Out on the Cutting Edge

He leaned back. "I don't think he hires out anymore," he said. "You call him, tell him So-and-so needs his legs broken, I don't think Ballou grabs a hunk of pipe and goes out and does the job himself. But he might send somebody. What else does he do? I think he's got a few dollars on the street, earning that six-for-five. There's joints he's supposed to have a piece of, but you hear all sorts of shit along those lines, you never know what to believe. His name comes up in connection with a lot of things.

Trucks getting hijacked, a couple of heavy heists. You remember a couple of years ago, five guys with masks and guns took off Wells Fargo for three mil?"

"They had somebody on the inside, didn't they?"

"Yeah, but he happened to die before anybody had a chance to ask him the right questions. And his wife

died, and he had a girlfriend on the side, and you'll never guess what happened to her."

"She died?"

"She disappeared. A few other people disappeared too, and a couple more turned up in car trunks out at JFK. We'd hear that this guy or that guy was one of the guns and masks on the Wells Fargo thing, and before we could go out looking for him we'd get a call that he was in the trunk of his Chevy Monte Carlo out at Kennedy."

"And Ballou—"

"Was supposed to be the man at the top. That was the word, but nobody said it too loud because it was a dangerous thing to do, you could wind up in Long-Term Parking along with all your friends and relations. But that was the word, Ballou set it up and ran it, and he may have come out with the whole three mil because there wasn't anybody around to share it with."

"He have anything to do with drugs?"

"Not that I ever heard of."

"Prostitution? White slaving?"

"Not his style." He yawned, ran a hand through his hair. "There was another one they called Butcher. A mob guy, out in Brooklyn if I remember it right."

"Dom the Butcher."

"That's the one."

"Bensonhurst."

"Yeah, right. Under Carlo G., if I remember it right. And they called him the Butcher because he had some kind of no-show job in the meatcutter's union, that's what he paid his taxes on. Dominic something or other, I forget his last name. Something Italian."

"No kidding."

"Somebody shot him a couple of years ago. His line of work, you call that dying of natural causes. The thing is, they called him the Butcher because of his cover job, but all the same he was a brutal bastard.

There was a story, some kids robbed a church and he had 'em skinned alive."

"To teach respect for the cloth."

"Yeah, well, he must have been a deeply spiritual guy. All I'm getting at, Matt, is when you got a guy they call the Butcher, or the Butcher Boy, or whatever the fuck they call him, you're talking about an animal oughta be in a cage, you're talking about the kind of guy eats raw meat for breakfast."

"I know."

"What I'd do in your position," he said, "is I'd take the biggest gun I could find, and right away I'd shoot him in the back of the neck. Either that or I'd stay the fuck away from him."

The Mets were back home for a weekend series with the Pirates.

They'd won last night and it didn't look as though anyone was going to catch them. I called Willa but she had chores to do and wasn't enough of a fan to shirk them. Jim Faber was at his shop, with a job he'd promised a client by six. I flipped through my book and called a couple of other fellows I knew from St. Paul's, but either they weren't home or they didn't feel like shlepping out to Shea.

I could just stay home. The game would be televised, NBC was carrying it as the game of the week. But I didn't want to sit around all day. I had things to do and I couldn't do them. Some of them had to wait until dark, and some until after the weekend, and I wanted to get up and go somewhere in the meantime, not sit around looking at my watch. I tried to think who to go to the game with, and I could only come up with two people.

First was Ballou, and I had to laugh at myself for thinking of him. I didn't have a number for him, and wouldn't have called it if I had. He probably didn't like baseball. Even if he did, I somehow couldn't see the two of us palling around, eating hot dogs and booing a bad call at first base. It just showed how strong if illusory the bond between us had been the previous evening for me to have thought of him at all.

The other person was Jan Keane. I didn't have to look up her number, and I dialed it and let it ring twice, then rang off before either she or her machine could answer.