Keeplock (25 page)

My days began to take on a routine. Eddie in the morning and the cops at night. Ginny was the fixed point. The days revolved around her. I told her everything that happened and she took it in without flinching. We seemed to spend all our time in bed, folded into each other. I had a key to her apartment and I was usually waiting for her when she came home from work. I’d have the evening planned, dinner out or a movie, but we always ended up in bed, surrounded by containers of Chinese takeout.

Somewhere along the line, we began to talk about the future. In a week or so, I’d be out of the jam, but I’d still be on parole. Ginny and I had gone to see Simon together and he’d made his position quite clear. The state was demanding “intense supervision” and that was what the state was going to get.

“The fact is, Pete, that you committed a felony the day after you got out of Cortlandt. The cops may be willing to overlook your indiscretion, but as far as the parole board is concerned, you’re still a dangerous, violent, high-risk sociopath. I’m putting it bluntly because I don’t want to be misunderstood.”

Ginny had taken up my defense. Not that it did any good, but Simon let her talk herself out.

“Words ain’t gonna do it, Ginny. Deeds are gonna do it. The only way Pete can prove he’s an ex-criminal is to stay clean for a long, long time. The next five years, to be exact.”

“And if he’s violated for some petty bullshit, what do you think will happen to him in jail?”

“The same thing that’ll happen if Eddie’s people catch him on the street. Look here, Ginny, you knew what Pete’s life was like and you had ten years to get it out of your system.”

“It was the system that kept him inside me.”

Simon hadn’t responded because he hadn’t understood what she was talking about. As for me, I’d enjoyed the conversation immensely because the dialogue was so familiar. It was like watching one of those crappy sitcoms where you know the punch lines in advance. I’d had a reason for bringing Ginny with me to see Simon and it had nothing to do with begging him for some slack. I wanted Simon to know every detail of my devil’s bargain with the good detectives and I wanted a witness to his knowledge.

Simon was a decent guy, even though he was pissed off. If worst came to worst, he’d go to bat for me. But that didn’t mean he’d be willing to confront the system head-on. It didn’t mean, for instance, that he’d stand up in court and accuse two New York City detectives of perjury. He might or he might not, and I wasn’t willing to take the chance. Ginny’s presence was an insurance policy.

I’d told her that before we went. I wasn’t holding anything back. We were co-conspirators in each other’s lives.

“I don’t trust the cops. My name won’t appear on any of the warrants. The phrase they use is ‘confidential informant.’ Not that Eddie won’t figure it out sooner or later, but we’ll have enough time to get our butts out of Flushing before anyone comes looking for us. Only suppose the four of them decide to plead it out. Suppose the prosecution doesn’t need my testimony. I can’t be sure that Condon and Rico won’t take the opportunity to put one more perp where he belongs.”

“What about parole?” she asked. “You could be violated if they charge you, even if they don’t get a conviction.”

I leaned over and kissed the tip of her right breast. She responded by shoving me away.

“I want an answer,” she insisted.

“How does the song go? The answer is ‘blowing in the wind.’”

“You can forget about ‘blowing’ until you tell me what’s going on.”

“Okay. I’m not worried about what Simon will do within the parole system. He can manipulate the board without exposing himself. It’s not the same as testifying in open court. Look, Ginny, if I was a Vegas bookie trying to calculate the odds, I’d have to make it ten-to-one against something going wrong. Most likely this whole thing’ll come off smoothly. Eddie, Parker, Avi, and Morasso will be arrested and go to jail for the rest of their useful lives. Condon and Rico will cut me loose, just like they promised. Even Simon’ll come through. Yeah, he’ll play that ‘intense supervision’ crap just to show me how tough he is, but after a couple of months he’ll ease up. He knows I can’t go back.”

“One more question, all right?”

“Ask away.”

“Right now I’m holding you down and threatening to tear your balls off. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“So how come you have an erection?”

“That’s two questions.”

“With one answer.”

The jokes ended a week before the job was scheduled to go off. All three New York newspapers put the Pope’s impending visit on the front page. That’s when it became real. In the planning stage, battles are little more than clouds moving across the sky. You have a map and a few models (Parker with his computer; Avi with his guns) which you manipulate this way and that, looking for the most efficient dance. Then something happens, something as real as the beaming face of Pope John Paul, and the abstract suddenly becomes tangible. You can reach out and touch the tension.

