Authors: George V. Higgins
“It’s funny, actually. The hardest part of this racket, hardest thing to do, is kill off this character that works so well. You feel like you’ve
become
him—you get so
you
think he exists too, actually kinda
like
him. And make the druggist who’s been helping him through his sad last days feel bad,
too
, he realizes Clyde is gone. But you
have
to do it. Act’s too good to let him live.
“You keep a dying man dying on a fifty percent overdose of Dilaudid for
too
long, more’n two or three months, say; pretty
soon the pharmacist is gonna get suspicious. ‘This guy’s holding on too long. Dilaudid alone should’ve killed him by now.’ Then he
will
start making phone calls, and that’s the last thing that you want. The way you can tell you played a string out too long is that nice scruffy-lookin’ guy at the counter waitin’ for them to mix some pink cough syrup for his poor little kid turns out to be from DEA—and you gotta setta cuffs on.
“It don’t matter what you’re getting,” Sexton said. “If you’re scoring Darvon, say, which’s nowhere near as strong, your max daily dose’s sixty-five migs every four, three-ninety every day. Give them a month’s scrip for fifteen thousand migs or keep going back too long and you’ll light up the switchboards in every cop house around. The benzoes,
every
body’s favorites—Halcion and Valium’re both not over sixty migs a day, habit forming as can be. You start presenting at that level, eighteen hundred a month, you run up red flags. Demerol—max nine hundred migs a day. Xanax—absolute max is ten migs a day, five tabs. Not supposed to be a permanent part of your diet. Go over two months and you make the man in Walgreens think your problem’s not anxiety or panic—you’re just not happy in this world. Paxil you can have up to fifty migs a day; over fifteen hundred a month and you’re asking for it.
“What we have to do is figure out how one person can get a lot of more of this stuff than a person who’s about as sick as you can get, but not dead yet, or no more’n normally fucked up, ’d ever need to stand the pain or craziness, okay? The opioids like Dilaudid, any of the stuff that does for you what morphine does—not supposed to be for recreation. They’re for
pain
, like when the cancer’s eating your jaw away, or your spine, like that. Or for real bombed-out craziness, all right—you’re so fucked up in your own mind that you’d rather die ’n face another day. They are
not
for having fun with, and the government don’t like it, that’s what
people use ’em for. That’s why they’re so hard to get, and so expensive when we get ’em, and why this’ll take some time.”
“But you can do it, though,” Rascob said.
Sexton’s metallic voice actually sounded happy. “For the right price,” he said, “anyone can do almost anything. And will.”
S
HORTLY
AFTER
5:00
P.M.
THE
SAME
day, FBI special agent Jack Farrier shut off the Ampex reel-to-reel audio recorder on the Officemaster Rentals grey steel desk he as senior agent in charge of the installation had chosen for himself as one of the four least dreary locations in the squad’s temporary quarters. For the foreman of the College Muscle Furniture Movers he had signed the General Services Administration delivery invoices “Ronald Clayton, Int. Div.,” satisfying the young guy’s curiosity by saying, “Intelligence. IRS. Actually—special audit unit. Local. That’s all I’m allowed to say.”
The foreman had looked alarmed, then nodded knowingly. “Of course. Tax time coming up next month. Some poor bastard has to get it. Scare the shit out of the rest of us.” Farrier had smiled.
The desk was next to the window at the southeast corner of the third-floor short-term rental space of the McClatchy Medical and Professional Building on the westerly side of Route 1 in Norwood. Every hour Farrier had a view of women in spandex leggings passing between their cars in the parking lot and Forever You Fitness on the first floor.
“Not all of them’re fat,” he told Hinchey (Hinchey had no window). “Some of them’re in
very
good shape—come here three times a week to stay that way.” Through his shoes he could feel the floor begin to pulse at 5:00 every afternoon, when some forty women started synchronized aerobic step-exercises in the basement.
Taylor at the second window had mildly disagreed, saying Farrier’s eyes must be going bad; most of the women he saw going back and forth were heavy. Taylor called the 5:00
P.M.
session “bouncing blubber hour.”
“You’re not crew chief, Taylor,” Farrier had replied. “Quitcha looking out the window—keep your mind onna tapes.”
