The Power Of The Dog by Don Winslow

anymore to do the cutting.
     
    A day later he also don’t have Jimmy Boylan or Fat Tim Healey, because Boylan is dead and Healey has just disappeared. And Kevin Kelly has found it convenient to take care of some business in Albany. Marty Stone has a sick aunt in Far Rockaway. And Tommy Dugan is on a bender.
     
    All of which leads Big Matt to suspect that there’s maybe a coup—a downright revolution—in the works.
     
    So he makes a reservation to fly down to his other home in Florida.
     
    Which would be very good news for Callan and O-Bop, except that it looks like before Matty got on the plane, he reached out to Big Paulie Calabrese, the new representante—the boss—of the Cimino Family, and called in a marker.
     
    “What do you think he gave him?” Callan asks O-Bop.
     
    “Piece of the Javits Center?” O-Bop says.
     
    Big Matt controls the construction unions and the teamsters’ unions working on the huge convention center being planned on the West Side. The Italians have been slavering after a piece of that business for a year or more. The skim off the cement contract alone is worth millions. Now Matt’s in no real position to say no, but he could reasonably expect a little favor for saying yes.
     
    Professional courtesy.
     
    Callan and O-Bop are holed up in a second-floor apartment on Forty-ninth between Tenth and Eleventh. They don’t get a lot of sleep. Lie there looking at the sky. Or what you can see of it from a rooftop in New York.
     
    “We’ve killed two guys,” O-Bop says.
     
    “Yeah.”
     
    “Self-defense, though,” O-Bop says. “I mean, we had to, right?”
     
    “Sure.”
     
    A while later O-Bop says, “I wonder if Mickey Haggerty’s gonna trade us in.”
     
    “You think?”
     
    “He’s looking at eight-to-twelve on a robbery,” O-Bop says. “He could trade up.”
     
    “No,” Callan says. “Mickey is old-school.”
     
    “Mickey could be old-school,” O-Bop says, “but he also could be tired of doing time. This is his second bit.”
     
    Callan knows that Mickey will do his time and come back to the neighborhood and want to hold his head up. And Mickey knows he won’t be able to get as much as a bowl of peanuts in any bar in the Kitchen if he rolls over to the cops.
     
    Mickey Haggerty’s the least of their worries.
     
    Which is what Callan’s thinking as he looks out the window at the Lincoln Continental parked across the street.
     
    “So we might as well get it over with,” he says to O-Bop.
     
    O-Bop’s got his head of kinky red hair under the kitchen tap, trying to get cool. Yeah, that’s gonna work—it’s a hundred and four out and they’re in a two-room apartment on the fifth floor with a fan the size of a propeller on a toy boat and the water pressure is zero because the little neighborhood bastards have opened up every fire hydrant on the street and if all that wasn’t bad enough there’s a crew from the Cimino Family out there looking to whack them.
     
    And will whack them, soon as it’s late enough for darkness to provide a curtain of decency.
     
    “What do you wanna do?” O-Bop asks. “You want to go out there blasting? Gunfight at the OK Corral?”
     
    “It would be better than baking to death up here.”
     
    “No it wouldn’t,” O-Bop says. “Up here sucks to be sure, but down there we’d be gunned down in the street like dogs.”
     
    “We have to go down sometime,” Callan says.
     
    “No we don’t,” O-Bop says. He takes his head out from under the tap and shakes the water off. “As long as they still deliver pizza, we never have to go down.”
     
    He comes over to the window and looks at the long black Lincoln parked across the street.
     
    “Fucking Italians never change,” O-Bop says. “You think they’d maybe mix in a Mercedes, a BMW, I dunno, a fuckin’ Volvo or something. Anything but these fucking Lincolns and Caddies. I’m tellin’ ya, it must be some kind of goombah rule or