Sweeney on the Rocks

by Allen Morris Jones

  She blows smoke. “No chit chat, huh. Just straight to bed.”

  “Not for me, no. I’m kind of engaged. You know, more or less.” Still, some part of him—the basic, reptilian, reproductive core back behind the cerebral cortex—wakes up and smells opportunity. Their sex had been so, so good.

  “So, you and Rachel…?”

  “Her name’s Marilyn now. Yeah, somebody left the coop door open, we both flew.”

  “I’m married now, too.” Glances away in what could be guilt or grief or guile.

  “Congrats to the lucky fellow and all that.” Some part of himself, he’s appalled to note, deflates. “But seriously,” Sweeney hops off his hood and walks around to open his truck door for her, “let’s get you off the street. We could drive out to my place, be about fifteen minutes…” he remembers his sink stacked with dirty dishes, the beer cans overflowing out of garbage bags. “Or where are you staying? You got a motel room?”

  She’s staring at his door. “Anything for money, huh? Kind of ironic, seeing as how that’s why I’m here and all.”

  “You got a motel room?” Sweeney looks up and down the street.

  Sure she does. The Blue Sky, half a dozen blocks to the east. The same fleabag, in fact, that had harbored the dead guy’s rental car.

  Inside his truck, she slips off her boots, puts a bare foot on his dashboard to massage the arch. It’s a gesture so unguarded, so familiar, it sucker punches him right in the heart. “You live here, Cosmo?” she says. “This little town? Jesus, how do you stand it.”

  Sweeney pulls into the parking lot. “So how’d you know which…uh, town?”

  He notes the parking spot that had last night held the dead guy’s Taurus. The car’s gone.

  Tina says, “What’s wrong.”

  “Nothing. What room, again?”

  ~

  Sweeney should call Aggie. Instead (what’s another ten minutes?) he gets comfortable on the second of two beds, ignoring the No Smoking sign to tip ashes into a plastic cup half full of water. “So.”

  “How do I look, Cosmo. Do I look good?” Touching her hair. Used to be, she’d be coy about her second glass of wine, making it last. But now she has a silver flask from her purse and pours gin over ice from the hotel’s machine. She doesn’t offer him one. Curled up on the other bed, putting her stockinged legs together, dig the sound of silk against silk.

  “You look good. So.” He holds up his ring finger. “Who’s the lucky fellow?”

  “You’re talking different now. You got that Midwestern twang thing going on now. All Brent Musburger and shit. I like it, it’s nice.”

  “Thanks.” He waits.

  She drinks her drink and pours another. Rubs her face. In the dim light of the bar, what had looked like an artfully-arranged, cascading mess of hair is, in fact, simply a mess. Take a step closer to the comb, Tina. Her nails have seen better days and the collar of her blouse is raveling at the corners. “How long you been dead now, Cosmo?”

  “Call me Sweeney.”

  “Ohhhkay. How long?”

  “Ten years. More, I guess.”

  “Lot can happen in ten years.”

  “You ain’t shittin’.” Some portion of every day spent wondering about the tiny dramas playing out, even now, back home in Brooklyn. “You keep in touch with anybody from the old days?”

  “Yeah, I mean. Yeah.” She takes one of his cigarettes. Lights up. “After you died, me and Eddie started a thing. Kind of. Kind of where you and me left off.” This last said in a tentative, wistful way.

  “Eddie? My cousin, Eddie?”

  “Yeah, we been married, what is it, six, seven years now.”

  How do you even start to digest this? “So. Uh. Wow. Okay. How’s he doing?” Back then Eddie hadn’t even liked Tina. What was his word for her? Hoity-toity.

  “Not too good right now. Neither one of us.”

  “Okay…?”

  “Eddie’s the one sent me out here. He’s, we, we’re in a pinch. He’s kind of laying low for a while. Waiting until you and me can take…some of the heat…off.” Her voice dwindles to a whisper. “Fuck it. I’m scared, Cosmo.”

  During the subsequent long silence, Sweeney thinks: Shit.

  Tina sees him wrestling with it. “I gotta take a leak.”

  “Always the lady.” One of the things he’d liked about her. Coarse and crass, but the poise of British royalty. Nobody could flick a cigarette like Tina.

  He can’t help comparing her now, though, to Aggie. Who wouldn’t say piss if she got dunked in it.

