Authors: George V. Higgins
To this McKeach had said, “No.”
“Whaddaya mean, ‘No’?” Sweeney had said. “I know this’s zoned commercial but I already checked the city and they say there’s no reason at all the owner of a business like a spa or say, a drugstore, can’t put a bed in if he wants, and a place to take a shower and so he can cook a meal. Hell, we’ve already got the microwave an’ little fridge anna coffee urn on downstairs inna backroom there, day and night, Chrissakes, gets more attention from the help ’n the whole rest the store does—what the hell’s problem?”
“The problem is you ain’t the owner and I am and I don’t want you livin’ here,” McKeach said.
“It’s my name’s on the deed,” Sweeney said.
“Yes, it is,” McKeach said, “and it’s also on the liquor license, and that’s
why
it went on the deed instead of mine and Brian G.’s. So the name on the deed and therefore the license application wouldn’t spit out a criminal record when the License Board plugged it in. And that’s the
only
reason—and you should keep that in mind, unless you maybe now decided what you now want is your name comin’
off
the deed, which I can do, just as fast I put it on—in which case it might get chiseled on a headstone.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be
livin’
here,” Sweeney said. “I’d just be
stayin’
here a while—just until I can get things straightened out again with Kay.”
“Which’ll be never, and you know it,” McKeach said, grinning. “Just like it was with Annie, and just like it’ll be when you finally figure out you can’t stay married to Kay if you’re gonna keep fuckin’
Ginny
, any more’n you could stay married to
Annie
, you first started fuckin’ Kay. You’re worse’n Elizabeth Taylor—you think anything you had your dick in more’n twice, it then hasta marry
you
and you hafta marry
it
, or God’ll punish you. It’s a wonder you didn’t hafta divorce your right hand when you started fuckin’ Annie and decided, marry her.
“You know what your problem is? I’ll tell you what it is. Your problem is your dream’s to be fucking two women the same time, but be
damned
if you can figure out how the hell to do it. When I told you and I told you but you just don’t seem to get it, that the only way to do it is the first thing that you do is, you completely stop worrying about what either one of them thinks. Never
mind
what they are thinking. You remember how it was, way back when I was with Traci, and then I started seein’ Dorothy and Traci just went
bullshit
?”
He paused. Wonder and then amusement passed across his face. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “I just said that and it hit me—that
was
thirty
years ago. Nineteen sixty-six I think it was, that we broke up. So it’s
over
thirty years now, since I was with Traci? Shit. I really must be gettin’ old.” He shook his head.
“Traci died, didn’t she?” Sweeney said.
“Oh, yeah, years ago,” McKeach said. “Kids hadda move back in with their father, poor little bastards they were, everyone was sayin’ then, havin’ to go back and live with him, their no-good father, and the only reason they could even do that was it so happened when she got it, Dennis’d just gotten out from whichever place that he’d been in, dryin’ out that time, and ‘How long’s that gonna last, you think?’ That’s what people’re sayin’. And he then surprised the world, got those kids and said ‘Aw right, you’ll live with me, then,’ and he went and got his job back, working for Gillette. Raised those kids, took care of them? So far’s I ever heard at least no one ever saw him take a drink again. Really an amazing thing.”
“Yeah,” Sweeney said, “but Traci there, didn’t she get
shot
?”
“Oh, yeah,” McKeach said, “she got shot. But that wasn’t anything, you know, had anything to do with
her
—she was just there, with Richie Dugan, when his turn came to get it. Which most people were surprised it hadn’t happened to him sooner, fuckin’ renegade he was, sell his mother for a buck. It was him that they were after, whoever it was that shot Traci. Naturally when they got him, since she was there, it hadda be two-for-one day—shoot ’em both. Richie, he’d been gettin’ to the point where he was makin’ people nervous. Very friendly with DeMarco, Al DeMarco, FBI. Very friendly guy, DeMarco. They say he didn’t hafta
take
the candy from the baby—he could talk the kid into givin’ it to him. And you know how Richie was—didn’t take a DeMarco, talk him into doin’ somethin’. Word was he was gonna tell DeMarco who did the Kingston armored car—made some fairly hard guys nervous.
