"Listen," he said, "you muthafuckas keep your mouths shut, you hear me? Don't say nothing to nobody, not your momma, not your baby's momma, nobody. I gonna call you in the morning." I pulled away, looked back at them standing there on the corner, watching us.
* * *
The storage place was this old warehouse way the fuck down near Coney Island. We had already rented a stall there. The building was an old printing plant, fourteen stories high, poured concrete, bars on the windows, metal doors. It was on a block where the other buildings had all been torn down, the neighborhood was all chain-link fences and weeds, just this one big art decolooking warehouse, nothing around it. Our stall was on the twelfth floor. Rosey grabs a few more stacks of money out of the box he had broken open, he hands me a couple, sticks the rest in his pocket. "We did it, Mo." He's grinning ear to ear, first time I ever saw him do that. "We did it, muthafucka. We rich now."
"We ain't in the clear yet."
"Don' worry," Rosey said. "Everything gonna be fine."
Rosey showed his ID to a security guy behind a bulletproof glass window. The guy checked it against a paper list, opened the door and let us in. We piled the boxes on a wooden pallet. I was trying to do the math in my head as we went. I figured there was about four hundred pounds there, give or take. I tried to guess how much in each box, and how much altogether, but without sitting down and counting it, there was no way to tell. The guy fired up a forklift, picked up the pallet, we all rode up the freight elevator. We got it all put away, right, locked up, the place looked pretty secure. I guess that's why Rosey picked it. We got back in the van, Rosey held up the key to the storeroom. "Look," he said. "I got an idea. Just so nobody gets any bad things in his head, okay, let's leave this key in a hotel safe somewhere. We'll tell the guy we need two claim tickets, he has to get them both back before he gives up the key. Time comes, we both gotta go back together for it. That way, we can both feel comfortable. You okay with that?"
"Yeah, sure." I felt like a guy buying a new car, he knows he's getting fucked, he just doesn't know how. That's the way we played it, though, we dumped the van, and we left the key in the hotel safe at the Omni on Fifty-third Street in Manhattan, just the way Rosey said. We separated on the sidewalk outside. Rosey gave me that shit-eating grin again, walked away looking like a winner. I put the claim ticket in my pocket, went home to catch some sleep. I had a feeling I was gonna need it. I had the thought then, I should have settled for one box. I should have taken one box from the van, let Rosey drive away with the rest, but I hadn't thought of it in time.
* * *
I slept most of that next day away, woke up in the early afternoon. I took the twenty grand Rosey had given me out of my pocket and laid it out on the kitchen counter, and I put that claim ticket on the counter next to the money. I didn't want to think about it, I didn't want to have to go where thinking was going to take me. I wanted to trust Rosey. I wanted to believe that the two of us would meet in a week or so, split the money, and go our separate ways. I couldn't, though. What's that old rule? Do unto others? I remembered a big hit some guys pulled off back in the seventies. People still talked about it, it was like Captain Kidd's treasure was buried in Brooklyn someplace. What happened, a bunch of guys, maybe ten or twelve, took down a cash shipment out at JFK. The take was just short of six million. Talk about critical massover the next year, all of those guys came up dead except for one, and he died in prison, of cancer, couple years later. If anybody knows what happened to the money, they ain't talking. Six million, whatever it was, it was too much to handle. I don't know if it says anything about the guys involved. Maybe not. Maybe there was just no safe way to cut it up and walk away. Bad things had to happen, and they did. It was inevitable.
The claim ticket lying on my kitchen counter was never going to buy me anything, I knew that. I remembered it as I sat there, it's an old scam, they used to call it the pigeon drop. It was Rosey's idea of getting fancy, switch the real claim ticket for another one he had in his pocket already, he winds up with the two tickets the attendant would need to give up the key, and the one I had gives you the booby prize. That was why he picked the Omni, he must have gone there ahead of time to get a third claim ticket, which was the one he'd given to me. It was touching, in a way. Rosey was giving me an out. As long as I had that ticket, he didn't have to kill me. I could walk around with it in my pocket, all happy and shit, and he could take care of business. That way, he gets away with the money, and I live to talk about it.
