“A library? What am I gonna do in a library? I never been in a library my whole friggin life.” Tony Too Tortorello turned away from the hotel room’s window and glared at Randolph Hayes, his Witness Protection Program case officer.
“Take it easy. You were in the top echelon of a major crime family, had a hundred guys working under you in a multi-million dollar crime enterprise. What’s so scary about a library?”
“This is like my worst nightmare.” Tony Too fumbled out a cigarette and lit it with a gold lighter, never breaking stride as he paced back and forth. “First you tell me I gotta go to some cow town in Arizona, that ain’t bad enough, now I gotta work in a library?” Tony Too ran a hand through his thick black hair, dropped into a chair and looked down his Roman nose at his case officer. “I thought this witness protection deal was supposed to help me. I’m too important to treat like this. I’m too…”
“What you are is too big a pain in the ass.” Randolph Hayes breathed deeply and concentrated on controlling his temper. “You know the drill. We can’t send you anyplace where you might be recognized, so this town, Prescott, is a good location.
We handpicked this library. You’ll have a crackerjack aide, and the rest of the staff is very competent. For the next two months you’ll be working in the Justice Department’s in-house library and getting intensive training. Between the crash course we’re going to put you through and the staff you’ll have once you get in place, you should just about be able to handle the director’s job, and - ”
“And then I can spend the rest of my life looking at pictures of cows in books. Friggin wonderful. I’m too talented to waste this way.” Tony Too dragged hard on the cigarette and flicked an ash into the overflowing ashtray on the table next to him.
“There’s something else we haven’t talked about yet,” Hayes said.
“What? You gonna cut it off and turn me into a broad or something, help with my disguise?”
“While you’re doing the library training, you’re going to take some speech classes. You have to clean up your mouth and polish your speaking ability or you’re not going to be believable.”
Tony Too stared up at the ceiling and shook his head. “Why couldn’t you guys at least get me into the casino there? Then I wouldn’t need all your fancy training.”
“Put you around all that loose green? Come on, man, we may be the Government, but we aren’t that stupid.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“We caught your ass, didn’t we?”
“Screw you.”
“The idea with the Program is to give you a fresh start, not to let you fall back into trouble.” Hayes felt the beginnings of yet another headache, a regular occurrence since he’d drawn Tony Too as his newest case. Part of it, he was sure, was from the incessant cigarette smoke that had filled Tony Too’s hotel rooms over the last six months since he’d been swept off the streets of Chicago and pushed into the Program. The man always had a cigarette burning, sometimes two. But there was more to it than that. The two men were ill-suited to the constant exposure to one another. No one would accuse this of being a match made two feet off the ground, much less close to heaven.
Hayes wondered if stupidity had been involved in assigning him as case officer, or if it was his supervisors’ way of putting their thumbs down on him. It was well known that Tony Too wasn’t very fond of black people, and Hayes wouldn’t go unnoticed in the small, central Arizona town during the time he’d have to spend there getting his charge settled in, thus making his job more difficult. Either way – pure stupidity or institutional hubris - it was giving him a headache, and one that wouldn’t be going away soon.
“Look at it this way,” Hayes said. “It’s going to be better than sitting in Marion, which is where you would have been for the next fifty years or so if you hadn’t decided to testify.”
“Marion ain’t looking that bad right now,” Tony Too snapped. “At least I would’ve known some guys there.”
“Yeah, and one of them would have stuck a knife up your butt first chance. And after you finished bleeding to death – because there’s no way to fix that - all your mob buddies would have given you a real Chicago-style sendoff. Lots of flower cars and limos. That what you want?”
Tony Too scowled at Hayes and wondered again how he gotten himself into this position. It seemed like only yesterday he had it all. Money, broads, respect, anything he wanted was his for the taking. Right up there next to the top man, number two in the Chicago Outfit. Christ, Al Capone had once held the same spot. They had all the rackets and too many supposedly legit businesses to count, and every piece of pie had a little taste of Tony Too’s fingers in it. He went anywhere, did anything, and if anybody gave him a hard time, he squashed them like a cockroach.
