Thinner (28 page)

'A little. I'm okay.'

'A ' you going to tell me now what the hell you've been doing?

'Yes. I'm going to tell you everything just as soon as I get out of the shower and bandage myself up. You're going to meet with him tonight, Billy. That's the important thing. That's what you want to psych yourself up for.'

A stab of mingled fear and excitement poked at his belly like a shard of glass. 'Him? Lemke?'

'Him,' Ginelli agreed. 'Now, let me get a shower, William. I must not be as young as I thought - all this excitement has got my ass dragging.' He called back over his shoulder, 'And order some coffee. Lots of coffee. Tell the guy to just leave it outside the door and slide the check underneath for you to sign.'

Billy watched him go, his mouth hanging open. Then, when he heard the shower start, he closed his mouth with a snap and went to the phone to order the coffee.

Chapter Twenty-two

Ginelli's Story

He spoke at first in quick bursts, falling silent for a few moments after each to consider what came next. Ginelli's energy seemed really low for the first time since he had turned up at the Bar Harbor Motor Inn on Monday afternoon. He did not seem much hurt - his wounds were really only deep scratches - but Billy believed he was badly shaken. All the same, that crazy glow eventually began to dawn in his eyes again, at first stuttering on and off like a neon sign just after you turn the switch at dusk, then glowing steadily. He pulled a flask from the inside pocket of his jacket and dumped a capful of Chivas into his coffee.. He offered Billy the flask. Billy declined - he didn't know what the booze might do to his heart.

Ginelli sat up straighter, brushed the hair off his forehead, and began to talk in a more normal rhythm. At three o'clock on Tuesday morning, Ginelli had parked on a woods road which branched off from Route 37-A near the Gypsies' camp. He fiddled with the steaks for a while and then walked back to the highway carrying the shopping bag. High clouds were sliding across the halfmoon like shutters. He waited for them to clear off, and when they did for a moment he was able to spot the circle of vehicles. He crossed the road and set off cross-country in that direction.

'I'm a city boy, but my sense of direction ain't as bad as it could be,' he said. 'I can trust it in a pinch. And I didn't want to go in the same way you did, William.'

He cut through a couple of fields and a thin copse of woods; splashed through one boggy place that smelled, he said, like twenty pounds of shit in a ten-pound bag. He also caught the seat of his pants in some very old barbed wire that had been all but invisible in the moonless dark.

'If all that is country living, William, the rubes can have it,' he said.

He had not expected any trouble from the camp hounds; Billy was a case in point. They hadn't bothered to make a sound until he actually stepped into the circle of the campfire, although they surely must have caught his scent before then.

'You'd expect Gypsies to have better watchdogs than that,' Billy commented. 'At least that's the image.'

'Nah,' Ginelli said. 'People can find all kinds of reasons to roust Gypsies without the Gyps themselves giving them more.'

'Like dogs that bark all night long?'

'Yeah, like that. You got much smarter, William, and people are gonna think you're Italian.'

Still, Ginelli had taken no chances - he moved slowly along the backs of the parked vehicles, skipping the vans and campers where people would be sleeping and only looking in the cars and station wagons. He saw what he wanted after checking only two or three vehicles: an old suit coat crumpled up on the seat of a Pontiac station wagon.

'Car wasn't locked,' he said. 'Jacket wasn't a bad fit, but it smelled like a weasel died in each pocket. I seen a pair of old sneakers on the floor in the back.
They
was a little tight, but I crammed 'em on just the same. Two cars later I found a hat that looked like something left over from a kidney transplant and put that on.'

He had wanted to smell like one of the Gypsies, Ginelli explained, but not just as insurance against a bunch of worthless mutts sleeping by the embers of the campfire it was the
other
bunch of dogs that interested him. The valuable dogs. The pitbulls. Three-quarters of the way around the circle, he spotted a camper with a small rear window that had been covered with wire mesh instead of glass. He peered in and saw nothing at all - the back of the camper was completely bare.

'But it smelled of dog, William,' Ginelli said. 'Then I looked the other way and risked a quick poke on the penlight I brought. The hay-grass was all broken down in a path going away from the back of that camper. You didn't have to be Dan'l Boone to see it. They took the fucking dogs out of the rolling kennel and stashed them somewhere else so the local dog warden or humane-society babe wouldn't find them if someone blabbed. Only they left a path even a city boy could pick up with one quick poke of his flashlight. Stupid.
That's
when I really started to believe we could put some blocks to them.'

