The Deed (27 page)

Nick and Jason teamed up to take on the interlopers, and Jason didn’t argue, deferring without dishonor when his partner strode toward the head of the table to break. He wondered how his drunkenness would affect his game, whether the confidence boost could master the coordination gap.

“Before I die,” said Nick dramatically, as he lined up his shot, “I want to kill somebody.” With that he fired, punctuating the announcement with a loud crack and the usual chaotic rainbow of rebounding and dispersion.

In Nick, the normal male drive to be the center of attention was absolute and biological, a matter of identity survival, and his efforts to establish social dominance by fiat aroused, in Jason, enthralled amusement tinged with something like pity.
My friend is a walking cry for help,
he thought.

“Who do you want to kill?” Jason replied blandly, accepting a cigar from Louis. As he rolled it in his fingers, awaiting a light, he wondered how much it was worth.

“Don’t be condescending; I’m serious,” said his friend, expertly chalking his cue with a wrist twist as he strode purposefully around the table, sniper’s eyes fixed immovably on his next target. “A stranger. I’m not talking about some messy crime of passion. Three in the corner.”

“You don’t gotta call ’em,” reminded Kyle.

“Admit it, Jason,” said Nick. “Aren’t you dying to know what it’s actually like?”

“The murder, or the twenty-to-life?”

“Don’t give me all that pussy ramification nonsense,” Nick admonished. “I’m talking about the immediate act, the pure, physical, irrevocable taking of another human life. What it’s like to look into someone’s eyes as you choke out their last breath? Tell me there isn’t a small part of you that wants to know what that’s like.”

“Keep shootin’, Kaczynski,” Louis complained.

“I’m in,” said Kyle, seated.

The billiard light overhead bathed the table in bright fluorescence, but reflected up and into the faces gathered around, it lent them a shadowy, flashlight-at-the-campfire demonic quality; the room’s smoky haze, and the bright points of fire and smoke, conspired to turn the game into a feast of fiends.

“Too rich for my blood,” said Louis. “I got no inner Son of Sam.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Nick accused, poking him lightly in the chest with the butt of the cue stick. For the first time, it occurred to Jason that these guys had to be getting drunk, too. “You’re a natural-born killer,” Nick continued, forgetting the game. “You have canine teeth carefully honed by natural selection for gnawing flesh. You have fingers for choking and nails for clawing. For millions of years nature has painstakingly crafted you into a fabulous killing machine. You can’t just repudiate that with an act of will.”

“I repudiate it thus!” shouted Louis, menacing Nick with his own cue, then snapping it over his knee with a loud crack. Kyle laughed out loud, and Louis beamed, holding the pieces aloft, triumphantly. Jason was amazed at the utter lack of self-consciousness; when a concerned goon from the club headed over, Kyle’s quick hand motion, scribbling on an invisible pad—
Put it on my tab, pal
—was accepted as hard currency.

“Let’s not forget,” said Jason, trying to rescuscitate the discussion, “that we killing machines later climbed down out of the trees and invented farming and civilization and so forth.”

“Oh yeah,” said Nick derisively. “I forgot you were a shepherd.”

Jason shrugged. “I don’t want to kill anyone,” he reiterated. “
You,
yes; a stranger, no.”

“Me neither,” said Louis.

“Thank you,” said Jason.

“Now,
rape
—there’s something I could sink my teeth into,” Louis deadpanned. “It’d be just as intense—plus you get laid!”

“You are one sick fuck,” said Nick, grinning.

Kyle laughed. “Someone’s inner child needs a serious spanking.”

“Oh,
now
everybody’s outraged,” laughed Jason. “But murder’s fine and dandy.”

Nick finally missed on his third shot, handed the cue to Louis, and took a seat next to Jason. “It’s not as if humans are an endangered species,” he said under his breath. “A loose cannon here or there isn’t going to do any harm.”

“Oh, my God—are you still talking about it?”

“I just want to kill
one person,
” Nick continued impassively. “Is that a crime?”

“I’m not sure I like the way you’re looking at me,” said Jason.

“I also want to go to the Guggenheim,” Nick said, sitting back. “I mean, what’s the point of living in the city if you don’t visit its cultural treasures, and all that crap?”

“You blowhard,” said Jason. “Stop trying to be outrageous.”

“Eat me.”

MASSAPEQUA
,
LONG ISLAND
, 7:00
P.M.

The house lights dimmed momentarily, as if an electric chair had gone into action somewhere in the building, and a fusillade of funky, staccato horn blares kicked off the disco euphoria of Foxy’s “Get Off.” But the dancer, when she emerged from the back room, was even more disappointing than the last, with a bright green bikini pasted over rock-hard silicone towers and an unappetizingly roomy lobby below. Resolutely, the girl hooked her thumbs in her G-string and did a fast butter churn to the beat, causing her freakishly protruding pudendum to jut out alarmingly over the listless crowd.

At their ringside table, Freddie smoldered disconsolately. “So help me, Vin,” he shouted over the music, “if a cock pops out of there, I’m gonna shoot you myself.”

Vinnie, already giddy and stupid on a couple of doubles, laughed until scotch threatened to trickle out of his nose. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” he slurred, palms clearing an invisible windshield between them as he spared a sideways smirk at the silent third member of their party. The Indian continued silently watching the girl and pouring straight bourbon down his throat like Coca-Cola.

