“I only met Sonny Red about three times,” Maruca says, distancing himself quickly. “I don’t know him.”

“He was a gentleman,” Sally says, “but everybody makes mistakes.”

“Things like this happen,” Maruca says. “You can’t question.”

“No, there’s no questions,” Sally says. “One thing you gotta realize. Anything happens, it happens for a reason. ”

Maruca clears his throat. “And you can’t bring it up and you can’t give opinions.”

“There’s a reason for everything that’s right,” I say.

“I wasn’t aware, you know. Mike called me and said, ‘Listen, everything’s fine, just stand pat, and there’s no more talking about it.’ ”

“Right.”

“This is why they sent me down here at a big expense,” Sally says, “because youse guys would feel comfortable. I mean, they didn’t want to send two guys you didn’t know.”

“If they sent somebody we didn’t know,” Maruca says, “we can’t talk to him. Gotta send somebody we know.”

“What good is strangers?” Sally says. “So now you’ll feel comfortable?”

“Yeah, yeah. Because I didn’t do nothing wrong. When you don’t do nothing wrong, you ain’t got nothing to worry about, right?”

“Right,” we say.

“Now my crew’s in power,” Sally says. “But Sonny Red, Phil Lucky, I’m gonna sit down and argue with them? They were in power long enough. Under-the-table power.”

“But they were there,” I say.

“Calling the shots,” Sally says.

“I didn’t know what the fuck was going on,” Maruca says. “He wasn’t telling me nothing at all. He was telling me very little.”

“Now we’re working under an honor system,” Sally says. “You gotta be honorable amongst our fellows, right?”

“That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” Maruca says.

“Well, you’re with the right guy,” I say, “with Sonny.”

“Yeah, he’s gonna be a big shot now,” Sally says. “Because if the doors open up there, he moves. We’re all under Sonny Black. Everybody.”

“In other words, you told them—Sonny Black.”

“Any problem, you call me,” Sally says.

“There ain’t no problem,” Maruca says. “What have I got to lose here?

“You did the right thing,” I say.

“If I’d have done something wrong, I’d have been loony.”

We got back on the subject of Anthony Bruno Indelicato, my target. “See, he’s got to come out,” I say. “That stuff, when you take it, you’re only high like twenty minutes. Then you need more. It’s not like heroin where you stay four or five hours. That’s why they get crazy.”

“Marone,” Sally says, “this guy needs sacks full.”

“That’s why it costs so much,” I say. “So he’s gotta come out of the fucking woodwork. He had connections down here for that stuff.”

“I never saw him before,” Maruca says.

“I met him three or four times,” Sally says. “And I remember his mouth.”

“The only time he does anything is when the coke is up,” I say. “Otherwise, forget about it.”

“Our guy over there said that he’s capable of anything,” Sally says.

“He might come in and start fucking shooting,” I say.

“He come into the O.K. Corral,” Sally says, “he didn’t care.”

“You gonna be around here?” I say. “Because I’m gonna be down here for a few days looking for this kid, so if I need something, you know . . . Can I get you over here?”

“Use my home number,” Maruca says. “I’ll come running. You want me heavy, just say, ‘Come heavy.’ ”

“Okay.”

“Just tell him it’s chilly out, get dressed,” Sally says.

“Okay.”

“You don’t wanna say that,” Maruca says. “Just say, ‘I’m buying a car and I want you to check it out.’ ”

“Okay. Nobody down here knows me. I’ll know him, but he doesn’t know me at all, so I can go in a lot of these joints. I’m at the Holiday Inn down here at the beach.”

“How long you gonna be down?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’d like to go home sooner if he could clean the dishes up,” Sally says. “For once we’re independent, completely. There’s no fucking dictators.”

“That’s right,” I say.

“Hope Lefty’s in favor,” Maruca says.

“Forget about it,” I say.

After the meeting I called Sonny to report.

“You’re gonna have to do a lot of traveling back and forth for me,” Sonny says. “Say hello to that fucking clownzo with holy underwears.”

I called Lefty. He knew that Puma wasn’t in Florida—he was in New York.

“I met here yesterday with him,” Lefty says. “Everything is straightened out with him.”

I told everybody that I was hitting a lot of joints looking for the kid. I did show my face around. I wasn’t worried about running into him—or having somebody run to me with a tip that he was around the corner—which would have put me in a bad situation. After all, the mob was looking for him. So was the FBI, which hoped to snatch him off the street for his own protection, at which time I could tell Sonny that I had done the job. If the mob and the FBI couldn’t find him, I didn’t have much to worry about.

The only thing some of the people at the Bureau were concerned about was that as word got round that I had the contract on Anthony Bruno, he might start looking to whack me out.

Sally and I stayed in the Miami area for about a week. Then Sonny called me. “I don’t think he’s down there. I think we got him up here in New York. So you go on back to Tampa.”

A couple of days later, during my routine daily call, Lefty says, “What’s happening?”

“Nothing. Just out seeing if I could hustle anything up, make some bread.”

“I hope so. I hope so.”

“Nothing going on?”

“No,” he says. “Just buy today’s Post, that’s all.”

“I don’t get it down here until tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow you get it. Give me a call in the morning.”

The article in the New York Post had the headline: MOB SNUFFS OUT AMBITIOUS BOSS.

The article said that the body of Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato had been found in a shallow grave in a vacant lot in Ozone Park, Queens, and described the body as “bullet-riddled.” A couple of kids had been playing, and they say a cowboy boot sticking out of the ground.

Two close associates of his were missing and presumed dead. I found out that the day before the article, the New York Police Department had notified the FBI that the body was positively identified as Sonny Red, and that he had died of gunshot wounds.

I called the next morning. “I saw that article.”

“Yeah. Heh! There’s a lot of warm heat over here. Forget about it.”

“Over that?”

“Yeah. Over a lot of things.”

“We’re all right, though, huh?”

“Lotta heat. But I can’t say nothing. Our phones over here are no good no more, you know?”

Now that there was open warfare, with key family members being murdered, Headquarters wanted to pull me out and close the operation. They wanted to close it right away, by June 1. More murders were expected. Jules Bonavolonta felt that since I was close to Sonny and had been given a contract, I myself was a target to get whacked. I could understand their concern, but I didn’t agree with it.

I was so close to getting made and becoming a real wiseguy that I could taste it. Soon Rusty Rastelli would be out of prison. I was sure that Sonny planned to move fast on it. He gave me the contract so that I would have that credential when he put my name up. He needed as a close ally a soldier he could trust and who could face other wiseguys as an equal. Sonny had already said that I would be doing a lot of traveling for him. As a made guy, I would have enormous clout as his emissary. I would be able to sit down with anybody. As a wiseguy, I would be Sonny’s partner. Sonny could have used me almost like an ambassador, an intermediary with other families.

The help I could give to other investigations, as a made guy, was limitless. When it ultimately became known that I had penetrated the mob and become a made guy, it would humiliate the Mafia and end forever the myth of the Mafia’s invincibility. I wanted to stay under until at least August.