So why am I fucking around investigating my shooting if O'Toole was the probable target? Get to work on the heroin shooter, Joe .
Kurtz walked over to the four-foot by five-foot framed map of the Buffalo area set on the north wall of the office. Sam had used the map in their old office, and Arlene had put it up here despite Kurtz's protests that they didn't need the damned thing. This morning, though, he and Arlene had gone through the list of murder sites from both Angelina Farino Ferrara's and Toma Gonzaga's lists and stuck red thumbtacks at each sitefourteen sites for twenty-two missing and presumed murdered people.
The hits had been literally all over the map: three in Lackawanna, four in the black ghetto east of Main, but others in Tonawanda, Cheektowaga, four more in Buffalo proper, and more in relatively upscaleor at least middle-classsuburbs such as Amherst and Kenmore.
Kurtz knew that no investigator in the world, even with police forensic resources behind him or her, could solve these murders in three days if the perpetrator didn't want to be caught. Too many hundreds of square miles to cover, too many hundreds of possible witnesses and potential suspects to interview, too many scores of fingerprints to check outalthough Kurtz didn't even own a Boy Detective fingerprint kitand too many possible local, state, and national killers who'd benefit from putting a crimp in the Gonzaga drug empire in Western New York.
If Kurtz were to make a list of suspects in the heroin killings right now, the name Angelina Farino Ferrara would fill the first five places on the list. The woman had everything to gain by destroying the Gonzagas' historical claim on the drug scene in the Buffalo area. She was ambitious. My God, was she ambitious. Her life's ambition had been to kill Emilio Gonzagawhich she had done last winter using Joe Kurtz as one of her many pawnswhile weakening the Gonzaga crime family's grip on the city and strengthening what was left of the Farino Family power here.
All this «Toma» and «Angelina» first-name crap made sense to Kurtz only if the woman was playing the old game of being friends with her adversary even while plotting his destruction.
But there were the five blue pins on the mapall Farino Family dealers or users who had disappeared with only bloody stains left behind!
Who said they'd been killed?
Angelina Farino Ferrara. Her family, in the first year of her rebuilding, had grabbed just enough peripheral drug action that it would be too suspicious if only Gonzaga people were being murdered. What was the loss of a few dealers and users if it meant gaining Toma Gonzaga's trust? Maybe they'd all been relocated to Miami or Atlantic City while Ms. Farino Ferrara continued to murder Gonzaga junkies.
But Kurtz was sure that Gonzaga didn't trust Angelina. Anyone would be a fool to trust this woman who shot her first husband and kept the pistol out of what she called sentimentality, this woman who married her second elderly husband to be trained in the strategies and tactics of thievery, and who calmly admitted to drowning her only baby because it carried Gonzaga genes.
Kurtz stood at the window and watched the cold rain fall on Chippewa Street It made sense that Gonzaga «hired» him to find the heroin-connection killer in four days. At the very least, Kurtz's failure would give Gonzaga another reason for whacking himas if possible collusion in the death of the mobster's father wasn't enough. And Angelina wasn't going to throw a fit when she learned that he'd been whackedshe'd accept Toma's explanation without rancor. The life of one Joe Kurtz wasn't that important in the grander scheme of things for herespecially when that grander scheme included revenge and ambition, which seemed to be the alpha and omega of Angelina Farino Ferrara's emotional spectrum.
Kurtz had to smile. His options were few. At least he'd neutralized the loose cannon that had been Big Bore Redhawk, recording the cell phone conversation with Angelina setting up the hit as he'd done so. Of course, the recording incriminated Joe Kurtz even more than the female don. In truth, they'd both been so circumspect over the phone that the tape was all but useless.
So it came down to the five thousand dollars advance money in an envelope that Kurtz was still carrying around. He'd use that on Tuesday morningHalloweenwhen he drove away from Buffalo, New York, forever, buying a different used car before crossing the state line (and violating his parole). Kurtz knew a few people around the country, perhaps the most important right now being a plastic surgeon in Oklahoma City who gave people like Joe Kurtz new faces and identities in exchange for hard cash.
But he'd need quite a bit more hard cash. Kurtz could get fifty thousand dollars in a minute by asking Arlene to buy his theoretical share of WeddingBells-dot-com and SweetheartSearch-dot-com, but he'd never do that. She'd waited for years to start an online business like this, even if the high school sweetheart thing had been his idea in Attica.