Andrew Vachss - The Weight

Must be the way those black-glove guys start thinking after a while. Once they’ve got the girl captured, they know what’s next. Even if they let her go, they’re still going down forever-that kind of thing, it’s probably got twenty different crimes tied up in it. Murder, that’s Life, too. So why let her go, maybe have her testify against you?

But on a professional piece of work, the cops usually know where to look. And they’re not the only ones.

It was Ken that changed that, a long time ago. Solly told me Ken was the first heister who wouldn’t pay tax on his work. Used to be, you pulled a job in anyone’s territory, you had to let them slice a little off the top. Probably started back when the families were only taking Sicilians. I even heard you had to ask their permission first.

Solly really admired Ken. He never got tired of telling stories about him. Not what you might think, though. What he liked about Ken the best was the way the man stuck pins in so many balloons.

“You go up to some poor bastard, working his ass off to support his family, and you sell him fucking ‘protection,’ yeah? He don’t pay, you bust his place up, then you go back and tell him, ‘See? The cops can’t protect you, but we can.’ That’s not a man’s work. Me, I do a man’s work .

“So-you gonna protect me? You got cops that’ll look the other way, judges on your payroll? That’s some insurance I wouldn’t mind buying .

“That’s what Ken told them at the sit-down,” Solly told me. “And when they said, yeah, they did have that kind of juice but they couldn’t put their names on the table-could they?-Ken, he says:

“Why is that, then? ’Cause you’d be giving me info on dirty cops and crooked judges, yeah? And maybe I could trade that, if I got in a jam, is that about right?

“So the dagos, they all nod, like the fucking movies, you know? And Kenny says:

“That door swings both ways, doesn’t it? If I come to you about a job of work I’m going to do, or even if I pay your tax after the work is done, and you get jammed, what’s to stop you from trading that?

“I thought it was gonna be the O.K. Corral right there,” Solly said. “But Kenny sliced into them first. Had a whole list of family men who’d turned rat. And the big shots at that table, they couldn’t deny it. So Kenny says,

“Tell me a guy who’ll give up a boss wouldn’t give me up. Can you do that?

“It was quiet for a minute. Then one of the older guys-a real survivor, he must have been-he says, ‘We let you slide on the tax, word gets around, then nobody pays.’ But Kenny, he’s ready for that one.

“ ‘Only way word gets around is if one of you spreads it .”

“The man had steel balls,” Solly said to me. “But it wasn’t just that. Ken made sense . He had a rep. Not just for being crazy-which he was, I grant you-but for keeping it low-key. No flashy suits. No diamond rings. No nightclubs. You see what I’m saying?

“The man was a master. No trademarks, no patterns. It could be a bank one time, a truckload of furs-only way you could tell it was Ken’s work was by how smooth it went.

“So what would be in it for Ken to brag about not having to pay tax? Nothing. He’d be killing his own golden goose. His game was no-ego, see? The family guys knew he was telling the truth: if they made a deal with Ken, nobody was gonna hear about it from him.”

Only Ken wasn’t around anymore. Which gave me a real problem with Solly being so generous.

He’d gone to a lot of trouble, setting me up like he had. The cops didn’t know Stanley Jay Wilson, but Solly knew him. Knew him real well. Where he banked, what car he was driving… even the business he was supposed to be in.

I didn’t like that last part. I’d been using that “personal trainer” tag for a while before I did my last bit. But, truth is, I don’t know the first damn thing about how to do it. I picked up some lingo from magazines, and I guess I look like someone who should know that stuff. It wasn’t like I actually had to convince anyone.

But I’d never mentioned this to any of the guys I ever worked with. It isn’t the kind of thing you talk about.

So how did Solly know?

And how come he told me so much stuff about himself? It was like he wanted us to be even up on info about each other.

I knew this much: Solly never did anything just to be doing it. “It’s all investment,” he once told me. “Risk against gain. Everything in life always comes down to that.”

That’s why my first stop was this Verizon store. The kid in the red shirt called up my account on his screen, said they were really sorry about my phone getting smashed on the subway platform, and sold me a new one.

The place was kind of frantic, people running in and out, arguing about credit, getting their friends to cosign for them, trading up to a fancier model… so the kid I got just told me to pick out whatever I wanted-it’d go on my next bill.

I told him I didn’t want my wife to know I’d broken another phone, so I wanted to pay cash.

That got his attention. “So I’m guessing, maybe your new phone wouldn’t need a GPS…?”

I threw him an extra twenty for being so considerate. And put a fifty on top of that to get a new number right away. He didn’t act surprised.

It took one of those instaprint joints only a few minutes to make me some new business cards.

Still not enough. I drove over to a Toyota dealer closer to the city but still in Queens. Traded the Mustang in on a used-they called it “pre-owned”-2004 Camry.

That bank manager had been right. The salesman hardly listened to me tell him my kids were too big for car seats now, so the Mustang wouldn’t work. We went back and forth a couple of times, but I wasn’t going to spend the whole day there, and I made sure he’d see that.

“My car’s only got thirteen thousand miles on it,” I told him. “Yours has got almost seventy-five. And it’s three years older, too. I told my wife I was taking the day off, and I’d be driving a different car home tonight. So I’m gonna do that. Started first thing this morning. So far, I’ve been to five dealers. I want a Camry. I’m taking the best offer. So tell me yours. Then I can say yes or no and be done with it.”

“We’ll beat any-”

“Jesus Christ. All you guys say the same thing. Fine. Never mind the ‘check with my manager’ routine, either, okay? You take my Mustang, I take the Camry. I’m not asking you for cash back. Which I should . So-what’s it gonna be?”

The Camry felt solid. I don’t know much about cars, but I knew this beige one I was driving looked like a million other cars on the road.

Sure, I traded the Mustang away, even though I knew Solly could trace it easy enough if he wanted to.

There was still another reason to get rid of the Mustang, a more important one. Say a guy wants to sell you a really top-shelf piece. Only half-price. Looks brand-new, sure. But you never know where that gun’s been. Or what it was used for.

That Mustang had been bought new, while I was still locked up. With thirteen thousand-plus miles on the odometer, it still looked new. But I hadn’t put those miles on myself.

I figured they’d detail the Mustang before they put it out on the lot, so if I duct-taped that GPS’ed phone Solly gave me under the front fender, they’d find it. I had to wait until I could find a better place.