Rocks Beat Paper

by Mike Knowles

  “I need a crew.”

  “Tell me what you’re looking for? I’ll reach out to the right people.”

  “How about I give you names instead.”

  “We can do it that way. But you know the deal; I do the reaching out.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Who are you looking for?”

  “I need the same crew I had last time.”

  There was a long sigh. “You know you can’t have the same crew. If memory serves, two of them are dead and one of them was left outside a hospital. And, if I’m being honest, I don’t remember that job as anything more than a clusterfuck. When I make those calls, the boys will want to know who’s reaching out, and I’ll have to tell them it’s you. Do you really think they’ll want to sign on after everything that happened?”

  “Their choice to make, Jake. Like you said, you make the calls, not the calls.”

  Jake was a middleman, not my mother. But the questions on his mind would be the same ones on everyone else’s. I needed Jake on board, so I gave him some answers.

  “The job never sat right with me. Alvin’s brother-in-law held back. We went in with the wrong information, and it cost us. We never had a shot at pulling that job off — not like that.”

  “So what changed?”

  “Ten months gave me time to think. Time to plan. I got a way to do it right.”

  “And this way requires seven other people?” Jake sounded skeptical.

  In the eight months I had spent waiting for the right time to come back, I had envisioned this conversation. “We lost our inside man, but I still need inside information.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The eight of us heard the pitch, Jake. Eight different people with eight different skill sets heard the same thing, but there is no chance they remember it the same way. The two safecrackers would have picked up on some things the driver would have missed. And the tech guy would have noticed details that the safe guys didn’t pick up on. I need everyone back so that we can piece the entire puzzle together. For what I have in mind, I need the original crew. Tell them there’s five in it just for showing.”

  Jake mulled it over. He finally said, “I’ll make some calls, but I can’t make any promises.”

  “Whoever believes promises, Jake?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Everyone showed up. Like the last meeting, I had been the one to arrive first, but this time I didn’t wait in the car. I had chosen a condemned building that had been boarded up and temporarily rezoned as a crack den in Hunts Point in the Bronx. The cold winter that had moved in on New York made the empty building too cold for even drug addicts to squat in, but it made it perfect for me. The apartment I picked was on the third floor; it was small, but the eight people who braved the storm were able to stand inside the living room without touching shoulders. There was only one piece of furniture — a chair I had placed opposite to the door, and no one was sitting in it. I’d also put a cooler in the centre of the room and filled it with ice and beer. Most of it was gone; Johnny and Tony had shown after the Diegos and Elliot, and they positioned themselves close to the cooler. Every beer they put down loosened their tongues, and by the time the cooler was half empty, the two men were offering unsolicited advice to whoever looked their way. If the lack of returned conversation bothered them, it didn’t show.

  When Miles came through the door, Johnny let out a belch that sounded like a growl. Miles walked to the cooler and took a beer. His smooth gait showed no signs of the pounding his body had taken in the getaway. He didn’t take his eyes off the two men who had managed to secure a whole wall to themselves.

  “Can we just get this thing started?” Tony asked from somewhere under his moustache.

  “And where are the five Gs we’re owed for making it to this meeting? Should be more if you ask me. The weather made it a bitch to get here,” Johnny said.

  “We’re one short,” I said. “Give it a minute.”

  “Fuck,” Johnny said. “He mean the girl? You telling me we’re still letting her in on this?”

  “Yup,” I said.

  Johnny laughed. “Whoever heard of a woman driving getaway?”

  No one answered. I imagine any one of us had, but we all recognized that talking to Johnny was a waste of time.

  “Was that rhetorical? Because I imagine plenty of women drove getaway after they met you.”

  The Diegos looked over to the doorway and laughed when they saw Monica standing in it. “Nice to see you again, chica.”

  “You too,” Monica said.

  “There’s beer in the cooler,” I said. “The chair is for you.”

  “You gonna pull it out for her?” Tony said, laughing and clapping his partner on the back.

  Johnny leered at Monica. “Just so you know, if he won’t pull it out, I will.”

  The two men laughed at their own jokes and emptied what was left in their bottles.

  Monica looked at the two much bigger men. “I’ll stand.”

  I stepped into the middle of the room. “I want to thank everyone for making the trip. I know things didn’t go as planned last time —”

  “You can say that again.” If Diego #2 was trying to make a joke, no one could tell by his face.

  “We’re hoping to change that,” I said.

  Diego #1 took a step forward. “What’s changed?”

  “I have a way inside,” I said.

  Everyone was quiet while they took in what I had said. Elliot, in rumpled clothes that looked like they’d been worn since the last meeting, cleared his throat and spoke first. “How?”

  “In a minute.”

  “Because you’re going to pay us the money you promised us first right?” Johnny said.

  “Soon,” I said. “When David and Alvin died, we called off the job. Some of us stayed on.”

  If the news surprised any of the men in the room, I didn’t see it on their faces. I looked every person in the eye, saving Miles for last. He had been watching the faces in the room, too. I moved my eyes over Miles’s eyes and looked at his hands.

