The Weight (13 page)

A towel, also in plastic. Toothpaste, toothbrush, mouthwash, shampoo. Comb, soap, nail file. Pack of three disposable razors, shaving cream.

Then another towel. Loose cash, mostly twenties. Two cell phones: the prepaid one Solly had told me about, and another one—a real one. Half a dozen envelopes, address and stamps already on them.

There was also a gym bag with a shoulder strap, the kind a
serious bodybuilder would carry. I opened it. In one of the inside pockets, a driver’s license with my picture on it. Visa card. Registration for a 2007 Mustang. Insurance, paid through the end of the year. Scotch-taped to the registration was “Home Depot parking lot,” and an address.

Business cards. A bank statement. Stack of checks. An ATM card, with one of those little sticky papers on it. “PIN number,” it said. And a single key, stamped “303.”

I figured the address on the business cards was one of those private-mailbox places, and the phone number would be that second cell.

Stanley Jay Wilson, personal trainer, had a little more than two grand in checking, another eleven in savings.

And three names that could be either first or last ones.

Everything I needed to find a place to live. Plus the message Solly didn’t need to write out: find one
quick
.

That bank account was in Queens. Forest Hills. I took the subway.

The bank manager was a guy about my age, but nothing fit him right. Too loose, all around. Even the skin on his face.

He tapped keys, looked at a computer screen on his desk. “I hope you’re going to get a good deal this time, Mr. Wilson.”

“Me, too,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

“That is, if you’re about to do what I think you’re going to be doing.”

“I just came here to—”

“You were such a
steady
saver,” he said, like I’d done something to let him down. “Two hundred dollars a week, like clockwork. You had quite a fine balance built up. Money that could have been
working
for you. I understand how you would need a car for your line of work, especially if you have clients out on the Island.”

“That’s true.”

“And I know it’s a buyer’s market now, so you can probably get into a new car really cheap. But you finished paying off your car loan a couple of months ago. That was … just about eight hundred
dollars a month. Imagine if you put that money into savings instead of starting a new loan.”

“Well, I—”

“Yes, I know. Some of the dealers are offering these ‘no interest’ loans, but you’re an intelligent man, so I don’t have to explain that they make that up in the price of the car,
especially
on a trade-in.”

“Hmmm …”

A little color came into his face. “You take the car as a business expense, don’t you?”

“Uh … sure.”

“All right, look at it this way: the mileage allowance has gone up
considerably
. Your car certainly isn’t
that
old. And, with your loan paid off, you don’t have to carry the mandatory collision insurance, either.”

“I never thought of that.”

“How would you like to
triple
what your money is earning, starting today?”

“Sure I would. Only …”

“Instead of taking ten thousand out of your savings account to add to your car as a trade-in, you could turn that money into a CD. As you know, with the prime rate so low today, we’re forced to pay a really low interest rate on savings. But we have a dynamite promotional offer, starting this week. If you’re willing to purchase a thirteen-month CD with that ten thousand, we can give you a
guaranteed
two-point-two-five-percent return. Plus the safety and security of true FDIC insurance coverage. How does that sound?”

“It actually sounds pretty good,” I told him.

“And if you continue to do all your banking online, we can also give you
free
ATM usage. We have branches all over New York. I see you’ve only used your card … 
very
rarely. One, two, three … eleven times in five years. So I guess that privilege wouldn’t be so valuable to you. Still, you never know when you’re going to need cash, anytime, day or night.”

“That’s true.”

“Well, we could offer you a choice of premiums, actually. Here, look this over while I print out your statement as of this morning.”

He handed me a strip of heavy, slick paper, with the bank’s name at the top. I could get a tote bag, an emergency road kit, a free safe-deposit box …

“This looks pretty good to me,” I said, handing it back to him, with my finger pointing out what I meant.

“Oh, it
is
. Everyone should have a safe-deposit box, for valuable papers, or bonds, or … well, anything you want to make sure is always protected, no matter where you live.”

“Sold,” I said, holding out my hand.

He shook it like he’d just closed a million-dollar deal.

When I left the bank, I left a lot of money behind. I don’t mean that CD—I mean three hundred K in the little safe-deposit box. I really had to pack it in careful; the “box” was more like a long, hollow metal slot.

The bank manager warned me not to lose the key to that box. If I lost it, they’d have to change the lock, and the charge for that was a hundred and fifty. He looked a little ashamed of himself for waiting to tell me that until after I bought the CD. I guess that’s why he waited to tell me the box was only free for a year. After that, it’d cost me twenty-five a month. I signed another card so they could automatically take that out of my checking account when the time came. I saw from the printout he handed me that they were already doing that with the bill for the cell-phone number on my business cards.

