“Want the Mole to go along?” I asked Clarence. “Porkpie’s never seen him, and he could—”
“Oh, that’s quick, Slick,” the Prof snarled. “What’s that maniac gonna do if something jumps off, blow the place up?”
“Mole’s smart,” I defended him.
“Smart? Man’s a motherfucking genius!” the Prof shot back. “Did I say no? But he ain’t smart like
“I was just—”
“Nix that,” the Prof cut me off, any concern for Clarence’s safety quickly overridden by even the slightest implication that the kid wasn’t competent to handle the job. “Clarence walks point, we cover the joint. Our dice, loaded nice—it’s all on ice.”
But our dice didn’t make one good pass all night. A five-hour investment drew nothing but blanks. “I didn’t see no Chinese woman, mahn,” Clarence said during debriefing. “And never this Porkpie guy either.”
“It worked like I said? With the booth?”
“Yeah, mahn.
“Sound legit?” I asked him, leaning close. In our world, when we’re dealing guns, “legit” means criminal. And “crooked” means the goddamned ATF.
“I think so,” Clarence said. “Hard to tell with those boys. We just . . . talked around it, like. He want to know what I got. I want to know what he want. You know. . . .”
“Yeah. You said two, right?”
“Oh, the second guy, mahn, he was nothing. A kid. One of those European guys from the Bronx, maybe. I could not tell for sure. He wanted a pistol. Just one pistol. It felt like personal, not professional. I blew him off.”
A European guy from the Bronx was Clarence-speak for Armenian. There’s supposed to be a whole tribe of them up there, gunfighters, every one. “He cop an attitude?” I asked.
“Nah, mahn. Nothing like that. I told him bulk only, and he didn’t push. He had his boys with him, over to the side. I think he was just profiling, maybe. Young stupid boy. Probably throw the piece away when the clip get empty.”
If that was so, the kid sure wasn’t Armenian, I thought. “You up for another round?” I asked Clarence.
“I go the distance, mahn.”
The next night was the same. “Place is nasty, brother,” Clarence said afterwards, a disgusted look on his face. “I keep this up, I have a big dry-cleaning bill for sure.” He grimaced, examining the sleeve of his plum-colored worsted sport coat as though it contained the answer to some important question.
“The buyer come back?” I asked.
“I didn’t see him, mahn. But I told him next week, right? He was gonna speak to some people, you know how that go.”
“Yeah.”
I gave it some thought, turned to the Prof. “You think we need a different player? Porkpie, he’d take a booth and just open up shop. He’s a middleman. Whatever you want, he could find it for you. Maybe that’s the kind of guy we need. Clarence set himself up as an arms dealer. This Chinese woman, she’s only looking for muscle, maybe?”
“Or maybe she already found it,” the little man replied. “And she’s not coming back, Jack.”
I wasn’t ready to let go of it. “One more time,” I said. Clarence nodded.
From our vantage point deep in the parking lot, we watched from the front seat of the Plymouth as cars came and went all night long. No way to tell who was inside. Sometimes the cars parked, sometimes they just dropped someone off. The weather was too cold and ugly to make a solid ID, everyone wearing coats, all bundled up. A lot of them had hats too. With the lousy light and the slanted sight-lines, I couldn’t tell Chinese from Swedish. But I’d know Porkpie—and he didn’t show.
The Prof and I talked each new sighting over anyway, just to keep the time moving. It was bone-deep cold in the car. Still, we didn’t want to run the heater. Nobody was cruising the lot peering into car windows, but a plume of smoke from the exhaust would mark us even from a distance.
The cell phone in my pocket buzzed once. Twice. I didn’t touch it. In about ten seconds, it did the same thing again.
“He’s got her,” I said to the Prof. It was one buzz for Porkpie, two for the Chinese woman, three for both. “Check to be sure.”
The Prof pulled his own cell phone, punched in a speed-dial number, let it ring a few times, then cut the connection. I lit a cigarette, waiting. The Prof’s phone buzzed, then went dead. Same again. One more time.
Max was on Porkpie. We’d had the little ferret on full-shadow ever since we started this piece. Max can’t hear, but the Mole had fixed him up with a vibrating pager set to go off if we dialed a certain number. The instant callback meant he had Porkpie in his sights. And a single ring meant the weasel was nowhere near Rollo’s.
Like they say in the S&M clubs . . . time to role-play.
I opened the door to Rollo’s and walked in. Caught Clarence’s eye. He climbed out of his booth and went toward the bathroom in the back. The only way out is through the kitchen, and that isn’t open to customers. He’d stay back there for a few minutes, checking for traps while I set mine.
I was wearing an old leather jacket over a heavy black sweatshirt, jeans and steel-toed work boots. They kept the joint hot enough to make a nun work topless, steam hissing from the industrial radiators lining the windowless walls. I took off my jacket, sat there a few minutes, getting my eyes adjusted to the haze from the low-lying smog. Clarence walked past me to my left, heading for the door. I got up and took an empty booth, jacket over one shoulder.
The place looked like a Southern juke joint, only bigger and without the music. Ramshackle, thrown-together furniture, a big red-and-white Coke sign behind the wood plank bar, yellowing posters on the walls—looked like they’d been swiped from a Medicaid dentist’s office. The low ceiling trapped a heavy, multi-tone hum of voices, keeping the heat close to the floor. Somebody had nailed a THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING sign to the side wall. The floor was a giant ashtray.
I eye-swept the big room, watching the criminal food chain draped over the landscape, everything from bottom-feeders to land sharks. I scanned quickly, looking for familiar faces. Nothing.
At one of the tables a teenager with an Arabic face watched intently as an older man from a similar tribe demonstrated some three-card-monte moves, doing it slow enough so the kid could follow, talking a blue streak in a low voice. Teacher and student.
Right across from them, a skinny blonde woman was getting histrionic with three heavy-bodied, stoic-faced men with identical slicked-back black hair. They looked enough alike to be brothers—Greeks, I thought. All watching quietly as the skinny blonde waved her hands around, contorting her face to make a point.
An old man with a thick shock of graying hair sat alone at a table, a heavy gold watch on each of his broad wrists. People stopped by his table, bent over and said something in his ear. Nobody sat down. Odessa Beach godfather, maybe.
In one corner sat a smooth-bodied man with plain round glasses, dark hair cut right to the scalp. He was big, six six at least, had to weigh in over two fifty. He had a bemused expression on his face, a drawing tablet open before him, right hand sculpting. One of the Greeks spotted what he was doing, started to stand up. The big guy didn’t move, didn’t take his eyes off the drawing tablet. An island of quiet popped up out of the ocean of noise. The
