The Art of Disposal (31 page)

Eddie strolled away, leaving puffs of smoke behind him like he was the world's slowest steam engine.

We stood for a while and watched him go. Sometimes he'd stop and look down at a gravestone, reading the names and dates.

Frank studied my face, watching for any sign that I was a dirty rotten bastard who should be erased ASAP. I stared right back until he believed in me. The only way to stand up under scrutiny is to believe in the lie yourself. I was on Frank's side now. Eddie Sesto was just a mark in the queue.

“One week,” Frank said.

I watched Eddie, a tiny black figure alongside of the white church.

“Who's doing it?”

“You,” Frank said.

I thought for sure he was sending Dante or Mudcap to do the job. Now I understood. This was the ultimate test of loyalty. Bump Eddie and end up with Frank. Or don't bump Eddie and end up in the Hudson River.

“Me?” I said.

“Is that a problem?”

“A job's a job. What's it pay?”

“This is
pro bono
work,” Frank said. “A personal favor.” He looked at Dante and shook his head. “Can you believe this guy?”

“Uh-uh,” I said. “I don't work for free. Fifteen.”

Frank chewed on a piece of nothingness and peered into my eyes, trying to figure me out.

“Dante'll do it just for the fun of it,” he said.

Dante nodded and cracked his knuckles.

“He might,” I said, “but Eddie will be expecting it from Dante or Mudcap. He'll never see it coming from me.”

“You really are a good salesman,” Frank said.

That first box is the hardest to pack. I started with the books, and there were plenty of them. I spent all Sunday night and went right through to Tuesday, working by myself with a roller of packing tape, a bag full of foam peanuts, and a stack of flattened cardboard boxes. I'd already arranged for a storage unit, and my idea was to leave all of my stuff there and stay in a cheap motel until we'd gotten rid of Frank Conese. My apartment wasn't safe anymore, not after Dan the Man's funeral. Sure, Frank had asked me to do the job on Eddie, but I could only trust Frank about as far as I could throw him—and he was pretty goddamn heavy.

The aquariums were the big problem. I had eleven tanks, ranging in size from ten to fifty-five gallons. I saved them for last, because I knew I wasn't taking them with me, and I was sad enough to cry. I'd pack a box of books, or silverware and plates, and I'd watch the fish, and I'd put my eyes up close to the glass and tell them they'd been damn good friends, and that Martin LaVelle would take good care of them. He owned a pet store, after all, so he'd better.

On Tuesday night, Martin showed up just like he promised. I'd bought most of these fish from his pet shop over the last few years, and now he was getting them back, bigger, healthier, and free of charge. But I made him promise that if he sold any of them, he'd only sell to real hobbyists who knew what they were doing, and that he wouldn't let any of them end up in one of those glittery abomination aquariums like the one I drowned Al Da Paolo in.

Martin was a pretty swell guy. A little bit goofy and over-caffeinated, and he had a hard time looking you right in the eye, but I've never seen a pet store owner that wasn't somewhat odd. These are guys who get more joy from a bearded dragon than they ever could from another human being. Not that I blame them. I'm just lucky I didn't end up as goofy as Martin. After all, I spent my formative years in the company of frogs and toads.

I hated to think of Vern in some stranger's house. The guy could be some kind of nut who doesn't know a bloodworm from a mealworm, or that you have to load your feeder crickets with vitamin powder every once in a while. So I told Martin that he could have the tiger oscar, but only if he promised not to sell him. I was giving him the fifty-five gallon tank and everything, and he was going to set it up in the front room of the pet shop as a display for the kids.

He knocked on my door, and I let him in, and he walked around and stared into the half-empty tanks and looked at the stacks of filled boxes.

“Enough aquariums?” Martin said.

“Hell, I probably paid two months of your rent,” I said.

Me and Martin had known each other for years, but only through business. I'd pumped thousands of dollars into his pet store. He'd never seen where I lived, and didn't know a thing about me except that I was a salesman. It's always weird when someone you know from one scenario is suddenly thrust right into another. They almost seem like a different person. Set and setting. Context. Alter it and everything changes.

“Howdy Vern,” he said, leaning over and looking into the big aquarium. Vern opened and closed his mouth a few times, and pushed his nose down into the gravel and threw some around like he was working on a landscaping project.