I got back on the subway, a local headed toward Manhattan. But I got off after only a few stops. After that, I walked.

If it wasn’t for the license number, I couldn’t have found the Mustang. It wasn’t even one o’clock in the afternoon, but the lot had a whole bunch of them. I knew mine was green, but even that didn’t narrow it down enough.

When I found mine, I pushed a button on the key holder. The car beeped once, like telling me I’d been right.

I got behind the wheel and headed back the way I’d just walked.

It was righteous of Solly to set me up with all the ID. That was way past what the rule called for: if you ride the whole beef for everyone in on the job, all that means is your share has to be there when you make the door.

Sometimes, it could be more than one guy going down, but the rules don’t change. You hold up your end, the other guys hold up theirs. Five men on the job, four get popped, that fifth man better be holding four shares. That’s why it’s better to have a planner—lots of things could happen to that fifth man over a few years.

If you fall, it’s okay to do something for yourself. You don’t have to plead not guilty and take your chances. You can take a deal. If you can clear up a whole lot of cases for the cops, you might score a pretty decent offer. Doesn’t matter if you did them or not. Nobody cares. Solved is solved.

That doesn’t happen too often to guys who do my kind of work. Those deals, they’re usually for killers. Not hit men, sickos who get off on doing it. Those kind, they
want
to talk about what they did, unless they’re holding out for a book-and-movie deal.

The cops, most of the time, they’ll respect you being a professional. It takes a long time for them to do that, though. My first time down, the cops told me, if I wouldn’t help myself, I’d be doing everyone else’s time for them. They also said I wouldn’t get any play from the DA unless they cleared it first.

That’s all a lie. NYPD Special. The truth is, they
always
want a plea. Unless the case makes the papers, that is. Once the media gets hold of a case, then the DA’s Office has to play hardball. Otherwise, unless they’ve got you dead to rights, they don’t want a trial.

Even the Legal Aid guys know this. They’ll sit down with you and tell you what they think the case is worth.
Any
armed robbery can land you with a quarter to do before your max-out date. Twenty-five years. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a first offender or a working pro, the top can’t be more than that. For one job, I mean. If you’ve been down before, every year you can cut from the
top is worth a lot, because then your minimum is half your max. There’s always a going rate for pleas. Even for a guy like me.

Sure, the cops’ll look me over, tell me, “You’ve got enough sheets for a king-sized bed.” Meaning, so many priors they wouldn’t fit on one piece of paper. Actually, what I’ve got is a lot of arrests. Only two convictions, and one of them a misdemeanor. Until I took the last one, I mean.

But that’s just cop-talk. They know it’s not up to them. If some ADA wants to cut a few years off your time, there’s nothing they can say about it.

It’s funny. The kind of work I do, the smoother the job goes, the more slack they can cut me if I get dropped. Armed robbery, that’s one thing. Armed robbery where you have to
use
the weapons, that’s another.

There’s all these fine little edges. You break into a warehouse, cart away a truckload of loot, that’s something you can deal on. But if you break into a house, not so easy. Those cat-burglar guys, you never know what they were really after, see? But with guys like me, the cops know it’s always money.
Only
money.

The law makes you aim high. Take down a bank or stick up a liquor store, it’s still an armed robbery. If they’re going to lump it all in that same bag, why take a ten-year risk for cigarette money?

Must be the way those black-glove guys start thinking after a while. Once they’ve got the girl captured, they know what’s next. Even if they let her go, they’re
still
going down forever—that kind of thing, it’s probably got twenty different crimes tied up in it. Murder, that’s Life, too. So why let her go, maybe have her testify against you?

But on a professional piece of work, the cops usually know where to look. And they’re not the only ones.

It was Ken that changed that, a long time ago. Solly told me Ken was the first heister who wouldn’t pay tax on his work. Used to be, you pulled a job in anyone’s territory, you had to let them slice a little off the top. Probably started back when the families were only taking Sicilians. I even heard you had to ask their
permission
first.

Solly really admired Ken. He never got tired of telling stories about him. Not what you might think, though. What he liked about Ken the best was the way the man stuck pins in so many balloons.

“You go up to some poor bastard, working his ass off to support his family, and you sell him fucking ‘protection,’ yeah? He don’t pay, you bust his place up, then you go back and tell him, ‘See? The cops can’t protect you, but
we
can.’ That’s not a man’s work. Me, I do a man’s work
.

“So—you gonna protect me? You got cops that’ll look the other way, judges on your payroll? That’s some insurance I wouldn’t mind buying
.

“That’s what Ken told them at the sit-down,” Solly told me. “And when they said, yeah, they
did
have that kind of juice but they couldn’t put their
names
on the table—could they?—Ken, he says: