Page 79 of The Picasso Heist

I FEEL THE barrel 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 the few 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.”

Lugieri can’t even look at her. “Enjoy this while you can,” he says.

“Oh, I plan to.”

“Once again, you’ll never get a conviction.”

“Something tells me this time will be a little different,” says Joyce. “You know what that something is? You, Dominick. Because this time you’ve done all the heavy lifting for me.”

“We’ll see about that.” But the words don’t pack a punch, and he knows it. He’s going over all the things that Malcolm knows about him, including what he witnessed with his own eyes. For instance, when Lugieri killed a member of his crew right in front of him at Osteria Contorni.

“You know what the most amusing part is, Dominick?” Joyce motions at the cops. “We didn’t need to bring more. Do you know what I mean by that?”

Lugieri looks at her for the first time. “Fuck you,” he says.

“Careful there, Dom. You’ve already been read your rights.

But we both know what I’m talking about.

We didn’t need an army because you left yours behind—you didn’t want any of them to know that your decision to do business with a sloppy, loose-lipped, and debt-ridden character like Enzio Bergamo had put your entire operation and every man working for it in jeopardy.

That’s right, you left them all behind… in every sense of the word. ”

Elise Joyce is smiling a little too widely. So are a couple of the cops. Even before I look over at my brother, I know what he’s doing: rolling his eyes. There’s only one reason he’s sheep-dipping from army intelligence and it’s not to stand around and listen to grandstanding like this.

sheep-dipping

verb

Taking a temporary leave from the military to pull a covert job as a civilian.

I clear my throat, and the sudden sound of it serves its purpose. Joyce turns to me and sees my look, the message in my stare.

We’ve still got places to go, people to see.