Sharky's Machine

by William Diehl

  “Flowers went for his piece, man. You think I’m gonna stand around, let some dumb nigger blow my ass off?”

  “He is a dumb fuckin’ nigger, no question about that. Good help’s hard to come by these days.” He looked through the car window. Steamboat was standing by the front of the car, watching. “Now Steamboat’s a whole nother case, baby. You fuck with Steamboat, you better have your plot paid for.”

  “Used to fight, didn’t he?”

  “Light-heavy. Mean son-bitch. Cat’s never been knocked out. Too slow was his fuckin’ problem. He was instant death when he was in-fighting but the fast boys would lay out there, cut him to pieces at arm’s length. You just let that motherfucker get in one good shot, though. Shit, they’d think they was run over by a goddamn freight train. What you want, nigger?”

  “Told ya, man. It’s a social call.”

  “Un hunh. How long you knowed about this here travelin’ bookie parlor of mine?”

  “About three years.”

  “Aww, don’t shit me, nigger. We grew up on the same fuckin’ street, man, remember?”

  “Look here, brother, long as you keep your operation clean, I ain’t interested in bringin’ anything down on you. You ain’t connected. You strictly cash and carry, don’t take no markers, so nobody gets their head stove in, any of that shit. I ain’t in any rush to turn you up to some white dude on the Gamin’ Squad just so’s he can make some goddamn points. I’d rather know what you doin’, Zipper, have some motherfuckin’ stranger come in here bustin’ nigger ass all over town, you dig?”

  Zipper thought it over, then smiled.

  “How about a little wine there, for old time’s sake?”

  “Thanks anyway, man. It gives me heartburn.”

  “Heartburn! Man, that shit’s fifty dollars a bottle. Ain’t no fuckin’ heartburn in this shit.”

  “I’ll still pass. I got a partner downstairs starin’ down Cherry. I got to get back before they get bored, start hurtin’ ass.”

  “Okay, so get it on. What the fuck you doin’ here?”

  “I need some information.”

  Zipper sat up as though he had been slapped. At first he seemed surprised, then surprise turned to anger.

  “Shee-it.”

  “Listen here, motherfucker …”

  “Sheee-IT, man. What you handin’ this nigger? Come in here, think you can … goddamn, hey, Zipper ain’t no fuckin’ stoolie. Zipper don’t rub ass with the heat. Man, you forgot where you came from.”

  “You ain’t changed a bit, sucker. Still put your fuckin’ mouth up front of your brains.”

  “Well, you changed, motherfucker. Shit, give a nigger a piece of goddamn tin and a peashooter, motherfucker thinks he’s Father fuckin’ Devine.”

  One of the phones rang and Zipper snatched it off the hook. “Closed for lunch,” he snapped. “Call back in ten minutes.” He slammed the phone back.

  “Look, I ain’t interested in your goddamn bookmaking, I told you that. I got a problem and I think maybe you can help me with it. Now, the dude I’m lookin’ for is white.”

  “Shit,” Zipper said, “I don’t do no business with honkies. Ain’t you heard? They’s a lotta fuckin’ rich niggers in Atlanta now.”

  Livingston looked at the floor. “You tellin’ me you don’t do business with whitey, I’m tellin’ you I’m talkin’ to one lyin’ nigger. You takin’ layoff bets from half the highpocket white bookmakers in town, Zipper, and I know it.”

  “Layoff bets? Man, that’s different. I don’t see none of them turkeys. M’bagman picks up the takes, brings me the bread and the slip. Then he takes back what we lose. All I do, I count the money and put down the bets. I don’t know any of them motherfuckers personal.”

  Zipper poured another glass of champagne, huffing while he poured.

  Livingston looked around the back seat, stared out the window, finally lit a cigar. He said, “We gonna talk or are you gonna get that fuckin’ hard head of yours dragged downtown and let a couple of white cats play good guy-bad guy with your ass?”

  “I told you my position. Zipper don’t hand out no shit to the fuzz. I don’t care we was street brothers fifteen years ago.”

  “I ain’t here ’cause we ran together,” Livingston said. “I’m here ’cause you got information I need. And I don’t have time to fuck around.”

