Way Past Legal

by Norman Green

  Dedication

  For Christine

  Acknowledgments

  I WOULD LIKE to thank my friends from down east for their contributions to this book and to my life, chief among them D.W. Terrell, who has always managed to be both a Yankee and a rebel. Thanks also to George Harris, skipper of the John G, for being generous with his time and his knowledge. I have taken liberties with the geography of Washington County, Maine, but not many, and I have done my best to stay true to the spirit of the place. I have also made the Old Sow in this story larger than she is in real life, but the Old Sow has, in fact, devoured both boats and men.

  I need to thank Marjorie Braman for her patience and persistence. She and her colored pencils have made this a better story and me a better writer. And, as always, thanks to Brian DeFiore for his encouragement and his belief in me.

  Finally, my apologies to Kluscap and his friends for whatever violence I have done to one of his legends. I heard the story long ago, and memory is a frail thing, but it might have happened my way after all.

  

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  About the Author

  Also by Norman Green

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  It was centuries before they got their white man’s names. At first it was only him, paddling down the St. Croix, though there was no one there to call it that. He was looking for the right place to leave his children. He was almost to the mouth of the river, the place where it emptied into the ocean, when he decided to pull his canoe up onto dry land and camp for the night. He was, in fact, in the act of doing so when he saw them. The moose was pregnant, the deer was not, and they were both out in the cold water swimming with the strength of fear, oblivious to the power of the current. The wolves ringed the spot on the riverbank where their quarry had entered the water, hesitating, and then, as if tethered to a single will, they leaped in to continue the chase. He stood there with the freezing water swirling around his ankles, watching with mixed emotions. It was right that the deer and the moose should flee, right that the wolves should follow, but it was wrong that the bay should kill them all. Even as he thought this the current seized the group of swimming wolves and sprayed them out into deeper water, where the currents ran even faster. Already it was too late for them.

  He closed his eyes and waved his arm slowly to stop them all where they were, then opened his eyes to see what he had done. The large ungainly humpbacked one, closest to shore, that was Moose Island. Out in the current, low and green, that one was Deer Island, and the smaller ones, farther out in the bay, fanned out from one another and from the larger islands, those were the Dog Islands. He waited there on the bank until sunrise to make sure that the thing he had done was right. When he was sure, he got back into the canoe and paddled away, leaving his children there on the bank behind him, almost as an afterthought. But the bay, denied its prey, had its revenge. At flood tide, the juxtaposition of the islands and currents created the phenomenon that came to be known as the Old Sow, a howling vortex of malevolent sea, a devourer of canoes, ships, and men.

  But by flood tide, he was far, far away.

  1

  Time, a guy once told me, ain’t nothing but one goddam thing after another. I met the guy in Ossining, New York, last time I was up there. I was a guest of the state, and so was he. He was like me, I suppose, a little too smart for his own good. Not smart enough to figure a way out of the life, not stupid enough to enjoy it. I heard he got shanked after I got out. I never found out why. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. These things happen. Right?

  The reason I remembered the guy, I was trying to figure out what got this whole thing started. You never know, when it happens, what’s going to change your life, what’s going to bounce you out of the rut you been in, send you flying off in some new direction. It might have been that guy and his theory of time, it might have been that I was worried about Nicky growing up to be like his old man, it might have been that I didn’t want to have to kill Rosey, because we’d sorta been friends for too long, but I really think it was Leonid.

  I don’t know who he was, the paper didn’t say. They named a meteor shower after him, though, I read about it in the Post. I know, another bad habit. The Post said it was the last time any of us would see it, because it wasn’t coming around again until 2099, by which time I will be dead, and so will you, along with everybody you ever knew. I don’t know why it bothered me. I mean, shooting stars, who gives a shit. Right? But I couldn’t get it out of my head, this idea that tonight, this thing is coming by, doesn’t matter if it’s a big deal or not, you, my friend, and I are both gonna be worm food before it happens again. Little Nicky might make it, if he lives to be a hundred and five, but growing up in foster homes in Bushwick, you gotta figure his chances are not good.

