Naked Greed

38

Gene Ryan woke on Saturday morning, his mouth dry, his head hurting and very fuzzy around the edges. It took him a minute to realize that it was his cell phone that had awakened him. “Hello?” Ryan croaked.

“Hey, Gene, it’s Al. How you doin’?”

“What time is it?”

“Hey, as bad as that, is it? It’s after nine — AM.”

“Shit.”

“Listen, I need to talk to you about something. Meet me at that diner down the block from you in an hour. I’ll buy you brunch.”

“What’s this about?”

“Work.” Al hung up.

An hour and fifteen minutes later, Ryan shuffled into the diner and located Al in a corner booth. “Coffee,” he said to the passing waitress, then joined Al.

“This better be good,” Ryan said as he slid into the booth. “Getting me up at the crack of dawn.”

Al laughed at that. They ordered breakfast and chatted idly. When the food was set on the table, Al got down to business.

“I got something sweet.”

“How sweet?”

“Maybe a hundred and a half — you and me take eighty percent.”

“Who gets the other twenty?”

“My cousin Vinny, like the movie.”

“What’s the job?”

“A poker game, a fat one. I’ve been playing in it for three weeks. Sometimes there’s two hundred grand changing hands.”

“Tell me more.”

“It’s in a pretty good motel on 17 North. The room is on the ground floor with two doors. The back one leads to the alley where they pick up the garbage. Six guys, all of them businessmen, no wise guys.”

“Go on.”

“I’m at the table, you and Vinny come in the two doors, you’ve got that sawed-off shotgun of yours. That will scare the shit out of everybody.”

“Are you carrying?”

“Nope, I’m a victim. You make everybody empty their pockets onto the table, then take the table blanket, cards, money, and all, and beat it out the back door, where Vinny has a car stashed. We meet at your place, as soon as I can get out, and divvy the money.”

“How do I know Vinny can handle this?”

“Because I say so. He’s a cool kid — it’s not his first job.”

“Are you the newest guy in the game?”

“There’s one newer by a week.”

“How’ve you been doing?”

“I’m up a couple grand for the three weeks. One of the players brought in a pro dealer, who, turns out, is a mechanic. I figure tonight I’ll win pretty big, and next week, they’ll lower the boom on me. Except you and me and Vinny will already have lowered the boom on them.”

“Okay, I’m in. When?”

“Tonight.”

“That’s not much time for planning.”

“The planning is all done. You just heard my plan.” Al looked toward the door. “Here comes Vinny.”

Vinny was lean and obscenely barbered, with a fashionable two days of stubble. He didn’t say much.

“I told him the plan,” Al said.

“I like the plan,” Ryan said, “but Vinny has got to understand: nobody gets hurt. No shooting, no blows to the head. This is an illegal game, so nobody is calling the cops — unless somebody gets hurt, then we’re in the shit.”

“Got it,” Vinny said. It was the first time he had spoken.

Ryan went back to his apartment, got a duffel off the top shelf of his closet, and dumped the shotgun onto the bed. It was an old-fashioned, open-hammer scattergun with the barrel sawed off to about four inches. Vinny had fired it into a target: from ten feet it had a pattern the size of a basketball.

He cleaned the weapon, dropped a couple of double-ought shells into it, and closed it. It couldn’t fire until he pulled back the hammers.

Al dropped off Vinny at his mother’s house. “You okay with Gene?” he asked the young man.

“No problem, I guess.”

“You guess? What does that mean?”

“Nothin’.”

“You do understand why nobody gets hurt?”

“Yeah, nobody gets hurt, nobody calls the cops. But, Al...”

“Yeah?”

“What if somebody’s packin’?”

“Don’t worry about it. Nobody in this crowd packs.”

“If you say so,” Vinny replied. “But if somebody draws, we’re in a whole new poker game.”