At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  “This’s a lot of work you and your guys’ve gotten done here. While no one bothered you, at any time, you were doin’ it. You been around enough to know that that’s no accident. This place is protected. For that coverage you pay me.

  “And since you been around enough to know that, I shouldn’t hafta drive out here and tell it to you. I hope I don’t also have to tell you that if I know what’s come in here, and I know what you’ve done to it in here, and I know what’s then gone out, and where it was headed to, I can stop it comin’ in, stop you working on it, and stop it going out—any fuckin’ time I want. You must know I can do this.

  “You shouldah come to see me before you come in. You didn’t. You shouldah come to see me since you been here. You didn’t. Okay, you’re a proud man. Or maybe you’re just a foolish one. But I been around a long time and dealt with both kinds; can deal with either one—as I have and as I will. In your case I decide that I will make this special effort, try and make you understand. I will come and see you, as I am doing here, right now, tell you what you already know. Take a good look—here I am.

  “The price’s twenty to come in here. That’s permission. Ten a week to stay. The twenty plus the five you been here, plus the next week in advance. I’m gonna hafta come and see you to collect the rent? All right, then; I will do that. But if you want room service, you pay in advance.

  “That’s what I’m doing here.”

  Walters gazed at him for a few moments, his smile gradually widening and his eyes beginning to sparkle. Then he put his hands palms down on the table, arched his back and threw his head back, laughing richly, like a man who’s heard wonderful news.

  The men in the shadows behind him were beginning their supporting chorus of laughter as McKeach came out of his seated position, clamping his left hand on the table as a fulcrum; using his right hand and forearm to swing the blackjack out in a backhand arc away from his body; rising up on the balls of his feet in the compact semicircular motion that a lefthanded player connecting solidly with a baseball performs, pivoting his body in his followthrough on the swing, only his front hand remaining on the bat.

  The pouch full of BBs sailed out at the end of the lanyard in a wider, faster arc from the web at the base of McKeach’s right thumb and forefinger, catching Walters on the base of the socket of his right eye and his upper right jaw, the pouch flattening on impact, smashing the temporal, zygomatic and maxilla bones and driving sharp fragments of them into the right eye and sinuses, breaking off four upper right molars into his mouth, open in laughter. The blow knocked two of the broken teeth clear, so that they plinked along the table and skittered onto the floor and the darkness, but Walters aspirated the other two and began at once to choke on the combination of bone, enamel, mucus, saliva and blood, making a wet, roaring, strangling sound of shock, pain, rage and fear, at the same time furiously attempting to rise but unable to get his balance and toppling backward off the packing crate, then crashing onto the floor. While he was reeling, trying to stand, McKeach, moving fast to his own left, with his left hand swept the Coleman lantern off the table onto the floor, so that it broke open and exploded on impact, creating a ball of white light. Walters, still roaring, unable to save himself, fell into the fire.

  McKeach, running low to the ground, heard one of Walters’ men scream as he reached the door, jerked it open, and went out, slamming it shut behind him—allowing himself to slow down then, approaching the car, grateful for the clean cold air he was gulping into his throat. He unlooped the lanyard of the blackjack from his wrist and stowed it again in his waistband. As he opened the door of the car he heard another small explosion, muffled, in the warehouse behind him, and as he slid onto the seat he nodded, smiling. “Fuckin’ aye,” he said.

  “YOU KNOW,” MCKEACH SAID, “as many times I do it, I still have to admit, I do still go in thinkin’ that I know what’s gonna happen when I’m gonna talk to guys that I don’t really know. And I really don’t. But I still feel like I do, think if I say something, I know what they’ll do? You know how you think that?” He snorted. “I don’t. I never do. I’ve actually got no idea.

  “Inna first place, guy is black. All four of them’re black. I’m tellin’ you, my friend, and I’ve said this time again—I don’t give a good shit, anybody wants to say about how we all’re brothers, all the same? They’re fulla shit. May have good reasons for it, really want it to be true. Well, I’m sorry but it isn’t. It isn’t fuckin’ true. Those bastards’re wired different. They just do not think the same.

