Nicky’s Deal IV

By Bill Wallace





By the time Peter Boscovich ran into Ray Campos and LaVonne Walker at the Blue Door two days later, Nick was only a fading memory on Bottom Street. Word in the ‘Loin had it that he  was in Canada, or Los Angeles, or hiding out someplace in Baja. Bosco had been looking high and low, but Nicholas Dolman, former truck driver, federal prison inmate and newly minted fugitive, had seemed to vanish from the face of the earth.


Bosco slid into the booth next to Campos. “Hello, boys,” he said with a slight smile. “Hear anything from your close personal friend, Nick Dolman?”


LaVonne shook his head, while Ray just looked at Bosco glumly.


“What’s the problem?” Bosco asked him.


Campos sputtered. “That motherfucking Dolman!” he muttered, his face dark with anger.


Bosco gestured to Hank Cutter and made a little circular motion taking in Walker, Campos and himself. “Can you give us a round, here, Hank?” he called before turning back to Ray. “Okay, what happened?” he said.


Campos didn’t seem capable of speaking, he was so furious.


“The fucker’s an idiot,” LaVonne said, looking no happier than Campos, but a good deal less agitated. “He fucked both of us on that tool trailer deal.”


“Well, that’s certainly not much of a surprise,” Bosco said, working to suppress an I-told-you-so smile. “How, exactly?”


“We did just what the sonofabitch said,” Campos sputtered. “He cut the lock off the gate and we brought the tractor right in. He hooked it to the trailer and everything, and we wheeled it out of the yard. Went North on 680 and turned onto Highway 24 at Walnut Creek. It all went exactly like he said.”


Bosco looked at him curiously. “So, what happened?” he said. “How did he fuck you guys?”


Walker grinned in a way that Bosco had never seen him do before; it was more of a grimace, really. “We got the fucker back to San Francisco,” he said. “Nick didn’t have money for the bridge so I had to pay the toll.”


Bosco laughed. “Is that it?” he said. “I thought you said he fucked you. Stiffing you on bridge toll is just SOP for Nick.”


“There wasn’t nothing in there,” Campos blurted in a tone of voice that made it clear he still couldn’t believe what had happened. “It was completely empty.”


“There was nothing in where?” Bosco said impatiently. “What the fuck are you talking about?”


“The trailer was empty,” Walker said. “It was supposed to be full of all these groovy tools and shit, but there was nothing inside when we cut off the lock and opened it up. We stole a fucking empty trailer, man.”


Bosco just stared at him with his mouth open.


“Yeah,” Campos said bitterly. “Nick talked us into crewing with him on this big job, but the asshole didn’t know what he was doing. We stole a trailer that didn’t have anything inside. We did a job for nothing. We didn’t make a damned cent off of it.”


“What happened to the tools?” Bosco said, still having trouble understanding what had happened.


“I guess the guys on the job took ‘em out,” Ray said, shaking his head. “I don’t know, man. It looked like the work was just about done to me when we got there. They wasn’t no tractors or nothing around. Just these little condo deals they’d built. Hell, they even had trees in front of them and grass in the little yards.”


Cutter brought a tray with two Budweisers and a shot of Jim Beam rye, neat. Bosco put a Ben Franklin on the tray. “We’ll work on that fifty for a while, Hank,” he said. “My boys here need some cheering up. Just keep ‘em coming and let me know when you need more.”


Bosco looked at Campos. “What did Nick say when you found out the trailer was empty?” he asked.


Ray raised his shoulders. “A lot of blah-blah-blah,” he replied. “He just ran his mouth, like he always does. What the fuck could he say? Besides, we were kind of in a hurry to ditch the damn thing and get the hell away from there.”


He sighed. “He said we’d talk it over the next day,” he continued. “But then the feds came by asking me if I knew where they could find him. I called him to tell him the feds were looking for him and that was the last I heard of the motherfucker.”


LaVonne took a pull off his fresh beer. His eyes were bleak. “I don’t know when we gonna be able to pay you back, Bosco,” he said. “I guess we lucky we only ended up paying the bridge toll on this stupid fucking job.”


Bosco shrugged. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m just glad Dolman’s gone, to be honest.”


“Why’s that?” Campos said. “I wish the motherfucker was right here so I could cut his throat.”


Bosco grinned. “Look, the only reason you two guys aren’t being sweated by the FBI right now is because Nick split,” he said. “If he was still in town, the feebs would have already grabbed him. They probably wouldn’t just have you two bozos in the cooler; they probably would have picked up Eli and I by now, too.”


“You think Nick would give you up, man?” Walker asked, his expression making it clear he couldn’t imagine such a thing. “He may be a fuckup, Bosco, but he’s not a rat.”


Bosco’s grin was gone. “Oh, he’d rat all right,” he said. “The fucker is just dumb enough to think he’s smart enough to talk his way out of a federal beef. Once the feebs got him started, they’d need two stenographers working 24-7 to get down everything he said. He’d give up you guys on the tool trailer deal just for starters and then he’d give up Eli and I on the Mandragola scam. To be honest, I’ve been looking for him for the last two days to make sure the feds didn’t find him.”


He pulled back his sport coat, revealing the butt of a blue-steel automatic shoved into his waistband, then let the coat fall shut again, concealing the weapon.


“Shit, man, you serious?” LaVonne said, licking his lips, his eyes wide with concern. “I never seen you packing before. That fucking scares me.”

Campos gave LaVonne a sharp look. “Man up, partner,” he said. “I agree with Bosco. Nick would give us up in a minute.” He turned to Bosco. “You were right about Nick—we never should have trusted the bastard. But you’re going to have to wait your turn if that shithead turns up in San Francisco again, because I’ll cut his throat myself if I see him first.”



