Double down, p.7
Double Down, page 7
“That was yesterday.
Things’re changin’ now,
Visions of the past
Never gon-na last;
Winds’re risin’ fast,
Measureless and vast.
Nothin’ never last.”
D’Marco looked on in disgust. He despised all that pounding jungle music and all the wiggling and writhing that went with it. Personally, he liked Barry Manilow or Neil Diamond. Some of the old Sinatra songs were good, too. Winds of Change—sounded to him more like fucking broken wind, inflated elephant wind. And he had ninety minutes of it yet to endure. Every job you took you earned your money, but some—like this one—a whole lot more than others.
Along about 9:30 a portly fellow in a beryl-blue suit appeared in the entrance, and the caterwauling din broke off midnumber, and the blonde uncoiled an arm in his direction, and the drummer did a roll, and every head in the place swiveled, D’Marco’s even, while the entertainers and bartenders joined in still another rousing chorus of the Andy anthem. The object of all this unmelodic celebration acknowledged it with a hand in the air, fingers splayed, and an elaborate bow. Then he signaled a resumption of the revel, and on command the music swelled, the frame-frozen dancers reanimated. Prince Andy swaggered into the room and circulated through the crowd, palm-slapping, rump-patting, bicep-clutching, smiling widely, now and again fabricating a stagy laugh. Sharing the largesse of his attention and substantial person. His head was uncommonly large, shaggy with a thick brush of iron-gray hair, and anchored to his shoulders by a fat-ridged neck. Piglet eyes bulged from a swarthy, jowly face ruined by assorted excesses, framed by Dumbo ears, and propped by secondary, tertiary, and a dwindling succession of nether chins. He seemed to move with a kind of ponderous deliberation, as though he were towed along behind the beam of that headlights smile. Eventually it led him to a table near the platform, where a place was hurriedly made. He eased his bulk into the chair, a drink was produced and thrust into his hand, and he tilted his head back and bubbled it down. D’Marco watched him with a mix of pity and contempt. About an hour of smiling left.
Shortly after ten a woman came weaving up to the bar, made straight for D’Marco, and invited him to dance. Not a bad-looking head, if you liked the flashy, slutty, pavement-princess type. Which he didn’t. Zoned-out witch like that probably call it a dry hump and present you with a bill the minute the music stopped. And a case of AIDS six weeks later. Dose of clap at the very least.
“I don’t dance,” he said, staring her down coldly.
“Well, par-don me, your fuckin’ highness,” she siren-shrilled, staring right back, hands planted on hips, swaying a little. Her bleary eyes settled on the pecs bulging under his shirt. “Thought maybe you musclemen had something swingin’ between your legs. Guess I was wrong.”
D’Marco could feel himself reddening. Feel the amused eyes of everyone at the bar skimming over him. Ordinarily and in a different place under different circumstances he’d’ve decked her, cold-cocked her. Showed her what wrong really meant. But he couldn’t afford any messy tangles just then. “Why don’t you go try your luck with somebody else,” he said.
“It’s you I’m talkin’ to, Mr. Muscleman.”
“Yeah, well, you’re talking to yourself,” he muttered, turning away.
“ ’Smatter, you don’t like girls?”
None of this was in his plan. Last thing he needed. He came to his feet and big-shouldered his way around her and through the knots of people, heading for the door and the asylum of the parking lot. “Muscleman don’t like girls,” he could hear her calling after him, “gonna find a boy to hit on.” Braying barroom laughter trailed him to the door. He didn’t look back.
And now, standing at the rear of his LX in the deserted lot, all he could feel was a mounting fury. Focus it, he instructed himself, channel it, direct it. You know who you are. Where you’re going. Fewer than fifteen minutes left to wait anyway (so the luminous dial on his watch told him); better to spend it out here, in the clean air and silence, under a brilliant night sky swarming with stars. Right? Right.
