The Drop Read online

  The thing he’d always remember about it, for the rest of his life, was the quiet. How the rest of the world was asleep—inside, outside—and all was still. And yet a man stood in the doorway with a ski mask over his head and a shotgun pointed at Bob and Marv.

  Bob dropped his mop.

  Marv, standing by one of the beer coolers, looked up. His eyes narrowed. Just below his hand was a 9mm Glock. And Bob hoped to God he wasn’t stupid enough to reach for it. That shotgun would cut them both in half before Marv’s hand cleared the bar.

  But Marv was no fool. Very slowly, he raised his hands above his shoulders before the guy could even tell him to, so Bob did the same.

  The guy stepped into the room and Bob got a sick feeling in his chest when another guy came in behind the first one, pointing a revolver at them, that guy’s hand shaking just a bit. It had somehow been manageable when there’d only been one guy with a gun, but with two of them the bar grew as tight as a swollen blister. All it needed was the pin. This could be the end, Bob realized. Five minutes from now—or even thirty seconds—he could learn if there was a life after this one or just the pain of steel penetrating his body and rupturing his organs. Followed by nothing.

  The guy with the shaky hand was thin, the guy with the shotgun was beefy, actually fat, and they both breathed heavily through the ski masks. The thin guy put a kitchen trash bag on the bar, but it was the overweight guy who did the talking.

  He said to Marv, “Don’t even think, just fill it.”

  Marv nodded like he was taking the guy’s drink order and began moving the cash he’d just rubber-banded into the bag.

  “I’m not trying to make trouble,” Marv said.

  “Well, you’re fucking making it,” the big guy said.

  Marv stopped putting the money in the bag and looked over at him. “But do you know whose bar this is? Whose money you’re actually jacking here?”

  The thin one stepped in close with the shaky gun. “Fill the bag, you fucking goof.”

  The thin one wore a watch on his right wrist with the face turned in. Bob noticed it read six-fifteen even though it was half past two in the morning.

  “No worries,” Marv said to the shaking gun. “No worries.” And he put the rest of the money in the bag.

  The thin guy clutched the bag to him and stepped back and now it was the two of them on one side of the bar with their guns and Bob and Marv on the other side, Bob’s heart beating in his chest like a sack of ferrets tossed off a boat.

  In that terrible moment, Bob felt all time since the birth of the world opening its mouth for him. He could see the night sky expanding into space and space expanding into infinite space with stars hurled across the black sky like diamonds on felt, and it was all just cold and endless and he was less than a mote in it. He was the memory of a mote, the memory of something that had passed through unnoticed. The memory of something not worth remembering.

  I just want to raise the dog, he thought for some reason. I just want to teach it tricks and live more of this life.

  The thin guy pocketed his pistol and walked out.

  Now there was just the big guy and that shotgun.

  He said to Marv, “You fucking talk too much.”

  And then he was gone.

  The door to the alley squeaked when they opened it, squeaked when it closed again. Bob didn’t take a breath for at least half a minute and then he and Marv exhaled at the same time.

  Bob heard a low sound, a kind of moan, but it wasn’t Marv making it.

  “Rardy,” Bob said.

  “Ho shit.” Marv came around the bar with him and they ran through the tiny kitchen into the back where they stored the old kegs, and there was Rardy, lying on his stomach to the left of the door, face caked in blood.

  Bob wasn’t sure what to do, but Marv dropped down by him and began yanking his shoulder back and forth like it was the string to an outboard motor. Rardy groaned a few times and then he gasped. It was a horrible sound, all strangled and broken, like he was inhaling broken glass. He arched his back and rolled onto his side and then sat up, his face stretched against the skull, his lips pulled back against his teeth like some kind of death mask.

  “Oh,” he said, “my fuck. My fuck. God.”

  He opened his eyes for the first time, and Bob watched him try to focus. It took a minute.

  “What the fuck?” he said, which Bob thought was a step up from “my fuck,” if anyone was wondering about the brain damage issue.

  “You all right?” Bob asked.