  I continued, “I saw a way to move on the diamonds. The plan was less flashy than what David had planned and required less bodies.”

  “And?” Diego #1 said. He was no longer leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. He was interested in what I had to say.

  “It didn’t go as planned.”

  “So now you want us to help you try again? Who the hell is going to sign on with someone who fucked things up the first time?”

  I looked at Johnny. “Hear me out.”

  “Fuck that,” he said. “I showed up. That was the deal. Give me my money, so I can walk out of here.”

  “Hear me out.”

  Johnny heard something in my voice that the primal part of his brain understood. He stayed on the wall.

  “The job had unforeseen complications,” I said.

  Diego #1 was still interested. “What kind of complications?”

  “Someone ratted us out to the cops.”

  Johnny snorted.

  “It was meant to take us off the board.”

  “It was a pussy move,” Johnny said with a sneer.

  “No argument here, partner,” Tony said.

  “There was something else,” I said.

  I watched the faces in the room. Johnny and Tony waited for the next revelation with the patience of men who have stared at bars for years. The Diegos were equally blank. If any of the men knew what I was talking about, they weren’t letting it show.

  I glanced over at Elliot. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Tony. I followed his gaze and saw Tony catch on to the chain of looks. He gave Elliot the briefest of glances, but it was long enough for me to see it on his face. Miles saw it, too. I looked at his hands and saw two fingers showing. We
had worked out a number for everyone who had showed up. Tony was the second half of the pair at the top of our list. He was a natural fit for number two. We had both seen Tony’s poker face crack; Johnny had missed it.

  “So this is a fucking witch hunt,” Johnny said. “You went solo, got burned, and now you’re looking for someone to pin it on. Well, maybe you should look in the mirror. Some fucking planner you turned out to be.” The burly con took a step towards the centre of the room. “Pay me what you promised, so I can get the fuck out of here.”

  “Wasn’t the deal,” I said.

  “The fuck it wasn’t.”

  “The deal was you show up and hear my proposition and then you get the money.”

  “Great,” Johnny said. “It’s a fucking timeshare presentation.”

  I ignored the con and walked to the cooler. “Hear what I have to say and then decide whether or not you want to walk.”

  I tapped the cooler. “You want another?”

  “I want my money,” Johnny said.

  “Me too,” echoed Tony.

  “Then I’ll finish what I have to say.” I reached for the cooler, but I didn’t reach for the lid; instead, I took hold of the handle and brought the whole end of the cooler off the floor. A tidal wave of ice, water, and beer bottles splashed across the floorboards.

  Diego #1 backed to the wall. “What the hell?”

  The hell was a Mossberg pump-action shotgun with a pistol grip. The cooler was the biggest one Walmart carried and it easily had enough space for three bags of ice and a case of beer; the base was also large enough to conceal the hole I had cut into the floor. Everyone’s eyes were on me, but I was done talking; I wanted answers. I racked the slide and sent an unspent shell to the floor. The demonstration was careless, but shotguns have a way of persuading people to speak up. The gun only knew two words, and sometimes, the quieter sound of a shell being racked was the scarier one.

  I kept the gun aimed down the centre of the room just in case anyone else wanted to add another gun to the mix. It was a mistake to go to a meeting heavy. We aren’t gangsters; we’re professionals, and guns are tools of the trade. Before a job, a gun is only a potential risk for drawing unwanted attention; a professional knew that, but I wagered a few people in the room decided to roll the dice and take their chances.

  “Miles,” I said.

  Miles stepped to the hole in the floor and pulled a pistol. He backed up towards me and took up a position outside of my line of fire. With another gun covering the men in the room, I brought the shotgun up towards Elliot’s ample torso.

  Elliot backed away from the gun, but he only managed a step before the wall let him know there was no place else to go.

  “Talk,” I said.

  “I don’t know — What do you — I — I —”

  I stepped towards Elliot and took my left hand off the shotgun. The pistol grip let me keep the gun pointed at him while I took a fistful of his shirt.

  “What are you —”

  I jammed the shotgun into hacker’s soft neck and ended his question. I spun the much bigger man and used my grip and the gun to force him into the centre of the room and onto his knees. With two hands on the gun again, I used the end of the barrel to force Elliot’s head into the hole in the floor. I could feel Elliot fighting against the gun, but I had strength and leverage on my side.

  “Last chance,” I said.

  From the hole I heard, “We —”

  Just like that, I became we and Elliot started talking.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  “This is bullshit,” Johnny said. His broad face was florid and his voice was loud. The colour and noise were all distractions. The big man’s hands were telling the real story. His heavy fists were balled tight into knuckled cannonballs. With each breath, his fists tightened and forced swelling veins to the surface of his skin. He was displaying anger and outrage, but it was all an act. The fists were the truth, and they weren’t playing or acting.

  “Which part?”

  Johnny’s brow furrowed, creating deep creases on his forehead. “Which part? All of it.”

  “So Elliot’s lying?”