Bosco lifted his glass. “I don’t think we have to worry about it,” he said. “I warned Nick that if he fucked up on this thing, he’d have to watch out for Eli and I as well as the cops. He doesn’t want to run into you two, guys, either.”


“I’ll bet we’ve seen the last of Nicky Dolman,” he said, taking a sip and rolling the whisky around in his mouth before swallowing it. “At least, I hope so.”

The End

Nicky’s Deal III

By Bill Wallace

Like every other FBI agent who had spent more than a couple of years in the San Francisco office, Freddie St. Claire was convinced that Inspector David Ballenger was bent. He’d heard the stories about the dope raids Ballenger led in which dealers were tipped beforehand, or half the evidence or drug money disappeared.


Despite those stories, St. Claire maintained a friendly and professional relationship with the San Francisco detective. The reason: Ballenger occasionally picked up information about thefts from interstate commerce that St. Claire found extraordinarily helpful. The fact is, St. Claire would have dealt with Beelzebub himself to make a felony pinch under 18 USC Sec. 659. That’s why he was meeting Ballenger at the Night Cap, a dive bar a few blocks north of the Phil Burton Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue.


“Dave, thanks for the tip-off on that Dolman schmuck,” Freddie said as he slipped into a booth opposite the San Francisco cop. “It was gold, pure gold.”


While Ballenger listened, St. Claire told him somebody had stole the front end of a semi the day before yesterday and used it to tow a tool trailer away from a construction site in Contra Costa County last night. Ballenger smiled slightly. He had tipped the feds that Nick Dolman was looking for a tractor rig a couple of days earlier, based on information he got from Ace Jeter. He’d followed his initial report about Dolman with Jeter’s warning that Nick hadn’t been able to raise the money to hire a rig, so he was probably going to steal one.


His second call to St. Claire had been the morning of the day the semi had been stolen. It turned out to be very timely.


“If I hadn’t been the one who got your original tip,” Freddie said, tapping the side of his head with a forefinger, “we probably would have missed the connection. Fortunately, I wasn’t swamped with other bullshit when you called me.”


Ballenger’s intelligence was followed by some dumb luck: the feds had obtained good security camera video of the break-in at the construction site in Contra Costa County. In the video, the three people who opened the gate, backed a bobtail up to the trailer and pulled it out of the yard were clearly visible, wearing over-the-head masks which were supposed to conceal their identities. At least, that was the plan.


However, the disguises that were supposed to keep Dolman and his crew from being recognized were a major fail, St. Claire said. The masks, heavy-duty vinyl jobs, were made by an outfit named César and agents were able to identify them on-line. A check with the manufacturer showed there were only four shops in the Bay Area that sold them and only one of them was in San Francisco.


When the field guys showed the clerk at the San Francisco store Dolman’s Bureau of Prisons mug shot, the clerk positively identified him as the man who bought the store’s last three César masks—a Hilary Clinton and one each of Laura and George Bush. All were identical to the ones the thieves were wearing in the security video.


Toss that one into the bin marked “Stupid Criminal Tricks:” The masks led the bureau immediately back to a known felon with prior arrests for truck theft.


“So,” St. Claire said, ticking the points off on his fingers: “We had the tip from you that Dolman was planning a job he needed a tractor rig for. We had the theft of the rig in San Francisco. We had the fact that a rig like it had been used to steal a tool trailer in Contra Costa County and we knew that the bad guys who ripped off the trailer wore specific masks during the heist. Finally, we knew Dolman had bought three identical masks in San Francisco the morning of the day the trailer was hijacked.”


The topping on the cake was once again the work of Ballenger. In the same conversation that the inspector’s snitch told him Dolman was going to steal the tractor rig, he said he would probably dump both the trailer and the bobtail in Hunters Point. Ballenger passed both pieces of information along to St. Claire. And, in fact, Hunters Point was precisely where the FBI field team found both the tractor and trailer after only two hours of searching.


“So,” Ballenger said, “you pick up Dolman yet?”


St. Claire smiled, but it was a loser’s bluff. “No, but he’s as good as in cuffs,” the agent said. “We got teams out looking for him right now. We’ll have him in custody before last call at the Night Cap.”


Ballenger smiled back, but it was the smile of a cop who has seen the FBI fuck up more collars than the Arrow Shirt Company sewing team in Shanghai. Ballenger personally knew dozens of cases where the FBI had the name and address of a crook who somehow managed to disappear hours before the feds arrived. The bureau had a lot of manpower and some of its agents actually knew what they were doing; but Ballenger had long joked that the average FBI agent couldn’t find his way out of a pay toilet unless he had a memo from the director.


The FBI had what is called a “known associates” list: an up-to-date roster of everybody who knew Dolman, including their names, CI&I numbers and home addresses. All St. Clair’s people had to do was work their way down that list and brace the people whose names were on it; it was a paint-by-numbers collar that even the dumbest FBI agent could make. From the bureau’s perspective, unless he left town, the feds would find Nicky Dolman before first light.


But Ballenger knew that crooks had their own communications network and when a cop brushes against it, criminals all over the web soon know what he is up to. As he sipped the Martini the waitress had brought him, he guessed Dolman was probably already on his way out of the FBI’s grasp.

#

In fact, at the very moment St. Claire was talking to Ballenger, Nick Dolman was getting a call from Ray Campos that the feebs were looking for him on Bottom Street. Campos had it first-hand: a couple of feds had just knocked on his door to ask him if he knew where Dolman was keeping himself.


“What did they want?” Nick asked, his sphincter tightening.


