Ed McBain - Lullaby

The shipment would be coming up north by automobile.

No borders to cross, no Coast Guard vessels to worry about.

You drove straight up on interstate highways with the shit in the trunk of your car. You obeyed the speed limit. You drove with a woman beside you on the front seat. A pair of married tourists on vacation. White people, both of them, pure Wonder Bread. No blacks, no Hispanics. Nothing to raise even the slightest eyebrow of suspicion. You later met these people at a prearranged place in the city, usually one of the apartments you rented on a yearly lease for the specific purpose of using it as a drop, you paid them the money, you walked off with the shit.

This big shipment coming up was the reason Hamilton had hired Herrera.

What Herrera hadn't known, of course-

Well, maybe he had known, considering it in retrospect.

'I still don't know why you trusted that fucking spic with fifty dollars,' Isaac said.

This was language the gangs had picked up from fiction.

It was funny the way life often imitated art.

None of the gangs in this city had ever read a book and they would never have heard of Richard Condon's Prizzi's Honor if there hadn't been a movie made from it. They liked that picture. It showed killers in a comical light. It also introduced real-life gangs to something Richard Condon had made up, the way his hoodlums talked about money in terms of singles instead of thousands. If Condon's crooks wanted to say five thousand dollars, they said five dollars. It was very comical. It was also an extension of real-life criminal parlance where, for example, a five-dollar bag of heroin became a nickel bag. That was when heroin was still the drug of choice, later conceding the title to cocaine and then crack, admittedly a cocaine derivative. A five-dollar vial was now a nickel vial. And when a thief said fifty dollars, he meant fifty thousand dollars. Which was the sum of money Lewis Randolph Hamilton had entrusted to José Domingo Herrera on the twenty-seventh day of December last year.

'Why?' Isaac asked now.

He knew he was risking trouble.

Hamilton was angry this morning.

Angry that Herrera had run off with fifty dollars belonging to him. Angry that Andrew Fields, who'd been sent out once again to dispatch the little spic, had been unable to find him anywhere in the city. Angry that he himself, Lewis Randolph Hamilton, had bungled the execution of the blond cop. Angry that the cop had taken a good look at him. All of these things were like a cluster of boils on Hamilton's ass. Isaac should have known better than to ask about Herrera at a time like this. But Isaac was still somewhat pissed himself over the way a week, ten days ago Hamilton had appropriated both of those German hookers for himself.

In many ways, Isaac and Hamilton were like man and wife. They each knew which buttons to push to get the proper response from the other. They each knew what the kill words were. Unlike most married couples, however, they did not fight fair. A marriage was doomed when either partner decided he or she would no longer fight fair. Hamilton had never fought fair in his life. Neither had Isaac. They weren't about to start now. But this was not threatening to their relationship. In fact, they each respected this about the other. They were killers. Killers did not fight fair.

'Not of the blood,' Isaac said, shaking his head in exaggerated incredulity. 'To have chosen someone not of the blood . . .'

'There's Spanish in you, too,' Hamilton said.

'East Indian maybe, but not Spanish.'

'A Spanish whore,' Hamilton said.

'Chinese maybe,' Isaac said, 'but not Spanish.'

'From the old days,' Hamilton said. 'From when Christopher Columbus was still there.'

'That far back, huh, man?' Isaac said.

'Before the British took over.'

'Oh my, a Spanish whore,' Isaac said. He was letting all this roll off his back. This wasn't dirty fighting, it wasn't even fighting. Hamilton was just feinting, seeing could he get a rise without exerting too much effort. Isaac was the one with the power to punch below the belt today. Isaac was the one who insisted on knowing why Hamilton had handed fifty big ones to a spic.

'I thought you knew the Spanish were not to be trusted,' Isaac said

Of course, Hamilton might just tell him to fuck off.

'A race that writes on walls,' Isaac said.

'You are not making sense, man,' Hamilton said.

'It's a cultural thing,' Isaac said. 'Writing on walls. They also stare at women. It's all cultural. Go look it up.'

'Come look up my asshole,' Hamilton said.

'I might find a dozen roses up there,' Isaac said.

Both men laughed.

'With a card,' Isaac said.

Both men laughed again.

This was a homosexual joke. Neither of the men was homosexual, but they often made homosexual jokes, exchanged homosexual banter. This was common among heterosexual men, Harold. It happened all the time.

'To have trusted a spic,' Isaac said, shaking his head again. 'Whose credentials you never thought to . . .'

'He was checked,' Hamilton said.

'Not by me.'

'He was checked,' Hamilton said again, hitting the word harder this time.

'If so, he was . . .'

'Thoroughly,' Hamilton said.

And glared at Isaac.

Isaac didn't flinch.

'If I had checked the man . . .' he said.

'You were in Baltimore,' Hamilton said.

'It could have waited till I got back.'

'Visiting your Mama,' Hamilton said.

'There was no urgency . . .'

'Running home to Mama for Christmas.'

He was getting to Isaac now. Isaac did not like to think of himself as a Mama's Boy. But he was always running down to see his mother in Baltimore.

'Running home to eat Mama's plum pudding,' Hamilton said.

Somehow he made this sound obscenely malicious.

'While you,' Isaac said, 'are having a spic checked by ... who checked him, anyway?'

'James.'

'James!' Isaac said.

'Yes, James. And he ran the check in a very pro . . .'

'You picked James to do this job? James who later used baseball bats on this very same . . .'

'I didn't know at the time that lames would later fuck up,' Hamilton said frostily. 'You were in Baltimore. Someone had to do the job. I asked James to check on him. He came back with credentials that sounded okay.'

'Like?'

'Like no current affiliations. A freelancer. No police record. A courier once, long ago, for the Chang people. I figured . . .'

'Chinks are not to be trusted, either,' Isaac said.

'No one is to be trusted,' Hamilton said flatly. 'You didn't know what the situation was, you were in Baltimore . I had to operate on my instincts.'

'That's right, I didn't know what the situation was.'

'That's right.'

'And I still don't.'

'That's right, too.'

'All I know is Herrera stole the fifty.'

'Yes, that's all you know.'

'Do you want to tell me the rest?'

'No,' Hamilton said.

* * * *

The Ba twins had been Hamilton's idea, too.

They were named Ba Zheng Shen and Ba Zhai Kong, but people outside the Chinese community called them Zing and Zang. They were both twenty-seven years old, Zing being the oldest by five minutes. They were also extraordinarily and identically handsome. It was rumored that Zing had once lived with a gorgeous redheaded American girl for six months without her realizing that he and his brother were taking turns fucking her.

Zing and Zang knew that if the Chinese ever took over the world -which they did not doubt for a moment would happen one day - it would not be because Communism was a better form of government than democracy; it would be because the Chinese were such good businessmen. Zing and Zang were young and energetic and extremely ambitious. It was said in Chinatown that if the price was right, they would kill their own mother. And steal her gold fillings afterward. The very first time the Ba twins had killed anyone was in Hong Kong five years back when they were but mere twenty-two-year-olds. The price back then had been a thousand dollars American for each of them.