by Don Winslow
Fucking Death Star’s about to blow for like the sixth time when Bobby shows up with a paper bag and leaves it by Callan’s feet.
“Good movie, huh?” he says, and takes off as fast as he came in.
Callan eases his ankle over to the bag and feels the metal.
They go into the men’s room and open the bag.
An old .25 and an equally ancient .38 police special.
“What?” O-Bop says. “He didn’t have flintlocks?”
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
Callan feels a lot better with a little hardware at his waist. Funny how quick you miss not having it there. You just feel light, he thinks. Like you might float up off the ground. The metal keeps you on the earth.
They sit in the theater until just before it closes, then carefully work their way back to the warehouse.
A Polish sausage saves their lives.
Tim Healey, he’s been sitting up there half the fucking night and he’s hungrier than shit waiting for these two kids, so he gets Jimmy Boylan to go out for a Polish sausage.
“What you want on it?” Boylan asks.
“Sauerkraut, hot mustard, the works,” Tim says.
So Boylan goes out and comes back and Tim wolfs down that Polish sausage like he’s spent the war in a Japanese prison camp, and that solid sausage is converting itself to gas in his intestines just when Callan and O-Bop are coming in. They’re in a stairwell on the other side of a closed metal door when they hear Healey cut loose.
They freeze.
“Jesus Christ,” they hear Boylan say. “Anybody hurt?”
Callan looks at O-Bop.
“Bobby gave us up?” O-Bop whispers.
Callan shrugs.
“I’m gonna open the door, get some air,” Boylan says. “Christ, Tim.”
“Sorry.”
Boylan opens the door and sees the boys standing there. He yells, “Shit!” as he raises his shotgun, but all Callan can hear is the explosion of guns echoing in the stairwell as he and O-Bop let loose.
The tinfoil slides off Healey’s lap as he gets up from the wooden folding chair and goes for his gun. But he sees Jimmy Boylan staggering backwards as chunks of him are flying out the back of him and loses his nerve. Drops his .45 to the ground and throws his hands up.
“Do him!” O-Bop yells.
“No, no, no, no, no!” Healey yells.
They’ve known Fat Tim Healey all their lives. He used to give them quarters to buy comic books. One time they’re playing hockey in the street and Callan’s backswing breaks Tim Healey’s right headlight and Healey comes out of the Liffey and just laughs and says it’s okay. “You’ll get me tickets when you’re playing for the Rangers, okay?” is all Tim Healey says.
Now Callan stops O-Bop from shooting Healey.
“Just get his gun!” he hollers.
He’s yelling because his ears are ringing. His voice sounds like it’s at the other end of a tunnel, and his head hurts like a bastard.
Healey’s got mustard on his chin.
He’s saying something about being too old for this shit.
Like there’s a right age for this shit? Callan thinks.
They take Healey’s .45 and Boylan’s 12-gauge and hit the street.
Running.
Big Matty freaks when he hears about Eddie the Butcher.
Especially when he gets the word that it was two kids practically with shit in their diapers. He’s wondering what the world is coming to—what kind of world it’s going to be—when you have a generation coming up that has no respect for authority. What also concerns Big Matty is how many people approach him to plead mercy for the two kids.
“They have to be punished,” Big Matt tells them, but he’s disturbed when they question his decision.
“Punished, sure,” they tell him. “Maybe break their legs or their wrists, send them out of the neighborhood, but they don’t deserve to get killed for this.”
Big Matt ain’t used to being challenged like this. He don’t like it all. He also don’t like that the pipeline don’t seem to be working. He should have had his hands on these two young animals within hours, but they’ve been down for days now and the rumor’s going around that they’re still in the neighborhood—which is shoving it in his face—but no one seems to know exactly where.
Even people who should know don’t know.
Big Matt even considers this idea of punishment. Decides that maybe the just thing to do is just to take the hands that pulled the triggers. The more he considers it, the more he likes the idea. Leave these two kids walking around Hell’s Kitchen with a couple of stumps as reminder of what happens when you don’t show the proper respect for authority.
So he’ll have their hands cut off and leave it at that.
Show them that Big Matt Sheehan can be magnanimous.
Then he remembers he don’t have Eddie the Butcher anymore to do the cutting.
A day later he also don’t have Jimmy Boylan or Fat Tim Healey, because Boylan is dead and Healey has just disappeared. And Kevin Kelly has found it convenient to take care of some business in Albany. Marty Stone has a sick aunt in Far Rockaway. And Tommy Dugan is on a bender.
All of which leads Big Matt to suspect that there’s maybe a coup—a downright revolution—in the works.
So he makes a reservation to fly down to his other home in Florida.
Which would be very good news for Callan and O-Bop, except that it looks like before Matty got on the plane, he reached out to Big Paulie Calabrese, the new representante—the boss—of the Cimino Family, and called in a marker.
