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and I know you brought me here to listen, not to talk about some crackhead I met on a job.”
    “All the same, Jack,” Marcus said. “Moreno ate a bullet this morning and he deserves our respect. He was one of us to the end.”
    “The day I give a murderer like Moreno respect I’ll eat a bullet myself.”
    We were silent for a second as I studied Marcus’s face. His eyeslooked strained. There were brown rings in his coffee cup. There was no steam off the coffee. No little creamer cups, no empty sugar packets. Just crusty brown rings, and a black sludge that started about halfway down. The cup had been poured at least three hours ago. Nobody orders coffee at three in the morning.
    “What’s this about?” I asked.
    Marcus reached into his pocket and produced a wad of twenty-dollar bills the size of a paperback book, wrapped up with rubber bands. He set it on the table. “This morning,” he said, “my heist with Moreno went bad. Bodies everywhere, loot missing, feds circling sort of bad.”
    “What do you want from me?”
    “I want you to do what you do best,” he said. “I want you to make it disappear.”

3
    Five thousand dollars doesn’t look like five thousand dollars. It never does, even after you’ve counted it twice, as I’m sure Marcus had. Five grand always just looks like a stack of green paper two and a half inches wide, six inches long and eight inches high. It could be two grand, or it could be twenty. At a certain point, the brain can’t count it all fast. It just looks like a lot.
    Marcus slid the stack toward me, through the bullets.
    I looked at it. “With all due respect, Marcus, I don’t get out of bed for less than two hundred grand.”
    “This isn’t an offer, Jack. These are cash expenses. You’re going to do this for me because you still owe me. You’ve owed me for five years.”
    I couldn’t argue. I’m not even sure I wanted to.
    Marcus told me all about it. He started thirty minutes before the heist and walked me through it like he was narrating a boxing match blow by blow. There was something broken about the way he talked, as if he’d learned to speak by reading telegraphs or talking to one of those automated phone machines. It was all a series of facts to him, spoken in short bursts, with no time to breathe in the middle. He said, “I suppose you haven’t heard anything about this, considering it’s still earlyhere, but it’s all over the news out east. Four people were killed, including Moreno. The target was a big brick of bank money on its way to a casino. Easy as you can imagine. A thirty-second job. I thought even idiots like him and his partner couldn’t screw it up. They had to avoid a few cameras, put the scare on a couple armored-car guys, grab the money and drive off. Once they bounced the heat, they were supposed to head north to a self-storage facility, call me and wait it out. It was supposed to be the easiest deal in the world.”
    “But Moreno ate a bullet.” I said.
    “And I never got the call.”
    “Why were you even using Moreno? I can’t imagine his partner was that much better.”
    “They were disposable.”
    I chewed it over. “What was the take?”
    “A million and change in hundred-dollar bills. Exactly how much depended on the casino numbers. First weekend in July, first delivery of the day, it was probably looking more like a million two, million three. Enough to cover the morning cash rush from last night.”
    “How do you know Moreno got shot?”
    Marcus nodded to the television playing in the corner. “One of the robbers got shot. Guy had white skin. Moreno’s partner was black. You ever see a security photo on TV before of one of your own guys?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I’ve seen two.”
    “When did the job go down?”
    Marcus looked at his watch. Like me, he was wearing a Patek Philippe.
    He said, “Almost four hours ago, now.”
    I put my hand on the money. “You want my advice? Wait. Four hours is no time at all. Four hours