The Drop Read Free Page B

back into place with his foot.
    Father Regan raised his hand above the throng and closed his eyes. “May the Lord bless you and keep you all the days of your lives. May He make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up His face upon you and give you peace. This mass has ended. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Amen.”
    Bob exited his pew and walked down the aisle. At the holy water font by the exit, he dipped his fingers and blessed himself. At the next font over, Torres did the same. Torres nodded hello, one familiar stranger to another. Bob returned the nod and they took separate exits out into the cold.
    BOB WENT INTO WORK at Cousin Marv’s around noon because he liked it when it was quiet. Gave him time to think over this puppy proposition he was facing.
    Most people called Marv Cousin Marv out of habit, something that went back to grade school, though no one could remember why, but Marv actually was Bob’s cousin. On their mothers’ side.
    Cousin Marv had run a crew in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It had been primarily comprised of guys with interests in the loaning and subsequent debt-repayment side of things, though Marv never turned his nose down at any paying proposition because he believed, to the core of his soul, that those who failed to diversify were always the first to collapse when the wind turned. Like the dinosaurs, he’d say to Bob, when the cavemen came along and invented arrows. Picture the cavemen, he’d say, firing away, and the tyrannosauruses all gucked up in the oil puddles. A tragedy so easily averted.
    Marv’s crew hadn’t been the toughest crew or the smartest or the most successful operating in the neighborhood—not even close—but for a while they got by. Other crews kept nipping at their heels, though, and except for one glaring exception, they’d never been ones to favor violence. Pretty soon, they had to make the decision to yield to crews a lot meaner than they were or duke it out. They took Door Number One.
    Marv was a fence now, one of the best in the city, but a fence in their world was like a mailroom clerk in the straight world—if you were still doing it after thirty, it was all you’d ever do. Marv also took some bets, but only for Chovka’s father and the rest of the Chechens who really owned this bar. It wasn’t exactly common knowledge, though it was no secret, that Cousin Marv hadn’t owned Cousin Marv’s outright for years.
    For Bob, it was a relief—he liked being a bartender and he’d hated that one time they’d had to come heavy. Marv, though, Marv still waited for the diamond-crusted train to arrive on the eighteen-karat tracks, take him away from all this. Most times, he pretended to be happy. But Bob knew that the things that haunted Marv were the same things that haunted Bob—the shitty things you did to get ahead. Those things laughed at you if your ambitions failed to amount to much; a successful man could hide his past, but an unsuccessful man spent the rest of his life trying not to drown in his.
    That afternoon, Marv was looking a hair on the mournful side, so Bob tried to cheer him up by telling him about his adventure with the dog. Marv didn’t seem too interested, but Bob kept trying as he spread ice melt in the alley and Marv smoked by the back door.
    “Make sure you get it everywhere,” Marv said. “All I need, one of those Cape Verdeans slips on the way to the Dumpster.”
    “What Cape Verdeans?”
    “The ones in the hair place.”
    “The nail place? They’re Vietnamese.”
    “Well, I don’t want ’em slipping.”
    Bob said, “You know a Nadia Dunn?”
    Marv shook his head.
    “She’s the one holding the dog.”
    Marv said, “This dog again.”
    Bob said, “Training a dog, you know? Housebreaking? It’s a lot of responsibility.”
    Cousin Marv flicked his cigarette into the alley. “It’s not like some long-lost retard relative, shows up at your door in a wheelchair with a colostomy bag,