The Drop (3 page)

Marv’s crew hadn’t been the toughest crew or the smartest or the most successful operating in the neighborhood—not even close—but for a while they got by. Other crews kept nipping at their heels, though, and except for one glaring exception, they’d never been ones to favor violence. Pretty soon, they had to make the decision to yield to crews a lot meaner than they were or duke it out. They took Door Number One.

Marv was a fence now, one of the best in the city, but a fence in their world was like a mailroom clerk in the straight world—if you were still doing it after thirty, it was all you’d ever do. Marv also took some bets, but only for Chovka’s father and the rest of the Chechens who really owned this bar. It wasn’t exactly common knowledge, though it was no secret, that Cousin Marv hadn’t owned Cousin Marv’s outright for years.

For Bob, it was a relief—he liked being a bartender and he’d hated that one time they’d had to come heavy. Marv, though, Marv still waited for the diamond-crusted train to arrive on the eighteen-karat tracks, take him away from all this. Most times, he pretended to be happy. But Bob knew that the things that haunted Marv were the same things that haunted Bob—the shitty things you did to get ahead. Those things laughed at you if your ambitions failed to amount to much; a successful man could hide his past, but an unsuccessful man spent the rest of his life trying not to drown in his.

That afternoon, Marv was looking a hair on the mournful side, so Bob tried to cheer him up by telling him about his adventure with the dog. Marv didn’t seem too interested, but Bob kept trying as he spread ice melt in the alley and Marv smoked by the back door.

“Make sure you get it everywhere,” Marv said. “All I need, one of those Cape Verdeans slips on the way to the Dumpster.”

“What Cape Verdeans?”

“The ones in the hair place.”

“The nail place? They’re Vietnamese.”

“Well, I don’t want ’em slipping.”

Bob said, “You know a Nadia Dunn?”

Marv shook his head.

“She’s the one holding the dog.”

Marv said, “This dog again.”

Bob said, “Training a dog, you know? Housebreaking? It’s a lot of responsibility.”

Cousin Marv flicked his cigarette into the alley. “It’s not like some long-lost retard relative, shows up at your door in a wheelchair with a colostomy bag, says he’s yours now. It’s a dog.”

Bob said, “Yeah, but . . .” and couldn’t find the words to express something he’d felt since he’d first lifted the puppy out of the barrel and stared into its eyes, that for the first time he could ever recall, he felt like he was starring in the movie of his own life, not just sitting in the back row of a noisy theater watching it.

Cousin Marv patted his shoulder, leaned in reeking of smoke, and repeated himself. “It’s. A. Dog.” And then he walked back into the bar.

AROUND THREE
,
ANWAR
,
ONE
of Chovka’s guys, came in through the back for last night’s book. Chovka’s guys were running late on pickups all over the city because the BPD had dropped a little harassment raid down on the Chechen social club last night, put half the runners and bagmen in jail for the night. Anwar took the bag Marv handed over and helped himself to a Stella. He drank it in one long, slow pull as he eye-fucked Marv and Bob. When he finished, he burped, put the bottle back on the bar, and left without a word, the bag of money under his arm.

“No respect.” Marv dumped the bottle and wiped up the ring it had left on the bar. “You notice?”

Bob shrugged. Of course he noticed, but what were you going to do?

“This puppy, right?” he said to lighten the mood. “He’s got paws the size of his head. Three are brown but one’s white with these little peach-colored spots over the white. And—”

“This thing cook?” Marv said. “Clean the house? I mean, it’s a fucking dog.”

“Yeah, but it was—” Bob dropped his hands. He didn’t know how to explain. “You know that feeling you get sometimes on a really great day? Like, like, the Pats dominate and you took the ‘over,’ or they cook your steak just right up the Blarney or, or, you just feel
good
? Like”—Bob found himself waving his hands again—“good?”

Marv gave him a nod and a tight smile. Went back to his racing sheet.

Bob alternated between taking down the Christmas decorations and working the bar, but the place started to fill after five, and pretty soon it was all bartending all the time. By this point, Rardy, the other bartender, should have been pitching in, but he was late.

