$200 and a Cadillac

XXIX



Hank was careful not to disturb anything, but that didn’t mean he didn’t comb the house completely. He put on his skintight spandex gloves and went to town. He wasn’t looking for anything particular and it wasn’t something he normally did. Hank had always believed that the less you knew about your target’s personal life, the easier the job was. The last thing he wanted was to spend an afternoon surrounded by pictures of some poor schmuck’s wife and kids. He’d done that before, and it wasn’t fun.

But there was no risk of that with Lugano. Hank already knew him. And at any rate, the house was strangely vacant of personal touches. Certainly no wife or kids. But no family of any kind. No parents, siblings, nothing. The walls were mostly bare, other than a few framed prints. Hank studied one, a large black and white photograph of the Manhattan skyline, probably from the 30s or 40s. It was a somber reminder of home. Hank wondered if Lugano ever went back. Snuck into town for a long weekend, soaking up the vibe, the energy of the city, and staying away from the old haunts where someone might see him.

Hank went from room to room. A hallway on one end of the small house with a bathroom and four cramped bedrooms. Everything was furnished in a spare, expensive style. Hank guessed Lugano had arrived in town with nothing, bought the place, slept on the floor until the phone was turned on, and then spent twenty minutes with a catalogue filling the place up. Either that, or he walked through a show room in Vegas for a half hour pointing to things as a flabbergasted clerk tried to write it all down—two of these, three of those, this couch, that chair—and paid cash for everything.

In the back bedroom, the one Lugano used, there was a slightly more lived-in look. Jeans draped over the corner of the bed. The blankets thrown back, exposing sheets that probably never got washed. Half a dozen bottles of cologne sat across the top of the dresser. Apparently Lugano liked to smell good. Hank imagined him being the kind of guy who wore too much and drove people crazy with it in confined spaces. He studied the bottles and grinned. You definitely didn’t want to ride on an elevator with a guy like Lugano.

The top dresser drawer held the usual: socks, underwear, and a few odds and ends crammed in along one side. Hank pulled out a small box and flipped it open. A thick gold money clip. His grin grew wider. That was the kind of guy Lugano was. Vain. Heavy cologne and a gold money clip, all the way.

The second drawer down was T-shirts. Nothing interesting. The third was more of the same. The guy had a ton of shirts. Hank flipped through a few of them. They were old. They bore the names of bars in New York, most of which probably weren’t even there anymore. At the bottom of the stack was faded shirt from The Cellar. Hank laughed out loud and pulled it from the drawer, holding it up.

The Cellar. Hank hadn’t thought of that place for twenty years. Probably not since the week it closed and he had to find a new bar to hang out in. A lot of Fazioli’s guys used to be in there. Hank didn’t really remember seeing Lugano in there, but obviously he’d been there.

It was on the lower east side, somewhere between Delancey and Canal—maybe on Orchard?—he couldn’t remember now. It was a real dive, but not an attention grabber, which made it perfect for the clientele. It was a place all the young tough guys would go to drink beer, shoot pool, and convince whatever women were there that they were the baddest thing in the room.

Those kinds of places were dangerous. A lot of young guys wanted to prove themselves and that caused a lot of stupid shit to happen. Fights. Drunks waving guns around. It was fun for a while, and then the serious people moved on. You only moved up in the organization if you were professional. Most of the guys never figured that part out. They thought it was all about being as tough as could be. As cruel and dangerous as possible. But they were wrong.

It was about efficiency. Calculation. The guy who could get in and get out without anyone seeing was the most dangerous of all. After four or five years in the game, after the shootout in Miami, Hank realized he had to get serious or get the hell out. The key to being someone the boss looked to for the serious jobs was being a serious guy yourself.

A serious guy didn’t hang out in places like The Cellar. A serious guy kept a nice apartment in a part of town not normally associated with the mob. The Village. Chelsea. The Upper East Side. He kept a low profile. Lived clean. Didn’t do anything flashy. Spent time in museums, art galleries, learning an instrument, whatever he wanted to do to kill the time between jobs, and just waited patiently for the phone to ring or a knock on the door. Patience, after all, was the virtue he used most in his line of work. Sit back. Observe. Stay ready, and wait for the bastard to make it easy on you.

When there was a serious case, you called the serious guy. Not the street thug who hung out at The Cellar with the other thugs and shook down dealers or shop owners for payoffs, but the cool professional. You needed a guy you could trust to travel across the country, blend in, play it smart, track the target down, watch him, be patient, wait for the right moment, and then simply appear out of nowhere, put a clean round through the back of the head, and vaporize. No complications.

