Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(96)

Rugs. He didn’t remember the conversation but no matter. Elizabeth thought his rugs were hot: fine. Some had been, in the old days, before he stepped up his fencing sideline. He used to sell appliances that Freddie had ripped off—she knew those were hot, Freddie being Freddie. Uptown rules—rules get bent in the name of survival. She was okay with that. When he had to duck out suddenly at nine P.M. to deal with a shady character, she let it pass. It wasn’t a woman, because he knew she would’ve castrated him in his sleep if he messed around. She assumed his hot merchandise was harmless, small-time stuff because her husband wasn’t built for anything heavy. For all her insight into him—which he cherished, which he was grateful for—the nature and scope of his criminal operation escaped her. The part of his character that made it possible was too foreign.

Rugs, then. “Maybe it’s the rugs,” Carney said. “I don’t know what happened. Harlem today—”

“People don’t do that. Just walk into a place and do that.” She took his hands. “Are you being safe? Are you keeping us safe?”

No. If they knew where he worked, they knew where he lived. It had been a long time since bad men threatened to steal his life from him, take Elizabeth and the kids from him. They’d taken his store today. If they’d wanted to go after him the other way, they would have. His family was safe tonight. Tomorrow?

Carney said, “It’s okay. Yes, some of the stuff in my store has fallen off a truck. You’re right, that’s how it works up here. Sometimes the guys who pick it up when it falls off a truck are not the most upstanding members, but this is—I don’t know what this is.”

“You all could have been killed,” she said. “Robert.” The kids. May and John weren’t working there this summer but they could have.

“There are quicker ways if you want—” He squeezed her hand. “They weren’t trying to hurt me.”

“They? So it is somebody you know.”

He shook his head.

“Somebody who knows Pepper?”

“I don’t know. But we’re safe now.”



* * *



***

At his urging, Elizabeth took a cab back to Strivers’ Row with the things he’d saved from the fire. Carney told Rusty he had to split downtown to deal with the insurance company—could he stick around in case something came up?

He turned the pay phone on 125th and Broadway into his temporary office. Had they hit Pepper, too? He lived over that funeral home. There was no answer at Pepper’s, but the funeral home picked up after the operator put him through, which meant it was not a pile of ash. Carney tried Donegal’s. Buford was on tonight, thank God. Pepper had run out, Buford said, but if you called, you were supposed to come uptown. “I don’t know—sounds heavy,” he said. It was worrisome that the bartender had departed from his standard indifference.

The walk uptown was a numb march. Every few blocks he slumped to the benches of the Broadway median, exhausted. He wanted to run back to the store, knock past the barricade and into the showroom. His office. What if the buildings are beyond saving? The fire inspector will deliver his report. Pepper was right. He’d come to think of himself as impervious. The apartment on 127th Street, the madness of Harlem, the white world and its quick, mean hands—he’d had to grow a concrete skin for a concrete city. Not concrete, something harder, like schist. But the fires had been drawing near. Every siren since the city started falling to pieces had been a countdown to the siren that was coming for him. Maybe the fires had been coming since his father first struck a match and threw it into a pool of kerosene on some unlucky tenement floor. It catches up with you.

Instead of going inside when he got to Donegal’s, he split for a bench to collect himself. The fire at the store leeched his energy. Some asshole kept honking. Carney turned to curse at the guy and saw Pepper in the Buick.

“Tough break,” Pepper said when Carney slid into the passenger seat. He’d been buying insoles for his tennis shoes and the drugstore clerks were talking about a fire down the street. “I got a feeling.”

Carney didn’t speak.

“Tough break,” Pepper said again, clearing his throat. Gruff sympathy.

Carney’s mind went somewhere.

Pepper said, “You’re in shock.”

“Yeah.”

He told him that Reece had called the bar. Reece wanted to meet. Both of them. “He said next time, it won’t be your store.”

Carney made his hands into fists on his lap. “How’d they put me with you?”

“All types of hustlers and losers in there,” Pepper said. Meaning Donegal’s. “Reece asks after me, I’ve been getting messages at the bar. Anybody hangs out there, they know we associate.”

And when Oakes hears Carney’s name, he knows it’s no coincidence.

“He wants what I took from the safe, and he wants us to bring it to that club of yours.”

“What?”

Pepper shrugged. “Tonight after hours.” The old crook started up the Buick. He had an idea to check in on their guest at the biscuit company, see if he had any insight as to what they were walking into. “You bring him food?”

“Who?”

“The guy.”

“Before or after my store burned down?”