Bob made two trips to run a round over to a dozen guys by the dartboards who laid fiber-optic cable in all the hotels springing up down the Seaport. He came back behind the bar, found Marv leaning against a beer cooler, reading the
Herald,
but the customers blamed Bob for the slowdown, one guy asking if his Buds were coming by fucking Clydesdales.

Bob nudged Marv aside, reached in the cooler, and mentioned Rardy was late. Again. Bob, who’d never been late in his life, suspected there was something hostile at the core of people who always were.

Marv said, “No, he’s here,” and gestured with his head. Bob could see the kid now, Rardy about thirty but still getting carded at the door to a club. Rardy, chatting up customers as he worked his way through the crowd in his faded hoodie and battered jeans, porkpie hat resting on the crown of his head, always looking like he was on his way to open mic night for either poetry or stand-up. Bob had known him for five years now, though, and he knew Rardy didn’t possess an ounce of sensitivity and couldn’t tell a joke for shit.

“Yo,” the kid said when he got behind the bar. He took his time removing his jacket. “Cavalry’s here.” He slapped Bob on the back. “Lucky for you, right?”

OUTSIDE IN THE COLD
, two brothers drove past the bar for the third time that day, looping around back through the alley, and then out onto Main, where they headed away from the bar so they could find a parking lot to do another couple of lines.

Their names were Ed and Brian Fitzgerald. Ed was older and overweight and everyone called him Fitz. Brian was thinner than a tongue depressor and everyone called him Bri. Except when they were referred to as a pair, in which case some folks called them “10” because that’s pretty much what they looked like when they stood side by side.

Fitz had the ski masks in the backseat and the guns in the trunk. He kept the blow in the console between the two seats. Bri needed the blow. Otherwise, he’d never go near a fucking gun.

They found an isolated spot under the expressway. From there they could see Penitentiary Park, covered in crusts of ice and rags of snow. From where they were sitting, they could even see the spot where the drive-in screen had once stood. A few years before it was torn down, a girl had been found beaten to death there, probably the neighborhood’s most famous murder. Fitz cut their lines on a glass square he’d popped out of the side-view mirror of a junker. He snorted the first bump, handed the mirror and the rolled-up fin to his brother.

Bri snorted his bump and then didn’t even ask before he snorted the one next to it.

“I don’t know,” Bri said, which he’d been saying so much this week Fitz was going to fucking strangle him if he kept it up. “I don’t know.”

Fitz took the rolled-up fin and the mirror back. “It’s gonna be fine.”

“No,” Bri said. He fiddled with his watch, which had stopped keeping time a year ago. A parting gift from their father the day he decided he didn’t want to be a father anymore. “It’s a bad fucking idea. Just bad. We should hit them for everything or not at all.”

“My guy,” Fitz explained for maybe the fiftieth time, “wants to see we can handle our shit. Says we do it in steps. See how the owners react the first time.”

Bri’s eyes grew wide. “They could respond real fucking bad, you nut. That’s a fucking gangsta bar. A drop bar.”

Fitz gave him a tight smile. “That’s kinda the point. If it wasn’t a drop bar, it would never be worth the risk.”

“No. All right?” Bri kicked the underside of the glove compartment. A child throwing a tantrum. He fiddled with the watch again, turning the band so that the face of the watch found the inside of his wrist. “No, no, no.”

Fitz said, “No? Little brother, you got Ashley, the kids, and a fucking habit. Your car’s been nursing the same tank of gas since Thanksgiving and your watch still don’t fucking work.” He leaned across the car until his forehead touched his little brother’s. He put his hand on the back of his neck. “Say ‘no’ again.”

Bri didn’t, of course. Instead, he did another line.

IT WAS A BIG
night, lots of Buds and lots of bets going down. Bob and Rardy handled the former. Marv took care of the itchy, and always slightly bewildered, bettors and dropped the bets into the slot in the cabinet below the register. At some point, he disappeared into the back to tally it all up, came out after the crowd had thinned considerably.

Bob was skimming the foam off two pints of Guinness when two Chechens came through the door with their close-cropped hair, two days’ beard growth, wearing silk warm-up jackets under woolen topcoats. Marv passed them and handed off the manila envelope without breaking stride, and by the time Bob had skimmed the rest of the foam off the pints, the Chechens were gone. In and out. Like they were never there.

