“This better be good,” Ryan said as he slid into the booth. “Getting me up at the crack of dawn.”
Al laughed at that. They ordered breakfast and chatted idly. When the food was set on the table, Al got down to business.
“I got something sweet.”
“How sweet?”
“Maybe a hundred and a half—you and me take eighty percent.”
“Who gets the other twenty?”
“My cousin Vinny, like the movie.”
“What’s the job?”
“A poker game, a fat one. I’ve been playing in it for three weeks. Sometimes there’s two hundred grand changing hands.”
“Tell me more.”
“It’s in a pretty good motel on 17 North. The room is on the ground floor with two doors. The back one leads to the alley where they pick up the garbage. Six guys, all of them businessmen, no wise guys.”
“Go on.”
“I’m at the table, you and Vinny come in the two doors, you’ve got that sawed-off shotgun of yours. That will scare the shit out of everybody.”
“Are you carrying?”
“Nope, I’m a victim. You make everybody empty their pockets onto the table, then take the table blanket, cards, money, and all, and beat it out the back door, where Vinny has a car stashed. We meet at your place, as soon as I can get out, and divvy the money.”
“How do I know Vinny can handle this?”
“Because I say so. He’s a cool kid—it’s not his first job.”
“Are you the newest guy in the game?”
“There’s one newer by a week.”
“How’ve you been doing?”
“I’m up a couple grand for the three weeks. One of the players brought in a pro dealer, who, turns out, is a mechanic. I figure tonight I’ll win pretty big, and next week, they’ll lower the boom on me. Except you and me and Vinny will already have lowered the boom on them.”
“Okay, I’m in. When?”
“Tonight.”
“That’s not much time for planning.”
“The planning is all done. You just heard my plan.” Al looked toward the door. “Here comes Vinny.”
Vinny was lean and obscenely barbered, with a fashionable two days of stubble. He didn’t say much.
“I told him the plan,” Al said.
“I like the plan,” Ryan said, “but Vinny has got to understand: nobody gets hurt. No shooting, no blows to the head. This is an illegal game, so nobody is calling the cops—unless somebody gets hurt, then we’re in the shit.”
“Got it,” Vinny said. It was the first time he had spoken.
—
Ryan went back to his apartment, got a duffel off the top shelf of his closet, and dumped the shotgun onto the bed. It was an old-fashioned, open-hammer scattergun with the barrel sawed off to about four inches. Vinny had fired it into a target: from ten feet it had a pattern the size of a basketball.
He cleaned the weapon, dropped a couple of double-ought shells into it, and closed it. It couldn’t fire until he pulled back the hammers.
—
Al dropped off Vinny at his mother’s house. “You okay with Gene?” he asked the young man.
“No problem, I guess.”
“You guess? What does that mean?”
“Nothin’.”
“You do understand why nobody gets hurt?”
“Yeah, nobody gets hurt, nobody calls the cops. But, Al . . .”
“Yeah?”
“What if somebody’s packin’?”
“Don’t worry about it. Nobody in this crowd packs.”
“If you say so,” Vinny replied. “But if somebody draws, we’re in a whole new poker game.”
Al sat at the poker table and glanced at his hand again. He raised. The dealer dealt another card, and Al watched his face instead of his hands. He had already learned that the guy was too good a mechanic to make a move you could see. His face was something else, though. As he dealt Al’s next card there was a tiny smile.
Al forced himself not to look at his watch, on being completely caught up in the game. He wanted to be as surprised as everyone else at the table. When the two doors were simultaneously kicked in, he flinched with the best of them and looked around. Two men in masks and black clothes came into the room, one with a semiautomatic pistol held out in front of him and the other with a mean-looking sawed-off shotgun.
“Hands on the table, everybody!” Ryan shouted, and for emphasis, he cocked both hammers of the shotgun.
Al went back to looking at the dealer, and as he placed his hands on the table, the butt of a pistol revealed itself under his jacket. Oh, no, Al thought.
Vinny was methodically emptying the pockets of the players, while Ryan moved the shotgun back and forth, as if spraying the men at the table.
Al saw a flicker of a move of the dealer’s right hand, and he caught the man’s eye and slowly shook his head. That stopped the man long enough for Vinny to discover the pistol. It was a snub-nosed .38, and he thumbed open the cylinder and shook the cartridges out onto the table. Al heard somebody say, “Shit!” but he wasn’t sure who.
Vinny began wrapping the money, the cards, and the cartridges in the blanket, then he nodded at Ryan, who let go a single, deafening round into the ceiling, showering everyone with pieces of acoustic tiles. The two men ran out the rear door, and a moment later, Al heard the car’s tires squeal as it drove down the alley.
People seemed reluctant to move for a moment. “They’re gone,” somebody said.
Al turned to face the dealer. “You,” he said, “you nearly got somebody killed.”
“Fuck you,” the dealer snarled.
—
After a change of cars and a dumping of their clothes, Ryan let them into his apartment and tossed the bundle onto the couch.
“I want to see it,” Vinny said, making a move.
“Not until Al gets here,” Ryan said. “That was the deal.”
“He’s going to be at least an hour,” Vinny said.
Ryan switched on the TV and found an old movie. “Watch and learn,” he said. “It’ll make the time fly.”
Al arrived at the apartment just before two AM. “Sorry,” he said, as Ryan let him in, “I had to drink with them, or they’d have suspected something. A couple of them were looking at me funny, until I pointed out to them that I was the big loser.”
He opened the blanket, and they stared at the pile of money. “I had twenty grand on the table,” Al said. “I get that out first.” He quickly counted the money, while Ryan and Vinny sorted the bills by denomination and kept a running tally on a shirt cardboard.
“I make it two hundred and twenty-two grand,” Ryan said, “give or take.”
“Vinny,” Al said, “you just made yourself forty-four grand.” He counted out the money.
“You guys made more,” Vinny said.
“You set up the jobs and do the planning, and you’ll make more,” Al said.
“Somebody give me a lift to my mom’s house?” Vinny said, getting to his feet.
“Sure,” Al said, getting up. “We’re all beat. Remember, no flashy spending for a while. Give it a month before you buy anything noticeable.” He led Vinny to his car and told him to get into the rear seat. “Stay down,” he said. “I don’t want anybody seeing us together.”
“Right,” Vinny said. “You got something else for us soon, Al?”
“Maybe,” Al said. “You don’t want to pull a rash of jobs. You got cash, take your girl to the city for dinner and a show.”
“Right.”
Al deposited Vinny on his doorstep, after a good look around, then drove away.
—
Ryan still wasn’t ready to sleep. He turned on New York One, the 24/7 cable news channel. He was half asleep when he heard a name that jerked him awake.