Strega - Andrew H. Vachss [22]
"Have to pay him a good piece, Burke—he loves that joint. What's the idea?"
"The idea is, we mail the stuff back to them. Mole, how much was in the suitcases?"
"Forty kilos—twenty bags in each case. Plastic bags. Heat–sealed."
"Prof, that's worth what on the street?"
"Depends—how pure is it now, how many times you step on it
"Mole…?"
"It's ninety, ninety–five percent pure."
"Prof?"
"They could hit it at least ten times. Figure twenty grand a key, at the least."
"So they'd pay five?"
"They'd pay the five just to stay alive.
"That's two hundred thousand, okay? How about we mail them four keys, okay? No questions asked. Just to show good faith? And we give them a post–office box number, and tell them to mail us the money for the next installment. We keep running like that until we're near the end. All they can beat us for is the first and last piece, right?"
"No good," said the Prof. "They'd trace the box, or have some men waiting. You know."
"Not if Melvin intercepts the shipment. He still works in the back, right? All he has to do is pull their package of money off the line when it shows up."
"Melvin don't work twenty–four hours a day, man. He's bound to miss some of them."
"So what? We don't need all of them. Every exchange is twenty grand coming from them. If Melvin can pull ten out of twenty, it's still fifty apiece, right?"
"It's shaky, man. I don't like it."
I turned to Max. He hadn't moved from his place against the wall, standing with his corded forearms folded, no expression on his face. He shook his head again. No point asking the Mole. We were back to Square One. The Prof was looking at me like I was a bigger load of dope than the one we'd hijacked.
I lit a cigarette, drawing into myself, trying to think through the mess. Keeping the dope wasn't a problem—the Mole's junkyard was as safe as Mother Teresa's reputation, and heroin doesn't get stale from sitting around—but we took all this risk and now we had nothing to show for it. Waiting didn't bother Max, and the Prof had done too much time behind the walls to care. I watched the candle flame, looking deep into it, breathing slowly, waiting for an answer.
Then the Mole said, "I know a tunnel." He didn't say anything else.
"So what, Mole?" I asked him.
"A subway tunnel," he explained, like he was talking to a child, "a subway tunnel from an abandoned station back out to the street."
"Mole, everybody knows about those tunnels—in the winter, half the winos in the city sleep down there."
"Not a way in—a way out," said the Mole, and it slowly dawned on me that we could still pull it off.
"Show me," I asked him. And the Mole pulled out a mess of faded blueprints from his satchel, laid one flat on the basement floor, and shone his pocket flash for us all to see.
"See here, just past Canal Street? You come in any of these entrances. But there's a little tunnel—it runs from Canal all the way up to Spring Street …see?"—pointing a grubby finger at some faint lines on the paper and looking up as though even an idiot like me would understand by now.
When he saw I still wasn't with him, the Mole's tiny eyes blinked hard behind his thick lenses. He hadn't done this much talking in the last six months and it was wearing him out. "We meet them in the tunnel near Canal. We get there first. They block all the exits. We give them the product and we take the money. We go out heading west…see, here?…they go out heading east. But we don't go out the exit. We take this little tunnel all the way through here"—tracing the lines—"and we come out on Spring Street."
"And if they follow us?"
The Mole gave me a look of total disgust. He was done talking. He took his satchel, pushed it away from him with his boot, so it was standing between us. "Tick, tick," said the Mole. They wouldn't follow us.
Now I got it. "How long would it take us to get to the Spring Street stop?"
The Mole shrugged. "Ten minutes, fifteen. It's a narrow tunnel. One at a time. No lights."
Yeah, it could work. By the time the wiseguys figured we weren't coming