Marv said, “Well, let’s nip that fucking impulse in the bud for the rest of, you know, your life.” He lit a cigarette and stamped his feet in the cold. “We got hit for five thou’ and change. But Anwar and Makkhal picked up our envelope, so I’m not on the hook for that.”
“So we’re okay.”
“We got clipped for five large,” Marv said. “It’s their bar, their money. We’re not too fucking okay.”
They looked back up the alley. They both shivered in the cold. After a while, they went back inside.
CHAPTER 4
Second City
ON SUNDAY MORNING, NADIA brought the puppy to his car as he idled in front of her house. She handed it through the window and gave them both a little wave.
He looked at the puppy sitting on his seat and fear washed over him. What does it eat? When does it eat? Housebreaking. How do you do that? How long does it take? He’d had days to consider these questions—why were they only occurring to him now?
He hit the brakes and reversed the car a few feet. Nadia, one foot on her bottom step, turned back. He rolled down the passenger window, craned his body across the seat until he was looking up at her.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I don’t know anything.”
AT A SUPERMARKET FOR pets, Nadia picked out several chew toys, told Bob he’d need them if he wanted to keep his couch. Shoes, she told him, keep your shoes hidden from now on, up on a high shelf. They bought vitamins—for a dog!—and a bag of puppy food she recommended, telling him the most important thing was to stick with that brand from now on. Change a dog’s diet, she warned, you’ll get piles of diarrhea on your floor.
They got the crate to put him in when Bob was at work. They got a water bottle for the crate and a book on dog training written by monks who were on the cover looking hardy and not real monkish, big smiles. As the cashier rang it all up, Bob felt a quake rumble through his body, a momentary disruption as he reached for his wallet. His throat flushed with heat. His head felt fizzy. And only as the quake went away and his throat cooled and his head cleared and he handed over his credit card to the cashier did he realize in the sudden disappearance of the feeling what the feeling was:
For a moment—maybe even a succession of moments and none sharp enough to point to as the cause—he’d been happy.
“SO, THANK YOU,” SHE said when he pulled up in front of her house.
“What? No. Thank you. Please. Really. It . . . Thank you.”
She said, “This little guy, he’s a good guy. He’s going to make you proud, Bob.”
Bob looked down at the puppy, sleeping on her lap now, snoring slightly. “Do they do that? Sleep all the time?”
“Pretty much. Then they run around like loonies for about twenty minutes. Then they sleep some more. And poop. Bob, man, you got to remember that—they poop and pee like crazy. Don’t get mad. They don’t know any better. Read the books. It takes time, but they figure out soon enough not to do it in the house.”
“What’s soon enough?”
“Two months?” She cocked her head. “Maybe three. Be patient, Bob.”
“Be patient,” he repeated.
“And you too,” she said to the puppy as she lifted it off her lap. He came awake, sniffing, snorting. He didn’t want her to go. “You two take care,” she said and let herself out, gave Bob a wave as she walked up her steps and then went inside.
The puppy was on its haunches, looking up at the window like Nadia might reappear there. He looked back over his shoulder at Bob. Bob could feel his abandonment. He could feel his own. He was certain they’d make a mess of it, him and this throwaway dog. He was sure the world was too strong.
“What’s your name?” he asked the puppy. “What are we going to call you?”
The puppy turned his head away like, Bring the girl back.
FIRST THING IT DID was take a shit in the dining room.
Bob didn’t even realize what it was doing at first. It started sniffing, nose scraping the rug, and then it looked up at Bob with an air of embarrassment. And Bob said, “What?” and the dog dumped all over the corner of the rug.
Bob scrambled forward, as if he could stop it, push it back in, and the puppy bolted, left droplets on the hardwood as it scurried into the kitchen.
Bob said, “No, no. It’s okay.” Although it wasn’t. Most everything in the house had been his mother’s, largely unchanged since she’d purchased it in the 1950s. That was shit. Excrement. In his mother’s house. On her rug, her floor.
