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.
Church walked over to the Dart and addressed the trunk. “What’s up, slick?”
Burgher’s response could only be described as muffled.
“Count to a hundred,” Church said.
“Five hundred,” Pepper said. He unrolled the mangy carpet to cover the message in the Camino’s bed.
“Count until you lose count,” Church said, “then you open that trunk and go about your day.”
Burt Miller hopped in the back of the El Camino and they headed for the icehouse. Pepper looked back at the overpass. How many times had he abandoned cars or vans in New Brunswick after a job? In 1949, ’54, ’63 with the fur-coat business, and now. Time to find another dump. Were cops as a species dumb and lazy? Yes. But occasionally a cop came along who was merely a half-wit as opposed to a full-fledged dummy, and if the half-wit had initiative and got a notion to check out old cases it might be a problem.
The ex-wife of one of Church’s buddies owned the icehouse, the final asset of a once prosperous dynasty. The guy had something on her—a marriage collects a variety of leverage over time—and he in turn owed Church for something. When the three thieves got to Newark, Gus had already snapped the trailer’s lock and pulled out one of the TVs. But it wasn’t a TV. No one knew what the fuck it was. The gizmo inside the cardboard box was made of black-and-white plastic, a four-inch square rising out of a rectangular base a foot and a half wide. Were you supposed to step on it? The shape reminded Pepper of those shoe buffers in hotels. Two other, smaller plastic squares trailed brown cords.
Church tilted the box into the light. “Magnavox Odyssey.”
Here the criminals competed over who could sound more perplexed.
“Tennis,” Gus said.
“There’s a TV on the box but there’s no TV inside,” Church said.
“Says that’s the master control module. Those things are the player controls. ‘Fits any brand TV black-and-white or color.’？”
“Table tennis,” Burt mumbled.
“And hockey.”
The pressing issue was how much they’d get for the devices, if anything. They stashed the boxes in the basement and the Alabamans departed to dispose of the eighteen-wheeler. A police siren emerged from the silence and retreated. Church cursed. He said he should have stuck to Baltimore, his usual hunting grounds. It was a disaster whenever he got it in his head to branch out. “This is Frederico’s all over again.” Pepper was unacquainted with the caper in question, but what crook did not recognize regret over a setup gone wrong.
Back to the city. Once in the El Camino, Church said he had to make a stop on Clinton Ave—the man did not elaborate. Money or a woman, what else could it be. Pepper made him take a circuitous and nonsensical route to avoid Hillside as he was not in the mood to have something stirred up. Newark the Fucker, Newark the Pest, Newark the Thing with a Hundred Snake Faces—his hometown had streets and corners that sucker-punched from the fog of yesterday. The old ghosts were groggy and slow, but they remembered your weak spots.
Church pulled up in front of a white-turned-gray clapboard house on Avon. Pepper used to play baseball with a kid who lived around the corner, Jimmy Temple. Stepped on a mine in France three days before he was due to ship home—so long, Shortstop. Church produced a brown bag from beneath his seat and walked into the dark house. The door was unlocked. He ran out a minute later, no bag, chased by a big hollering broad, her house slippers slapping echoes on the concrete until the El Camino made it around the corner. Pepper didn’t ask. Church didn’t say. Five minutes later the man busted out in laughter and didn’t stop for miles.
It took three weeks for Church to find a buyer in the Bronx, a Lithuanian with tendrils in home electronics. The offer: a measly few grand. The machines retailed for eighty bucks, but they weren’t exactly flying off the shelves. They did a deal for the game consoles. A week later Pepper was in Donegal’s and got word that Dootsie Bell had “expired” in prison, brain cancer. Misery is a money pit. The widow, the kids, no burial insurance meant no scratch for the funeral—Pepper gave the wife a bunch of cash for expenses. Dootsie had dumped Pepper at Harlem Hospital once instead of leaving him to bleed out by the side of the road. The bill had to come due eventually. Come November cash was tight and then Zippo came along.
* * *
***
With Lucinda Cole’s disappearance, the production was stuck on the rocks. It was her movie after all. Nefertiti was in every scene, save when they cut to the criminal mastermind’s yacht sanctum to have him explain his methods （sparking the race war） and motivation （post–race war domination）。 They’d shot those scenes the first week, as the actor playing the Baron—white guy—needed to split for a dinner-theater gig, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on a transatlantic cruise, Miami to Le Havre. “Had to cut an hour but the heart of the play is the heart of the play.” Once they gave up on the scene at the CCNY entrance （“We’ll go with a straight exterior shot without her”）， the crew moved to the Anthropology Building for the classroom scenes and hoped she’d show up.
Pepper’s last visit to a college campus was the time he and T.T. ripped off that Stony Brook lab, years ago. （Never did find out what was in that barrel but still remembered his relief that it did not explode when it fell off the dolly and bounced down the fire stairs.） He lingered before the flyers and posters in the hallways—working with the film kids made him curious about what made the young set tick. Everybody’s research when you’re crooked, another variable in a setup down the line. Closed-circuit cameras, electronic eyes, people: same shit. Notices for the requisite protests and marches and candlelight vigils decorated bulletin boards and office doors. Posters for midnight movies like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Freaks. Those odd creatures had slithered past Pepper’s TV at obscure hours; getting rubes to pay money to see them was a nice con. Sign-up sheets for rap sessions, consciousness-raising groups. Even though Carney had explained it one Easter dinner, Pepper found his very literal interpretation of “consciousness raising” hard to shake. What do you do with it once you get it up there? Sometimes that was the whole problem with life: Chumps abounded with a mentality stuck this high when yours was that high.