The Weight (23 page)

Even after I felt him start to give, I didn’t speed up, just pulled all the way through until I touched down.

The fat guy mumbled something, and we shook hands. Left hands, ’cause his other one was in that cast.

I could tell the people watching were happy, but nobody really said anything to me.

Except Buddha, later. That’s when he told me what the fat guy’s hustle was.

“How’d you know?”

“I’ve seen his act before. That other guy with him? He’s the moneyman. Backs his boy against anyone who wants action. He’s slick. Never does anything lame like
asking
for bets, but he’ll cover anything you put down. If you ask him for odds, he’ll give a little—three-to-one is about as far as he can go without tipping his play.”

“Why didn’t you tell—?”

“Like I said, I’ve seen his act before. The way they work it, they just pick a guy who looks like muscle. Every joint like this place, they always got guys look like you. Only, this time,
I
had the sleeve ace, not them. I know you don’t have a power arm, Sugar. Lefty, righty, makes no difference to you.”

“I guess not. But I still don’t see why—”

Buddha put ten C-notes on the table between us. “Your cut,” he told me. “I got the three-to-one, on a grand. The money guy, he saw me take the cash out of my shirt pocket, figured me for a degenerate gambler. You know, the kind who bets on any fucking thing, because they gotta have action going all the time.”

“Huh!”

“He’ll make it back by the end of the week. You didn’t hurt his boy.”

“How could I hurt a guy doing … that?”

“If he
resisted
, you could. But that’s not the way he’s got his man trained. He takes one real
blast
. If he can move the other guy, he reloads and fires again, until he breaks through. But if he can’t move the first time, he won’t fight too hard when the other guy comes back against him. He knows he could get his arm broken that way.”

I put the thousand in my jacket. “What if I had lost?” I said.

“I would have taken the moneyman off to the side and asked him if he wanted me to cut the cast off his guy’s hand. In front of everyone.”

“That’d get him—”

“Sure would. But all he has to do is pay off
my
bet. He does that and he gets to walk out of here with all the other money he just banked. It’s the perfect play, see?”

“Perfect for you.”

“You just got your cut, didn’t you?”

Buddha never even smiled. For him, it was business.

I started to think about how that was a side of him people didn’t know. It was like he had some of Ken’s guts, and some of Solly’s brains. He didn’t just know the rules, he knew how to make them work for him.

Lucky for me, I was only a couple of blocks from the apartment by then.

I wanted to be tired, not sleepy. So I lifted for an hour or so. Drank lots of Gatorade. Took a steamy shower.

Then I sat back and closed my eyes.

Buddha having a side hustle didn’t mean he wasn’t still Buddha. Anybody seeing him work that hustle wouldn’t think,
Buddha, he’s not the same man he was
. They wouldn’t worry about him not waiting with the motor running, no matter how nasty things got on a job.

But what if anyone heard of me offering to give someone up? If it was some guy who knew me, I wouldn’t be me anymore. Not to him, not to the other guys he’d tell. Not even to myself.

Like those prison choices.

I didn’t know the rules for someone like the guy who owned that jewelry store. He wasn’t one of us. So maybe I didn’t owe him anything. But I didn’t
know
.

Who could I ask? Solly, he’d know. But then he’d also know what I’d been ready to do. And Solly was the only one that store
owner could roll on—he didn’t know any of the men who’d actually pulled off the job.

Christ! How fucked in the head could I be? I met Woods thinking I could give up the jewelry-store guy without breaking the rules. But I didn’t know anything about that guy, only Solly did. And if I even brought it up, Solly’d have questions about
me
.

I started shaking. Not like I was scared, more like I had this terrible fever.

If that cop hadn’t turned me down …

When I woke up, I was on the bed, facedown. I must have … I don’t know. Maybe I blacked out when I got to the part about why the whole thing mattered so much. Sure, I did that scumbag’s time for him. But it wasn’t that much time, and I slid out from under a lot of worse things when I took the deal. Plus, I still had the money.

And the cop had warned me about that Order of Protection thing. I couldn’t go near that girl, even if I knew where she was. I didn’t even know her name—it wasn’t in the papers. And she hadn’t been in court when I was sentenced—like to make one of those statement things.

I stopped myself, because I knew where I was going. In my head, I mean. There’s things you don’t think about. Not if you want to keep your mind right.

That’s what rules are for. And that’s one thing I
did
know, the rules. I was raised on them.

Not everyone knows the rules. Or maybe different kinds of people have different ones.

Not everybody’s the same. For men like me, you can do all kinds of things as long as you stay inside the lines.

Some guys, they make a big score, they go through it all in a week. That’s okay. Stupid, but okay.

Those guys, they always get caught. Either they splash so much money around that people can’t help noticing, or they live straight, like they’ve got a job and all, but they pick too expensive a neighborhood.

Thing is, you want a rich-suburbs lifestyle, you have to
keep
working. No time off.

It doesn’t matter if they blow a big score in two weeks or live on it for five years—soon as they need money, they go back to work. They can’t be picky, so they take whatever’s on the table.

You never want to work with guys like that. They get known. They know the rules, sure. But it’s not that you’re worried about them giving you up if the job goes bad, it’s that any guy who
needs
the money, there’s a lot of ways he can take everyone else down with him.