In the seconds it took him to reach the kitchen, the puppy’d left a piss puddle on the linoleum. Bob almost slipped in it. The puppy was sitting against the fridge, looking at him, tensing for a blow, trying not to shake.
And it stopped Bob. It stopped him, even as he knew the longer he left the shit on the rug the harder it would be to get out.
Bob got down on all fours. He felt the sudden return of what he’d felt when he first picked the dog out of the trash, something he’d assumed had left with Nadia. Connection. He suspected they might have been brought together by something other than chance.
He said, “Hey.” Barely above a whisper. “Hey, it’s all right.” So, so slowly, he extended his hand, and the puppy pressed itself harder against the fridge. But Bob kept the hand coming, and gently laid his palm on the side of the animal’s face. He made soothing sounds. He smiled at it. He said “It’s okay” over and over.
THESE DAYS DETECTIVE EVANDRO Torres worked Robbery Division, but before that, he’d been somebody. For one glorious year plus three months, he’d been a Homicide detective. Then, as he usually did with the good things in his life, he fucked it all up and got bounced down to Robbery.
At end of shift, Robbery did its drinking at JJ’s, Homicide at The Last Drop, but if you wanted to find someone from Major Crimes, they were usually upholding the time-honored tradition of drinking in their cars down by the Pen’ Channel.
That’s where Torres found Lisa Romsey and her partner, Eddie Dexter. Eddie was a thin, sallow man who had no friends or family anyone knew of. He had the personality of a wet sandbox, and he never spoke unless spoken to, but he was an encyclopedia when it came to the New England mob.
Lisa Romsey was something else entirely—the hottest, prickliest Latina who’d ever strapped on a gun. The name Romsey was the leftover of her two-year disaster of a marriage to the DA, and she kept it because, in this city, it still opened more doors than it shut. She’d partnered with Torres a few years back on a task force. After that disbanded, she got sent to Major Crimes, where she stayed, and Torres reached Homicide, where he didn’t.
Evandro found them both sitting in their unmarked in the southern corner of the parking lot, drinking from cardboard Dunkin’ Donuts cups with no steam coming out of them. Their unit faced the channel, so Evandro pulled his car into the next slot, pointing in the opposite direction, and rolled down his window.
Romsey rolled hers down after giving him a look that said she was debating leaving it up.
“What’s the sunset nightcap this evening?” Torres asked. “Scotch or vodka?”
“Vodka,” Romsey said. “You bring your own cup?”
“I just come out of the womb?” Torres handed her a ceramic coffee cup that had WORLD’S #1 DAD stenciled on it. Romsey arched an eyebrow at the words but poured vodka into the cup and handed it back.
They all took a drink, Eddie Dexter staring hard out the windshield like he was trying to find the sun in a sky so gray it could have been the wall to a prison.
Romsey said, “So what up, Evandro?”
“You remember Marvin Stipler from the day?”
Romsey shook her head.
“Cousin Marv?” Torres said. “He got pushed off his own book—what was it?—nine, ten years ago by the Chechens.”
Romsey was nodding now. “Right, right, right. They came in, told him he had little Tic Tac testes. He spent the next decade proving them right.”
Torres said, “That’s
the guy. His bar got held up the other night. Bar’s owned by one of Papa Umarov’s shell companies.”
Romsey and Eddie Dexter exchanged surprised looks and then Romsey said, “Kinda retard holds up that kinda bar?”
“You got me. Major Crimes up on the Umarovs?”
Romsey poured herself another round and shook her head. “We barely survived the last budget cuts, we’re not sticking our heads up to go after some Russian that John Q barely knows exists.”
“Chechen.”
“What?”
“They’re Chechen, not Russian.”
“Blow me.”
Torres pointed at his wedding ring.
Romsey grimaced. “Oh, like that ever mattered.”
“So Cousin Marv’s not a dog anyone’s got a stake in?”
Romsey shook her head. “You want him, Evandro, he’s all yours.”
“Thanks. Good to see you again, Lisa. You look great.”
She batted her eyelashes at him, flipped him the bird, and rolled her window back up.