These internal dialogues had a way of soothing him, settling him down. He inserted a key and lifted the trunk. Inside was the canvas bag that held all his stunt gear. Earlier he had narrowed his choices down to two: blowtorch or pick. Fire or ice. He’d been given carte blanche on this assignment. (“You’re the expert, Frog,” the phone voice had said. “Do what you want, long as it stings.”) So the decision was his to make. Flame was always good, but the conditions here didn’t favor it. Go for the cold tonight. He rummaged through the bag till he found the icepick and a roll of adhesive tape. These went into one of the pockets of his jacket. Into the other he fitted the .32 he habitually carried along on stunting, throw-down piece, case the subject got frisky. Insurance.
He closed the trunk and took just a moment to scan the terrain. Andy’s Fun House was located out in what was left of the country north of Juno Beach and south of Jupiter, set well back from the highway, parking lot in front and along one side, stand of fishtail palms on the other. Its nearest neighbor, a competitor saloon, was a quarter of a mile down the road. The LX was parked at the far end of the outer file of cars, with direct and easy access to the highway. Arrangement couldn’t be more ideal if he’d laid it out himself. But then he knew that already, since he’d taken pains to scout it when he first arrived.
At a leisurely pace, he walked through the front lot and past the entrance and around the corner and down the side of the building, trees side, keeping to the shadows. In the back was a single door with a small light above it; and a few feet beyond, next to the wall, a dumpster; and beyond that, in a space reserved for Mr. Scalisi by a prominent sign, a white Lincoln Town Car. Otherwise there was nothing at all back here, just a ribbon of asphalt bordered by an empty field of scraggle grass reaching off into the distance. More of that ideal.
D’Marco slipped behind the dumpster and squeezed himself between it and the wall. His position was such that he could cover both the car and the door. He’d been assured Andy held to pattern, came through the door five minutes after the first set ended, climbed in the back seat of the Lincoln and waited for the blonde to follow, ten minutes after that, like they had everyone fooled, and kneel on the floor of the car and transport him into rapture-land. That’s what he’d been told, but he didn’t like surprises. As it was, he was working inside a narrow window of time. And his line of work, even stunting, allowed for no witnesses.
And so he stood there, bathed in moonlight, flattened against the dumpster, rhythmically filling his lungs with the pure night air (tainted a bit by the sour stink of various unidentifiable table leavings sifting through the crack beneath the lowered lid), listening to the insistent screech of bug buzz rising from the field and the muffled throb of music from the other side of the wall. Steadying himself. Waiting.
There were no surprises. At 10:30 the music suddenly ceased. At 10:33 Andy came marching purposefully through the door, humming some spirited, unrecognizable tune. Early tonight, must be in serious heat. D’Marco stepped out from behind the dumpster and stationed himself between Lincoln and hurrying wop and said in the sunny, hayseed voice he liked to affect at the onset of a stunt, “Hi there, Mr. Andy. Come out to take the air?”
Andy stopped. The humming stopped. The distance between them was maybe ten feet, no more, and Andy squinted through it with the intense prying gaze of the man who sizes you up rapidly and classifies you according to a simple test: Can I use him? Can he hurt me? Fall anywhere outside those elemental categories and you were a cipher in the eyes of Andrew J. Scalisi, invisible. From the wary look on his face and the belligerent, wide-legged stance, he didn’t seem certain yet which pigeonhole this figure blocking his path fitted, though he wasn’t taking any chances either. “Fuck’re you?” he growled.
“Friend of some friends of yours,” D’Marco said good-humoredly. This was the part he always liked best, the prelims. “They asked me to have a word with you.”
“Yeah, ’bout what?”
“Oh, nothing special. They just said drop by, get acquainted.”
“Get acquainted, huh? Which friends mine is it, told you that?”
“Forget their names. You got so many.”
“You forget,” Andy sneered after a pause, as if he’d used the instant to consider D’Marco’s answer carefully, assess him, and consign him to his proper rank, which was somewhere below worm level. “Okay. That’s cool. Tell you what, them names come back to you, you come see me. Make an appointment. Right now I got business.”