“What do you think he gave him?” Callan asks O-Bop.
“Piece of the Javits Center?” O-Bop says.
Big Matt controls the construction unions and the teamsters’ unions working on the huge convention center being planned on the West Side. The Italians have been slavering after a piece of that business for a year or more. The skim off the cement contract alone is worth millions. Now Matt’s in no real position to say no, but he could reasonably expect a little favor for saying yes.
Professional courtesy.
Callan and O-Bop are holed up in a second-floor apartment on Forty-ninth between Tenth and Eleventh. They don’t get a lot of sleep. Lie there looking at the sky. Or what you can see of it from a rooftop in New York.
“We’ve killed two guys,” O-Bop says.
“Yeah.”
“Self-defense, though,” O-Bop says. “I mean, we had to, right?”
“Sure.”
A while later O-Bop says, “I wonder if Mickey Haggerty’s gonna trade us in.”
“You think?”
“He’s looking at eight-to-twelve on a robbery,” O-Bop says. “He could trade up.”
“No,” Callan says. “Mickey is old-school.”
“Mickey could be old-school,” O-Bop says, “but he also could be tired of doing time. This is his second bit.”
Callan knows that Mickey will do his time and come back to the neighborhood and want to hold his head up. And Mickey knows he won’t be able to get as much as a bowl of peanuts in any bar in the Kitchen if he rolls over to the cops.
Mickey Haggerty’s the least of their worries.
Which is what Callan’s thinking as he looks out the window at the Lincoln Continental parked across the street.
“So we might as well get it over with,” he says to O-Bop.
O-Bop’s got his head of kinky red hair under the kitchen tap, trying to get cool. Yeah, that’s gonna work—it’s a hundred and four out and they’re in a two-room apartment on the fifth floor with a fan the size of a propeller on a toy boat and the water pressure is zero because the little neighborhood bastards have opened up every fire hydrant on the street and if all that wasn’t bad enough there’s a crew from the Cimino Family out there looking to whack them.
And will whack them, soon as it’s late enough for darkness to provide a curtain of decency.
“What do you wanna do?” O-Bop asks. �
��You want to go out there blasting? Gunfight at the OK Corral?”
“It would be better than baking to death up here.”
“No it wouldn’t,” O-Bop says. “Up here sucks to be sure, but down there we’d be gunned down in the street like dogs.”
“We have to go down sometime,” Callan says.
“No we don’t,” O-Bop says. He takes his head out from under the tap and shakes the water off. “As long as they still deliver pizza, we never have to go down.”
He comes over to the window and looks at the long black Lincoln parked across the street.
“Fucking Italians never change,” O-Bop says. “You think they’d maybe mix in a Mercedes, a BMW, I dunno, a fuckin’ Volvo or something. Anything but these fucking Lincolns and Caddies. I’m tellin’ ya, it must be some kind of goombah rule or something.”
“Who’s in the car, Stevie?”
There are four guys in the car. Three more guys standing around outside. Real casual like. Smoking cigs, drinking coffee, shooting the shit. Like a mob announcement to the neighborhood—we’re going to whack somebody here so you might want to be someplace else.
O-Bop refocuses.
“Piccone’s sub-crew of Johnny Boy Cozzo’s crew,” O-Bop says. “Demonte wing of the Cimino Family.”
“How do you know?”
“The guy in the passenger seat is eating a can of peaches,” O-Bop says. “So it’s Jimmy Piccone—Jimmy Peaches. He’s got this thing for canned peaches.”
O-Bop is the Paul’s Peerage of mobdom. He follows them like some guys follow baseball teams. He has the whole Five Families organizational chart in his head.
So O-Bop is hipped to the fact that since Carlo Cimino died last year, the family’s been in a state of flux. Most of the hard-core guys were sure Cimino would pick Neill Demonte to be his successor, but he went for his brother-in-law Paulie Calabrese instead.
It was an unpopular choice, especially among the old guard, who think that Calabrese is too white-collar, too soft. Too focused on turning the money into legitimate businesses. The hard guys—the loan sharks, extortion artists and flat-out plain robbers—don’t like it.
Jimmy “Big Peaches” Piccone is one of these guys. In fact, he’s sitting in the Lincoln holding forth on it.
“We’re the Cimino Crime Family,” Peaches is saying to his brother, Little Peaches. Joey “Little Peaches” Piccone is actually bigger than his older brother, Big Peaches, but no one is going to say that, so the nicknames stick. “Even the fuckin' New York Times calls us the Cimino Crime Family. We do crime. If I wanted to be a businessman I would’ve joined—what—IBM.”
Peaches also doesn’t like that Demonte was overlooked as boss. “He’s an old man, what’s the harm of letting him have his few years in the sun? He’s earned it. What the Old Man should have done is, he should have made Mister Neill boss and Johnny Boy the underboss. Then we would have had 'our thing,’ our cosa nostra.”
