Run (4 page)

So: Who knows about those secretaries? Could be store managers, building inspectors. Lovers. Terrorists. Cops. But not today; today they are secretaries, and when these secretaries turn their not-so-pretty little heads in this direction, we are four men in white shirts and plain ties and plain suits who converse in plain tones.

We are insurance salesmen out for lunch, and since the Shrimp
Lover’s Feast at long last has arrived, here is what the one of us at the head of the table, the one named Kruikshank, the one we call CK, has to say about the benefits of term versus whole life:

This weekend we have a run. A major delivery, the proverbial wagonload, and what’s inside the crates don’t really matter. It’s top-notch iron and it’s very profitable. We take the product north, do a double drop, a wait-and-switch: the goods handed off at one spot, the paper at another. Nothing to it.

So what’s the wrinkle? I ask him.

CK stabs at his shrimp. Chews awhile.

New clients. Some niggers. Gangbangers out of the Ville or some other hellhole in NYC. Call themselves the 9 Bravos. Money’s good, though, real good. And Sal Maggio gives his word on them, so hey.

Yeah, I tell him. So hey.

CK stabs at another shrimp. Chews. Swallows. Then:

Still, better safe than sorry. So Jules wants a larger unit and some backup. Which is why—and this is where CK stabs his fork at me instead of the shrimp—Jules wants you along for the ride.

Then, in one of those stutter-step afterthoughts that can only be a putdown, he turns to Renny Two Hand and says: You too.

There’s a long silence while CK finishes off his plateload of shrimp, then the baked potato, and then takes a big swallow of coffee. It’s over.

This one’s mine, he says. Now we got to go see Jules.

So CK actually picks up the tab. A miracle. He hands the waiter a fifty and says, Keep it, kid. And do you and me a favor and get yourself a haircut.

When we’re in the lobby, lots of folks still waiting for tables, I pull CK over to this big fish tank full of murky water and lobsters, and I say the obvious:

This is a milk run.

Yeah, he says, parking a toothpick in the corner of his mouth.

You could do this thing in your sleep.

Yeah, he says.

You don’t need me, and you sure as hell don’t need Two Hand. You
need four, maybe five of your own guys. Mackie, Toons, Fryer. What about Dawkins?

Yeah, he says.

So is it so much to ask? I mean, am I missing something or what?

Yeah, he says. Oh, yeah. You’re missing something, all right.

Hey, I say to him, and when I put my hand on his shoulder CK gives it a funny stare. You’re blowing sunshine up my ass, I tell him. How about a clue, maybe? Why do you want me?

I don’t want you, CK says. And I sure don’t need you.

He snaps the toothpick and manages to spit it out while giving me a grin.

I don’t like that grin, and I don’t like the laugh that follows. I’m about to tell him what I don’t like when Mackie the Lackey turns toward us and says:

Shit.

Past Mackie the crowd seems unsettled, something, someone, pushing his way through them. Then Mackie says:

It’s Doby.

The guy’s waltzing into the lobby, heading for a table maybe, who knows. You don’t need rear-end collisions, you don’t need telegrams telling you about your dead grandmother, and you sure as hell don’t need this Doby Mathers guy.

So: Shit is right. I’m wondering about turning around and looking for the back way out. But Doby is so looned, coke probably, that he could be nothing but for real. It’s fate, an accident. Still, my right hand is in my coat pocket, and so’s my Glock.

Hey, man, he calls to CK, and he gets silence and he looks my way. Say hey, Ray.

Stoned fuck can’t even remember my name. Still:

Hey, Doby, I tell him. How’s it hanging?

Yokay, Ray. Fine as wine.

CK eyes the lunch crowd and he knows, like I know, that nobody in the lobby, waiting for their name to be called, waiting for a table at the Red Lobster, for Christ’s sake, could care less. The guy’s weak. He’s so weak he can’t break wind. CK nods and I give Doby the buck-fifty smile.

Got to go, Dobe.

Cool. He’s not moving, and he’s standing in my way.

I say, a little louder: Got to go, Dobe.

He’s staring right through me, the words burrowing in from his ears to the brain. Must’ve been taking hits of the white daddy since breakfast. Then: Plink! The light goes on.

Oh, man. Yeah, that’s right, Ray. You got to go.

I shrug my way past him and head for the door. But this guy ain’t quitting. He’s onto CK now.