Gazing rightward at their blithely distracted partner, Freddie tried to decide whether the Indian was entranced or simply bored out of his skull. He fancied himself a good reader of men, and to his eyes the way the Indian had dressed up tonight—starched white button-down, cheap, but dry-cleaned suit, skinny tie—made it all too plain he was eager to deal. The knowledge should have given Freddie a leg up in the negotiations, but his dipshit partner’s amateurish, frat-boy antics now threatened to undermine everything. As he fixed Vinnie with a reproachful stare, he could feel something beginning to give way inside him, some ropy bond of loyalty that was too old-fashioned, or had been too often tested, or had simply outlived its useful life. The emasculating claustrophobia of this shitty little strip club had brought him to the brink of rage; his heart pounded in his wrists and forehead, more or less synchronized to the disco beat, and it was all he could do to keep his huge hands from clenching into wrecking balls.

“Come on,” he hissed at Vinnie. “Fucking get on with it.”

“All right, yeah, fine,” said Vinnie, chuckling with a casual superiority that very nearly had him taking the rest of his life’s meals through a straw. He tapped the Indian on one shoulder, lurched over the table toward him, and smiled idiotically.

“So let’s talk turkey,” he shouted hoarsely over the goofy bump and grind.

The purpose of the meeting, ostensibly, was to begin turning the casino idea into a working plan. In practice, it played out more like an interrogation, with Vinnie, all sodden enthusiasm, badgering the Indian on a million and one trivial points, each new question following so closely on the heels of the last, and bearing so little relation to it, that it soon became clear he was trying, through sheer swagger, to cow the Indian into accepting a submissive role in the deal.

Dovatelli had made it clear: he wanted Freddie to stay out of the negotiations. So Freddie had spent most of the evening plotting the future. For years now he’d been keeping one eye peeled for the big score, an escape route, a clear path to something loftier than the tin-pot organization he’d been scrabbling around in here for most of a decade, like a cockroach caught in a smooth-walled spittoon. Working for Dovatelli had once been promising, but the old man had taken over the business too late in life, and had been overwhelmed by strange distractions: nieces and nephews, playing the stock market, and now his own fading health. Dovatelli was already half out of the game, and the business was crumbling away. The fact that he was looking for leadership from below spelled certain doom. When the big dog starts asking for help mounting the females, you know a sea change is coming.

Privately, Freddie no longer even
wanted
to run the organization. Truth be told, there just wasn’t anything to it anymore. Ten worthwhile guys, maybe seven or eight million in revenue if everyone paid their bills, which they didn’t, and a mountain of overhead in column B. And the constant risk of the whole operation being blown wide open, meaning jail or death, a risk magnified by trigger-happy idiots and this ludicrous confessional age. The thought of someday running this show had once inspired him to greatness; today it felt more like a small inheritance promised by an eccentric uncle only after fulfilling some abominable condition, a tainted treasure not quite worth the effort of acquiring it.

An old-school pragmatist, Freddie understood steel and unions and head-busting and bullets. That, to him, was business, and he felt a disgust for paperwork that was honestly akin to the nausea others feel, he’d heard and had no choice but to believe, at the sight of a corpse in the trunk of a car. The casino Vinnie and the Indian were haggling over was a rock-solid concept, and in the old days Freddie would have insisted on involving himself, would, in fact, have already sent Junior out for a pizza and closed this deal himself, and Dovatelli be damned. So why did he feel so…bored?

The half-overheard discussion was fading away, and Freddie felt his perspective shift in an ecstasy similar to déjà vu. There comes a moment, more often in Freddie’s line of work than in most, when you become aware of a deeper reality underlying the seemingly simple situation you
thought
you were in—that moment when you suddenly realize your boss has decided to have you killed, or that the waitress is a cop. Having a good nose for this sort of thing, as Freddie did, could save your life, and he was beginning to feel that itch right now.

“Freddie, help me out here—I can’t explain it any better to him,” said the Indian, eyes darkening. “It’s Lenape land as far as the federal government is concerned. But my people have an agreement with the Lenape for the territory we’re talking about. It’s our property.”

“Yeah, I get that,” said Vinnie dismissively. “I know they’re not going to object. The point is, do you have the legal standing to do a contract with us, or do we have to get them to sign off?”

The Indian polished off his drink, spared a glance at the dancer who’d wandered into their vicinity, strutting her stuff just above eye level, and slowly turned back to Vinnie.

“Let’s talk about the deal,” he said gravely.

Freddie, now wholly reengaged, poured the rest of his tequila and OJ down his throat and eyeballed the antagonists, handicapping the battle to come.

Vinnie was losing his cool. “But do you understand the problem?”

Christ,
thought Freddie.
Enough’s enough.
“We run the daily ops,” he interjected steadily, ignoring the sudden, angry dart from Vinnie. “Your people get twenty-five percent of the book as a host fee. That’s extremely generous. How you split that is up to you. Parking and concessions we split fifty-fifty. You pay taxes and building and grounds maintenance; we handle construction while it’s being built and the payroll after.”

“But wait, wait,” interjected Vinnie, desperate to remain central. “Before we discuss any of this, we need to have some assurances that your tribe owns the land, and that you are the guy who can—who has the authority to negotiate for them. I mean”—he switched his attention to Freddie—“are we talking to the right person or aren’t we?”

At this, caught up in his own rhetoric, Vinnie swayed to his feet, lurched, and tried to grab the table. But the hand still had his drink in it, and he busted the glass into the table’s edge. “Whoa,” he said, staring at the table, then his hand, which had miraculously survived uncut.

“Come here a sec,” said Freddie, rising and walking Vinnie over to one side; the Indian resumed watching the show.