by Norman Green
She reached across with her other hand, plucked the bill out of his grasp, gave him one final squeeze. “Past the men’s room door,” she told him. “Go through the blue doorway. First room on the right. When you finish your business here, I’ll be waiting for you.” She leaned up close again, touched the tip of her tongue to his eyebrow, then released him. She stepped back slowly, turned her back, and walked away.
Marty swallowed, then looked back at Caughlan. “She come courtesy of you?” he said.
“Not me,” Caughlan said. “Seen her coming, though. Man, I love this place.”
“You kidding? You didn’t pay her off?”
“All right,” Caughlan said. “Maybe I tipped her on the way in. Maybe I told her about this lonesome and generous businessman I was meeting here tonight.”
Stiles’s head swam. “Just what is it you want me to do, Mickey?”
Caughlan glanced past Stiles at the departing blonde. “All right,” he said again. “Listen up. Six, seven months ago, one of my trucks picked up a container off a ship down in Port Newark. No big deal, we do that all the time. According to the bill of lading, the thing was supposed to be a load of blue jeans headed for some discounter in Chicago. Okay? So the truck gets hijacked. We find it down by the river in Jersey City a couple days later. Container is empty, except for the driver; poor bastard was inside, deader than last year’s Christmas goose.”
“I didn’t hear nothing about it,” Marty said. “It musta not made the papers.”
Caughlan shook his head. “We kept it quiet,” he said. “There was some brown goo on the floor of the container.”
“Goo?”
“Corn syrup, like. Thick and oily.”
“Yeah.” Marty Stiles felt the hair on the back of his neck rising. “What was it?”
“Chemist I sent it to said it was opium base,” Caughlan said. “Stuff is like crude oil. Couple steps away from gasoline, but still damned expensive. You get me?”
“Yeah, I get you. What’d you do about it?”
Caughlan shook his head. “Nothing. Stuck our heads back in the sand. Hoped it would all go away.”
Stiles stared at him. “For real, man. What did you do?”
“We waited. Figured whoever belonged to that shit would come looking for it, but they never showed.”
“So you’re off the hook.”
“I don’t think so. I got a tip, there’s a secret grand jury looking into Penn Transfer. And into me.”
“Over this? Over dope?”
“Don’t know for sure,” Caughlan said. “But I wouldn’t want to bet against it.”
I don’t want to ask this question, Marty thought, but I have to, because Caughlan knows I should ask it. “You into dope? You get a piece of what moves through Port Newark?”
For a second, Caughlan looked like what Marty knew him to be: hard, cold, merciless. Then he looked away, caught a waitress’s eye, waved his empty glass. He looked back at Stiles. “You and I go way back, Marty,” he said. “You know I never been a altar boy. Joint like this one, maybe the cops think it’s a brothel, and maybe it is, but I ask you: man can’t get drunk and get his ashes hauled, what’s the use in living? I ask you, where’s the harm done? But the drug trade burns everyone it touches. I always kept my distance.”
“So? You think someone’s setting you up?”
“No. I think someone’s using Penn Transfer to move their shit. I think they figure when the cops finally tumble to it, I’ll be the one that swings, not them.”
Marty nodded. What cop would bother looking past a man like Caughlan? “Smart,” he said.
Caughlan leaned over and whispered in Stiles’s ear. “Hundred large,” he said, “you find out who’s doing it. Buck and a half, you give me the score on the grand jury, too. A deuce if you get it all done before the end of the month.”
It was too much money to even consider passing up, even if he was gonna have to walk through a few dark places to get it. “All right,” he said. “But how do you want to work this? What is it that you want Al for?”
“I don’t wanna tell you how to do your job,” Caughlan said. “If I knew how to handle this, it’d be done already. But I figure you probably know every crooked cop and scumbag lawyer in Jersey. You chase the grand jury angle. Let Martillo loose, let her chase it from the other end.”
Clever, Marty thought. Once I start turning over rocks, things will start to happen. Caughlan thinks it’s someone close to him, and figures he’ll have Al watching his back. “There’s one problem with all of this,” he said.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Al. Al’s the problem. She ain’t great at following instructions. Matter of fact, she’s prolly the single most annoying female I ever met. The bitch could find a white cat in a snowstorm, but she could never explain how she knew where to look. You get her going on this, she’s gonna go where her nose tells her to go. You hear what I’m saying? You got some closets you don’t want her looking in, that’s your tough luck, she’s gonna do what she wants to do. You better think about that before you pull the trigger here.”
“I can handle her,” Caughlan said. “Besides, I got too much at risk to worry about a few indiscretions coming to light.”
Stiles watched the dancer. Caughlan thinks he knows Al, he thought, but the guy has no idea, not if he thinks he can handle her. Unless he figures he can just bury her once she gets to be too much of a pain in his ass. And good luck with that . . . But I might be putting Al in a tough spot with this, Stiles thought. His stomach rolled once, but the thought of two hundred grand in his bank account had a wonderfully restorative effect. “We need to talk money. I can’t afford to go on spec. I’m gonna need fifty large up front and a guaranteed hundred, minimum, when we’re done.”
Caughlan stared at him for a moment. “Agreed,” he said. “Set up a meeting—you, me, and Martillo. We can go over the details there.”
“Okay,” Stiles said.
Caughlan got off his stool. “The lady’s waiting for you,” he said. “Enjoy yourself, but watch that girl, she bites.”
“She what? What did you say?”
Caughlan nodded. “Something wrong with her head. She bites. She’ll want to blow you, but don’t you let her. You knock her down and give it to her proper.”
About the Author
NORMAN GREEN is the author of six crime novels, most recently Sick Like That. Born in Massachusetts, he now lives in New Jersey with his wife.
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Also by Norman Green
The Last Gig
Dead Cat Bounce
Way Past Legal
The Angel of Montague Street
Shooting Dr. Jack
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from The Last Gig copyright © 2008 by Norman Green.
Sick Like That was originally published in 2010 by Minotaur Books.
SICK LIKE THAT. Copyright © 2010 by Norman Green. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
Digital Edition JUNE 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-267276-6
Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-06-267277-3
Cover photograph © Anna Jurkovska / Shutterstoc
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