5 Bad Moon Read Free Page B

before he looked like Gibbons. Gibbons looked like an old guy. Not an old man, but an older guy, an older middle-aged guy. His hair had gone south long before Tozzi had met him. All he had now were those thin gray strands that he combed back over his freckled head. Gibbons had jowls, too, real jowls. And that face. Nose hanging over his mouth like a big hot pepper, small mean eyes, and no lips. All that and the personality of a moray eel.
    Tozzi studied both their faces side by side and shuddered. In fifteen, sixteen years, that could be him. Jesus.
    But it wasn’t his aging face that was bothering him or his graying hair. It was the fact that here he was in the middle of his life, and he hadn’t done a single positive thing he could look back on and be proud of. Sure, putting bad guys away and keeping the mob at bay was something, but it didn’t seem like it was enough. It wasn’t like he had created something, something that would last, like a building or a great song. He didn’t even have kids.
    He glanced at Gibbons in the mirror. Gibbons didn’t have any kids either. But at least he had a wife. Tozzi didn’t even have that.
    It was cool being single and free when he was in his twenties and thirties, going out with different women all the time, but the thought of being forty and still on the prowl seemed kinda sad and pathetic, very past tense. Too old for young babes, too immature for women his own age.
    He took another swig from the bottle and looked up at the TV set over the bar. The local news was on, the black guy with the glasses on Channel 9. He was doing an update on a transit cop who’d been shot in the line of duty last month. The poor bastard was in a wheelchair, his arm in a sling, his wife trying to push him around their crowded little apartment, banging him into walls and furniture.
    Tozzi shook his head and sighed. He glanced down at the beer in his hand, then glanced at the cute secretaries getting shit-faced in the mirror.
    Shit. He had to get outta here.
    Gibbons turned in his seat and laid his forearms on the bar, lacing his fingers around his beer. “So what’s the face for, Toz? I’m telling you. Turning forty is not a problem. It happens, and you feel like you want to kill yourself, but the next week you forget about it.”
    “It’s not that.”
    “Yeah, right.”
    “I’m telling you. It’s not.”
    “Then what is it? Your black-belt test? You’re good. You’ll do all right. Don’t worry about it.”
    Tozzi stared at him. He resented the pep talk. “It’s not that either.” His black-belt test was only part of it.
    “Then what’s buggin’ you, Toz? You can’t tell me? I spend more friggin’ time with you than I do with my own wife, and you can’t talk to me? You know, Lorraine predicted a long time ago that you’d be terrible when you turned forty. She was right.”
    “How the hell would she know?”
    “She’s your cousin.”
    “Is that what you two do in bed at night before you turn out the lights? Talk about me?”
    Gibbons looked at him blankly. “Who talks?” The crocodile smile broke open under his big hot-pepper nose. Wiseass bastard.
    Tozzi slid off his stool. “I gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    Gibbons grabbed his sleeve. “Hey! Where you goin’?”
    “I got paperwork to do on the Mistretta thing.”
    “It’s eight o’clock. We put in a twelve-hour day. I think the taxpayers got their money’s worth today. Sit down and relax.”
    “No, really. Ivers said he wanted this report right away. I’ll see you on Monday.”
    Gibbons layed a hand on Tozzi’s shoulder. “Let me tell you something, Toz. One person cannot solve every crime in the city of New York by himself. Not even you. We did our part today. We covered the crime scene and collected the evidence. We spent the whole goddamn day with those two bodies. Now it’s up to the lab techs to come up with something. See, each person has to take his own little square of turf and just deal with