Brian erupted in a choking fit; he had tried to inhale my stogie.
"That's a no-no, fella; you'll kill yourself," I warned.
"Peeling a safe is strictly for amateurs," continued Joe. "When you peel a safe you don't have the knowledge, skill, or tools needed to do a professional job. What you're doing is, you're attacking the steel casing of the safe rather than the door. You're going after the body, and you start at an edge of the casing and peel away the layers of steel with cold chisels and sledges, wedges, pickaxes… anything. It takes about eight hours of sweaty work to peel even a small safe, and it's noisy as hell. You can only peel a safe that's isolated in some old warehouse where nobody will hear the noise."
"Right," said Brian, whose eyes still watered. "Had a junkie tried to peel the safe in the lumberyard last year. Could hear him a mile away. Caught him before he'd even made a dent in it. Poor slob. But punching's different. Now that takes a little skill, and it's much quicker. Problem is, it's also noisy."
"Yeah, noisy, but it is quick," said Joe. "Usually the guy who punches a safe will plan to skedaddle before the heat arrives. What you do is, you drill into the safe door with a low-speed, high-torque drill with a good Swedish bit. You put the hole just to the side of the dial in the door, angled in toward the center. Then you stick a heavy metal punch into that hole and whang it with a baby sledge. Ping! The back of the lock is knocked right off, and in you go. Noisy but quick."
"But you gotta have a good drill, and it takes an hour, and several bits, to get that hole," said Brian.
"I wanna tell about blowing a safe," said Kevin, who'd spun around in his chair to face us. Cops. They'll talk your ear off. Everybody's seen the movies about this, where the guy packs in the vials of nitro, called soup, and then hides behind the mattresses while the building blows up. Well, it ain't like that. Now they don't use nitro, which is dangerous as hell. They use plastique. Black-market plastique, and they place it just right. Then they ramp it with a hemp-and-cable mat and detonate it electrically. Boom! Off comes your door and you're in."
"Yeah," said Brian, "but not as easy as that. One: how and where do you get the funny putty? Not so easy, and a federal offense if you're even caught with the stuff. Two: you still gotta drill the holes and know how to place the charge. You gotta study the box before hand. Blowing a box is like cleaving a diamond, you get one shot… and you can wreck the box and everything that's inside. Also of course, you can kill yourself."
"True, true," said O'Hearn philosophically. He returned to "The Young and the Restless."
"Still," mused Brian, "blowing a box remains the quickest way in. If speed is all that counts, and you don't worry about the noise-"
"- or the danger-"
"- or the danger, then you can't beat it. But burning's the most popular method now."
"Oh for sure," said Joe, lighting a Benson amp; Hedges with his Orsini lighter.
"Where'd you get that fruity lighter, James0e?" asked Brian.
Joe cuddled the instrument in his big hairy paw and glared back.
"This is a class lighter, Hannon. Cost three hundred bucks. Made in Italy. In Florence. Only reason you think it's strange is because it's class."
"I just said it looks a little fruity is all. I guess a lot of stuff made in Italy is fruity, like those chacha boots."
"Izat so? How fruity is a nine-millimeter Beretta? I guess the Israeli army doesn't think it's so fruity. How about a Lamborghini, or a Ferrari? I notice there are no high-performance racing cars named O'Grady. Eh?"
Brian squinted at him, like a leopard on a limb.
"About the only thing they make in Ireland is Guinness… as if the Irish need any more of that- "
Brian slammed his palms down on the table and rose to his feet. O'Hearn slammed down his shot glass and rose to his feet.
"Shut up, Joe, or I'll paste you one," said Mary.
"Everybody keep quiet, or I'll paste everybody," I said.
"But you're just a doctor," said O'Hearn.
"Kevin, you obviously haven't seen Doc Adams in the gym or on the pistol range," said Joe.
Gee, he made me feel like Captain Marvel. I liked hearing that. Any guy who's almost fifty likes to hear that.
"I want to hear about burning safes," I said.
"Aren't they steel? Then how can you burn them?" asked Mary, getting another cappucino.
"You use an oxyacetylene torch, Mary," said Brian. "It'll cut through anything. Burning is pretty slow, but it's dead quiet and safe. In the old days the only problem was lugging those big gas tanks to the box. How can you hike those big cylinders up to a roof and through a skylight? Can't. But recently they've come out with these little bottles, tanks you strap on your back just like scuba tanks. With hoses and gauges. Only instead of a mask on your face you're carrying the torch. You climb into the joint and walk up to the box and start burning it. Right around the lock face. She falls away when you cut through the facing. It's kind of like punching, only slower.. . but dead quiet."
Sam Bowman spoke up. We'd almost forgotten him, he'd been so polite and quiet.
"Doc. What tipped you off was those guys come to look at my roof."
"Yep. Seemed to me they came and inspected your place at a pretty convenient time. So I warned you. But it was only a really vague hunch. I wish I'd have caught on to this."
I glared down at the crumpled brochure describing the highefficiency oil burner, which I was holding in my hand.
"Mary says she let the guy into the basement for a quick look at our furnace. She stayed upstairs. He was down there for maybe ten minutes."
"Enough time. Plenty," said Joe. "He was a real pro. He cut through your alarm wires in two lower windows, and so skillfully you can't detect the cuts on casual inspection. He slipped the snib on one. He left the bogus literature and split, knowing he could come back at his convenience and get in. Which he did."
"Only question now," said O'Hearn, "is how many of them are there? Twenty? Keee-riste, seems like there's an army of 'em."
"Don't like it," said Brian. "But as far as Doc and Mary are concerned- as far as the town of Concord is concerned think the worst has passed. Don't think I can say the same for you, Sam."
"The worst ain't passed for them, I tell you that," Sam said.
The phone rang. It was for Joe. While he nodded and grunted into the instrument, Mary began making a pizza. She had delegated tasks to everyone: Sam sliced the pepperoni, Kevin opened the anchovies, Brian sliced mushrooms and green peppers, and I grated mozzarella. Joe grunted and nodded. Then we all froze. in our tracks.
'DeLucca!"
Stunned silence on the part of all the cops. Mary and I stared at each other dumfounded, as if someone had just told a joke and we didn't get the punch line.
'DeLucca!" echoed O'Hearn.
"DeLucca shmalooka," said Brian contemptuously. "Carmen DeLucca is dead."
Joe held the phone, frozen. He was wearing the Thousand-Yard Stare, like a G.I. who's been in combat for two days, or a football coach who's just lost the title game in the last thirty seconds because of an interception runback. He replaced the phone without saying good-bye, returning it to its cradle carefully, as if it were filled with "soup." I didn't like the look on his face.
"Lab finally did a make- a twelve-point positive make- on the dog biscuit fingers we found at Johnny's," he said.
"Not DeLucca's," said Kevin.
"DeLucca's. Positively DeLucca's. Carmen Salvatore DeLucca, the East Coast buttonman and Wise Guy."
"They found Carmen DeLucca in a lime pit," said Brian. "They found what was left of him in Elizabeth, New jersey, in a quarry lime pit. Don't tell me different?
"I tell you different. Fingers in the doggie's mouth belong to Carmen DeLucca. Twelve-point positive make. The bag of smelly jelly they dragged out of that lime pit was some other poor bastard."