Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(43)
THREE
Pepper took the film job because he was low on cash and he was low on cash because the Anson job crapped out. Church Wiley’s prep work had been top-notch. It usually was. Church couldn’t remember the names of his own kids, but ask him the average speed of Anson Freight’s driver on the Jersey Turnpike and he’d mumble, “Fifty-seven miles per hour, sixty if it’s cloudy.” He only had two kids.
The Thursday driver was named Phil Burgher and he drove the Alexandria-to-Newark run every week to ensure that the Magnavox warehouse made its Friday deliveries. Phil was steady, steady as in predictable, the best kind. He permitted himself one stop on his route, at the Pedricktown service area just over the border from Delaware. “It’s a real ‘Welcome to Jersey’ place,” Church said. Two diesel pumps, a big pile of gravel, and a greasy spoon called Teddy’s Place. The name of the joint winked in and out in a hum of busted red neon. Burgher had a thing for the waitress. She was a beehive hairdo with a bent cigarette sticking out of it. The trucker typically lingered after his meal in luckless flirtation and hit the head before the final push to Newark. There were two stretches on the turnpike that suited their purposes before you reached population centers.
West Side Garage had been raided by the larceny squad a few times, but Pepper preferred Tom Gerald over any other shady outfit. He’d never heard of one of Gerald’s cars getting traced back and it was almost twenty years now Pepper’d been buying wheels from him. Pepper headed over to 165th off Broadway. Tom was getting on; his last bid upstate had turned his hair white and his bones creaky. He came out of his office to greet Pepper but quickly retreated to let his son take over. Billy took after his mother, with his oval face and long lashes. From his accent they spoke Spanish around the house.
Billy vouched for the two cars, the Dodge Dart and the El Camino, both ’67. He rapped the hood of the Dart and said it was a little monster that could handle any curves and action that might come up. Pepper said, yeah. More interested in the Camino: “Got that cover for the bed?” Billy was about to make a joke about it being extra, but thought better of it once he looked at Pepper’s face. He threw in the cover for free. They didn’t use it in the end. A cut-up square of brown carpet did the job just fine.
Thursday night was soft and sugary, one of those perfect objects that summer doled out once in a while to torture you with how it could be all the time, if it cared. Pepper had known women like that, women stingy with the better parts of themselves, and perhaps there were those who’d say the same of him. He shrugged and sipped the sweet night air. Church and Pepper were in the El Camino, parked a few yards over from the concrete cube housing the public toilets. Across the lot, the truck driver Burgher hunched in the diner window, clocking the waitress as she bused the next table.
Gus Burnett and Burt Miller waited in the Dodge, next to the dumpster behind the restaurant. Pepper didn’t know them; they were Church’s guys, from Alabama. Twenty, twenty-one, greyhound lean and not too talkative. This time tomorrow they were supposed to be back down South, sucking crawdads or plucking homemade banjos or whatever they did down there. They appeared to follow simple instructions fine and gave correct answers when Pepper quizzed them on the setup. Solid enough.
Pepper had worked with Church a bunch and held no doubts about his abilities. Before the action, Church always chatted like a lonely aunt. Pool sharks and card hustlers talked a lot when they worked, probing for weaknesses and weaving distractions. Church’s talk was the opposite—he was testing himself to get the kinks out.
He was behind the wheel of the El Camino tonight. “Pedricktown,” he said, drawing out the syllables in boredom. He pointed at the gravel pile and said, “That’s the mayor.”
Pepper exhaled and checked the service area in the rearview.
“You’re good at, uh, ‘nonverbal communication,’?” Church said.
The side of Pepper’s mouth curled. A tumbleweed cloud skidded above.
“Here we go,” Church said. He tapped his door to signal the men in the Dodge.
When did Burgher get hip something untoward was underway? When the El Camino in front of his truck slowed down for no reason? Or when he looked over to pass the car and saw the Dodge keeping pace with his cab and the black man in the passenger seat aiming the pistol up at him? The semitruck was a twelve-ton monster and if its driver had a mind for violence it could have smushed or swatted away either car. According to Church, Burgher had two assault beefs on his sheet, barroom shit gone awry. That’s why they painted a message for him, in big letters so he couldn’t miss it: DIANA CORY LINDA. They’d made sure it was visible from various truck cab angles but not from a passing car, and that headlights picked it up at night. Man sees the names of his wife and kids in the bed of an El Camino, he’s liable to interpret it as an implicit threat. If not, the gun provided a subtitle.
“Should I put a skull and crossbones?” Church had asked, paintbrush dangling, and Pepper answered in a nonverbal fashion.
Burgher pulled over. There was a discussion. Gus Burnett, the Alabaman with the revolver, clambered into the rig and drove the truckload of new TVs to Newark, to a disused icehouse west of the train yards. Burt Miller drove the Dart, tailing the El Camino on the toll road and until they got off and made for an overpass on the raggedy edge of New Brunswick. They parked. To the east the woods had been cleared for a construction site. Work shut down every day by seven, Church said. Crisp white light described a silhouette of dirt mounds and earth-moving equipment. Church and Pepper looked at each other—a quarter mile back they’d passed an old man, plodding along, pushing an empty, wobbly fruit cart. Did it need to be addressed? They got out of the car: Forget it.