Anyway, it’s a nice June morning, good day to be outside.
Malone says, “You sure about this? Your bosses hear you’re dealing, they’ll take you out.”
Cimino family rule: you deal, you die.
It’s not because they have moral compunctions, it’s that the heavy sentences induce guys to flip. So if you get busted with dope, you’re too big a risk and you have to go.
“That’s not for dealing,” Savino says. “That’s for getting caught dealing. As long as the bosses get their beaks wet, they don’t give a shit. And how else am I going to eat, right?”
Yeah, right, Malone thinks.
Louie crying poor is pretty funny. Like he needs to sling smack to put a little bread on the table. He just knows there’s a fucking killing to be made here. A fucking windfall, if he can pull it off.
“You let me worry about me,” Savino is saying. “What do you want for it?”
“A hundred grand a kilo,” Malone says.
“What the fuck world you live in?” Savino asks. “I can get smack for sixty-five, seventy.”
“Not Dark Horse,” Malone says. “Not sixty percent pure. The market price is a hundred.”
“That’s if you can go straight to the retailer,” Savino says. “Which you can’t. Which is why you called me. I can go seventy-five.”
“You can go fuck yourself, too.”
“Think about it,” Savino says. “You can do business with family, white people instead of niggers and spics.”
“Seventy-five’s not enough,” Malone says.
“Make a counter.”
“We got Shark Tank going on here,” Malone says. “Okay, Mister Wonderful, we’ll do ninety a kilo.”
“You just want me to bend over a headstone here, you can fuck me in the ass?” Savino asks. “Maybe I could go eighty.”
“Eighty-seven.”
“The fuck, are we Jews?” Savino says. “Can we do this like gentlemen, say eighty-five? Eighty-five thousand a kilo times fifty. Four million, two hundred fifty thousand dollars. That’s a lot of chocolate-glazed.”
“Do you have it?”
“I’ll get it,” Savino says.
That means he’s going to have to go to other people, Malone thinks. More people means more talk, more risk. But it can’t be helped. “Another thing, you don’t put this out in Manhattan North. Take it upstate, New England, just not here.”
“You’re a piece of work,” Savino says. “You don’t care there are addicts, just as long as they’re not your addicts.”
“Yes or no?”
“Deal,” Savino says. “Only because I don’t feel like standing out in a graveyard any longer. Gives me the creeps.”
Yeah, Malone thinks. Nothing like a graveyard to bring it home someday you’ll have to pay, answer for what you’ve done.
Fuckin’ nuns.
“When do we do this?” Savino asks.
“I’ll give you a time and a place,” Malone says. “And cash, Lou. Don’t show up with hot jewelry and some paper on a bad loan.”
“Cops.” Savino smirks. “So suspicious.”
Before he leaves, Malone goes to pay his respects at Billy’s grave.
“This is for you, Billy,” Malone says. “It’s for your son.”
Malone opens the trap under the shower.
What do the PRs call it? La caja.
The fifty kilos of horse are each wrapped in blue plastic with stickers indicating that they’re Dark Horse. Malone rips off the stickers and flushes them down the drain. Then he puts the kilos in two North Face duffel bags he bought for the occasion, replaces the trap in the shower, hefts the bags one at a time down the elevator and puts them in the back of his car.
Normally he’d have Russo or Monty or both with him, but he wants to keep them out of this, just present them with their cut of the cash like it’s Christmas all over again. It’s tricky, though, flying solo with no backup.
But that’s your world now, he tells himself as he turns north on Broadway and drives uptown. You’re on your own until you can get out from under Paz and the feds, and until that happens you have to protect your guys.
It would be good to have them along, though, in case Savino tries to rip him. He doubts that will happen, because they have so many ties with the Cimino borgata, but you’re talking a lot of money and a lot of dope here, and you never know what that’s gonna do to a guy.
Savino might just take the big home-run swing.
Which he wouldn’t do if Russo or Monty was there.
But now it’s just me, with a Sig, a Beretta, and a knife. Yeah, okay, and the MP5 in a sling under my jacket. I have a lot of firepower but only one trigger finger, so what I’m mostly counting on here is Savino’s honor.
Used to be you could count on that with mob guys.
Used to be a lot of things, though.
He turns onto the West Side Highway and drives up past the GW Bridge, then into Fort Tryon Park below the Cloisters. One o’clock in the morning, the park is pretty empty, and if someone is there, it isn’t for a good reason. You’re a transient building an illegal fire, or you’ve brought a hooker there, or you’re looking for a blow job—although a lot of that shit stopped since the gays came out of the closets.
Or you’re looking to make a dope deal.
Which is what I’m looking to do, Malone thinks, just like any other skel.
If it wasn’t me, it would just be someone else, Malone thinks, knowing it’s an age-old rationalization even as he thinks it. But it’s age-old because it’s true. Right now in some lab in Mexico they’re cranking out more of this shit, so if it wasn’t these fifty keys, it would be their replacements. And if it wasn’t me, it would be someone else.
So why should the bad guys make all the money all the time? The guys who torture and kill. Why shouldn’t me and Russo and Monty make a little something, build a future for our families?
You spend your whole fucking life trying to keep this shit out of people’s arms and no matter how much you seize, how many dealers you bust, it just keeps coming anyway, right up the line from the opium fields, to the labs, to the trailer trucks, to the needles and into the veins.
One smooth, ever-flowing river.
No, he gets his own hypocrisy.
Knows he might as well be shooting this directly into Claudette’s arm.
But if it ain’t me, it’s just someone else.
And the irony of it is, I use it to send her to rehab. Send my kids to college. Instead of it goes to some Mexican or Colombian to buy another Ferrari, some more gold chains, a pet tiger, a country estate, a harem.
Anyway, you tell yourself what you gotta tell yourself to do what you gotta do.
And sometimes you even fuckin’ believe it.
He pulls off where Fort Tryon Place meets Corbin Drive. He wants to still be on his Manhattan North turf, something goes wrong here, but he also knows what every skel knows—you want to move around precincts. Start in the Two-Eight, do the deal in the Three-Four, all of it also covered by Manhattan North.