บท 8: Antsy
Dominick suspected that DePrima was jerking him around now. Between the New Jersey State Police and the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice, they had more than enough on DePrima to make his life miserable. He was a known fence with a lengthy criminal record, and they could easily put him away for receiving stolen property.
They could also prosecute him for a number of auto thefts, burglaries, and hijackings he'd sponsored. This was how people in DePrima's business ordered their wares. If there was something you knew you could sell, you hired somebody else to steal it for you. Cars, jewelry, fur coats, TV sets, sewing machines, watches, canned goods, whatever. Dominick remembered when a hijacked truckload of Maine lobsters had appeared a couple of days before New Year's. DePrima figured he could unload lobsters easy for the holiday, so he'd put in an order.
But DePrima wasn't getting a free ride from the state for nothing. Dominick had several informants who said they knew Liu Shifu and were working to get him an introduction, but DePrima was the one who claimed to be Shifu's old buddy. When they first started leaning on DePrima, he had promised to introduce Dominick to Shifu and vouch for him, no problem. But in seventeen months Shifu hadn't come into "the store" once, and whenever Dominick asked why, DePrima just shrugged and said Shifu must be spooked or something.
The state wanted to pack it in with Dominick and his informants and try something else. But Dominick had a feeling DePrima wasn't giving this his best effort, and he was getting tired of the bullshit. He wanted that introduction, and he wanted it soon. DePrima had to start doing more.
Normally Dominick might have been more patient. He knew from experience that these things took time, that in deep cover it often took years to establish yourself. But this wasn't a normal assignment. This one was different.
It was a joint effort, state and federal, combining the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the New Jersey Attorney General's Office, and the New Jersey State Police. A cooperative effort like this was almost unheard of in law enforcement, but Liu Shifu was a very unusual kind of criminal. He was deadly, crafty, and efficient, a mass murderer who set no pattern and left no traces. Everybody had had high hopes when Dominick started out on this undercover assignment, but now he was hearing rumblings from the state side. People were getting impatient and beginning to have doubts about Dominick's ability to succeed.
Maybe if he hadn't come into this operation with such a fanfare, they wouldn't be so disappointed with his slow progress. Ed Denning and Alan Grieco, his old buddies from the Bergen County Homicide Unit, where Dominick had worked before he became a fed, had recommended him for the job. He could imagine the build-up they must have given him.
Captain Denning, poker-faced, squinting behind the perpetual veil of cigar smoke, stating the facts as if they were carved in stone, and there must be something wrong with you that you didn't already know this: Dominick Edge is the best, period. And Alan Grieco, he looked so honest and sincere he could sell snow to an Eskimo.
Dominick could just hear the two of them: ''Oh, Dominick's the guy you need for this job."
"Dominick put John Gotti's little brother Vinny away—the one nobody ever hears about because Dominick put him away for a long, long time."
"Dominick. He's got balls like a frigging elephant. One time he went undercover on location in New York where Frank Sinatra was making a movie and he busted some guy on the crew who was dealing coke."
"Dominick's got a scrapbook full of wise guys he's put away over the years that would make Dick Tracy jealous."
It was all true, of course, but Dominick knew how Grieco and Denning operated. They must have made him out to be Superman. And Grieco was his best friend. Three times a week he and Dominick went jogging together. No one could ever live up to whatever those two had said about him.
Of course, when you consider who they were giving their sales pitch to, the hype job wasn't so surprising. Patrick Kane of the state police had been chasing Shifu since 1980 and all by himself for most of that time. Catching Shifu had practically become his mission in life. So when a pharmacist in Bergen County was reported missing and the last person this man was supposed to have been with was Liu Shifu, Kane made a beeline for the Bergen County Homicide Unit and asked that they not pursue this suspected homicide but leave it to the state police instead.
It never sits well with the locals when other agencies try to horn in on their territory, but when Captain Denning and Lieutenant Grieco heard about all the killings that were linked to Shifu, they decided not to argue with Detective Kane over jurisdiction. Wishing out loud, Kane said what they really needed to flush Shifu out was a good undercover man, and a single lightbulb went on over Denning's and Grieco's heads: Dominick Edge. If they got Dominick involved, they could cooperate with the state police and still keep it in the family, so to speak.
Even though Dominick was a fed now, he was still one of them. They told Detective Kane that Dominick Edge was without a doubt the one man for this job, and when Kane objected that Dominick was a federal agent and probably couldn't get involved in a homicide investigation like this, Denning puffed on his cigar and said one word: "Guns." Selling guns was part of Shifu's extensive criminal portfolio. As long as there were guns involved, an ATF agent could be brought in.
Kane bought their pitch and called Dominick that very afternoon. It wasn't long before Dominick was on the job as "Michael Dominick Provenzano."
But that had been seventeen months ago, and even though certain people from the state might not be saying it out loud, Dominick could feel that they were getting antsy. Frankly so was he. In the past year and a half he'd heard a lot of stories about Shifu and the things he was supposed to have done, stories from both sides of the law. At "the store" they referred to him as "the one-man army", "the devil himself" and "the angel of death."
And if half of what Dominick had heard was true, these names were well deserved.
Dominick could understand Kane's relentless devotion to this case. There was something about Shifu that was so insidious, so arrogant. Shifu's face had become the last thing Dominick pictured before he went to sleep at night, and it was right there staring at him when he woke up in the morning. There was no question about it anymore. The bastard had to go down; he had to.
Everyone understood that.
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