“Last month?” Amato said. “Last month the bills’re almost a week late going out. The checks’re two and a half, at least. I had guys calling me up. ‘Uh, Mister Amato, about your order?’ And then he tells me, three new transmissions he put in, couple tune-ups, I also owe for three tires they hadda have fixed, one of my great customers don’t know they got curbs on roads, and the guy’s into me for around eight hundred bucks and he wouldn’t mind seeing his money.
“So I go out there,” Amato said, “the kid’s sitting there. She’s putting on nail polish, for Christ sake, she’s talking to her boyfriend onna phone. I wait. I only pay her, for Christ sake. No reason she oughta stop talking about how they’re gonna do it after closing, it’s not closing yet and I’m still paying her. No, of course not. She finally gets off. I tell her, Jesus Christ, we can’t do business like this. We need a wrecker or something, this guy, he’s not gonna send one. ‘Mister Amato,’ she says, ‘I haven’t had time. I’ve been so busy.’ Jesus. I pay that broad one thirty-five for that.”
“That the one with the nice ass?” Frankie said.
“That’s the one,” Amato said. “Before I get through that silly little bitch’s gonna have me in court, and I’m gonna look awful stupid, I’m telling the judge, I got the money, I just couldn’t get the girl to hang up long enough to send it out.”
“How is she?” Frankie said.
Amato did not reply immediately. Then he said: “Well, okay, yeah. But Jesus Christ, I mean, you still gotta get the work done and everything.”
“You don’t learn nothing,” Frankie said. He was grinning. “I bet when you were a little kid it took them about eight years to get you to stop shitting in your pants.”
“I know it,” Amato said. “But, I still can’t be going down to Taunton or some place every day. I got to keep this thing going even if I can’t do anything else, you know?”
“Every day,” Frankie said, “that’d be if you’re going in when it’s open.”
“You wanna go in through the roof or something?” Amato said.
“Yeah,” Frankie said. “One of them Sunday night jobs. The back wall or something like that. Two guys that knew where everything was, and I figure, somebody went down there once and just made a little map, that’d be enough to go in on. You know what you’re gonna have to do when you get in there. All you got to know is where it is.”
“You’d have to get a guy, knew bells and stuff,” Amato said. “Doglover know anything about bells?”
“I wasn’t thinking about Russell,” Frankie said. “If I was gonna go in when it’s open again, I’d get Russell. But anyway, Russell took off. Him and the guy he’s stealing the dogs with. I dunno if he’s gonna be back and if he was, he probably wouldn’t want to do it. He’s gonna deal.”
“What’s he got?” Amato said.
“I didn’t really ask him,” Frankie said. “Coke, I think.”
“He’s gonna make a million bucks off of that,” Amato said.
“He might,” Frankie said, “and he might just get himself grabbed about six minutes after he starts and then do twenty more. That stuff’s dangerous. There isn’t anything around, you know? Everybody’s hunting around and half of them’re narcs. I heard a couple guys, they got sixty thousand hits of meth off a terminal down in Pawtucket, and they come back up, these’re tough guys, and about ten freaks ripped them off. The cops’ve got bigger hard-ons for that’n they got for fuckin’ coons with fuckin’ guns, for Christ sake. Russell’s got balls, but he didn’t ask me and I don’t think this guy he’s working the dogs with, I don’t think he’s in it with him. I don’t think anybody’s in it with him, which is no way to be if you’re gonna do something like that. No, I was thinking, Dean, my brother-in-law. When he was in the service he was Electronics SP, and he still fools around with that stuff all the time.”
“Alarms?” Amato said. “I thought the guy works in a gas station.”
“He does,” Frankie said. “No, but he built one of them quadraphonic things from a kit on the table in the kitchen, and he was telling me, well, when he saw my car? ‘Now if I was to get that, if I ever got myself a few extra bucks,’ he tells me, he’d build his own color television. It’s all the same thing, isn’t it? I mean, it’s just circuits and stuff, and he knows about that.”
“You think he’d go for it?” Amato said.
“I won’t know till I ask him,” Frankie said. “See, I wanted, talk to you, first, see what you thought about it. I can’t lay the place out like you can. I’m all right going in, but I got to have the map in front of me. I don’t notice things like you do. So, I wanted, talk to you, first. Before I see him. I think he will, though, yeah.”
“He ever do anything before?” Amato said.
“I think he did favors for a couple guys that bought cars,” Frankie said. “And he told me, mine needs a tune-up or something, he’ll do it for me and the parts aren’t gonna cost me anything. He’s hurtin’ for dough.”
“Has it got to be Taunton?” Amato said.
“Shit, no,” Frankie said. “I just said that, account of the way everybody’s so interested in what we do around here. I haven’t got no particular one in mind. What I want, I want the easiest one around to get into, probably one of those new ones that they made outa plastic or something, and that’s got some money in it, and maybe some other things around it so you’re not bare-ass to the world when you’re doing it.”
“I took Connie the movies the other night,” Amato said. “Some fuckin’ thing, and it’s over in Brockton there, in this shopping plaza they got. It’s, I dunno what the name of it is. One story.”
“How about,” Frankie said, “take a look at it, and I’ll go drive past it too, and then if it looks good we can start thinking about it.”
“Yeah,” Amato said. “Yeah, I’m beginning to like this, you know? It’s funny about a thing, like that last thing, there, you can tell right off, if it feels right.”
“HE’S AN ASSHOLE,” Cogan said. He sat in the silver Toronado. It was parked in the MBTA lot behind Cronin’s in Cambridge. “The way he’s an asshole, he’s a gambler. He thinks he’s a gambler, at least. What he really is is a jerk. He don’t gamble, he bets on everything. Jerk of the year.”
“I enjoy going to the track now and then myself,” the driver said. “I haven’t missed an opening at Lincoln in years.”
“So do I,” Cogan said. “I still do. Even though, every time I go down the track, I lose.”
“I don’t,” the driver said. “Of course I don’t bet very much, but I’ve won three or four hundred dollars in an afternoon, and I very seldom lose more than twenty or thirty dollars. And I have a good time.”
“It is a good time,” Cogan said. “It doesn’t pay as good as writing the stuff down, but it’s fun. I go, it’s because there’s other guys that’re going. It’s a nice thing to do, get some fresh air and see some people and maybe you even win. You lose? So what.
“Squirrel,” Cogan said, “Squirrel don’t do that. He never goes down the track, he never goes to any of the games or anything, he just bets on things. And he doesn’t bet because he heard about something and he’s interested in that and he thinks he’s got something. He bets because he’s gotta be down on something all the time, it’s like he’s not gonna be able to live if he’s not. He thinks he’s gonna win, when he bets, he’s always gonna win.”
“Some people do win,” the driver said.
“I know people that win,” Cogan said. “Some of them, get a little something in the horse and they win. Some other guys get something into all the other horses, and they win. And some guys, spent their whole lives doping horses, one or two of them, maybe there’s three, I dunno, they win. Except when the other guys’re getting to the animals and winning. Then they lose. And they take it in stride. Write it off. Not Squirrel. He loses today, he spent the whole morning onna phone, he’s gonna be back onna phone tomorrow, and he’s gonna lose again. So pretty soon he’s got to go out and get some dough some place, and then something like this happens. You know Mitch?”