5 Bad Moon Read Online Free PDF

the small guy ahead of him. Then he heard Stacy’s clicking heels coming up behind him.
    She knelt down beside him, her knees in his face. “Oh, my God! Are you all right? Are you all right?”
    Tozzi tried to push himself up, but the leg hurt like a bitch. He tried to move it, but it wasn’t responding, so he eased himself down onto his side. “Get Gibbons,” he grunted.
    “Oh, God!” she kept saying. “Oh, God!” She was chewing on her pouty lips, on the verge of hysteria. “Oh, God!”
    “Go get Gibbons,” he grunted again. “Don’t worry. I’m all right. Just go get Gibbons. Go now !”
    Reluctantly she got to her feet and staggered toward the bar, stopping to look back at him with every step she took, afraid to leave him alone.
    “Go ahead, Stacy. Get Gibbons. Go ahead now. And call for an ambulance.” He tried to sound as reassuring as he could even though he felt like he was gonna pass out.
    He lowered his head back down to the asphalt and squeezed his eyes shut as he reached for the wound.
    Shit! he thought. Now I’m gonna miss my black-belt test. Shit!

Chapter 3
    Sal Immordino sat hunched over on a folding chair, looking intently at his fists, making like he was talking to them. He always talked to his hands when he was putting on the nut. It was what he did.
    Loopy Lou Nardone was sitting next to him with his fingers joined on top of the table. They were in the visitors’ room, a small cubicle built into one corner of Sal’s ward at the Vroom Building, the dungeon where the criminally insane were kept at the state psychiatric hospital in Trenton, New Jersey. Visits weren’t monitored here the way they were at a regular prison because no one here at the nuthouse had been officially convicted of anything. But the walls were made of that thick security glass, the kind that has the thin wire mesh inside it, and the guards were always watching.
    Sal furrowed his brow and frowned at his left hand. “So did you find out who the hitter was?”
    Loopy Lou threw his hands up and shook his head. His jet-black hair looked like a used Brillo pad, his mouth was lopsided, and he was walleyed, but he was the top soldier in Sal’s old crew, loyal like a brother. He was the one who should’ve taken over the crew after Sal got sent here, not that ass-licking Frank Bartolo. “It’s a big fucking secret, Sal. I got my ear to the ground, but nobody knows nothing. It must be somebody nobody ever used before.”
    Sal raised an eyebrow and examined the knuckles of his right hand. “Not Bartolo’s kid?”
    Loopy Lou’s wandering eye shot open. “Whatta you, kidding? You think that dumb fuck could sneak his way in here and pull off a hit? You’d spot him a mile away.”
    “Hmmm. Maybe. What about Joey D’Amico? He’d volunteer.”
    “D’Amico couldn’t shoot himself. You know what they say. He didn’t even make his bones by himself. He hired some kid to do his hit for him so he could get made. I don’t think it’s D’Amico.”
    “Maybe.” Sal glanced out at the ward on the other side of the glass. The nut cases, the real ones, were shuffling around in their bathrobes and baggy jeans. A big TV set was mounted high up on the wall where no one could reach it. It was on, but no one was watching it. There was a guard leaning back on a folding chair, reading a paper by the door, and another one just outside the door to this room who kept his eye on Sal and Loopy Lou.
    Loopy Lou threw up his hands again. “I just can’t figure it, Sal. Either they hired somebody nobody knows, or they called off the hit.”
    Sal spread his fingers and studied them. “They didn’t call off the hit.” He was sure about that.
    He stared out at the Thorazine Boys, the other nine patients on this ward, and wondered if any of them might be faking it to beat a rap the same way he was. But if one of them was, he’d never say so. That was the whole deal. You had to act like a nut to be declared mentally incompetent in the eyes