  Rosario is this guy that I work with from time to time. I was just a burglar before I met Rosey, not a great one, but pretty good. I did all right. Rosey was more of an armed-robbery guy. First thing we did together, it was a card game down in Canarsie, it was just him and me. They ran the game on Friday nights, we watched the game four Fridays running, make sure nobody too heavy was there, then on the fifth Friday, we hit them. We wore ski masks so none of them would know who we were, and it went down easy even though it was just the two of us, mostly because Rosey’s a scary guy whether he’s got a mask on or not. He’s slightly taller than I am, maybe six foot two or three, and he’s a few pounds heavier, he probably goes around two-thirty-five or two-forty. He got his physique for nothing—as far as I know, Rosey has never had to lift a weight or run a mile. Everything I have to work hard for, he gets for free. The thing that sticks in your mind, though, is not his build. I guess you would have to call it his aura. They say God gives you the face you’re born with, but you earn the one you die with. Rosey had eyes that looked like they had seen a lot of pain, though how much of it he bought and how much he sold is anybody’s guess. It’s not just in his eyes, either, it’s in the way he holds himself, it’s on his face, it’s in his bones. You meet the guy, you know instinctively you gotta watch him. People shake hands with Rosario carefully, and I’ve known him long enough to know that he’s worse than he looks. Rosey’s one of those people who believes that you were put here on this planet to be miserable, to suffer, and to die. It’s almost as though he knows he’s predestined for trouble, so he’s never surprised to see it coming, and he never runs away from it. Rosey looks like he’s right on the edge, all the time. You just know, he thinks he needs to pop you, he’s gonna do it. He won’t have to think about it much, not until it’s over with.

  So anyhow, when you hit guys that know how to hit back, you have to be careful, you have to be absolutely certain you can’t be recognized, you have to plan thoroughly so nothing goes wrong, and you can’t go stupid afterward, either, buying jewelry for your favorite hooker. Most guys in the game find those rules too restrictive, believe it or not.

  The last job I did with Rosey, there was this brokerage house run by a couple of Russians. They had a stock scam running, it was your basic Ponzi scheme, and they were getting ready to pull the plug. The trickiest part of a scam like that is cashing out, okay, because everybody is worried about getting screwed or going to jail. Most of the money we couldn’t touch because it’s
already in some bank in the Cayman Islands or someplace, but there are certain elements involved that don’t trust banks of any kind, they got to be paid off in cash. Now the brokerage house is in Manhattan, but the Russians are running it out of an apartment house in Vinegar Hill, which is this neighborhood down on the Brooklyn waterfront, used to be mostly factories but half of them got people living in them now. The place is too big for me and Rosey to take down by ourselves, so Rosey picks up three other guys, one guy to drive and two to handle the exits while Rosey and I go in. I’m only twenty-eight, right, already I’m getting gray hairs from this shit.

  So we go in, and right away two things go wrong. One, there turns out to be way more money there than we thought there was gonna be. I mean, way more, the kind that comes with serious heat. We weren’t even out of the place and I’m hearing the wheels turning in everybody’s head. And two, the doorman must’ve called the cops, because we were just a couple of blocks away when the sirens started up. We got away clean, but now you got the cops looking at the Russians and the Russians looking at the cops and all of them looking for us. One whisper of this gets out, one little peep, and it’s all over. We dumped the car we used over in Fort Greene, down by the projects. We transferred the money into a van we had parked there ahead of time. The three guys Rosey picked up to help out, their eyeballs are spinning, they’re all excited, they never seen so much money. They had agreed beforehand to a flat fee of ten grand apiece, but now that’s out the window. They’re looking at each other, then at Rosey and me—man, I can practically smell it coming.

  The thing is, a job where the payoff is too small is actually better than a job where it’s too big. Five guys and a bunch of cardboard boxes full of money in one van, we had achieved critical mass. That’s when you get too much fissionable material in one spot, right, once the chain reaction starts, it’s not gonna stop until it runs out of fuel. Rosey climbs into the back of the van. “Mohammed,” he says to me. “You drive.”

