Authors: George V. Higgins
He had entered the warehouse by climbing the four wooden steps leading up to the battleship-grey steel door black-stenciled E
MPLOYEES
O
NLY
at the back, using his left hand to remove the Ray-Bans and his right to turn the knob and pull the door open, and then, once inside, give the door a yank before releasing it to boom shut behind him. While his eyes adjusted to the dim interior he had pushed the Cubs hat back on his forehead and unzipped the black suede tanker jacket, moving his shoulders and sucking his belly in, passing his hands around inside his belt, tucking his shirttails deeper into his jeans, palming the sap out of the place where it lived in the hollow at his waistband over his right kidney. It was second nature to him now, after all the years, gathering his fingers together and inserting his hand through the supple nine-inch looped lanyard he had fashioned six years before, cutting the cobbler’s-grade oiled cowhide stock from the pattern he had made by slitting the stitching of the one Brian G. had shown him how to make, modifying it to make the lanyard an inch longer.
“More whip,” he explained proudly to Cistaro, showing it the day after he made it. He had also added an inch to the pouch, to accommodate more BB shot—another ounce or so, he figured. “More wallop, take some of the doubt out of it.” He had never actually weighed the old bludgeon and he hadn’t put the new one on a scale either, but he liked it even better—“Better heft—ten ounces or so.” He slipped the pouch up under the black knitted wristlet of his jacket so that it lay against the underside of his right forearm, the lanyard looped around his wrist against the base of his thumb.
“You been here five weeks now,” McKeach said. “Brought in
six truckloads so far you put under the floor here, and while the trucks’re still comin’ in you took some of it out, cut it and repacked it, and shipped four trucks out again. Two of them were for Detroit. Don’t know where the other two went, yet—by tomorrow night I will.
“This’s a lot of work you and your guys’ve gotten done here. While no one bothered you,
at any time
, you were doin’ it. You been around enough to know that that’s no accident. This place is protected. For that coverage you pay me.
“And since you been around enough to know that, I shouldn’t hafta drive out here and tell it to you. I hope I don’t also have to tell you that if I know what’s come in here, and I know what you’ve done to it in here, and I know what’s then gone out, and where it was headed to, I can stop it comin’ in, stop you working on it, and stop it going out—any fuckin’ time I want. You must know I can do this.
“You shouldah come to see me
before
you come in. You didn’t. You shouldah come to see me since you been here. You didn’t. Okay, you’re a proud man. Or maybe you’re just a foolish one. But I been around a long time and dealt with both kinds; can deal with either one—as I have and as I will. In your case I decide that I will make this special effort, try and make you understand. I will come and see you, as I am doing here, right now, tell you what you already know. Take a good look—here I am.
“The price’s twenty to come in here. That’s permission. Ten a week to stay. The twenty plus the five you been here, plus the next week in advance. I’m gonna hafta come and see you to collect the rent? All right, then; I will do that. But if you want room service, you pay in advance.
“That’s what I’m doing here.”
Walters gazed at him for a few moments, his smile gradually widening and his eyes beginning to sparkle. Then he put his
hands palms down on the table, arched his back and threw his head back, laughing richly, like a man who’s heard wonderful news.
The men in the shadows behind him were beginning their supporting chorus of laughter as McKeach came out of his seated position, clamping his left hand on the table as a fulcrum; using his right hand and forearm to swing the blackjack out in a backhand arc away from his body; rising up on the balls of his feet in the compact semicircular motion that a lefthanded player connecting solidly with a baseball performs, pivoting his body in his followthrough on the swing, only his front hand remaining on the bat.
The pouch full of BBs sailed out at the end of the lanyard in a wider, faster arc from the web at the base of McKeach’s right thumb and forefinger, catching Walters on the base of the socket of his right eye and his upper right jaw, the pouch flattening on impact, smashing the temporal, zygomatic and maxilla bones and driving sharp fragments of them into the right eye and sinuses, breaking off four upper right molars into his mouth, open in laughter. The blow knocked two of the broken teeth clear, so that they plinked along the table and skittered onto the floor and the darkness, but Walters aspirated the other two and began at once to choke on the combination of bone, enamel, mucus, saliva and blood, making a wet, roaring, strangling sound of shock, pain, rage and fear, at the same time furiously attempting to rise but unable to get his balance and toppling backward off the packing crate, then crashing onto the floor. While he was reeling, trying to stand, McKeach, moving fast to his own left, with his left hand swept the Coleman lantern off the table onto the floor, so that it broke open and exploded on impact, creating a ball of white light. Walters, still roaring, unable to save himself, fell into the fire.
