Except I had a job to finish. I couldn’t freelance around the neighborhood like some amateur detective chasing a half-baked hunch; my time was Froehmer’s and I had to go and get the trophy all over again. Froehmer would hang that over me forever. Only he wouldn’t tell me that directly; he had Mobley call me. “You know what to get and where,” Mobley said. “Now’s the time.” I asked for a couple of days, thinking maybe I could get some answers by then, but Mobley wouldn’t even give me that. “Get it now,” he said. “Tonight.” It didn’t work that way, I told him, but Mobley wouldn’t listen. It didn’t matter what I wanted to do; the machinery had started to move and nothing could stop it.

23

THE KID

“DO YOU HAVE A GUN?” Frank said. It might have been the second time he came on the job with me. He was still trying to figure it out, seeing all the angles and wondering how I dealt with them.

“Don’t want one, don’t need one,” I said.

“What would you do if someone walked in on you?”

“It’s never happened.”

“But it might. What would you do?”

I used to think about that a lot. I even thought about carrying a gun or a knife, just in case. But it wasn’t worth it. Besides, it was correcting a problem at the end, instead of taking care of it before it ever happened. You eliminated that chance, or reduced it as much as possible. I used to think about it, but now I never did.

“Run, I guess. If I could,” I said.

“What if they have a gun?”

“I’d get shot then, or arrested.”

“They might kill you,” Frank said.

“They might. If I fuck up bad enough. But I’d rather be killed for my own mistake than kill someone else. Getting arrested for B and E is a whole lot different than getting arrested for murder. But it’s not going to happen.”

“This is how it works,” Frank said. “Wherever somebody’s got more than somebody else, there’s stealing, and wherever there’s stealing, there’s going to be killing.”

“Not by us,” I said.

“Let’s get out before it comes to that,” Frank said. “Because it will come.”

—