The Town: A Novel by Chuck Hogan Read Free Book Online Page B

there.”
    “We don’t duke him, there could be trouble down the road.”
    “How?” Doug felt himself getting carried away and not caring. “Trouble how? What trouble, explain that to me. This ‘Code of Silence’ trial now, everybody in town is an opera star. Clutching their hankies and belting it out for the cops and the papers. The fat lady, she’s singing. Just tell me you didn’t visit him in his shop.”
    “I saw him out on the pier. He’s my mother’s cousin, Duggy.”
    “We’re not Italian, Jem. Third or fourth cousin means maybe a nice Christmas card, not ‘Here’s my kidney, you should need one.’ The G is all over his shop, that is guaran-fucking-teed.”
    “It’s so. But you think
he
don’t know that?”
    Dez piped up, “That thirty-five grand or so you gave him—he gonna wash that clean before sending it out to the IRA?”
    Jem scoffed and said, “All that’s rumor. That’s just for street cred.”
    Doug said, “Dez
thinks
he knows that Fergie fronts for the IRA. He doesn’t
know
it—not like he
knows
that Fergie puts dust out on the street, not to mention has a taste for it himself. This is a sixty-year-old man on angel dust you’re meeting out there on the pier, Jem kid. Chatting with, handing bank money to.”
    “Look, Fergie’s always putting things into motion. You’re working on our next, sure, but he said, and in not so many words, that he’s got some big things that would suit us nice. That we could buy from him.”
    Doug thought he was going to levitate out of his seat. “Why the fuck would we want to work for someone else?
One
good reason.”
    “These are marquee scores.”
    “Marquee scores!”
Doug waved at the vanished salt. “You got kids in braces or something, that’s not enough? We got more than we can conveniently wash as it is. Marquee scores mean marquee busts, Jem boy. Fergie’s got room on his roster exactly because Boozo’s crew got lazy up in New Hampshire and Boozo’s tweak-freak son, Jackie the Jackal, shot up that armored guard. And the heat from that is
still
out all over the Town. Jackie’s what, he’s our age? Younger? And he’s gonna die in prison. He’d fucking die there anyway, for being stupid and running his mouth, but eighty years is not something he’s gonna survive. And that’s without a murder charge ever being brought—that’s the racketeering thing, interstate, plus the firearms mandatories. This isn’t kid stuff anymore. We all of us, except the Monsignor, got strikes against us. We take a fall now, with twenty-year gun mandies, we’re never gonna land. Got it? I gotta spell this out in salt for you?”
    Gloansy said, “I ain’t taking no more falls.”
    Doug said, “And I ain’t taking any falls before you. The only thing the law likes less than pro outlaws are reckless outlaws. The G—they don’t like it when you rob banks, that’s fine, fair. Honest heat is honest heat. Toss in kidnapping and assault, their fucking palms start getting sweaty. They take that personal. Suddenly they got jobs on the line—reassignment, whatever. They need results. And we can’t win going up against them nose-to-nose. This crazy Cagney shit you pull, it draws them out. Things go wrong on every job. Trick is, keep moving, don’t fix one fucking mistake with another.”
    In the silence that followed, Doug realized he had gone on what was for him a tirade. He was the only one who could talk to Jem like this, and even he was pushing it. Gloansy, or especially Dez, they would have been on the floor with Jem’s knee in their throat.
    Jem was making a show of fishing food out of his teeth with his tongue. Doug had been sitting on this stuff too long. He didn’t even know specifically why he was so pissy himself. It was the jokes, it was the beer on their breath andthe hour of the day. It was all of their youth going round and round in circles on the ice down there.
    “Fuck it,” Doug said with a wave. “You want to duke the Florist,