"You don't get it?" Morris asked.
"No." His foot felt stinging, hot. "What? What?"
Morris smoothed the front of his green shirt. "He didn't do it. It took a long time to figure that out."
"What?"
"Like you don't know, or who."
"Who?"
"Maybe you, maybe Christina."
"What? No! No way!"
Morris rubbed the face of his watch. "All right, keep talking."
"The shipments were monthly… we couldn't risk any more than that, we were always trying to be careful. So Christina and the fence had to both know where the shipment was coming in. We had a numbered list of drop-off spots. Warehouses and loading docks that were safe. We were usually using a plain thirty-foot truck, not a tractor trailer, so we could actually get it in during the day, which is actually better, you don't look so fucking suspicious…" He stopped. What else did they want? He pulled the lace out of the shoe of his good foot and tied it tightly around his ankle above the wounds to pinch off the blood flow.
"That's smart," Morris said. "Not too tight, though."
"What we wanted was a way so that Christina and the fence knew which drop-off place. We needed what Christina called a 'random number generator.' That's a real term, you can look it up. The number you got gave you the drop-off place. We needed a way for each to get the number, the same number, without talking to each other. It had to be a public place. That way, if you have guys watching you, all they see is that you're walking around some public place, looking at all the things everybody usually looks at." He felt a little calmer. "What we needed was-Shit, can I at least have something to drink?"
"Tommy, get the man a drink. We got some stuff in the car."
"All right."
"Will you at least put that thing down?" Rick pointed at the drill.
"More talk, Rick, we need more talk."
He nodded in miserable compliance and drew a breath, but not a good one. "Also, it had to be a reasonably big place, because that way Christina and the fence are not close together. So Tony liked the idea, but he said they couldn't go to the same place each time. They had to go to a different place. So Christina had to come up with different public places in the city, in Manhattan, where you could get a random number generated." He looked at the men, told himself to keep talking. Fill up the room with talk, you bastard, and make sure you don't tell them where Christina is. "So what you do is you agree ahead of time what day you're going to both be there looking to get the number. Same day, same exact moment. You also had to have a number that stayed the same for a little while, like at least ten seconds, to account for human error. But you also wanted the number to change pretty frequently, too, so that it would be difficult to catch, so that if Christina was standing in front of the generator for like a minute, then maybe five numbers go by and somebody watching her can't tell which one it is."
"Go on."
"I am, I fucking am," Rick breathed, trying to move his foot. Impossible. Still bleeding, but not dangerously. Tommy returned and handed him a bottle of iced tea. Why was he talking so much? What else would he say? "It's been a few years, you know? So Christina explains this and he says, Fine, but come up with a bunch of different places, I want a way so that you and the fence don't have to talk to each other. So Christina figures that one out, too."
"But how do you know what time to go to the same place?" said Morris. "You got to decide on that every month."
"You could just set it at a regular time… but that makes you predictable. So Christina put a wrinkle in for that, too. You get the time and day from the numbers themselves. You combine the last number with the new number," he remembered out loud. "The last number gives you the hour and the new number gives you the day. So if the old number was three and the new one was four, then you met at three o'clock on the fourth day of the next month to get the next number."
"What about the numeral zero?" Morris looked at his piece of paper. "How do you handle that?"
"Zero was ten. Also, she made a rule that numbers seven through nine were a.m., zero was 10:00 a.m., and numbers one through six were in the afternoon… that way she was always out when lots of other people were around, didn't look strange. Now, with the date, zero was also treated as ten. So that gave you the date of the next meeting. It was always in the first ten days of the month, that way."
"What about the time and date of the drop-off? You can't just make that any old time, with traffic and parking and all. Plus fucking parades and shit."
"That's true. She had some kind of trick for that."
"You could just set a regular time for a particular date, taking into account the traffic for the truck."
"You could," Rick agreed, "but if the same drop-off-place number came up twice in a row, which can happen, then you have the truck appearing in the same place at the same time on the same date two months in a row, which was too risky. No, she had something in there for that, but I can't remember."
Morris consulted his piece of paper. "What about the places where you got the numbers?"
"I remember a few," he said, feeling tired. The pain from the foot wound was indistinguishable from the ankle pain. "One of them was in Penn Station, looking at the train board. Another was that big stock market board they got over on Times Square. Then I think a third was the digital thermometer on the top of the Gulf amp; Western Building, probably the last digit, since that would-"
Morris took off his watch.
"Hey," yelled Rick, "I just gave you everything!"
"You didn't give us Christina."
"I told you, I'm looking for her myself. I'm getting-"
"Drill."
He fought them as hard as he could now, butting with his head, whipping his feet out, but they'd kept his cuffs on, and while Tommy pulled his arms over his head and Jones sat on his feet, Morris touched the drill against Rick's rib cage. He could feel it powdering the bone, vibrating his whole chest.
"Rick," Morris hissed next to his ear. "Come on, be a champ here, tell us where she is, guy."
He breathed as best he could. "I don't know," he cried in misery. "I-wait, I-oh…" Suddenly he found his hatred. "Oh, you cocksuckers can fucking go to hell."
Morris nodded to Tommy and Jones. "The jaw."
He felt their fingers grab his neck and head and shove it down on the old wooden table. He fought with everything he had left, kicking with his good foot, hitting one of them hard in the chest, not even feeling his foot, his rib, but just fighting blindly, fighting against them and his own fear, fighting for the idea of survival, and they snatched his hair and lifted his head up and pounded it against the table and he fell asleep for a moment, and that was when the drill started again and went in and through his unshaven cheek and destroyed one of his upper teeth. The pain burned through into his eye and ear and neck, and he saw hot white lights in his head yet held his mouth open and kept his tongue pressed down to avoid the drill. It stayed in there, whirling blood and tissue inside his mouth, riding back and forth across the destroyed roots of the tooth, killing his head with pain. He may have been screaming, he didn't know. He went limp, eyes shut, mouth filling with blood. Morris pulled out the drill, not cleanly but dragging it over the bottom tooth, and again the pain cabled into Rick's eye socket and pushed outward along the ear canal and even into his nose. He felt air coming in coolly through his cheek. The blood was sticky and warm in his throat, and he tentatively closed his mouth and opened it, tonguing little pieces of tooth against his gum.
" That, I will freely confess," said Morris, "was a mistake."
"Why?" asked Jones.
"You want a guy to talk, you don't drill his mouth."
"Got a point there."