  “Most of them, I swear to God, I wonder if they do think. But even with the ones that do, you’re still not outta the woods. Because when you try to tell ’em something—‘You don’t do what I tell you, I will break your fuckin’ head’—and you think ‘Now they have to get it,’ you made it so damn plain—they didn’t. It’s like you’re talkin’ a foreign language to them. Nothin’ that they recognize. They sit there starin’ at you like you just got in from Mars, thinkin’, ‘All those moving pictures on TV and stuff, green men and flying saucers? Those guys got it all wrong. These outer-space guys’re mostly the same shape like us, ’Cept their dicks’re prolly smaller and their skins’re kinda pale. Wonder if they’re good to eat?’ ”

  Cistaro laughed.

  “I tell you, it is true,” McKeach said, also laughing.

  “I went in there, ’kay? I’m in a good mood. ‘Gonna cut this kid some slack. He did me a nice favor once—owe him one for that. He didn’t know he was doin’ it, and my guess is he made a lot more for himself off the guys who paid him to do it than I made off of bettin’ other guys he would. But he did it, just the same, and therefore for a guy I don’t even know, who is one big spade to boot, I got friendly feelings for him.”

  Walterboy as a sophomore power forward had averaged 23.4 points, 8.6 assists, and 9.3 rebounds per game for the ’77–78 University of Kansas basketball team. Ranked nineteenth nationally for nine straight weeks during December, January and February in the UPI Coaches’ Poll, “the surprising Jayhawks” made it to the Sweet Sixteen round of the NCAA championships in March of ’78 before losing 87–68 to twelve-point underdog East North Carolina. Walterboy limped off the floor with 1:07 left in the first quarter of that game, complaining of a severe right hamstring pull, after scoring five points, one rebound and no assists. He was unable to return to the lineup that night.

  “Had the time to follow teams, then,” McKeach said, referring to his stay at the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Leavenworth, “which if you’re planning to put money on them’s the only smart way you can do it. Pay close enough attention to their games and how they play so you get some kind idea what’s liable to happen, they get inna particular kind of situation. And plus which in prison—and this’s something naturally that you yourself would not know, you being such a pussy all your life, never took a major chance on nothin’——”

  “Never saw a situation return looked good enough to me, is why,” Cistaro said laconically. “I look at something and I see a risk involved? What I do then is think, ‘Is what I’m gonna get if I take this chance good enough so if it don’t turn out right, I won’t mind that I got lugged and I’m gonna hafta spend the next eight years my life beatin’ my meat, like some fuckin’ kid who’s got so many pimples he can’t even get a fuckin’ ugly girl to pull his pud for him—’stead of fuckin’ like a man who’s got some fuckin’ self-respect? Because if it isn’t I’m not takin the risk.’ And so far I haven’t seen any scam looked like it would be, and so I never did.”

  He paused one beat. “Whereas you, I guess, you’re so fuckin’ money hungry eight years of lopin’ your pony doesn’t bother you. Or else bein’ a mick you think that’s okay because it must be what the priests do, but gettin’ laid’s a mortal sin. Plus which, spent my bulletproof years inna service. Got all the wild-ass young stuff outta my system, so time I got out, I had some sense, got hooked up with Hugo.”

  “You got a point,” McKeach said. “I did so
me dumb stuff, I’s a kid. But you’ve also had shit luck.” He took the Pontiac down the last long hill in Newton into the valley under Route 128, still crowded with heavy traffic, and commenced the long ascent up Route 9 into Wellesley Hills. “Still, can be educational. In prison you hear certain kinda things you’re not always gonna hear on the outside. Or at least not as soon.

  “So I got to where I thought I had a read on these guys, on this team—Walterboy especially. To the point where I thought I could tell pretty well what he’d do if he got in the kind of situation where he had a choice. Where if he did one thing another thing would happen—his team would win the big one. That being the thing most people who follow the team’d expect in that situation. Because they think they know you, or at least what makes you tick—when they actually do not. Whereas if you don’t do that thing, the one that they expect, and you do the opposite, then as a result the team’ll lose. Or at least not beat the spread enough to make the bettors happy.”