For a young guy—Peaches is twenty-six—he’s a throwback, a conservative, a mafioso William F. Buckley without the tie. He likes the old ways, the old traditions.
“In the old days,” Peaches says, like he was even around in the old days, “we would have just taken a piece of the Javits Center. We wouldn’t have to suck ass to some old Harp like Matty Sheehan. Not like Paulie’s gonna give us a taste anyway. He don’t care if we fuckin’ starve.”
“Hey,” Little Peaches says.
“Hey what.”
“Hey, Paulie gives this job to Mister Neill, who gives it to Johnny Boy, who gives it to us,” Little Peaches says. “All I need to know: Johnny Boy gives us a job, we do the job.”
“We’re gonna do the fuckin’ job,” Peaches says. He don’t need his little brother giving him lectures about how it works. Peaches knows how it works, likes how it works, especially in the Demonte wing of the family, where it works like it did in the old days.
Another thing, Peaches fucking worships Johnny Boy.
Johnny Boy is everything the Mafia used to be.
What it oughta be again, Peaches thinks.
“Soon as it gets really dark,” Peaches says, “we’ll go up there and punch their tickets.”
Callan’s sitting there flipping through the black notebook.
“Your dad’s in here,” he says.
“There’s a surprise,” O-Bop says sarcastically. “For how much?”
“Two large.”
“Probably bet on the Budweiser Clydesdales to show at Aqueduct,” O-Bop says. “Hey, here comes the pizza. Hey, what the fuck is this? They’re taking our pizza!”
O-Bop is genuinely pissed. He’s not especially angry that these guys are here to kill him—that’s to be expected, that’s just business—but he takes the pizza hijacking as a personal affront.
“They don’t got to do that!” he wails. “That’s just wrong!”
Which, Callan recalls, is how this whole thing started in the first place.
He glances up from the black book to see this fat guinea with a big grin on his face, holding a slice of pizza up at him.
“Hey!” O-Bop yells.
“It’s good!” Peaches yells back.
“They’ve got our pizza!” O-Bop says to Callan.
“It’s no big deal,” Callan says.
O-Bop whines, “I’m hungry!”
“Then go down and take it from them,” Callan says.
“I might.”
“Take a shotgun.”
“Fuck!”
Callan can hear the guys out in the street laughing at them. He doesn’t care. It doesn’t get to him the way it gets to O-Bop. O-Bop hates to be laughed at. It’s always been an instant fight with him. Callan, he can just walk away.
“Stevie?”
“What.”
“What did you say was the name of that guy down there?”
“Which guy?”
“Guy they sent to whack us.”
“Jimmy Peaches.”
“He’s in here.”
“Say what?”
O-Bop comes away from the window. “For how much?”
“A hundred thousand.”
They look at each other and start to laugh.
“Callan,” O-Bop says, “we got us a whole new ball game here.”
Because Peaches Piccone owes Matty Sheehan $100,000. And that’s just the principal—the vigorish has to be piling up faster than stink in a garbage strike, so Piccone is in serious trouble here. He’s in to Matt Sheehan deep. Which would be bad news—all the more motivation for him to do Sheehan a solid—except that Callan and O-Bop have the book.
Which gives them an angle.
If they can live long enough to play it.
Because it’s getting dark, fast.
“You got any ideas?” O-Bop asks.
“Yes, I do.”
It’s one of them desperate fourth-and-long plays, but shit, it’s fourth and long.
O-Bop walks out onto the fire escape with a milk bottle in his hand.
Yells, “Hey, you guinea bastards!”
The boys look up from the Continental.
Just as O-Bop lights the rag stuck in the bottle, yells, “Eat this!” and launches it in a long, lazy arc at the Lincoln.
“What the fuck—”
This is from Peaches, who presses the button to roll the window down and sees this freaking torch coming out of the sky straight at him, so he scrambles to get the door open and get his ass out of the backseat of the Lincoln, and he does it just in time because O-Bop’s aim is perfect and the bottle crashes onto the top of the car and flames spread across the roof.
Peaches yells up at the fire escape, “That’s a new fucking car!”
And he’s really pissed because he don’t even have a chance to shoot at nobody because a crowd gathers, and then there’s sirens and all that shit and it’s just a couple of minutes before the whole block is full of Irish cops and Irish firemen, who start hosing down what’s left of the Lincoln.
Irish cops an
d Irish firemen and about fifteen thousand fucking drag queens from Ninth Avenue, and they’re standing around Peaches screaming and screeching and dancing and shit. He sends Little Peaches down to the phone on the corner to make a call and get a new fucking vehicle, and then he feels metal pressed against his left fucking kidney and someone whispers, “Mr. Piccone, turn around very slowly, please.”