“No.”
“Good. Have you ever pulled a job like this before?”
“I’ve written it dozens of times.”
Stark glowered in the mirror.
“This is my first. In real life,” Poe said.
“Listen up. When we get in there, your job is to keep your eyes open and watch my back. You see trouble, tell me who to shoot.”
“Are we just barging in there?”
“No. We are entering on a mission to retrieve our criminal bosses, because the feds got the word they’re in the club. The feds are going to bust in in ten minutes. Our criminal bosses are armed. There will be gunfire and innocents will die, which means the cops will shut down the club for a very long time unless their loyal limo drivers get their bosses out quietly.”
“Security will ask what our bosses’ names are.”
“Our bosses use assumed names in strip clubs.”
“Security will ask why we don’t just text them.”
“What?”
“It’s the year 2005. They have cell phones that receive voice and text messages.”
Stark digested this information and said, “We can’t ‘text’ them because the feds are wiretapping their cell phones.”
“The feds can’t exactly wiretap cell phones. They have no wires.”
“They can call it whatever the hell they want to call it, but I can guarantee you the feds are still tapping the phones. In your day, they would have netted homing pigeons.”
Poe said, “The club has security cameras covering the whole place. They’ll probably make us go to their office and look for our bosses on their video screens.”
“Now you get it,” said Stark.
Stark had driven down Twelfth Avenue while Poe put on his chauffeur uniform, and he talked the writer through the job. Now he turned the limo around at Fourteenth Street and headed back up toward Fifty-First. Two blocks from the strip club, he pulled to the curb and switched on the hazard blinkers.
“What?” asked Poe.
“Cops.”
Patrol cars with flashing lights had converged on the corner of Fifty-First. A phalanx of men in blue charged in the door.
“Now what?” asked Poe.
“We wait ’til they leave.”
“What are they doing in there?”
“Whatever they want to.”
“Security won’t believe our story if the cops have already been there.”
“They’ll believe it more,” said Stark.
An ambulance pulled up. Men and women rolled a gurney across the sidewalk.
“Oh my God, it’s a shootout,” said Poe. “We better—”
“Just relax.” Stark thought that Poe was getting dangerously nervous for a man who was supposed to be watching his back. Yet another reason not to pull a job without rehearsing. He kept his eyes on the scene two blocks ahead and tried to distract the writer before he got too frantic to be of any use at all. “What kind of book will you write next?”
“Mysteries are coming back big time,” said Poe. “Best sellers, even. So, my agent thinks we can find a publisher willing to shell out big for the right book. He’s trying to talk me into writing one. I have an awful feeling I’m going to have to.”
“You don’t like mysteries?”
“I like them. But I know I’ll never win an Edgar.”
“What’s an Edgar?”
“MWA Edgar Allan Poe Award.”
“MWA?”
“Mystery Writers of America. They organized to promote mysteries and protect writers. They’ve got a clever motto: Crime does not pay—enough.”
“Bull,” said Stark. “Crime pays top dollar. But you gotta put the work into it. Plan. Prep. Rehearse. If you don’t, you’re a two-bit stick-up artist broke and in the slammer—wait a minute. Did you say they named the award after you?”
“Writers think I invented the mystery genre.”
“Hell of an honor.”
“I suppose.”
“Suppose? They don’t call it a Herman or a Ralph or a—what was Hawthorne’s name.”
“Nathaniel.”
“They don’t call it a Nat. They call it an Edgar. How much dough is the prize?”
“No dough. Big honor, and you get a little statue of me. But I’ll never win one.”
“Why not?” said Stark, who tended to feel optimistic halfway into a heist.
“Too perverse.”
“But genres come and go. You said so yourself. Sagas, gothics, bodice rippers. Perverse will come back, too.”
“I meant I’m personally perverse. I always write whatever I feel like writing. I never build on one thing. Which the winners tend to. The comedy guys do comedy, the hardboiled guys hardboiled, and they keep doing it over and over and over until someone notices. I’m all over the place—detective, science fiction, horror. Perverse.”
“Sounds more like feckless,” said Stark.
The ambulance crew and the cops trooped out of the club wheeling a gurney on which lay a bulbous shape covered with a sheet. A nurse was holding an oxygen mask to his face. Cocaine, thought Stark. Some things never change. Cute girls, martinis, coke, mortgage trader, no gym. “Okay, here we go. You up to this, Edgar?”