He was in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central, the seafood pan-roast combo and a glass of white wine. He’d started out on cherrystone clams and a bloody mary shooter, and he was thinking he’d finish off with a half-dozen local bluepoints.
A couple of stools down, two guys were talking.
“You know what a pack of smokes goes for in New York these days? Ten bucks.”
“You couldn’t buy toenail clippers for less than ten bucks, and that’s cheap,” the other guy said.
“You know what a carton of smokes costs down South, one of the tobacco-growing states? Thirty bucks. You load up a truck, you double your money, you sell it under the counter.”
“If you don’t get caught with North Carolina revenue stamps on the product.”
“I’m just saying.”
“You just keep talking out your ass,” the other guy said.
The first guy dropped his voice. “This is money in the bank,” he said. “You make the investment, pay off the truck and the driver, it’s gonna return fifty large, no downside risk.”
If it’s not your money, Tommy thought.
That’s what the other guy thought, too. “Looks good on paper,” he said. “But the plain fact is, you’ve got nothing but a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged.”
“Let me talk to my guy, Jack, see what he’ll do for us.”
“You do that,” Jack said. He got up.
Tommy had made this kind of pitch himself. He knew it was a hard sell. Guys like Jack were at the top of the food chain and didn’t need bottom feeders. It was the same the world over.
Tommy decided to order the bluepoints.
Tommy always had something working, nothing that was going to knock down fifty large, maybe, but it was better to stay under the radar. You got too ambitious, you attracted the wrong kind of attention. Which in fact was why he’d been inside. His brother Roy, rest in peace, had tried for a big score and gotten his dick handed to him. There was serious gang muscle involved and Tommy knew to take himself off the street until the heat blew over, so he pled to a bullshit accessory charge and went up the river for a year and change.
The thing about doing time is, your time isn’t your own. In a max facility like Clinton, you’re on the clock 24/7. So you get with the program. Wake up, chow line, work detail. And no such animal as privacy. Nights, there’s bed check. If you got on the wrong side of the screws, you might as well kiss your ass goodbye.
It was an enormous luxury, then, for Tommy to just lie in bed in the mornings and watch the early light play off the ceiling. No bells, no PA system, nobody with a hard-on and a bad attitude ready to give him grief. He kept to a routine all the same. Brushed his teeth, started the coffee, made the bed. The studio apartment wasn’t much, God’s honest truth, but it was his, and he wanted his self-respect more than he wanted to hook up. Not that it was monastic, but he made the effort to keep it squared away.
The other thing he tried to keep neat was his perimeter. One of the conditions of his probation was that he not associate with known felons. This was, of course, a joke, since pretty much everybody in Tommy’s circle of friends, going back to grade school, had gotten jammed up with the law, one way or another. Mostly petty theft, but a couple of guys in the heavy. He knew to steer wide of them. There was no point in giving his PO reason to violate him. Basically, he was keeping his head down.
Not that he didn’t keep his ear to the ground. There was always some graft you could put your hand to. A week ago, he’d been down in Maryland. He wasn’t supposed to leave the state, not without permission, but what the hey? The old lady expected her rent.
He picked up his beard in Gaithersburg, and they trawled some local gun shops. Browning nines were pricey, Glocks were a glut on the market. Gangbangers were into the Brownings, the more pimped out the better. He even found a nickeled 1911, not his own weapon of choice, if he had to choose, but covering a rough circle of two hundred miles, they picked up two dozen guns Tommy could take back to New York. He cleared fifty a pop with his wholesaler. Easy in, easy out. It wasn’t up to him to meet the buyers. Shooters weren’t always the most pliable clients.
On the low end, he fenced credit cards. This was only good for about forty-eight hours, until the issuing bank closed them down. Still, it was bread and butter. He knew he was coasting.
And then it fell in his lap.
Brooklyn South was sucking hind tit, and Babs DiMello was taking heat from her lieutenant.
“I’m not trying to be a complete jerk, here, Detective,” he asked her, “but why are we stuck on the dime?”
Whenever somebody tells you they’re not trying to be a complete jerk, they probably mean the exact opposite, Babs knew, but she was as frustrated as he was. The problem was the Russians. These days the Russian mob had their hooks into everything from white slavery to identity theft, and they took no prisoners. They were brutal with the competition. A war of attrition with a rival Jamaican posse known as the Dreads was just coming to a long and bloody close, mostly because both sides were exhausted by it, and turf wars were bad for business all around. Somebody, maybe whatever was left of one of the old Mafia families, had brokered a grudging lay-down. The capos had lost much of their juice, but you could still go to them for remediation. They knew from settling scores. Then there were the new kids on the block, Mara Salvatrucha, MS-13, a Salvadoran gang that had interpenetrated the other crime syndicates, with an enormous presence in the federal prison system, where they recruited fresh meat. They hired out as muscle. Unhappily, the learning curve wasn’t steep.
“Babs, tell me, please, that you’ve turned up something, or anything, on the hijack at Kennedy.”
She understood the fork he was in. Homeland Security, the FBI, Port Authority, NYPD’s counterterrorist unit. They were raking the ground. Scorched earth. A shipment of military munitions, 5.56, bound for the Gulf, had been boosted. Not an armed robbery. The entire manifest had simply disappeared. It had to be an inside job. There was a leak, obviously, but who had the ammo now? On the open market, it was worth a million bucks. And there were motivated buyers. But it wasn’t the sellers so much that bothered the feds. The real question was the identity of the end user.
Babs wasn’t the only one to think the Russians had a hand in it, and with a buyer already lined up, but she had absolutely nothing to go on.
“I’m getting hammered,” the lieutenant said.
“I know that,” she said.
“Sorry to take it out on you.”
“Don’t do it, or don’t apologize,” she said.
He smiled. “I should have been looking for that,” he said. “You’re ornery, Babs, but that’s what makes you a good cop.”
“I’ve still got diddly-squat, Lieutenant.”
“I thought you had an inside guy at ATF.”
It was the kind of thing the lieutenant would remember. “Treasury agent named Chapin,” she said, “but he’s probably been shipped off to Missoula, Montana.”
“How come?”
“That thing a year and a half ago. The cell-phone scam. ATF had an oar in the water, and we stepped on their skirts. My guy took the fall for it. Senior in the office.”