“You got out of there all right, though,” Frankie said.
“Yeah,” Russell said. “Went over to Orlando with Kenny, burn the fuckin’ car. Kenny fuckin’ near killed himself. Went in this orange grove, right? Pulled it offa the road, there’s this little dirt road, there. So, Kenny was driving. He gets out, sticks a rag down the gas tank, he hangs it down and soaks it and then he pulls it out and hangs it down onna fender and lights it off. Fuckin’ car just blew up. And, he left it in gear, you know? Knocked him right on his ass, it was in reverse. He’s a hot shit. Gets up. ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘that’s the second job like that I fucked up. I got to do that again, I’m gonna find somebody, knows what he’s doing.’ Kenny, he didn’t have no eyebrows, for Christ sake, hasn’t got much hair left, either.”
“What was it,” Frankie said, “hot?”
“Nah,” Russell said, “it was Kenny’s car. But what the fuck’s a car good for, you had all them dogs in it over two days? Nothin’. It’s like riding in a shithouse. So, Kenny had it in his sister’s name, she called the cops the day we’re supposed to get there, says it got stolen. Then, we got out of there Wednesday. You should’ve seen those assholes when they search you at the airport, they see me and Kenny. I thought their eyes was gonna come right out of their heads. Four times we got to go through the metal detector. Then there was this guy, I guess he was the newest guy there or something, he had to pat us down. I think they give him the rest of the day off. ‘You’re gonna let us on the plane, finally,’ Kenny said, ‘aren’t you?’ They look at him. ‘Mister,’ one of them says, ‘if you haven’t got no weapons on you, you can ride. You probably oughta ride in the baggage, but never mind that.’ Nobody’d sit next to us. We hadda ride way in the back and there was this one stewardess, every time she hadda come near us, she’d look at us like she never saw anything like us before in her life. ‘You guys going all the way to Boston?’ she says. ‘You wouldn’t consider, getting off in Washington or some place?’ Kenny fell for it. ‘This thing gonna land in Washington?’ he says. ‘I never been to Washington.’ See, we didn’t stop or anything. ‘No,’ she says, ‘but if you’ll get off there, I’ll use my influence with the captain and I’m sure he’ll agree to it.’ The guy on the bus from New York,” Russell said, “I come up from there onna bus? I’m not gonna get searched with the weight on me. I thought he was gonna make me ride outside. I fuckin’ crashed when I got here, boy. I never been so tired in my life.”
“You look all beat to shit,” Frankie said.
“Yeah,” Russell said, “and the hell of it is, I been up for about a week, you know? And I shouldn’t’ve even slept last night, only I hadda or I would’ve just fallen down. I got to keep moving till I finish this thing off. I thought I was gonna see the guy with the other stuff this morning, but I couldn’t raise him.”
“You haven’t dumped the stuff?” Frankie said.
“Dump it,” Russell said, “Christ, no. I didn’t hit it yet. I can’t, I probably won’t be able to move it till tonight, now, by the time I see him and everything. I know where it is. I can get it, and I haven’t got it on me.
“Down the bus station,” Frankie said.
“Never mind,” Russell said. “I know where it is.”
“You’re just an asshole,” Frankie said. “You know that, you asshole? The kind of chances you’re taking, they’re gonna forget about putting you away for the stuff when they catch you. They’re gonna put you away for being nuts.”
“Talk to me about that when I get the dough,” Russell said.
“Russ,” Frankie said, “this whole town’s dry, and it’s been dry for three or four weeks. There’s more guys running into drugstores now with guns’n you ever saw. They got Goldfinger and that was the end of that. They tossed three guys with shipments this week, for Christ sake. The minute the word gets out, somebody’s in with something, everybody goes right out of their minds. There’s more heat in this town on that’n there is in the FBI, for Christ sake. Unload, Russ. Let somebody else do a hundred years or so, they catch him with it.”
“Not till I hit it,” Russell said. “Look, I’m into this, over twelve K, right? I put it to a guy, fast, I don’t hit it, what do I get? I’m gonna get, even with things the way they are, no more’n fifteen, sixteen. I take it up a step, I can hit that stuff a whole step with the stuff I’m getting, I can move it to two guys and get twenny-five.”
“It’s stupid,” Frankie said. “It’s fuckin’ stupid. That’s a thousand dollars a year.”
“Look,” Russell said, “I don’t need nothing, make me dumb. You know that, you and Squirrel. Squirrel knows it, at least. Maybe you still think we were smart, doing that. You’re just as dumb as I am. You just come around and stroke me some, I’ll do any dumb fuckin’ thing you can think of. The thing is, though, you and me’re different. When this’s over, I’m through, doing dumb things for guys. I do dumb things for me, maybe, and then, I get grabbed, okay, at least I was doing them for me. Which means, I get to keep all the fuckin’ money. I don’t have to give Squirrel nothing for being smart enough to see I’m stupid any more.”
“That worked out beautiful,” Frankie said.
“Sure,” Russell said, “fuckin’ cheesecake. Of course there’s a contract out on us and all, but it worked beautiful. You and me, we got different ideas of beautiful, too.”
“The fuck’re you talking about?” Frankie said.
“You,” Russell said, “me, and the Squirrel. There’s a contract out on us. I hang around here too long, which I’m not gonna do, I’m gonna be as dead as you guys are. I’m gonna go to Montreal. I know a guy that’s got something going up there and that’s where I’m gonna go. And I’ll tell you something: if I didn’t, I’d still go.”
“For what?” Frankie said.
“Cut the shit, Frank,” Russell said, “for the Trattman game. The fuck’s the matter with you?”
“What the fuck’s the matter with you?” Frankie said. “You’re the one that’s got something the matter with him. Where’re you getting this fairy story? You flying or something?”
“Frank,” Russell said, “I can add and subtract. There’s gotta be a contract. Has to be one.”
“Nobody knows we did it,” Frankie said.
“I think they do,” Russell said.
“They went for it,” Frankie said.
“That’s good,” Russell said. “You go ahead and believe that. It’ll make you feel better while the guy’s catching up with you. Who’s the guy that does the work? Tell him when he sees you, sorry I couldn’t wait around. Tell him I went to, tell him I went back inna service, I liked it better when it was a pretty good chance I’d at least get a chance to shoot back if they missed me the first time.”
“Russell,” Frankie said, “Trattman’s practically dead. They beat him shitless. You didn’t know that, did you?”
“Shit,” Russell said, “of course I knew that. Kenny told me that.”
“Kenny,” Frankie said, “this’s Kenny Gill we’re talking about, right?”
“Right,” Russell said. “Kenny was telling me, well, he didn’t give me the guy’s name, but it hadda be Trattman. We’re talking, we got all them fuckin’ dogs inna car and we got all this time and it’s raining and everything, I said to him: ‘You know, this really sucks. This is really a shitty way to make a couple dollars. I thought it was gonna be easy, and it fuckin’ sucks.’
“ ‘Well,’ he tells me, we get to talking, ‘there’s not very many things a guy can do.’ And he tells me, there’s a guy, runs a card game some place, Kenny don’t even know who he is.”