Guzman said, “No, thanks. I don’t want to be a drug dealer.”
“Oh, I wasn’t offering anything like that. You’d need some balls to deal. I just figured two matching Honduran boys could shine both my shoes alike.”
Alvin and Chuy and Rogoso laughed, but Guzman and Corona stared at them, their faces unreadable. Gaffney said, “What’s that all about?”
“Nothing,” said Corona. “He’s just telling jokes.”
Rogoso seemed frustrated. “How long is this going to take?”
“I don’t know,” said Gaffney. “Mr. Kapak said he would be around twenty minutes.”
Rogoso took off his raincoat and set it on the table along the wall. He unzipped the lining and revealed a row of pockets full of money, and began taking the stacks of cash out of it and tossing them on the table with an audible flap. When he was finished, he said, “This is eighteen thousand five hundred dollars. I don’t have time for him to drive over here at ten miles an hour like an old lady.”
Gaffney took the money and began counting rapidly, laying each thousand to the side as he finished counting. Alvin and Chuy, Guzman and Corona stared into each other’s eyes and occasionally touched the pocket of a coat or behind their backs, the places where they had hidden their weapons.
There was a knock on the door, and Guzman backed to the door and opened it. The waitress tried to come in, but Corona stood and said, “I’ll take the tray.”
She looked unwilling, because she could probably see at least some of the money, and she wanted her tip. She caught sight of Rogoso and his men, and seemed to reconsider. “All right.”
“Bring her in,” Rogoso said.
“No, that’s okay,” she said, and started down the hall.
Alvin and Chuy brushed past Guzman, ran three steps, and caught up with her. They seemed to lift her by her elbows, then turned around, walked back with her, and shut the door.
Rogoso came close, smiling. “Are the zombies any good?”
“Sure. But I just deliver them. I don’t make them.”
He took one from the tray and held it up to her lips. “Taste it for me.”
“I’m not supposed to drink when I’m working.”
“Sip it or I’ll think you put something in it.” He pushed it against her mouth and began to pour.
The waitress looked at Gaffney for help, but he was still counting rapidly, unaware of her, so she took some in and gulped. She started to cough, and Rogoso put his hand on her back and patted it, hard. “Here. You’d better finish it and bring me another one.”
Gaffney said, “You made a mistake. It’s not eighteen five. It’s only seventeen thousand.”
Rogoso put the glass down and glared at Gaffney. “I think you’re wrong.”
“No, I’m not. I put each thousand in a stack on the table as I went along. You can count it for yourself. Did you forget some, leave it in the car by mistake?”
Rogoso looked at Alvin and Chuy, then saw they were staring at Guzman and Corona. While he was teasing the waitress, Guzman and Corona’s guns had somehow found their way into their hands. The two men still sat where they’d been, but each of them had a gun resting on his lap.
The stillness lasted for a few seconds without anyone lowering his eyes or moving. Then Rogoso said, “I’ll take a look.” He released the waitress, who hurried out the door to return to the club.
He went to the table, picked up a thousand-dollar stack, riffled through it, and set it aside, then another. Next he counted the stacks. “I guess you were right. I counted wrong. Only seventeen thousand here.” He shrugged. “I probably left the rest on my desk.” He glanced at his watch. “Now we’ve got to move on. Tell Kapak I’m sorry I missed him”
“Sure,” said Gaffney. “Want me to ask him to call you?”
“No,” said Rogoso. “This eighteen thousand was the only business we had with him tonight”
“Seventeen thousand”
“Right.” He smiled. “See you around” The three men went out the door toward the club. Gaffney and Guzman and Corona followed them to the parking lot, and then watched them drive away.
Later, when closing time had come, Manco Kapak looked at the ranks of tall stacks of bills on the counting table in the back office at Siren. He was momentarily tempted to do some skimming—just fold a few hundreds into his pocket. It would be stealing from nobody. But by now his attitude toward the Internal Revenue Service had become a superstitious dread. He put both of his hands in his pockets and watched his three men putting the money into the maroon canvas deposit bag.
When they were finished he knelt by the wall and opened the locked desk drawer where Gaffney had stored the seventeen thousand dollars in cash that had come from Rogoso’s drug business. He added it to the twenty-one thousand that had come from the food, liquor, and cover charges, and the house’s rental fees for private lap-dancing rooms.
Kapak put the money together, wrote in the total on the deposit slip, and handed the canvas bag to Jerry Gaffney. Corona and Guzman slowly tugged on their sport coats over their thick arms.
Tonight Kapak wanted to maintain the impression of trust. He had been around long enough to know that some people could be trusted. But he did have a precise sense of what each of his associates could understand, remember, and do. He had an approximate sense of what their financial thresholds were and tried hard not to exceed them. He could be confident that Corona and Guzman would guard his thirty-eight thousand dollars, transport it, and get it into the night deposit of the Bank of America branch, even if St. Michael and all the angels stood in the center of Ventura Boulevard swinging fiery swords to stop them. But he would never have asked Corona and Guzman to deposit five or six hundred thousand. He would not have asked Jerry Gaffney to deposit any money with his brother, Jimmy. They could never be counted on to watch each other. They were a conspiracy from birth.
He walked out with the three men and stood by the doorway to watch them get into Jerry Gaffney’s car and drive off. He could see that the majority of cars still in the lot belonged to his employees. The rest belonged to young men who didn’t see any need to hurry home. He could remember being young and feeling that way. Even boys who were good at arithmetic couldn’t quite get themselves to believe that there would be thousands of other nights just like this one, so they could afford to stop and let the girls go home.
It didn’t seem necessary to stay around here while the bouncers herded the last few customers out and the rest of the staff finished cleaning the place up. They knew enough to lock the doors. Kapak got into his black Mercedes and started the engine. As he pulled away from Siren, he saw the front door open again and the last group of customers file out. The big lighted sign high on the pole above the flat-roofed brick building went out and the door closed, but the floodlights on the parking lot would stay on until dawn. At 6:00, Harkness the day manager would be in opening things up and preparing the building for the morning deliveries: liquor, soft drinks, linens, bar napkins, food. By 9:00, they’d have the place restocked, and the cooks would start preparing for the lunch crowd. The first of the dancers would arrive around 11:00 to limber up and put on their costumes. Most of the early shift had kids they took to school in the morning. They arrived with no makeup and hair either in ponytails or under scarves, carrying cups of coffee. They left in the early afternoon, out the back door to the lot to pick up the kids. Then the sequence of evening shifts would begin again.
He drove along Vanowen Street at forty, not taking a chance that a cop would pull him over, search the trunk, find the money he was going to add to the take at Siren, and think it was his lucky day. When Kapak drove late at night, he always saw cars driven by people who appeared to be drunk, nearly all of them young men. He supposed he deserved the risk because he was one of the bar owners who made them that way.