Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(91)

Hickey didn’t know if Oakes’s performance was showing off or a message to not fuck with him. “I was going to warn him not to get in Reece’s face with that shit, but that ain’t my job.” He paused. He looked at Pepper. “It was Oakes who told—recommended—that Reece pick you up. See what your angle was.”

Carney snorted. Pierce had said, “He’s the type of man who keeps track.”

Pepper said, “What’s your boss’s boss think about all this?”

Hickey was tentative. “Most things, Notch don’t care as long as you give him a taste.”

“Is he getting a taste of this action?”

“No.”

Carney caught Pepper scanning the room, as if to confirm that it was a room without windows, and that there was no one to hear. “Don’t,” Carney said.

“What?” Then Pepper got it—Carney knew his tells at this point.

He didn’t want Pepper to snuff the guy for beating him with a baseball bat. The blood spilled here, the blood to come, was his fault. Reece and Hickey had nothing to do with putting the kid in the hospital—they ambushed Pepper because they thought he was nosing around old business across the street. Carney had flipped a switch. A machine turned on and it was making a lot of noise but he didn’t know what it did or made or when it was going to finish what it was doing. “You do this, maybe you don’t do that,” Carney said.

Pepper cracked his neck. He told Hickey they were going to put him on ice for a couple of days. For his own good. “When we catch up with Reece he’s going to know it was you that snitched. We wouldn’t want you warning him, making him mad at you.”

The bagman considered his surroundings, the stains and remnants of brutalities, and looked forlorn.

“You hit me here?” Pepper asked, indicating the lump over his eye.

Hickey’s face made the truth plain.

Pepper gave him tit for tat.



* * *



***

Enoch Parker waited for them on the corner of Broadway and 118th. He got in the backseat of the Buick. “I had to tell my wife I came into Mets tickets. If she knew I was doing this…” That explained the Tom Seaver jersey. The safecracker was tall, with a long face and wide, alert eyes behind his black horn-rimmed glasses. His fingers were slender and delicate, an evolutionary advantage for a safecracker. Enoch’s canvas Ringling Bros. bag sagged on its straps—heavy gear inside.

Pepper introduced Carney. “He’s the wheelman.”

“So I see,” Enoch said. They headed north.

According to Pepper, Enoch had retired from safecracking and now taught chemistry at Carver High School. “Some of those kids really have a knack for the sciences.” They’d pulled jobs together back when. In the spring of 1970, Enoch had a close shave after going twelve rounds with a mattress-factory safe and swore off the life. When Pepper let him.

“Whenever you need something, you say I owe you.”

“You do,” Pepper said.

“Doesn’t mean it’s fair to lord it over everybody.” It was an act. The tremble in his voice said he was excited to join this excursion. Carney imagined it helped that the safecracker didn’t know what they’d been up to that afternoon.

“This yours, Pepper?” Enoch asked. Hickey’s porkpie hat had fallen to the floor in the backseat.

“No.”

“It didn’t look like you.”

Once they handcuffed Hickey to the radiator, Pepper had informed Carney that he wanted to go after Oakes’s records. “See what this slick motherfucker’s been up to.” They were in the Buick, departing the domain of the elevated highways and their shifting planes of gloom. Carney was busy consigning the biscuit-factory episode to the category of tall tale or dream. Would Pepper have killed Hickey? Did Carney really walk into the office next to reception and pluck handcuffs from the cardboard box marked “Candles”—and what was in those other boxes? When the hideout’s planners bought the bucket at the hardware store did they say, “Excuse me, I’m looking for a hostage toilet, about yea big?”

Carney asked him, “You get the records and then what? The Feds?”

It was Pepper’s turn to withhold the larger plan. If there was one.

“Blackmail?” Carney offered.

Pepper adopted a thoughtful expression. He told Carney to pull over at that pay phone and he called Enoch.

Enoch leaned into the front seat and put on 1010 WINS. “I want to hear the weather,” he said. “Hey, Pepper, when’s the last time we—”

“That fried-chicken thing,” Pepper said.

“That was something.”

The office of Oakes for Borough President was on Seventh Ave, two doors in from 135th. The bottom floor of a four-story townhouse, it sat between Brights Laundry and Hotline Records & Tapes. Red, white, and blue bunting bowed over the front window. The laundromat was still open but devoid of patrons except for an old biddy doing a crossword on the bench by the dryers.

Carney parked across the street. There was more action than he liked, a bodega over yonder, red and yellow lights blinking, and a takeout Chinese joint with a bedraggled Grand Opening sign. Not too close to campaign headquarters, but places that attracted foot traffic.

Enoch piped up when he got a load of the big poster of Oakes’s smiling face in the window. “Wait, this is that dude on TV?” he said. “He’s running for mayor.”