Free Bad Guys by Anthony Bruno Page B

fit. He picked it up, immediately thinking that the damn thing would have to be returned. It was heavy, thirty, forty pounds from the feel of it, and he was sure there wasn’t enough postage on it. He turned the box over on the hood of his Jeep and saw almost thirty twenty-cent stamps plastered down the right-hand side of the package in uneven overlapping lines, lines of American flags ripped from a roll and haphazardly pasted down. No return address. Then he noticed the carefully printed address done with a black felt-tip pen:
    DIRECTOR
    FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
    WASHINGTON, DC 20535
    The postal worker set the package down gently, crossed to the other side of the street, and flagged down the next police car that came by.
    Two hours later the NYPD bomb squad trailer arrived on the scene and took possession of the package. The bomb squad truck looks like a giant chain-mail jelly roll and is specially designed to contain an explosion while in transit. They took the package to the police firing range at Pelham Bay Park on the other side of the Bronx for examination and detonation if necessary. As part of their routine procedure, one of the men on the bomb squad X-rayed the package to see just what he was dealing with. What he saw made his mouth go dry.
    That afternoon the package was transferred to the city medical examiner, who opened it with an FBI lab tech in attendance so as not to lose any possible evidence, like fingerprints, lint, hair, or saliva. Inside they found what the bomb squad told them to expect, three human heads. But the bomb squad X rays didn’t prepare them for the rest of it, not the smell or the first sight of the mottled yellowed faces, and certainly not the gouged-out eyes. Three heads lined up on a stainless steel tray, six horrible raw holes looking at nothing. Lando, Blaney, and Novick. Gibbons remembered the ME’s report saying that in each of the victims there were signs of clotting in the torn optic nerves, indicating that the eyes had been ripped out before death.
    Lando, Blaney, and Novick. Before they were killed, they had each been working alone, undercover, infiltrating organized crime in the New York families. They posed as eager-beaver hoods, anxious to find a regular gig with the mob. They were swimming with sharks. Lando had an office over a plumbing-supply company in Uniondalewhere he took care of the books for Sabatini Mistretta’s loan-sharking operations on Long Island. Blaney was running numbers for a lieutenant in Phillip Giovinazzo’s family, working out of a car wash on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan. Novick was working for a trucking business owned by one of Joe Luccarelli’s associates, driving oranges, grapefruit, and cocaine twice a week from Florida to the farmers’ market in Newark. They swam with sharks, and they got their heads bitten off.
    Tozzi stared out the window and mumbled into his fist. “I keep thinking about Nina Lando. And the two girls. The older one must be in high school now. He was my first partner in the Bureau. He used to look out for me, have me over for dinner, that kind of stuff. Even tried to fix me up with his sister-in-law once. He was the kind of guy you could talk to about real things . . . Good man . . . I was supposed to have that undercover . . .”
    Gibbons stared down at the pictures. “Lando, Blaney, and Novick fingered by another agent . . . that’s a pretty serious charge.”
    â€œI’ve considered every other possible alternative.” Tozzi shook his head gravely. “It’s got to be a bad agent. How else would a flea like Clementi have pictures like this? It has to be.”
    Gibbons’s head was throbbing. “If the mob knows who we are and they have known for almost three years, why haven’t they tried to get rid of all of us?”
    â€œWhy? Because it would be stupid, that’s why. If they started gunning down agents, the Bureau would just replace them