Cogan's Trade

by George V. Higgins

  “I said to him,” Russell said, “I said: ‘Kenny, I thought I was supposed to sleep all day. How’m I gonna sleep, I’m doing all them things?’ And he tells me. ‘Take a little dog dope.’ So I ask him, he’s gettin’ dough offa these dogs, how come I got to do all the work? ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I got to do something.’

  “He’s worse’n fuckin’ Squirrel for making out off guys,” Russell said. “He shows up, right around midnight, he’s got three more dogs. I’m busting my ass all day, getting dogs ready, Kenny’s out gettin’ more dogs. I said: ‘For Christ sake, Kenny, that’s’—we already sold some of the dogs to this guy down the North End? Poodles. We had three poodles and he give us a buck and a half apiece on them. Which isn’t bad—‘that’s sixteen dogs we got, mine and yours.’ He’s got this Caddy limo. Took the back seat out and he had a lot of old blankets all the way back in there, in the trunk. ‘Can’t put sixteen dogs in there. They’ll kill each other.’

  “These dogs, he tells me, ‘These’re little ones.’ He’s got a couple spaniels and a wire-haired. Tit right in, no sweat.’ So, we load them up. My dogs’re all dopey. He takes the front legs, I take back legs. My mother’s looking out of the window. Finally get all them dogs in. Stack them right up. I’m getting in the car, she opens the window. ‘That all of them?’ Yeah. ‘Good. Remember what I said.’ Right, and now I understand the old man a lot better, too. She shuts the window, bang.”

  “You’re still better off’n I was,” Frankie said. “My mother, she used to come every week. Every single fuckin’ week, I’d, I used to sit on Sunday, and the first thing I hadda do was, I hadda go to Mass. Fuckin’ guy, every single fuckin’ week he talks about Dismas. Oh for Christ sake. Well, no. Some weeks he talks about beating off. Funny, didn’t have nothing to say about blow jobs and like that. And then, the good meal, you know? The one that was just as shitty as the rest of them, except it was supposed to be good. Seen a turnip? I see another turnip, I throw the fuckin’ thing at somebody. And then my poor old gray-haired mother, her and her fuckin’ coat that’s all beat to shit, comes in looking like somebody that just got hit on the head. And I got to sit through that. ‘I pray for you, Frankie.’ ‘I made a novena for you, Frankie.’ ‘I hope you get parole, Frankie.’ ‘I know in my heart you’re a good boy, Frankie.’ ‘Frankie, you’ve got to change your ways.’ And she’s gonna stay, boy, she’s not comin’ all the way up there, she’s gonna leave in five minutes. No, sir. One week she’s sick. Sandy comes for a change. ‘Anything I can do for you, Frankie?’ You bet your ass there is. Chain Ma the bed, for Christ sake. ‘She don’t mean anything,’ Sandy says. ‘She feels guilty. She told me, she dunno what she didn’t do.’ I told her: ‘She didn’t tell me about assholes like the Doctor, that’s what it is,’ ” Frankie said. “ ‘Tell her, the next kid, teach him to plan a job right, he doesn’t get some fatmouth bastard in there, fuck things up.’ She looks at me. ‘You want me to tell her, you don’t want her coming no more?’ Of course I do. So she does, and the next week Ma comes up, you should’ve seen her. Looked like somebody took her out and kicked the shit out of her. ‘Frankie,’ she says, ‘Sandy said, you don’t want your mother coming up here no more.’ And then she starts crying, and there’s guys looking at me, and half of them’re bulls and they’re all gonna tell the parole, ‘He’s mean to his mother, she comes up to see him and he don’t appreciate it.’ Oh, Jesus, it was awful. So, what could I do? I told her, come back, Ma, I was just talking. And she did. Novenas, the stations, the rosary, she’s going down to Mission Church there and everything for me. Christ. ‘I ain’t crippled, Ma,’ I tell her. ‘In your soul you are,’ she says. Jesus. I’m lucky I didn’t get at her through the screen.”

  “They don’t know,” Russell said. “None of them know. They just think, you’re in there, you can’t get out. That’s all they know. They don’t know.”

  “I wished they did,” Frankie said. “Putting up with them’s something awful. I wished I knew what it was, a guy goes in and they think it isn’t bad enough, they got to make it worse. I go in again, boy, I’m making sure nobody knows. I dunno if I can do time again, but I sure can’t take the visiting. Shit.”

  “I’m not going in again,” Russell said. “That’s what I’m not gonna do.”

  “You decided, huh?” Frankie said.