He took a step forward. D’Marco stretched out an arresting hand, rolled it over to show it was empty, harmless, and said in a wheedling tone, “I was hoping maybe we could talk tonight. Only take a minute of your time.”
Andy braked again, only now he squared his fleshy shoulders and poked out his oversize head, and his fists began balling, and in a voice dipped low and snarly and filled with cruising menace he said, “Listen, ratfart, I don’t know you, don’t wanta know you, and don’t got no friends who’d know a dickdribble rube like you. So what I’m recommendin’ here is you do a Casper. Before you end up bruised.”
D’Marco put both hands in the air and backed away slowly. “C’mon, Mr. Andy,” he said, still in his whiny gear, “I just come by to have a friendly chat with you. Way they sing it inside, you’re not supposed to be mad at nobody.”
Preceded by the aromatic trumpet of his musky aftershave, Andy advanced on the retreating D’Marco, saying, “You got turds in your ears, boy? Watch the lips. They’re tellin’ you get lost. Vanish. While you still can.”
Now D’Marco felt the door of the Lincoln pressed against his spine. He reached inside the pocket of his jacket and removed the .32 and leveled it and brought the stalking Andy to another sudden halt. A slow, dangerous smile spread across D’Marco’s face. “Funny how you put that,” he said casually, though no longer whining. “Like a coincidence. Y’see, that’s what your friends said was your problem, too. Hearing, I mean. Said you were getting to be a regular deafie, comes to paying attention.”
Andy’s eyes wavered. All his expression changed. “Hey, don’t go ballistic on me,” he said, indicating the gun.
“Oh, you don’t want to worry about that any. I always had a real steady piece hand.” D’Marco extended it, as though in evidence, and then he came around behind Andy and laid the muzzle against his trembling neck. He did a quick patdown, found nothing.
“Look,” Andy said with a kind of beggarly desperation, “you wanta talk, we’ll talk. Whatever they’re payin’ you I can beat easy. Doubles. Trips.”
“Honest, Andy, that the goods? You’d give me that kind of money?”
“Name the figure and you got it.”
D’Marco went silent a moment, like he was actually seriously considering. Give the greaseball a sliver of hope. Before the roof caved in. Finally he said, “Well, that’s awful tempting. Got to think that one over. While I do, I’d be obliged if you’d just lay down on the ground there.”
“Ground?”
“That’s right. On your tummy, arms behind your back. Think you can do that for me?”
“Listen, I’m talkin’ the large dollar here—” Andy started to say, but D’Marco jabbed the gun into one of the sausage rolls at the neck and Andy expelled a long despairing sigh and got down on hands and knees and then, as directed, stretched himself out across the asphalt and crossed his arms over the small of his back. D’Marco dropped onto him, straddling him and pinning the arms with the full weight of his body, and in a series of nimble moves he slipped the gun in one jacket pocket and got the tape and icepick out of the other. He grabbed a hank of Andy’s hair and yanked his head back and rolled a wide swatch of tape over his mouth. Still grasping the hair, which felt slick and oily in his hand, he wrenched the head sideways and held the icepick in front of the eyes and traced lazy rolling circles in the air. Leaning in close, he said, “That’s a real handsome offer you’re making me, Mr. Andy. Triple money. Afraid I got to decline, though. Man’s got to protect his good name. You can understand that.”
Their faces were only inches apart. A coil of veins pulsed in Andy’s temple. From under the tape came gagging noises, as if he were having difficulty catching his breath. His naturally bulging eyes were steep with terror, full of pleading, dread. But in all the twenty-nine years of his life, D’Marco had yet to perform his first act of mercy, and tonight would be no exception to that impeccable record. “You know what they say,” he said solemnly, “buy the ticket, take the ride. That’s just how it is, man.”