THE CITY WOKE THE next morning to four inches of snow. A month into winter and already they’d had three significant snowstorms and several dustings. If it kept this pace, come February there’d be no place to put it.
Bob and Cousin Marv each took a shovel out to the front of the bar, though Marv mostly leaned on his and wrapped his excuses in an old knee injury that nobody but Marv could recall.
Bob told him about his day with the dog and the cost of all the pet supplies and how the dog had taken a dump in the dining room.
Marv said, “You get the spot out of the rug?”
“I came close,” Bob said. “But it’s a dark rug.”
Marv stared over the top of the shovel handle at him. “It’s a dark . . . It’s your mother’s rug. I stepped on the thing with my shoe once—wasn’t even dirty—and you tried to cut my foot off.”
Bob said, “Listen to the drama queen,” and it surprised both himself and Marv. Bob wasn’t the type to give someone shit, particularly if that someone was Marv. But he had to admit, it felt good.
Marv recovered enough to grab his crotch and make a loud kissing noise and then he pushed his shovel through some snow for a minute, not doing much but lifting it off the asphalt enough for the breeze to catch it, fuck things up even more.
Two black Cadillac Escalades and a white van pulled up to the curb, the rest of the street empty this time of day, and Bob didn’t even have to look to know who’d be coming down here late on a snowy morning with two SUVs that were freshly washed and waxed.
Chovka Umarov.
“Cities,” Bob’s father once told him, “aren’t run from the capitol building. They’re run from the cellar. The First City? The one you see? That’s the clothes they put over the body to make it look better. But the Second City is the body. That’s where they take the bets and sell the women and the dope and the kinda TVs and couches and things a working man can afford. Only time a working man hears from the First City is when it’s fucking him over. But the Second City is all around him every day his whole life.”
Chovka Umarov was the Prince of the Second City.
Chovka’s father, Papa Pytor Umarov, ran things these days, sharing power with the old Italian and Irish factions, working out subcontractor deals with the blacks and the Puerto Ricans, but it was accepted as stone cold truth in the streets that if Papa Pytor decided to be impolite and force any or all of his associates under his heel there wasn’t a fucking thing they could do to stop him.
Anwar got out of the driver’s seat of the lead SUV, eyes as cold as gin as he scowled at the weather like Bob and Marv were the cause of it.
Chovka exited the backseat of the same Escalade, pulling his gloves on and checking the ground for ice. Chovka’s hair and trim beard were the same black as the gloves. He wasn’t tall or short, wasn’t big or small, but even with his back turned, he radiated an energy that made something itch in the base of Bob’s skull. The closer you get to Caesar, one of Bob’s high school history teachers had been fond of saying, the greater the fear.
Chovka stopped on the sidewalk by Bob and Marv, stood on a patch that Bob had already shoveled.
Chovka said to the street, “Who needs a snowblower when you got Bob?” And then to Bob, “Maybe you come to my house later.”
Bob said, “Uh, sure,” because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
The white van moved slightly from side to side. Bob was sure of it. The side closest to the curb dipped, and whatever weight caused the dip resettled in the middle and the van resettled with it.
Chovka chucked Bob’s shoulder. “I’m kidding. This guy.” He smiled at Anwar, then at Bob, but when he looked at Marv, his small black eyes got smaller and blacker still. “You on the welfare?”
A muffled thud emanated from the van. Could have been anything. The van rocked in place again.
“What?” Marv asked.
“What?” Chovka leaned back to get a better look at Marv.
“I meant, sorry.”
“What’re you sorry for?”
“I didn’t understand your question.”
“I asked if you on the welfare.”
“No, no.”
“No I didn’t ask you?”
“No, I’m not on welfare.”
Chovka pointed at the sidewalk and then their shovels. “Bob does all the work. You watch.”
“No.” Marv shoveled some snow, chucked it to his right into the pile. “I’m shoveling.”
“You shoveling all right.” Chovka lit a cigarette. “Come here.”