“How the fuck would I know, asshole?” Campos said. “They were fucking FBI agents, not my buddies. They didn’t exactly fill me in. I was just happy they didn’t have a fucking warrant to search my place.”


“Shit,” Nick said, his throat dry. “I wonder how they knew you knew me?”


“They didn’t tell me that either, dickhead,” Campos said. “They just fucking knew, that’s all. They came right to my apartment. Hell, I don’t even have a fucking phone in the place. I have no idea how the bastards knew where I was.”


So leaving town was precisely what Nicholas T. Dolman planned to do the minute he hung up on Ray Campos. As dumb as Nicky was, he was shrewd enough to realize that the feds were looking for him because of the trailer heist. Despite his careful planning the FBI knew he was involved. And he could still remember Bosco’s warning days earlier in Lucy’s:


“If you guys fuck up, you better watch your back, because Eli and I aren’t going to end up in your shit, dig?”


Nick intended to take Bosco’s advice and watch his back; and he figured the best place to do it was somewhere as far away from Bottom Street as he could get.


Leaving town was precisely what Nick Dolman had in mind.

#

At almost the same moment the FBI knocked on Ray Campos’ door, Bosco was finding out indirectly that Nicky’s tool trailer scam had gone sour: he was sitting in the Blue Door when two FBI agents came in and asked Hank Cutter if a Nicholas Dolman had been in the joint recently.


The feds spent about ten minutes questioning Cutter about Dolman, where he lived, who he hung out with and where he worked. Cutter, of course, was cool: he appeared to be cooperating, but everything he said was doubletalk that had no actual content. If a bartender in a joint that caters to criminals was to start running his mouth to the cops, the crooks would stop going there; that would be the kiss of death for the Blue Door because nobody but crooks and the occasional lost tourist asking for directions ever set foot in the place.


Despite this, Bosco was listening to the entire session. Even though Cutter was artfully telling them nothing, Bosco knew from the questions the feds were asking that they weren’t checking up on Dolman because he had been tapped for a job in the White House. The agents reeked of major felony bust. The smell was almost as strong as a butcher shop dumpster that hasn’t been emptied for a month.


As soon as the two agents left their business cards on the bar and made their way out, Bosco went into the men’s toilet to call Eli on his cell.


“Your pal, Dolman, is in the shit, man,” he said.


“Oh, yeah?” Eli replied. “What happened?”


“Two federal cops were just in the Door asking about him,” Bosco said. “I don’t think it was a social call, either. I think he pulled that tool trailer job he talked LaVonne and Ray into, and he fucked it all up, just like I figured he would.”


“How close were the feds to catching up to him?” Eli asked.


Bosco shrugged. “I dunno. He hasn’t been in the Door for more than a week now. He’s been avoiding me since we had our little heart-to-heart about his moonlighting. If they’re asking about him at the Door, they’re working off old leads, although obviously somebody told them he hangs out there from time to time. That means we have a rat in Bottom Street.”


“Fuck,” Eli said quietly. “Are you there now?”


“Yeah,” Bosco said. “I called you as soon as I found out they were looking for him.”


“That fucking idiot,” Eli said.


“I told you he was too stupid to get out of his own way, but you brought him in, anyway,” Bosco said, needling Eli. “You love all these dumb fucks that have their heads up their asses so far they shit ear wax.”


“ ‘I think he’s funny,’ you said when I asked you why you kept the numb nuts around,” Bosco added, quoting Eli in a nasal, high-pitched voice that was intended to irritate him even more. “I guarantee you that if the feds catch up to Dolman, you won’t find him so damned amusing because we’re all going to end up in the toilet with him.”


“I get the point, Peter,” Eli said coldly, using Bosco’s full first name to show he didn’t appreciate being lectured or having his chain pulled. “We have to make sure they don’t catch up to him then, don’t we? Can you find the motherfucker?”


“I did before,” Bosco said. “He won’t go back to Lucy’s though. He knows that I would look for him there. I’ll have to ask around, see if any of the guys know where he is.”


“Do it,” Eli said. “We have to get the stupid bastard out of the picture for a while.”


Bosco’s smile lacked even a trace of humor: “If I find him, he’s going to be out of the picture permanently.”

(Continued in Nicky's Deal III)

Nicky’s Deal II

By Bill Wallace



Ace Jeter, the pimp who ran two crack whores up on Jones Street, struggled to keep from yawning in Nick Dolman’s face while Nick whined about how he had wasted four weeks trying to raise the cash to rent the tractor rig he needed for his tool trailer caper.


“I even tried to borrow some money from that Chinaman in Oakland,” Dolman was saying over coffee in the American Café on Bottom. “You know: Chan, the guy who fences that office shit? I figured his outfit would be a good place to fence this stuff I’m planning to steal. But you know what the fucker told me?”


Ace didn’t know and didn’t much care, either. He raised his shoulders in a noncommittal shrug, not because he gave a damn but just to show he was listening.


“No, what’d he say, Nick?” Jeter said, struggling to summon up some interest.


“ ‘I don’t sink so,’ ” Nick said in a sing-song voice, squinching up his eyes to make a face he probably thought looked oriental. “Fucking slope-head. Nobody wants to give a poor white man a break these days.”


Jeter, who was black, didn’t respond. He knew that Nick had “issues” with just about everybody in the world who was a different race, gender, sexual orientation or religion from him. Nick’s biggest “issue,” so far as Jeter was concerned, was that he was a racist fuck-up who probably didn’t have a single real friend in the city and county of San Francisco. Jeter couldn’t figure out why Eli Jones even allowed the sorry son-of-a-bitch to hang around. The only reason most of the Bottom Street guys put up with Nick was because Jones seemed to actually like him. That baffled Jeter, who considered Dolman to be a lying sack of shit.