  “Goddamn right he’s lying.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Maybe,” Tony offered, “it has something to do with the gun to his head.”

  The taller of the two men was still next to his partner, but he was not standing where he had been a minute before. Tony was slowly putting distance between himself and Johnny and creating two targets for me to deal with.

  “Tony,” I said. “Stop moving.”

  Tony stopped and grinned a little hand-in-the-cookie-jar sort of smile at me.

  “Elliot,” I said without taking my eyes, or my gun, off the two men. “You admitted to playing a part in what happened to Monica. That’s bad — how bad is going to depend on how big that role was. The boys here say it was a solo performance.”

  “They’re lying.”

  “Prove it,” I said.

  Elliot had scrambled away from the hole the second I took the gun away from his head. He had found his old spot on the wall and pressed his back into it. It was a lonely place. Everyone had backed away in fear of being collateral damage should I decide to shoot Elliot with the shotgun.

  When Elliot saw that no one was going to stand up for him, he started talking. “We were after the diamonds. Same as you were. We saw the girl —”

  “Monica,” Miles said.

  “Monica,” Elliot said. “We saw her when we were following the old man. We knew she wasn’t in it alone — she couldn’t have been — but we disagreed on how to find her partners. I wanted to put a GPS on the car, but Johnny said there were better ways to get answers. They grabbed her, put a bag over her head, and took her back to a place we had. Johnny started working her over, but it was getting us nowhere. He kept hitting her too hard. I told them we should have used a GPS, but Tony laughed at me. He said there were better ways to track an animal to its den. That’s when Tony stabbed her like this.”

  Elliot lunged forward with an invisible knife in his hand and stabbed the air at waist level. It didn’t seem like a threatening gesture when he did it.

  In preparation for the meet, I had sat down with Monica about the night she was taken. I mined her account for any information buried under the surface and came up with little more than a brief recount of events that focused heavily on the time before the abduction. Monica’s memory of what had happened to her was fractured, but Elliot’s story matched what little she could tell us about that night.

  “And, Johnny said — He said —”

  Miles spoke up from behind me. “Yeah?”

  “When Tony was waving his knife around, Johnny said, Yeah, gut that nigger.”

  I looked over at the two cons. Their black eyes didn’t shy away from mine. “This is bullshit. All of it.”

  I didn’t hear the same confidence in Johnny’s words.

  Elliot looked at his shoes. “They knew you were getting close, so they followed her and did what they said they were going to do. I wanted to plant drugs in her car and call the cops while she was following the jeweller. Not enough drugs to get her sent away, just enough to keep her away, y’know? The cops were my idea. That wasn’t enough for Johnny and Tony.”

  I looked at Johnny again and noticed I wasn’t the only one. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Monica staring at the much bigger man. Her face was working hard to hide what she was feeling, but the tendons straining against the thin skin of her neck betrayed her.

  “Fuckin’ liar —”

  I pointed the shotgun at Johnny and he shut up.

  “They wanted Monica and whoever she was working with out of the way. They said you were greedy and that you cut us out so that you could take everything for yourselves. Tony said you cut us out, so you deserved to be cut. Those were h
is words. You deserved to be cut. Tony said that.”

  “It’s just wind,” Johnny said. “Words. His words. He gave you nothing but a story. If I was holding the shotgun, you’d have been the one holding the knife.”

  I looked over at the Diegos. They had been quiet since I introduced the shotgun. It was a smart play; talking just put you in the mix, and when the mix included a shotgun, it was best to stay out of it. Diego saw me watching him; he also saw the gun wasn’t, so he figured it was safe to get involved.

  He looked over at Johnny and Tony. There was no love there; there wasn’t even respect. “It’s a good story,” he said without taking his eyes off the two men. “Real good,” he looked back at me, “but a good story doesn’t mean it’s the truth.”

  I nodded. “You ever stab anyone, Diego?”

  The safecracker recoiled a fraction of an inch. “What are you trying to say? Now you think I had something to do with this?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m asking you if you have ever stabbed anyone. I’m not talking self-defense. I mean thinking about it, and then taking a knife and doing it.”

  Diego #1 shook his head. “Me? No way.”

  “Takes a special kind of thing to want to put a piece of metal into someone else. It’s why people get shot so much more than they get stabbed. Think about it. Knives are everywhere, but how often do you hear about someone getting stabbed? It happens, but nine times out of ten it’s a crime of passion. People who set out to stab other people are a rare breed.” I looked at Tony to make sure he was paying attention. “Rare as they are, there is one interesting thing about that type of animal. They all seem to love their knives. They have favourites, and they hold on to them even when they shouldn’t.”

  “This going somewhere?” Diego #1 asked.

  “Monica didn’t see who stabbed her. I asked, but she told me that there had been a bag over her head. The bag didn’t let her see faces, but it was loose enough for her to see the knife sticking out of her shirt. Seems our guy had a distinctive looking switchblade.”

  Monica spoke from the doorway. “A switchblade with a confederate flag on the hilt.”