  “I’m doing everything I can,” Russell said.

  “And that’s what’s gonna put you in again,” Frankie said.

  “Nah,” Russell said.

  “Sure,” Frankie said, “you’re going back for stealing dogs.”

  “Not so far,” Russell said, “and never again, either. You know something? The next dog I see, I’m gonna do a wheelie on him, is what I’m gonna do. Dogs, dogs’re stupid. You beat the living shit out of a dog, hit him with the pills and he goes to sleep, he wakes up the next day and he’s staggering around and all, but he’s hungry. All you got to do with a dog, you can do anything you want to a dog, then just wait till he gets hungry and feed him and he thinks you’re fuckin’ God or something. Except that black fucker.”

  “Shepherd grab you?” Frankie said.

  “That dog,” Russell said, “he’s the only dog I ever saw, remembers. First time he wakes up, sees me, rrrr, way down in his throat. So, I give him another day. Gets hungry enough, he’ll come around. I starved that fucker four days. His bones showed, for Christ sake. Know what I get when I go out? Rrrrr. I thought I was gonna have to give him some more of the stick. But he don’t come after me, see? Which proves it, that black bastard isn’t dumb. He remembers that stick. He’s not gonna tackle me. He’s just gonna make my life as hard’s he possibly can. So, I hadda feed him. I can’t sell hairy bones, for Christ sake.

  “Now,” Russell said, “now he’s got me, and he knows it. I try and get him out, he holds back. I practically got to throw him out of the garage. Then he won’t, I can’t get him in. And he growls at me all the time, still. That bastard, all the way to Florida, we’re in this fuckin’ rainstorm in Maryland, they had a barge hit the bridge and we either hadda go around or we use the tunnel. Which everybody else is using. So Kenny say, ‘We’re going around.’ I thought I seen rain when I was with my Uncle. Christ. And them dogs’re all pissing and farting and shitting and everything in there and we can’t leave the windows down, we don’t wanna suffocate, and we also don’t want to drown. It was awful. I thought dogs was an easy way to make money. It’s not dangerous. I was right about that. I was half right. You know what I get for that black fucker, I thought I was probably gonna get twenty million dollars or something? Seventy-five bucks I got for that dog, and I was lucky to get that. The guy we’re selling them to, he just buys them, right? He just, he only takes care of them. One of those guys with no meat on him. He doesn’t talk. We’re there, he’s got this kind of beaten-to-shit old farm down outside Cocoa Beach. We’re there about half an hour, we’re finally breathing again, we been on the road about ten years with them dogs, all of a sudden I notice, his wife does all the talking. ‘This one here looks like he’s been run over,’ she says. She never stops talking and he never starts. ‘He sick or something? We don’t want no sick dogs here, Mister. I can’t let you have more’n twenty dollars for this one.’

  “So I say to her,” Russell said, “she said she’s gonna give me fifty bucks for the black one. ‘Look, he’s got papers, he’s a valuable dog. He’s the real thing. He’s a great dog. Fifty’s not enough.’

  “ ‘He hasn’t got no papers today, Mister,’ she says to me,” Russell said. “ ‘He’s just another dog now that I got to think about selling to somebody and that means I got to keep him and feed him and look after him the whole time I’m trying to sell him to somebody, and that’s going to be a long time. I don’t want this dog. I don’t want him at all. You want to take him back with you? Because that’s exactly what you can do, if you don’t like the price. I’ll have trouble, selling that dog to somebody. He looks vicious to me and he’ll look vicious to somebody else.’
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  “The guy still doesn’t say anything,” Russell said. “Now, she’s got me, of course. I’m not taking that dog no place with me ever again. What I want to say to that dog is ‘Good-bye,’ and I hope I never see him again. All the way to Florida that bastard’s watching the back of my neck, he’s gonna eat me if he gets half a chance. She’s right. He is vicious. But, he’s not being vicious then. The guy’s got him sitting down and the dog’s giving him his paw and the guy’s rubbing his ears and that dog is fuckin’ grinning at him. He thinks he’s home again with the stupid bastard that bought him to protect the medals. Then the dog, the guy stands up and the dog stands up too, puts his feet on the guy’s shoulders and starts lapping his face. ‘Look, Lady,’ I say, ‘that’s a vicious dog? You think somebody’s gonna think that’s a vicious dog? Let ’em see him like that.’

  “ ‘Mister,’ she says, ‘that’s the way he is. That’s the way they all are with him. Every dog that comes in here’s like that. That’s why he keeps the dogs and I do the business. Fifty.’