  With Tina out of the room, Sweeney finds his ring box. Flips open the lid and gives himself a second or two. Trades the box for his cell phone. “Yeah, hey, it’s me…Yeah, I know. I’m sorry baby. Yeah. Okay, well, let me fill you in on all this later. Okay. Trust me? Okay, yeah. Thanks, babe. Talk to you soon…Hour or two, at the most. Okay. Bye.”

  Tina’s standing in the bathroom door, blouse untucked. “Short leash, huh?”

  ~

  Tina settles in with her third glass of gin. “So what I want to know, I mean, why the car crash and funeral, right? Why not, just, you know, phew….” she kisses her fingertips, “… disappear.”

  “My mother, my sister, Eddie. Ma familia. You too. Those Russians, they got no….decency. Is maybe the word. That guy got sent up to Sing Sing? Bytchkov. He ever thought I was still alive? He’d have gone after everybody. Sisters, cousins, whatever. When I turned states, I didn’t want a chance, not a single chance, there’d be a vendetta on the table. My one condition.”

  “You did it for me.”

  “Yeah. In part.”

  “You never thought about….” She stares into her drink. Opens her mouth, shuts it again.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Forget it.”

  “So you and Eddie? How’d that happen?”

  “Dangerous men, Cosmo. You got me hooked.”

  “And college?”

  “Couple years into it, well. It lost its spice.”

  “Now here you are.”

  “A man who states the obvious.”

  “How’d you find me?” The question of the hour.

  “Eddie. He figured it out. I got the idea it weren’t too hard.” She stares at him, acting cool.

  Sweeney can play that game. “And how’d he take it when he found out I was still alive?”

  “How you think?”

  “Pissed?”

  “Yeah, I mean…yeah? Cousin Cosmo? You know how much he grieved over you? That first year after the funeral, he lost like twenty pounds. And he was already skinny. You meant more to him than I ever will. I’m just being honest. Then once he found out, couple months ago I think, he figured, yeah, you must have had your reasons, Russians and all.”

  “I’m surprised he’s not out here himself.”

  “He’s been, yeah uh, preoccupied.” She twists hair in her finger.

  “Well, whatever shit you got yourselves into, you’re still in it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “There was a guy in town showing around a photo. Asking about you.”

  A little drunk, she’s taking it pretty well. “What’d he look like?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Might, yeah.”

  “Short little guy. Clothes horse. Shoes built up on the soles. Ring a bell?”

  “Not even a bit,” she says, but might be lying. Tosses off her drink and taps on the plastic rim with a fingernail, beating out a rhythm. “Wanna know why I’m here?”

  ~

  He does, of course he does, but what Sweeney finds now, more than anything, is that he wants to hear about home. He wants gossip. Ten years. Ten years of squeezing pennies like they were pimples, ten years of lying in bed and wondering about his sister, his cousins, about Eddie, he needs information, needs details he can roll around in his head during the next fifty years of sleepless nights. “So where are you guys living?”

  “Bensonhurst, on Seventy-second? Got a little red b
rick townhouse. It’s nice, Cosmo. Two stories, three bedrooms. These gorgeous big pictures windows on the second floor. Eddie put em in special so I’d have good light for my houseplants. Neighborhood’s gone wall to wall Chinamen these days, but we got good parking.”

  “You keep in touch with any of the old gang? Mike Maio? Jimmy Ruggino?”

  “Oh yeah, I mean. Some.”

  “So?”

  “Well. Mike’s down at that penitentiary in Atlanta, twenty to life. He got drunk and ran over some old lady.”

  “Wouldn’t that be involuntary, though? I mean twenty to life for a hit and run?”

  “Yeah, but. He drug her under the car for a while? Claims he didn’t know she was under there, but you know Mikey. He’s got that weird sense of humor? Anyway, there was this school, PS 128? Out for recess, and yeah, all these fourth graders stood at the fence, watching him drag this sweet old lady for like half a block. Some of those kids were in therapy for, you know, months.”

  “He never was the sharpest knife. What about my family? Uncle Joe’s kid Cathy was dating some Mexican. How’d that ever work out?”

  “Yeah, Cuco. He’s Puerto Rican. Owns his own plumbing business in Newark. Has like twenty guys working for him. Cathy and Cuco, they got a couple kids. Cuties. But I mean, we don’t see them much. Eddie and Mexicans, right?”

