that winter. This means they’ve been watching our guys for—what?—almost three years?”
    Gibbons thought it was interesting that Tozzi referred to the agents in the pictures as “our guys.” In all his years with the Bureau, he himself never thought of it as a brotherhood.
    â€œNow look at this.” Tozzi snatched up their picture. “Look on the counter, next to my coffee.”
    There was a small white bottle in front of Tozzi, a crumpled-up napkin next to it.
    â€œCold pills. I remember, three winters ago, I had a stupid cold that I couldn’t shake and I was taking those pills that’re supposed to keep you going. They didn’t work for shit, and my nose was running all over the place. Now the way I figure, this had to have been taken somewhere on Staten Island. We were checking out that construction company, remember?”
    Gibbons nodded. “I remember. It was February, March of eighty-four.”
    Tozzi dropped their picture and grabbed the third one. It showed a crowd of standing men, most of them smoking, some looking around, others studying racing forms. There was a row of betting windows in the background. A circle had been drawn around two of the men standing together in the crowd, both in their mid-thirties. One was wearing a leather jacket over a crewneck sweater, the other a light-colored suit with no tie. “Kozlowski and Driscoll. I’m positive this was taken atAqueduct.” Tozzi tapped the picture with his index finger. “They were undercover at the time, had a warehouse setup somewhere out on Long Island. They were posing as small-time fences looking for some big-time action. I remember this distinctly because Kozlowski came to me to show me this shitty little goatee he’d grown. He wanted to know if I thought he looked Italian enough.”
    â€œWhat’d you tell him?”
    â€œI told him he looked okay, but it was his rotten kielbasy breath that would give him away.” Tozzi laughed, but Gibbons could tell his heart wasn’t in it.
    Gibbons stared at the faces of the two agents. “These guys were undercover, and somebody knew who they were.” He shook his head. “This is bad . . .”
    â€œAnd it gets worse.” Tozzi grabbed the envelope and pulled out a handwritten list. Gibbons immediately recognized Tozzi’s hasty block printing. “These are the names of the guys I picked out of the pictures. Thirty-eight agents in all. But who’s missing?”
    Gibbons scanned the list quickly, then went back over it one by one. What was Tozzi driving at? He shrugged and shook his head.
    â€œIf these pictures were taken in the winter and early spring of eighty-four, there are three very obvious omissions here.”
    Three. Gibbons stopped breathing. Of course. Lando, Blaney, and Novick. Jesus Christ . . .
    He rubbed the back of his neck and looked hard at Tozzi, his gut churning. Lando, Blaney, and Novick—three guys who hardly knew each other but whose names were permanently linked, always mentioned in the same hushed breath, three names that still made federal agents swallow hard and think anxious thoughts about their kids and wives. Everybody knew the story, but for those agents who were active at the time, it would never go away and would always be a startling reminder of what could happen on the job.
    It started out as a gruesome puzzle, didn’t even concern the Bureau at first. Three bodies found in the middle of a field of high grass behind a grammar school in Stamford, Connecticut. Three male bodies without heads. It was late September 1984.
    Then, a few days later, on the last Saturday of the month, a postal worker drove up to a mailbox on a fairly busy road near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to make his first pickup of the day. He found a large package on the ground next to the box, the corners crushed andtorn as if someone had tried to jam it in but couldn’t make it