Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) by William Lashner Page B

daughter her medicine, get your husband back to school, find yourself a job with benefits.”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it.”
    “And the Congressman?”
    “Don’t call him again, and don’t spill the beans you were about to spill. Not even to me. This blackmail thing is not the racket for you, Jessica. What would happen to your family if I was wearing a wire? What would happen to your daughter if you ended up in jail? This time you ran into me; next time who knows. I’ll keep the proof to keep you safe. You take the money and go home and make your life better. You’re too damn good for this.”
    “Mr. Herbert, I don’t know what to say.”
    “Don’t say anything, to anybody,” I said. “Ever.”
    She reached out one of those worked-to-the-bone hands and placed it atop mine, and for a moment there was something in her eye other than wariness. Then the envelope disappeared into her own big brown bag and she was gone. And I sipped my Scotch in satisfaction.
    And that was what the sense of possibility I had felt before was all about. Here I was taking cash from a perverted old biddy who thought the world owed her its adulation because she had married some loaded bastard who liked his stuff rough. And here I was giving it to pretty Jessica Barnes, with the scaly red hands and the sick daughter. This wasn’t any longer a blackmailing payoff to save DeMathis’s career; this was a simple redistribution of wealth from the rich to the needy, and I was Robin Hood. Here I was, finally on the side of the angels. Who could ever have imagined such an improbable thing?
    With a bag full of money, what couldn’t I achieve?
    The satisfaction was destined to drown in my throat a few hours later, but it lived in that young moment. I finished my drink, and left a tip, and left the bar, and took a shower, and put on the tuxedo Timothy had sold me a few days before, and slipped on my patent-leather slippers. And with a whistle on my lips and a song in my heart I headed out to find my rightful place in the political world at the Governor’s Ball.
    And all the while Jessica Barnes was headed for . . . Yeah, right. So much for my pallid dreams of Robin Hood. “What exactly are you?” Sloane would ask me at Jessica’s murder scene that very night. I could imagine myself a hundred ways of noble, but the answer was there for anyone willing to see it plain.
    You know what a bagman is. He’s the scurvy errand boy for some corrupt fat-faced pol. Quiet as a cat, he lugs his bag full of black cash and dirty tricks through the city night, bringing in teetering stacks of crisp bills from those lusting to do business with power, and later passing out those same crisp bills as street money to grease the electoral wheel. He is a dark, malevolent figure in a shady fedora and long leather jacket, and when he whispers in your ear you shiver, because he holds the shiv of his boss’s clout at your throat.
    I was a bareheaded lawyer, a credentialed member of the bar, lank and weedy and as threatening as a chipmunk. I was nothing like I imagined a bagman to be. But hadn’t I become an errand boy for some power-mad congressman? And hadn’t I agreed to get the goods on that congressman’s next opponent? And hadn’t I indeed carried illicit cash through the city streets in a brown leather satchel? I could frame it any way I chose, pretty it up with flowers and bows, deny it to an army of reporters, but that didn’t change the truth of things. I had fallen face-first into the worst of all rackets.
    Call me bagman.

CHAPTER 15
    COVER BOY
    T he morning after the trauma of the Governor’s Ball, still shaken from the blood and the death, I emerged from my office stairwell to find my waiting room stuffed full as a Thanksgiving turkey. It is hard to express the strangeness of such an occurrence. In the last year, physics students from Drexel University had taken to using my waiting room to examine the peculiar properties of a vacuum. And yet