Ah, but there it is, there's the rat turd in the oatmeal. I'm still alive, right, I can still talk. When they come lookingand brother, they willI can say, guy you're looking for goes by the name of Rosario Colón, about so tall, all of that. My guess was that Rosey hadn't followed the logic that far yet, and I was safe until he did. But Rosey was no dope. It wouldn't be long. I went into the bathroom of the place where I was living and looked at my face in the mirror. You talk yourself into it yet? That's what I wanted to know. You all right with it yet? It would really be self-defense anyhow. Right? But I couldn't tell, from that face looking out at me, much of anything at all.
It isn't just your face that forgets how to smile. For a long time, growing up, I hadn't found a hell of a lot to laugh at. And that expression you wear on your puss all the time, sour or hostile or resentful or whatever it is, it sinks in, it seeps into you, it prints itself on what you are inside, and then it's not a mask anymore, because you can't take it off. It's you, you're it. I got all the excuses you want, but they don't mean shit.
* * *
It was in the
Post
the next morning, same day as the meteor shower, right, cops found three dead guys in a Dumpster out in Queens. Rosey was as good as his word, he had taken care of them. I took the train into Manhattan, wondering if I was going to be in time. Rosey might have moved the money already, but if he thought I'd bought his scam, he might have just left it where it was. I went into a big sporting goods store up near Union Square, a place where they sold serious mountaineering gear. I spent about twenty of those nice clean hundred-dollar bills on rope, a climbing harness, some cam-lock tensioners sized for a three-inch crack. I also bought two of the biggest duffel bags I could find, green, like army surplus, big enough for me to fit in myself. You had one of them to put your dirty clothes in, you wouldn't have to do laundry for a month.
* * *
It was not quite dark when I parked the U-Haul truck behind the warehouse. It hurt me to actually rent the thing, but it seemed the smart thing to do. The warehouse looked like it was built back in the twenties. It was an industrial building, but it had a certain elegance to it, a kind of a solid dignity. It was still a factory, but it was built back when they gave a shit about factories. You could have had pride that you worked there. There were vertical grooves cast into the concrete of the outside wall, the grooves led up to the tenth floor, where there was a terrace, a flat ledge about four feet wide, and then the building went up four more floors to the roof. I waited another half hour until it was dark enough. It was an easy climb, actually. The cam-lock tensioner locks securely into the vertical groove, you rope yourself in, reach up as high as you can with the other one, lock that one in, pull yourself up, and so on. I put on the climbing harness and went right up like a spider. It might sound scary, but it's not. It's a hell of a lot easier, and saner, than walking into a room full of desperadoes and taking their money. The only thing I needed to worry about was a couple of places where the concrete had gotten a little crumbly. I thought, while I climbed up, This is the kind of shit I should have stuck to. No partners, no scams, no guns. I popped a window on the tenth floor, took a stairwell up to the twelfth. It probably took more time to open the boxes and transfer the money into the duffel bags than it did to climb up. I thought about leaving a few bucks behind, just to fuck with Rosey's head, but I didn't do it. When I was finished I closed the door on all those empty cardboard cartons and humped the bags down to the tenth-floor ledge. Too bad the stuff wasn't all in hundreds, it would have made for a much smaller package. As it was, it took me two trips. I counted the bundles as I was packing the money, and put it right at two million. About two hundred pounds per duffel. I lowered the bags down first, climbed down after them. I dumped the climbing gear in one of those used-clothing boxes in a strip mall somewhere in Brooklyn. It always bothered me to do that, but if a cop caught me with that stuff, he'd take one look at me and throw my ass in jail. Good thing I tossed it, too, because a cop pulled me over just as I crossed the George Washington Bridge into Jersey. The guy nearly gave me heart failure, but he just wanted to tell me that the truck had a taillight out. I showed him the rental papers, told him I had just picked the thing up, which I had. He looked at my license. The name on it was Emmanuel Williams. Manny is clean, he doesn't have any convictions yet, no points on his license, he even has a good credit rating. I spent a lot of time and money setting him up. Call it an unofficial pardon. I always figured, I survive long enough to retire, I could be Manny. I guess it was my lucky nightthe cop didn't feel like writing me up, so he let me go.
I stayed in a cheapo motel in Hackensack that night, took the duffel bags into the room with me. The next day I rented a storeroom of my own, stuck the bags inside. I paid the guy for six months up front. It was still hard for me to believe that I was actually gonna get something out of this, other than a bullet. The guy in the office of the storage place gave me a paper grocery bag, and I took a hundred thou with me when I left. I don't know why, it wasn't like I really needed it, I hadn't even spent the twenty Rosey gave me. I guess I did it just to prove to myself that it had really happened. It was late in the afternoon when I got the truck back to the U-Haul guy.
