Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [70]
“Rex? You in trouble?” His boss came into the boiler room where Rex was laying down sawdust to soak up spilled oil.
“No,” he said, and added, “sir.”
Before he went in he was a carpenter. Used to build things, good solid things. Something real—something wouldn’t be, wasn’t for him. Coming out, world was different. Not easy for ex-cons to find work, and no chance of getting back in the union. But one of the contractors used to hire him from time to time, he had a cousin, super at a fancy East Side building. The cousin put Rex on the maintenance crew. Now he spread sawdust and hauled the garbage out.
“Because there’s two cops here,” his boss said. “They want to talk to you.”
Shit, Rex thought, but he didn’t say it, just went out to the service alley. “What you doing here?” he said into the two smiles.
“We want that gun, Rex.”
“I told you, I don’t know nothing about that gun.”
His boss was watching from the doorway.
“You shouldn’t of come here,” Rex told the cops. “I need this job.”
“And we need that gun. And funny, we find none of those boys seems interested in talking to us. Can you believe that? Good thing the Landry boy already talked to you.”
“He didn’t.”
“Well, then.” The white teeth smiled, the brown ones following like a shadow. “Then it’s a good thing he’s going to.” The two cops made a point to nod and wave to Rex’s frowning boss as they left.
That night Rex dreamed he was back inside. Not in his cell, but in one of them crooked, leaky passageways they got all over Greenhaven, connecting someplace you don’t want to be in to someplace you don’t want to go. The passageway was filled with garbage and he was digging through it, his heart pounding, fit to burst, things getting scarier and scarier as he went looking for something, he didn’t even know what. He could feel the pressure building, building. And before he got even close to finding anything, a bright white shape and its dark shadow came and swept all the garbage up, and him too, buried him in it.
He woke up all tangled in sweaty sheets. Shit, he thought.
Shit, and shit.
That day he didn’t get as far as work, not even as far as the corner, before Something and Something Else come swooping, one from the front and one from the back, surrounding him all by their two selves.
“Let’s take a ride downtown,” Something said through them damn brown teeth.
“What the hell for?”
“You’re a material witness, Rex. Maybe you remembered some details that might help us.”
“I ain’t remembered nothing because ain’t nothing for me to remember! The Landry boy never said nothing to me!”
“Not even lately?”
“I ain’t spoke to him lately.”
“Why not? I thought we agreed you would.”
“Didn’t agree about nothing! I ain’t spoke to the kid. Look, I can’t go downtown with you. I got to get to work.”
“That’s okay, Rex. We’ll call your boss. We’ll explain where you are.”
Rex looked at them, a matched set in different colors. Looked a couple of times. “Okay,” he said.
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, I tell you where the gun is.”
Because Rex had an idea, a great one, fucking genius.
Tell them a lie.
Why not? Say he seen someone, not the Landry boy and he wasn’t sure who, but someone, seen him drop a .45 in the basement. Make him up: tall kid, with one droopy eye. Not one of them rapper assholes from the corner. Someone he ain’t never seen before or since. Say, when he run into the Landry boy he’d been out to get some chips and beer, but when he come home from work earlier, he seen this tall kid then. Yeah. Yeah, that would work. Then he take them to the boiler room. They ain’t gonna find nothing, and he’d say, Well, shit, there’s where I seen him drop it. They’d be pissed, bust his balls that he ain’t told them before, but who gives a shit? After that, they’d go away, leave him alone.
“Okay,” he said.
He told them the story, listened to some bullshit about How come you ain’t told us before? He said, because he’s trying to stay out the whole thing, do they want to see the place or not? Of course they do. He took them into the basement.
“Here,” he said, and pointed