Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

“He’s looking at eight-to-twelve on a robbery,” O-Bop says. “He could trade up.”

“No,” Callan says. “Mickey is old-school.”

“Mickey could be old-school,” O-Bop says, “but he also could be tired of doing time. This is his second bit.”

Callan knows that Mickey will do his time and come back to the neighborhood and want to hold his head up. And Mickey knows he won’t be able to get as much as a bowl of peanuts in any bar in the Kitchen if he rolls over to the cops.

Mickey Haggerty’s the least of their worries.

Which is what Callan’s thinking as he looks out the window at the Lincoln Continental parked across the street.

“So we might as well get it over with,” he says to O-Bop.

O-Bop’s got his head of kinky red hair under the kitchen tap, trying to get cool. Yeah, that’s gonna work-it’s a hundred and four out and they’re in a two-room apartment on the fifth floor with a fan the size of a propeller on a toy boat and the water pressure is zero because the little neighborhood bastards have opened up every fire hydrant on the street and if all that wasn’t bad enough there’s a crew from the Cimino Family out there looking to whack them.

And will whack them, soon as it’s late enough for darkness to provide a curtain of decency.

“What do you wanna do?” O-Bop asks. “You want to go out there blasting? Gunfight at the OK Corral?”

“It would be better than baking to death up here.”

“No it wouldn’t,” O-Bop says. “Up here sucks to be sure, but down there we’d be gunned down in the street like dogs.”

“We have to go down sometime,” Callan says.

“No we don’t,” O-Bop says. He takes his head out from under the tap and shakes the water off. “As long as they still deliver pizza, we never have to go down.”

He comes over to the window and looks at the long black Lincoln parked across the street.

“Fucking Italians never change,” O-Bop says. “You think they’d maybe mix in a Mercedes, a BMW, I dunno, a fuckin’ Volvo or something. Anything but these fucking Lincolns and Caddies. I’m tellin’ ya, it must be some kind of goombah rule or something.”

“Who’s in the car, Stevie?”

There are four guys in the car. Three more guys standing around outside. Real casual like. Smoking cigs, drinking coffee, shooting the shit. Like a mob announcement to the neighborhood-we’re going to whack somebody here so you might want to be someplace else.

O-Bop refocuses.

“Piccone’s sub-crew of Johnny Boy Cozzo’s crew,” O-Bop says. “Demonte wing of the Cimino Family.”

“How do you know?”

“The guy in the passenger seat is eating a can of peaches,” O-Bop says. “So it’s Jimmy Piccone-Jimmy Peaches. He’s got this thing for canned peaches.”

O-Bop is the Paul’s Peerage of mobdom. He follows them like some guys follow baseball teams. He has the whole Five Families organizational chart in his head.

So O-Bop is hipped to the fact that since Carlo Cimino died last year, the family’s been in a state of flux. Most of the hard-core guys were sure Cimino would pick Neill Demonte to be his successor, but he went for his brother-in-law Paulie Calabrese instead.

It was an unpopular choice, especially among the old guard, who think that Calabrese is too white-collar, too soft. Too focused on turning the money into legitimate businesses. The hard guys-the loan sharks, extortion artists and flat-out plain robbers-don’t like it.

Jimmy “Big Peaches” Piccone is one of these guys. In fact, he’s sitting in the Lincoln holding forth on it.

“We’re the Cimino Crime Family,” Peaches is saying to his brother, Little Peaches. Joey “Little Peaches” Piccone is actually bigger than his older brother, Big Peaches, but no one is going to say that, so the nicknames stick. “Even the fuckin' New York Times calls us the Cimino Crime Family. We do crime. If I wanted to be a businessman I would’ve joined-what-IBM.”

Peaches also doesn’t like that Demonte was overlooked as boss. “He’s an old man, what’s the harm of letting him have his few years in the sun? He’s earned it. What the Old Man should have done is, he should have made Mister Neill boss and Johnny Boy the underboss. Then we would have had 'our thing,’ our cosa nostra.”

For a young guy-Peaches is twenty-six-he’s a throwback, a conservative, a mafioso William F. Buckley without the tie. He likes the old ways, the old traditions.

“In the old days,” Peaches says, like he was even around in the old days, “we would have just taken a piece of the Javits Center. We wouldn’t have to suck ass to some old Harp like Matty Sheehan. Not like Paulie’s gonna give us a taste anyway. He don’t care if we fuckin’ starve.”

“Hey,” Little Peaches says.

“Hey what.”

“Hey, Paulie gives this job to Mister Neill, who gives it to Johnny Boy, who gives it to us,” Little Peaches says. “All I need to know: Johnny Boy gives us a job, we do the job.”

“We’re gonna do the fuckin’ job,” Peaches says. He don’t need his little brother giving him lectures about how it works. Peaches knows how it works, likes how it works, especially in the Demonte wing of the family, where it works like it did in the old days.

Another thing, Peaches fucking worships Johnny Boy.

Johnny Boy is everything the Mafia used to be.

What it oughta be again, Peaches thinks.

“Soon as it gets really dark,” Peaches says, “we’ll go up there and punch their tickets.”

Callan’s sitting there flipping through the black notebook.

“Your dad’s in here,” he says.

“There’s a surprise,” O-Bop says sarcastically. “For how much?”

“Two large.”

“Probably bet on the Budweiser Clydesdales to show at Aqueduct,” O-Bop says. “Hey, here comes the pizza. Hey, what the fuck is this? They’re taking our pizza!”

O-Bop is genuinely pissed. He’s not especially angry that these guys are here to kill him-that’s to be expected, that’s just business-but he takes the pizza hijacking as a personal affront.

“They don’t got to do that!” he wails. “That’s just wrong!”

Which, Callan recalls, is how this whole thing started in the first place.

He glances up from the black book to see this fat guinea with a big grin on his face, holding a slice of pizza up at him.

“Hey!” O-Bop yells.

“It’s good!” Peaches yells back.

“They’ve got our pizza!” O-Bop says to Callan.

“It’s no big deal,” Callan says.

O-Bop whines, “I’m hungry!”

“Then go down and take it from them,” Callan says.

“I might.”

“Take a shotgun.”

“Fuck!”

Callan can hear the guys out in the street laughing at them. He doesn’t care. It doesn’t get to him the way it gets to O-Bop. O-Bop hates to be laughed at. It’s always been an instant fight with him. Callan, he can just walk away.

“Stevie?”

“What.”

“What did you say was the name of that guy down there?”

“Which guy?”

“Guy they sent to whack us.”

“Jimmy Peaches.”

“He’s in here.”

“Say what?”

O-Bop comes away from the window. “For how much?”

“A hundred thousand.”

They look at each other and start to laugh.

“Callan,” O-Bop says, “we got us a whole new ball game here.”

Because Peaches Piccone owes Matty Sheehan $100,000. And that’s just the principal-the vigorish has to be piling up faster than stink in a garbage strike, so Piccone is in serious trouble here. He’s in to Matt Sheehan deep. Which would be bad news-all the more motivation for him to do Sheehan a solid-except that Callan and O-Bop have the book.