Martin bumped my arm and pointed at the apartment door, still open. Brandi was standing there looking at us.

“I seen you taking out bags of garbage earlier,” she said. “You moving out?”

“Yep,” I said.

She looked down and kicked her foot at the hallway carpet. “Lucky you.”

Martin looked at me. I looked at him and shrugged a little. I asked Brandi to come on in, and then I asked if she wanted an aquarium.

“For reals?” she said. She took out a pack of chewing gum, and offered a piece to me and Martin. I said no, but Martin took one. Brandi smacked her gum when she chewed it.

“I ain't never had a Muh-querium,” she said.

“Too hard to take them with me,” I said.

“So
I'm
taking them,” Martin said.

“Where you moving to?” Brandi said.

“I'm not sure.”

“Ain't you s'posed to find a new place 'fore you move out the old one?”

“Guess I'm doing it backwards,” I said. I walked over to one of the ten gallon tanks with my finest guppies. “This one's yours if you want it.”

Brandi smacked her gum. “Let me ask my Mom, 'fore I say yes.”

“Downstairs neighbor still bugging you?”

“I ain't never heard no one so loud.”

“I'm gonna have a little talk with her before I leave,” I said.

“What'd they do?” Martin said.

“Long story,” I said.

“
Loud
story,” Brandi said and giggled.

“You stop by tomorrow night, and we'll see about sending you home with these guppies. They're prize-winners.”

Brandi left. I drained off the rest of the water in Vern's tank. He wasn't too happy about it, and he was big enough to let you know. Martin handed me a bucket, and I coaxed Vern into it. He was almost the size of the bucket. Then we filled it up with some of the water from the tank, and Vern seemed glad to at least be back in deeper water, even if he could only swim in circles.

We spent the rest of the night making back and forth runs to Martin's Pet Shop. My tiger barbs looked good back in the For Sale section, and I again made Martin promise not to sell them to any teenage knuckleheads.

The pet shop mascot, an iguana named Hank, sat on his electric hot-rock and watched us walk around. Sometimes he'd raise his head and bob it up and down like he was pleased with our work. Hank had it made. He was so tame that Martin seldom kept him in his enclosure. He had free run of the shop, but mostly he just sat there on his hot-rock and watched the people come and go. I liked Hank. He had the disposition of a house cat.

“Later, Hank,” I said, scratching the top of his head. “Keep it real.”

Hank closed his eyes while I scratched, and when I took my hand away, he bobbed his head again, up and down, like I'd just pressed the start button on some strange machine.

I went home and passed out, and was blessed to find only darkness where usually were dreams; and when I woke up and walked groggily around the dark and mostly empty rooms, it seemed I had never really lived there at all, but had awoken in some scary place and needed to find a way out. The clock read 4:45. It was still the tail end of night, and the world outside was dark and cool and damp: the kind of night when cats creep along wooden fences. The light was on in my one remaining aquarium. I went over and watched the billowy tails of my guppies drift along like colorful scarves. Then I went to the kitchen and got to work with the grinder and the coffee pot.

For just a second, I was angry with Martin. How could that guy take Vern and all of my other fish and not even pay me a dime? And then I let go of it, because it was ridiculous. Martin had offered to give me money, several times in fact, and I insisted he take them for free. I was just sore because I loved those fish, and my world was empty without them.

I ground the coffee beans. Then I felt pretty good, because Vern would have a good life there at the front of the pet store, and kids might even learn something from him. I pictured Vern shoveling big scoops of gravel with his nose, and looking out through the glass with those button-black eyes.

Just as I was pouring the hot water over the grounds, my phone rang. I didn't know where it was, and I didn't feel like finding out, so I let it go to voicemail. I finished making the coffee, took one good sip, and someone was pounding on my front door.

I got my Walther and crept over to the side of the door. “Who is it?” I said.

“Santee Claus,” Carlino's muffled voice said.

I flipped the lock, and Carlino walked right in—no invite—and studied the coffee mug in my one hand and the Walther in the other. “Glad you're up, Sam. You got more coffee?”

I shut and locked the door, walked to the kitchen and got him a mug. He sat on my couch and drank a few sips. “Love what you've done with the place,” he said as he looked at the stacked boxes and all of the emptiness around them. “Frank gave you the job?”