"Hey, buddy," I told the guy. "Fix that taillight, will ya? You almost got me a ticket."
"Yeah, yeah, sure," the guy said. "You leave the key in the truck?"
* * *
I dropped off the paper bag at the place where I was living, but I couldn't stay there, I was too keyed up. I decided I had to go look at the Leonid thing that night. The paper said you had to get out of the city, go out where it's dark, so I took the subway up to Brooklyn Heights to steal a car. I boosted a Volkswagen GTI, which is one of my favorite cars. Guy bought the four instead of the six, the cheap fuck, but at least he got the five-speed stick. I jumped on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and headed back for Jersey.
If you cross the George Washington Bridge and head north on the Palisades Parkway, there's a lookout up on the state line, up on the cliffs. It's got to be a couple of thousand feet up above the Hudson. It's a great place to go and look at the city at night, also great for watching migrating eagles, hawks, falcons, and so on. It was dark when I got there, maybe about one in the morning, but the parking lot was full, there were more cars than I had ever seen there before. I got out and laid on the car hood, and as the engine cooled off I started freezing. It was colder that night than I expected it to be, plus there's usually a pretty good wind up on the bluffs.
They came in bunches. You'd see two or three shooting stars together and the crowd of people up there in the dark would ooh and aah and then there would be nothing for a few minutes. In the crowd there was one example of the common tufted Jersey blowhard, this one was a male, and he's going on in the stentorian bellow native to the species, "Orion is right over there, and that's the Big Dipper, and if you follow the handle out you can see
" and like that. I listened to it for a while, but he just kept it up, they always do, and finally I felt obligated to point out to the guy that he should shut the fuck up before someone from Orion went over there and kicked his ass.
I suppose I've been spoiled by video games and computer-generated dinosaur movies. They were just quick streaks in the sky, maybe three of them in the space of an hour and a half were what you'd call memorable, big enough to leave a sort of afterglow, a neon green streak that took thirty seconds or so to fade out, but it's something, when you think about it. This stuff has been flying through space for six or seven billion years, if you believe what they tell you, and it's dying tonight, burning up, and the only ones watching are a bunch of loonies from Jersey and one thief from Brooklyn. I wasn't thinking about that at the time, though. I was wondering how pissed off Rosario was gonna be when he opened up his rented storeroom, whether or not he was already trying to find me, also whether that chickenshit crested Jersey gasbag was looking around the parking lot, seeing if there were any cops in attendance. I didn't need the attention, I was already a two-time loser. Next time I go away I'm gonna do serious time. And how stupid would that be, get away with two million bucks and then get busted for hassling some loudmouth asshole in a parking lot? I left while it was still dark.
I really didn't want to go back, and I drove down the parkway wondering what Leonid was really all about. In primitive societies they would probably know, the old men would probably stay up all night watching, they would probably attach some spiritual significance to the event, fast for a few days, start looking for a virgin to sacrifice. I paid the toll at the bridge, asked the guy if he had seen Leonid, but he didn't know what I was talking about.
I dumped the car back where I got it. Hey, I try to be a good guy when I can. By the time I got back, though, my head was all fucked up. Last thing in the world I wanted to do was get back on the train and go home. There was a little park a few blocks away from where I left the car; it runs over the top of the BQE behind some brownstones. I had done a few B&E's in the neighborhood, but nothing recent, so I went over and sat on a park bench. You can't watch the sunrise from there because it comes up behind you, but I stayed there while it got light. You can see the whole of Upper New York Bay from there. It made me wish I had brought my binoculars along. It ain't much of a place to watch for birds, though, mostly what you see there are herring gulls, cormorants, and your basic assortment of ducks. There's supposed to be a nesting pair of peregrine falcons that comes back to the Brooklyn Bridge every January, but I've never seen them. You wanna see birds, the best place to go is Central Park, as insane as that sounds. Think about it: New York City is right on the migration path, right, the bird's doing his thing, he gets tired, okay, all he can see for miles around is fucking buildings, then all of a sudden he sees this big green park, got its own lake, trees up the ass. Stands to reason, right?