"Well, thank you," Vito said.
"I'm glad we could straighten this out," Paulo said, and wrapped his arm around Vito's shoulder.
Vito felt pretty good until he got to the goddamned plumber's. The sonofabitch was waiting for him, and overnight, he'd gone back on his word. Now he wanted twenty-five hundred before he would fix a fucking thing at the house. That left him with nine hundred. The plumber said it would probably run another thousand, maybe fifteen hundred, for the labor and incidentals.
There isn't a plumber in the fucking world who ever brought a job in for less than the estimate, and even if this sonofabitch did, that would leave me, if he wants fifteen hundred, six hundred short.
I've got eleven, twelve hundred in the PSFS account, and I can always borrow against the Caddy.
Jesus, I hate to put a loan against the Caddy.
Why the fuck didn't I take Cassandro's offer to take my time making the markers good? I really didn't have to pay them off that quick. My credit is good.
The absence of inhabitants in most of the Pine Barrens does not obviate the need for police patrols. The physical principle that nature abhors a vacuum has a tangential application to an unoccupied area. People tend to dump things that they would rather not be connected to in areas where they believe they are unlikely to be found in the near future.
Enterprising youth, for example, who wish to earn a little pocket money by stealing someone's automobile, and removing therefrom parts that have resale value, drive the cars into the Pine Barrens and strip them there.
And, in the winter, more than one passionate back seat dalliance in an auto with a leaking exhaust system has ended in tragedy by carbon monoxide poisoning.
And the Pine Barrens is a good place to shoot someone and dispose of the body. The chances that a shot will be heard are remote, and a shallow grave even desultorily concealed stands a very good chance of never being discovered.
There had been an incident of this nature just about a year before, which Deputy Sheriff Daniel J. Springs was thinking about as he drove, touching sixty, on a routine patrol in his three-year-old Ford, down one of the dirt roads that crosses the Barrens.
Dan Springs, a heavyset, somewhat jowly man who was fifty and had been with the Sheriff's Department more than twenty years, tried to cover all the roads in his area at least once every three days. Nine times out of ten, he saw nothing but the scrubby pines and the dirt road, and his mind tended to wander.
One of Springs's fellow deputies, making a routine patrol not far from here, had come across a nearly new Jaguar sedan abandoned by the side of the road, the keys still in the ignition, battery hot, with half a tank full of gas.
That meant somebody had dumped the car there, and driven away in a second car. They'd put the Pennsylvania plate on the FBI's NCIC (National Crime Information Center) computer and got a hit.
The cops in Philadelphia were looking for the car. It was owned by a rich guy, a white guy, who had been found carved up in his apartment. The cops were looking for the car, and for the white guy's black boyfriend.
Springs had been called in on the job then, to help with working the crime scene, and to keep civilians from getting in the way. Springs never ceased to be amazed how civilians came out of the woodwork, even in the Pine Barrens, when something happened.
Everybody came in on that job. The State Police, and even the FBI. There was a possibility of a kidnapping, which was a federal offense, even if state lines didn't get crossed, and here it was pretty evident, with a Philadelphia car abandoned in New Jersey, that state lines had been crossed.
Plus, of course, the Philadelphia Homicide detectives working the job. Springs remembered one of them, an enormous black guy dressed like a banker. Springs remembered him because he was the only one of the hotshots who did not go along with the thinking that because the car had been foundhere, that if therewas a body, it had been dumped/ buried anywherebut here, and the chances of finding it were zilch.
The black Philadelphia Homicide detective had said he was pretty sure (a) that there was a body and (b) they were going to find it right around where they had found the Jaguar.
And they had. Not a hundred yards from the Jaguar they had found a shallow grave with a black guy in it.
Springs had spoken to the big Homicide detective:
"How come you were so sure we'd find a body, and find it here?"
"I'm Detective Jason Washington," the black guy had said, introducing himself, offering a hand that could conceal a baseball. " How do you do, Deputy Springs? We're grateful for your cooperation."
"Why did you know the body would be here?" Springs had pursued as he shook hands. "Call me Dan."
"I didn't know it would be here," Washington had explained. "But I thought it would be."
"Why?"
"Well, I started with the idea that the doers were not very smart. They would never have stolen the Jaguar, an easy-to-spot vehicle, for example, if they were smart. And I'm reasonably sure they were drunk. And people who get drunk doing something wrong invariably sober up, and then get worried about what they've done. That would apply whether they shot this fellow back in Philadelphia, en route here, or here. They would therefore be anxious to get rid of the car, and the body, as quickly as possible. I would not have been surprised if we had found the body in, or beside, the car. And they are both lazy, and by now hung over. I thought it unlikely that they would drag a twohundred-odd-pound corpse very far."
Just like Sherlock Holmes, Springs had thought. He haddeduced what probably had happened. Smart guy, as smart as Springs had ever met.
They'd caught the guys, two colored guys, who had shot the one in the Barrens, a couple of days later, in Atlantic City. They had been using the dead white guy's credit cards, which proved Detective Washington's theory that they were not very smart.
They'd copped a plea, and been sentenced to twenty years to life, which meant they would be out in seven, eight years, but Springs now recalled hearing somewhere that they had been indicted for kidnapping, and were to be tried in federal court for that. The white boy's father had political clout, he owned a newspaper, newspapers, and he wanted to make sure that the guys who chopped up his son didn't get out in seven or eight years.
Deputy Springs was thinking of the enormous black Homicide detective who dressed like a banker and talked like a college professor, wondering if he was still around Philadelphia, when suddenly the steering wheel was torn out of his hands, and the Ford skidded out of control off the dirt road and into a scraggly pine tree before he could do anything about it.
He hit the four-inch-thick pine tree squarely. He was thrown forward onto the steering wheel, and felt the air being knocked out of him. The Ford bent the pine tree, and then rode up the trunk for a couple feet, and then the tree trunk snapped, and the car settled on the stump.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" Deputy Springs exclaimed. For a moment, he could see the branches of the pine tree, and then, accompanied by the smell of the water/antifreeze mixture turning to steam, the windshield clouded over.
There was a screeching from the engine compartment as the blades of the fan dug into the radiator.
Springs switched off the ignition, unfastened his seat belt, and pushed his door open. He got out and walked several feet away from the car and stood there for a moment, taking tentative deep breaths to see if he'd broken a rib or something, and bending his knees to see if they were all right.
Then he walked around the front of the car and examined the bumper.
They're not bumpers, they're goddamned decoration is all they are. Look at the way that "bumper" is bent!