McKeach, running low to the ground, heard one of Walters’ men scream as he reached the door, jerked it open, and went out, slamming it shut behind him—allowing himself to slow down then, approaching the car, grateful for the clean cold air he was gulping into his throat. He unlooped the lanyard of the blackjack from his wrist and stowed it again in his waistband. As he opened the door of the car he heard another small explosion, muffled, in the warehouse behind him, and as he slid onto the seat he nodded, smiling. “Fuckin’
aye
,” he said.
“Y
OU
KNOW
,” M
C
K
EACH
SAID
, “as many times I do it, I still have to admit, I do still go in thinkin’ that I know what’s gonna happen when I’m gonna talk to guys that I don’t really
know.
And I really
don’t.
But I still feel like I do, think if I say something, I know what they’ll
do
? You know how you think that?” He snorted. “I don’t. I never do. I’ve actually got no idea.
“Inna first place, guy is black. All four of them’re black. I’m tellin’ you, my friend, and I’ve said this time again—I don’t give a good shit, anybody wants to say about how we all’re brothers, all the same? They’re fulla shit. May have good reasons for it, really want it to be true. Well, I’m sorry but it isn’t. It
isn’t
fuckin’ true. Those bastards’re wired different. They just do not think the same.
“Most of them, I swear to God, I wonder if they
do
think. But even with the ones that do, you’re still not outta the woods. Because when you try to tell ’em something—‘You don’t do what I tell you, I will break your fuckin’ head’—and you think ‘Now they have to get it,’ you made it so damn plain—they didn’t. It’s like you’re talkin’ a foreign language to them. Nothin’ that they recognize. They sit there starin’ at you like you just got in from Mars, thinkin’, ‘All those moving pictures on TV and stuff, green men and flying saucers? Those guys got it all wrong. These outer-space guys’re mostly the same shape like us, ’Cept their dicks’re
prolly smaller and their skins’re kinda pale. Wonder if they’re good to eat?’ ”
Cistaro laughed.
“I tell you, it is true,” McKeach said, also laughing.
“I went in there, ’kay? I’m in a good mood. ‘Gonna cut this kid some slack. He did me a nice favor once—owe him one for that. He didn’t
know
he was doin’ it, and my guess is he made a lot more for himself off the guys who paid him to do it than I made off of bettin’ other guys he would. But he did it, just the same, and therefore for a guy I don’t even know, who is one big spade to boot, I got friendly feelings for him.”
Walterboy as a sophomore power forward had averaged 23.4 points, 8.6 assists, and 9.3 rebounds per game for the ’77–78 University of Kansas basketball team. Ranked nineteenth nationally for nine straight weeks during December, January and February in the UPI Coaches’ Poll, “the surprising Jayhawks” made it to the Sweet Sixteen round of the NCAA championships in March of ’78 before losing 87–68 to twelve-point underdog East North Carolina. Walterboy limped off the floor with 1:07 left in the first quarter of that game, complaining of a severe right hamstring pull, after scoring five points, one rebound and no assists. He was unable to return to the lineup that night.
“Had the time to follow teams, then,” McKeach said, referring to his stay at the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Leavenworth, “which if you’re planning to put money on them’s the only smart way you can do it. Pay close enough attention to their games and how they play so you get some kind idea what’s liable to happen, they get inna particular kind of situation. And plus which in prison—and this’s something naturally that you yourself would not know, you being such a pussy all your life, never took a major chance on nothin’——”
“Never saw a situation return looked good enough to me, is why,” Cistaro said laconically. “I look at something and I see a
risk involved? What I do then is think, ‘Is what I’m gonna get if I take this chance good enough so if it don’t turn out right, I won’t mind that I got lugged and I’m gonna hafta spend the next eight years my life beatin’ my meat, like some fuckin’
kid
who’s got so many pimples he can’t even get a fuckin’ ugly girl to pull his pud for him—’stead of fuckin’ like a man who’s got some fuckin’ self-respect? Because if it isn’t I’m not takin the risk.’ And so far I haven’t seen any scam looked like it would be, and so I never did.”
