players and iPods the day before, but the stores were selling that shit so cheap now there wasn’t enough profit to be made. Fifty here, fifty there, and you’re back out the next day on the stoop outside your mom’s, trying to think up something new. The hustle was getting tired, man, getting old fast. DeMaurice was not even twenty yet and feeling the drag, the toll of having to provide for himself and Tanika and their boy DeMarco. Some thieving, some dealing, the thieving part not so bad, but the dealing a tough go, with everybody so hard up for cash these days, doing thieving of their own to come up with the hundred a day they needed for their pipe.
But just a second. One fucking second. Drifting down the street toward him like it was coming out of a mirage: was that a brand new Charger? A dark navy blue but gleaming in the early light. Easing along at no great speed. Too nice to be a cop car. Maybe God was heeding his call, sending him some white boy in his daddy’s car looking to buy weed for him and his buddies. The car slowing now, the window sliding down. DeMaurice scratched his abdomen lazily, grinning, thinking what a brand new Charger was worth. Now that’s what he needed. That was a score he could bring home to Tanika, tell her to go out and buy whatever she and DeMarco needed.
As the window came down, he saw that yes indeed, the driver was white. No boy, though. In his late thirties, say. Dark curly hair like an Italian or Jew.
DeMaurice’s piece was a Beretta clone called a Taurus in the pouch of his Patriots hoodie. He put both hands in there as he sauntered over to the car, the right slipping around the gun butt.
“Before you get too frisky with your hands,” the driver said, “let us introduce ourselves.” DeMaurice could see a Beretta in the man’s right hand, a couple of models up from his own. The passenger was also white, maybe forty. Definitely Italian, with a shotgun in his lap.
“I’m Mr. Franklin,” the driver said, showing a folded hundred-dollar bill in his left hand, up near the open window, almost close enough to snatch. “And my friend is Mr. Mossberg. Who do you want to do business with?”
DeMaurice left his hands where they were and asked what business.
“It’s actually more of a mission,” the driver said. “Reconnaissance.”
“Say what?”
“Breaking and entering.”
“Where?”
The man pointed at a digital camera on the console and said, “I need the best pictures you can get of Halladay’s Funeral Home.”
“Ain’t that place closed? What you going to steal out of a closed-down fucked-up funeral home?”
“I need both sides and the rear. All doors, windows, security cameras, close-up of wires of any kind.”
“From where?”
“The rooftops of whatever buildings you break into.”
“How do you know I won’t just take the camera?”
“Mr. Mossberg won’t like it,” the passenger said.
“Say I got a friend named Mossberg too.”
“We’ll pay you three hundred,” the driver said. “Which is more than that camera is worth.”
“Make it four.”
“I knew you’d prefer dealing with Mr. Franklin,” the man said.
CHAPTER 34
“See?” I said to Ryan. “I make friends wherever I go.”
We had found a diner that had its own parking lot and two police cruisers parked in it and had breakfast and coffee refills while we waited for Simms to call back and tell us he was done.
“Sure,” he said. “With your personality and my money. So that’s how Hoffman does it in the movie?”
“Not exactly. He already knows the guys on his street, they’re his neighbours and they razz him because he’s a runner and a misfit. And he doesn’t pay them cash, he tells them they can burgle his apartment and take his stereo. All he wants is his clothes and his gun.”
“Well, we’re paying this guy cash, so he better deliver some decent pictures. Probably wind up with thirty shots of his thumb.”
“I showed him how to use it.”
“He strike you as a fast learner?”
“If he doesn’t get the pictures, we won’t pay.”
“Got that right. Turn things over to Mossberg.”
“He’ll come through.” My phone rang then; too soon for it to be Simms. The display said it was the Brookline police calling. I let it go to voice mail, gave it a minute, then listened.
“Geller, this is Mike Gianelli calling, nine-fifteen Monday morning. I didn’t want to tell you this in a message but I called a couple times earlier and your phone was off. I also tried your hotel and they told me you checked out, so I don’t know what’s going on with you, if you’re leaving Boston or what. Anyway, I-look, David Fine is dead. He was shot to death yesterday morning on a beach about an hour north of town. I really need to talk to you, Geller. I want to know as much as I can before I notify his parents. Call me the minute you get this, all right?”
I didn’t call him back. We waited another hour, drinking coffee neither of us really wanted, until Simms called. Then we drove back down Wellington Hill.
When we got to his door, the stoop was deserted. I stopped the Charger and left the engine running, the transmission in drive, my foot light on the brake. Ryan kept the shotgun close to his body. I could tell he didn’t like it and I didn’t either. If anyone opened fire, we were sitting ducks in the car. Simms and some friends might have figured they could ambush us here in the street and take everything we had: the car, the cash, our weapons, even the damn camera.
Some movement in the rearview caught my eye. Simms was coming alone up the sidewalk toward the car, his hands hidden in his pouch. I elbowed Ryan, who lay the shotgun down and pulled his Glock out of its shoulder holster. “If his hand comes out with anything but your camera,” he said, “roll out your door.”
He unlatched his door, turned sideways and kicked it open just as Simms reached the car. Simms had to jump back to avoid the arc of the door, and his hands instinctively came out of the pouch, with neither his gun nor my camera in sight.
“Fuck y’all doin’?” he yelled. “Playin’ some Starsky and Hutch thing, pointing a gun at me on my own block? I’ll fuckin’ Starsky your ass, man.”
“Cool down,” Ryan said. “You came up a little fast for my taste.”
“I
“That’s not the key to a long life, kid.”
“Like I got one anyway. Know what this neighbourhood is surrounded by? Huh? Cemeteries, man, like five of them. Calvary, New Calvary, St. Mary’s, Forest Hills, and one more I always forget. Not another hills but a mountain … Mount Hope, that’s it. Five cemeteries round this neighbourhood, man, all doin’ good business, so don’t talk to me about no long life.”
The pictures he had taken were better than fine. A quick scan confirmed the images were sharp and showed what we’d asked: all sides of the building, all doors and windows, in longer, middle and close-up perspectives.
We drove back toward midtown with Ryan reviewing the images one by one. “He did good,” he said. “He actually paid attention.”
“Not all is lost with the youth of America.”
“The north side has a door that opens from the inside only. No handle on the outside.”
“Probably an emergency exit with a crash bar.”
“Yeah. The windows are all too high off the ground to be of any use to us. Okay, coming around to the rear, there’s the bay where a hearse can back in. The doors are closed in the shot. There’s an entrance next to it, which is where everyone will go in tonight. More cameras there.”
“What about the south side?”
“Getting to it. He shot a lot of frames. Okay, same deal. One door, only this one does have a handle. It’s an alternate entrance, maybe for the employees.”
“Or the families of the deceased.”
“Hey,” Ryan said, “here’s one I like.”
