“Is there a picture?”
“Just of the restaurant. A white X where he got it.”
Joe nodded. A small smile of satisfaction was on his face. “You know what that means, don’t you?”
“He lost the mob’s two million dollars,” Tom said, “and they didn’t like it.”
“Besides that.”
“What else?”
“They can’t find us,” Joe said. “They’ve tried, and they can’t do it, and they gave up.”
“The mob doesn’t give up,” Tom said.
“Bullshit. Everybody gives up, if there’s nothing left to do. If they thought they could still find us and get the money back, they wouldn’t kill Vigano. They’d let him keep looking.” Joe gave Tom a big smile and said, “We’re free and clear, buddy, that’s what that thing in the paper means.”
Tom frowned at the newspaper report, thinking it over, and gradually he too began to smile. “I guess so,” he said. “I guess we are.”
“Fucking A well told,” said Joe.
They rode along in silence again for a while, both of them thinking about the future. A little later, Joe glanced toward Tom, and beyond him he saw the next car over, stopped like they were, and it was a gray Jaguar sedan, one of the big ones. The windows were rolled up, and the middle-aged guy inside was neat and cool in his suit and tie. As Joe looked at him, the guy in the Jaguar turned his own head, met Joe’s eye, and gave him that quick meaningless smile that people invariably flash when they cross glances with somebody in another car. Then he faced front again.
Joe smiled back at him, but with something savage in it. “That’s right, you bastard, smile,” he said to the Jaguar driver’s profile. “Six months from now you’re going to be six months closer to your coronary, and I’m going to be in Saskatchewan.”
Tom looked at Joe while he was talking, puzzled; then turned and saw the Jaguar driver and understood. The surf on a beach in Trinidad crashed lazily in his mind, and he smiled.
It was going to be a hot day. They sat there in the car, their elbows out the open windows, reaching for a little breeze. Endless stalled traffic stretched away into the hazy distance, and far away they could just make out the scum-covered smoky island of Manhattan, squatting there like that portion of Hell zoned industrial.
The car in front of them moved a little.
©
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Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 Page 22