  What can I tell you, street names tend to be dramatic.

  I’m driving down Flatbush Avenue, I hear him bust open one of the boxes. The shit’s in all denominations, but they got it banded into ten-grand bundles. I watch him in the mirror, he’s got this box cradled in his arms, he looks like a proud papa, he’s in love. He hands each one of those characters one banded stack of hundreds. Half-inch thick, ten grand, that’s what they agreed to, but now they’re all disappointed, we’re screwing them. He should have given them one of the fatter bundles, made up of tens and twenties instead of hundreds, it would have made them happier. As it was, it started to look like the whole thing might blow right then and there. I still had the piece I used in the stickup. I started looking for a place to ditch the van in case one of these guys decides to renegotiate. Rosey got them calmed down, though. “Look,” he said, “me and Mo, we got to stash this money in a safe place until the heat is off. What I’m giving you is just for now, it’s just to tide you guys over, you hear me? Then, when it’s safe, we gonna make a good split. Don’t worry, I gonna take care of you all.” We were supposed to ride them down to Red Hook, this neighborhood where one of them lives with his mother, but I pulled over on the corner of Flatbush and Fulton Street.

  “Okay,” I told them. “Out.”

  “Why you leavin’ us way over here?” It was one of the two that had gone up with us. “You ’posed to drive us home.”

  “You’re a rich man now. Take a fucking cab.” I’m half turned in the driver’s seat, I’ve got the pistol in my hand but I’m not showing it.

  “Hey, bro,” Rosey says to the guy. “Gimme a break, okay? We din know there was gonna be this kinda money in there. We gotta get it under cover before the heat comes down. Every cowboy in Brooklyn gonna be all over this, it ain’t smart to be drivin’ aroun’ with this shit. We don’ got a lotta time. You unnerstan’?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” They weren’t happy about it, but they got out, slammed the side door to the van closed behind them. Rosey climbed back into the front passenger seat. He rolled the window down and stuck his head out.

  “Listen,” he said, “you muthafuckas keep your mouths shut, you hear me? Don’t say nothing to nobody, not your momma, not your baby’s momma, nobody. I gonna call you in the morning.” I pulled away, looked back at them standing there on the corner, watching us.

  The storage place was this old warehouse way the fuck down near Coney Island. We had already rented a stall there. The building was an old printing plant, fourteen stories high, poured concrete, bars on the windows, metal doors. It was on a block where the other buildings had all been torn down, the neighborhood was all chain-link fences and weeds, just this one big art deco–looking warehouse, nothing around it. Our stall was on the twelfth floor. Rosey grabs a few more stacks of money out of the box he had broken open, he hands me a couple, sticks the rest in his pocket. “We did it, Mo.” He’s grinning ear to ear, first time I ever saw him do that. “We did it, muthafucka. We rich now.”

  “We ain’t in the clear yet.”

  “Don’ worry,” Rosey said. “Everything gonna be fine.”

  Rosey showed his ID to a security guy behind a bulletproof glass window. The guy checked it against a paper list, opened the door and let us in. We piled the boxes on a wooden pallet. I was trying to do the math in my head as we went. I figured there was about four hundred pounds there, give or take. I tried to guess how much in each box, and how much altogether, but without sitting down and counting it, there was no way to tell. The guy fired up a forklift, picked up the pallet, we all rode up the freight elevator. We got it all put away, right, locked up, the place looked pretty secure. I guess that’s why Rosey picked it. We got back in the van, Rosey held up the key to the storeroom. “Look,” he said. “I got an idea. Just so nobody gets any bad things in his head, okay, let’s leave this key in a hotel safe somewhere. We’ll tell the guy we need two claim tickets, he has to get them both back before he gives up the key. Time comes, we both gotta go back together for it. That way, we can both feel comfortable. You okay with that?”