You don’t come round no more, CK. Why don’t you come round no more?

CK elbows by him, but the guy won’t let it go.

Hey, CK, he says. Hey, man. You don’t come round. You got something for me or not?

CK turns on him, jabs a finger into his chest: Get away from me.

Take it easy, man. Doby gives him the palms up. You in some kinda hurry? We oughta talk. Do some business. Have some fun.

And then he says something obscene: Mikey.

He says: Hey, CK. You guys. You know what? You oughta come on down to the lake sometime. No business like show business. Take you to see some of my girls. And hey, man, bring Mikey down too. Whatever happened to that guy? Good guy, real good guy. Bring Mikey down and we’ll—

That’s when CK takes him through the men’s room door. He just hoists the guy by the lapels of his jacket and walks him backward through the door.

Stand by, I say to Mackie and Two Hand, and then I’m in there after them.

Some guy’s zipping it up at the pisser and I tell him: Hey, excuse us, our buddy’s sick, must have been the crab cakes, and the guy’s out the door. By then CK has Doby against the far wall and he measures him with a hard left, kidney punch, doubling him over. He follows with a knee to the gut and I hear this sound like a baby rattle.

Two minutes, I say to CK. Two minutes and then we’re out of here.

You don’t say nothing about Mikey, CK’s saying, like I’m not there, and maybe I’m not. I lean into the door, holding it closed. You hear me, Teflon nose? You hear me, you little fuck?

CK can’t quite let him go or he’ll fall to the floor. I wonder whether the punk is going to start bawling like a baby. His lips are moving, but there aren’t words, aren’t even sounds, just this kind of weird windup to a whine.

After a couple more punches the guy starts to vomit and that’s when CK lets go, dropping him like a sack of garbage onto the floor. As I shove the door open, heading out, I hear CK tell him these true words of wisdom:

You don’t never say nothing about Mikey.

I didn’t do Mikey, but I watched. Good thing, too, because for every night I wake up with nothing in my head but an ache for a straight shot of whiskey and that look in his eyes, I tell myself this is something I need to remember, something I don’t ever want to forget.

One time Mikey called me on the phone and said, You want to talk about Jesus? I told him no, but he said, You need to talk about Jesus. I asked him why, and he said, If you have to ask why, then you have to talk about Jesus.

So I said: Okay, Mikey, let’s talk about Jesus.

And he said: All right. Yeah. Well, see, I need to know what happens when you die.

Mikey had a wife. Sharon was her name, washed-out redhead with a lot of Irish, liked to wear those dangly earrings. Two kids, too. A boy, Kevin, I think, and this little girl, cute kid. They usually are cute. Then they grow up. Wonder what happened to them.

Mikey worked out of Wilmington, North Carolina, where Jules had a couple auto supply stores, turned a fair profit as I recall. His business card probably read Manager, but what he was managing was the trade out of Camp Lejeune, like this Marine captain with some kind of bad habit and a need to trade ordnance for cash. Risky business, but Mikey
could play the angles, and for a time we had some prime goods for yahoo prices, buy low sell high, not just M-16s and M-60 machine guns but some M-203 grenade launchers, plus the grenades to launch.

We don’t do much retail, not anymore. Too hairy and too, too dirty. But back then, back when I was coming up, there was never a problem. Even selling on the streets: We’d buy low in Virginia and South Carolina, stuff like those cheapshit Davis pistols or some Third World knockoffs, and we’d sell high, maybe four or five times high, in the inner city. The wise guys were still on top, and whatever else you want to say about them, they kept things clean. You had omertà: the code of honor, the code of silence, whatever. You didn’t rat on anyone; you didn’t fuck up deals. You played by the rules. You had honor. You did business.

Or someone dug you a ditch.

But that was in the days of the Five Families, before the Cubans and the Jamaicans and the Triads and those fucking Colombians. And then the gangs. Before cocaine became crack. Before things got too gun-crazy and the streets were running red.

Nowadays you just watch your back. But when your insides start turning you out, when you can’t trust the guys on your own side of the table, the guys you run with—well, you have to do more than watch.

Somebody was watching Mikey. Somebody didn’t like what they saw. Mikey was dirty, probably dirty from the get-go, but hell, no one is handpicked in this business; it’s not the few, the proud, all that bullshit. You want clean hands, clear heads, but like good guns these are scarce commodities. You need stand-up guys, real soldiers, and sometimes you never know. You just never know until it happens.

