George Higgins - Killing Them Softly

“So I say to her,” Russell said, “she said she’s gonna give me fifty bucks for the black one. ‘Look, he’s got papers, he’s a valuable dog. He’s the real thing. He’s a great dog. Fifty’s not enough.’

“ ‘He hasn’t got no papers today, Mister,’ she says to me,” Russell said. “ ‘He’s just another dog now that I got to think about selling to somebody and that means I got to keep him and feed him and look after him the whole time I’m trying to sell him to somebody, and that’s going to be a long time. I don’t want this dog. I don’t want him at all. You want to take him back with you? Because that’s exactly what you can do, if you don’t like the price. I’ll have trouble, selling that dog to somebody. He looks vicious to me and he’ll look vicious to somebody else.’

“The guy still doesn’t say anything,” Russell said. “Now, she’s got me, of course. I’m not taking that dog no place with me ever again. What I want to say to that dog is ‘Good-bye,’ and I hope I never see him again. All the way to Florida that bastard’s watching the back of my neck, he’s gonna eat me if he gets half a chance. She’s right. He is vicious. But, he’s not being vicious then. The guy’s got him sitting down and the dog’s giving him his paw and the guy’s rubbing his ears and that dog is fuckin’ grinning at him. He thinks he’s home again with the stupid bastard that bought him to protect the medals. Then the dog, the guy stands up and the dog stands up too, puts his feet on the guy’s shoulders and starts lapping his face. ‘Look, Lady,’ I say, ‘that’s a vicious dog? You think somebody’s gonna think that’s a vicious dog? Let ’em see him like that.’

“ ‘Mister,’ she says, ‘that’s the way he is. That’s the way they all are with him. Every dog that comes in here’s like that. That’s why he keeps the dogs and I do the business. Fifty.’

“The guy wakes up or something,” Russell said. “He looks at us. The shepherd’s frenching him, for Christ sake. Guy finally gets the dog’s tongue out of his mouth. ‘Give him seventy-five, Imelda,’ he says.

“ ‘Seventy-five,’ she says,” Russell said. “ ‘Now,’ she says, takes her about three hours to say anything, ‘am I setting the prices here, or are you gonna argue with me every time he decides he likes another dog? Because if you are, you can leave right now and take the rest of those animals with you.’ The only thing I wish,” Russell said, “I wish that woman could’ve met my mother. They’d get along fuckin’ great.”

“You got out of there all right, though,” Frankie said.

“Yeah,” Russell said. “Went over to Orlando with Kenny, burn the fuckin’ car. Kenny fuckin’ near killed himself. Went in this orange grove, right? Pulled it offa the road, there’s this little dirt road, there. So, Kenny was driving. He gets out, sticks a rag down the gas tank, he hangs it down and soaks it and then he pulls it out and hangs it down onna fender and lights it off. Fuckin’ car just blew up. And, he left it in gear, you know? Knocked him right on his ass, it was in reverse. He’s a hot shit. Gets up. ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘that’s the second job like that I fucked up. I got to do that again, I’m gonna find somebody, knows what he’s doing.’ Kenny, he didn’t have no eyebrows, for Christ sake, hasn’t got much hair left, either.”

“What was it,” Frankie said, “hot?”

“Nah,” Russell said, “it was Kenny’s car. But what the fuck’s a car good for, you had all them dogs in it over two days? Nothin’. It’s like riding in a shithouse. So, Kenny had it in his sister’s name, she called the cops the day we’re supposed to get there, says it got stolen. Then, we got out of there Wednesday. You should’ve seen those assholes when they search you at the airport, they see me and Kenny. I thought their eyes was gonna come right out of their heads. Four times we got to go through the metal detector. Then there was this guy, I guess he was the newest guy there or something, he had to pat us down. I think they give him the rest of the day off. ‘You’re gonna let us on the plane, finally,’ Kenny said, ‘aren’t you?’ They look at him. ‘Mister,’ one of them says, ‘if you haven’t got no weapons on you, you can ride. You probably oughta ride in the baggage, but never mind that.’ Nobody’d sit next to us. We hadda ride way in the back and there was this one stewardess, every time she hadda come near us, she’d look at us like she never saw anything like us before in her life. ‘You guys going all the way to Boston?’ she says. ‘You wouldn’t consider, getting off in Washington or some place?’ Kenny fell for it. ‘This thing gonna land in Washington?’ he says. ‘I never been to Washington.’ See, we didn’t stop or anything. ‘No,’ she says, ‘but if you’ll get off there, I’ll use my influence with the captain and I’m sure he’ll agree to it.’ The guy on the bus from New York,” Russell said, “I come up from there onna bus? I’m not gonna get searched with the weight on me. I thought he was gonna make me ride outside. I fuckin’ crashed when I got here, boy. I never been so tired in my life.”

“You look all beat to shit,” Frankie said.

“Yeah,” Russell said, “and the hell of it is, I been up for about a week, you know? And I shouldn’t’ve even slept last night, only I hadda or I would’ve just fallen down. I got to keep moving till I finish this thing off. I thought I was gonna see the guy with the other stuff this morning, but I couldn’t raise him.”

“You haven’t dumped the stuff?” Frankie said.

“Dump it,” Russell said, “Christ, no. I didn’t hit it yet. I can’t, I probably won’t be able to move it till tonight, now, by the time I see him and everything. I know where it is. I can get it, and I haven’t got it on me.

“Down the bus station,” Frankie said.

“Never mind,” Russell said. “I know where it is.”

“You’re just an asshole,” Frankie said. “You know that, you asshole? The kind of chances you’re taking, they’re gonna forget about putting you away for the stuff when they catch you. They’re gonna put you away for being nuts.”

“Talk to me about that when I get the dough,” Russell said.

“Russ,” Frankie said, “this whole town’s dry, and it’s been dry for three or four weeks. There’s more guys running into drugstores now with guns’n you ever saw. They got Goldfinger and that was the end of that. They tossed three guys with shipments this week, for Christ sake. The minute the word gets out, somebody’s in with something, everybody goes right out of their minds. There’s more heat in this town on that’n there is in the FBI, for Christ sake. Unload, Russ. Let somebody else do a hundred years or so, they catch him with it.”

“Not till I hit it,” Russell said. “Look, I’m into this, over twelve K, right? I put it to a guy, fast, I don’t hit it, what do I get? I’m gonna get, even with things the way they are, no more’n fifteen, sixteen. I take it up a step, I can hit that stuff a whole step with the stuff I’m getting, I can move it to two guys and get twenny-five.”

“It’s stupid,” Frankie said. “It’s fuckin’ stupid. That’s a thousand dollars a year.”

“Look,” Russell said, “I don’t need nothing, make me dumb. You know that, you and Squirrel. Squirrel knows it, at least. Maybe you still think we were smart, doing that. You’re just as dumb as I am. You just come around and stroke me some, I’ll do any dumb fuckin’ thing you can think of. The thing is, though, you and me’re different. When this’s over, I’m through, doing dumb things for guys. I do dumb things for me, maybe, and then, I get grabbed, okay, at least I was doing them for me. Which means, I get to keep all the fuckin’ money. I don’t have to give Squirrel nothing for being smart enough to see I’m stupid any more.”