perhaps it was best to have her cry. I walked her downstairs and we sat on the ruined couch together. I wondered. If there was a plan to the Great Going On, was what had just happened to us retribution for my clutching those luscious globes of flesh? And then a little self-hatred and guilt went into the stew pot along with the disaster and the horrendous, pyrotechnic trauma and injustice delivered to the Abernathys.
And I realized life had outdone itself. The needle had now fallen below boring. It was all the way down into the Dead Zone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
'Everybody should believe in somethin',' mused a dejected Sam Bowman as he hefted the jug of Cutty Sark and poured himself a magnum load. 'I believe I'll have me another drink.'
It was two in the afternoon the following day. We were having a powwow in the Adams kitchen. If you could call it a powwow. I couldn't. It looked more like a wake. I opened a bottle of Bass by ale while Joe set the Krups machine to growling and produced cappucinos for Mary and himself. Kevin O'Hearn took the whisky jug from Sam when he was finished and gave himself a double-barreled slug, then returned to fiddling with the little Sony television, tuning in a soap. Brian Hannon was smoking one of my Montecruz coronas and sipping a Sprite. O'Hearn eyed the soft drink with disdain.
'Don't you want some Cutty, Brian?'
'Yes I do, Kevin. But if I had some, then I'd have more and more and more. Then things would go blank and I'd disappear and you wouldn't see me for months, and I'd wake up in an ash can in Panama City. So I'm having a Sprite.'
'Oh. Had it bad eh?'
Brian's big balding head swiveled like a gun turret and two streams of pungent smoke cascaded out of his nostrils.
'How many people have you known who've had alcoholism good? Hmmm?'
O'Hearn returned to his soap, and Brian to his Sprite and stolen cigar. Brian's story, replete with fled wife and kids, wasn't a happy one. This somewhat accounted for his rather acerbic wit and sarcastic humor. But a nicer guy never lived. Except Moe.
'Okay Doc, we hand it to you. That makes two in a row. You're batting a thousand. So spill. How'd you know they'd burn Sam's safe?' Brian interrogated me.
'Didn't. Like I told Sam, just a hunch.'
'Good hunch,' returned Brian. 'You got any more hunches?'
'Yeah, like on the Sox game Sunday?' asked O'Hearn.
'They just about done it to me,' said Sam, tossing off the last of the amber fluid. 'They just about broke me down now. Kill my partner, break open my place. S'all ruint now.'
He shook his handsome head slowly. He was dressed in a cream-yellow Windbreaker. His hands and forearms were veiny, his chin clean and taut. Tiny little white pinpricks of whisker showed on his nut-brown jowls where he hadn't shaved- the reverse image of my Calabrian brother-in-law, who patted him, softly on the back.
'C'mon, guy,' said Joe. 'Remember, the damage done to the office and safe is all covered. Covered well. You'll/lose a coupla hundred, max. Thanks to Doc here you took the cash out and stashed it at Nissenbaum's. Good thing too. You had no proof of it at all. It was just a giant-sized hunk of petty cash, right? You wouldn't have gotten a dime on it, I'll bet. But it's safe, so don't worry.'
'What I gonna do for a partner?'
We all stared at the table and sighed. There was a lull in the talk, which added further to the gloom. Mary asked Joe about Johnny Robinson's car.
'They towed it four blocks away in the dead of night to a deserted garage, which is where the Lowell police found it. The rocker panels had been ripped off, seat upholstery torn open-'
'And they also, what did they do, burned up Sam's safe? What do you mean, burned?' asked Mary.
'They broke into Dependable's office- came in through the roofand burned the safe, honey. Burned it,' I said, lighting a pipe.
'See, Mare,' said her brother, 'there are several basic ways to open a safe without the combination. The famous one is by cracking it, or moving the lock dial delicately back and forth until the tumbler-pins fall into place. Then the safe can be opened. This is a great method, but it takes infinite skill and hours of time. Most crooks nowadays have neither. Also, the old pintumbler safe locks have been replaced by disc locks and other sophisticated stuff. It's almost impossible to crack a safe anymore. Now Sam's safe is- was- an old pin-tumbler Mosler. It could be cracked, but it would take a long time and it's in an exposed position. That leaves the other methods: peeling, blowing, punching, and burning.'
Brian erupted in a choking fit; he had tried to inhale my stogie.
'That's a no-no, fella; you'll kill yourself,' I warned.
'Peeling a safe is strictly for amateurs,' continued Joe. 'When you peel a safe you don't have the knowledge, skill, or tools needed to do a professional job. What you're doing is, you're attacking the steel casing of the safe rather than the door. You're going after the body, and you start at an edge of the casing and peel away the layers of steel with cold chisels and sledges, wedges, pickaxes… anything. It takes about eight hours of sweaty work to peel even a small safe, and it's noisy as hell. You can only peel a safe that's isolated in some old warehouse where nobody will hear the noise.'
'Right,' said Brian, whose eyes still watered. 'Had a junkie tried to peel the safe in the lumberyard last year. Could hear him a mile away. Caught him before he'd even made a dent in it. Poor slob. But punching's different. Now that takes a little skill, and it's much quicker. Problem is, it's also noisy.'
'Yeah, noisy, but it is quick,' said Joe. 'Usually the guy who punches a safe will plan to skedaddle before the heat arrives. What you do is, you drill into the safe door with a low-speed, high-torque drill with a good Swedish bit. You put the hole just to the side of the dial in the door, angled in toward the center. Then you stick a heavy metal punch into that hole and whang it with a baby sledge. Ping! The back of the lock is knocked right off, and in you go. Noisy but quick.'
'But you gotta have a good drill, and it takes an hour, and several bits, to get that hole,' said Brian.
'I wanna tell about blowing a safe,' said Kevin, who'd spun around in his chair to face us. Cops. They'll talk your ear off. Everybody's seen the movies about this, where the guy packs in the vials of nitro, called soup, and then hides behind the mattresses while the building blows up. Well, it ain't like that. Now they don't use nitro, which is dangerous as hell. They use plastique. Black-market plastique, and they place it just right. Then they ramp it with a hemp-and-cable mat and detonate it electrically. Boom! Off comes your door and you're in.'
'Yeah,' said Brian, 'but not as easy as that. One: how and where do you get the funny putty? Not so easy, and a federal offense if you're even caught with the stuff. Two: you still gotta drill the holes and know how to place the charge. You gotta study the box before hand. Blowing a box is like cleaving a diamond, you get one shot… and you can wreck the box and everything that's inside. Also of course, you can kill yourself.'
'True, true,' said O'Hearn philosophically. He returned to 'The Young and the Restless.'
'Still,' mused Brian, 'blowing a box remains the quickest way in. If speed is all that counts, and you don't worry about the noise-'
'- or the danger-'
'- or the danger, then you can't beat it. But burning's the most popular method now.'
'Oh for sure,' said Joe, lighting a Benson amp; Hedges with his Orsini lighter.
'Where'd you get that fruity lighter, James0e?' asked Brian.
Joe cuddled the instrument in his big hairy paw and glared back.
'This is a class lighter, Hannon. Cost three hundred bucks. Made in Italy. In Florence. Only reason you think it's strange is because it's class.'
'I just said it looks a little fruity is all. I guess a lot of stuff made in Italy is fruity, like those chacha boots.'
'Izat so? How fruity is a nine-millimeter Beretta? I guess the Israeli army doesn't think it's so fruity. How about a Lamborghini, or a Ferrari? I notice there are no high-performance racing cars named O'Grady. Eh?'
