More Twisted

federal government impound dock. It went on to add that security had been stepped up and the FBI and Florida police were looking into who might’ve bought the half dozen missing boats. They’d arrested the principals and recovered nearly a million dollars in cash from buyers on the East Coast.
    Ricky looked over the article. “You, what? Printed it up yourself?”
    “Word processor. Tore the edges to make it look like I ripped it out of the paper and then Xeroxed it.”
    “So you keep ’em scared shitless some cop’s going to find their name or trace the money to them.”
    Now, just go on home, keep your head down and watch your back.
    “Some of ’em make a stink for a day or two, but mostly they just disappear.”
    This warranted another clink of beer glasses. “Fucking brilliant.”
    “Thanks.”
    “So if I was to hook you up with a buyer? What’s in it for me?”
    Gardino debated. “Twenty-five percent.”
    “You give me fifty.” Ricky fixed him with the famous mad-guy Kelleher stare. Gardino held the gaze just fine. Which Ricky respected.
    “I’ll give you twenty-five percent, if the buyer pays a hundred Gs or less. Thirty, if it’s more than that.”
    Ricky said, “Over one fifty, I want half.”
    Gardino debated. He finally said, “Deal. You really know somebody can get his hands on that kind of money?”
    Ricky finished his beer and, without paying, started for the door. “That’s what I’m going to go work on right now.”

    Ricky walked into Mack’s bar.
    It was pretty much like Hanrahan’s, four blocks away, but was busier, since it was closer to the conventioncenter, where hundreds of Teamsters and union electricians and carpenters would take fifteen-minute breaks that lasted two hours. The neighborhood surrounding Mack’s was better too: redeveloped town houses and some new buildings, expensive as shit, and even a Starbucks. Way fucking different from the grim, hustling combat zone that Hell’s Kitchen had been until the seventies.
    T.G., a fat Irishman in his mid-thirties, was at the corner table with three, four buddies of his.
    “It’s the Lime Ricky man,” T.G. shouted, not drunk, not sober—the way he usually seemed. Man used nicknames a lot, which he seemed to think was cute but always pissed off the person he was talking to mostly because of the way he said it, not so much the names themselves. Like, Ricky didn’t even know what a Lime Ricky was, some drink or something, but the sneery tone in T.G.’s voice was a putdown. Still, you had to have major balls to say anything back to the big, psycho Irishman.
    “Hey,” Ricky offered, walking up to the corner table, which was like T.G.’s office.
    “The fuck you been?” T.G. asked, dropping his cigarette on the floor and crushing it under his boot.
    “Hanny’s.”
    “Doing what, Lime Ricky Man?” Stretching out the nickname.
    “Polishing me knob,” Ricky responded in a phony brogue. A lot of times he said stuff like this, sort of putting himself down in front of T.G. and his crew. He didn’t want to, didn’t like it. It just happened. Always wondered why.
    “You mean, polishing some altar boy’s knob,” T.G. roared. The more sober in the crew laughed.
    Ricky got a Guinness. He really didn’t like it but T.G. had once said that that and whiskey were the only things real men drank. And, since it was called stout, he figured it would make him fatter. All his life, trying to get bigger. Never succeeding.
    Ricky sat down at the table, which was scarred with knife slashes and skid marks from cigarette burns. He nodded to T.G.’s crew, a half dozen losers who sorta worked the trades, sorta worked the warehouses, sorta hung out. One was so drunk he couldn’t focus and kept trying to tell a joke, forgetting it halfway through. Ricky hoped the guy wouldn’t puke before he made it to the john, like yesterday.
    T.G. was rambling on, insulting some of the people at the table in his cheerful-mean way and threatening guys who weren’t here.
    Ricky just sat at the table, eating peanuts and sucking down his licorice-flavored stout, and took the insults when they were aimed at him. Mostly he was thinking about Gardino and the boats.
    T.G. rubbed his round, craggy face and his curly red-brown hair. He spat out, “And, fuck me, the nigger got away.”
    Ricky was wondering which nigger? He thought he’d been paying attention, but sometimes T.G.’s train of thought took its own route and left you behind.
    He could see