His comment about Titus Chan was a good example: Jeter had met Titus on one or two occasions and Chan didn’t have any kind of an accent at all, let alone one of those sing-song jobs Nick had mimicked while supposedly quoting him. Chan talked like somebody from the Midwest who had gone to college; that was probably because he was born and raised in Chicago, the son of a Methodist minister, and graduated from the city’s university with a major in English and a minor in business administration.


“Yeah, it’s a tough world for a po’ white boy,” Jeter said drily, putting the emphasis on “white.” “So what you going to do?”


Dolman looked at him suspiciously. “What do you mean, what am I going to do?” he said, as if he thought Jeter was trying to trick him into saying something embarrassing.


Jeter sighed. Not only was Dolman a liar, but he was also dumber than the evening lineup on Fox News.


“Well, man, you need the motherfucking truck, but nobody’s spottin’ you the motherfucking money, dig?” he said. “So what you gonna do?”


Nick snorted. “I’ll probably end up stealing the damned thing, that’s what,” he said, although the idea didn’t hold much appeal: he had just finished one jolt in the federal slam for stealing a truck and he hoped to avoid a return engagement; still, he couldn’t think of any other way to get what he needed for the job. And he wanted to do this job real bad.


Jeter smiled. “How you going to get rid of the son-of-a-bitch once you done with it?”


Nick gave it some thought.


“I’ll probably just park it down at Hunters Point,” he answered finally. “The kids down in the projects there will strip it right to the frame in a few hours.”


“Good plan,” Ace said. “Now you using your head, man. Well, Nick, I gotta split. Gotta go make sure my girls are working, not just standing on the corner smoking cigarettes and shooting the shit.”


He left Nick nursing his various grudges against the world and made a bee-line for the only working pay telephone within six blocks of Bottom Street. He needed to make a call to his close friend, San Francisco Police Inspector David P. Ballenger. Jeter had been looking for a way to fuck Dolman ever since he met the guy and he figured Nicky had just given him the information he needed to do the job.

#

When he got up, Jeter left a five on the table to cover his coffee and leave a tip. Nick pocketed Jeter’s Lincoln, counted out exactly enough pocket change to cover the tab, gulped the last of his ice-cold coffee and practically ran out of the café.


Talking with Ace had made him antsy to get on with the job, as if he had suddenly realized that while he had been piddling around trying to line up a truck legitimately, the construction crew building those townhouses near Concord was finishing work on the project. If he didn’t go for that tool trailer soon, he was going to let the opportunity to run his own game get away from him. He decided he needed to bag a bobtail ASAP as quickly as possible and he figured the best place to find one was on Barneveldt, down in the old warehouse district south of Army, the street the yuppies at city hall had renamed for Cesar Chavez.


Dolman had once been a line truck driver working point-to-point freight runs for big outfits like P.I.E. and Consolidated. He’d carried a card in the Teamsters, earned scale, enjoyed paid holidays and days off, and had a shot at eventual retirement courtesy of the union’s big pension fund. But like most serious crooks, Nick was too lazy and shiftless to actually work for a living; being a thief was a lot more to his liking.


Not that his years as a union workingman had been totally wasted: Dolman had learned how to steal trucks during his Teamster days. In fact, he had clocked more hours whacking shipments from 18-wheelers than he had driving the damned things; half of the cargo he had stolen had been drive-away jobs where he backed a tractor up to a trailer full of freight, hitched up and wheeled it away.


He took the Third Street light rail to Chavez, got off and walked west toward the Mission District, keeping an eye peeled for a likely rig parked on one of the side streets. About three blocks from Bayshore, he saw what he was looking for: a big Cummins cab-over with no trailer, parked on the sidewalk in an area that appeared completely abandoned.


Nick was a little rusty so it took him three minutes with lock picks to open the passenger side door and another four working on the truck’s wiring before he had cold black smoke pouring out of the stacks while the diesel fired up. Driving a big rig away from a cold start in less than ten minutes is pretty good, but what really pleased Nick was that he managed to whack the truck without ever seeing another soul in the area.


He would have to stash the bobtail while he scammed some supplies and contacted LaVonne and Ray, but by tomorrow night, they would be ready to tow that tool trailer back to the city where they could find somebody to take the goodies inside off their hands.


“Piece of cake, just like I said,” Nick grinned to himself as he drove the truck back to the Tenderloin.

#

Ray was okay with the mask Nicky provided for him but LaVonne Walker wasn’t happy. He looked at the pullover vinyl hood with distaste. “How come I gotta wear this Hillary Clinton face?” he asked in a tone of voice that bordered on a whine.


“I told you, man,” Nicky said impatiently, “They got security cameras out there on this job site. We break in and haul that trailer off without a disguise, we’re going to have cops on our doorstep tomorrow morning.”


“Yeah, I understood that part, dumbass,” LaVonne said hotly. “What I want to know is why I gotta wear a mask of a chick?”


The vein on Nick’s temple stood out like it was going to blow any minute. “I got the last three fucking masks they had in the costume shop, dipshit,” he said angrily. “All they had was that George Bush I gave Ray and this Laura Bush one I’m going to wear.”


“Well, I don’t want to wear no chick face,” LaVonne said, sulking. “That’s too fucking gay, man. People will think I’m a fucking faggot.”


“Give me the Clinton mask, LaVonne,” Ray said with a sigh. “I’ll wear the son-of-a-bitch. It don’t make no difference anyway, man. Nobody that knows us is going to see us wearing them.”