I was at Eddie’s when I first saw the headline:
POPE ARRIVES WEDNESDAY.
A formal portrait, head and shoulders, covered the front of the tabloid.

Parker came down the stairs as I turned the pages.

“Every detail’s falling into place,” he said happily. “Things couldn’t be better. Did you see the schedule?”

“The Pope’s?”

“Yeah.”

“I was just looking it up.”

“Don’t bother. The big
putz
is doing a mass at Yankee Stadium next Saturday.” Parker had been a Presbyterian in his former life and had a longstanding dislike for the Catholic Church and its ceremonies. “Every Irish cop in the city’ll be there praying. The Puerto Ricans and the guineas, too. It couldn’t be better for us. Ya know how he’s getting up to the stadium?”

“Gee, John, I don’t.”

“A motorcade.” He paused for effect. “Through fucking Harlem and the South Bronx. They’re gonna have to call out the National Guard to protect him.”

“It’s like he’s workin’ for
us
, cuz.” Eddie strode into the room and put his arm around me. “I mean, did you ever see a better job than this one? Ever in your fuckin’ life?”

I shook my head sincerely. “If I was ever involved in a sweeter deal, I don’t remember it. It’s like they’re giving us a gift.”

“Wait,” Parker said, “it gets even better. I went into the computer today. To get the final schedule. Listen to this. Chapman Security has six new vehicles on order, all GMCs. That is, the chassis are manufactured by General Motors. The bodies are custom made by an independent outfit named Secure Coachworks. Secure was supposed to deliver the new vehicles on Tuesday, but they’re behind schedule. Meanwhile, Chapman has six trucks that are barely running, two of which are coming out of service whether the new vehicles arrive or not.
Their
schedules are being distributed among the rest of the fleet. For instance, truck 345, our target, is making three extra pickups in Fresh Meadows, a big drugstore on 188th Street, and two movie complexes on the Long Island Expressway service road. The complexes have a total of twelve theaters between them.”

“You got all this out of the computer?”

He looked at me with disdain. “It’s not like it was written down the way I told it. I put it together piece by piece. Like, when I saw that three pickups had been added to 345’s schedule, I started looking for a reason. I went to the overall schedule and found two fewer trucks than usual. So I went to Maintenance and—”

“Enough,” I said. “I get it. People don’t leave paper trails anymore. The trails are electronic.”

“Big trails you don’t need an Indian to follow. When companies start using computers, they tend to put
everything
in the memory. I went into the cargo file and found records of prior pickups for every company on 345’s schedule. It’s really nice the way they broke it down into cash, coins, and checks. If we get any kind of break, we’re looking at well over a million dollars.”

Eddie took me into the office just before lunch. He locked the door and took a small 9mm automatic out of the desk drawer, a Walther PPK.

“I changed my mind about Morasso, cuz,” he announced. “I want you to bang him out after all.” He waved a hand in my face. “Don’t interrupt me. The first thing is that I’m gonna be drivin’, so somebody’s gotta be ready in case Morasso gets outta hand. Also, Avi’s gonna get to the Bronx before us. He’ll be waitin’ when we pull up. I ain’t gonna say I don’t trust Avi, but life is full of traps. The reason they call ’em traps is because they’re designed so you don’t see them coming. Me, I like to keep my eyes open all the time. What I want is to know that after we finish the job, Morasso’s gonna be covered every minute. He’s got a double hard-on, one for you because of what you did to him and one for me because I brought you here.”

“I get the point, Eddie. And I don’t really have a problem with it.” What problem could I have? We were never going to get that far, anyway. As long as Eddie didn’t try to take the gun out of my hand, I was ready to go along with anything. “But what I wanna know is why I can’t use the piece I already have.”

He took a short, narrow cylinder out of the desk, a silencer, and screwed it into the barrel of the automatic. “We don’t need to be makin’ a lotta noise just when we’re about to enjoy the fruits of our fuckin’ labor.” He pointed the 9mm at the back of a couch and pulled the trigger. The sound was a good deal louder than the “poof” you hear in the movies, but it was nothing like the roar of a .38 going off in an enclosed space. The bullet, on the other hand, went right through the back of the couch and embedded itself in the wall.