“Traci had to’ve heard it, he had people lookin’ for him. Should’ve known what’s gonna happen, she happens to be standin’ next to him, they find him. Didn’t take ’em long. Hampton Beach. Which
anyone
, I mean,
I
could’ve told you, that’s where he’d go if someone told him, ‘Now just go lie low someplace, all right? Not long, a week or two, while we work it out with Washington.’ So what if it was wintertime, the merry-go-round was shut down and everything was boarded up except a couple clam stands? Wouldn’t make no difference, Richie—Richie just loved Hampton Beach. It was his favorite place to be. And so that was where he went, an’ Traci-little-bitch went with him.
“Those were hard guys, involved in that, that armored-car thing. They did something, like clip a guy, they weren’t the type of guys who leave loose ends around you know? Fix one problem, make another one? Leave an eyewitness? Uh-uh. You’re there they find the guy they want? You must’ve wanted to
come
with him; you’re
goin’
with him, too. Those guys were serious.”
He sighed. “But that was Traci, all the way. Liked the bright lights, and the
danger
—I think she got off on it. She was that way I first knew her, she’s still livin’ then with Danny and there’s nothin’ wrong with him, but you knew, she kept it up, there was probably gonna be. I even told her that myself—and this’s when she was with
me
—that it was really killin’ Danny; an’ she oughta cut it out. But there was no holdin’ Traci. She’s stayin’ out at night on him, bein’ seen with guys like me and Brian? Well, what’m I supposed to do? Leave her standin’ in the street, place shuts down at two
A.M.
? Or take her home and fuck her brains out like she’s clearly got in mind? So I did it, I admit it. And loved every minute of it. But you just
knew
something’d happen, and then sure enough, it did.”
He paused and smiled. “She was one good-lookin’ babe, though, big blue eyes and all that hair? You did have to give her
that. Not the brightest bulb in town, no, but lookin’ like that, you tell me, how bright did she needah be? As long as she’s still young. Why she ever married Danny and then had those two kids with him, that’s one thing I never knew.
“But anyway,” he said, “that was before, long before we got together. And then I started goin’ out with Dorothy, a few times, and Traci heard about it somewhere, by then she’s livin’ with me, and did she ever get pissed
off.
She said I hadda cut it out. Well, I just told her, I said, ‘Traci, this’s something you decide now, what it is you wanna do here. If you want to stay with me, then that is what you should do. And when I’m here with you, I’m with you. And when I’m not, I’m not. And you leave me the fuck alone. An’ if you don’t want to do that, well then, I don’t think you should.’
“And I was takin’ a chance there, and it’s not like I don’t know this—although the time if you’d asked me what I thought was gonna happen, I would’ve said, ‘Well, my thought is she won’t do it. She ain’t got the balls to go.’ But either way I couldn’t let it happen, let no woman run my life. That’s one thing you cannot do.
“I will say she did cross me up, though, little bitch—it turned out that she did have ’em. She did have the balls to leave.
“But hey, okay, she made her mind up, that was how she wanted it—okay, that was still all right with me. Then that’s how it’s gonna be. But anyway, beside the point, John, far as you are now concerned. Point for you is if Kay now knows you’re fucking Ginny and as a result she’s not happy; or if the other one isn’t happy, Ginny, knowing that you still fuck Kay;
any
of that happy horseshit—just never mind it, all right?”
Sweeney looked puzzled. McKeach sighed. “I’m making this too complicated,” he said.
“The way you do it is, you fuck the one that you wake up with, and then you go out for the day and do your regular work.
And then when that day’s over and it’s time now to relax, you then go fuck the other one. And then either go back to the first one, that you fucked in the morning, so you spend the night with her again anna next day’s the same as the one before, or you stay that night with the second one—anna next day it’s then the same thing, but reversed. And you never tell the one you’re leavin’ in the morning, don’t matter which one it is, if you’re coming back that night. She asks you, you say ‘Dunno.’ Period.
“And that is how you do it, if you get it
up
enough so that you
can
do it—which I would think that most guys can, get their rocks off twice a day. They would think that was about right, specially with two different broads; you’d have some variety.
“And that, incidentally, is one thing you’ve got goin’ for you, this’s what you’re doing here—fucking two women every day—they don’t think we
can.