  They talk for half an hour. Finally, Tina stubs out her cigarette, says, “This is great and all, memory lane, don’t get me wrong. But I drove all this way in my little Toyota, which doesn’t get great gas mileage by the way, and…”

  “You drove?”

  “Through South Dakota, Cosmo. I mean, Jesus. You ever been to South Dakota? Just to find my old flame. And now he apparently doesn’t give a shit why.”

  “Yeah, all right. So. Why?”

  She exhales. “Finally.”

  ~

  “You never used to carry a purse.”

  Smoking, using both hands to dig around in her handbag, she squints up. “Yeah? You never used to wear blue jeans or apologize. Pot kettle black, right?” She comes up with a clenched fist. “Okay. You remember how you and Eddie were always talking about efficiency of effort? The big kahuna score, the one you could use to leave the life?”

  “He told you about that did he?” This, more than anything, brings home how his lady on the side and his best friend have been living lives intertwined. Efficiency of effort had been Eddie’s favorite phrase. Rather than nickel and diming all these little hijackings and blackmailings, he was always looking for that one. Big. Score.

  “He got it, Cosmo. He got it. Problem is…” She opens her fist and tosses him a piece of crushed gravel. “Problem is, we got no way to move it.”

  Sweeney snags the stone out of the air. Opens his palm.

  Poorly lit between his heart line and life line, here’s some kind of rock, man. A blob of a stone. If it weren’t for the sides flattened out into octahedrons, he might have just spit out a wad of bubblegum. He holds it up to the light. The surface winks palely opaque. He bounces it in his hand. “Is this what I think it is?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “The biggest fucking uncut diamond I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “Ding ding ding. The man goes to the bonus round.” Tina stubs out her cigarette in her gin. “Take that times four or five dozen. Enough rocks to fill up a ten gallon hat. That’s what we got. And given the people Eddie pissed off getting hold of them? Yeah, pretty much the whole wide world. We got no way to move them.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “You’ll get your cut, don’t get me wrong. Ten percent? Management fee?”

  “You want me to find a buyer? Out here in Montana.”

  “Shakespeare in Montana. Take the wiseguy out of the city, is our thinking, right?”

  Ten percent. Despite himself, he’s already thinking: Why not half? “Where’s Eddie during all this?”

  “Laying low. The heat he’s got on him right now? It’s like the limbo. How low can you go.”

  “And who’s bringing the heat?”

  She lights another cigarette, smoking and staring, judging. “I’m not sure that’s a need-to-know sort of thing. Need-to-know basis. That was always what you were always saying, remember?’

  “I’m in Montana. I’m dead. What harm could it I possibly do.”

  She shrugs.

  “So how’s Eddie expect me to move a hatful of diamonds?”

  Standing up, she twists her silky legs his direction, him on the edge of the bed. She folds his fingers over the stone and straddles him slow, arms crossed around his neck. “Cosmo, mi amore.” She kisses him lightly on the forehead, then the nose. The mouth. Her lips open slow, and her tongue gives him a tentative tap. “We got faith.”

  You ask Tony Castori how many people he’s killed, he’ll say thirteen. Thirteen’s a good number. He’ll talk about car bombs, digital actuators, Mohawk caps, Semtex wired into ignition systems. He’ll talk pipe wrenches and .22 slugs in the back of the head. Truth is, though, he’s personally responsible for only one mortality, a hit and run in Midwood. Some short little waspy fireplug of a guy come running across Thirteenth Avenue on a Saturday evening, trying to make the light. Maybe he was heading to see his girl. Dressed up in cashmere and khakis, he was forced to meet Tony’s Cadillac all of a sudden like. Twenty-eight hundred bucks in body work later, Tony had a notch on his bandolier.

  Unlike most killers, and maybe because his hit was an actual hit, Tony’s still got a tiny little bit of heart in him. Shriveled and underused, sure; wrinkled like fingertips coming out of a bath, yeah, but it’s a heart.

  Friday morning, alone in the motel room, this feeling he’s got in his gut, it’s no damned good for nobody. It’s like when he saw the legs under his Caddy, red blood pebbling through the broken asphalt. He tries his brother again. Gets popped straight to voice mail.

