Donald Westlake - Smoke

"Terrific," she said, listening to the slide and slither of him getting dressed back there, and then Dick Tracy joined her, wearing pink Playtex gloves and a long-sleeved buttoned shirt and khaki slacks and pale socks and loafers. "Hi, Freddie," she said.

"What a snap, Peg," he said, the Dick Tracy face puffing and collapsing as he spoke. "I think I could hit a different one of those stores every week, up and down the Eastern Seaboard."

"Let's just do this one," she suggested.

"Right. One thing at a time."

"That's right."

"Follow me," he said, and got out of the van.

Peg started her engine, switched on her lights, and drove around to the front, and what a big trailer that was out there! For Pete's sake. "Wow," she whispered, peering up at how tall it was, how way up off the ground were those yellow lights along its top edge. And how long it was. And it had more yellow lights on the sides, and red lights at the back, and red and yellow lights on the cab, and great big headlights out front. It was more like a steamship than a truck, like a great big cargo ship on its way around the world.

She beeped to let him know she was ready, and the big rig slowly started forward, grinding upward through the gears, moving out onto this empty country road in the darkness, Peg in her van easing along in its wake.

They had to cross the Hudson River, which they did on the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, which was all right, because twenty years did not go by before they got to the other side. They kept driving west until they got to the New York State Thruway, where the Dick Tracy mask and Playtex gloves would get their first of several tests tonight. This was the first time they were going anywhere that Peg couldn't do Freddie's driving, which made for a great unknown. So, just to be on the safe side, while waiting behind the truck for Freddie to take his toll ticket from the guy in the booth, Peg opened an extra button on her blouse, and when she drove forward to get her own ticket she was kind of leaning forward a little, smiling.

And the guy in the booth had the weirdest expression on his face, as though asking himself, What the hell was that? But then he saw Peg, and he saw the shadows within her open blouse, and he forgot all about the previous driver. "Hi, there," he said, handing Peg her ticket.

"Hi." She smiled some more.

"Nice night," he suggested.

"Sultry," she said, rolling the l around in her mouth like a strawberry, and took off after Freddie.

They were over a hundred miles from New York. Freddie tucked the big rig into the right lane and kept it at the speed limit, fifty-five miles an hour, not wanting to attract any official attention. Peg tucked in behind him, turned on the radio and settled down to the long and boring drive.

All the way down the Thruway, with traffic very light the whole way (mostly trucks). Then, when they were near New York, they switched over to the New Jersey Turnpike, which meant two more toll-people Freddie left stunned and Peg left happy. Down the turnpike through New Jersey to the spur over to the Lincoln Tunnel, and two more toll-people, one of whom (at the tunnel) was a woman, so Peg's wiles wouldn't do any good. On the other hand, this woman was a toll-taker at the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel, so she hadn't seen anything odd at all about the guy driving that big tractor-trailer; in fact, if you asked her, he looked more normal than most.

Freddie had told Jersey Josh he'd probably phone between three and four in the morning, and it was in fact about a quarter past three when, reaching Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, Freddie pulled the big rig to a stop at the curb in a no-parking zone, and Peg pulled in behind him. Getting out of the van, stretching, stiff and sore, she walked forward to the cab, looked up, sighed, and said, "Freddie, put your head on."

"Oh. Sorry. I remembered for the tollbooths."

She watched Dick Tracy reappear. "You mean, you drove all the way down with your head off?"

"It gets hot, Peg."

"I'm surprised we didn't leave a hundred accidents in our wake."

"You can't see up in here at night," Dick told her. "It worked out, didn't it?"

"Sure. I'll call Josh now, right?"

"Yeah." The Playtex glove pointed. "I parked where there's a phone booth. If it works."

It wasn't a booth, it was just a phone on a stick, but it did work. Peg dialed the number, and after about fifteen rings it was finally answered. "S?"

"Hi, Josh," Peg said, with absolutely false friendliness. "It's Peg, calling for Freddie."

"O." He didn't sound happy.

"We're here with the stuff. We'll meet where you said, right?"

"Meet Freddie."

"The both of us, Josh."

"S," he said, sounding bitter, and hung up.

A long long time ago there was an actual slaughterhouse in Manhattan, way down below Greenwich Village, near the Hudson River. In the nineteenth century, they had cattle drives down Fifth Avenue, bringing the cows to the slaughterhouse, but then they built a railroad line that was partly in a cut between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, which is still used by trains from the north coming down to Penn Station, in the West Thirties. Going down from there, the old train line was elevated, at second-floor level, and ran all the way downtown, the trains that carried the doomed cows trundling south and south, as buildings were constructed all around the track, and neighborhoods grew up, until here and there the elevated train line was actually inside buildings along its route.

Then it all came to an end. The slaughterhouse shut down and there was less and less manufacturing of other kinds in lower Manhattan, and fewer and fewer cargo ships from Europe that unloaded there, so there was no longer a need for a railroad line down through Manhattan south of Penn Station. But that old elevated line had been constructed of iron, and built strong enough to carry many tons of train and beef, and it was not an easy thing to tear that big old monster down, so for the most part it was left standing. Here and there, when new construction was under way, it made sense to remove a part of the old line, but most of it is still there. It's there today, just above your head, black old thick iron crossing the street, out of that old building and into that old building, an artifact from an earlier and more powerful time.

Down in the West Village, a block-square brick factory building had long ago risen around the railroad line, incorporating the track inside the building. After World War II, when that factory was converted to apartments, the old loading docks and other access to the tracks were all sealed up with concrete block and finished on the converted side with Sheetrock walls. The unlit unfinished ground-floor area beneath the track was used as parking space by a few neighborhood businesses, a plumber and a locksmith and one or two others, but over the years that cubbyhole down there became a hangout for the kind of people who have only good things to say about anonymous sex. There were some robberies down in there, and some assaults, and then two fatal stabbings within a month, at which point the city sued the corporation that owned the building, which was the first time the corporation had had to confront the fact that the filthy grungy hellhole beneath the old railroad track was actually a part of the structure they owned. So they concrete-blocked one end of it, and put a high chain-link gate at the other end, with razor wire on top, and only the supers had the key to the gate, which meant that, within six months, half a dozen of the worst felons in the neighborhood had keys to the gate.

One of these was an associate of Jersey Josh Kuskiosko. He it was to whom Jersey Josh would deliver the truck and its goods, for a nice profit on the evening's work, it having been agreed that Freddie Noon would be paid forty thousand dollars if the truck and goods were as advertised, whereas Jersey Josh's associate would then pay Jersey Josh one hundred thousand. That is, once the truck, and its contents, were safely locked away inside that gate, inside that apartment building, under those old railroad tracks.