We made the exchange and went into lunch a few minutes later. As if on cue, Morasso decided to act out. He’d been a good boy all week, snorting his dope and switching back and forth between
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
and
Popeye
, but halfway through the soup he lost his cool.

“Tell him to stop slurpin’.”

“You talkin’ to me?” Eddie asked. There was no give in his voice.

“Tell the little faggot to stop slurpin’. I can’t eat when he’s slurpin’ the fuckin’ soup. It’s disgusting.” He jabbed his spoon at Parker. “We don’t need this fucker now. What’re ya keepin’ him around for?”

“We didn’t need
you
from the beginning,” I said quietly.

He looked up at me in surprise. Maybe he’d forgotten I was there. It’s hard to know what goes on inside a psychotic’s mind. One thing was certain, though. Morasso was feeling the tension. By the day of the job, he’d be seething.

I picked up the bowl of soup in front of me and sucked down several mouthfuls. Slurrrrrrrrrrrrppppp.

“Ahhhhh, that was good.” I put the bowl on the table and stared over at Tony. He thought about it for a moment (I could tell he was thinking because his eyes went blank), then returned to his food.

T
OWARD THE END OF
that first week, I began meeting Condon and Rico in a small coffee shop on Second Avenue in the Twenties. It was usually the last stop on what was getting to be a series of very long days. I’d start at six in the morning with a drive to Ginny’s place in Flushing. She’d still be in bed when I arrived, her body warm and flushed with sleep. I’d begin tossing my clothes as soon as I closed the door, then slide under the covers. Her landlord wasn’t sending up heat, now that it was officially spring, but we made plenty of our own.

By nine-thirty, Ginny would be in her office and I’d be walking into Eddie’s Woodhaven apartment. The days were full of the usual bullshit. Avi was still trying to decide what rifle to use on the cop and Eddie was pushing him to make an immediate decision.

“No last-minute problems, cuz,” he’d lecture. “Ya gotta make a choice and live with it.”

“The rifle must be right for job. It is not for me to work in half-assed manner.” Avi’s voice would be calm, almost placid. He was the only one of us who seemed immune to the spreading tension.

After dinner I’d make an exit and drive to my nine o’clock meeting with Condon and Rico. I kept expecting them to provide me with details and they kept asking more questions. As my answers were always the same, it got to be pretty boring. By Monday, five days before the job, I began to lose my cool.

“I been watching for signs of a stakeout at Eddie’s place, but I don’t see anything. You going into this blind?”

“You don’t ask questions, you answer them.” Condon was still playing it tough.

“You expect me to just walk through it without knowing when you’re coming in?”

“I expect you to do what you gotta do to stay out of jail. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re rattin’ out your buddies.”

“Bullshit. There’s at least a good chance that Eddie and the boys won’t go down without a fight. Especially if you fuck it up on your end. You know what I’m gonna do when the bullets start to fly? You know what I’m gonna
have
to do? I’m gonna have to start shooting, too. How can I get out of it? Now suppose one of your people gets hit. Or even killed. And there I am, firing away. What you said about staying out of prison is right on the mark. For me, those’re plans A, B, C, and D. I wanna know when and where, so if shit happens I can remove myself from the scene. Does that make sense to you?”

“Why don’t you stop playin’ the tough guy?” Rico asked. “It’s gettin’ a little tired.”

“You keep me in the dark, I’m gonna fly.”

“Say that again?” Condon’s face was even redder than usual. I’d finally caught his attention.

“If you don’t let me know what’s going on, I’m gonna take what money I have in my pocket and get in the wind. Like a magician—one minute I’m here and the next I’m gone. Suicide is not part of my career path.”

They gave each other one of those significant cop looks, then turned back to me. Rico was really hot—if we weren’t sitting in a public place, I think he would have come after me—but Condon was calm enough.

“We’re gonna take ’em in the act,” he said. “If we do it before, the only charges we got are conspiracy and weapons possession. And the only proof we got is your testimony.”

“That’s right,” Rico echoed. “All we got is the testimony of a piece of shit co-conspirator. Juries don’t like pieces of shit.”