More Twisted

asked, “Can I give you a check?”
    Schaeffer laughed.
    “Okay, okay . . . but I’ll need a few hours.”
    “Tonight. Eight.” They arranged a place to meet. “I’ll keep your driver’s license. And the evidence.” He picked up the cash on the table. “You try to skip, I’ll put out an arrest warrant and send that to Des Moines too. They’ll extradite you and then it’ll be a serious felony. You’ll do real time.”
    “Oh, no, sir. I’ll get the money. Every penny.” Shelby hurriedly dressed.
    “Go out by the service door in back. I don’t know where the vice cop is.”
    The tourist nodded and scurried out of the room.
    In the lobby by the elevator the detective found Bernbaum and Darla sharing a smoke.
    “Where my money?” the hooker demanded.
    Schaeffer handed her the two hundred of the confiscated cash. He and Bernbaum split the rest, a hundred fifty for Schaeffer, fifty for his partner.
    “You gonna take the afternoon off, girlfriend?” Bernbaum asked Darla.
    “Me? Hell, no, I gots to work.” She glanced at the money Schaeffer’d given her. “Least till you assholes start paying me fo’ not fuckin’ same as I make fo’ fuckin’.”

    Schaeffer pushed into Mack’s bar, an abrupt entrance that changed the course of at least half the conversations going on inside real fast. He was a crooked cop, sure, but he was still a cop, and the talk immediately shifted from deals and scams and drugs to sports, women and jobs. Schaeffer laughed and strode across the room. He dropped into an empty chair at the scarred table, muttered to T.G., “Get me a beer.” Schaeffer being about the only one in the universe who could get away with that.
    When the brew came he tipped the glass to Ricky. “You caught us a good one. He agreed to a hundred fifty.”
    “No shit,” T.G. said, cocking a red eyebrow. (The split was Schaeffer got half and then Ricky and T.G. divided the rest equally.)
    T.G. asked, “Where’s he getting it from?”
    “I dunno. His problem.”
    Ricky squinted. “Wait. I want the watch too.”
    “Watch?”
    “The old guy. He had a Rolex. I want it.”
    At home Schaeffer had a dozen Rolexes he’d taken off marks and suspects over the years. He didn’t need another one. “You want the watch, he’ll give up the watch. All he cares about is making sure his wife and his cornpone customers don’t find out what he was up to.”
    “What’s cornpone?” Ricky asked.
    “Hold on,” T.G. snarled. “Anybody gets the watch, it’s me.”
    “No way. I saw it first. It was me who picked him.”
    “My watch,” the fat Irishman interrupted. “Maybe he’s got a money clip or something you can have. But I get the fucking Rolex.”
    “Nobody has money clips,” Ricky argued. “I don’t even want a fucking money clip.”
    “Listen, little Lime Ricky,” T.G. muttered. “It’s mine. Read my lips.”
    “Jesus, you two are like kids,” Schaeffer said, swilling the beer. “He’ll meet us across the street from Pier Forty-six at eight tonight.” The three men had done this same scam or variations on it for a couple of years now but still didn’t trust each other. The deal was they all went together to collect the payoff.
    Schaeffer drained the beer. “See you boys then.”
    After the detective was gone they watched the game for a few minutes, with T.G. bullying some guys to place bets, even though it was in the fourth quarter and there was no way Chicago could come back. Finally, Ricky said, “I’m going out for a while.”
    “What, now I’m your fucking babysitter? You want to go, go.” Though he still made it sound like Ricky was a complete idiot for missing the end of a game that only had eight minutes to run.
    Just as Ricky got to the door, T.G. called in a loud voice, “Hey, Lime Ricky, my Rolex? Is it gold?”
    Just to be a prick.

    Bob Schaeffer had walked a beat in his youth. He’d investigated a hundred felonies, he’d run a thousand scams in Manhattan and Brooklyn. All of which meant that he’d learned how to stay alive on the streets.
    Now, he sensed a threat.
    He was on his way to score some coke from a kid who operated out of a newsstand at Ninth and Fifty-fifth and he realized he’d been hearing the same footsteps for the past five or six minutes. A weird scraping. Somebody was tailing him. He paused to light a cigarette in a doorway and checked out the reflection in a storefront window. Sure enough, he saw a man in a cheap gray suit, wearing gloves,