“Because,”he said, still wearing The Look, “the riskier this is, the more money I want for the part, the uh participation.”
“That’s understandable,” the deaf man said. “So suppose I tell you up front exactly what I’ll need from you, and then you can tell me whether or not you feel the risk is worth whatever it is I’m willing to pay for your participation, isn’t that the word you used?”
“Yes,” Carter said.
He had the feeling he was being put on, the fuckin hearing-impaired jackass.
“So tell me what you need,” he said.
“First the uniforms. Four in all. I don’t care if you buy them or steal them or find them under a rock. You know your own size, I’ll give you mine and Florry’s, and I’ll have the other one for you by the end of the week.”
“What are you thinking here? A wheel man and three to go in?”
“Something like that.”
“Cause I know a good wheel man, if you need one. Guy I met in the joint. Very good. Hands like a brain surgeon. He can drive you in and out of a pay toilet without putting in a quarter.”
“Can he drive a garbage truck?”
“A what?”
“A garbage truck.”
“What kind of heist is this, anyway?”
“A very big one.”
“With just four men involved?”
“That’s all it’ll take.”
“What kind of security are we talking about?”
“Virtually none.”
“Like what? What does virtually none mean?”
“A handful of policemen at most.”
“Does this involve taking out cops? Cause I have to tell you, I draw the line at doing cops. Except on the English-speaking stage, if you follow me.”
“I don’t plan on injuring any policemen.”
“But does the possibility exist?”
“Yes, it does. If things go very very wrong. But I don’t…”
“That’s what I…”
“…expect anything…”
“…meant. Taking out a cop…”
“…to go wrong.
“Well, you never know. And what I’m trying to say, you box a cop, you never get the bastards off your back. They’ll hound you till you’re old and gray, those bastards. They stick up for their own, it’s like a fuckin tribe they’ve got.”
“I recognize the risks.”
“I’m glad you do. I don’t mean the uniforms. For all I know you can walk in some store and buy them right off the rack. It’s not like a police uniform, where it could mean trouble if the wrong person got hold of it. Who the hell would want to wear a garbage man’s uniform except a garbage man?”
“Me,” the deaf man said, and smiled.
“And me, apparently. And two other guys.”
“Correct.”
“One on the wheel…”
“Yes, and another on the front seat beside him.”
“And the other two?”
“Hanging off the truck. The way garbage men do.”
“We’re going to ride a garbage truck to a bank stickup, right?”
“No, we’re not going to stick up a bank. This is so much simpler. But yes, we’ll be using a garbage truck.”
“Where are we going to get this garbage truck?”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to steal one.”
“Here we go with the risk element again,” Carter said. “The uniforms, I’m not too worried about. A garbage truck is another thing again. You can’t just walk off with a fuckin garbage truck. That’s taking a very big risk, ripping off something as big as a garbage truck. In size , I mean.”
“But I heard you’re very good.”
“Sure, breaking into an apartment, opening a wall safe, like that. But the biggest thing I ever stole—I’m talking about size now, physical size, not value—the biggest thing was a bronze lamp supposed to come from some Egyptian museum, it turned out it was as queer as a turnip, it brought me twenty bucks from my fence. This big bronze thing like an elephant. Twenty bucks, can you believe it? I nearly got a hernia carrying it out. But a garbage truck? I never stole a garbage truck in my life.”
“Maybe you can just borrow one.”
Another smile. Big fuckin joke here, stealing a garbage truck.
“Big risk, a garbage truck,” Carter said, and gave him The Look again.
“Yes. That’s why I’m willing to pay you fifty thousand dollars for this part of the job alone.”
Carter swallowed.
“What does the rest of the job entail?” he asked.
FOX HILL was a town in Elsinore County on Sands Spit, some sixty-odd miles outside the city. The town had originally been named Vauxhall by the British, after the district of that name in the borough of Lambeth in London, but over the years the name had become Americanized—some might say bastardized—to its present form. The county had also been named by a British colonist well versed in the works of his most illustrious countryman. Nobody knew who had named Sands Spit.
Fox Hill had been a sleepy little fishing village until as recently as forty years ago, when an enterprising gentleman from Los Angeles came east to open what was then called the Fox Hill Inn, a huge rambling waterfront hotel that had since fallen into different hands and been renamed the Fox Hill Arms. The building of the hotel had also been responsible for the building of a town around it, rather the way a frontier fort in the dear, dead days eventually led to a settlement around it. Fox Hill was now a community of some forty thousand people, thirty thousand of them year-round residents, ten thousand known alternately as “the summer people” or, less affectionately, “the Sea Gulls.”
Herman Friedlich was a year-round resident.
At five forty-fiveP .M. on that Friday, the twenty-seventh day of March, Friedlich called the Fox Hill Police Department to say that he’d left his 1987 smoky-blue Acura Legend coupe outside the Grand Union supermarket while he went inside for a bottle of milk, and when he came out the car was gone.
The police officer to whom he’d reported this was Detective Sergeant Andrew Budd.
“Was the car locked?” Budd asked.
“No, I was just going in for a minute,” Friedlich said. “I got caught on the damn checkout line.”
You jackass, Budd thought.
6.
THING SIL LIKED TO DO BEST was work by the window. Sit by the window, look down at the street, watch the people going by, write his words about the people. He still lived in Diamondback, better apartment than he used to live in with his mother and three sisters when he was just coming along. Close to the uptown edge of the park here. Look out the window, watch the people, write about the people. Difference between a rock group, no matter how lofty they played, and a rap crew was that the rapper was a social commentator, the rapper was writing about the people, telling the people what it was like to be black . You got some of your white rappers, they tried , man, they got the beat right and they got the words almost right, but the protest was plastic, man, they didn’t know what it was like .