“Yeah,” Nick chimed in. “I take all three of the fuckers after the job and burn them. Nobody’s going to know you wore a mask at all, except the people who look at the security videos, and they aren’t going to know who you are. They’re just going to know you’re part of the crew that ripped off the tool trailer.”


LaVonne was somewhat mollified by Ray’s offer but not entirely. “I don’t see why any of us should have to wear one of these,” he sniffed, still upset. “Why couldn’t we just pull a nylon over our heads?”


Nick narrowed his eyes shrewdly. “Because then the security people would know we were two white guys . . . and an African American,” he said, nearly using the word “nigger,” but stopping himself just in time to avoid pissing LaVonne off.


LaVonne looked at him with disgust. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That going to narrow down the field of suspects a whole bunch. Two white guys and a black man. Probably only be something like three, four million people in the Bay Area alone that going to fit that description.” He spat on the ground to show how little he thought of Nick’s reasoning.


“C’mon, give it,” Ray said, handing LaVonne the George Bush face. LaVonne turned over his Hillary mask with a final look of distaste and pulled the Bush hood over his head.


“Phew!” he said. “These motherfuckers stink, man!”


Nick pulled his Laura Bush face on. “Yeah, they do smell bad, don’t they?” he said. “Must be the damn plastic they’re made out of.”


Ray tried his Clinton mask on. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice muffled by the mask. “If we put them on just before we open the gate and then take them off after we haul the trailer out of the damn yard, we’ll probably only have to wear them for about ten or fifteen minutes. I can handle that,”


“You look pretty hot for a Republican chick, Nick,” LaVonne said to Dolman, who was finding the stiff plastic of the Laura Bush mask more uncomfortable that he had expected. “I always thought you were a good-looking woman, even if your husband was a stone dumbass.”


Nick stripped off the mask, his face burning with embarrassment. “Yeah, well fuck you, George,” he sneered at LaVonne.


“Watch out, George,” Campos laughed inside the Clinton mask. “Laura going to cut you off tonight. No pussy for you!”


LaVonne laughed, pulling off the mask of the president. The last of his resentment seemed to have evaporated. “Okay, I guess this is alright,” he said. “So what time we doing this job tonight?”


Nick looked at his watch. “Let’s hook up at the American Café around eight,” he said. “It’ll be good and dark by then. We’ll take the bobtail over to the site, cut the chain on the gate and wheel that fucking trailer out. Let’s wait until we get it back over here to open her up and take out the tools. Then we can ditch the trailer over in Hunters Point. We park it on one of the streets down below those projects on Potrero Hill? Shit, the kids who live up there will strip both of them clean by morning.”


Campos was wiping his face with a handkerchief. “Those things make you sweat man,” he said. “Let’s do this one fast, guys. I don’t want to wear that fucking mask any longer than I have to. To be honest, those things creep me out.”

(Continued in Nicky's Deal III)

Nicky's Deal I

By Bill Wallace


Nicky Dolman might have been stupider than a bedful of cracker crumbs but his lack of mental horsepower didn’t keep him from being ambitious. He wanted to call his own shots so when he cooked up the tool trailer job he pulled in Ray Campos and LaVonne Walker but didn’t say a word to Eli or Bosco, the actual leaders of the Bottom Street crew.


“It can’t miss,” Nick said as he bought Ray and LaVonne drinks at the Blue Door. “We just pull the bobtail up to this trailer, hook her up and wheel her out. Piece of fucking cake.”


“How do we get in where this trailer at?” LaVonne asked. He thought the basic plan had promise, but he was automatically skeptical of anything Dolman said. Nick Dolman couldn’t find his way out of a phone booth with a roadmap and a compass so if he was pitching a moneymaking scheme, LaVonne figured it was a good time to keep his hand on his billfold.


“LaVonne’s got a point, Nick,” Campos said. “You said this trailer full of power tools is behind a cyclone fence that’s chained and padlocked. How do we get inside?”


Nick sighed. He hated to let LaVonne and Ray in, but they were the only guys lower on the Bottom Street food chain than him. Even Bagwell, the college kid that scammed office equipment by pretending to be a repairman, got more props than Nick, Ray or LaVonne—and Bags wasn’t even part of the crew.


“Look guys,” he said patiently. “It’s a trailer full of construction tools: power saws, drills, what they use to build stuff. It’s inside a fence where they’ve been putting up all those new condos this side of Concord. The fence just has a chain locked on the gate. I got a bolt cutter that’ll get through it in a New York minute. We go in, hook the trailer up to the truck, then rock and roll.”


He spread his hands, palms up, to show how easy it would be. “That’s all there is to it,” he said confidently.


LaVonne was still skeptical. “Man, I don’t know,” he said. “What you think these tools are worth?”


Nick was ready for that one. He pulled out a newspaper ad for a discount tool outlet in Newark, south of Oakland, and stood up to point out various items to Ray and LaVonne.


“This is a cut-rate outfit that sells a lot of cheap gear,” he said. “But even they are charging like $50 for a good power drill, $65 for this saw here, and look at this compressor—they’re asking nearly two grand for it!”


“What the fuck’s a compressor?” LaVonne asked, furrowing his brow. “How you use something like that on a construction job?”


“How the hell would I know?” Nick asked angrily. “Do I look like a construction expert?”


“Hey, guys, let’s be nice,” Campos said soothingly. “What’s this thing here?” he added, pointing at one of the devices on the cluttered advertisement.


Nick sat back down with a grin. “One of them boxes you can roll around with drawers for putting tools in,” he said. “They want 250 bucks for the son-of-a-bitch. Man, I’m telling you guys, this is gonna be like taking off a bank, only without guards or dye-pack. We can probably sell all this shit to that Chinaman in Oakland, the guy who loaned Eli and Bosco all the stuff for that big office scam they ran.”