Ginelli followed the path over a knoll and to the edge of another small wooded area.

'I lost the path,' he said. 'I just stood there for a minute or two wondering what to do next. And then I heard it, William. I heard it loud and clear. Sometimes the gods give you a break.'

'What did you hear?'

'A dog farting,' Ginelli said. 'Good and loud. Sounded like someone blowing a trumpet with a mute on it.'

Less than twenty feet into the woods he had found a rough corral in a clearing. It was no more than a circle of thick branches driven into the ground and then laced up with barbed wire. Inside were seven pit-bulls. Five were fast asleep. The other two were looking dopily at Ginelli.

They looked dopy because they
were
dopy. 'I thought they'd be stoned, although it wasn't safe to count on it. Once you train dogs to fight, they become a pain in the ass - they will fight with each other and wreck your investment unless you're careful. You either put them in separate cages or you dope them. Dope is cheaper and it's easy to hide. And if they had been straight, a rinky-dink piece of work like that dog corral wouldn't have held them. The ones getting their asses chewed would have busted out even if it meant leaving half their hides hanging on the wires behind them. They were only sobering them up when the betting line got heavy enough to justify the risk. First the dope, then the show, then more dope.' Ginelli laughed.

'See? Pit-bulls are just like fucking rock stars. It wears them out quick, but as long as you stay in the black, you can always find more pit-bulls. They didn't even have a guard. '

Ginelli opened his shopping bag and took out the steaks. After parking on the woods road, he had taken them out of their store shrink-wrap and injected a hypo of what he called Ginelli's Pit-Bull Cocktail into each: a mixture of Mexican brown heroin and strychnine. Now he waved them in the air and watched the sleeping dogs come slowly to life. One of them uttered a thick bark that sounded like the snore of a man with serious nasal problems.

'Shut up or no dinner,' Ginelli said mildly. The dog that had barked sat down. It immediately developed a fairly serious starboard list and began to go back to sleep.

Ginelli tossed one of the steaks into the enclosure. A second. A third. And the last. The dogs squabbled over them in listless fashion. There was some barking, but it had that same thick, snory quality, and Ginelli felt he could live with it. Besides, anyone coming from the camp to check on the makeshift kennel would be carrying a flashlight, and he would have plenty of time to fade back into the woods. But no one had come.

Billy listened with horrified fascination as Ginelli told him calmly how he had sat nearby, dry-smoking a Camel and watching the pit-bulls die. Most of them had gone very quietly, he reported (was there the faintest tinge of regret in his voice? Billy wondered uneasily) - probably because of the dope they had already been fed. Two of them had very mild convulsions. That was all. All in all, Ginelli felt, the dogs were not so badly off; the Gypsies had had worse things planned for them. It was over in a little less than an hour.

When he was sure they were all dead or at least deeply unconscious, he had taken a dollar bill from his wallet and a pen from his breast pocket. On the dollar bill he wrote:

NEXT TIME IT COULD BE YOUR GRANDCHILDREN, OLD MAN. WILLIAM HALLECK SAYS TO TAKE IT

OFF. The pit-bulls had worn twists of clothesrope for collars. Ginelli tucked the bill under one of them. He hung the foulsmelling coat on one of the corral posts and put the hat on top of it. He removed the sneakers and took his own shoes from his hip pockets. He put them on and left.

Coming back, he said, he
had
gotten lost for a while and had ended up taking a header in the bad-smelling boggy place. Finally, however, he had seen farmhouse lights and gotten himself oriented. He found the woods road, got into his car, and started back toward Bar Harbor.

He was halfway there, he said, when the car started to feel not right to him. He couldn't put it any better or make it any clearer - it just didn't seem right anymore. It wasn't that it looked different or smelled different; it just didn't seem right. He had had such feelings before, and on most occasions they had meant nothing at all. But on a couple ...

'I decided I wanted to ditch it,' Ginelli said. 'I didn't want to take even a little chance that one of them. might have had insomnia, been walking around, seen it. I didn't want them to know what I was driving, because then they could fan out, look for me, find me. Find you. See? I
do
take them serious. I look at you, William, and I got to.'

