Having shaken his body around with the retching and vomiting, Frank sat on the toilet and pondered the world a while. He thought about what he needed to do between now and the end of the day and he imagined how the first few hours of tomorrow would pan out - until he segued from imagination to fantasy.
Frank knew even his plan, which was well thought through, would go awry. Something always got in the way of your intentions on jobs like these. The successful people were the ones who made the right decisions at the time when things went wrong. The failures ended up back in jail or with a bullet through the chest and neither option sounded like a great idea to Frank.
He played the movie of Tuesday morning through his mind again, anticipating anything where reality might force him to shift away from his imagined scenarios. There was nothing obvious, but if there had been the hours and hours of talking the matter through with Mary Lou, Pete and Uncle Frankie would have been completely wasted.
Frank went back to replay his list of chores for today. There were only a couple of things he absolutely needed to do. First, he needed to kick off the chain so everyone knew the job was finally on. Then he’d need to hook up with Frankie some time before evening and, finally, he needed to be on the receiving end of the chain before nightfall - otherwise all bets were off and he’d have to nix the game before anyone made any foolish moves in the morning. But Frank knew better than to get ahead of himself. So he finished on the toilet, washed his hands and face to help give him a super clear head, put on some clothes and left the apartment. First stop, Andrew’s place.
FRANK FIRED UP the jalopy and headed over to the apartment on the other side of Halethorpe. He parked a couple of blocks away and walked over to the brownstone, just as a precaution. Up the stairs to the second floor, turned right at the hallway and third on the left. Frank knocked on the door and waited.
And waited. An eternity passed, the door opened up and Andrew stood there. And quite surprised to see him, judging by the expression on his face. Frank was hoping to be invited in, more out of curiosity than anything else. He’d never been inside Andrew’s pad and he was interested to see what it looked like. But no.
Andrew stood at the door, barring Frank’s further progress, so he said what needed to be said, out in the corridor.
“I’ll make this quick, Andrew,” said Frank, trying to crane his eyes around the door to get a glimpse of at least the decor.
“Okay. What’s up?” snapped Andrew back at him. A bit sharp for Andrew, thought Frank. What was the matter with him? Or maybe he just wasn’t expecting Frank to appear at his front door at ten in the morning.
“The job’s tomorrow. Game on.” Frank let the words hang in the air because he knew how immense the impact those words would have on the rest of the gang. They were all going to galvanize behind that single phrase.
“Game on, Frank,” replied Andrew with a smile, although his eyes showed more fear than the pleasure showing on his lips. Before Frank could say another word, Andrew shut the door on his face. Frank shrugged and decided not to take it personally although it was damn strange behavior. People react weird at the best of times.
ANDREW SMILED AS he closed the door on Frank, his heart racing with the adrenaline Frank’s words generated. Game on tomorrow. A simple code for a simple game. They each passed on the news to another fella and until the message reached all of them. Then the last person fed what they were told back to Frank. That way he could be certain they hadn’t been playing the Telephone Game.
Andrew sat on the sofa and let the news soak in, dripping into his brain. First, the sheer immediacy of it all: tomorrow morning they would wake up and a couple of hours later, they’d be in the bank with guns in their hands and cash in their pockets. Second, the thudding realization this meant he was shooting Pete tomorrow too.
Third, and this was taking the longest time to feel real to Andrew: from some point tomorrow morning, they’d be lying low for weeks with just a phone number, and a pre-arranged time, provided by Frank, to hold them together. He and Brian wouldn’t be seeing their apartment for a while. They’d better not leave anything open in the fridge or it will walk out by itself by the time they got back.
Finally, there was the thought maybe they wouldn’t be seeing this apartment again. Either because they’d hit easy street or because they were either dead or in jail. The last two options didn’t appeal, but Andrew tried to process their implications, nonetheless.
After two minutes, a wave of melancholia descending upon him and he decided the best option was a long walk. The smart thing was to walk around Lansdowne and give himself one last chance to get the street map in his head before the game began.
HALF AN HOUR later, Andrew stood in the middle of the cemetery to get his bearings and headed off northwards, moving away from the bank to swing round later and catch a few other streets along the way.
He exited the cemetery and turned west until he hit Saratoga Avenue. Then he sauntered south and reached fifth. Next right and he walked parallel to the south side of the cemetery along Hollins Ferry Road.
When he’d got about three hundred feet, Andrew realized what he really wanted was a cup of coffee. As luck would have it, he was stood outside a place called the Dulce Caffe, so he popped right in and sat down at a table by the window.
A waiter let him sit there perusing the menu for a minute or two then swooped in and asked what Andrew wanted. The answer of a coffee was met with a curt smile and a shuffling of the menu back into the slot in the menu holder, which each table had included on its surface, as well as napkins, cutlery and a bowl of sugar cubes.
Andrew leaned his elbows on the table, holding his head in his hands. He looked out the window and watched the world go by, not that there were too many people walking past. The time for workers to be out had ended and the hardened shoppers were either not yet in town or in another part of Lansdowne where there were shops. This stretch of the road was fairly bare: a connector between the residential roads further south east and the town center further north west after the cemetery.