  Zipper looked at Livingston with contempt. “Know somethin’?” he said. “You was one bad motherfucker. Nobody shit with you on the street, man. You bust ass. Now look at you. Two dollar fuckin’ suit, wash ‘n’ wear shoes, honkie goddamn haircut. And you want me to turn fuckin’ stoolie. I ain’t believin’ you, now.”

  “Listen here, Zipper, and listen good. I ain’t interested in your goddamn players. We’re talking about murder.”

  Zipper looked startled.

  “That’s right,” Livingston said. “Murder. Now you keep your fuckin’ yap shut until I finish. Cat I’m after is white. He’s an outfit hitman, can you dig that? Last night this son-bitch burned a very nice lady. He’s a fuckin’ lady-killer. And you givin’ me all this shit about protectin’ his ass?”

  Zipper said nothing. He stared into his champagne glass.

  “This motherfucker woulda come into town a couple weeks ago. If he is a gamblin’ man, he’d be a big gamblin’ man. Sports, ponies, any national shit. Now you don’t know anything about such a cat, okay. But if you do, Zipper, I got to know about it, ’cause man, we talkin’ about rough trade here.”

  “How come you so fuckin’ sure this dude gambles?”

  “I’m not. It’s a hunch. But right now it’s all I got.”

  The car was quiet. Zipper cleared his throat. Then the phone rang again.

  “Go ahead and talk,” Livingston said, “I know you’re a bookie. What the shit you so shy about?”

  Zipper yanked the phone off the hook. “Hello … yeah, this Zipper. What it is? … It’s Dallas and seven … Well, that’s tough shit, turkey. That’s the fuckin’ spread and ain’t nothin I can do about it…. Listen here, motherfucker, I don’t make the odds. You don’t like it, put your fuckin’ money back in your goddamn shoe. Now, you want some action or don’t you? … Well, fuck you too, nigger.” He slammed down the phone.

  Silence again.

  Finally Zipper said, “Only one possibility. Only one possibility. Cat can’t be your man. Can’t be.”

  “Who says?”

  “I say. He makes book in a fag bar out Cheshire Bridge Road.”

  “A fag bar?”

  “That’s right. This tough-nuts shooter you talkin’ about queer?”

  “Who is he?”

  “Shit, I told ya, nigger, I don’t have no truck with any of those fuckers personally. This joint, it’s called, uh … this stays with us, that right?”

  “C’mon, Zipper.”

  “This joint is called, uh, the Matador. Got this pansy-lookin’ bullfighter on the sign out front.”

  “I know the place.”

  “ ’Bout five weeks ago my bookie friend out there, you know—he does nickel and dime shit out there, nothin’ big, mostly local games—anyways, he calls me, says, do I want to take a layoff on the Oakland and Miami game? Fucker took the spread for five grand and lost his ass. Next week he’s back again. Motherfucker doubles up, lays out ten grand on some NFL game and a basketball game, and splits. Been goin’ like that ever since. Five, ten g’s a clip. Right now I’m into him for about five thou.”

  “When’s the last time he bet?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “You heard right, yesterday. He bettin’ on the playoff. Took Dallas and the points over Minnesota. Ten big ones.”

  “Zipper, I got to know who this player is.”

  “No fuckin’ way.”

  “Just the name, man.”

  “No motherfuckin’ way. Shit, I told ya. I don’t even know who it is. The bookie deals with the score and I deal with the bookie.”

  “Okay, who’s
the bookie then?”

  “C’mon, goddammit. You lean on him, he’s gonna know I done it to him.”

  “I’ll cover your ass. Don’t you worry about that. I ain’t interested in the fuckin’ bookie. I want his mark.”

  “You got to cover my ass, Livingston. Tell you somethin’. You come down on this little motherfucker, he gonna die on the spot.”

  “I’ll do it right, man. Who is it?”

  “The bartender. Name’s Arnold.”

  Livingston sighed. “Jesus,” he said, “that was worse than pickin’ cotton with your goddamn feet.”

  “Just don’t fuck me over on this, hear? And don’t come back with any more of this snitch shit either. I done made my contribution for life.”