  “The guy wakes up or something,” Russell said. “He looks at us. The shepherd’s frenching him, for Christ sake. Guy finally gets the dog’s tongue out of his mouth. ‘Give him seventy-five, Imelda,’ he says.

  “ ‘Seventy-five,’ she says,” Russell said. “ ‘Now,’ she says, takes her about three hours to say anything, ‘am I setting the prices here, or are you gonna argue with me every time he decides he likes another dog? Because if you are, you can leave right now and take the rest of those animals with you.’ The only thing I wish,” Russell said, “I wish that woman could’ve met my mother. They’d get along fuckin’ great.”

  “You got out of there all right, though,” Frankie said.

  “Yeah,” Russell said. “Went over to Orlando with Kenny, burn the fuckin’ car. Kenny fuckin’ near killed himself. Went in this orange grove, right? Pulled it offa the road, there’s this little dirt road, there. So, Kenny was driving. He gets out, sticks a rag down the gas tank, he hangs it down and soaks it and then he pulls it out and hangs it down onna fender and lights it off. Fuckin’ car just blew up. And, he left it in gear, you know? Knocked him right on his ass, it was in reverse. He’s a hot shit. Gets up. ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘that’s the second job like that I fucked up. I got to do that again, I’m gonna find somebody, knows what he’s doing.’ Kenny, he didn’t have no eyebrows, for Christ sake, hasn’t got much hair left, either.”

  “What was it,” Frankie said, “hot?”

  “Nah,” Russell said, “it was Kenny’s car. But what the fuck’s a car good for, you had all them dogs in it over two days? Nothin’. It’s like riding in a shithouse. So, Kenny had it in his sister’s name, she called the cops the day we’re supposed to get there, says it got stolen. Then, we got out of there Wednesday. You should’ve seen those assholes when they search you at the airport, they see me and Kenny. I thought their eyes was gonna come right out of their heads. Four times we got to go through the metal detector. Then there was this guy, I guess he was the newest guy there or something, he had to pat us down. I think they give him the rest of the day off. ‘You’re gonna let us on the plane, finally,’ Kenny said, ‘aren’t you?’ They look at him. ‘Mister,’ one of them says, ‘if you haven’t got no weapons on you, you can ride. You probably oughta ride in the baggage, but never mind that.’ Nobody’d sit next to us. We hadda ride way in the back and there was this one stewardess, every time she hadda come near us, she’d look at us like she never saw anything like us before in her life. ‘You guys going all the way to Boston?’ she says. ‘You wouldn’t consider, getting off in Washington or some place?’ Kenny fell for it. ‘This thing gonna land in Washington?’ he says. ‘I never been to Washington.’ See, we didn’t stop or anything. ‘No,’ she says, ‘but if you’ll get off there, I’ll use my influence with the captain and I’m sure he’ll agree to it.’ The guy on the bus from New York,” Russell said, “I come up from there onna bus? I’m not gonna get searched with the weight on me. I thought he was gonna make me ride outside. I fuckin’ crashed when I got here, boy. I never been so tired in my life.”

  “You look all beat to shit,” Frankie said.

  “Yeah,” Russell said, “and the hell of it is, I been up for about a week, you know? And I shouldn’t’ve even slept last night, only I hadda or I would’ve just fallen down. I got to keep moving till I finish this thing off. I thought I was gonna see the guy with the other stuff this morning, but I couldn’t raise him.”

  “You haven’t dumped the stuff?” Frankie said.

  “Dump it,” Russell said, “Christ, no. I didn’t hit it yet. I can’t, I probably won’t be able to move it till tonight, now, by the time I see him and everything. I know where it is. I can get it, and I haven’t got it on me.

  “Down the bus station,” Frankie said.

  “Never mind,” Russell said. “I know where it is.”

  “You’re just an asshole,” Frankie said. “You know that, you asshole? The kind of chances you’re taking, they’re gonna forget about putting you away for the stuff when they catch you. They’re gonna put you away for being nuts.”

  “Talk to me about that when I get the dough,” Russell said.

  “Russ,” Frankie said, “this whole town’s dry, and it’s been dry for three or four weeks. There’s more guys running into drugstores now with guns’n you ever saw. They got Goldfinger and that was the end of that. They tossed three guys with shipments this week, for Christ sake. The minute the word gets out, somebody’s in with something, everybody goes right out of their minds. There’s more heat in this town on that’n there is in the FBI, for Christ sake. Unload, Russ. Let somebody else do a hundred years or so, they catch him with it.”