“Mr. Chan?” Campos said. “I’m not sure he fences this blue collar junk. I don’t remember anything but office stuff in that big warehouse of his.”


Nick shrugged to show indifference. “If he don’t want it, he can probably tell us where to unload it,” he said.


“It best be someplace where they don’t care how old stuff is,” LaVonne said sarcastically. “I hear Chan pay top dollar for the shit he buy but he want it like fresh off the showroom floor. This stuff you talking about going to be hella rasty and beat up, man: tools people been using on they jobs, with all kinda dings and scratches and dirt. Even if we can unload power tools onto Chan, he ain’t going to want no funky old bullshit that’s past its prime.”


Dumb fucking nigger, Nick thought. You think you’re so smart with all your questions and bullshit. He didn’t say it, though. He really needed a crew for this job, not just for practical reasons but because he wouldn’t be a real shot-caller unless there was somebody there to follow his orders. He couldn’t afford to alienate the only two crooks he had done any business with since he got out of the federal slammer. So instead of telling LaVonne to fuck himself, which would blow the whole deal, he decided to play it cagy.


“Hey, if you don’t like the job, that’s fine with me,” he said, raising his hands, palms out. “I’m sure I can line up some other guys who are interested in easy money.” He drained his beer and stood up to leave.


“Hey, now—wait a minute,” Ray said, giving Nick the stop sign. “Don’t be so hasty.” Turning to LaVonne he added: “Come on, man, we could use some dough. I already blew what we got from Eli and Bosco for breaking down that office after the start-up scam. I got rent due and I can’t sweet-talk my landlady again. I gotta score some cash pretty soon or she’ll throw my ass out on the street.”


LaVonne rolled his eyes in exasperation but Nick knew he would cave; Walker didn’t like Dolman but he was sitting here drinking his beer and tolerating his company. Nick could think of only one plausible reason: he was just as broke as Campos.


“Aight,” LaVonne said finally. “I’m in, but this seem like a fucked-up deal to me.” He nodded at Dolman. “I don’t think Professor Moriarty here thought this job through too well and I bet something going to come back and bite us in the ass down the road. But I’ll play—until the shit hit the fan. Then I’m out of here so fucking fast it make your head spin.”


Nick grinned triumphantly.


“So, when we going to bag this trailer?” Campos asked, taking a sip of beer.


Nick’s face clouded. “Uh, any time now,” he said.


“How about tomorrow?” LaVonne asked.


Nick shook his head. “No, we can’t do it tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll have to pick a time and then get back to you both and let you know what it is.”


“Hey, a few minutes ago you were about to look for some other partners because we were taking too long making up our minds,” Ray said with a sharp edge to his voice. “You were the one in a big hurry. Why can’t you pick a time right now?”


“Well,” Nick said, blushing, “I have a little problem that is keeping us from doing it right away.”


“What’s that?”


Nick swallowed hard. “The truck,” he said. “I haven’t found the bobtail we need to pull the trailer.”

#

Bosco ran into Ray and LaVonne in the Blue Door, drinking on a tab. He could tell they had both already managed to go through the money they had picked up in the Mandragola Ventures scam. It was the same every time a Bottom Street guy scored: he just didn’t seem to be able to get rid of the cash fast enough.


Bosco ordered a straight rye from Ronnie Pervez, the Door’s owner. Sipping it, he joined Campos and Walker at their table.


“You’ll never guess what I just saw,” he said as he sat down, grinning and shaking his head with an expression of amused exasperation.


“A UFO full of them little green guys?” LaVonne said. “Shit, I dunno. What?”


Bosco hooked a thumb toward the door. “On the other side of the street, there’s this Mexican-looking guy, maybe middle-eastern but I’m guessing Hispanic,” he said.


“Maybe he just has a good tan,” Campos said with a tight smile. His father and uncle were rapoñeros—pickpockets from Colombia who had come to the U.S. to ply their trade on the gringos at LAX. Both eventually were deported, but not before Ray's father had met and married a Mexican woman and sired little Ray. The woman, who was also an illegal, was deported 18 years later, but by then Raimundo Elizondo Campos—his U.S. citizenship a happy accident of birth—had already acquired a lengthy juvenile rap sheet and was doing a stint in the California Youth Authority.


Because of his background, Ray was a little sensitive to perceived slights against Latinos.


“Could be,” Bosco said, mulling it over. “He also could have been a Jewish brain surgeon moonlighting by doing yard work. The fact is, where he came from isn’t really part of this story. You want to hear it?”


Ray lifted his beer bottle in a gesture for Bosco to continue.


“Anyway, he’s got this leaf blower and it’s all cranked up, you see?” Bosco said. “He’s blowing all the leaves from the far side of the street over to this side.”


Campos shrugged. “Probably hired by Connaughey over at the funeral home,” he said. “That guy’s a fucking neat freak.”


Bosco held up his hand to indicate he wasn’t done. “Over on this side of the street there’s another Mexican-looking guy with a leaf blower,” he said. “And he’s blowing all the leaves from his side over to the other side.”


LaVonne looked puzzled. “These motherfuckers blowing leaves onto each other or what?” he asked, struggling to visualize the scene.


Bosco shook his head. “No,” he said. “One is up at the far corner, by Jones, and one is down near Leavenworth, at the other end. But they’re working their way toward each other. I couldn’t help but wonder what was going to happen when they do meet up in the middle.”


Ray chuckled. “I’m glad you told me that story and not that sick fuck Dolman,” he said. “He’d spend the rest of the day yammering about dumb Mexicans.”


