If Coletta wasn’t going to cooperate, Jake wasn’t going to waste time playing priest, listening to some self-serving confession. Perhaps Jake’s message would drive home the point — that there was no salvation, and that only damnation awaited him. If he delivered that message right, it might even hasten his demise and save the state some carrying costs.
Pisano passed the elevators and took the stairs to the fourth floor. He took every third step in rapid succession to burn off the built-up tension.
Coletta had been moved to a private intensive-care hospital room for the meeting with Pisano. Two armed prison guards stood in the hallway outside the room. Acknowledging the guards, Pisano nodded before entering the room, and was immediately taken aback by what he saw. If death hadn’t already knocked on Coletta’s door, it was certainly hovering in the doorway waiting to come in. Pisano’s face tensed; he barely recognized the fragile body.
Gone was his hair and most of his eyebrows from chemo. Tubes and wires ran from every part of his body, beginning or ending in fluid bottles or a wide array of colorful monitors. Coletta’s eyes were closed, set in deep sockets surrounded by dark rings. His pale, white face was tinged with yellow, and his chapped blue lips appeared to have been kissed by death itself some weeks ago.
The hulk of the former six-foot, six-inch, 300-pound killer now looked like a pile of skinny corpses stacked on top of one another. Protrusions of flesh and bone stuck out in all directions from under the sheet.
A nurse stood on the other side of the bed, injecting medication into Coletta’s IV tube. She glanced across the bed at Pisano and turned back to check the monitors as the new medication entered his veins. Some number on the screen seemed to strike her as important, and she wrote it down on the chart before turning to Jake.
“He goes in and out of consciousness.”
“That’s fine, I’ll wait.”
In a few moments, Coletta’s right eye partially opened but didn’t seem to comprehend the blurry image it saw. His one eye closed again; the other never moved. Moments later, both eyes opened in a blank stare that still showed no sign of registering Jake’s presence.
Coletta was doubtless trying to overcome the effects of pain and the drugs that interrupted links between his brain and eyes. His eyes drifted shut again for a few seconds before opening again.
In a barely audible, raspy tone, Coletta struggled to get out a word. “Hello.”
“How are you, T.J.?”
“Dead.”
“I heard you wanted to speak to me.”
“Yeah.”
Coletta tried in vain to coordinate his eyes, tongue, and brain but nothing was working very well. He blinked several times to clear the cobwebs in his head. He tried clearing his throat, which triggered a painful cough, and he grimaced, causing his facial muscles to flex, and folds of skin to move along his jawline down his neck as he tried to speak.
“Thanks for coming.”
“Not a problem.”
His eyes closed for a short moment then opened again. “They cut me open for nothing.”
“I heard.”
“My little sister…” Only disjointed pieces of the sentence came out. He uttered a few more incomplete thoughts before his eyes closed. Jake responded, hoping Coletta’s hearing was working better than his speech.
“I remember your little sister. She was never arrested.”
Coletta opened his eyes again and from somewhere found the strength to respond.
“She moved to South Carolina. The Feds are still harassing her.”
“Does that have to do with the missing money?”
Coletta had to think about the question before he answered. “I guess. She don’t know nothing. She only worked for me for six months before you shut us down.”
“She was your bookkeeper, right?”
“She don’t know nothing. I kept her out of everything to protect her. Can you get the Feds off her back?” His eyes closed, and his face involuntarily contorted into a grotesque expression.
“I have some people at the Feds I can talk to, but I can’t promise you anything.”
Coletta shut his eyes and drifted off into another morphine dream for the next thirty seconds. Then his eyes fluttered open again. This time he looked intently at Jake as though he had never seen him before.
Before Coletta could put a thought together, Jake asked a key question. “Where’s the money, T.J.?”
Coletta paused, closing his eyes, his face grimaced. “I can help.”
“You’re going to have to do better than that, T.J.”
A raspy sentence sputtered out beneath the oxygen tube running from his nose. “I made a deal with Lugassi.”
Frank Lugassi was the mob boss in New Orleans, and at the top of Pisano’s personal most-wanted list.
“What kind of deal?”
Trying to be coherent, Coletta explained his deal with Lugassi. “When you started marking my money with that invisible blue dye crap, I couldn’t use the cash without it being traced. You know, the blue stuff is what brought us down. So I went to Lugassi.”
“What was your deal with him?”
“He said he could use the marked cash in European and South American operations. So I gave him $12 million in cash. He was going to launder it through his operations and give me back $8 million in clean bills. We transferred the cash at the docks, mixed in with some auto parts going to Panama, but the rat stiffed me. I never got my $8 million back. Then you guys shut us down. My little sister, she didn’t know anything about the deal.”
Coletta had no sooner finished his last sentence then he started to cough. He couldn’t clear his throat, and his coughing became uncontrollable. He grimaced as pain shot through his body with every agonizing breath.
Pisano patiently watched until Coletta finally got himself under control. “I’m surprised you made that deal with Lugassi. You know what a rat he is.”
“I got some information on Lugassi’s operations before we made the deal. It was my insurance policy. If I hadn’t gotten sick, believe me, he wouldn’t have pulled this on me even in prison.”
“What kind of information do you have on Lugassi?”
Random syllables tumbled out of Coletta’s mouth before he finally spoke coherent words. “I have information on all his drug operations in Central and South America — including companies he owns, attorneys, bank accounts, everything on his operations. I got it from his accountant before we wasted him. We did his accountant clean. Lugassi still doesn’t know it was us. I have all the information.”
“Where is all that information now?”
“It’s in a bank vault box. My attorney has the key and password, but he doesn’t know anything about what’s in the package.”
“Are you willing to turn over that information to me?”
“Yeah. I can’t use the money where I’m going. I just don’t want my little sister brought into this. Let her live her life. That’s the only thing that means anything to me right now.”
“Like I said, I’ll talk to some people at the Feds. If your sister isn’t involved in any of this, maybe they’ll leave her alone.”
“Thank you. That’s all I want.”
“I have a few other things I need from you. I know you had state and local politicians on your payroll. I want those names, and evidence of what you paid them.”
“Yeah. I can get you that. I don’t need them or their influence anymore. I’ll need to make some phone calls to get you that information.”
“I’ll make sure you have access to a phone.”
Coletta just nodded. Jake saw his opportunity with Coletta beginning to dwindle. He jumped in with his next request.