Hard as Nails

If Kurtz were to make a list of suspects in the heroin killings right now, the name Angelina Farino Ferrara would fill the first five places on the list. The woman had everything to gain by destroying the Gonzagas' historical claim on the drug scene in the Buffalo area. She was ambitious. My God, was she ambitious. Her life's ambition had been to kill Emilio Gonzaga—which she had done last winter using Joe Kurtz as one of her many pawns—while weakening the Gonzaga crime family's grip on the city and strengthening what was left of the Farino Family power here.

All this «Toma» and «Angelina» first-name crap made sense to Kurtz only if the woman was playing the old game of being friends with her adversary even while plotting his destruction.

But there were the five blue pins on the map—all Farino Family dealers or users who had disappeared with only bloody stains left behind!

Who said they'd been killed?

Angelina Farino Ferrara. Her family, in the first year of her rebuilding, had grabbed just enough peripheral drug action that it would be too suspicious if only Gonzaga people were being murdered. What was the loss of a few dealers and users if it meant gaining Toma Gonzaga's trust? Maybe they'd all been relocated to Miami or Atlantic City while Ms. Farino Ferrara continued to murder Gonzaga junkies.

But Kurtz was sure that Gonzaga didn't trust Angelina. Anyone would be a fool to trust this woman who shot her first husband and kept the pistol out of what she called sentimentality, this woman who married her second elderly husband to be trained in the strategies and tactics of thievery, and who calmly admitted to drowning her only baby because it carried Gonzaga genes.

Kurtz stood at the window and watched the cold rain fall on Chippewa Street It made sense that Gonzaga «hired» him to find the heroin-co

Kurtz had to smile. His options were few. At least he'd neutralized the loose ca

So it came down to the five thousand dollars advance money in an envelope that Kurtz was still carrying around. He'd use that on Tuesday morning—Halloween—when he drove away from Buffalo, New York, forever, buying a different used car before crossing the state line (and violating his parole). Kurtz knew a few people around the country, perhaps the most important right now being a plastic surgeon in Oklahoma City who gave people like Joe Kurtz new faces and identities in exchange for hard cash.

But he'd need quite a bit more hard cash. Kurtz could get fifty thousand dollars in a minute by asking Arlene to buy his theoretical share of WeddingBells-dot-com and SweetheartSearch-dot-com, but he'd never do that. She'd waited for years to start an online business like this, even if the high school sweetheart thing had been his idea in Attica.

Well, he could always get more cash.

Kurtz pulled on his baseball cap, slipped the.38 into his belt, and headed down to the Pinto. He had someone in Lackawa

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Lackawa

As the market for American steel declined, the heaps of slag near the Lackawa

By the 1970s, the Lackawa

The neighborhoods in the shadow of the huge mills, neighborhoods that once housed German and Italian and some black skilled laborers, now boasted crack houses and abortion clinics and storefront mosques as even poorer blacks and Hispanics and Middle Eastern immigrants flowed into the vacuum created by the fleeing steelworkers.

Kurtz knew Lackawa

Ridge Road was the main east-west street through the heart of Lackawa

Parolee Yasein Goba's address was south of the old Carnegie Library and the nearby Lackawa