Dead Cat Bounce

by Norman Green

  “I heard of it,” Benny said, “but I can’t say I know what the hell it is.”

  “It’s a form of self-defense,” Stoney said. “Japanese. It’s based on the theory that someone who attacks you is fundamentally off balance. Just by being the aggressor, he’s irrational, he’s unbalanced. Okay? Jujitsu capitalizes on that imbalance, it uses the guy’s own negative energy to knock him on his ass. You get it? So if the guy’s pile of blocks is already leaning, you don’t even have to kick ’em over, you just tickle the guy’s nuts with a feather and he’ll do it himself.”

  “We’re gonna miss the meeting,” Benny said, glancing at his watch. “So you, you just go around looking for a thief with a big pile of blocks….”

  “That’s me,” Stoney said. “I’m the guy with the feather.” He looked at his friend. “I didn’t go looking for this guy, Benny. I’m just looking after my own. Is that a bad thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Benny said. “You gotta figure that out yourself.”

  TWENTY

  Stoney examined his fingernails while he waited.

  “Forty million,” Harman said, after a minute.

  “Probably don’t have anything like that left,” Stoney said. “We can’t be sure how much he pried out of the banker before he killed the guy, and we don’t know how much of that he’s already spent. Bound to be a lot less.”

  “Maybe,” Harman said. “Maybe not. There are lots of ways to make money when you’ve got that kind of capital and you aren’t overburdened with scruples. And Prior has to be a smart son of a gun to have survived this long. But even if you’re right, so what? Suppose there’s only twenty? Or ten? Still a lot of money. How many ways you plan on splitting this?”

  “That depends,” Stoney said. “There’s the three of us, plus Georgie Cho. Then there’s Emil Barton, the broker, we gotta give him something. And there’s gonna be two or three more players before this is all over, they’re all gonna want theirs.”

  “Still could turn out to be a very nice score. But there’s a couple of things you haven’t thought about. First, there’s no way a guy like Prior, or Plotnik, is in this country without the State Department knowing about him.”

  “You kidding?” Tommy said. “They lucky they finda they shoe under the bed in the morning.”

  Harman was shaking his head. “Don’t you believe it. That’s just for public consumption. Whoever it was let him in, they might have neglected to inform the FBI or whatever, but you can bet your last nickle that somebody on a federal level gave this guy safe harbor. If he was working in Europe before that bank thing went down, he must have had something to sell. Probably something in the Balkans. Maybe he knows where Milosevic hid his money, or some shit. But they know he’s here.”

  “Suppose you’re right. You think they’re still watching him?”

  “Who knows? After a couple years, you would think they’ve probably loosened up on his leash a little bit, but I would guess they haven’t forgotten about him.”

  “All right. So the feds are a wild card. What’s the second thing?”

  “You still haven’t told me why you hate this guy. He kick your dog or what?”

  Stoney’s face darkened. “Prior has a thing for my daughter.”

  “Your daughter? Marisa? Oh my God. That bastard.”

  “She’s seventeen,” Stoney said.

  “Yeah, I know. Where is she right now?”

  “Tuco is watching out for her.”

  “He’s just a kid. He’s probably overmatched, you know that?”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “Come on, man, these guys are pros, and there’s three of them, counting Prior. Who’s that good?”

  “Tuco is….”

  “No way, man. No, listen, forget that. That’s why you had her here before, am I right? You have to bring her in, I ain’t kidding, dude, you gotta put her butt right in this kitchen where you can eyeball her. You need to know where she is, for real, and you need to know where Prior is, and you have to be damn sure that never the twain shall meet, especially after this game gets rolling, because if anything happens to her, you are going to come unglued right in the middle of this, and you’ll take all of us down with you.”

  Stoney looked at Fat Tommy, who was nodding in agreement. “He’s right,” Tommy said.

  “I thought she’d be okay,” Stoney said. “I mean, nothing happened so far.”

  “Nothing you know about,” Harman said.

  Stoney stared at him.