  “Not till I hit it,” Russell said. “Look, I’m into this, over twelve K, right? I put it to a guy, fast, I don’t hit it, what do I get? I’m gonna get, even with things the way they are, no more’n fifteen, sixteen. I take it up a step, I can hit that stuff a whole step with the stuff I’m getting, I can move it to two guys and get twenny-five.”

  “It’s stupid,” Frankie said. “It’s fuckin’ stupid. That’s a thousand dollars a year.”

  “Look,” Russell said, “I don’t need nothing, make me dumb. You know that, you and Squirrel. Squirrel knows it, at least. Maybe you still think we were smart, doing that. You’re just as dumb as I am. You just come around and stroke me some, I’ll do any dumb fuckin’ thing you can think of. The thing is, though, you and me’re different. When this’s over, I’m through, doing dumb things for guys. I do dumb things for me, maybe, and then, I get grabbed, okay, at least I was doing them for me. Which means, I get to keep all the fuckin’ money. I don’t have to give Squirrel nothing for being smart enough to see I’m stupid any more.”

  “That worked out beautiful,” Frankie said.

  “Sure,” Russell said, “fuckin’ cheesecake. Of course there’s a contract out on us and all, but it worked beautiful. You and me, we got different ideas of beautiful, too.”

  “The fuck’re you talking about?” Frankie said.

  “You,” Russell said, “me, and the Squirrel. There’s a contract out on us. I hang around here too long, which I’m not gonna do, I’m gonna be as dead as you guys are. I’m gonna go to Montreal. I know a guy that’s got something going up there and that’s where I’m gonna go. And I’ll tell you something: if I didn’t, I’d still go.”

  “For what?” Frankie said.

  “Cut the shit, Frank,” Russell said, “for the Trattman game. The fuck’s the matter with you?”

  “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” Frankie said. “You’re the one that’s got something the matter with him. Where’re you getting this fairy story? You flying or something?”

  “Frank,” Russell said, “I can add and subtract. There’s gotta be a contract. Has to be one.”

  “Nobody knows we did it,” Frankie said.

  “I think they do,” Russell said.

  “They went for it,” Fr
ankie said.

  “That’s good,” Russell said. “You go ahead and believe that. It’ll make you feel better while the guy’s catching up with you. Who’s the guy that does the work? Tell him when he sees you, sorry I couldn’t wait around. Tell him I went to, tell him I went back inna service, I liked it better when it was a pretty good chance I’d at least get a chance to shoot back if they missed me the first time.”

  “Russell,” Frankie said, “Trattman’s practically dead. They beat him shitless. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “Shit,” Russell said, “of course I knew that. Kenny told me that.”

  “Kenny,” Frankie said, “this’s Kenny Gill we’re talking about, right?”

  “Right,” Russell said. “Kenny was telling me, well, he didn’t give me the guy’s name, but it hadda be Trattman. We’re talking, we got all them fuckin’ dogs inna car and we got all this time and it’s raining and everything, I said to him: ‘You know, this really sucks. This is really a shitty way to make a couple dollars. I thought it was gonna be easy, and it fuckin’ sucks.’

  “ ‘Well,’ he tells me, we get to talking, ‘there’s not very many things a guy can do.’ And he tells me, there’s a guy, runs a card game some place, Kenny don’t even know who he is.”

  “Bullshit,” Frankie said.

  “No bullshit,” Russell said, “he didn’t know the guy’s name.”

  “Kenny Gill works for Dillon,” Frankie said.

  “So fuckin’ what?” Russell said.

  “Anything Kenny knows, he got from Dillon,” Frankie said. “He’s too goddamned stupid to figure out anything for himself. If Kenny knows a guy who runs a card game, Dillon knows, and there was some kind of reason he had for telling Kenny. Nobody ever tells Kenny nothing unless it’s something they got to tell him because they want him to do something for them.”

  “They did,” Russell said, “that’s what he said. He said there’s this guy, he knows these two guys, him and his brother hadda go out and do the number onna guy that runs a card game. Hadda be Trattman. Because the guy knocked over his own game and they hadda teach him something for a change. And them guys, well, Kenny knows them, is all, and they asked him if he wanted to come along, they’d give him some of the money, but he was going with me and the dogs and he couldn’t. That’s all. ‘I give that up,’ he was saying. ‘It don’t pay anything and it’s dangerous. I bet them guys didn’t get more’n two hundred bucks, and look at the chances they hadda take, huh? The fuck can you do with a hundred bucks. Nothin’.’ That’s all he said.”