He forced one side of Andy’s face flat against the ground and spiked the icepick into the exposed ear. Then he rotated the head and punctured the other ear. He bounded to his feet as the tidal wave of pain rolled south through the twitching body, washed up on its farthest extremities, reversed itself and surged back again, stringing a trail of convulsive shudders in its wake. Andy’s hands, abruptly freed, clawed at his ears as though to stop off some immense thunderous roar audible only to himself, for in fact the only distinct sound was the whistling screech of the army of insects in the field behind him. D’Marco stood there a moment, how long he couldn’t say, not long, observing the results of his efforts with a clinical dispassion. And then, because time was closing in on him, he got out of there fast.
By driving at a sensible speed, well within the limit, D’Marco was able to make it home shortly before midnight. Home was a spacious, expensively furnished, immaculately clean apartment in a small complex just off Glades Road in Boca Raton. Nice quiet location, respectable neighbors, elderly folks mostly, a few studious-looking Florida Atlantic graduate students, a widow or two. For the time being a good place to live, handy to all the routine facets of his orderly life.
The first thing he noticed on coming through the door was the flashing red light of the answering machine. He was radically beat, what with the late hour (on nights he wasn’t professionally engaged he was ordinarily in bed by ten), the drive, workout, stunt, inhaling all that smoke in the rackety bedlam of a bar—been a long day. But since his number was of course unlisted, the winking light could only signal more potential business, so he figured he’d better at least listen to the message. He set the canvas bag on the floor and pushed the button to Play and the tape rewound and a voice unfamiliar to him said, “Frog? Callin’ on a referral from some associates of yours, Miami, said you might be interested in takin’ on an assignment for us. You are, you wanna call this number, tonight if you can, tomorrow morning latest? Ask for Eugene.”
D’Marco printed the number on the ruled notepad labeled “Things to Do Today” that he kept beside the phone. He didn’t recognize the area code, so he opened the directory and checked the listings. Northeastern Illinois—had to be Chicago, for certain. Nothing else up that way.
In spite of his weariness, D’Marco felt a flutter of excitement. He’d never gotten any business out of the Midwest, didn’t know anyone up there. Though in the past couple of years he’d done a little here-and-there work for some people in New Jersey, essentially his bread-and-butter trade was local. So he took this as a piece of encouraging news. Maybe the beginning of the making of a nationwide rep. His impulse was to place the call right then, but he made it a practice never to act on impulse and after careful deliberation rejected that notion. Tomorrow would do just fine. The quintessence of cool was never to have to reach.
He went into the kitchen and shook a handful of vitamins from his pill container and swallowed them with water. In the bedroom he got out of his clothes and hung trousers and jacket on pants and coat hangers respectively, noting with some irritation the stain on the jacket’s back. Goddam dumpster. Stain better come out. If it didn’t, he’d factor the replacement cost into his expenses fee, along with mileage and dinner. That was only fair, pricey jacket like that. In the bathroom he washed his face and brushed his teeth and scrubbed his hands and shot a couple of quick flexing poses at the mirror. And in bed he fell immediately into a sound and dreamless sleep.
PART TWO
EIGHT
Friday, June 19—a day for phone conversations.
At 8:30 a.m. (an hour later by Eastern time) Bennie placed a person-to-person call to an officer of the Palm Beach Gardens branch of the Barnett Bank. Over the years he and this gentleman had done a considerable amount of business, much of it by phone and not all of it strictly banking, and so Bennie’s request—to wire fifty thousand dollars immediately to a small bank in Downers Grove, Illinois—came as no great surprise to the officer, though he did indicate it would require the better part of the day for the transaction to be effected, and he observed, in passing and with bankerly solemnity, the Key Line Services, Inc. account balance was dipping perilously low. Bennie said Yeah yeah yeah, just get it up here, okay? And the officer said Certainly; and they rang off.
Next he phoned Eugene. “Stump,” he said, “I got the principal for you, but that 50K vigorish, that’s gonna take a little while.”
“You heard what Dietz said last night, about negotiatin’.”
“I’m talkin’ a few hours here, Stump.”
“How few?” Eugene demanded, and in his voice there was none of the warmth of friendship renewed after the lapse of these many years.