  “Hey, sorry,” Harman said, holding his hands up in surrender. “But listen, I’m closer to her age than you are. I remember what seventeen was like better than you do.”

  “All right. Okay, we’ll bring her in.” He patted his shirt pocket. “I gotta go have a cigarette.”

  Tommy and Harman watched him go. Harman waited until he heard the back door close. “Tommy, was I out of line?”

  Tommy shook his head. “No,” he said. “You know something, when you see someone every day, you become blind. Stoney’s daughter, she’s so smart, she look so good, you know, I never wasa think she gonna do anything, you know…” He searched for the right word.

  “Human?” Harman offered.

  “Yeah,” Tommy said. “Anyway, maybe you wasa see something Stoney and I wasa no see.”

  “Maybe. While we’re on the topic…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tommy, you sure your buddy out there is gonna be able to keep it together? I think he really just wants to kill this guy Prior. And if that’s what he’s really after, he should just do it. If he goes into this with a bad enough case of testosterone poisoning, he could wind up getting all of us jammed up.”

  Tommy looked in the direction of the back door. “Used to be a lot worse,” he said. “I tell you something, this happen maybe one year ago, we don’t gonna be sitting here talking about. Still, I understand whatta you say.”

  “Maybe you’re right, Tommy.” He shook his head. “My real problem is, my heart just isn’t in it anymore. I thought I was bored, up in Toronto, but you know what? I miss my house, and I miss my boring life.” He put his arm around Fat Tommy’s shoulders. “I thank you for one thing, Tommy. This job has cured me. I lived my whole life seeing how close to the edge I could get, but when I’m done with this, I’m done. I don’t want to go to jail, Tommy. I just want to go home.”

  “Nobody wanna go to jail,” Tommy said. “Let’sa say in this way: we gonna keep you out of trouble. Know what I mean? Sit near the door. You feel like you gotta go, you just leave. No hard feeling.”

  Harman was shaking his head. “My part of this is just about done, isn’t it? Would you feel like I was running out on you if I decided I had enough?”

  “Don’ worry,” Tommy told him. “When you finish to talka to Prior, go on home. No hard feeling.”

  “All right. I’ll check the flights when I get back to the hotel tonight.”

  “Fine,” Tommy said. “You calla me in the morning, let me know how you feel. Anyway, everything here gonna come good. You’ll see.”

  Stoney made the call from the back porch. He pitched his voice low and soft, in the manner of a man whose head hurts him when he talks too loud. “Hello,” he said, when Prior came on the line. “My friend Martin tells me you’d like to see me.”

  “You the lawyer?” Prior asked, without preamble.

  “Yes,” Stoney said.

  “Your employer caught my interest when I happened to run into the three of you yesterday,” Prior told him. “In subsequent conversation with Martin, it seems that there might be an investment opportunity here for me.”

  “This is a private fund,” Stoney said. “You do understand that. You can’t just buy or sell it on an exchange.”

  “I know who Gregory Ahn is and I know what he does,” Prior said. “I also know that anyone who is as big an asshole as he appears to be has to have the chops, or someone would have stepped on him before now.”

  “Very well,” Stoney s
aid. “Martin also said that you are holding…”

  “I don’t wish to go into that on the phone,” Prior said. “When and where can we get together?”

  Stoney pretended to think it over. “I have some time this afternoon,” he said. “If it’s convenient for you, why don’t you meet me at Emil Barton’s office at five-thirty.”

  “I’ll be there,” Prior said, and he hung up.

  Stoney went back inside. “We have achieved liftoff,” he said.

  “This is not exactly ‘staying out of sight,’” Tuco said. He was following Marisa through the giant Willowbrook Mall in Wayne, New Jersey. She wasn’t paying much attention to the stores, she seemed more interested in the people streaming through the corridors. This place, Tuco thought, is Jersey’s version of Thirty-fourth Street. Something to look at everywhere you turn.

