“I go see the guy,” Frankie said. “ ‘Look,’ I say, ‘my old man wants his teeth. He’s in fairly good shape now. Not gonna bite anybody. Where’s his teeth?’ And the guy tells me, same thing the old man tells me. ‘I dunno where his teeth are,’ he says. ‘I put the damned things inna box, and the box’s still there but the teeth’re gone. Him and Burke, they been talking about his teeth ever since he come in. I just don’t know. I don’t find them, I’ll buy him new teeth. I can’t understand it.’

“So I go back,” Frankie said. “Burke’s awake now, at least his eyes’re open, and the old man’s all pissed off, talking the best he can without his teeth, ‘Fine fuckin’ place this is, you come in here and they take your teeth, fuckin’ bastards,’ it’s all ung, ung, ung, he hasn’t got no teeth, and Burke’s sitting up straighter and straighter and finally Burke laughs. And he’s got two sets of teeth. His own, that’re his, and my old man’s. Looked like a fuckin’ man-eating shark. I thought the old man was gonna kill him. Gets his teeth back, wipes them on his sleeve, puts them in his mouth, I think the old bastard was almost sober. ‘See?’ he says. ‘See, you little shit? Make something of yourself and stay off the fuckin’ booze. See what happens to you? Get out there and make some big money and stay the fuck away from Burke. You cocksucker.’ Then he’s gonna beat up Burke.

“I tell you,” Frankie said, “I think he was right. I always thought he was right.”

“You got caught doing it, though,” Russell said, “that fat little fuck. And now you’re gonna go out and get caught again.”

“I didn’t meet you at the ball park,” Frankie said. “Keep that in mind. You’re already pushing your luck again, and you could get grabbed too.”

“For what I’m doing?” Russell said.

“Not gonna matter very much,” Frankie said. “What’ve they got over you?”

“Year and a half,” Russell said.

“Plus what they give you for doing it,” Frankie said. “And all the guys, they’ll be shitting all over you, stealing dogs, for Christ sake.”

“You know something?” Russell said. “I bet they wouldn’t. I bet they wouldn’t even violate me for that. I bet they wouldn’t. And Jesus, it’s gotta be the easiest thing a guy ever did. This morning there, we go out to Sudbury? Those silly shits. They get up and they come downstairs and they let the dog out. They don’t know what they’re doing. You sit there, I think you could park right in their yard if you wanted. They wouldn’t even see you. They let a four-hundred-dollar animal out, right out the door at you, woof, woof, woof, ‘Here, boy, here boy,’ and you wave a little meat at him. Jumps right in. You tried to go in that house and he was in there, he’d take your fuckin’ leg off, probably. But you show him eighty cents’ worth of cheap lamb chops and it takes about two minutes and you’re on your way. I got this Labrador today, beautiful dog, scoffing down the meat and drooling all over the place before they get the door shut, big tail going whump, whump, whump, happy as a pig in shit because he’s eating and he’s getting his ears rubbed. That dog loves my ass. You talk about money? It’ll be Saturday before those stupid bastards even know he’s gone, and I’ll sell him in Florida next week for two hundred without even pushing the guy. Don’t take no brains. Just the rocks.”

“Two hundred,” Frankie said. “John’s talking about ten apiece.”

“Yeah,” Russell said, “but he didn’t say, he didn’t say how we’re gonna get it, that he’s too chickenshit scared to do it himself so he wants us to do it and he just sits back there and takes his piece without doing nothing. I didn’t hear him say nothing about that. He just decided he wanted to get all pissed off because somebody might’ve used something or maybe was doing something or something.”

“If he says it’s there,” Frankie said, “it’s there. And you got to, if the guy’s worried about something, well, he doesn’t want to go and fuck it up, is all. You can’t blame a guy for that. He’s all right.”

“Yeah,” Russell said, “yeah. He’s so careful, how much’d you do the last time he got something set up for you? About sixty-eight months, am I right?”

“Five and a half,” Frankie said. “That wasn’t his fault. He did time too, don’t forget.”

“Forget nothing,” Russell said. “He was the guy that set the thing up, wasn’t he? And now he’s got another bright idea. Okay. But me and Kenny, you give me another week with Kenny and we’ll have ourselves about twenty good dogs, and I guarantee you, the coke’ll be there and I’ll be where the coke is and I’ll have the money and I am on my fuckin’ way. One month from today I got a Moto Guzzi and no shit from anybody.”

A silver train pulled in from Cambridge. The red panel on the front read: QUINCY. It blocked the view of the heavyset man as he finished removing the E in SOUTHIE and started on the E in EATS.

“So I guess you’re not coming, then,” Frankie said.

“Look,” Russell said, “go and see the guy. See if you can get him to tell you something about it. I’ll be around. You find out what it is, you’re still interested, don’t matter to me. You decide, you want to do it, it’s all right, I’m in. Without knowing. He still wants me out, I’m out. I’m not gonna waste the whole afternoon on it, though. That I’m not gonna do.”

“HE’S GETTING LAID,” Frankie said. “He said he hadda choice between coming down here and getting laid, and he decided to get laid.”

“Can’t blame a guy for that,” Amato said. “Somebody put one like that up to me today, I probably wouldn’t be here myself. So, I assume you’re still in for it, who else’re we gonna get? You think of somebody?”

“I didn’t,” Frankie said. “I don’t know, he’s still interested. He didn’t, the only reason he didn’t come down here, he said if you wanted him to come in on it, okay, he’d come in on it. And if you didn’t, okay, no hard feelings, he’s doing all right.”

Amato was silent. Then he said: “Frank, I just don’t like the guy, you know? I just don’t like him.”

“He’s all right,” Frankie said. “He comes on kind of strong when you first see him, but he’s basically all right. And he’s very, very stand-up.”

“Which, after the Doctor, we could both use,” Amato said.

“Yeah,” Frankie said. “I wouldn’t mind running into that son of a bitch some time again when I felt good.”

“I don’t think you’re gonna,” Amato said. “Nobody’s seen the Doctor for a while, the way I get it.”

“That so?” Frankie said. “I wonder where he could’ve gone.”

“Well,” Amato said, “you know, it’s hard to say. He was in San Francisco, he was in the service. He was always saying, he’d like to go back there some time. He said it was too cold, it got too cold for him around here.”

“That’s probably where he went, then,” Frankie said.

“Yeah,” Amato said. “Of course, this was Dillon, I get this from. He knows a guy.”

“Oh,” Frankie said.

“Dillon don’t look good,” Amato said. “He don’t look good at all. I was in town the other day and I saw him. He looks white, all white around the gills. I didn’t say anything to him, but he don’t look good at all.”

“Dillon’s getting old,” Frankie said.

“We all are,” Amato said. “Look at me, the way I let that little shitbird of yours get to me the other day? I never would’ve done that before. I’m yapping at the kids all the time, for Christ sake. For seven years the only time I see the little bastards’s once a month or so, and now I’m finally home and I’m giving them hell all the time. I’m always fighting with my wife. I never used to fight with my wife. I used to, she was being a big pain in the ass, I used to kind of roll with the punches, you know? Now I don’t. I’m getting old. And I swore, boy, I was in? I swore when I got out I was gonna make every minute count, the rest of my life. You ever get me some place again, I can go to sleep without some asshole shoving his dick through the bars, all right, that’s all I ask. And am I doing it? No. Of course I’m not. I’m just as big an asshole now as I was before.”