Miss Laura was determined, Carney knew. She’d pull it off if she had to drag it on her back, up Broadway all the way from the Battery to the Cloisters.
* * *
*
Carney informed Rusty and Marie he’d be out the rest of the day.
“Okay, boss,” Rusty said. “It’s looking better today.”
“Yeah, it does,” Marie seconded.
He touched the lump under his right eye. The day had been so hectic he’d forgotten about his black eye.
Last Friday, the furniture salesman had stepped out of his apartment building’s vestibule and was immediately felled. He crashed against the front door and slid down. Pepper had socked him magnificently. He was not enthused with the purpose to which Carney had directed his labor.
“You got me doing legwork for cops?” Pepper said.
Carney was dizzy. Across the street two teenagers stopped dribbling their basketball to gawk. Carney looked up at the crook and tried to sit up. The last time someone socked him like that, it had been his father. For what, what did he do wrong that time, he couldn’t remember.
“If you weren’t Mike Carney’s son I’d choke the shit out of you,” Pepper said.
Then he was gone. The right side of Carney’s face pulsed with heat. He staggered back upstairs. Elizabeth was out with the kids. The area around the eye was livid and discolored. What would he say? All the junkie shit going down these days, he opted to blame it on the drug trade. Some druggie punched him in the face, yelling something, kept going, didn’t even try to take his wallet. Someone should do something about all these pushers. An enactment of how decent people felt these days: things are off-kilter, the world is overtaken by shadow.
His eye closed up the first day. The skin bulged, turned purple and motley-toned. He couldn’t open the eye for twenty-four hours. Carney was a sight; Rusty handled the customers for the Labor Day Weekend Savings Bash. Two days after the sale, they nabbed Cheap Brucie and the clock started ticking on the Duke job, whether he was ready or not.
Before Carney went up to Convent Ave, he paused to take in his sign. carney’s furniture. If he were arrested, would they seize the store? He’d spent so much time trying to keep one half of himself separate from the other half, and now they were set to collide. But then—they already shared an office, didn’t they? He’d been running a con on himself.
Miss Laura met him at the Big Apple Diner. That’s how he knew the caper was almost over: She agreed to meet him at the greasy spoon. Today’s waitress was the third nested Russian doll, with identical features on a diminished scale. The magnitude of disdain for Carney remained the same. When he sat down, the waitress asked Miss Laura, “You know this guy?”
She said, “Not really.” The women chortled.
“The waitresses…” Carney said.
“They’re sisters,” Miss Laura said. “What’s that?” Meaning the black eye.
“I got punched in the face.”
She pursed her lips in disdain. Then rubbed her fingertips in the pay-me gesture. He forked over twenty bucks.
Before they figured out how they were going to play it, Miss Laura had to cuss him out for the time they’d lost. Carney blamed it on Munson and let her vent. Underneath her irritation, she was afraid. Had been for a long time. The man could be out as soon as tomorrow, and needed girls to take out his wrath on. She’d roll over on Duke, but only if Carney took care of Cheap Brucie first—that was her demand that day in July when they did the deal. Get Cheap Brucie out of the picture, and I’ll do it.
Sometimes when Carney jumped into the Hudson when he was a kid, some of that stuff got into his mouth. The Big Apple Diner served it up and called it coffee. “How do we get him here on a Wednesday?” he said. “At night.”
“That’s the problem.”
“Tell him you’re in trouble? You’ll tell his wife?”
She shrugged. “He don’t care if I’m in trouble or need money. And he don’t care about his damn wife.” She tipped her cigarette into the tin ashtray. “You can’t threaten him because it only gets him hot and bothered—trust me.”
He looked up at her apartment. If they pulled it off, that’s where it would go down.
She said, “I’m going to tell him to come because I want him.”
“Just that?”
“Just that.”
There was the problem of Zippo. Carney had to track down Zippo and tell him it was on.
“You know where that nigger’s at?” Miss Laura asked.