There were only a handful of people in that category, and Hank had spent twenty years becoming one of the best, one of the most trusted, and most feared. He got a hundred grand minimum, and often two or three times that, which meant his services were used sparingly and only when it truly mattered. Finding and killing people in the witness protection program certainly qualified.

Howie Lugano graduated from the same ranks of low level thugs, but never made it quite as far. His style was over the top, he lacked the cool subtlety required for the discreet hit. But if you wanted a spectacle. If you wanted to send a message to others about the cruelty that awaited them if they stepped out of line, then Lugano was your man.

Hank folded the shirt and tucked it back in the pile exactly where he had found it. He went to the bottom drawer. In among some pairs of pants was a thin, leather bound photo album. Hank flipped through it. Old pictures of Lugano and his friends. Hank recognized a few of the other faces, but most of them were unknown. A cluster of guys held drinks at a bar with a beach and ocean in the background. Lugano and another guy on the stoop of a brownstone, grinning at the camera, a couple of open beers sitting on the step between them. A young woman in a bathing suit, striking a mock glamour pose in the doorway of a cheap motel, the iridescent blue of a kidney-shaped swimming pool gleaming behind her.

Here were Lugano’s personal memories and he kept them in a dresser drawer. Hank closed the book and put it away. He left the bedroom wondering what had happened to the people in the pictures. Did they know who Lugano was? Probably. Did they miss him since he disappeared? Who could say?

Hank thought about the few friends he had. None of them knew what he did for a living. They all thought he was an antiquarian, occasionally flying around the world to collect small batches of rare manuscripts, letters, drafts of poems or books from famous writers. And it was something he did, but only for himself, never as a dealer.

Hank wondered what he would do if he retired. Maybe he really would become an antiquarian dealer. Maybe it would be a seamless transition. He wouldn’t have to be a success at it. He had enough money saved to survive, it wasn’t a question of that. The only issue would be how to kill the time. And it had to be killed. He couldn’t sit alone with idle memories of all the jobs he had done over the years. All the people he had done. How did Lugano manage it?

Hank came back down the hall and stood in the living room, trying to picture Lugano wandering around inside the house for the past four years. He studied the stack of bats leaning up behind the door. That was one way Lugano killed the time, by coaching baseball. Hank wondered if one of the bats was the one used to kill the guy in the desert.

He wondered about it throughout the morning and into the afternoon. He went through the kitchen. He went down to the basement and smiled at the mason jars and the physics textbook. He sat on the couch and waited, checking the mechanism of the gun, feeding a round into the chamber and leaving it there, ready to go.

Every few minutes he would think about the baseball bats in the corner. The whole thing sounded too much like Lugano to dismiss. What was he involved in? What did the guy in the desert have to do with it? Hank assumed it was drugs. It was the obvious thing. Then he thought about the pictures in the photo album and wondered if Lugano had really ever said good-bye. Maybe he just changed industries.

It was nearly two in the afternoon when he finally heard the crunch of gravel under tires and an engine pull up outside and shut off. Hank checked his watch. Apparently Lugano had come home early. Or maybe they worked short shifts with the economy going to hell like it was.

Whatever the reason, Hank could care less. Now was the time. Hank moved to the space behind the door, his motions quick and automatic. Now there would be no more thinking, no more reflection. Now he would do his job.

He heard the steps on the porch. Listened to the keys in the lock. Hank relaxed his grip on the gun, breathed in and out with the slow, steady rhythm of the expert shooter. Squeeze the trigger at the bottom of the exhale, when the body is absolutely still. He cocked his elbow out in front of him, the gun pointed vertically at the ceiling, ready to drop in next to the head as it stepped into view.

The lock turned and clicked. The door swung back. Hank dropped the gun, breathing out, ready to squeeze. There it was. He recognized the hair on the back of the head as it came into view around the door. He hesitated and she seemed to sense it.

Janie turned quickly, surprised by the feeling of someone in the room. As she turned, she called out, “Ron?”

But it wasn’t Ron. She gasped at the barrel of the gun resting right between her eyes, and Hank’s face behind it, cool and calm. Hank’s eyes met hers and she watched a hardness deep inside them dissolve. He raised the gun up, away from her face, and kicked the door closed.

Then he smiled and said, “I guess we’ve both got some explaining to do.”