The weeks before his trial felt like one long day. He kept hoping Julia would appear, serious and sorry, a cashier’s check in her purse, but Julia and that moment never arrived, and before long he was pulling nine months of a year bid, including time served, twenty-three days.
The judge would’ve let Harry slide on the bullshit possession rap if he hadn’t punched Simms into the X-ray room, but his public defender, whose angry African-American-ness didn’t help Harry at all, refused to plea him out. This pissed off the judge like a charm, and when he handed down the sentence, he wasn’t even looking at Harry. He burned slow, shaking his head at the black PD.
“This is the problem,” he told Aggie. “My entire life has been getting fucked up and stealing and fighting, but it’s starting to feel less and less like me. You know what I’m saying? That fight at Sailor Randy’s? Last thing I wanted to have anything to do with.”
“That’s what Bryce pays you for,” Aggie said. “You were doing your job.”
“That’s what I mean. When I was moving blow, I was doing my job. When I was stealing TVs, I was doing my job. I don’t want to do jobs like that.”
Which presented a dilemma. He didn’t know anything else.
One thing he made sure Aggie understood, he never walked in anywhere behind a gun, and he never threatened to hurt anybody if they didn’t give up their wallet or their watch. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t lift a wallet on a rush-hour bus, but that was a different kind of crime. Any job that involved a gun, it wasn’t for him.
Using the gun, that is. He sold lots of guns. There was a good buck in that.
Sometimes he thought he might actually do something to change his life, but what? Unlike a lot of hoods, Harry never dreamed of the Big Score. His thinking didn’t run like that. The hustle was just to get him through one day and into the next. Harry Healy was textbook small time, and he knew it.
“What about your family?” Aggie said. “Your brother, the one on TV?”
Harry was a mistake, born when his mother was fortythree. He had two brothers, ten and fifteen years older. Ernie lived in North Carolina, and Arthur, the big Wall Street man, owned a house on Long Island that Harry used to visit on Christmas.
His mother worked forty years at the phone company, right up till the time she got sick. Diagnosed with liver cancer, she was gone, goodbye, six months. Harry was sixteen.
The old man was a trumpet player. Never had any kind of job besides playing trumpet. He still worked, or anyway was working off and on the last time Harry talked to him. Harry James was the old man’s idol. Harry didn’t get that one. Harry James was a suck-ass trumpet player if you asked Harry.
He hadn’t talked to his father, or his brothers, since, well, he didn’t remember, but it was a good long time.
What Harry had been doing all this time was waiting for something to save him. He didn’t know what. An event, a person, something, some vague thing, was going to pull him up and turn his life around. He usually caved in for the rich-chick-as-savior scenario, which is where he supposed Julia fit, but just look at how that one turned out.
Like after he read that Brooke Astor was dissolving her Foundation, giving away the last of her money before she went down for the long count, Harry thought, If she only kicked a million or so my way, I’d be set. He pictured himself above the fold of the
Maybe he’d waited long enough.
“My family,” Harry said. He let out a breath.
Every time Harry saw her, Darlene was looking better and better. The dermatologist gave her some pills that knocked out that skin condition, and she was coming off trashy and sexy in her cut-offs and halter, her baby-fine hair pulled back like a schoolgirl’s. He waved to her from his end of the driveway as he was letting himself into his room.
Harry had chipped a hole in the wall behind the hot water pipe, covered the hole with masking tape, then slapped some paint that almost matched over the tape. His money was in a Marlboro box in the hole. Winding some small bills around the fifties and hundreds, he stuffed the knot into his jacket and buttoned the pocket flap.
He packed his duffel bag and folded the promotional t-shirts he’d accumulated at Sailor Randy’s. He left the shirts in a stack on the bed. Darlene could help herself to them, cut them in half, some brand new halter tops for the siren of the Wind N’ Sand.
He stuck his head through the window that opened on an alley. All clear. He dropped his bag and climbed out feet first. Cutting through the alley, he walked into some weeds still wet with a rain he didn’t remember, and came out in a parking lot, where Aggie was waiting at the wheel of her Miata.
She wasn’t talking, so Harry went over his story one more time. Leo, Manfred, the Surfside two. What happened, he had no idea, but he didn’t shoot Manfred. Were they clear on that? Because there was a great chance the police were going to want to talk to her before too long.
“And you think you got set up,” she said.
“No,” Harry said. “No extra information. Don’t do their job for them. Let them do it. You don’t know anything. Nothing. You got it?”
She stared at the road, the wind sculpting her short hair into a quiff. Harry had her drive him to Boynton Beach, and when they found the bus station, Aggie went in and bought him a ticket to Philadelphia.
Without the highway to distract them, and with a halfhour wait yawning, the tension was like a bug-zapper crackling over the wheezing of the buses. It attacked Harry’s neck, that tension, but he didn’t want to be the one who spoke first. He didn’t know what to say.
Aggie said, “All I want to know is, where do I fit in?”
Harry flipped his cigarette to the asphalt and said,
“What do you want me to tell you? You don’t.”
He turned his face flush into a slap and he blinked twice, reeling Aggie back into focus. Then he thought of something. What stopped her from rolling right over on him? If she got that in her head, they’d grab him before he got to Orlando.
“Look, I know this isn’t nearly as romantic as you boarding a plane with some hero of the Resistance, and me walking away to run my gin joint.”
She got the reference. She wasn’t digging it.
“The last four weeks, Aggie... I’ve been happier than I’ve ever been. I guess I just wasn’t meant to live like that. I guess God is saying, Harry, you can’t have this kind of life.”
“How moving,” she said. She squeezed back the tears. They came out in spite of her. “Get out.”
“Sweetheart?”
“I said get out,” she said, gunning the idle. “Get the fuck out.”
He lit another cigarette and walked over to where a dozen or so riders waited with their luggage, Aggie leaving rubber in second gear.
Manfred Pfiser had never been arrested in the United States, in his native Netherlands, or anywhere else. He chipped out a nice living for himself with his imports and exports, he was even-steven with the Dutch taxman, and he was all caught up on his alimony and child support. Another Euroman on an extended vacation, soaking up sunshine and neon. The difference between him and a few thousand other guys, besides his cocaine sideline, was that Pfiser left the party early, and against his will.
The traces in his suitcase tested out almost eighty percent pure. That much was rare in quantities under a kilo. Your strongest kick-ass street gram came in around twenty-five, and if you were copping in some after-hours dive, ten percent would be about the best you could get your hands on. Martinson theorized Pfiser went down holding large, a package that’d be worth killing for.
Being the savvy businessman he was, Pfiser no doubt had profits of his own to maximize, but to the heavyweights, to the real gangsters, he would’ve been a customer, and these people had grown far too shrewd to cut into their own market share. And the murder weapon, which Martinson didn’t have, was a piece of evidence that mitigated against a professional hit.