So he had parked the car on another deserted side road, pulling the distributor cap, and had walked the three miles back into town. When he got there, dawn was breaking.

After leaving Billy in his new Northeast Harbor quarters, Ginelli had cabbed back toward Bar Harbor, telling the driver to go slow because he was looking for something.

'What is it?' the driver asked. 'Maybe I know where it is.'

'That's all right,' Ginelli replied. 'I'll know it when I see it.'

And so he had - about two miles out of Northeast Harbor he had seen a Nova with a For Sale sign in the windshield sitting beside a small farmhouse. He checked to make sure the owner was home, paid off the cab, and made a cash deal on the spot. For an extra twenty the owner - a young fellow, Ginelli said, who looked like he might have more head lice than IQ

points - had agreed to leave his Maine plates on the Nova, accepting Ginelli's promise to send them back in a week.

'I might even do it, too,' Ginelli said thoughtfully. 'If we're still alive, that is.'

Billy looked at him sharply, but Ginelli only resumed his story.

He had driven back toward Bar Harbor, skirting the town itself and heading out along 37-A toward the Gypsy camp. He had stopped long enough to call a person he would only identify to Billy as a 'business associate.' He told the 'business associate' to be at a certain pay-telephone kiosk in midtown New York at twelve-thirty P.M. - this was a kiosk Ginelli used often, and due to his influence it was one of the few in New York that was rarely out of order. He drove by the encampment, saw signs of activity, turned around about a mile up the road, and cruised back. A makeshift road had been carved through the hayfield from 37-A to the camp, and there was a car heading up it to 37-A.

'A Porsche turbo,' Ginelli said. 'Rich kid's toy. Decal in the back window that said Brown University. Two kids in the front, three more in the back. I pulled up and asked the kid driving if they were Gypsies down there, like I'd heard. He said they were, but if I'd been meaning to get my fortune read, I was out of luck. The kids had gone there to get theirs read, but all they got was a quick here's-your-hat, what's-your-hurry routine. They were moving out. After the pit-bulls, I wasn't surprised.

'I headed back toward Bar Harbor and pulled into a gas station - that Nova gobbles gas like you wouldn't believe, William, but it can walk and talk if you put the go to the mat. I also grabbed me a Coke and dropped a couple of bennies because by then I was starting to feel a little bit low.'

Ginelli had called his 'business associate' and had arranged to meet him at the Bar Harbor airport that evening at five o'clock. Then he had driven back to Bar Harbor. He parked the Nova in a public lot and walked around town for a while, looking for the man.

'What man?' Billy asked.

'The man,' Ginelli repeated patiently, as if speaking to an idiot. 'This guy, William, you always know him when you see him. He looks like all the other summer dudes, like he could take you for a ride on his daddy's sloop or drop ten grams of good cocaine on you or just decide to split the Bar Harbor scene and drive to Aspen for the Summerfest in his Trans Am. But he is not the same as they are, and there are two quick ways to find it out. You look at his shoes, that's one. This guy's shoes are bad shoes. They are shined, but they are bad shoes. They have no class, and you can tell by the way he walks that they hurt his feet. Then you look at his eyes. That's big number two. These guys, it seems like they never wear the Ferrari sunglasses and you can always see their eyes. It's like some guys got to advertise what they are just like some guys have got to pull jobs and then confess to the cops. Their eyes say, "Where's the next meal coming from? Where's the next joint coming from? Where's the guy I wanted to connect with when I came here?" Do you dig me?'

'Yes, I think I do.'

'Mostly what the eyes say is, "How do I score?" What did you say the old man in Old Orchard called the pushers and the quick-buck artists?'

'Drift trade,' Billy said.

'Yeah!' Ginelli kindled. The light in his eyes whirled. 'Drift trade, right good! The man I was looking for is high-class drift trade. These guys in resort towns float around like whores looking for steady customers. They rarely fall for big stuff, they move on all the time, and they are fairly smart ... except for their shoes. They got J. Press shirts and Paul Stuart sport coats and designer jeans ... but then you look at their feet and their fucking loafers say "Caldor's, nineteen-ninety-five.' Their loafers say "I can be had, I'll do a job for you." With whores it's the blouses. Always rayon blouses. You have to train them out of it.