  “I know,” she said, and she touched his elbow, sending a charge up and down his nervous system. Relax, he told himself. She’s just letting you know she wants to stop over here. “I’ll go nuts if I have to sit home all the time,” she said. She steered him over to the side of the hallway.

  About twenty-five feet away, a young woman stood next to a kiosk that sold newspapers and lottery tickets. She had two children with her, one imprisoned and half asleep in a baby stroller and another who was zooming through the crowds in an erratic orbit around her. The woman was working her way through a pile of scratch-off tickets. Whenever she hit a winner, she traded it in for more tickets and added them to the bottom of her pile. Every so often, the kid who was ping-ponging through the general vicinity would stop by. “Are we going yet?” he would ask. “C’mon….”

  “In a minute,” she kept saying, intent on her tickets, and he would exhale in frustration and resume his irregular journeys.

  “She looks like she’s got it bad,” Marisa said.

  “Yeah,” Tuco said. “Everybody got something. That’s what your father says.”

  She glanced his way. “I feel jealous of you sometimes,” she said.

  It was the last thing he would have expected her to say. “Of me? Why? What do I got that anybody would want?”

  “Contact,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You and him,” she said. “You and my father. The two of you seem very cool with each other. I see the way you mess with him. Like, yesterday when he told you to do something, I forget what it was, you said, ‘Yassuh, boss.’ If I did that, he’d have a fit.”

  “Yeah, well, I ain’t his kid,” Tuco said. “That makes it different.”

  “Maybe so,” she said. “But to me, it just feels like I’m a lot farther away from him than you are.”

  “I probably spent more time with him than you,” Tuco said. “When I was working at that junkyard that him and Tommy were running for a while, we would be together a lot. And the two of them, they, ahh, they like adopted me. You know what I’m saying? I was like this stray dog, and they felt sorry for me and they fed me, and after that I wouldn’t go away.” That didn’t come out exactly the way he had intended, but it was too late to get it back.

  “I don’t believe that,” she said. “Check this guy out, white guy with the shaved head, by the jewelry store, walking in our direction.” The guy was about five foot five, he looked like a doughy three hundred pounds, but he was all duded up in the tough guy uniform of the day, voluminous shorts that hung almost to his ankles, two-hundred-dollar sneakers, skirt-length basketball shirt. He wore a goatee. The guy was almost a parody of gangsta cliché, on top of being overweight and out of shape, he had to be at least thirty. “What do you suppose he was thinking?” Marisa wanted to know. Just then the man seemed to sense the attention Marisa had directed his way, and he glared at Tuco and Marisa as he lumbered toward them, but Marisa just stared vacantly off down the hallway.

  “I guess you don’t come here for the stores,” Tuco said.

  “Sometimes I do,” she admitted. “But not always. You have to dress just right at my high school. If you wear the right clothes, it doesn’t much matter what else you do.” The overweight tough guy passed them by, throwing them what had to be his best hard stare on his way past. Tuco didn’t look at the guy, and Marisa simply ignored him. “So you hooked up with Fat Tommy and my dad,” she said, continuing to gaze off down into the distance. “And that was a good thing, ’cause it got you out of that neighborhood. Right? But are you, ahh, are you gonna stay with them now? Do what they do?”

  She was trying for an offhand tone when she asked her question, but it seemed to Tuco that she didn’t quite nail it. My answer means more to her than she wants me to know, he thought. He considered his reply carefully. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “I worked hard to get them to, you know, have some confidence in me. But that was back when they were my only shot. I didn’t have nothing else.”

  “I understand that,” she said, still not looking at him.

  “But I’m learning, you know what I’m saying? I’m finding out new things. I think that a new door is gonna open up someplace for me.”

  Her cell phone rang, startling her. She dug it out of her bag and looked at the caller’s number on the little screen. “Is it that guy?” Tuco asked her. “Is it him?”

  “No,” she said. “Too early for him. It’s my father.”

  “Don’t answer it yet,” he told her. “Let’s get out of here first, that way you can tell him that we’re riding around in the car.”

