“He always,” Cogan said, “he never, well, I knew Dillon a long time, right? It was Dillon, really, got me started, said I oughta get something besides the booking, something that’d be around and like that, you know? He was the guy that really plugged me in. I knew Dillon a long time.”
“He knew him a long time too,” the driver said. “He had a lot of respect for him.”
“Sure,” Cogan said, “so’d I. You know why?”
“You were afraid of him?” the driver said.
“Nah,” Cogan said. He finished his beer. “Nah, it wasn’t that. It was, he knew the way things oughta be done, right?”
“So I’m told,” the driver said.
“And when they weren’t,” Cogan said, “he knew what to do.”
“And so do you,” the driver said.
“And so do I,” Cogan said.
George V. Higgins
KILLING THEM
SOFTLY
George V. Higgins was the author of more than twenty novels, including the bestsellers The Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Rat on Fire, and The Digger’s Game. He was a reporter for the Providence Journal and the Associated Press before obtaining a law degree from Boston College Law School in 1967. He was an Assistant Attorney General and then an Assistant United States Attorney in Boston from 1969 to 1973. He later taught Creative Writing at Boston University. He died in 1999.
ALSO BY GEORGE V. HIGGINS
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972)
The Digger’s Game (1973)
THESE ARE BORZOI BOOKS
PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK
BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION,
NOVEMBER 2011
Copyright © 1974 by George V. Higgins
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover under the title Cogan’s Trade in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1974.
Vintage Crime is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black
Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Higgins, George V.
Killing Them Softly.
I. Title.
PZH.H6365Co
813′.5 4 73–20438
eISBN: 978-0-345-80502-7
www.vintagebooks.com
Cover design credit:
Artwork Copyright
© 2012 The Weinstein Company LLC
All Rights Reserved
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