Johnny Temple: USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

“The guy who beat him? He gets a second chance?”

She gave him a half-frown and a nod. “ If he doesn’t take it,” she lifted the puppy’s ear, peered in, “chances are this little fella’ll be put up for adoption. But it’s hard. To find them a home. Pit bulls. More often than not?” She looked at Bob. “More often than not, they’re put down.”

Bob felt a wave of sadness roll out from her that immediately shamed him. He didn’t know how, but he’d caused pain. He’d put some out into the world. He’d let this girl down. “I…” he started. “It’s just…”

She glanced up at him. “I’m sorry?”

Bob looked at the puppy. Its eyes were droopy from a long day in the barrel and whoever gave it that wound. It had stopped shivering, though.

“You can take it,” Bob said. “You used to work there, like you said. You—”

She shook her head. “My father lives with me. He gets home Sunday night from Foxwoods. He finds a dog in his house? An animal he’s allergic to?” She jerked her thumb. “Puppy goes back in the barrel.”

“Can you give me till Sunday morning?” Bob wasn’t sure how it was the words left his mouth, since he couldn’t remember formulating them or even thinking them.

The girl eyed him carefully. “You’re not just saying it? Cause, I shit you not, he ain’t picked up by Sunday noon, he’s back out that door.”

“Sunday, then.” Bob said the words with a conviction he actually felt. “Sunday, definitely.”

“Yeah?” She smiled, and it was a spectacular smile, and Bob saw that the face behind the pockmarks was as spectacular as the smile. Wanting only to be seen. She touched the puppy’s nose with her index finger.

“Yeah.” Bob felt crazed. He felt light as a communion wafer. “Yeah.”

At Cousin Marv’s, where he tended bar twelve to ten, Wednesday through Sunday, he told Marv all about it. Most people called Marv Cousin Marv out of habit, something that went back to grade school though no one could remember how, but Marv actually was Bob’s cousin. On his mother’s side.

Cousin Marv had run a crew in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It had been primarily comprised of guys with interests in the loaning and subsequent debt-repayal side of things, though Marv never turned his nose down at any paying proposition because he believed, to the core of his soul, that those who failed to diversify were always the first to collapse when the wind turned. Like the dinosaurs, he’d say to Bob, when the cavemen came along and invented arrows. Picture the cavemen, he’d say, firing away, and the tyrannosauruses all gucked up in the oil puddles. A tragedy so easily averted.

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’s income derived from running his bar as a drop. In the new world order—a loose collective of Chechen, Italian, and Irish hard guys—no one wanted to get caught with enough merch or enough money for a case to go Federal. So they kept it out of their offices and out of their homes and they kept it on the move. About every two to three weeks, drops were made at Cousin Marv’s, among other establishments. You sat on the drop for a night, two at the most, before some beer-truck driver showed up with the weekend’s password and hauled everything back out on a dolly like it was a stack of empty kegs, took it away in a refrigerated semi. The rest of Marv’s income derived from being a fence, one of the best in the city, but being a fence in their world (or a drop bar operator for that matter) was like being a mailroom clerk in the straight world—if you were still doing it after thirty, it was all you’d ever do. 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 golden train to arrive on the golden 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; an unsuccessful man sat in his.

That morning, Marv was looking a hair on the mournful side, lighting one Camel while the previous one still smoldered, so Bob tried to cheer him up by telling him about his adventure with the dog. Marv didn’t seem too interested, and Bob found himself saying “You had to be there” so much, he eventually shut up about it.

Marv said, “Rumor is we’re getting the Super Bowl drop.”

“No shit?”

If true (an enormous if ), this was huge. They worked on commission—one half of one percent of the drop. A Super Bowl drop? It would be like one half of one percent of Exxon.

Nadia’s scar flashed in Bob’s brain, the redness of it, the thick, ropey texture. “They send extra guys to protect it, you think?”

Marv rolled his eyes. “Why, cause people are just lining up to steal from coked-up Chechnyans.”

“Chechens,” Bob said.

“But they’re from Chechnya.”

Bob shrugged. “I think it’s like how you don’t call people from Ireland Irelandians .”

Marv scowled. “Whatever. It means all this hard work we’ve been doing? It’s paid off. Like how Toyota did it, making friends and influencing people.”

Bob kept quiet. If they ended up being the drop for the Super Bowl, it was because someone figured out no Feds deemed them important enough to be watched. But in Marv’s fantasies, the crew (long since dispersed to straight jobs, jail, or, worse, Connecticut) could regain its glory days, even though those days had lasted about as long as a Swatch. It never occurred to Marv that one day they’d come take everything he had—the fence, the money and merch he kept in the safe in back, hell, the bar probably—just because they were sick of him hanging around, looking at them with needy expectation. It had gotten so every time he talked about the “people he knew,” the dreams he had, Bob had to resist the urge to reach for the 9mm they kept beneath the bar and blow his own brains out. Not really—but close sometimes. Man, Marv could wear you out.

A guy stuck his head in the bar, late twenties but with white hair, a white goatee, a silver stud in his ear. He dressed like most kids these days—like shit: pre-ripped jeans, slovenly T-shirt under a faded hoodie under a wrinkled wool topcoat. He didn’t cross the threshold, just craned his head in, the cold day pouring in off the sidewalk behind him.

“Help you?” Bob asked.

The guy shook his head, kept staring at the gloomy bar like it was a crystal ball.

“Mind shutting the door?” Marv didn’t look up. “Cold out there.”

“You serve Zima?” The guy’s eyes flew around the bar, up and down, left to right.

Marv looked up now. “Who the fuck would we serve it to—Moesha?”

The guy raised an apologetic hand. “My bad.” He left, and the warmth returned with the closing of the door.

Marv said, “You know that kid?”

Bob shook his head. “Mighta seen him around but I can’t place him.”

“He’s a fucking nutbag. Lives in the next parish, probably why you don’t know him. You’re old school that way, Bob—somebody didn’t go to parochial school with you, it’s like they don’t exist.”

Bob couldn’t argue. When he’d been a kid, your parish was your country. Everything you needed and needed to know was contained within it. Now that the archdiocese had shuttered half the parishes to pay for the crimes of the kid-diddler priests, Bob couldn’t escape the fact that those days of parish dominion, long dwindling, were gone. He was a certain type of guy, of a certain half-generation, an almost generation, and while there were still plenty of them left, they were older, grayer, they had smokers’ coughs, they went in for checkups and never checked back out.