  “Well, of course,” Cistaro said, chuckling. “Heck, everybody knows that.”

  “Okay, you can laugh,” McKeach said. “But you keep on forgettin’—the things that everybody knows, most people in fact don’t know. And those’re the things we do know, and make most of our money on.

  “So I think, What if what this great player wants to have happen isn’t what the fans want—huh?

  “ ‘Fuck them, and fuck the fuckin’ team,’ he thinks. ‘What’re all them fine white folk doon fo’ my ass? I’m just a big nigger from Harlem to them. Who’s playing this fuckin’ game anyway? Who’s the talent here?’ Get yourself in that frame of mind, then you don’t give a shit about anybody else—just want to do yourself some good.”

  The dark imitation Gothic spires of the convent school high on Maugus Hill to the left ahead of them made columns of solid darkness against light pollution generated by the gas stations and fire station clustered in the valley of Wellesley Hills beyond it. The building had been converted years before into a Massachusetts Bay Community College, and the lights in the windows of the evening-class rooms below the towers burned like campfires.

  “Keep in mind now, this’s twenty years ago. That’s a long time. Lotta things’ve changed since then. Don’t seem that long a time, two old guys like us, but to most people and in lots of things it is. Pro sports is one of them. NBA didn’t draft kids out of college then, they still had some eligible years left. Even they dropped out first year, never played a game. Which meant they either played the four years or else they sat on their ass ’fore their chance at big dough legit. And that was not as big then either. Teams gave bonuses back then, sure, but only to the guaranteed top players. Which Walterboy was not. He was good, yeah, no question, but he was no Larry Bird.

  “Word that I’m gettin’ while I was inside was that for a player, he may not’ve been that burn-the-world-down good, but he was fairly smart—which not all of those guys are. So I figure if he’s smart then he knows at least what I know about his pro future—pretty much a tossup. And I also figure, ‘He’s this smart, he wants money.’ Why else do people do things? What the hell else is there? Money more than anything. And if possible, money today. Now.

  “This is the other thing that the people who bet on his team to win this game themselves want, and therefore think that he wants. But the difference is that he can do something to make the game come out the way he wants, and they can’t. Therefore if I am right about him, he’ll know how to find somebody who will give him serious money to do something so the way the game turns out, as far as he’s concerned, the result will then be great—for him. For the people bet on it, it will’ve come out bad. If I’m right when the time comes, he will do the different thing than they all expected, them and the sports books too, and his team will’ve lost—or at least not beat the spread.

  “Naturally I didn’t know how he’d do this, make it happen, but I was pretty sure he would, and so I got down on it. And I make ten grand on ENC over Kansas, taking points.”

  “That’s the kind of bet I would’ve made,” Cistaro said. “Only suckers gamble.”

  “Exactly,” McKeach said. “Now today, he’s got three-four of his buddies in there with him. Not all as big as he is but they’re not exactly small—and anyway I’m not there like I went there to make trouble. So I tell him all of this, everything I just told you. I feel like I know him from before, even though I really don’t.

  “And then I say to him, all right? Still trying to be nice. ‘When I hear you’re in my territory, naturally I think, “This is the same Walterboy that I know of from a long time ago, I think we can do business. This’s real good news.”

  “ ‘So I make it my business to run into you out here and I make the connection, all right? You don’t know it but you did me a good thing a long time ago. I’d just as soon do you one now. I mean, it doesn’t set me back too much and not too many other people hear about it. So I don’t then have them comin’ around all the time and asking me, you know, how come I do this for you, this spade from out of town someplace who’s not even from around here—and I won’t do it for them. This’s a good deal I’m offering you here, and all this talk and stuff you’re now givin’ me about it, I don’t expect I’m gonna get that, I first told you what it is. Throws a wrench into my plans.