The same thoughts he tried to shake off in the apartment flooded back now he was in the cafe as if Andrew could only exorcize them through physical movement. The coffee arrived and he added a drop of milk, then he plopped two sugar cubes into the cup with a splash and stirred them round and round with a coffee spoon. The sugar dissolved and Andrew returned to his musing.
The biggest thing haunting him was the thought of jail again. Not that the building itself held much sway, more the people. Between the guards and the hardcore inmates, they could stir up a lot of shit for a man like Andrew. He was smarter than the average - he’d found that the last time he was inside - and his lifestyle was upsetting to some of the inside straight community. And they tended to react with violence rather than an inquisitive nature.
So jail was far from an ideal location. And he’d be split up from Brian, almost inevitably, which would be another layer of pain on top. Or relief, depending on his mood on the day.
But Frank was a reliable guy who’d got the planning down to a tee. The more likely issue was dealing with killing Pete while keeping everyone else on-side. Brian would get the joke immediately, but Frank or Frank Senior? Mary Lou would fall in line behind Frank.
The waiter dropped the bill onto Andrew’s table and he threw out a buck and left.
35
BY THE TIME Andrew got home, Brian had woken from his tequila coma from the night before and was sat up in bed. Just.
Andrew inhaled the musty air in the bedroom which had accumulated all of Brian’s tequila breath, and opened the window nearest Brian’s head. A blast of cold air hit the man’s body and he was most definitely awake.
“Game on tomorrow,” said Andrew loudly. Then he turned round and walked out the apartment, making sure the front door was firmly, and far from noiselessly, shut.
Andrew carried on wondering around the streets, his hands in his pockets and his head down low, meandering along the sidewa
lk with no particular purpose in mind. He crisscrossed streets, sometimes going left, sometimes heading right, but never paying much attention to the where of where he was going.
At this point, he happened to turn a corner and walking towards him was Pat.
Now Pat was an old flame, long since extinguished, from Andrew’s past. His hair was shorter than when Andrew had seen it last, but this was Pat without any question. And the sight of Pat slapped Andrew out of his reverie and snapped him back to planet Earth. The big question at the front of Andrew’s mind was why Pat suddenly appeared out of nowhere, only a day before the job.
“You gotta be kiddin’ me!” Pat exclaimed when he looked up from the sidewalk and saw Andrew for the first time in seven years.
“Holy moly!” responded Andrew, still in mild shock from seeing this guy after so long and still wondering why the coincidence on this of all days, not realizing what happens when you randomly walk around a town you’ve lived in for many years.
They shook hands and rolled that gesture into a brief hug. Then they stepped back and smiled.
“What brings you round here?”
Andrew smiled again and shrugged.
“I was just walking around, to be honest, clearing my head.”
“And you were walking round here?”
“Yep. Just strolling from here to there.”
“Nice. What are you up to when you’re not having a walk?”
“This and that, y’know,” replied Andrew, trailing his voice into nothingness. Pat picked up on the evasiveness and let it lie. He knew Andrew worked on the wrong side of the tracks so he didn’t push the matter. Part of Andrew’s attraction to him was his criminal tendencies. So they small-talked for a minute, another hug and off they went, carrying on in their respective original directions.
But from that point on, Andrew was back awake and aware, focused on where he was and where he was going. He grabbed a cab and went across town so he could take a bus back home, just in case Pat - or anyone else - was following him. It was time for him to get his head in the game.
BEFORE ANDREW RETURNED to the apartment, he made a minor detour to the train station and went to the left luggage area and zoomed straight to locker number B21, one of the smaller lockers at head height. He took out a key from a compartment in his wallet, turned the key in its lock and opened the B21 door just enough to enable himself to put his hand into the dark abyss and retrieve a metallic gadget and a cardboard box the size of his fist. Pistol and ammo.
All that practice in the firing range with Brian was shaping into tomorrow. But this pistol was not for the job itself. No, this was a special gun for a special purpose. If the opportunity to cap Pete only arose after they’d ditched their firearms, Andrew wanted to be sure he’d have the necessary tools for the job. Of course, if Pete did hand his revolvers over that would be the best time to hit him. When he was naked.
Also Andrew had kept up his driving practice, because if the Wheels had to go before they’d left the scene, he needed to show Frank all was well with the world - apart from a dead Pete, that is.
Now today was not the day for driving round a track, but it was a day for making sure there were no loose ends in their lives, so when they vanished for a few weeks, no-one would notice their absence. They weren’t the kinds of people to buy a newspaper on a regular basis. And they only occasionally went to the same diner twice in a row for breakfast - Brian was always too cautious to let them do anything as normal as that.
Andrew knew the most important thing, therefore, was to throw out all the food and empty the trash. The very last thing they’d want in two weeks time would be for the Super to unlock the place with his master key to find an unoccupied apartment harboring the aroma of death and decay. No-one must notice they were gone and absolutely no-one should notice when they were gone.
A COLD BLAST of air caught Brian in the neck and he awoke with a start. Andrew was right in his face.