  “Yeah, you okay?” Marv stood up beside Bob, both of them bending at the knees by Rardy.

  “I’m gonna puke.”

  Bob and Marv took a few steps back.

  Rardy let out several shallow breaths, took in several shallow breaths, exhaled another round of them, and then announced, “No, I’m not.”

  Bob took a couple steps forward. Marv hung back.

  Bob handed Rardy a kitchen towel and Rardy touched it to the jellyfish of blood and raw flesh that covered the right side of his face from his eye socket to the corner of his mouth.

  “How bad do I look?”

  “You look okay,” Bob lied.

  “Yeah, you look good,” Marv said.

  “No, I don’t,” Rardy said.

  “No, you don’t,” Bob and Marv agreed.

  CHAPTER 3

  Drop Bar

  TWO PATROLWOMEN, FENTON, G., and Bernardo, R., responded to the call first. They took one look at Rardy, and R. Bernardo keyed her shoulder mike and told dispatch to send an ambulance. They questioned all three of them but focused on Rardy because no one figured he’d last long. His skin was the color of November and he kept licking his lips and blinking his eyelids. If he’d never had a concussion before, he could check it off the list now.

  Then the door opened and the lead detective came in, his blank, disinterested face growing curious and then amused as his eyes landed on Bob.

  He pointed at him. “The seven at Saint Dom’s.”

  Bob nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Every morning we see each other for, what now, two years? Three? And we’ve never met.” He held out his hand. “Detective Evandro Torres.”

  Bob shook his hand. “Bob Saginowski.”

  Detective Torres shook Marv’s hand too. “Let me talk to my girls—wait, my officers, excuse me—and then we’ll all go over what happened.”

  He walked a few paces to Officers Fenton and Bernardo and they all spoke in low tones and nodded and pointed a lot.

  Marv said, “You know the guy?”

  “Don’t know him,” Bob said. “He goes to the same mass.”

  “What’s he like?”

  Bob shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “He goes to the same church, you don’t know what he’s like?”

  “You know all the regulars you see at the gym?”

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  Marv sighed. “It just is.”

  Torres came back, all pearly white teeth and playful eyes. He had them tell him in their own words exactly what they remembered, and their stories were pretty identical although they disagreed about whether the one with the pistol had called Marv a “goof” or a “fuck.” Otherwise, though, they were in sync. They left out the entire part about Marv asking the chunky guy if he knew whose bar this really was and yet they’d never had time to consult each other on the issue. But around East Buckingham, the maternity ward at Saint Margaret’s Hospital had the words KEEP YOUR FUCKING MOUTH SHUT scrawled above the entrance.

  Torres scribbled away in his reporter’s notebook. “So, I mean, ski masks, black turtlenecks under black coats, black jeans, the skinny one more nervous than the other one, both of them pretty cool under pressure, though. Nothing else you remember?”

  “That’s about it,” Marv said, turning on his helpful smile. Mr. Well Meaning.

  “Guy closest to me,” Bob said, “his watch was stopped.”

  He felt Marv’s eye
s on him, saw Rardy, an ice bag to his face, look over too. For the life of him, he had no idea why he’d opened his mouth. And then, even more to his surprise, he kept fucking talking.

  “He wore the face turned in like this.” Bob turned his wrist up.

  Torres held his pen poised over the paper. “And the hands were stopped?”

  Bob nodded. “Yeah. At six-fifteen.”

  Torres made note of that. “How much they take you for?”

  Marv said, “Whatever was in the register.”

  Torres kept his eyes and his smile on Bob. “Just what was in the register?”

  Bob said, “Whatever was in the register, Officer.”

  “Detective.”

  “Detective. Just what was in there.”

  Torres looked around the bar a bit. “So if I was to ask around, I wouldn’t hear anything about anyone making book here or, I dunno”—he looked at Marv—“providing safe passage for purloined items?”

  “Fucking what items?”

  “Purloined,” Torres said. “It’s a pretty word for stolen.”

  Marv acted like he was giving it some thought. Then he shook his head.

  Torres looked at Bob, and he shook his head too.