  You start imagining accidents. Cops. Coronaries. Twenty-eight’s not necessarily too young. Plus, I mean…Montana. Rattlesnakes, bears. He stares off at the horizon. Maybe he’ll try the hospital. Cop shop. Fontana’s not much of a boozer, but he likes his dope. Maybe he tried to score and got collared.

  Tony knots a blue-and-black striped tie in the mirror, a limited edition silk number from Seigo. Slaps the blood into his cheeks, breathes deep through the nose. Okay, he’ll get this figured out. The fucking kid. Poppa’s dead, but Momma… God won’t let it happen.

  In the rental car, he wets a fingertip, touches his eyebrows. Does a double take.

  Briefcase. He’d left it on the floor there right there, right fucking there. Fifteen hundred dollar Brooks Brothers calfskin. Now it’s gone.

  Okay, so yeah. This changes things.

  Motherfuckers. I mean, motherfuckers.

  He hits the steering wheel with his palm. Winces, inspects his hand for a bruise. Sits for a while, absorbing the implications.

  Ten minutes later, he goes to a pay phone across from his motel. Dials Donnie. “Yeah, hey, it’s me. Call me back at…” He pulls back, gives him the number. It rings five minutes later. “Yeah, hey. Fontana’s gone missing. Fuck if I know, we split up yesterday. I ain’t heard from him since. But, yeah… but the thing is, is my briefcase, see, it’s gone too. No, yeah, Donnie, I know. What? Yeah, pistol, pictures, some cash. No, he wouldn’t a just took it. But Donnie, hey, just listen…okay. What I’m saying, they got Fontana. What I’m saying…” Tony takes a breath, looks up and down the street. Dirty pickups parked at angles. A fishing shop. Some kind of art gallery. A half dozen cowboy bars already open for business. “I think we got competition out here.”

  For the next ten hours, Tony finds himself going through the motions. Feel the tension, man. He’s a hammer thumbed back slow, he’s an overinflated tire, tight as teak. If this little shitheel excuse for a town is in the least way responsible for one single hair gone missing on little Fontana’s head, it’ll be a Bruckheimer movie. God’s wrath will come down, and it shall
be called Tony Trigger. Fire, brimstone, a voice thundering from the clouds.

  Poor kid. Tony fights back tears.

  In the hospital, he clears his throat at a couple nurses. “Yeah, heya. I’m looking for my brother? Late twenties, about my height, yeah. You had anybody breaking a leg or something?” Nothing, of course. Then he considers asking at the sheriff’s office, the city police, but whichever way he can imagine that conversation going, it don’t go his way. If Tony Trigger got on the radar in Montana, he’d get blamed for every half ass bank job and convenience store holdup inside of a hundred miles.

  Lack of a better plan, he starts a slow rotation through the bars, sipping Johnnie Walker, feeding bills into poker machines. Hell, this town ain’t so bad. He wins fifty-two dollars at Mustang Sally’s, loses it again (plus a twenty) at The Lazy Bar B. A series of affable, booze-hardened bartenders give him a little bit of shit about his hat, his tie, his suit. “Some kind of convention in town?”

  He doesn’t mind. “The tie? You like the tie? Hundred and twenty dollar tie, you ain’t seen none of these in here before. Not unless you seen my brother. He likes the bars. Looks kind of like me, right? Little shorter? Dresses sharp?”

  Finally he gets a hit. “Yeah, he was in here yesterday about this time. Looking for some woman. Had a picture?”

  “That’d be him. What time was that?”

  “I don’t know. What time…” He shouts into the back. “Carol, what time was that kid in here with the pictures?”

  Come dusk, all Tony’s got to show for his time is a Scotch drunk. He stands wobbly under a streetlight, squinting at metal numbers on the phone. “Yeah, hey, it’s me. Call me back.” A minute later, picks it up on the first ring. “No he’s still gone. I figure tomorrow I’m shaking down some Russians. You know how they stick together. Gotta be somebody in Montana they’d want to connect with…No, yeah, no sign of Eddie’s woman either. Fuck no, I’m not giving up…I’m just… Donnie, hey man. Please, you know how much I…No…what it is, I just need me some more guys out here. I’m flying solo out here. How about you get Nick Scarpa and that buddy of his, what’s his name, Jake, Jack, something. I need me some ballbusters out here. Get me some ballbusters…”