Killing Them Softly (Cogan's Trade Movie Tie-in Edition)

Because you tell her and she’s probably gonna start wondering, how I find this out. But you probably wanna get your ashes hauled, there’s this broad I know, she works, her husband thinks she gets off at midnight, I guess. She gets off about ten.’ So I say to him, well, I don’t tell him, I was inna big hurry for names, Sandy’d be the one I’d ask, he don’t need that kind of favor from me. So I just say, I appreciate it. But I haven’t got no place to go, where I can take a broad, you know? I haven’t got no car. I got less’n thirty bucks. I mean, what am I gonna do?
    â€œSo he says,” Frankie said, “he says him and Sandy’ll go out, I can use their place. Yeah, and probably one of the kids isn’t gonna get up inna middle of the night and come out, see how come I’m making so much noise, getting laid onna couch. It’s not gonna work, and that’s it, it just won’t work. I got to get some dough and Ican’t, this thing John’s got, it’s the only thing I got in front of me right now. I got to listen to the guy.”
    â€œShit,” Russell said, “listen to him. I’m willing to listen to him. He just didn’t want to say anything in front of me that I could hear. Fuckin’ guy, he don’t like me. Okay. But I’m not gonna go around and check myself into something I don’t even know what I’m getting into or anything. I did that before. I’m not doing that again. This thing I’m doing, I can do that. It’s probably gonna take me longer, get what I need from it, but I can do it. I’m picking my own spots from now on. I don’t have to sit around and take no shit from the Squirrel.”
    â€œOkay,” Frankie said, “that’s what I’m saying. You can take it or you can leave it alone, and that’s fine. I wished I was you. But me, this’s at least ten apiece the guy’s talking about. You don’t want the ten, all right. But I do. And I haven’t got no place else to get it. You have.”
    â€œNot that much,” Russell said. “I’m not gonna get ten out of this. Five, seven’s more like it. No ten. You gimme ten and I’ll be gone so fast it was like I never was here. I know exactly what I’m gonna do, I get that kind of dough. But, I don’t have to get it from what he’s gonna, that he’s got in mind to do. It’s gonna take me a while longer, but I can get it from what I’m doing anyway, and that, that’s on balls, see? Balls. It’s something I think up myself, how I’m gonna do this. So, the guy don’t like me? All right, I still don’t have to kiss his ass, I don’t want to. Fuck him. So it’s up to you and him. It’s up to you guys. You want me, you want me in this, I’ll come in. He’s the guy with the big ideas. Fine. You want to go and get somebody else, also fine. Don’t matter to me.”
    A blue and white train pulled in from Cambridge.The doors opened. An elderly drunk stood up unsteadily, ignored the doors open behind him and lurched toward the doors open in front of Russell and Frankie. He wore black suit pants and a white dress shirt and a greenish checkered jacket. He had not shaved for several days. There was a large red bruise on his left cheek. His left ear was bloody. His black shoes were open along the welting and his bare bunions protruded. He made it most of the way across the car before the doors shut. He bent, reaching for the curved edge of the orange seat with his left hand. It was bloody at the knuckles. He reeled backward into the seat. The doors shut and the train departed for Dorchester.
    â€œMust’ve been a pretty good one,” Russell said. “Like to see the other guy.”
    â€œHe fell down,” Frankie said. “My father used to come home like that. He was a strange bastard. Payday was no trouble at all. He’d get his check and work all day and come home and give the dough to my mother and they’d go out that night, go shopping. And they’d come home and watch TV and he’d maybe have two beers. At the most, two beers. Lots of times you’d come down in the morning and there’d be the glass on the table next to his chair, full of flat old beer. I remember, I tasted it, the first time I tasted it, I thought: how the hell can anybody drink anything that tastes like this. And he’d