  “Or moving a bag of weed every now and then?” Torres said. “I wouldn’t hear nothing about that?”

  Marv and Bob embraced the Fifth without actually invoking it.

  Torres rocked back on his heels, taking them both in like they were a comedy skit. “And when I go through your register tapes—Rita, make sure you grab those, ’kay?—they’ll line up exactly with the amount of money got took?”

  “Absolutely,” Marv said.

  “You bet,” Bob said.

  Torres laughed. “Ah, so the bagmen already came by. Lucky for you.”

  It finally got to Marv and he scowled. “I don’t like what you’re, you know, insinuating. We got robbed.”

  “I know you got robbed.”

  “But you’re treating us like suspects.”

  “Not for robbing your own bar, though.” Torres gave Marv a soft roll of the eyes and a sigh. “Marv—it’s Marv, right?”

  Marv nodded. “That’s what the sign above the building says, yeah.”

  “Okay, Marv.” Torres patted Marv’s elbow and Bob got the feeling he was trying not to smirk. “Everyone knows you’re a drop.”

  “A what?” Marv put his hand behind his ear, leaned in.

  “A drop,” Torres said. “A drop bar.”

  “I am not familiar with that term,” Marv said, looking around for a peanut gallery to play to.

  “No?” Torres played along, enjoying himself. “Well, let’s just say this neighborhood and a couple others around the city, they got a criminal element.”

  “Hush your mouth,” Marv said.

  Torres’s eyes widened. “Oh, no, I’m serious. And so the rumor—some call it urban legend, others call it fucking fact, excuse my French—the rumor is that a criminal collective, a syndicate if you will—”

  Marv laughed. “A syndicate!”

  Torres laughed too. “Right? Yeah, a criminal syndicate, yes, made up mostly of Eastern Europeans, those would be your Croatians and Russians and Chechens and Ukrainians—”

  “What, no Bulgarians?” Marv said.

  “Them too,” Torres said. “So the rumor is—You ready?”

  “I’m ready,” Marv said, and it was his turn to rock back on his heels.

  “The rumor is that this syndicate takes bets and does drug sales and runs hookers all over the city. I mean, east to west and north to south. But every time we in the police try to bust those illicit gains, as we call them, the money isn’t where we thought it was.” Torres held up his hands in surprise.

  Marv mocked the gesture, adding a sad clown face for good measure.

  “Where’s the money?”

  “Where?” Marv wondered.

  “It’s not in the whorehouse, it’s not in the drug den, not at the bookie’s joint. It’s gone.”

  “Poof.”

  “Poof,” Torres agreed. He lowered his voice and gathered Bob and Marv to him. He spoke in a voice so low it was almost a whisper. “The theory is that every night, all the money is collected and”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“‘dropped’ in a preselected bar somewhere in the city. The bar takes all the money from all the illegal shit going on in the city that night and sits on it until the morning. And then some Russian in a black leather trench coat and too much aftershave shows up, takes the money, and runs it back across the city to the syndicate.”

  “This syndicate again,” Marv said.

  “And that’s it.” Torres clapped his hands together so sharply that Rardy looked over. “Money gone.”

  “Can I ask you something?” Marv said.

  “Sure.”

  “Why not just sit on the bar in question with a warrant and bust them for receiving all that illegal money?”

  “Ah,” Torres said, holding up his index finger. “Great idea. You ever think about becoming a cop?”

  “Nah.”

  “You sure? You got a knack for this, Marv.”

  “I’m just a humble publican.”

  Torres chuckled and leaned in again, all conspiratorial. “The reason we can’t bust a drop bar is that no one, not even the drop bar, knows it’s gonna be the drop bar until a few hours before it happens.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. And then it might not be the drop bar for six months. Or it might be called into action two days later. Point is—you never know.”

  Marv scratched his stubble. “You never know,” he repeated with soft wonder.

  The three of them just stood there for a bit, nothing to say.

  “Well, you think of anything else,” Torres finally said, “you give me a call.” He handed each of them his card.

