rustle of fringe.
Jerry having ducked my question, I tried again: “Am I interrupting anything? Last thing I’d want to do is call attention, if you’re working.”
“Naw,” he said, pawing the air with a thick-fingered hand. “It’s fine. My part’s done, anyway.”
That was good to know. That meant Jerry was working the back-up position. When I’d worked for the Broker, the drill had been two-man teams-one of us went in and gathered intel, nailing the target’s pattern; a day or two before the hit was to go down, the other half of the team would come in, get filled in by the back-up guy, and do the deed. At that point, the first guy was just there for back-up, in case anything went south, and to make sure his partner got away clean.
Passive and Active, the Broker called it. We all had a preference, and mine was Active-I preferred coming in for a day or two, and do the dirty work, rather than sit for a couple of weeks watching and taking notes. But the Broker insisted we trade off at least once every four contracts. Jerry here had been one of the first Passive specialists I’d worked with, and I had pretended to get along with him fine, but I hated his ass.
Nothing personal-it’s just that he was a drunk. Or I guess the polite word is alcoholic. The Broker insisted Jerry was a “gentleman drinker,” which was his way of saying the boozing did not seem to have an impact on Jerry’s work. I didn’t like it. I have never cared for drunks, and never been a heavy drinker myself, and I didn’t like having my future in the hands of an alky.
All Jerry knew, however, was that after a handful of successful jobs together, the Broker had split us up, and assigned us new partners. I’d gone on to work with a guy named Boyd, who had his own problems, but that’s another story. I had no idea who Jerry had teamed up with.
Well, maybe not no idea…
“Are you out of the business, Jerry?”
“Not hardly,” he said, followed by a sigh. His Scotch had come. He sipped it. “I wish to hell I could get out. I mean, it’s been a long run. Hell of a ride. But someday it’s got to catch up with you.”
“I hear that.”
He made a sound that mingled a grunt with a chuckle. “Made a small fortune, these ten years or so. If I had invested instead of throwing it away on three fuckin’ wives, and six fuckin’ kids…shit. Child support’s a bitch.”
“So you’re not going to take out your wallet, and show the family photos?”
“Fuck them. Two of those brats I’m not even sure are mine.”
“Shame. Long as you’ve been at it, you could have socked a lot away by now.”
“Tell me about it.” The white smile flashed. “What the hell? Easy come, easy go. And anyway, my new wife isn’t like those other bitches. We got so much in common, it’s ridiculous.”
So she was a drunk, too.
“I always wondered,” I said, and summoned a nostalgic smile, “whatever happened to the guys I worked with, after the Broker bought it.”
“Yeah. I wonder who killed the old bastard?”
You’re looking at him.
“I wonder. Without him, how did you stay in the business? I mean, Broker kept us cut off from clients. We were in limbo.”
A laugh rumbled up out of his barrel chest. “I was fuckin’ lucky, Quarry. Did you ever work with Nick Varnos?”
Nick Varnos was the guy I’d been shadowing in Vegas for the past month.
“Never heard of him,” I said. “But then, how would I? Broker kept us away from the rest of his crew, unless you were working with somebody.”
Jerry nodded his shaggy head. He sipped Scotch. “I been with Nick all these years. Great fuckin’ guy. He gets more tail than Sinatra, that boy, and none of them bitches have ever managed to tie his ass down. Lives like a king. He’s got a boat, and a timeshare in Aspen. You should see the kind of car he drives.”
Varnos drove a 1976 Excalibur sports, modeled on the pre-war Mercedes Benz SSK, but with a Chevy Corvette engine under its old-fashioned hood. That was at home. Right now, on the job, Varnos was driving a ’78 Buick Century, a nothing two-door coupe. Light blue.
There was something I’d been wondering about, and I took a chance and asked, “Where’s Nick live?”
“Just over in Vegas.”
I frowned. “And you’re doing a job here? Just sixty miles down the road?”
Jerry shrugged. “It is close to home for Nick. Does break the don’t-shit-where-you-eat rule, I grant you. But Nick and me, we’ve done this our own way, for a lot of years. The Broker and his rules and ideas, lot of that went out the window a way long time ago for us two… So-are you still in the trade?”
I shook my head. “After the Broker got himself killed, I took what I’d saved up and bought a little business.”
“Yeah? What kinda business?”
“Used books and records. In Illinois. Little college town — Dekalb?”
None of that was true, of course. Well, Dekalb is a college town.
“That’s the life,” Jerry said, shaking his shaggy head again, loosening a couple tendrils of comb-over, and flashing the expensive grin. “I bet you got yourself hot-and-cold runnin’ coeds.”
“I not only get more tail than Sinatra,” I said, smiling back at him, “I get more than Nick Varnos.”
That had more truth in it than the other stuff I’d told him, but only slightly.
Nevertheless, it made Jerry roar with laughter. The redhead came over to give him a refill, and he frowned and started to raise a reluctant hand, to shoo her away.
“Sorry, sweetie,” he said. “I’m drivin’.”
The thought of him driving made her eyes widen.
“I can take you to your hotel,” I said. “Go on and enjoy yourself…Another round, miss. Please.”
She smiled at me-I think you got in good with her if you just didn’t call her “honey” or “sweetie.” Maybe I could have got lucky with her, but I was playing another game.
As Jerry and I spoke, she brought several more rounds- and of course, my side of that was Coca Cola, one glass to every double Scotch Jerry downed. My sugar high was far outweighed by his alcoholic fog.
“How did Nick keep you guys afloat,” I asked, “with the Broker out of the picture?”
Jerry shrugged, and blinked blearily. “I’m not the business end. I stay out of that shit. What I don’t know can’t hurt me kinda deal. All I know is, Nick has some connections with the goombahs-I mean, he’s lived in Vegas for over twenty years-and I figure that’s the, uh, you know… the con do it.”
Conduit, in non-drunkese.
“Jeez,” I said, and mock-shivered, “handling mob hits, that must make things kind of tense. I don’t scare easy, but any time I had to deal with those boys, it gave me pause.”
Jerry flashed the choppers again. “I don’t know, Quarry. You always seemed like a pretty cool customer to me-I don’t see anything much ever giving you fuckin’ ‘pause.’ ”
“Thanks. But I got out. You stayed in. You and Nick must be made of sturdier stuff. I just buy used books and records from college kids now. Not too many bullets flying.”
His head moved side to side, kind of proud, or maybe it was just trying to stay on. “Well, you know how it is. I’m sure a lot of what the Broker gave us, all of us, came through those kinda channels. I can’t say more than half a dozen of the forty or so hits we’ve done over the years would be what I’d call, you know, mob hits. Mob related.”
He’d had enough Scotch to be pretty loose with his mouth. Our booth was over to one side-like I said before, isolated. The place had filled up a little, which I didn’t love, but the music was loud-more New Wave, The Romantics, “What I Like About You.” At the bar, two guys were side by side playing poker machines embedded in the counter, a little drunk and somewhat loud. So we really could talk freely.
Anyway, I knew what Jerry meant. The Broker himself had told me that superficially straight business types with even a tangential connection to the mob would go to somebody they knew in that left-handed domain and request help with a problem, and that problem would be shifted over to the Broker, and then to people like me. And Jerry and Varnos.
That’s how business partners and business rivals and wives and boyfriends of wives and girlfriends and all sorts of folks in the straight world wound up dead in various puzzling ways, accidental deaths, home invasions gone
