they don’t get a car they wanted, or a house, or some pussy. But that asshole, he wasn’t pissed off about not getting a boat. He was pissed off about not getting his down payment back. So, how come he didn’t?”
Gardino shrugged.
Ricky tried again. “How’s about we play a game, you and me? I’ll ask you something and you tell me if I’m right or if I’m full of shit. How’s that?”
“Twenty questions.”
“Whatever. Okay, try this on: You
Gardino studied his beer. Son of a bitch still wasn’t giving away squat.
Ricky added, “Only there never was any boat. You never steal a fucking thing. You just show him pictures you took on the dock and a fake police report or something.”
The guy finally laughed. But nothing else.
“Your only risk is some asshole whaling on you when he loses the money. Not a bad grift.”
“I sell boats,” Gardino said. “That’s it.”
“Okay, you sell boats,” Ricky eyed him carefully. He’d try a different approach. “So that means you’re looking for buyers. How ’bout I find one for you?”
“You know somebody who’s interested in boats?”
“There’s a guy I know. He might be.”
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. But 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 three 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:
THREE ARRESTED IN COAST GUARD IMPOUND THEFTS
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.”
“Some of ’em make a stink for a day or two, but mostly they just disappear.”
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 debated. He 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 seventies.
T.G., a fat Irishman in his mid-thirties, was at the corner table with three, four buddies of his.
“It’s the Lime Ricky 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 Ricky 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 Ricky Man?” Stretching out the nickname.
“Polishing me knob,” Ricky responded in a phony 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
