Page 93 of The Picasso Heist
“I said, let me have your piece,” says Malcolm.
“Oh,” says Sammy. “Yeah, sure thing.”
He pulls out the gun tucked at his waist, walks over to Malcolm, and nearly drops it while handing it over.
“For Christ’s sake,” says Lugieri, rolling his eyes. He turns to head back up the stairs. He’s had enough of his Keystone Cops. Apparently he doesn’t need to watch me being murdered.
“You pussy!” I scream. “You can’t even stick around for it, huh?”
He spins. “What the hell did you just say?”
“You heard me.”
“You’re right, I did,” he says. He points at Malcolm, who now has Sammy’s gun pressed against my head. “Fuckin’ blow her brains out.”
“One last thing,” I say. “There’s one question you didn’t ask me: How did we know?”
“Know what?”
“You didn’t ask how we knew Bergamo was the anonymous source for the FBI, that he was the one who set my father up.”
“Why would I give a shit?”
“You told me yourself that you do business with Bergamo,” I say. “He launders your money for you.”
“How do you know that?” asks Lugieri.
“My brother told me,” I say. “He knows a lot of things about you, all the bad stuff. In fact, do you know what my brother would do if he were here right now?”
“I do,” says Malcolm. “It might look something like this.”
CHAPTER79
I FEEL THEbarrel of Sammy’s gun leave the back of my head and the breeze of Malcolm’s arms whipping out wide, a gun in each hand.
Oh, the look on Sammy’s face. He’s staring at his own Glock aimed square at his chest.That’s right, Sammy boy, you gave us your own gun. You just up and handed it over.
But Lugieri’s look takes the cake. His initial shock gives way to the kind of anger that comes only when you realize you’ve been taken down by a long con. Suddenly, he gets that his trusted Malcolm is a mole. He’s been played from the very second they met, the allegiance as fake as the jammed hammer on Malcolm’s gun.
“You’re a dead man,” says Lugieri. “You know that, don’t you?”
“It’s funny,” says Malcolm, “the only guys who say that are the ones on the wrong end of the gun.” He pauses, smiles. “You know that, don’t you?”
I’d love to sit around and enjoy the moment, soak it all in, but there’s still work to do. I spring up from the chair and do one of thefew things I can do with my hands zip-tied: I press the button on the wall. The garage door opens like a curtain to reveal the supporting cast who’ve been outside all along, listening and waiting for their cue.
Three of the four cops have their guns drawn. The fourth has a pair of small cable cutters to get me out of the zip ties. When my arms are free, I hand over the wire and transmitter from underneath my sweatshirt. I’m pretty good now at removing them. Practice makes perfect.
“You get it?” I ask. But I’m not talking to the cop.
“Every word,” says Elise Joyce, who’s standing behind him. She wouldn’t have missed this moment for the world. “Nicely done. You and your brother.”
I started calling my older brother “Skip” when I was in kindergarten and Malcolm told me that he was skipping the fifth grade, going straight from fourth to sixth. The smarty-pants. He was already doing advanced algebra and could write computer code. He also could bench-press me ten times with one hand, which was why no one ever called him a nerd—not to his face, at least, because they knew they’d get their own faces rearranged.
Only when both Sammy and Lugieri have been cuffed and read their rights does Skip lower his weapons. He’s still watching them both, though. Still gripping both guns.
Elise Joyce walks over to Lugieri, the happiest ten feet of her life.
“How you doing, Dominick?” she asks. “Nice to see you again.”