LaVonne laughed. “Not while you around, Ray,” he said. “He never talk shit about a group of people while any of them nearby.”


Campos looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”


“What he means is you’re a Latino, so Nick won’t run Mexicans down as long as you can hear him,” Bosco said. “Nick never pisses on a particular type of person so long as a member of that specific group is nearby. You remember when he was going on and on about the hot air blower the other night?”


Ray nodded.


“It was rag-head this and sand-monkey that,” Bosco said. “But whenever Ronnie over there walked by, he stopped running his mouth.”


"What's your point?" Ray asked.


Bosco shrugged. "Ronnie is Persian," he said. "Nick isn't going to talk shit about Iranians someplace where one might hear him—particularly not one who can refuse to let the cheap bastard run a tab."


Ray considered this. “I guess I never noticed that before,” he said slowly as he mulled it over. “Now that you mention it, he’s always ranting about niggers when we’re alone together, but not when LaVonne or Eli or Bags is around. And I can’t remember him ever saying anything bad about Latinos when I was with him.”


LaVonne laughed again, clearly enjoying Ray’s reaction to this revelation. “Yeah, but you leave to take a shit, man, and he’s all over spics and wetbacks and motherfucking chili chokers,” he said. “I know. I been there when it happen.”


“Why’s he do that?” Ray asked with a puzzled look on his face.


“Dolman is a person of color himself,” LaVonne said with a smile. “His color’s yellow. He got a big-ass stripe of it from the back of his head to the crack of his ass.”


Bosco shook his head. “I don’t think he does it ‘cause he’s chickenshit,” he said. “I think he does it because he’s shrewd. He doesn’t want to piss anybody off that he might be able to get something from. If he’s nice to you, buys you a drink or something? That’s ‘cause he wants something from you.”


Ray and LaVonne looked at each other. LaVonne grinned broadly as a light bulb finally went off in Ray’s head.


“That must have been the reason he bought us all those drinks the other day,” Ray said. “He wanted us to work with him on that tool trailer deal.”


Bosco frowned. “What tool trailer deal?” he asked.


“We wasn’t supposed to say nothing to you or Eli about it,” LaVonne said. “Nick found this construction job where they got a trailer full of construction shit he gonna light finger. He cut Ray ‘n’ me in on his scam. I think he was gettin’ off on having his own crew for a job.”


“What do you mean construction shit? You mean like tractors and all that bop?” Bosco asked.


“Naw,” Ray said. “This is all small stuff. Drills, and electric saws and things that you can store inside a trailer on a construction site.”


Bosco considered this. “What exactly does Nick have in mind?”


“He’s going to try and find one of those front ends from a trailer-tractor rig,” Campos said. “He wants to cut the chain on the gate, drive the truck inside, hook up to the trailer and haul it away. He’ll stash the trailer someplace safe, go through all the shit inside and fence the goods.”


The scheme would only sound like it had possibilities to a knucklehead like Dolman, Bosco thought. Where in hell could you temporarily stash a trailer full of construction tools without having somebody report it? Where would you get rid of the damned trailer after you cleaned out anything valuable inside? And who would buy that kind of stuff? There were all kinds of hot goods dealers in San Francisco but Bosco didn’t know any that specialized in small pieces of construction equipment. You’d probably have to cart the swag all over town, going from one pawn shop to another to unload it.


Nick’s scheme has more holes in it than a cheese grater, Bosco thought.


“So are you guys in on this deal?” Bosco asked.


LaVonne sighed. “Man, we know Nick is a moron, but we both need work,” he said. “You and Eli don’t have anything for us and we got to do something. Only I got a bad feeling about this deal. It smells like it going to blow up in our face.”


“Yeah,” Ray said. “Nick could fuck up a wet dream. If he’s setting this up, there’s bound to be a hole in it big enough to stash this trailer he wants to steal. What do you think, Bosco? Should we tell Nick to pack sand or what?”


Bosco shrugged. “You’re both big boys now, you have to figure this one out for yourself,” he said. “It will probably be a couple of months before Eli and I run another number, so you’re right about us not having any work for you right now. I could loan you both some cash, but I have to hoard part of the take from Mandragola as start-up for our next scam, so it probably wouldn’t be that much.”


He smiled. “Besides, the way you two assholes spend money, it wouldn’t go very far anyway.”


“I think I’m going to go with Nick on this deal then,” said LaVonne. "I hate to do it, but money talks and bullshit walks. And I ain’t walkin’ bro."


“Yeah, me too,” said Ray. “If it ends up being FUBAR, that’s the breaks. I can’t go back to working the dip at Pier 39 and Hallidie Plaza. The cops all know me too well there and the merchants, too. First pocket I pick, I’m violated and going back to Corcoran. I still got parole conditions from that 211 that earned me a six-year stretch there.”


“Well, fuck,” Bosco said, lifting his glass in a weak salute. “I guess that’s it then. I hope it goes well for you guys and that you make a big score. I hope it all works out for the best.”

#

The more Bosco thought about it, the more it ticked him off. Nick was one of Eli’s hires and Bosco considered him a charity case. He was too dumb to use in a big con, even for a walk-on part. The only thing he was really worth a damn for was loading the truck when the game was over and they were breaking the scam down, like at Mandragola. And Bosco wasn’t even sure Nick was any good at cleaning up the site. Now he wondered if the dumb bastard had left a bunch of fingerprints on something or spread his own DNA all over the scene.


“What an asshole,” he muttered angrily as he nursed his Jim Beam Rye.