All the stuff they read in all the fuckin’ magazines and see on television, gettin’ laid and so forth, fifty different ways to do it—it’s always about how of course they can come off six or seven times a night without even breathin’ hard. But all we can do it is once. Or maybe, when we’re still young studs,
maybe
twice in the same day, if we could sneak a nap in. So it will generally be quite a while that you can fuck two women before either one of them’ll really believe it. Even if the evidence is in front of her face. Because she doesn’t think you can. She thinks if you’re pullin’ down her bloomers, she must be your only one. But you still have to face it—sooner or later one of them’ll find out, and then if the other one don’t know, well, it’s just a matter of time—she’s gonna.
“And then what? Well, if either one of them don’t like it, then, well, you make your decision and you let one of them go, tell her to just beat it. ‘I’m tiredah yah noise—take a hike.’ And you keep the other one—who then thinks she won. While you start keeping your eyes open for a new one for the place you now got open. The key’s not to let it get complicated.
“Not that I care how you do it, just so you don’t get to thinking you’re comin’ in here an’ livin’ over my store. I’m not gonna have some half-crazy woman that you’re fuckin’ while you’re fuckin’ someone else come in here some night after dark, hollerin’ and screamin’, maybe wavin’ a gun around—gonna reduce competition, shootin’ up the joint and drawin’ cops. This’s where I have my business, and the kind of business
I
do, where I
do
my business matters. Anything else that goes on in here comes way second after that.”
Shifting the duffel to his left hand in order to pull the door closed with his right, Rascob then used both hands to lug it in front of him down the passageway until he had passed the northeasterly corner of the big office. Then, steering the duffel around to his left and counting his steps on the wide planks he could not see underfoot, he carefully followed the bag into the gloom of the space between the studs supporting the interior wall of the big office and the bearing studs of the outside wall of the spa. The dirt accumulated on the inside of the narrow windows under the eaves made the thin remaining light of late afternoon in April into the pale twilight of evening.
When he had counted six paces, he stopped and used his left hand to grope in the gloom at shoulder level, once more—again to his mild surprise and relief—finding the seventh stud in from the passageway, then locating by touch the rocker switch for the single-bulb shop light suspended overhead. He pressed the switch and the bulb came on.
Up against the studs of the outside wall facing B Street there was a faded red steel floor-model Coca-Cola cooler. Three feet high, four feet deep and six feet long, with a top that was hinged at the middle and equipped with a handle at each end, it had been designed in the fifties for use by the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. to ice down as many as two dozen twenty-four-bottle cases of Coca-Cola—576 six-ounce bottles—for free good-will distribution
at public gatherings at which Coke was the only beverage served. The front carried raised white block letters that read D
RINK
and larger white letters in flourished script reading C
OCA
-C
OLA
.
John Flynn had obtained it and three others for a Fourth of July celebration on Broadway in 1953, after Ike had stopped the fighting in Korea, and had so arranged matters that when the Coca-Cola people came to retrieve the coolers on the morning of the fifth one had disappeared. Thereafter each year on St. Patrick’s Day and other public celebrations he used it to chill beer served from the loading dock to loyal customers and friends who knew about the informal gathering behind the Spa, three blocks west of the parade route on Broadway.
Rascob set the duffel down on the planking and used both hands to open the top of the machine and lift it off, resting it against the left end of the cooler. Then he lifted the duffel onto the left-hand corner of the cooler and rested it there.
The cooler was about a quarter full of currency. The contents of the duffel would bring the total it contained to slightly over $631,000. He had finished stacking the currency from the duffel in the cooler and was replacing the cover when he heard the first footfall on the wooden staircase below. He sighed as he spun, reaching out and pressing the rocker switch that shut off the light overhead. He took a deep breath and held it.
The person approaching began to hurry up the stairs, extending his left arm to hasten his ascent by pulling on the railing, making it shake audibly. Then a second person followed the first.
“Max,” McKeach said, first in line, reaching the top of the stairs, “I assume it’s you in there, just had the light on with the money. If it’s not, you’ll wish you were Max, me and Nick get through with you.” Rascob exhaled and turned the light on.