Gardino thought for a minute. “This a friend of yours we’re talking?”
“I wouldn’ta brought him up, he was a friend.”
The sunlight came through some clouds over Eighth Avenue and hit Gardino’s beer. It cast a tint on the counter, the yellow of a sick man’s eye. Finally, he said to Ricky, “Pull your shirt up.”
“My-?”
“Your shirt. Pull it up and turn around.”
“You think I’m wired?”
“Or we just have our beers and bullshit about the Knicks and we go our separate ways. Up to you.”
Self-conscious of his skinny build, Ricky hesitated. But then he slipped off the stool, pulled up his leather jacket, and lifted his dirty T-shirt. He turned around.
“Okay. You do the same.”
Gardino laughed. Ricky thought he was laughing at him more than he was laughing at the situation but he held on to his temper.
The con man pulled up his jacket and shirt. The bartender glanced at them but he was looking like nothing was weird. This was, after all, Hanny’s.
The men sat down and Ricky called for more brews.
Gardino whispered, “Okay, I’ll tell you what I’m up to. But listen. You get some idea that you’re in the mood to snitch, I got two things to say: One, what I’m doing is not exactly legal, but it’s not like I’m clipping anybody or selling crack to kids, got it? So even if you go to the cops, the best they can get me for is some bullshit misrepresentation claim. They’ll laugh you out of the station.”
“No, man, seriously-”
Gardino held up a finger. “And number two, you dime me out, I’ve got associates in Florida’ll find you and make you bleed for days.” He grinned. “We copacetic?”
Whatever the fuck that meant. Ricky said, “No worries, mister. All I wanta do is make some money.”
“Okay, here’s how it works: Fuck down payments. The buyers pay everything right up front. A hundred, hundred fifty thousand.”
“No shit.”
“What I tell the buyer is my connections know where there’re these confiscated boats. This really happens. They’re towed off by the DEA for drugs or Coast Guard or State Police when the owner’s busted for sailing ’em while drunk. They go up for auction. But see, what happens is, in Florida, there’s so many boats that it takes time to log ’em all in. I tell the buyers my partners break into the pound at 3 in the morning and tow a boat away before there’s a record of it. We ship it to Delaware or Jersey, slap a new number on it, and bang, for a hundred thousand you get a half-million-dollar boat.
“Then, after I get the money, I break the bad news. Like I just did with our friend from Jersey.” He opened up his briefcase and pulled out a newspaper article. The headline was: “
The article was about a series of thefts of confiscated boats from a federal government impound dock. It went on to add that security had been stepped up and the FBI and Florida police were looking into who might’ve bought the half-dozen missing boats. They’d arrested the principals and recovered nearly a million dollars in cash from buyers on the East Coast.
Ricky looked over the article. “You, what? Printed it up yourself?”
“Word processor. Tore the edges to make it look like I ripped it out of the paper and then Xeroxed it.”
“So you keep ’em scared shitless some cop’s going to find their name or trace the money to them.
This warranted another clink of beer glasses. “Fucking brilliant.”
“Thanks.”
“So if I
Gardino debated. “Twenty-five percent.”
“You give me fifty.” Ricky fixed him with the famous mad-guy Kelleher stare. Gardino held the gaze just fine. Which Ricky respected.
“I’ll give you twenty-five percent if the buyer pays a hundred Gs or less. Thirty, if it’s more than that.”
Ricky said, “Over one fifty, I want half.”
Gardino finally said, “Deal. You really know somebody can get his hands on that kind of money?”
Ricky finished his beer and, without paying, started for the door. “That’s what I’m going to go work on right now.”
Ricky walked into Mack’s bar.
It was pretty much like Hanrahan’s, four blocks away, but was busier, since it was closer to the convention center where hundreds of teamsters and union electricians and carpenters would take fifteen-minute breaks that lasted two hours. The neighborhood surrounding Mack’s was better too: redeveloped town houses and some new buildings, expensive as shit, and even a Starbucks. Way fucking different from the grim, hustling combat zone that Hell’s Kitchen had been until the ’70s.
T.G., a fat Irishman in his mid-thirties, was at the corner table with three, four buddies of his.
“It’s the Lime Rickey man!” T.G. shouted, not drunk, not sober-the way he usually seemed. Man used nicknames a lot, which he seemed to think was cute but always pissed off the person he was talking to, mostly because of the way he said it, not so much the names themselves. Like, Ricky didn’t even know what a Lime Rickey was, some drink or something, but the sneery tone in T.G.’s voice was a putdown. Still, you had to have major balls to say anything back to the big, psycho Irishman.
“Hey,” Ricky offered, walking up to the corner table, which was like T.G.’s office.
“The fuck you been?” T.G. asked, dropping his cigarette on the floor and crushing it under his boot.
“Hanny’s.”
“Doing what, Lime Rickey man?” Stretching out the nickname.
“Polishing me knob,” Ricky responded in a phoney brogue. A lot of times he said stuff like this, sort of putting himself down in front of T.G. and his crew. He didn’t want to, didn’t like it. It just happened. Always wondered why.
“You mean, polishing some
Ricky got a Guinness. He really didn’t like it but T.G. had once said that Guinness and whiskey were the only things real men drank. And, since it was called stout, he figured it would make him fatter. All his life, trying to get bigger. Never succeeding.
Ricky sat down at the table, which was scarred with knife slashes and skid marks from cigarette burns. He nodded to T.G.’s crew, a half-dozen losers who sorta worked the trades, sorta worked the warehouses, sorta hung out. One was so drunk he couldn’t focus and kept trying to tell a joke, forgetting it halfway through. Ricky hoped the guy wouldn’t puke before he made it to the john, like yesterday.
T.G. was rambling on, insulting some of the people at the table in his cheerful-mean way and threatening guys who weren’t there.
Ricky just sat at the table, eating peanuts and sucking down his licorice-flavored stout, and took the insults when they were aimed at him. Mostly he was thinking about Gardino and the boats.
T.G. rubbed his round, craggy face and his curly red-brown hair. He spat out, “And, fuck me, the nigger got away.”
Ricky was wondering which nigger. He thought he’d been paying attention, but sometimes T.G.’s train of thought took its own route and left you behind.
He could see T.G. was upset, though, and so Ricky muttered a sympathetic, “That asshole.”
“Man, I see him, I will take that cocksucker out so fast.” He clapped his palms together in a loud slap that made a couple of the crew blink. The drunk one stood up and staggered toward the men’s room. Looked like he was going to make it this time.
“He been around?” Ricky asked.
T.G. snapped, “His black ass’s up in Buffalo. I just told you that. The fuck you asking if he’s here?”
“No, I don’t mean here,” Ricky said fast. “I mean, you know,