The best that could come of Nick’s scheme was a bunch of second-hand boodle that nobody would take off the stupid bastard’s hands. There probably wasn’t going to be much profit, even if he had good luck moving the swag, but that was a relatively minor downside. The real problem was that the scheme could end up getting Nick and his partners arrested: they had to find some way to ditch the trailer they stole; the vehicle they used to haul it away could be traced. The cops would eventually track them down and each guy from the crew who got grabbed was a potential rat. That meant Bosco and Eli got exposure from Nick’s caper, even though neither had anything to do with it.


“Stupid fucking asshole,” he said, angrier than before.


This was all Eli’s fault. All the dumb fucks they worked with had been recruited by Eli: Dolman, Campos, Walker and that dipshit Carnahan who got grabbed by the cops sticking up an Arab liquor store and was doing 25-to-life on his third strike. None of them were worth the powder to blow them to hell.


The brainy people—like Bagwell if he’d ever take the bait and join the crew, and Carole Peterson, the chick that had done such a beautiful job in the psychic number they had run two years back, were Bosco’s hires. He sighed. Too bad Carole got married and moved out to Walnut Creek. She'd been smart and really quick on her feet. She probably had two kids, a Volvo station wagon and 80 pounds of extra flab by now. Even so, she could still out hustle Dolman, who had the IQ of a jar of oysters.


Bosco had once raised the issue with Eli but got no satisfaction.


"Dolman is an idiot," he'd said. "Why do you keep that dipshit in the crew?"


Eli just gave him that smirk that irritated people and used his forefinger to pet his little soul patch. "I know he's not the sharpest knife in the kitchen, but the guy is funny," he said.


"I got an aunt that's funny like Nicky Dolman," Bosco replied with disgust. "She's up in the Q ward at Napa because she jammed a pair of scissors through my uncle's left eye. Someday Nick is going to fuck us all, wait and see."


Bosco drained his glass and ordered a second. It looked like that someday was now. He was going to have to have a heart-to-heart with Nicky Dolman, and really soon.

#

Soon ended up being a little after 3 p.m. the next day. Nick hadn’t been around Bottom Street since LaVonne and Ray bought into his trailer heist so Bosco went looking for him. With a word here and there, he learned Dolman had been hanging out at Lucy’s, a dive a couple of blocks from the Hall of Justice. That made sense, Bosco reasoned: the son-of-a-bitch spent so much time in the county lock-up he probably hated to wander far from his home away from home.


Nick was just starting his second beer and looking at the funnies in the afternoon paper when Bosco walked through the door, crossed the room and spun a chair around to sit down across from him with his arms on its back.


“Nick,” he said quietly. “You’d be amazed at the shit you hear sometimes. Somebody told me you were going solo on us.”


Dolman almost choked on his beer. “Who the fuck told you that bullshit,” he sputtered, wondering how Bosco knew where he was and how he had found out about the trailer deal.


“A little bird,” Bosco said with a humorless smile. “Is it true? You running your own game now?”


Dolman’s flushed with embarrassment. “No!” he said. “I just had a little job I stumbled onto that I wanted to do by myself, that’s all.”


“You planning to go solo regular, man?” Bosco demanded.


“No, honest,” Dolman said, shaking his head frantically.


“Because if that’s what you want, I can understand,” Bosco said, ignoring his response. “Sometimes a guy wants to spread his wings a little, be his own boss, you know?”


“No,” Nicky blurted before realizing he was giving the wrong answer. “I mean, yeah, I understand what you’re saying, Bosco,” he added, correcting himself.


Bosco stared at him. “A little free-lance piece, huh? I hear you got Ray and LaVonne in it with you, so you aren’t exactly doing it by ‘yourself,’ are you?” he added, using his fingers to make imaginary quotation marks in the air around the word “yourself.”


Nicky had the look of an animal in a spotlight. “Well, yeah,” he said, licking his lips. “They were between jobs. I didn’t figure you or Eli would care or I would have mentioned it to you.”


“Why would we be interested, Nick?” Bosco said. “I mean, you guys are all adults, right? You’re big enough to make decisions for yourself. You don’t need me and Eli hanging over you and telling you what to do, do you?”


“No,” Nick said, then didn’t like the way it sounded. “I mean, yeah, we’re grown-ups. But it isn’t like I was cutting you loose or anything.”


“I mean it’s really none of our business, is it Nick?” Bosco added.


“No. I mean yes,” Dolman said weakly. He was now completely confused about what question he was actually answering—or whether Bosco had asked a question he was supposed to answer in the first place. Sweat was beading on his forehead and he could feel it well up in his armpits and trickle down his sides.


He had never been afraid of Bosco or Eli before; they were just con men, not hard guys like that mob hit man he had met at the federal joint in Dublin. But there was something in Bosco’s manner today that reminded him of the hit man. Nicky was beginning to wish he had never thought about that tool trailer job.


“But it would be our business if you fucked it up so much that one or more of you assholes got busted, wouldn’t it?” Bosco said, lowering his voice so Dolman had to lean forward to hear what he was saying. “It would definitely be our business, because if any of you guys go inside, you become a threat to Eli and me.”


Nick said nothing. He was trembling so much that he looked like one of those dolls with the big heads they give away at the ballpark.


Bosco leaned forward himself and poked Dolman in the chest with his forefinger. “You go ahead and do this solo number, Nick,” he said, lowering his voice even more. “But if you guys fuck up, you better watch your back, because Eli and I aren’t going to end up in your shit, dig? Not now. Not ever.”


Without another word, Bosco stood, turned and walked out of the bar. Nick sat there for several minutes, still shaking. When he finally got up, he went directly to the bathroom, leaving a little puddle on the seat of his chair.

(Continued in Nicky's Deal II)