  “Yeah, sure.” I felt like a guy buying a new car, he knows he’s getting fucked, he just doesn’t know how. That’s the way we played it, though, we dumped the van, and we left the key in the hotel safe at the Omni on Fifty-third Street in Manhattan, just the way Rosey said. We separated on the sidewalk outside. Rosey gave me that shit-eating grin again, walked away looking like a winner. I put the claim ticket in my pocket, went home to catch some sleep. I had a feeling I was gonna need it. I had the thought then, I should have settled for one box. I should have taken one box from the van, let Rosey drive away with the rest, but I hadn’t thought of it in time.

  I slept most of that next day away, woke up in the early afternoon. I took the twenty grand Rosey had given me out of my pocket and laid it out on the kitchen counter, and I put that claim ticket on the counter next to the money. I didn’t want to think about it, I didn’t want to have to go where thinking was going to take me. I wanted to trust Rosey. I wanted to believe that the two of us would meet in a week or so, split the money, and go our separate ways. I couldn’t, though. What’s that old rule? Do unto others? I remembered a big hit some guys pulled off back in the seventies. People still talked about it, it was like Captain Kidd’s treasure was buried in Brooklyn someplace. What happened, a bunch of guys, maybe ten or twelve, took down a cash shipment out at JFK. The take was just short of six million. Talk about critical mass—over the next year, all of those guys came up dead except for one, and he died in prison, of cancer, couple years later. If anybody knows what happened to the money, they ain’t talking. Six million, whatever it was, it was too much to handle. I don’t know if it says anything about the guys involved. Maybe not. Maybe there was just no safe way to cut it up and walk away. Bad things had to happen, and they did. It was inevitable.

  The claim ticket lying on my kitchen counter was never going to buy me anything, I knew that. I remembered it as I sat there, it’s an old scam, they use
d to call it the pigeon drop. It was Rosey’s idea of getting fancy, switch the real claim ticket for another one he had in his pocket already, he winds up with the two tickets the attendant would need to give up the key, and the one I had gives you the booby prize. That was why he picked the Omni, he must have gone there ahead of time to get a third claim ticket, which was the one he’d given to me. It was touching, in a way. Rosey was giving me an out. As long as I had that ticket, he didn’t have to kill me. I could walk around with it in my pocket, all happy and shit, and he could take care of business. That way, he gets away with the money, and I live to talk about it.

  Ah, but there it is, there’s the rat turd in the oatmeal. I’m still alive, right, I can still talk. When they come looking—and brother, they will—I can say, guy you’re looking for goes by the name of Rosario Colón, about so tall, all of that. My guess was that Rosey hadn’t followed the logic that far yet, and I was safe until he did. But Rosey was no dope. It wouldn’t be long. I went into the bathroom of the place where I was living and looked at my face in the mirror. You talk yourself into it yet? That’s what I wanted to know. You all right with it yet? It would really be self-defense anyhow. Right? But I couldn’t tell, from that face looking out at me, much of anything at all.

  It isn’t just your face that forgets how to smile. For a long time, growing up, I hadn’t found a hell of a lot to laugh at. And that expression you wear on your puss all the time, sour or hostile or resentful or whatever it is, it sinks in, it seeps into you, it prints itself on what you are inside, and then it’s not a mask anymore, because you can’t take it off. It’s you, you’re it. I got all the excuses you want, but they don’t mean shit.

  It was in the Post the next morning, same day as the meteor shower, right, cops found three dead guys in a Dumpster out in Queens. Rosey was as good as his word, he had taken care of them. I took the train into Manhattan, wondering if I was going to be in time. Rosey might have moved the money already, but if he thought I’d bought his scam, he might have just left it where it was. I went into a big sporting goods store up near Union Square, a place where they sold serious mountaineering gear. I spent about twenty of those nice clean hundred-dollar bills on rope, a climbing harness, some cam-lock tensioners sized for a three-inch crack. I also bought two of the biggest duffel bags I could find, green, like army surplus, big enough for me to fit in myself. You had one of them to put your dirty clothes in, you wouldn’t have to do laundry for a month.