Big Silence Read Free

extra charge.”
    “Thank you,” the woman said. “You said three thousand dollars?”
    “Total cost,” the big man said. “You can pay it all up front. You’ve got my guarantee and I’ll give you a receipt. I’m sure your check is good. If you want to put up two thousand till we finish …”
    “No,” said the old woman, adjusting the front of her dark dress. “My husband knew how to do things like this. That’s him.”
    She pointed at a large photograph on the wall, a couple in their thirties. Both of the people in the picture stood erect, smiling. The man shorter than the woman. He was thin, wore a light-colored suit, and had a head of curly black hair.
    “A fine-looking man,” the big man said, admiring the photograph.
    “A saint,” the woman whispered reverently. “Didn’t fool around. Worked hard his whole life. Never hit one of the kids. Never. Not once even when Tony took the car without permission.”
    “Kids,” said the big man. “Got two of my own.”
    “That’s nice,” she said. “Don’t hit them.”
    “I won’t.”
    “More cake?”
    “Yes,” he said. “About the check …”
    “Checks confuse me,” Mrs. Lawton said. “I go to the bank. Make money orders from the Social Security or savings. My neighbor drives me once a week. I get enough cash for the week. Would it be all right if I gave you cash?”
    “That would be acceptable,” said the big man, taking a plate of neatly cut coffee cake from the thin fingers of the old woman.
    “I wouldn’t want to get you into tax trouble,” she said. “I know Tony worries about that. He’s a good boy. Busy. Wants me to live with him in Houston, but … my husband and I lived here all our lives. I’ll live here till they carry me out.”
    “Let’s hope that’s a long, long time from now.”
    “Thank you,” she said, holding up her coffee cup to drink. It took both her hands to hold the cup steady.
    “You were saying you have cash? The entire three thousand?” the big man asked with a warm smile.
    “I don’t like it.”
    “What?”
    “This Salt and Pepper shit.”
    The young man on the sofa shrugged, started unwrapping his second sandwich, and kept his eyes on the television where Michael J. Fox stood with a perplexed look on his face while the sound track gave off laughter.
    “This show ain’t funny,” the young man on the couch said.
    The man on the couch was named Irwin Saviello — Jewish mother, Italian father. Irwin was big and burly — heredity, but he also worked out. The papers and the television had been calling them Salt and Pepper for the last two months. Irwin, who was thirty-one and had a baby face, sort of liked it. His partner, Antoine Dodson, Pepper, was black, his head shaven. He shared Michael Jordan’s birthday and wanted to look like the superstar. The truth was he looked more like a bald, nervous version of Richard Pryor on crack, which Antoine used as well as whatever he could get.
    Saviello, on the other hand, was clean, always had been.
    The two men had met in prison. Dodson had been doing time for breaking and entering. Saviello had been sitting in his cell for manslaughter, a fight in a supermarket in which he had thrown a man into the frozen fish display. The man had died. At the time, Irwin had not quite remembered what the fight had been about. His appointed attorney had told him and then had plea-bargained down to manslaughter.
    There was no doubt about who was the brains of the duo. It was Dodson, who had not only graduated from high school but had gone to the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle for a semester. Saviello had not quite made it through Austin High. Neither man had ever had an I.Q. test, but there was a note on each man’s record saying that Dodson probably had a high I.Q. and was definitely a sociopath. The note on Saviello was that he was at least slightly below the low end of normal in intelligence.
    Something had brought the two together. Saviello normally didn’t