  “Chances of catching these guys?” Marv fanned his face with the card.

  “Oh,” Torres said magnanimously, “slim.”

  “At least you’re honest.”

  “At least one of us is.” Torres laughed sharp and loud.

  Marv joined him and then cut it off abruptly, let his eyes ice over like he was still a hard guy.

  Torres looked at Bob. “Shame about Saint Dom’s, ain’t it?”

  “What about it?” Bob asked, happy to talk about something—anything—else.

  “It’s gone, Bob. They’re closing their doors.”

  Bob’s mouth opened but he couldn’t speak.

  “I know, I know,” Torres said. “Just heard today. They’re folding it into Saint Cecilia’s. Believe that?” He shook his head. “The guys with the guns sound like anyone ever came in here before?”

  Bob was still back on Saint Dom’s. Torres, he suspected, liked to fuck with a man.

  “They sounded like a thousand guys who’ve been in here before.”

  “And what do those thousand guys sound like?”

  Bob gave it some thought. “Like they’re just getting over a cold.”

  Torres smiled again, but this time it seemed genuine. “That sounds about right for this part of town.”

  OUT BACK A COUPLE minutes later, Rardy sat on a gurney behind the ambulance as the two patrolwomen left in their unit, and one of the EMTs tried to get a tall can of Narragansett out of Rardy’s hand.

  “You have a concussion,” the guy said.

  Rardy snatched the beer back. “The beer didn’t cause it.”

  The EMT looked at Cousin Marv, who took the beer out of Rardy’s hand. “It’s for the best.”

  Rardy reached for the beer and called Marv a douche bag.

  Torres and Bob were watching the miniconflict when Torres said, “Whole thing’s a travesty.”

  “He’ll be okay,” Bob said.

  Torres looked at him. “I meant Saint Dom’s. Beautiful church. And they did mass right. No group hug after the Our Father, no folk singers.” He looked down the alley with a hopeless victim’s gaze. “Time the seculars get done persecuting the Ch
urch, all we’ll have left is a bunch of condos with stained glass windows.”

  Bob said, “But . . .”

  Torres gave him the righteous glare of a martyr watching pagans build his bonfire. “But what?”

  “Well . . .” Bob spread his hands.

  “No, what?”

  “If the Church’d come clean—”

  Torres squared himself, nothing playful in his eyes anymore. “That was it, uh? You don’t see the Globe doing front-page articles on abuse cases in the Muslim world.”

  Bob knew he should shut his fucking mouth, but something took hold of him. “They covered up child rape. Under Rome’s instruction.”

  “They said sorry.”

  “Was it meaningful, though?” Bob asked. “If they don’t release the names of the priests who raped—”

  Torres threw his hands at the air. “Cafeteria Catholicism did this. People wanting to be mostly Catholic, except for, you know, the hard parts. Why don’t you take Communion?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve seen you at mass for years. You haven’t taken Communion once.”

  Bob felt bewildered and violated. “That’s my business.”

  Torres finally smiled again, but it was a smile so vicious Bob could have smelled it with his eyes closed.

  Torres said, “You think so, uh?” and walked to his car.

  Bob crossed to the ambulance, wondering what the fuck had just happened. But he knew what had happened—he’d made an enemy of a cop. A life spent living in a cubbyhole of airtight anonymity and the cubbyhole just got dumped all over the street.

  The EMTs prepared to lift Rardy’s gurney into the ambulance.

  Bob said, “Moira meeting you?”

  Rardy said, “I called her, yeah.” He swiped the beer can out of Marv’s hand and drained it. “Fucking hurts like a bastard, my head. Like a bastard.”

  They lifted him into the ambulance. Bob caught the empty beer can when he tossed it, and the EMTs shut the back doors and drove away.

  Marv and Bob stood in the sudden quiet.

  “The cop let you wear his letter jacket, or you have to let him give your nips a twist first?”

  Bob sighed.

  Marv wouldn’t let it go. “Fuck you tell him about the watch for?”

  “I don’t know,” Bob said and it dawned on him that he didn’t. He had no idea.