  Livingston started to get out of the car. “Shit, motherfucker,” he said, “my eyes couldn’t stand any more of this pussywagon.”

  Zipper’s eyes flared. “Pussywagon. Pussywagon! Shit, you fuckin’ no-class nigger, this car cost fifty grand. Fifty fuckin’ thousand goddamn dollars. Ain’t no goddamn Detroit pussywagon. Shit, I don’t even scratch my balls when I’m in this machine. You hear me, Livingston?”

  But the policeman was gone, down through the fire door toward the bowling alley below.

  “Pussywagon, my ass,” Zipper growled, then he leaned out the door. “Steamboat!”

  “Yeah, boss.”

  “Take that fuckin’ dumbass to the Gradys and get his head stitched up and then fire his ass.”

  _____________________

  At four A.M., Friscoe quit for the night. He drove home, grumbling to himself, angry because he had turned up nothing at all in six hours of hard work. His back ached and his eyes burned as he entered the house, passing up his customary raid on the refrigerator and going straight to the bedroom. He went into the bathroom and closed the door before turning on the light so as not to awaken Sylvia, splashed cold water on his face, and sat on the commode to take off his shoes. He sighed with relief as he dropped them on the floor, then went back to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, bone weary and almost too tired to get undressed.

  His wife rolled over and said sleepily, “Barney?”

  “No, it’s Robert Redford,” he said wearily.

  “Oh, how nice.”

  “If he was as tired as I am, you could forget it.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Past four. I’m dead. My feet feel like I just ran the Boston Marathon.”

  “You would’ve been proud of Eddie, Barney. He did just fine.”

  “Jeeze, I completely forgot. Did you explain? Did it embarrass him I had to leave like that, right in the middle of Prokofiev?”

  “He understood. Nobody saw from the stage; they were very busy.”

  The lieutenant pulled and tugged at his clothes until they lay in a pile at his feet, then he fell back on the bed in his undershorts.

  “Jesus, Syl, there’s got to be an easier way to make a living.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “It never ends. You clean up one, there’s two more in its place.”

  She rose on one elbow and rubbed his temple with two fingers.

  “You been saying that since the day we got married,” she said.

  But Friscoe did not hear her. His breathing had already settled into a steady drone. Sylvia got up and pulled the covers over him and went into the bathroom.

  A moment later the phone rang.

  Before she could get back to it, Friscoe, from years of experience, reached out and answered it without opening his eyes.

  “Barney?”

  “Umm.”

  “Is that you, Friscoe?”

  “Uh … yeah.”

  “It’s Max Grimm. You awake?”

  “Almost … uh, you finish the autopsy?”

  “Oh, on the girl? Abrams got that hours ago. I’ve got something else you ought to know about. Are you listening?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “You remember, I told you Riley had a couple of John Does down here in the icehouse?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I just finished the post mortem on one of them.”

  “Christ, what the hell time is it?”

  “Who knows? I been going so long I can’t stop now. Anyway, this p.m. I just finished? They found the corpse out in the city dump yesterday afternoon. A real messy thing. Face blown off, both hands are missing.”

  “Hands missing?”

  “Yeah, cut off at the wrist. No clothes, no I.D., nothing.”

  “Twigs, I got one too many bodies on my hands already.”

  “Listen to me. Like I say, his face was blown off, nothing left, no way to idenitfy him, okay?”

  “Um hmm.”

  “But that isn’t what killed him. He was drilled through the right eye. A single .22 caliber long rifle-bullet, with the end dumdummed. It flattened out and laid up against the back of the skull on the inside.”

  “So?”

  “So the bullet was soaked in garlic.”

  _____________________

  And at almost the same moment that Twigs was telling Friscoe about the stiff in the ice house with the .22 caliber garlic-soaked bullet in its head, Anderson brought the telex message to Larry Abrams, who was sitting half asleep at his table, staring at the tape he had been studying for hours.

  The teletype message woke him up.

  “Here’s that FBI report you were lookin’ for,” Anderson said. “Looks like a dead end.”

  “What do you mean?” The Nosh said.

  “Read it.”

