it must have been a bad one. For the cops, the worst one would be if it happened to some kind of famous person. I hadn’t seen a paper for days, but I knew they’d been sitting on my place, waiting for me to come back. At least six of them, round the clock. That’s a lot of cops.
I didn’t know how long they’d been waiting, but they couldn’t have started until after I left, and that was only a few days ago.
Sending the sex-crimes cops in first, that didn’t mean anything—it could just be a hype to get me to take my eye off the ball. Misdirection, like three-card monte. They pull you in for something big, get you so scared of that charge that you drop your guard and give up something about whatever they’re really after you for.
I knew they hadn’t bagged any of the others. If they had, they’d drop their names, so I’d know they weren’t just blowing smoke. Then they’d have their magic words. Door One: one of the other guys had turned canary, put all the weight on me, trying to cut himself a deal. Door Two: here was my chance to help myself before it was too late.
Only the second pair of cops would try a move like that. The first two, the sex-crimes boys, they mostly made speeches. Or asked me stupid questions, like a TV camera was filming them. Big guy like me, all those muscles—what happened? I’d been on steroids so long I couldn’t get it up, and she’d laughed at me? I hadn’t meant to hurt her, just slap her around a little, maybe? Come on, isn’t that how it went down?
I yawned in their faces.
“Got nothing to say now, huh?” one of them had said. Like he’d just nailed me to the cross.
I wanted to ask him if that pathetic crap ever worked. What kind of chumps show you their hand first and then try to bluff you off a better one?
But I didn’t say anything. I’m a professional, not a punk with a pistol. You’ll never see my picture on a security camera sticking up a bodega. Or jacking some guy in a suit while he’s standing at an ATM.
I’m a thief, and I do clean work. I don’t hurt people for money, I don’t set fires, I don’t do any of those sicko sex things. Stuff like that, it gets spread all over: the papers, radio, TV. Gets everybody paying attention. Specially when there’s big reward money out there.
A man who does my kind of work, the only way he ever gets caught is if he goes in without a plan. Or if someone rolls over on him.
You never talk about your work, period. Too many guys walking around with heavy charges hanging over them. Anyone gets caught holding K-weight powder in this state, it’s the same as a murder beef. A street cop catches a guy holding that heavy, he can make the bust, but all that’d get him is another one of those “commendations” every cop has a couple dozen of. What he really wants is that gold shield, so he’d rather have that guy on the street, working for him. Any outlaw is going to be able to go places no undercover ever could. So all he has to do is listen long enough.
Guys like that, they’re all nothing but rats on leashes. If it wasn’t for informants, the cops would have to get damn lucky to ever make a case against a pro.
They’ll pretty much always get the amateurs—the clowns who leave a trail you could follow even with one of those white canes tapping the way.
The amateurs who stay out the longest are the ones who kill for fun. A random kill doesn’t even look like what it really is until the bodies pile up.
There’s also people who get off on being a rat. Nothing in it for them; they like doing that kind of stuff.
So it’s just as hard for people on my side of the law to sniff them out as it is for the law to sniff out a guy who does freakish stuff.
There’s even people stupid enough to rat on themselves. A pro can be smart about work and dumb about other things. Say you talk about your work to your girlfriend: all it takes is for her to get mad at you one time to put a whole crew under the jail.