hidden by a dark curtain. He had not tasted food in three days, and his only nourishment came courtesy of a warm six-pack of Colt 45 malt liquor. He was wearing jeans that were both frayed and stained, and a Deep Purple T-shirt that had once been white as a morning cloud. The veins in his arms were swollen, jabbed full with Blackbeard, the newest and the best low-grade, crumpled-singles heroin for the habitual on-the-nod user. He kept his eyes on the undertaker, gazing out at him through a glazed-doughnut stare, watching as he worked with quiet precision on the body of a young man less than seventy-two hours dead. He tried to keep his breaths short, taking in the cool, moist air of the room through clogged and caked nostrils. Every two minutes or so, he let out a sudden shudder, sending his entire body, from felony-flyer feet to greasy hair hanging loose across his forehead and eyes, into a long, rhythmic series of low-wattage spasms.
The man gripped the knife handle as tight as he could muster and took several silent steps forward, inching closer to the undertaker as he quietly and carefully neared the end of his death ritual. The man’s every movement was fueled by the insane drive of the desperate addict to seek out the easy mark, to find the quickest route to fast cash that would pay for the next high that lay in wait. The warm needle that just ached to course its way down the glory roads of his arms and legs there, just waiting for the cash transfer and the grab. The man, James Pelfrey, was a twenty-two-year-old twice-convicted petty thief and doper, hectored and hounded by the police since he first cracked the puberty mark, who lived hand to nickel bag by pulling down small-time scores and late-night widow push-in-and-snatch jobs. He got the idea to reach for a hit against Victorino’s Funeral Home while nursing a series of cold taps at a local alehouse, his head resting against the old stone of the bar that his family had once owned and gambled away. He was doing a bent ear to the two men in cheap suits off to his left, discussing matters of money—mostly, who had it and who didn’t. That’s when he first heard mention of the small parlor nestled between a Met supermarket and Eliot’s Dry Cleaners just under the IRT number 2 elevated subway line along White Plains Road in the East Bronx. “The place is a fuckin’ gold mine,” the cheaper of the two cheap suits said. “Wives, mothers, sons, and daughters all paying out cold cash to bury a young husband or an old father. And the dead doin’ nothin’ but layin’ there, not able to breathe one fuckin’ word about their hard-earned dollars taking a fly out of their relatives’ pockets and into the clean and crisp pockets of the dago gravedigger.”
“Owning one of them funeral places is like owning a piece of a fuckin’ casino, is what I heard tell,” the other cheap suit said, his words coated with anger. “Every day, every night, some poor bastard bites the bit and his ass ends up on that fucker’s cold slab while his cash does a fast fade.”
“Somebody with a head on his shoulders and a pair as big as this room could make a move on a place like that,” the first cheap suit said, slugging down another in a steady line of shooters. “Walk himself away with a nice and sweet payday. Fuck, if I had the time and was the type who leaned in that direction, for sure as shit I’d take a jab at a hit myself. But, if truth be told, a cold room packed top to bottom with the fresh dead is more than enough to make me want to take a step back.”
“The dead can’t fuck with you,” James Pelfrey said, the words meant to be more a murmur than spoken aloud as he interjected himself into the conversation that would alter the course of his one-way life. “Seems to me the best place to go for a prime-time score would be a place where the dead outnumber the living.”
“Listen now to the doper’s words,” the second cheap suit said, raising an empty glass in
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