  She nodded, put her arm in his, and turned them for the exit. Jesus, Tuco thought, does she know what she’s doing to me when she does that? I bet she does…. “I’m getting you to lie to him again,” she said. “You said you’d only do it once. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I keep doing this.”

  “Doing what?”

  She looked away when she answered. “Coloring outside the lines,” she said. “I was the one who wouldn’t go home, like I was supposed to. I had to come here instead.”

  “You know what your problem is?” Tuco asked her. He didn’t wait for an answer. “You got something,” he told her, his heart thudding in his chest. You are stepping in it now, you idiot, he told himself, but he went on anyway. “You know you got it, but you don’t know what it is. You gotta keep trying it out. You gotta keep stepping on the gas.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Come on, you know what I mean. You always gotta push. Like with that fat guy just now. You knew you could mess with his head, just by looking at him a little too long, so you did it. I know the guy looked all fucked up, but he’s doing the best he can, right? You know what I’m saying? But you stripped him just a little bit more naked than he was. He knows he don’t measure up, and you rubbed his face in it. You gotta learn how to be more careful.” She slid her arm out of his, hooked his elbow to stop him, stared intently into his face. “Have a little mercy on us,” he said. “We know what we are.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said, and she slid her arm around his waist, giving his nervous system another jolt. He felt the pressure of her hand on his hip, urging him forward. They walked in silence a couple of steps. “I’ll try to watch myself,” she said.

  The makeup girl in the salon in Oradell said she was twenty-two, but she seemed even younger than Marisa. She giggled when he told her what he wanted. “Well, whyncha just go get ’faced?” she asked him. “I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t want a real hangover,” Stoney told her. “I just want to look like I got one. And it can’t look like makeup, either. It has to be subtle enough to fool a very smart guy, up close.”

  She shrugged. “Enkay,” she said. “No problem.”

  It only took her a couple of minutes, but the effect was, when he walked into Emil Barton’s office in Haworth for his meeting with Prior, he looked like a beaten man. His face was pale, his hair was not quite right, and he had dark circles under his eyes. His hands trembled, too. He had achieved that by drinking four cups of coffee. Barton came out, looking almost as bad, although Stoney fig
ured that Barton’s case of the shakes was probably well earned. Barton ushered Stoney into his inner office, where Prior and his guard were waiting. Prior was seated at a conference table. His guard stood against the back wall, silent, his hands crossed in front of himself.

  Prior stood up, held out his hand. “We didn’t have the opportunity to meet, last time,” he said. The makeup worked: Stoney knew from the look on Prior’s face that the man saw him, not as a threat, but as someone who had accepted his lot in life and was resigned to the choices he had made. Prior’s grip was fierce. Stoney returned the squeeze, but just barely. The first impressions are the strongest, and Stoney knew that from now on, Prior would think of him as a lush, a loser, a man defeated by life.

  “No, we didn’t,” Stoney said, and he sat down carefully, in the manner of a person whose bones were made out of chalk. I spent half my life feeling like this, he told himself. What a waste.

  “So,” Prior said. “Does Gregory Ahn take his lawyer and his bodyguard with him everywhere he goes?” Prior was feeling it, Stoney was sure. The man was practically itching with the need to prove he had a bigger dick than all the other dogs.

  “Generally,” Stoney said.

  Prior continued probing. “Can you tell me why that is?”

  Stoney leaned back slowly and sighed. “Gregory Ahn,” he said, “is a man of singular capabilities, but peaceful coexistence is not one of them. You don’t need to like him, Mr. Prior. You only need to tolerate him. And he will make money for you.”

  “So I’m told,” Prior said. “Is that what he’s done for you?” His tone insinuated that the cost of Ahn’s largesse, in Stoney’s case, might have been too high.

  “I do well enough,” Stoney said. “And I only have the one client to worry about.”

  “What about Martin?” Prior said, speaking of Harman’s character. “What’s his story?”

  “Martin is very good at what he does.”