An hour later, the place was empty. Bob mopped up behind the bar, Marv counted the revenue. Rardy dragged the trash out the back door into the alley. Bob squeezed the mop out in the bucket, and when he looked up there was a guy standing in the rear doorway pointing a shotgun at him.

The thing he’d always remember about it, for the rest of his life, was the quiet. How the rest of the world was asleep—inside, outside—and all was still. And yet a man stood in the doorway with a ski mask over his head and a shotgun pointed at Bob and Marv.

Bob dropped his mop.

Marv, standing by one of the beer coolers, looked up. His eyes narrowed. Just below his hand was a 9mm Glock. And Bob hoped to God he wasn’t stupid enough to reach for it. That shotgun would cut them both in half before Marv’s hand cleared the bar.

But Marv was no fool. Very slowly, he raised his hands above his shoulders before the guy could even tell him to, so Bob did the same.

The guy stepped into the room and Bob got a sick feeling in his chest when another guy came in behind the first one, pointing a revolver at them, that guy’s hand shaking just a bit. It had somehow been manageable when there’d only been one guy with a gun, but with two of them the bar grew as tight as a swollen blister. All it needed was the pin. This could be the end, Bob realized. Five minutes from now—or even thirty seconds—he could learn if there was a life after this one or just the pain of steel penetrating his body and rupturing his organs. Followed by nothing.

The guy with the shaky hand was thin, the guy with the shotgun was beefy, actually fat, and they both breathed heavily through the ski masks. The thin guy put a kitchen trash bag on the bar, but it was the overweight guy who did the talking.

He said to Marv, “Don’t even think, just fill it.”

Marv nodded like he was taking the guy’s drink order and began moving the cash he’d just rubber-banded into the bag.

“I’m not trying to make trouble,” Marv said.

“Well, you’re fucking making it,” the big guy said.

Marv stopped putting the money in the bag and looked over at him. “But do you know whose bar this is? Whose money you’re actually jacking here?”

The thin one stepped in close with the shaky gun. “Fill the bag, you fucking goof.”

The thin one wore a watch on his right wrist with the face turned in. Bob noticed it read six-fifteen even though it was half past two in the morning.

“No worries,” Marv said to the shaking gun. “No worries.” And he put the rest of the money in the bag.

The thin guy clutched the bag to him and stepped back and now it was the two of them on one side of the bar with their guns and Bob and Marv on the other side, Bob’s heart beating in his chest like a sack of ferrets tossed off a boat.

In that terrible moment, Bob felt all time since the birth of the world opening its mouth for him. He could see the night sky expanding into space and space expanding into infinite space with stars hurled across the black sky like diamonds on felt, and it was all just cold and endless and he was less than a mote in it. He was the memory of a mote, the memory of something that had passed through unnoticed. The memory of something not worth remembering.

I just want to raise the dog, he thought for some reason. I just want to teach it tricks and live more of this life.

The thin guy pocketed his pistol and walked out.

Now there was just the big guy and that shotgun.

He said to Marv, “You fucking talk too much.”

And then he was gone.

The door to the alley squeaked when they opened it, squeaked when it closed again. Bob didn’t take a breath for at least half a minute and then he and Marv exhaled at the same time.

Bob heard a low sound, a kind of moan, but it wasn’t Marv making it.

“Rardy,” Bob said.

“Ho shit.” Marv came around the bar with him and they ran through the tiny kitchen into the back where they stored the old kegs, and there was Rardy, lying on his stomach to the left of the door, face caked in blood.

Bob wasn’t sure what to do, but Marv dropped down by him and began yanking his shoulder back and forth like it was the string to an outboard motor. Rardy groaned a few times and then he gasped. It was a horrible sound, all strangled and broken, like he was inhaling broken glass. He arched his back and rolled onto his side and then sat up, his face stretched against the skull, his lips pulled back against his teeth like some kind of death mask.

“Oh,” he said, “my fuck. My fuck. God.”

He opened his eyes for the first time, and Bob watched him try to focus. It took a minute.

“What the
fuck
?” he said, which Bob thought was a step up from “my fuck,” if anyone was wondering about the brain damage issue.

“You all right?” Bob asked.

“Yeah, you okay?” Marv stood up beside Bob, both of them bending at the knees by Rardy.