He paused one beat. “Whereas you, I guess, you’re so fuckin’ money hungry eight years of lopin’ your pony doesn’t bother you. Or else bein’ a mick you think that’s okay because it must be what the priests do, but gettin’ laid’s a mortal sin. Plus which, spent my bulletproof years inna service. Got all the wild-ass young stuff outta my system, so time I got out, I had some sense, got hooked up with Hugo.”
“You got a point,” McKeach said. “I did some dumb stuff, I’s a kid. But you’ve also had shit luck.” He took the Pontiac down the last long hill in Newton into the valley under Route 128, still crowded with heavy traffic, and commenced the long ascent up Route 9 into Wellesley Hills. “Still, can be educational. In prison you hear certain kinda things you’re not always gonna hear on the outside. Or at least not as soon.
“So I got to where I thought I had a read on these guys, on this team—Walterboy especially. To the point where I thought I could tell pretty well what he’d do if he got in the kind of situation where he had a choice. Where if he did one thing another thing would happen—his team would win the big one. That being the thing most people who follow the team’d expect in that situation. Because they think they know you, or at least what makes you tick—when they actually do not. Whereas if you
don’t
do that thing, the one that they expect, and you do the
opposite
, then as a result the team’ll lose. Or at least not beat the spread enough to make the bettors happy.”
“Well, of
course
,” Cistaro said, chuckling. “Heck,
everybody
knows that.”
“Okay, you can laugh,” McKeach said. “But you keep on forgettin’—the things that everybody knows, most people in fact
don’t
know. And those’re the things we
do
know, and make most of our money on.
“So I think, What if what this great player wants to have happen
isn’t
what the fans want—huh?
“ ‘Fuck them, and fuck the fuckin’ team,’ he thinks. ‘What’re all them fine white folk doon fo’
my
ass? I’m just a big nigger from Harlem to them. Who’s playing this fuckin’ game anyway? Who’s the talent here?’ Get yourself in
that
frame of mind, then you don’t give a shit about anybody else—just want to do
yourself
some good.”
The dark imitation Gothic spires of the convent school high on Maugus Hill to the left ahead of them made columns of solid darkness against light pollution generated by the gas stations and fire station clustered in the valley of Wellesley Hills beyond it. The building had been converted years before into a Massachusetts Bay Community College, and the lights in the windows of the evening-class rooms below the towers burned like campfires.
“Keep in mind now, this’s twenty years ago. That’s a long time. Lotta things’ve changed since then. Don’t seem that long a time, two old guys like us, but to most people and in lots of things it is. Pro sports is one of them. NBA didn’t draft kids out of college then, they still had some eligible years left. Even they dropped out first year, never played a game. Which meant they either played the four years or else they sat on their ass ’fore their chance at big dough legit. And that was not as big then either.
Teams gave bonuses back then, sure, but only to the guaranteed top players. Which Walterboy was not. He was good, yeah, no question, but he was no Larry Bird.
“Word that I’m gettin’ while I was inside was that for a player, he may not’ve been that burn-the-world-down
good
, but he was fairly smart—which not all of those guys are. So I figure if he’s smart then he knows at least what I know about his pro future—pretty much a tossup. And I also figure, ‘He’s this smart, he wants money.’ Why else do people do things? What the hell else is there? Money more than anything. And if possible, money
today. Now.
“This is the other thing that the people who bet on his team to win this game themselves want, and therefore think that
he
wants. But the difference is that he can
do
something to make the game come out the way he wants, and they can’t. Therefore if I am right about him, he’ll know how to find somebody who will give him serious money to do something so the way the game turns out, as far as
he’s
concerned, the result will then be
great
—for him. For the people bet on it, it will’ve come out bad. If I’m right when the time comes, he will do the
different
thing than they all expected, them and the sports books too, and his team will’ve
lost
—or at least not beat the spread.