Marv put a hand to his own chest, the question in his eyes.
“Both of you,” Chovka said.
He led them down the sidewalk, the ice melt and rock salt crunching under their feet like broken glass. They stepped off the curb behind the van and Bob saw what could have been transmission fluid leaking out of the underside of the van. Except it was in the wrong place for tranny fluid. And it was the wrong color and consistency.
Chovka opened both van doors at once.
Two Chechens built like Dumpsters with feet sat on either side of a sweaty, thin guy. The thin guy was dressed like a construction worker—blue plaid shirt over a thermal and tan denim pants. They’d gagged his mouth with a cotton scarf and drilled a six-inch metal bolt through the top of his right foot, which was bare, the boot tipped over just to the right of it, the sock sticking out of the boot. The guy’s head drooped, but one of the Chechens pulled back on his hair and shoved a small amber vial under his nose. The guy got a good whiff and his head snapped back, his eyes snapped open, and he was wide awake again while the other Chechen used a chuck key to tighten the bit in a power drill.
“You know this guy?” Chovka asked.
Bob shook his head.
Marv said, “No.”
Chovka said, “But I know this guy. Moment I know him? I know him. I try to explain to him when he come to me to do some business that he must have a moral center. Eh, Bob? You understand?”
“A moral center,” Bob said. “Sure, Mr. Umarov.”
“A man who has a moral center knows what he knows and knows what has to be done. He knows how to keep his affairs in order. A man with no moral center, however, does not know what he does not know and you can never explain it to him. Because if he knew the thing he did not know then he would have a moral center.” He looked at Marv. “You understand?”
“I do,” Marv said. “Absolutely.”
Chovka grimaced. He smoked for a bit.
In the van, the construction worker whimpered and the Chechen on his left slapped the back of his head until he stopped.
“Somebody robbed my bar?” Chovka said to Bob.
“Yes, Mr. Umarov.”
Chovka said, “You call my father ‘Mister Umarov,’ Bob. Me you call Chovka, hey?”
“Chovka. Yes, sir.”
“Who robbed our bar?”
“We don’t know,” Cousin Marv said. “They wore masks.”
Marv looked down at his shovel.
Bob said, “I answered without thinking. I’m very sorry.”
Chovka looked back at the construction worker for a bit and smoked and no one said anything.
Then Chovka asked Marv, “What have you done to get my father’s money back?”
“We’ve got the word out in the neighborhood.”
Chovka looked over at Anwar. “The word is out there. Like our money.”
The guy in the van shit himself. They all heard it, and they all acted like they didn’t.
Chovka closed the van doors. He knocked on the door with his fist twice and the van pulled away from the curb.
He turned to Bob and Marv. “Find our fucking money.”
Chovka got back in the Escalade. Anwar paused at the door, looked at Bob, and pointed at a spot of snow Bob had missed. He followed his boss into the SUV, and both Escalades pulled away from the curb.
Cousin Marv saluted them as they reached the stop sign and turned right. “And a Happy Fucking New Year to you as well, gents.”
Bob shoveled for a bit in silence. Marv leaned on his shovel and watched the street.
“That guy in the van?” Marv said. “I don’t ever want to talk about him or hear about him. We good on that?”
Bob didn’t want to talk about him either. He nodded.
After a bit, Marv said, “How we supposed to find their money? If we knew where their money was that’d mean we knew who robbed us which would mean we were in on it which would mean they’d shoot us in the fucking face. So how we supposed to find their money?”
Bob kept shoveling because it was the kind of question there was no answer for.
Marv lit a Camel. “Fucking Chechneyans, man.”
Bob stopped shoveling. “Chechens.”
“What?”
“They’re Chechens,” Bob said, “not Chechneyans.”
Marv didn’t believe it. “But they’re from Chechneya.”
Bob shrugged. “Yeah, but you don’t call people from Ireland ‘Irelandians.’”
They leaned on their shovels and stared up the street for a while until Marv suggested they go back inside. It was cold, he said, and his knee was fucking killing him.
The Drop Page 4
