Laura Lippman - Baltimore Noir

“Who was the guy? You remember him?”

“Agro something. Somebody Agro, I think. He’s a big shot there now, I’m not mistaken. Skipper with the Vignieri crew.”

“That’s one I gotta remember,” Tommy said. “It’s a great way to fix a ball-breaker.”

Jilly looked up toward the front door and spotted a man wearing sunglasses. “Look at this mamaluke,” he whispered. “Middle of the fucking night, he’s the nightrider with those shades.”

Tommy turned to see who Jilly was talking about.

“He puts on a white baseball hat, he’s our guy, which he is, I can tell,” Jilly said.

The man in the sunglasses pulled a white baseball cap from his coat pocket. He took his time looking around the restaurant before putting it on.

“Cocksucker,” Jilly said.

“What?” Tommy said.

“Fucking Mets hat.”

Forty-five minutes and thirty-five miles later, which was all that separated Baltimore from Annapolis, Jilly sat in a stolen Taurus half a block from the Tidewater Marina while he waited for Tommy Red and the guy from New York to return from their visit to the Tina Marie . The rain was coming down hard. It had just started to thunder when Jilly spotted the white Mets hat.

He flashed the headlights to get their attention. The two men ran back to the car. Jilly unlocked the doors when they were close. Tommy sat in the back. The guy from New York sat up front.

“How’d it go?” Jilly asked.

“Done and done,” Tommy said, “the both of them.”

“Which means you have something for me now,” the guy from New York said.

Jilly said, “You can take that hat off now, it stopped raining soon’s you got in the car.”

The New York guy wasn’t amused. “Where’s my money?”

“Under the seat,” Jilly said.

The New York guy reached down under his seat at the same time Jilly pulled the Walther from between his legs. The mousetrap he had set under the car seat snapped shut and the New York guy barely gasped before the first of three bullets entered the left side of his skull.

Tommy froze on the backseat. Jilly had to yell to get his attention.

“Oh! You wanna sit here with him, be my guest, but I suggest you come with me before it stops raining, some fucking plebe on a midnight jog finds you.”

Tommy was nodding, but hadn’t moved.

“Grab the handle and pull,” Jilly told him. “Then the door’ll open, you can get the fuck out.”

Tommy finally realized what Jilly was saying and got out of the car. He circled the back end slowly until he saw Jilly was wiping down the Walther with a chamois cloth.

“We just leavin him here?” he asked.

Unless you wanna invite him home,” Jilly said. He started across the road toward a minivan parked at the curb. “Come on. That one’s ours. You’re driving.”

Tommy tried the door and found it unlocked. He got in behind the wheel and waited for Jilly to get settled.

“Key’s in the ignition,” Jilly said. “You gotta turn it to start the thing.”

“Right,” said Tommy, before he started the engine. He glanced back at the stolen car before he pulled away from the curb. “Where to?”

“Me, home,” Jilly said. “But first I gotta get my car. I was you, I go back the Inner Harbor and catch that waitress before she goes home with one’a the kitchen help.”

Tommy drove toward Interstate 97. He didn’t speak again until they were pulling off the exit where Jilly had parked his car near Route 50.

“What was this tonight?” Tommy asked.

“Something between bosses,” Jilly said. “Not that you need to know.”

“Right,” Tommy said.

Jilly lit a cigarette. “You okay?”

“Yeah, almost.”

“You did good.”

“I’d’ve done better, I knew what was comin.”

“You thought you were next, after the prick?”

“For a second, yeah. Yeah, I did.”

“Angelo likes you,” Jilly said. “Or he don’t send you.”

“Right.”

“But this is where it ends, make no mistake. What happened tonight, that’s the end of it. Should never come up in conversation, okay?”

“Got it. Course not.”

“Your old man wasn’t Irish, you might get straightened out, be what used to be a made guy.”

Tommy forced himself to shrug. “Ain’t what it used to be, like you said.”

“We’re not flashy down here, but we look after our own,” Jilly said. “Remember that.”

“Yeah, I will. I appreciate it. I do.”

Jilly pointed to the curb near the entrance to a parking lot.

Tommy pulled over. “Here good?”

“Yeah, I promised the old lady I get her bagels for the morning,” Jilly said. “She likes to toast them, she don’t need them fresh.”

Tommy put the transmission into park.

“One thing,” Jilly continued. “I didn’t like that scam shaking down the Erioles. The guy steered you straight, you don’t do that to the home team. If nothing else, learn that tonight, huh? You ever get a bug like that again, you wanna go after some baseball players, go pick on the Yankees in that shit city. They’re all fucking millionaires anyway, they can afford it.”

“Right,” Tommy said. “I’ll go to New York.”

Jilly was about to get out when he stopped. “Leave this thing a block from wherever you parked your car. At least a block. Wipe down whatever you remember you touched and take the keys with you. Grab a ferry ride in the morning and drop ’em in the bay.”

“Got it,” Tommy said.

Jilly opened the glove compartment. Tommy flinched.

“Easy, kid,” Jilly said. He pointed to a thick envelope. “There’s eight grand in there. Take it with you, unless you don’t need it.”

Tommy managed a smile through his nervousness.

“I’ll see you around,” Jilly said. He closed the door, knocked on the window twice, and was gone.

Tommy swallowed hard a few more times before he removed the envelope from the glove compartment, jammed it between his legs, and drove off. When he looked up at the rearview mirror, he noticed he was still smiling.

“Go O’s,” he said.

Pikesville

I wanted honest work and got it at Pern’s. A Jewish bookstore is a strange place to work for a guy like me, but I didn’t have much choice; a month of job hunting left me frustrated and ready to break things, and the ad stuck on the store’s main window was as close to salvation as I could get.

Though Sam-we were on a first-name basis from the beginning-was very particular about which items I could handle and which I couldn’t (“Anything with God’s name on it, leave it to me”), he left me to my own devices when it came to handling the cash register, stocking the books, and helping out customers. I hadn’t known much at all about Judaism, but I sure learned fast.

When I told my mother where I was working, she was understandably confused, but got over it quickly enough. I had a job, and a pretty decent one, and that was what mattered to her most.

“I worried about you, Danny, the whole time you were incarcerated “ She articulated each syllable, just as she did every time she used the word. Which was a lot, because my mother adored big words. It was her way of showing how much more educated she was than the rest of the mamas in Little Italy.

“Why’d you do that?” I said. “I was going to be okay. And I am, right?”

She touched my face. “Danny, I know that, but not then.” The silence afterwards was telling. I hadn’t written her much in the six and a half years I was gone. Only when she made the four-hundred-mile trek with my cousin Sal did I learn just how sick she was.

“I don’t want to think about then, Ma. It’s over, I made my mistakes and I don’t want to make them again. You have my word.”