“I never thought about that. All I could see was the money,” he said, his face turning red with shame. In all the time I’d known Bobby, I’d never seen him red-faced. “Besides, I haven’t been doing a lot of clear thinking since Sam got killed.”
“Well, think about it now. The whole time you’ve been doing these runs, Tony and Jimmy have probably been looking for another way to transport the heroin and to cut you out of the deal. My guess is the only reason you’re not dead yet is because all the pieces of their new system of getting the heroin out of the airport aren’t in place yet.”
Bobby seemed surprised. “Get outta here.”
“Christ, Bobby, use your brain. If you’ve made a hundred grand, that means he musta cut you in for what, half?”
“Forty percent.”
“Did you really think he was gonna keep giving up almost half of the profits?”
“Like I said, Moe, I haven’t been thinking.”
“The most fucked-up part of this, Bobby, is that I’ve admired you my whole life. I wanted to be like you. Shit, I wanted to be you. You always seemed to know where you were going and how to get there, and I’ve always felt lost.”
Bobby didn’t say anything to that and then he mumbled, “I can’t die yet.”
“Do you know where they have Lids?”
“Tony said they’ll have him at the drop and that when I deliver the last shipment, they’ll let him go.”
“Yeah, and Santa will come down the chimney holding the Tooth Fairy’s wing and the Easter Bunny’s paw.”
“What can I tell you? That’s what he said, that he’d let Lids go if I did this last thing for him.”
“Is this drug run the same as the others? You park in the lot outside the Eastern terminal at JFK, they load your trunk, and you deliver it?”
“That’s how it’s always works.”
“Okay, I think maybe there’s a way to keep us alive.”
“You can’t go to the cops. Like you said, if I go away, Tony P will have a hit put on me. I won’t last five minutes inside.”
“For once in your life, Bobby, you don’t get a say in things. You do what I tell you or you won’t live to see the inside of a prison. When’s the drop set for?”
“Monday. I’m supposed to get released tomorrow.”
“In a few hours, you call Tony P and tell him I ran, tell him I figured out that Jimmy was trying to kill me. He’ll ask where, so tell him you think I caught a bus to Texas at the Port Authority. Tony will believe you.”
“But — ”
“Just do it. I’ll call you in the morning with the rest of the details.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
There are months I love and months I hate. March, for instance. I have always loved March. October too. I love October because its still-warm days beg you to play basketball in the park: no sweatshirts, no gloves, no shovels necessary to scrape away the snow and ice. I love it because while its waning heat invites you to play ball, October throws leaves on the court, leaves so much more beautiful in death than in life; leaves to remind you to savor those last moments, to savor what you have and what you have left. I hate January for its endless cold and sense of hopelessness, New Year’s notwithstanding. I’d never given much thought to February, not until that February.
On that Monday in that February, late in the afternoon, the sky was already darkening, but not quite as quickly as it had darkened the week before nor as slowly as it would the week after. That day, the sky had reneged on its promise of snow, delivering only panic in its stead. I remember that the stores were overrun by shoppers buying out milk and bread and eggs. To this day, I wonder why it is that snow makes people hungry for just those three things. That day, not all promises of white delivery were reneged on. At 4:35 P.M., in the parking lot closest to the Eastern Airlines terminal at Kennedy airport, a van pulled up behind Bobby Friedman’s Olds 88. A big guy got out of the van, keyed the lock, and popped the trunk lid. He moved three two-kilo bricks of heroin into the trunk. According to Bobby, the bricks, like the ones he’d moved before, were covered in blue plastic and brown packing tape. The big man shut the trunk, got back into the van, and drove away. Ten minutes later, Bobby made a call from the Eastern Airlines terminal.
“It’s done,” he said. “I hope you know what the fuck you’re doing.”
“For the first time in my life, I think I do.”
“I hope it’s not the only time in your life.”
“If you can come up with a better option that doesn’t end up with the three of us dead, Bobby, let me know. Get moving, I’m going to make the call.”
Click.
• • •
There were few benefits from my father’s litany of failures. More often than not, my dad’s going in the tank did not happen with a resounding clap of thunder but with a meek, pitiable sigh. His failures tended to play out like long, sad songs with only tears and debt collectors at the end. Although there was the occasional perk, like the time he thought he would capture the market on the next kid’s fad and bought a thousand star-shaped Hula Hoops from a Japanese importer. They were about as popular as square eggs and kosher bacon, but Aaron, Miriam, and I had a lot of fun with them. It took him about five years to sell them off, and the loss was minimal. Then there was the time he invested some money in a scheme hatched by the sons of two guys he worked with. They were going to build household computers smaller than a TV set. Sure they were.
But one of his ridiculous investments was hopefully going to pay off for me if not for him. About two years ago, he had put money into a personal storage warehouse out in Suffolk County on Long Island in someplace called Lake Ronkonkoma. Only my dad could invest in a business in a place he couldn’t even pronounce. The idea was to compete with the big cold storage warehouses by renting small lockers and garage-sized compartments to people who could come and go as they pleased. Aaron and I went with my dad for the grand opening. We knew it would fail when we saw that almost no one lived in Suffolk County, and that those who did all had big private houses with garages, backyards, and sheds. If it had been built in the city, it might’ve had a chance. If, now there’s a dangerous word. The building had sat empty for a year now. Technically, my dad didn’t own any part of it anymore, but I still had a set of keys. And while it might not have been the perfect place for storage, it seemed like the perfect venue for our showdown with Tony Pizza and Jimmy Ding Dong.
Among the first things I learned about sports was that there were advantages, both obvious and subtle, to playing home games. Knowing which way a ball bounces when it hits a dead spot on the court, or at what time of day the wind comes up, or at what hour the sun drops beneath the bottom ledge of the backboard to shine in your opponents’ eyes, can mean the difference between winning and losing. And since playing ball was the only thing in the world I really knew anything about, I let it guide me. Another thing I knew was that we couldn’t afford to play this game on Tony Pizza’s home court. Bobby explained that he was supposed to drop the heroin off at a body shop Tony Pizza owned on Flatlands Avenue in Canarsie, as he had previously. Scared, inexperienced, and outgunned, we were already at too much of a disadvantage. Flatlands Avenue at night was deserted, and Tony and Jimmy probably knew every inch of the place and the surrounding area. There was no way we could walk in there and have any hope of walking back out. That’s why I dropped the money down the slot of the pay phone across the street from the warehouse and dialed the number Bobby had given me.
“Body shop,” someone said at the other end.
“Let me talk to Tony or Jimmy.”
“Who’s calling?”
“Tell him it’s the delivery man. He’ll understand.”
“Hold on.”
“Yeah, Bobby, what?” Tony barked into the phone. “Get over here. I don’t have time for your bullshit.”