“At the funeral.”

“When's he want it done?”

“Saturday,” I said.

“What are you gonna do?”

“Why are you here so goddamn early?” I said. I wanted to be alone with my coffee and my iridescent guppies. My eyes were barely open. I didn't want to talk about Eddie Sesto. I was edgier than a duck in a gun shop.

“I can't sleep,” Carlino said.

“Lay off the yay-yo.”

“Two weeks clean,” Carlino said, and set his mug down. “Look. We need a plan, and it better be tighter than a nun's backdoor.”

“Eddie won't leave town,” I said.

“Pffft. Baby-Boomers,” Carlino said. “They all think they're John Wayne or something.”

“What would you do?” I said.

“I'd do the job. Then we move on Frank when the shit's cooled down.”

“That's not an option,” I said. “Not Eddie.”

“You'd be doing him a solid. Putting him out of his misery.”

“He's not
in
any misery,” I said.

“He will be soon enough,” Carlino said, and ran his fingers over his gold chain. “It sure would make things a hell of a lot easier.”

We sat there quietly for a minute.

“When Frank finds out you didn't go through with it, that's it—you're done, Sam. And if Frank gets a whiff of this mutiny, I'm done too. And I don't wanna be done. Fucked up as this world is, I've gotten pretty used to it.”

We drank coffee and talked up our plan, and the sun came up, and at around seven-fifteen there was a soft knocking on my front door. I got up and took the Walther, and Carlino set his coffee down and pulled his piece. He cracked his neck. He nodded.

Never look through the keyhole. A bad guy can wait for the glass to go dark, and then he knows that you're home; or worse, he can shoot you right through the door.

I opened the door, just the wee-ist bit, and through the sliver of brand new daylight I saw one of Brandi's eyes and mascaraed lashes.

“You awake?” she said.

“Sort of,” I said. I looked back at Carlino, nodded, and he put his gun away. “Give me a minute,” I said to Brandi. I shut the door, stashed my Walther in a box full of magazines, and opened it again.

Brandi walked in, wearing a black mini-skirt and thigh-high socks. Carlino sat up like a prairie dog looking out of a hole.

“This is my cousin, Carlino,” I said. “He's visiting from New York.”

“Y'all don't look like cousins.”

“She ain't as dumb as she looks,” Carlino said.

Brandi started to say something, but she quickly lost whatever it was she'd come up with, and she stood there confused, knowing she'd been insulted, but not sure what, if anything, could or should be done about it.

“I asked my Mom, and she said yes. About the fish tank.”

“Cool,” I said, wondering why I said it. Every time I'm talking to someone under the age of twenty, I have this irresistible urge to say the word cool, like it's gonna help me win them over or something.

“Time to go play school,” Brandi said.

“Can I play too?” Carlino said.

“I'll bring the aquarium over tonight,” I said.

“What grade you in?” Carlino said, standing up and walking over to us.

“Tenth,” she said.

“Right on,” Carlino said, and grinned and nodded his head.

Brandi eyed him suspiciously; blew a bubble and popped it loudly. “Bye bye,” she said to me, and blinked her eyes a few times as she walked past.

I shut the door. Carlino tapped out a cigarette from his pack.

“Mmmm,” he said.

“She's fifteen, man.”

“Amen.”

“You ever do time?” I said.

“I might: for a few nights with that.”

“All I'm giving her is a tank full of guppies.”

Carlino lit the smoke. “Givin' her a 'tank full of guppies, eh? Isn't that what they call it when you forget to pull out?”

I ground some more coffee beans, Carlino had a few smokes, and we worked on our plan. I cracked the windows and looked outside. It was raining a gentle drizzly rain, the kind that seems to freshen up the whole town.

“You hear from that dyke at Calasso's?” Carlino said.

“Not yet.”

“Well goddamn. What if she don't get back to you?”

“She will.”

“And Bullfrog's getting the cyanide?”

“He knows a guy,” I said.

We headed off to do collections, since Eddie's “week-on-the-house” had just expired. We stopped at Rocky's Pub first. He's an old-timer, and he knows how the game works. Be square with us, and we'll be square with you. It's always the younger guys, the guys who think they're tough—they're the ones who cause trouble. Rocky? He made us a fresh pot of coffee, and had the cook whip us up a little something for breakfast.