  The bureau had made a positive I.D. on the two prints. They belonged to a fifty-nine-year-old white male from Lincoln, Nebraska named Howard Burns. But The Nosh did not read any further. His eyes jumped to the bottom line of the report and he stared in disbelief.

  According to the FBI report, Howard Burns had been incinerated in an automobile accident on the outskirts of Omaha two months earlier.

  16

  The sleek white Grebe cabin cruiser rolled gently on a quiet sea, protected by a womb of warm fog that had drifted in from the Gulf Stream just after midnight, a fog so thick that it now obscured the crow’s nest over the cabin. Hotchins slipped on a pair of faded corduroys and a yellow slicker and went out on the afterdeck where he sat quietly massaging the calf of his imperfect leg. Occasionally, when tension and weariness weighed on him, he could almost feel the missing foot cramping up on him, the pain spreading slowly up to his knee, the artificial foot becoming a dead weight. It was a discomfort he endured alone, never mentioning it to others.

  He had anchored in a cove on the inland side of the island, an unnamed hump of sand and sea grass he remembered from the early days when he worked the shallows off the Georgia and South Carolina coasts with his father. He rarely thought about those days anymore. Time had eased all that, erasing memories of the harsh work and bitter loneliness that were the realities of a shrimper’s life. Now he regarded the sea with affection, a friend providing tiny islands along the coast from Brunswick to Charleston that had become his private hideaways.

  He sat in the stern, rubbing the leg, drawing strength from the artificial foot, which had become a constant reminder of the humiliation of defeat, of the common weakness he saw in all people who failed, who dreamed too small, and would not pay the price for even their little dreams. His utter contempt for those who simply endured had started in Korea. There were prices to be paid and the greater the prize, the higher the price.

  In the prison camp, where he lay nursing his shattered foot for almost a year before it was amputated, Hotchins had learned about survival. He needed a goal, something more than just day-by-day groveling to stay alive. His goal, his single driving obsession to be president of the United States, was born in morphine-crazed hallucinations, but it became his goal for living. He invented methods for keeping his mind alert. He tried to think like a president, act like a president, adopt the attitude of a president.

  When he was released from the hospital into the
prison population, he was shocked at what he found—a motley, demoralized, filthy group who reflected their senior officer, a colonel named Sacks who was a weak and disheartened shell, tormented by fear and sickness and destroyed by his own nightmares. Hotchins watched as Sacks encouraged the weak to submit to the North Koreans, to collaborate, sign confessions, to do anything to stay alive. He hated Sacks, not because he was weak, but because he had created an atmosphere that eventually would enervate Hotchins himself.

  If Hotchins were to survive, he had to destroy Sacks. His became a constant and subtle voice hammering at the colonel’s conscience, eroding the last vestige of Sacks’s self-respect. It was an insidious and ruthless campaign, so carefully carried out that when Sacks eventually hanged himself, he did not realize he had been driven to the act by the man who assumed his position of command.

  For the next two years Hotchins ruled the camp, hand-picking a small coterie of the toughest men left and establishing his own harsh rules and regulations. He restored military discipline to the prison, demanded that the men practice personal hygiene, that they exercise to keep their morale up. Twice he secretly ordered the execution of men on the verge of confessing to war crimes. He was both a frightening martinet and an inspiration to his fellow prisoners. They survived because he needed them to, and in the end he endured his humiliation with dignity and walked out of the camp a hero.

  When he did, he was convinced that he would someday be president, regardless of the price. It was a passion which DeLaroza had eased to life, nurtured, encouraged, and fed. And now it was happening. Nothing could stop it. In Hotchins’s mind, it was destiny.

  He sat in the fog, preparing himself for the tough ten months ahead, for the exhausting personal toll he knew the campaign would exact, contemplating the price he would have to pay.

  He had already paid dearly by ending his affair with Domino. DeLaroza had been right, she represented a constant danger and a foolish one. Besides, she had served her purpose. Domino had awakened new passions in Hotchins, arousing a latent need that had been smothered by ambition. She had fired his carnal desires with her incredible sensuality and given him a new vitality. Losing her was just the first of many personal sacrifices he knew he would have to make.