Like if the planner says we’ve got two hours between rotations for the security guards in some building. But it turns out that we’re not getting into the safe in any two hours. The box man says there’s some new stuff on it, going to take him a lot longer than we planned to be in there. Something like that happens on a job, what you’re supposed to do is walk away.

But a guy who
needs
that money, he’s not leaving. So he changes the plan. That’s hosed right there—nobody can make up a good plan in a couple of minutes.

I know because it once happened to me, just like that. The guy who
needed
the money, he took over. “You,” he said, pointing at me, “we need more time. We know the guard’s rounds; he’s on his way right now. All you have to do is go down the hall and wait for him to walk past you. Old guy like him, they wouldn’t even trust him with a gun. Step out behind him, choke him out, and we’ve got
another
two hours to get this thing open.”

“Not me,” I said. I didn’t say why. You never have to say why unless it’s something that was in the plan from the beginning.

I picked up my bag. Two of the other guys got their gear together; one of them kept looking at his watch.

“Fuck it, then,” the guy who needed the money said. He took out this little black gun from one pocket and a silencer from the other.

The three of us got out. The guy who needed money stayed. So did the box man and one other guy. I didn’t know any of them, never worked with them before.

They stayed inside the lines, right to the end. The guy who
needed money, he stood up and said he was the one who’d killed the security guard. Said the whole job was his idea. He even said he made the other two guys stay—if they had tried to leave, he would have shot them, too.

It was worth a try, I guess. If the jury believed the other two hadn’t known he was carrying, they might have cut them some slack.

But they put the killing on all three. It doesn’t matter who pulls the trigger, everybody pays the same. I even heard of a getaway man who got life for killing a bank guard who went for his gun. The driver never even went inside the building, but it didn’t make any difference.

There were a lot of good reasons for me not trying to choke out the guard. You hit a guy over the head with a pipe, you might knock him out … or you might kill him. I learned that from the doctor who closed up my face during my first bit.

“You know how people say, ‘He’s got a thick skull’?” that doctor said.

“Sure,” I said. “They’re always saying it about me.”

“Well, in your case, it’s not a pejorative.”

“A what?”

“Derogatory. A put-down.”

“But it means you’re dumb, right?”

“Yes,” the other doctor in the room said. “That’s the way it’s used. But in the medical sense, the human skull can vary in thickness. Here, look at this.”

It was a pair of X-rays, side by side. “Yours is the one on the left. The one on the right is normal. Average. See how much more bone there is in yours?”

“Yeah. Is that why that hatchet didn’t chop into my brain?”

“Exactly,” the first one said. “Dr. Leong is a radiologist. He was the one to bring this to my attention.”

“What are you, then?”

“What am …? Oh, I see. I’m a dermatological surgeon. When you first came in, the ER triage team sent you up to the cranial unit. Head wounds bleed considerably, so it wasn’t until the scans came back that you ended up in this wing.”

“That’s why my head’s shaved?”

“Yes. The fracture of the skull was so mild it was barely discernible. It will heal on its own. It was my job to suture the wound.”

“You are most fortunate,” the X-ray doctor said. “Dr. Trotta is one of the finest plastic surgeons in the country, and he came right over from the university. The reason the prison transported you straight to this hospital was because a brain injury was assumed.”

“Huh! You’re right about that one, doc. If those guys in the prison infirmary had stitched me up, I’d probably be blind in that eye by now.”

Neither of them said anything. For the first time, I felt scared. “The eye, it’s okay, right?”

“Certainly,” the first doctor said. “The weapon’s major force was to the hairline. It cut all the way down to below the eye, but it didn’t touch the eye itself. You have a heavy shelf of bone above the eyebrows. That’s what saved the eye.”

“Thick skulls, they’re good for something, huh?”

Both doctors smiled. Even the nurse. She’d been over in the corner; I hadn’t noticed her until I turned my head a little.

“Have we answered your questions, Mr. Caine?”

“Yeah,” I told them. “And thanks for what you did.”

“Could you perhaps answer a question for me?” the X-ray doctor said.

I figured he was going to ask me who did it, but I wasn’t even close.

“How could someone get a
hatchet
inside a maximum-security prison?”

“Make it himself. Or buy it.”

“That seems … bizarre.”

“I don’t get what you’re saying.”

“Lethal weapons
inside
a prison—it seems like an anomaly.”

“If you’re saying it doesn’t add up, you’re wrong,” I told them. “If you were walking down a dark alley in the middle of the night, wouldn’t you want to have some kind of weapon with you?”

“I … I suppose so. But how is that—?”

“Prison’s like that, doc. Every day.”

I hadn’t heard about that thick-skull thing, but I’d never hit a guy in the head with a pipe unless I wanted to kill him. Same for choking him out. There’s a little bone in the throat. You crush that, the guy dies. But I wasn’t thinking about that. All I heard was
two hours
 … playing like a song you couldn’t get out of your head.

The three who went down never mentioned the three of us who left. If they’d gotten away with the job, none of us would have come around asking for a share.

That’s the rules.

I was never going to put myself in a position like that: where I needed money so bad that I’d have to change a plan.