  “ ‘But look, it’s gettin’ late here and I gotta be someplace. So look, all right? It’s ten thousand dollars a week. You had at least a hundred kilos of the white stuff in here for three weeks now, and nobody bothered you. Reason that it happened that way is because this is my turf, and even though you didn’t ask me when you first come onto it, I find out that you are here, as I always do, you’re on it as my guest. You owe me seventy thousand bucks and you’re gonna pay it me, now.’

  “And you know what he said to me, in that woman’s voice of his? You know what the fucker said? He said—first he laughed at me, all these big white fuckin’ teeth shinin’ out at me, like he’s got a string of pearls in his big black fuckin’ mouth, puts his head way back and laughs—and he actually then says to me, ‘Go fuck yourself, white man. I go where I want to go, and where I go’s my turf. That’s why nothin’ happens to me—where I am, I am.’ ”

  “Where the fuck’re you, all of this’s goin’ on?” Cistaro said, anger bubbling in his voice.

  “The old Wheelers warehouse,” McKeach said. “West Roxbury? You go out by the railroad tracks there, follow them on top the hill? Road bends to the left and you keep on goin’, pretty soon you’re gonna find yourself comin’ out back on Route One. You with me there so far?”

  “There’a shopping center there,” Cistaro said. “Then a big fuckin’ movie theater, whole buncha fuckin’ screens, and a couple discount stores and some kind of a big car dealer, sells about a dozen different makes. I forget the name.”

  “That’s the place,” McKeach said. “Brick building anna parking must cover three-four acres, dunno how much land they got, a really huge-big parking lot.”

  “Yah,” Cistaro said, “I know the place you mean. Last time I was by there, forget what I was doin’, snow was onna ground. Not too much though—most of it’d melted out there onna parking lot. Dead weeds growin’ up all over, stickin’ up through holes, the pavement. But Wheelers trailers’re still out there, way down back there by the tracks. Made them look like they were lonesome, made me feel a little sad—six or eight of them, you know? Bright yellow and red paint they used to use, used to see them everywhere—‘THE WHOLE WORLD ROLLS ON WHEELERS.’

  “Now you don’t see them no more. What happened to that company? Who owns that big plant now?”

  “You wanna know something?” McKeach said. “Fact is I don’t really know. Some kind of business in the front part. This small sign out front, not sure really, what it says. ‘Something something Systems.’

  “Like it’s one of those computer things nobody else can understand. Bookkeeping for other people, got their own businesses they mostly run all by themseves but they don’t wanna keep t
heir books. Basically the same thing as Maxie does for us—keep track of the money, how much we got of it. But Maxie also brings it in, which I don’t think they would do—all they do is keep the books.

  “I think they rent front space from whoever owns the building now. Who’s out back or what they’re doin’ there? I doubt these people inna front know or even care who that is, what they’re doin’ in the space or bringin’ in and keepin’ there.

  “Us, the way I first heard about it, whole back the building being absoutely vacant, I was over Marybeth’s house havin’ dinner one night, maybe three-four years ago. She invited me, said, ‘We never see you anymore—you got to stop around more.’ Which of course we both know they don’t’s because if there’s any chance at all that Emmett might come along, then she doesn’t dare invite me. Because Emmett told Caroline some years ago, and she then told Marybeth, he first made superintendent, he realized she’d still wanta keep in touch with her sister. And that naturally this would mean now and then that they’d also be having dinner, sometimes, one house or the other, with Marybeth and Peter. And that kind of thing would still be all right because he always did like Marybeth, and what with Peter being in what to him always looked something like real law enforcement—Peter’s in industrial security, New England district manager, Watchguard Security—him and Peter’d still be all right.

  “But as far as him still seein’ me? Well, he knew Caroline probably would, time to time herself—just by accident. She was over Marybeth’s and I happened to drop by to see Peter about something—that would be perfectly okay. But he personally hadda stop doin’ it. He just couldn’t afford it anymore, him now bein’ command level, if word started gettin’ out, newspapers or something, he’s associatin’ with known felons. Such as me. Even though I dunno what kind of big change it could’ve made made, his goddamned career, him makin’ superintendent, him and Caroline her sister and her sister’s husband havin’ dinner, Peter’s house, and Pete’s brother dropped by.