restaurant—that’s enough space to hold every member of my family.
“This one was going to be so juicy,” Michelle said, regretfully.
“Been lots of those,” I told her.
By the time the morning light was making a run against the grimy windows, we weren’t any closer to a good scheme. This was the third plan that had gone sour in the past couple of months.
Good scams are harder and harder to come by these days. Too many thieves fishing in the same pool of chumps. Colloidal silver for longevity, “form books” for tax evasion, orgasm enhancers for patheticos who think a lap dance is a relationship. Online auctions for collector cars that don’t exist…and every bidder’s a winner. Even some neo-Nazis were going into the penis-enlargement business to finance their operations—skinheads aren’t much for paying their membership dues, and the self-appointed Fuhrers are too afraid of their own followers to get heavy about collecting.
I used to do violence-for-money. But the older I get, the less it’s worth playing for those stakes. “The gun’s fun, but the sting’s the thing,” the Prof called it, when he first started schooling me.
For lifelong outlaws like us, crime is all about cash. We’re not psychopaths—we don’t need the action to feel alive. Crime’s not about the buzz; it’s a business.
Anyone who’s been running on our track for long enough has learned a few things. Like, you’ll get more time for a gas-station holdup than for taking a few million out of a company pension fund. And a double-nickel jolt for a young man is a very different trip than it is for a guy with a lot of miles on his odometer.
A generation ago, our whole crew got involved with hijacking a load of dope. It was a foolproof scheme. The people we took it from wouldn’t run to the Law—they’d just buy it back from us. Nobody gets hurt, we make a fortune, and they chalk it up to the cost of doing business.
The first half clicked as sweet as stiletto heels on a marble floor. Then the wheels came off. If we’d known how deep some NYPD boys were involved with the dope trade back in the day, we wouldn’t have gone near the job.
I was the only one of us they caught. In an abandoned subway tunnel, with enough heroin to give a small town a collective overdose. The dope never got vouchered; I got to plead to some assaults, avoiding the telephone numbers a possession-with-intent charge would have brought. And best of all, I got to go down alone.
I’m a two-time felony loser. The Prof has three bits under his belt. If either of us ever falls again, we’re looking at the life-without they throw at habitual offenders in this state.
Clarence and the Mole have never been Inside. Max has, but not for long. Just arrests, no convictions. Why plea-bargain when you know the witnesses are never going to show up for the trial?
Michelle was locked up back when she was pre-op. About the hardest time you can do, unless you’re willing to whore out or daddy-up.
She spent most of her time binged, in solitary. Not PC, Ad Seg. You go to Protective Custody—aka Punk City —as a volunteer, to keep yourself safe. You go to Ad Seg—Administrative Segregation, aka The Hole—when you commit a crime inside. Michelle wasn’t big, and she wasn’t fast, but she
In our world, showing you can do time counts for something only when you’re young. After that, what earns you the points is showing you can avoid it.
In the juvie joints, it seemed like nobody was ever there for the worst things they did. One guy, he was in for stealing fireworks. He wanted the cherry bombs and ashcans to torture animals with. Another guy was a fire-setter. They caught him doing that a year after they caught him raping his baby sister. He got counseling for the rape, but destruction of property, that was something they couldn’t let slide.
Most of the gang kids were there for fighting, but, to hear them tell it, they’d all gone much further down the violence road. One little Puerto Rican guy was talking about how he chopped an enemy’s hand off with a machete in a rumble. A white kid laughed out loud at the story, as deep a diss as a bitch-slap.
The Puerto Rican kid went back to his bunk, came over to where we were all standing around, and hooked the white kid to the stomach with a needle-sharp file. Gutted him like a fish. The white kid didn’t die, so, instead of going back to court with a new charge, the Puerto Rican kid got shipped to another juvie joint. With a bigger rep.
It was inside that kiddie prison that I first claimed another human being as family. I told the others that Wesley was my brother. I wasn’t worried that anyone would ever ask Wesley if it was true—nobody ever asked Wesley anything. But a kid who called himself Tiger called me on it.
Tiger was twice my size, plus he never walked around alone. So he should have been safe. But, one night, he got shanked in his sleep.
Everyone thought Wesley had done it—that was what Wesley did, even then. But it wasn’t him. It was his brother.
“You have anything, honey?” Michelle asked. “Anything at all?”
“Little Eric in the fifth,” I told her, just to see her smile.
“You want something from down the way?” I asked Gateman.
“Which way is that, boss?”
“Diner?”
“Sold. I could really go for some of their bull’s-eye meatloaf today.”
“Two sides?”
“You’re singing my song,” he said, grinning. “Make mine mashed potatoes and spinach, okay?”
I got the same for myself, and brought the whole thing back, hot. Gateman and I admired the way the half- cut hard-boiled egg looked embedded in the thick slab of heavy-crusted meatloaf before we dug in.
“Ever wonder how come this is the only good thing they make in that dive, boss?”
“I figure it’s what they call a ‘signature dish,’ Gate. Every restaurant’s got one. It’s how the chef shows off.”
“Yeah? Well, I been in that joint plenty of times, boss. And if they got a ‘chef,’ I’m a fucking ballerina.”
“Got to look past the cover, bro,” I said mildly, holding out a clenched fist.
Gateman tapped my fist with his own, acknowledging the mistake more than one man had made about him. Dead men now. Gateman is one of the reasons they have to make prisons wheelchair-accessible. He was a pure shooter, and he could conjure up the pistol he wore next to his colostomy bag like a fatal magic trick.
A couple of years back, the Prof had bet Max that Gateman could drill the center out of the ace of hearts at ten yards. Took a couple of weeks to set up the match, trucking sandbags down to the basement. The lighting down there was so lousy I could barely make out the white card, never mind the red heart in its center.
I should have known something was up when Clarence put down a hundred on Gateman. The Prof and Max were both hunch-players, but Clarence was a gunman. Still, I faded his action, saying, “No disrespect” to Gateman first.
Gateman braced himself in his chair, holding his compact 9mm Kahr in both hands, turning himself into a human tripod. He exhaled a soft sigh, then he punched out the center of the card with his first shot.
“Got something for tonight?” he asked.
“Just a guess,” I cautioned him.
“That’s all there ever is, right?”
“At the track, sure.”
“It’s all a bet,” Gateman said. “Everything. All that changes is the stakes, boss.”
I started telling him what I liked about Little Eric. By the time I was up to my two favorite trotters of all time, Nevele Pride and Une de Mai, duking it out at the International—I never saw that race; that was the year I spent in Biafra—Gateman’s eyes were starting to glaze over. He wanted action, not ancient history.
“On the nose, okay?” he said, shoving a twenty over to me.
