Page 10 of Perfect Vengeance

Stopping the Falzones before they become a major player in the modern-day world of organized crime meant everything to him, and that’s where his listening devices came in. The Mafia was more insidious than ever and spreading like a cancer. Just because they didn’t make headlines anymore didn’t mean they were gone. They were reorganizing.

In the fifteen years he’d worked on the FBI’s Organized Crime Strike Force Team, he’d witnessed the mob growing smarter and more sophisticated. Technology was transforming every day and becoming increasingly complex. So was organized crime. Where once the Mafia’s bread and butter came from extortion, heroin trafficking, and waste management, now the almighty internet provided a virtually covert way for them to make millions off scam cyber-crime businesses. Although, when it came to modern innovation, the Falzones were running behind.

The phone on his desk rang, interrupting his thoughts and hammering into his skull. He grabbed the receiver. “Gates,” he snapped.

“Is this Special Agent Jack Gates?” a female voice with a heavy Italian accent asked.

“Yes.” He narrowed his eyes. Something about the voice was familiar, but he couldn’t place it. “Who’s this?”

Click.

He replaced the receiver, then wolfed three aspirin and washed them down with a swig of rotgut coffee that only added to his sucky mood. With a groan, he rose to retrieve the bottle cap from the fish tank. He plunged his good hand into the water to scoop out the cap. Again, his clownfish bolted in opposite directions.

Jack’s partner sauntered into the office and headed for a chair opposite Jack’s desk. The chair creaked as he sat. The buzz cut Smitty had gotten last week made him look like a blond, blue-eyed—albeit very out of shape—marine. His lime-green dress shirt stretched across his broadening gut to the point where two buttons defied the laws of physics by not popping off. Smitty’s customary Monday morning aftershave—eau-de-doughnut—wafted across the desk.

Smitty swiped at the powdered sugar on his orange-and-purple tie, flinging some onto Jack’s files. “Still pissed, I see.”

“Getting run over will do that to a guy.” He glanced at the cast covering half his right hand and extending up his forearm.

“Getting outrun by a woman must sting too.”

When Smitty snickered, Jack drew his brows together and instantly regretted it. The movement was enough to tug on the strips of tape an ER doctor had used to close the cut on his scalp. “Did you get the memo?” he bit out. “I’m on the disabled list.”

“I got it.” Smitty leaned forward, wearing a more serious expression. “You know Morrison had no choice.”

He gave a slight nod. “Yeah, although I didn’t think he’d assign you to another squad. I can easily get back into Rocco’s to finish the job there, but I don’t have a key to the deadbolt on Psycho Fiori’s front door.” Between Rocco’s apartment and Psycho Fiori’s house, he’d have two of Franco Falzone’s top soldiers covered. “Even if I could climb a twenty-foot rope to get onto the balcony, which I can’t with a busted wrist, I’m no locksmith, and all our tech teams are still tied up on the west coast. How does Morrison expect me to get that second bug planted before the court order expires?”

“I don’t,” Special Agent in Charge Michael Morrison boomed from the doorway. He strode into Jack’s office and planted his beefy hands on the desk. “You’re on light duty until the doc clears you. You’ll have to get an extension on your Title III orders for those bugs.”

“I can’t.” He reached for the manila folder in his in-box and smacked it on the desk. “This was the last extension Judge Ortiz would sign. Said our probable cause was getting stale.” Jim Spencer had given his life to get that PC and Jack would be damned before letting an agent’s ultimate sacrifice be meaningless. “If I don’t get these devices planted within the next four days, this case is dead.”

“Better the case dead, than you.” Morrison straightened to his full six feet and crossed his arms over his massive chest. Glare from the overhead lights glinted off his balding head. “I won’t risk losing another agent just to nail Franco and Tino Falzone.”

The mention of that trigger-happy piece of garbage had Jack grinding his teeth.

“What happened to Jim Spencer wasn’t your fault.”

“The hell it wasn’t.” Renewed guilt ripped through him as it had every day for the last six months. Since he identified Jim’s bullet-riddled body in a Pennsylvania cornfield. His gut told him Tino had personally done the hit, with or without Franco’s blessing. “He was too young, too inexperienced, and I put him in anyway.”

“He was good,” Smitty said. “That’s why you picked him.”

Jack stared at the file on his desk, not really seeing it. No matter how many times he heard that he hadn’t been responsible, and that he’d done everything by the book, he’d never forgive himself for Jim’s death. Worse, it reminded him of someone else he’d once been responsible for. A cooperator he’d wired up to gather evidence against the Falzones. That was nearly fifteen years ago, but he’d never forgotten the way that bookie’s face had looked when the body was discovered behind the old Meadowlands Arena. Gunshots to the man’s head had all but obliterated any identifying features.

Morrison held up his hand to stop Jack from objecting further. “Agent Spencer had the requisite five years’ experience as a field agent. He aced every practical problem and scenario Quantico’s undercover school could throw at him. The board reviewed his qualifications and blessed him as a UC operative.”

Jack dragged his hand down his face. That might be enough to mollify some agents. Not him. He’d failed Spencer and could never make it up to him. “I should have waited for Mark Simmons to get freed up on that other case. He had more experience.” But Jack had been impatient, too eager to get an undercover inside the Falzone organization before the secret Mafia Commission meeting took place.

Jim Spencer’s murder had to be avenged, and it was his responsibility to do it. It was a matter of honor among agents, and the only thing that mattered in his life right now.

He looked at the manila folder containing the soon-to-expire court orders, then at the calendar blotter on the desk. Midnight Thursday. The deadline was approaching fast.

“Don’t even think it.” Morrison’s baritone cut through Jack’s haze of revenge. “You’re a senior agent in this office. You and your brothers are the best I’ve got on the Strike Force teams. No offense, Smitty.”

Smitty shrugged. “None taken.”

Jack’s brothers, Kyle and Deke, were also top agents in the FBI. If his youngest brother, Lance, wasn’t doing some kind of black ops assignment for an agency he suspected didn’t really exist—officially, that was—there was no doubt in Jack’s mind that he’d have made a top-notch FBI agent too.

“If I so much as get wind of you doing any field work before the doc clears you,” Morrison continued, “I’ll take your badge, your gun, and give you thirty days on the beach for insubordination.”