And then it had all gone to shit. A simple knock on the door and a team of FBI guys with a warrant for his arrest had turned everything upside down. Even his high-priced lawyer hadn’t slowed them down at all. Sitting in the interrogation room in the Federal Building, they hadn’t bothered to ask any questions. They’d piled on statement after statement, document after document, and tape recording after tape recording until he felt like he’d been turned over and over in a cement mixer, scraped, bruised and raw to the bone. When they’d finished laying it all out for him – the evidence of murder, racketeering, gambling, juice, prostitution and a dozen other crimes - it hadn’t taken him long to figure out that if he went to the joint he’d never be coming out. Thirty-eight years old and his life would be over. Omerta my ass, he’d thought, and right there decided to flip.
“Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I don’t have much choice, but I still think they coulda found something else for me.” He tapped his forehead with three fingers of his left hand. “A library in a cow town and an eggplant handling my case, I should bend over and grab my ankles right now.”
Randolph Hayes lost it. “You think you’re something special. What you are is a giant boil on the ass of society. All you’ve ever been interested in doing is taking, and the only one you’ve ever looked out for is yourself. Don’t ever forget one thing: I don’t like you any more than you like me. If it were up to me, I would have lanced that boil and you’d be nothing but a puddle of pus. But that’s not what happened, and we’re stuck with each other for now, so why don’t you quit bitching and get your head together. Tomorrow you start training, and if you screw that up, maybe they’ll change their minds and make you a garbage man or something really suited to your talents.”
Tony Too smashed his cigarette into the ashtray and stalked from the room. Hayes grabbed his coat and barely managed not to slam the door on his way out.


Randolph Hayes sat in his car with the window down, trying to dilute the second hand smoke he’d inhaled from Tony Too’s cigarettes. The fresh air helped, even though the temperature hovered near freezing and the Hawk was out. There were two competing stories of how Chicago had earned its moniker of the Windy City. One claimed it was all the hot air the politicians produced; the other blamed the wind off Lake Michigan that blew straight from Canada with nothing to stop it for almost four hundred miles. Shivering, Hayes voted for the latter and reluctantly pushed the button to close the window.
He was trying, but he was getting sick of Tony Too’s whining. What’d the guy expect? He was a thief, a murderer, and he’d turned informant on top of everything else. No, wait. In this case, that was a good thing; it helped make cases against bad guys. It wasn’t like little kids who were told not to be a tattle-tale. This was different. Hayes started the car and pulled into traffic. It had to be different. It was his job to protect these people, a job he did well. But sometimes, sometimes he couldn’t help wondering whether it was worth letting men like Tony Too walk away from the shitstorms they caused and start over.
Some stupid kid could get hold of a gun, stick up a Seven-Eleven for thirty bucks and a handful of Snickers bars and end up doing a nickel in Joliet; and when he came out you’d think he’d been a criminal his entire life. He walked it, talked it and never looked back at what might have been. But a real, professional criminal like Tony Too could cut a deal and walk away from everything because what he knew was valuable to those in power. Tony Too was going to make some careers when he testified against the big boss. But who really deserved the break, Tony Too or the dumb kid?
Hayes pondered these questions as he sat at a red light on Iner Lake Shore Drive just north of Navy Pier. He looked down the pier and up at the towering Ferris wheel not turning in the chill weather but brightly lit in the gathering dusk. Hayes didn’t like Ferris wheels. He’d been stuck on one as a kid and had avoided them for a long time. Finally, on one of the weekends his ex-wife allowed him his visitation rights, he’d taken his kids on this one. They’d loved it; he’d hated it. But at least now it was behind him, and he’d proved to himself he could cram his fears into a little compartment and ignore them. Now he needed to put his concerns about Tony Too and his fresh start in a similar compartment and get on with his job.
He’d seen the program work both ways, and you were never sure who would succeed and who would fail. Some of the worst cases managed to adjust and flourish, and some guys who figured to have any easy go of it went off like skyrockets: a flash, a bang and it was all over.
The car next to him started to move, and he realized the light had turned green. Stepping on the gas, Hayes muttered to himself, “I hate that damned Ferris wheel; always did, always will.”