Andrew Vachss - The Weight

I picked up my bag. Two of the other guys got their gear together; one of them kept looking at his watch.

“Fuck it, then,” the guy who needed the money said. He took out this little black gun from one pocket and a silencer from the other.

The three of us got out. The guy who needed money stayed. So did the box man and one other guy. I didn’t know any of them, never worked with them before.

They stayed inside the lines, right to the end. The guy who needed money, he stood up and said he was the one who’d killed the security guard. Said the whole job was his idea. He even said he made the other two guys stay-if they had tried to leave, he would have shot them, too.

It was worth a try, I guess. If the jury believed the other two hadn’t known he was carrying, they might have cut them some slack.

But they put the killing on all three. It doesn’t matter who pulls the trigger, everybody pays the same. I even heard of a getaway man who got life for killing a bank guard who went for his gun. The driver never even went inside the building, but it didn’t make any difference.

There were a lot of good reasons for me not trying to choke out the guard. You hit a guy over the head with a pipe, you might knock him out… or you might kill him. I learned that from the doctor who closed up my face during my first bit.

“You know how people say, ‘He’s got a thick skull’?” that doctor said.

“Sure,” I said. “They’re always saying it about me.”

“Well, in your case, it’s not a pejorative.”

“A what?”

“Derogatory. A put-down.”

“But it means you’re dumb, right?”

“Yes,” the other doctor in the room said. “That’s the way it’s used. But in the medical sense, the human skull can vary in thickness. Here, look at this.”

It was a pair of X-rays, side by side. “Yours is the one on the left. The one on the right is normal. Average. See how much more bone there is in yours?”

“Yeah. Is that why that hatchet didn’t chop into my brain?”

“Exactly,” the first one said. “Dr. Leong is a radiologist. He was the one to bring this to my attention.”

“What are you, then?”

“What am…? Oh, I see. I’m a dermatological surgeon. When you first came in, the ER triage team sent you up to the cranial unit. Head wounds bleed considerably, so it wasn’t until the scans came back that you ended up in this wing.”

“That’s why my head’s shaved?”

“Yes. The fracture of the skull was so mild it was barely discernible. It will heal on its own. It was my job to suture the wound.”

“You are most fortunate,” the X-ray doctor said. “Dr. Trotta is one of the finest plastic surgeons in the country, and he came right over from the university. The reason the prison transported you straight to this hospital was because a brain injury was assumed.”

“Huh! You’re right about that one, doc. If those guys in the prison infirmary had stitched me up, I’d probably be blind in that eye by now.”

Neither of them said anything. For the first time, I felt scared. “The eye, it’s okay, right?”

“Certainly,” the first doctor said. “The weapon’s major force was to the hairline. It cut all the way down to below the eye, but it didn’t touch the eye itself. You have a heavy shelf of bone above the eyebrows. That’s what saved the eye.”

“Thick skulls, they’re good for something, huh?”

Both doctors smiled. Even the nurse. She’d been over in the corner; I hadn’t noticed her until I turned my head a little.

“Have we answered your questions, Mr. Caine?”

“Yeah,” I told them. “And thanks for what you did.”

“Could you perhaps answer a question for me?” the X-ray doctor said.

I figured he was going to ask me who did it, but I wasn’t even close.

“How could someone get a hatchet inside a maximum-security prison?”

“Make it himself. Or buy it.”

“That seems… bizarre.”

“I don’t get what you’re saying.”

“Lethal weapons inside a prison-it seems like an anomaly.”

“If you’re saying it doesn’t add up, you’re wrong,” I told them. “If you were walking down a dark alley in the middle of the night, wouldn’t you want to have some kind of weapon with you?”

“I… I suppose so. But how is that-?”

“Prison’s like that, doc. Every day.”

I hadn’t heard about that thick-skull thing, but I’d never hit a guy in the head with a pipe unless I wanted to kill him. Same for choking him out. There’s a little bone in the throat. You crush that, the guy dies. But I wasn’t thinking about that. All I heard was two hours … playing like a song you couldn’t get out of your head.

The three who went down never mentioned the three of us who left. If they’d gotten away with the job, none of us would have come around asking for a share.

That’s the rules.

I was never going to put myself in a position like that: where I needed money so bad that I’d have to change a plan.

I knew I couldn’t live on the money from the jewelry job forever. But I could be real careful about what jobs to take. That’s the best any man who does what I do can hope for.

It’s happened before. A guy looks like me, he can always find work. Not score work, regular work. Like collecting debts. But even that kind of work, there’s risks.

I worked construction once in a while, but I didn’t have an in, so I could never get on with the union. Mostly, I’d end up with lousy jobs, like being a bouncer in a club.

I never kept one of those jobs long. Usually, I’d get fired. Not for going too far; for not going far enough. If I couldn’t scare a guy, or just wrap him up and carry him outside, I’d step off. Guys don’t walk around with warning labels telling you if they had real thin skulls or a bad heart, stuff like that.

So I’d get fired for not doing my job. I’d listen to some greasy little puke in a suit tell me I was a punk-all show, no go. I was probably taking it up the ass, they’d say. Tell me to go work in a gay bar. That always got a laugh from the others in his office.

There’s always other guys in the office. I just look at them, one at a time. They never say anything themselves.

That’s why I only took cash jobs, the kind where you get paid after every shift.

Just let it go . That’s what I kept telling myself.

“Go” was the word, not “no.”

Go on down to Florida and see about this Jessop, like Solly wanted me to do. Don’t say no to him.

“Buying time,” those words go either way. Could mean you’re playing it smart; could mean you’re playing it stupid. I couldn’t find this Jessop, but maybe the PI the lawyer used could.

I knew I didn’t actually have to find the guy. But I had to be able to tell Solly I tried. And it had to be the truth.

Talking to that cop, that had been insane. Way too close to the edge. I should only talk to my own kind.

But I just couldn’t get that girl out of my mind. Not her, the guy who raped her. The guy whose time I did.

Something else was off about the whole thing. But I could never get my mind to open up and show me, no matter how hard I tried.

So I just let it go.

“I’ll take the bus,” I told Solly.

He kind of smiled. “That’s smart, Sugar. You don’t need a credit card for the Greyhound. I’ll set it up for Albie’s niece to pick you up at the depot.”

“Okay.”

“By his neighbors, Albie was just another old retired guy, moved to Florida to get away from the cold. Tallahassee, it’s not where you go if you like boats, stuff like that. The whole town’s built around the college. Big-time sports school, that’s about it.