By removing his padded black earphones and straining slightly, Farrier could hear the women shouting “
hut-hut, hut-hut, hut-hut
” in time with some throbbing disco music that he couldn’t identify. He smiled and put the earphones down on the yellow legal pad next to his ballpoint pen. To the left there was a stack of 25 black-and-white 3M boxes face up, to the right a stack of six face down. He pushed his chair back and stood up, turning toward the window. Rush hour on Route 1; as usual traffic clogged three lanes southbound and three northbound. The lights made two broad skeins, like bunting, white headlights at the top and red brakelights the bottom, in the dark blue winter twilight.
Fifty-one; 6′2″; 189. Farrier had lost most of his black hair; he combed the remainder uselessly over the bald spot. He’d developed four brown liver spots on the back of his right hand. On his left wrist he wore a Tag Heuer diver’s matte black watch his first wife had given him at Christmas 1981, when he was assigned to the Buffalo, N.Y. Strike Force, about to go free-diving off Key West in January with three colleagues who played golf and skied. “More active in those days,” he’d recall, with some
regret. “People there were closer.” He wore a pale blue broadcloth shirt with an eighteen-carat gold collar pin, a blue tie of Italian silk gabardine, and dark grey flannel trousers.
The collar pin had been a no-special-reason gift in 1994 from his second wife, Cheri—she’d been a secretary in the Buffalo field office—when they’d been together two years, about a year before their divorces became final and enabled them to marry. In those days she was still surprising him with vanity presents, and he still came home with flowers.
There were eleven other Officemaster Rental desk-and-chair sets in the room. At the northerly end: three long grey steel tables holding three videotape editing machines, boxes of 3M videotape, and six straight grey metal chairs. Each of the other desks also held an Ampex reel-to-reel recorder and two stacks of 3M audio tapes. Taylor was out with the flu; besides Hinchey there were eight other well-groomed middle-aged men bowed over their work at the other desks—six white, two black, also wearing shirts and ties. Now that they had heard or glimpsed Farrier knocking off, after a short but decent interval they’d begin to shut down their machines.
Hinchey at the desk ahead of Farrier’s shut off his Ampex, turned his swivel chair, put his glasses on, clasped his hands over his fly, and said: “I don’t
believe
these LCN guys. How much braggin’ they do.”
Hinchey was completing his first year assigned to the Organized Crime Field Office of the FBI Boston. Farrier as senior man on the squad was his rabbi. Hinchey was forty-six, exactly 6’ tall, 170. He’d retained most of his curly blond hair, and was resisting awareness that the hearing loss he had developed in his right ear after being struck on the temple by a foul ball at fourteen in Pony League ball had recently begun to worsen. He wore a white button-down shirt with a dark blue figured necktie and
blue wool trousers. Megan, the youngest of his three childen, a sophomore at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, had just celebrated her twentieth birthday and was living off campus with her boyfriend, twenty-two, but Hinchey had logged sixteen years of dedication to the cause of divorced fathers denied adequate access to their children, and still reserved Thursday evenings for meetings of the Natick chapter of Fathers for Justice. He thought his selflessness—“My own childen’re grown now, but the courts’re still shafting daddies”—made his arguments stronger, and never failed to mention it when he lobbied legislators, represented divorced fathers on bar-association panel discussions, or commented publicly to reporters when another father skipped with his children during visitation.
Farrier laughed. “War stories, Bob,” he said. “Somebody recorded us, they’d get the same kind of shit. Put it behind you. Means this time we
hang
the bastards, using their own words. Make America a place where the Mafia’s extinct.
“Course it also means we’ve spent another day we’ll never see again sitting on our big fat asses, turning little dials. Marking places where what’s on that frigging tape might as well be in mandarin
Chinese
, all the sense it makes to me—fuckin’ accents and the TV blarin’ all the time. All I’m doing is
assuming
that it’s got to be in English, probably with some Sicilian dialect thrown in, just to confuse me—fact is, I don’t know. But now for a few hours that won’t matter. This part of this day is over.”