Take Kruikshank. They call him CK. Two letters, and can you guess what they mean? Clark Kent? Calvin Klein? Captain Kidd? Chung King?

No, no, no, and no.

Word is that the initials stand for Cop Killer. CK doesn’t talk about it, won’t say a word. Unless he’s asked. Then he tells you he won’t tell you.

I call him Cuke. He likes that.

Cool, he says. Cool as a cuke.

Now CK is your average certifiable hardcase, the kind of thing you get when you breed a Force Recon NCO with a pit bull terrier. Lives alone in a high-rise apartment, living room, two bedrooms, kitchen, and not one damn piece of furniture, unless you count the television set and I don’t. Puts Led Zeppelin posters and pictures of porno stars on the walls. Sleeps on a futon, eats brown rice and Snickers bars. Believes in God and phone sex. Runs seven miles every day but Sunday. He’s got three suits, and they’re identical, he bought them at the same place, at the same time, these sort of grey plaid nothings.

CK carries a Smith & Wesson Model 29—the Dirty Harry gun, .44 Magnum, chamfered cylinder, full lugged barrel, drilled and tapped for scope mount, with a nine-inch snout that’s pure show, the blue steel penis and all that. But like they say in those ads on TV about the knives that cut through beer cans: Wait, there’s more. CK names his sidearms. Like they’re dogs or kids. So the .44 Magnum is Elvis, and he’s got a pair of Browning Hi-Powers called Siegfried and Roy.

One time, waiting out a straw-man scam in Atlanta, this geezer named Smitty told me that the whole CK thing was bullshit. That CK had never squeezed down on anybody, except maybe in his dreams. No way he ever killed a cop.

Have a care, sonny, Smitty told me. He’s a talkin dude, not a walkin one.

Of course Smitty was his own piece of work, the kind of guy who would lie just to get away with it. And he didn’t see CK that day in Norfolk. The day that Mikey died. Not right after Mackie the Lackey says to CK:

What time you got?

Same time I had when you asked me ten minutes ago, CK says to Mackie. Plus ten minutes.

Mackie looks up out of picking lint from his crotch and says:

CK, explain this thing to me one more time. You know, about this grand jury thing and about who’s been talking to who and why this little a-hole Mikey should shut the fuck up.

And of course there is an explanation but I don’t need to hear those words again, because in the end, it’s not really what Mikey did that matters. It’s the simple fact that it was done. The guy had a job and he was
supposed to do it. End of story. I don’t want to hear that it was busting his balls or the old familiar refrain about being low on cash. The guy had a job, and the job had some rules. So he had to play by those rules. Which means you don’t talk, you don’t ever talk, to the cops. I mean, if we don’t live by the rules, then we’re animals.

So we’re sitting there waiting for Mikey, and that’s when the radio, one of those oldies stations, the radio starts playing this song, the one the guy sings through his nose about the Hurdy Gurdy Man, and CK reaches over and spins the dial up so the song is playing loud enough to sizzle the little plastic speaker.

Hurdy gurdy he sang
, and CK’s actually trying to sing along and it’s a good thing the volume’s topped out because I do not want to hear him sing.

Faggot music, Mackie says, but CK just keeps going.

I said—

Heard you, CK tells Mackie. He rolls down the sound a little and he stares over at me and he says:

You know who’s playing lead guitar?

I say: What?

And he says: Do you know who played lead guitar on this song?

I say: No, who played the lead guitar? Which right about now is growling down, real fuzzy, and starting to make me think we’re going someplace I don’t want to go.

CK drops his boots from the table and looks at me like he’s won the lottery.

Jimmy Page, he says.

I decide it’s best to look suitably impressed. Huh, I say.

But Mackie leans in. Who the fuck is Jimmy Page?

I don’t believe you, CK says. I don’t fucking believe you.

Then CK turns right back to me and says, So?

And I say, So?

Which is a mistake, because then he says:

All right, so do you know who’s playing drums? On this song? Who put sticks right onto the pads on this song?

CK, I tell him, you got me, you know? This time you really got
me, man, because I don’t know who played the lead guitar and I don’t know the guy who’s singing and I sure as hell don’t know who’s playing the drums.