Bad Apple Read Online Free Page A

for.”
    â€œNo, it wasn’t.” Gibbons holstered his gun and turned on him. “Gary Petersen deserves better than twenty seconds’ worth of footage of his bloody car seat in a stupid TV report that doesn’t say anything about anything sandwiched in between some garbage about what Madonna had for lunch and a commercialfor Ex-Lax. The guy’s got a wife and kids. He’s a decent guy and a damn good agent, but nobody’s gonna say shit about that because nobody gives a shit about the guy who takes the bullet. It’s always the other guy, the one who pulls the trigger, who gets all the press. The victim is always just a prop for the bad guy in these things.”
    Ivers took off his half-glasses. “I agree with you entirely, Bert. But that cameraman was right, too. The First Amendment guarantees his right to cover this event as a journalist.”
    Gibbons was looking around on the ground, grumbling. “Yeah, well, maybe the Supreme Court will get around to fixing that, too.”
    â€œWhat?”
    Gibbons found his icebag on the pavement by the front of the car. “Never mind.” He brushed off the bag and put it back on his cheek.
    That was the goddamn problem with this country, he thought. Everybody knows his rights, even when it’s wrong.

THREE
3:37 A.M.
    Tozzi’s arm lay on the table in front of him like a dead fish. The squeezed lime wedge in the glass of dark rum in front of him looked like a dead fish, too, a little green one. He stared down at his watch. It took a few seconds for the time to register in his brain. Twenty minutes to four. In the morning. He closed his weary eyes. This was nuts.
    The place was called Joey’s Starlight Lounge, but the only light in there came from behind the bar, and it gave everybody who got near it a sinister Phantom of the Opera kind of look. Joey’s Starlight Lounge was a peek-a-boo bar where topless dancers in g-strings shook their booties with their hands over their nipples. When a patron at the bar gave a girl a buck, he’d get a peek. For five, he could have a gander. For ten, he could get up close. For twenty, he could touch. But right now there was hardly anyone there, and Annette, the only girl on duty, was sitting in a folding chair behind the bar, wearing a Seton Hall warm-up jacket to cover her assets, reading a paperback copy of King Lear. She had jet-black hair chopped at the collar, and she said she was studying acting at Juilliard. She worked here, she said, because she refused to waitress, and the tips were a lot better.
    Tozzi finished off what was left of his drink, which was prettywatery now that all the ice had melted. That was okay. He was just thirsty.
    He looked into the bottom of his empty glass and saw his reflection under the little dead lime. The dark hair was getting thinner every day, but it still covered what it was supposed to. The dark deep-set eyes were tired, so they were even more deep-set and that much more suspicious. Heavy brows, Roman nose, slightly thick lips—a thug if there ever was one. But not a bad-looking thug. He wasn’t DeNiro, of course, but he wasn’t a toad either. Not on a good day.
    Tozzi leaned out of the booth where he was sitting and squinted into the gloom in the back room. It was even darker back there, but in the dim light of a wall sconce he could make out the two figures huddled over a table, clasping their glasses in front of them. He couldn’t see the muscle, but he knew they were back there, too, four of them, all bruisers. The thin guy was Tony Bells, the loan shark. The little guy was his boss, Buddha Stanzione. Tozzi knew what they were talking about. Him.
    Tozzi scanned the bar, looking for his “partner,” but the only person at the bar was Stanley Sukowski, Tony Bells’s driver. Stanley wasn’t a made guy and never would be because he was half-Polish. He was what they called a “mob associate.” Stanley was