Andrew Vachss - Two Trains Running

“Not too much to ask! Information like that’s worth a-”

“It’s worth whatever Beaumont paid you for it,” Procter cut him off.

“I never said-”

“You know what, Yancey? You’re making me tired. You and me, we’ve had a deal. A working relationship. I’ve held up my end of the bargain, haven’t I?”

“I’m not saying you haven’t,” Yancey said, sullenly. “But when am I done paying that off?”

“Ever borrow money from a loan shark?” Procter asked him, smiling without showing any teeth.

“No. Why should I-?”

“It’s the principle I’m trying to make you understand, Yancey. That’s a play on words, you get it? The principle of principal and interest. A six-for-five man makes his living from when you don’t pay him off. He doesn’t want his money back; he wants you to keep paying the juice.”

“You’re saying I’ll never get those letters back?”

“Right, Yancey. That is what I’m saying.”

“That’s blackmail.”

“It was blackmail the first time I did it,” Procter said. “Now it’s just a habit.”

“Jesus, Jimmy; we went to school together!”

“Lots of guys went to school together. You, me, Carl Gustavson…”

“It’s not what you think it is… was. Those letters, they don’t mean what you-”

“I’m tired,” Procter repeated. “You think I’m bluffing, go ahead and call my hand.”

Yancey pulled up the top sheet from the clipboard, revealing a road map with a number of red lines hand-drawn across it. “Yeah, you’re the great investigative reporter, Jimmy,” he said bitterly. “Big crime-buster. You know what? You’re no better than the people you’re going after.”

“That’s what it takes,” Procter said.

1959 September 30 Wednesday 15:40

“I’m not doing nothing like that, Rufus Hightower. Stealing is no different than whoring; you can’t do no ‘little bit’ of it.”

“Did I ask you to take anything, honeygirl? Did I? No, I sure didn’t. And I wouldn’t. I know what kind of woman you are. Kind of woman a man marries, he gets lucky enough.”

“Kind of man wants a fool for a wife, you mean,” Rosa Mae said, not mollified.

“You supposed to be in the man’s room, Rosa Mae. That’s your job. You said you had to come back, do the vacuuming, right?”

“I supposed to be cleaning his room-not searching it, like some thief.”

“It’s not thieving if you don’t take nothing. There’s no crime in looking.”

“Why you so interested in this man, Rufus? I know he never did nothing to you.”

“Now who’s playing someone like a fool, girl? You know it ain’t me that’s interested in that man. What I’m interested in is-”

“-money. Pastor Roberts says-”

“Think I give a damn what some high-yellow, straight-hair pretty-boy says? Every man got to have a hustle of some kind. You know how the song goes: if you white, you all right; if you brown, stick around; but if you black, get back. That’s me, Rosa Mae. I don’t have that nice paper-bag complexion; I ain’t got good hair; and my nose is spread all over my face. So I don’t apologize for none of what I do. I may be about money, but I got a good use for it.”

“And what’s that?”

“Someday, I’ll tell you, girl. I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time. But, for now, I tell you what it’s not for-it’s not for no big white Cadillac, like your jackleg preacher got.”

“You just jealous, Rufus.”

“You want to say I’m jealous because that man get you all big-eyed, you be telling the truth, girl. When I see you sometimes, just standing there, I say to myself, ‘Damn, I wish that woman was waiting for me.’ But I don’t care nothing about that nigger otherwise.”

“Rufus!”

“What you think he is, to all the white people, Rosa Mae? You think a colored man ain’t always a nigger to them? Doctor, lawyer, preacher-don’t make no difference.”

“That’s all changing now. If you went to church sometimes, you might learn about it.”

“If you went to… Never mind.”

“Rufus, you are the most downright… confusing man I ever met.”

“Rosa Mae, if I was to tell you taking a look around that man’s room, it would be doing something for our people, would you believe me?”

“For our people? You mean, like for integration?”

“For our people, girl. Not for mixing. I ain’t about that.”

“You… what? Rufus, why shouldn’t we have the same rights as any-?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Rufus said. “Someday… maybe, I’ll talk to you about all this. But not now. This ain’t the time. This is the time to make some money.”

“Well, I’m not going to-”

“That’s all right,” Rufus said, shrugging his shoulders. “You only work six days.”

“Of course. I wouldn’t work on-”

“I know. But you think the man don’t want his room cleaned, just because it Sunday? Don’t worry about it no more, girl. I’ll get Big Annie to do what I need.”

Rosa Mae stepped back a pace from Rufus, widening her lively amber eyes. “You’ll get caught, Rufus,” she said. “Annie’s like a cow in those rooms. The man will know as soon as he-”

“Then I guess I lose my job, pretty Rose. Because I got no choice. I got to do this.”

He looked Rosa Mae full in the face for a long moment. “I’m sorry I asked you,” he finally said.

Rosa Mae closed her eyes and stepped close to him, her voice just above a whisper.

“You be here at five-thirty,” she said.

1959 September 30 Wednesday 15:59

“I guess what I need is an outside bodyguard,” Beaumont said.

“I don’t understand what that means,” Dett replied.

“I mean, not a bodyguard who stands right next to me. Only Luther does that. A bodyguard who works… at a distance. Let’s say, just to be talking, there was this guy who, I don’t know, threatened to kill me, all right? Now, the kind of bodyguard Luther is, a thing like that was happening, he would never leave my side. You couldn’t make him go. But the other kind of bodyguard, the one I’m talking about here, he might go out and look for the guy who was making the threats.”

“I get it.”

“But what I need done, it’s a lot more than any one single job. You were in the service, right?”

Dett didn’t answer, his face as blank as a career criminal’s in a police interrogation room.

“Never mind,” Beaumont said. “I was never in the army”-he rapped his heavy ring against the steel of his wheelchair-“but I always liked reading about military tactics and strategy.”

Beaumont shifted position in his chair, but his iron eyes never left Dett’s face. “We’ve got a good-sized operation here,” he said. “Been here for a long time. But now there’s some who want what my people have. We know they’re already on the march. So what I need isn’t any one single job. It’s more like a… campaign.”

He leaned forward to grind out his cigarette. When he looked up, his head was tilted at a slight angle, his tone almost professorial. “Now they’ve got more men than we do-not right here, but access to them, no more than a phone call away. A long-distance call. But it’s our territory they’re invading, so they have to come to us. And in a million years, they’ll never know the terrain the way we do.

“Still, it’s not that simple. Some of what we do, it’s out in the open. Easy to find means easy to take. Which is what they think. You know what makes a big army just give up and go home?”

“When there’s no end in sight. Like Korea. A war like that, all it does is drain you dry.”

“Right! Winning a war’s a lot easier than trying to occupy the territory you take. If we wanted, we could make it too expensive for them, cost them too much. But there’s something else we have to consider, something even more important. Locke City is a wide-open town, everyone knows that. We’re right on the border of two other states. This is where people come, they want to have a good time. But if we start drawing too much attention, that could all go away.”