Butcher's Moon

Seventeen

The two men sat in the back seat of a darkened car on Brower Road, near the baseball field and the amusement park. It was four o’clock Sunday morning, six hours after the meeting in Lozini’s office had broken up, and it was almost pitch-dark. The stars were thin and aloof and far away, the thin crescent of moon was like a tiny rip in a black plastic bag showing the sugar inside. There were no houses out in this part of town, no traffic, nobody moving except the driver of the car, strolling back and forth a hundred feet down the road, kicking at stones he could barely see, while the two men in the car, dark faceless mounds to one another, talked things over.

“So Al knows what’s happening, does he?”

“Not yet. He knows something is happening, but he doesn’t know what.”

“The money?”

“You mean from Fun Island?”

“No, the money we’ve been skimming. Is he onto that?”

“No. He still believes it’s just that times are slow.”

“So what does he know?”

“That he should take a look around. That something isn’t kosher.”

“And we have these people from out of town to thank, huh?”

“Mostly.”

“What’s their names?”

“They call themselves Parker and Green.”

”What are they like?”

“Green didn’t come to the meeting. Parker looks tough.”

“What kind of tough? He talks big?”

“He doesn’t talk much at all. He just makes you want to step to one side.”

“Scare him, buy him off.”

“Not the first. And I doubt you could do the second with less than the full seventy-three thousand he came here for.”

“I hate to say it, but I think maybe we need the two of them hit.”

“Good God. Like O’Hara?”

“That wasn’t my idea. He did it on his own and told me later.”

“It was a bad thing to do. We’ve been clean up to now, no killings, no strong-arm. Sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with some people at the national level, Jack Fujon in Baltimore, Walter Karns in Los Angeles. They don’t have any complaint against Al, and you don’t want them to have complaints against you.”

“I’ve already talked to some of them. Don’t worry about it, leave them to me. They’ll accept the situation the way it is.”

“They won’t be happy if we start acting like twenties gangsters.”

“What do you mean, gangsters? I’m a businessman.”

“I mean O’Hara, for one thing.”

“I told you that wasn’t me. Besides, I understand he wasn’t that strong a personality, it might have been possible to lean on him. This Parker sounds like someone who might have been able to get O’Hara to talk.”

“He could have been sent away on vacation for a couple of weeks. The point is, we’ve already had one killing, now you’re talking about two more.”

“Drifters. Parker and Green, who are they? We do it right, we don’t leave bodies, there’s no trouble at all. They drifted into town, they drifted out again. No fuss.”

“I don’t like to hear about this sort of thing.”

“You wanted a piece of it.”

“I wanted to be on the winning side. I’m not a fool. But if you want somebody killed, don’t talk to me about it, that’s not what I’m here for.”

”Calm down. I wasn’t at the meeting, that’s all, I haven’t met these two guys. I’m asking your opinion, that’s all it is.”

“My opinion is, don’t talk to me about murder.”

“All right, all right. Relax.”

“I just don’t want to hear about it.”

“Fine. Fine.”