The Power Of The Dog by Don Winslow Page A

something.”
     
    “Who’s in the car, Stevie?”
     
    There are four guys in the car. Three more guys standing around outside. Real casual like. Smoking cigs, drinking coffee, shooting the shit. Like a mob announcement to the neighborhood—we’re going to whack somebody here so you might want to be someplace else.
     
    O-Bop refocuses.
     
    “Piccone’s sub-crew of Johnny Boy Cozzo’s crew,” O-Bop says. “Demonte wing of the Cimino Family.”
     
    “How do you know?”
     
    “The guy in the passenger seat is eating a can of peaches,” O-Bop says. “So it’s Jimmy Piccone—Jimmy Peaches. He’s got this thing for canned peaches.”
     
    O-Bop is the Paul’s Peerage of mobdom. He follows them like some guys follow baseball teams. He has the whole Five Families organizational chart in his head.
     
    So O-Bop is hipped to the fact that since Carlo Cimino died last year, the family’s been in a state of flux. Most of the hard-core guys were sure Cimino would pick Neill Demonte to be his successor, but he went for his brother-in-law Paulie Calabrese instead.
     
    It was an unpopular choice, especially among the old guard, who think that Calabrese is too white-collar, too soft. Too focused on turning the money into legitimate businesses. The hard guys—the loan sharks, extortion artists and flat-out plain robbers—don’t like it.
     
    Jimmy “Big Peaches” Piccone is one of these guys. In fact, he’s sitting in the Lincoln holding forth on it.
     
    “We’re the Cimino Crime Family,” Peaches is saying to his brother, Little Peaches. Joey “Little Peaches” Piccone is actually bigger than his older brother, Big Peaches, but no one is going to say that, so the nicknames stick. “Even the fuckin’ New York Times calls us the Cimino Crime Family. We do crime. If I wanted to be a businessman I would’ve joined—what—IBM.”
     
    Peaches also doesn’t like that Demonte was overlooked as boss. “He’s an old man, what’s the harm of letting him have his few years in the sun? He’s earned it. What the Old Man should have done is, he should have made Mister Neill boss and Johnny Boy the underboss. Then we would have had ‘our thing,’ our cosa nostra.”
     
    For a young guy—Peaches is twenty-six—he’s a throwback, a conservative, a mafioso William F. Buckley without the tie. He likes the old ways, the old traditions.
     
    “In the old days,” Peaches says, like he was even around in the old days, “we would have just taken a piece of the Javits Center. We wouldn’t have to suck ass to some old Harp like Matty Sheehan. Not like Paulie’s gonna give us a taste anyway. He don’t care if we fuckin’ starve.”
     
    “Hey,” Little Peaches says.
     
    “Hey what.”
     
    “Hey, Paulie gives this job to Mister Neill, who gives it to Johnny Boy, who gives it to us,” Little Peaches says. “All I need to know: Johnny Boy gives us a job, we do the job.”
     
    “We’re gonna do the fuckin’ job,” Peaches says. He don’t need his little brother giving him lectures about how it works. Peaches knows how it works, likes how it works, especially in the Demonte wing of the family, where it works like it did in the old days.
     
    Another thing, Peaches fucking worships Johnny Boy.
     
    Johnny Boy is everything the Mafia used to be.
     
    What it oughta be again, Peaches thinks.
     
    “Soon as it gets really dark,” Peaches says, “we’ll go up there and punch their tickets.”
     
    Callan’s sitting there flipping through the black notebook.
     
    “Your dad’s in here,” he says.
     
    “There’s a surprise,” O-Bop says sarcastically. “For how much?”
     
    “Two large.”
     
    “Probably bet on the Budweiser Clydesdales to show at Aqueduct,” O-Bop says. “Hey, here comes the pizza. Hey, what the fuck is this? They’re taking our pizza!”
     
    O-Bop is genuinely pissed. He’s not especially angry that these guys are here to kill him—that’s to be expected, that’s