He bent at the waist and stared at Hinchey. “Here is the meaning of life,” he said. He patted the short stack of 3M boxes face down on the right. “Tonight there’re two more boxes on this side’n there were this morning. Two more eventful days
and
fun-filled nights in the rich and varied life of
capo
Carlo Rizzo and his evil henchmen, but only
one
day out of mine. While on
this
side”—patting the tall stack with his left hand, each box
with a small white sticker on the upper right front corner carrying a black notation of the date it was made—“there are actually two
fewer
.
“Few men can measure out their days and accomplishments, however humble, with such hair’s-breadth precision. I am a fortunate fellow. Though because this particular day is only just beginning, not one
excessively
blessed.”
“Late dinner with the lads for you and Darren, I take it?” Hinchey said. “Little walk on the wilder side tonight with our peerless leader?”
Farrier nodded. “Affirmative,” he said. He frowned and shook his head, looking down at the surface of the desk and moving the pen an inch to the right. He looked up. “I still don’t know,” he said.
“How he’s taking it?” Hinchey said.
Farrier nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “As my dear mother used to say, back when she was teaching, drew a kid who didn’t get it, matter how much help she gave him—‘He’s willing enough but he’s not an apt pupil.’ Brother Stoat plays well with others, shares his pail and shovel, doesn’t hit or bite, and follows instructions well, but he just doesn’t seem to show the consistent steady progress that we like to see. And I suspect, that wife he’s got, this guy hurts for money. Never a hopeful sign.
“Now, I realize he’s still new at this, whole new different world. Twilight all the time—
everybody
needs some time, get used to being in it.
I
needed time, get used to it, when I first was breaking in, I know guys must’ve wondered if I’d ever make the grade. I don’t care what you were doing, ’fore you started doing this—you weren’t ready for it. That’s a fuckin’ given.
“Where most of us come from; kind of people that we are; want to join the FBI—we tend to be pretty straight-arrow types. Have to be honest with ourselves, with each other, at all times.
See ourselves for what we are. Recognize our limitations, imperfections—how they influence our judgment. Law enforcement implied power—that was what we wanted. Thought we’d handle power well; kind of people who should have it; that authority was
meant
for. And how what’s happened to us since has to have affected that kind of person.
“Ordinarily by the time a guy makes it into OC, he will’ve had his rougher edges worn down from the other stuff he’s done. Lost his naiveté. You know, ITSP, ISMV, couple years bank-robbery squad; you’ve been there yourself, so you’ve got some idea, you know? You find out what’s going on. What kind of people do these things, what these guys’re like. Because those other categories, yeah, they’re mostly isolated, individual acts, guys freelancing in a life of crime.
“Well, they’re also the kind of things that OC guys do, too, but they do them
all the time
.
“If you’re going to do this work, that concept is key. That’s the central difference with them—the ordinary, boring
dailiness
of it all. Robbing banks and armored cars, bringing in a tonna dope, hijacking long-haul trailers? ‘
Yeah
—what else is new?’ These are not big
events
to them, like they
are
to other people.
“Regular law-abiding, lawn-mowing, fence-painting, snow-shoveling, kid-raising people—the closest they ever get to that kind of excitement’s when they see it on TV or in a movie. And even then, unless it’s somebody’s shaky handheld home video, shows a cop whaling the shit out of some poor-bastard minority guy, gave him some lip—in which case you can’t see that much—they know it’s only actors, make-believe.
“To your basic career hoodlum, sticking up banks and shaking down smugglers, shooting a guy in the head or actually emptying a thirty-round banana clip into him—those’re things they
do
—not on TV, real life. Normal routine; their
occupations
—just
like restocking cookies and chips in aisle twelve, correcting thirty-two science tests or getting ready for the annual going-back-to-school sale, the kind of things that normal people deal with every day, and every year, their lives.
“Robberies, smuggling; hijacking and fencing; the odd murder now and then, like shooting some guy in the
face
?. While he’s
looking
at you? And probably
talking
to you,
begging
you please not to
shoot
him? These’re just the normal things that the hoodlums’re always planning, like we plan and shop for cookouts, New Year’s Eve parties. Stealing a getaway car, set of plates somewhere else; making sure you got a gun that can’t be traced and a good supply of bullets—this is the way they
live
. But now, when somebody gets
caught
, he’ll almost always sell a friend to save his own white ass.