“Game on tomorrow,” he said with an unbelievable volume, slammed the door and left.
Brian’s head was filled with a wooly, fuzzy sensation, which made his hands shake and caused him to crave a long drag on a cigarette. Tequila hangovers were a killer for him.
While Brian’s body generally followed the rule that clear liquor didn’t cause hangovers, no-one bothered to explain that simple fact to the tequila coursing through his veins. He faced the ceiling with both hands by his side and, for a man his size, he was too afraid to open his eyes, in case the room carried on spinning the way it did last night before he crashed out.
When Brian fell into the apartment, he quite literally moved around the place from memory as his eyes weren’t working in the normal fashion. It was only luck and habit that meant he landed on the correct side of the bed, instead of squashing Andrew with his not inconsiderable frame.
Brian knew he needed to get a serious hangover recipe inside himself before too long because he really couldn’t spend the day with the tremors. Not today. Not with the news Andrew had just left in his ear. Game on tomorrow.
He bumbled into the kitchen and cracked a couple of eggs into a tall glass. Next he poured in some milk and a splash of tabasco. Using a fork, he whisked the mixture until the raw egg had turned the milk an eerie pale yellow. Then he swigged the concoction down in one, clinging to the sink as he did, partly to stay upright and partly to manage the foul taste of his own devising. Finally, he made himself an extremely strong coffee to jolt his body back into life. And then another.
By the time he’d showered, shaved and got dressed, Brian felt more like a human being and thought beyond the quivering moments he was experiencing. If he’d known tomorrow was game on, he wouldn’t have drunk that much hard liquor. But you only know what you know although he’d have preferred if Frank had given them all a bit more notice.
Brian left the apartment and slunk down to a phone booth two blocks west. He dialed Pete’s number and waited. And waited. No reply after ten, twenty, thirty rings. Either Pete had his head stuck in an engine block or he wasn’t in his yard.
“Fuck,” thought Brian, knowing this meant he either had to spend the day chasing phone calls to Pete or he’d have to drive over to the yard and just sit and wait for Pete to show. Both involved effort on his part and neither sounded like fun.
Brian decided to try again in an hour and, if there was still no joy, he’d pop over and deal accordingly. Pete had until noon to show his sorry ass.
In the meantime, Brian decided the best thing he could do was to get some proper lunch, so he walked across the street to the Lansdowne Steakhouse. What the restaurant lacked in terms of inventiveness of its name, it sure made up for in its product: the steaks were to die for.
BRIAN TOOK A table away from the window and ordered a sixteen ounce rib-eye and fries. He had a hunger on him brought on by the recovery from the tequila slammer evening and the thought he’d need to be in best shape for tomorrow. So today had better have some protein in it.
He also had the good sense to start drinking a lot of water so he could wash away the sucking dryness of the tequila and get his brain back in gear.
In his booth, Brian sipped the umpteenth glass of water, sucked the remains of his steak caught between his teeth, and swallowed the lot down. Slowly. These were the last moments of silence and isolation he would experience for weeks at the very least.
He and Andrew would hole up somewhere in Manhattan, somewhere busy where they could get lost in the crowd and no-one asks questions of strangers. And there would be no quiet there. Even when they were alone together, there’d still be Andrew warbling in his ear about something scaring him. And the repetitiveness of their relationship would wear Brian down more than it had over the past year.
Ultimately, Brian knew Andrew was going to have to go. Go away from his life, that is, but Brian hadn’t had the energy to deal until now and with the job happening tomorrow, he knew Andrew would have to wait at least until they’d got their fair share. Worst case, Brian wo
uld end up with a double share if Andrew really began to piss him off, but Andrew was dull rather than dangerous, so there was no reason at this point to think it’d be anything other than an amicable split. Screaming, shouting, tears. The usual amicable split.
Brian ordered a piece of key lime pie to balance out the steak. The pie arrived almost immediately and Brian got the feeling the waiter was trying to hustle him out the restaurant. There was no reason because the place was half empty. There was also no reason because the waiter was merely being prompt and had picked up on some tetchy vibes coming from Brian. The tensions in his mind were revealing themselves to those whose job it was to pick up on such things.
The bill appeared as soon as Brian asked for it. He carried on finishing his dessert, threw down some greenbacks and left the eatery. Back to the phone booth and he dialed Pete’s number again.
36
PETE HAD SPENT the night until six a.m. playing five stud poker with a bottle of vodka by his side and Lady Luck waving him goodbye through an open window. By the time he collapsed onto his bed, he was five hundred dollars down and couldn’t taste the insides of his mouth. This counted as a good night’s gambling for Pete.
So when the phone rang around eleven, there was no way on this planet he was going to be roused from his slumber to answer the dang thing.
An hour later and his body was sufficiently recovered to acknowledge the constant ringing noise by his head. Pete fished for the phone keeping his eyes shut as the brightness of the room was not something he was prepared to deal with at this point in his life.
“Yep?” he muttered when he finally managed to get the handset near his ear.
The Lagotti Family Series Page 18
