The Pariot GAme

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Authors: George V. Higgins
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forward to, I just try to scrape off all the bullshit and the fancy words he picked up in school and translate what’s left. Maybe he can get us through the summer without me having to holler for the State Police and the National Guard armor. Maybe he can’t. Maybe this thing, maybe nobody can run it. Maybe it just can’t be done, and we’ll end up admitting that we’re doing exactly what we have been doing all this time without admitting it—when a guy gets convicted of doing something serious, nobody’s figured out how to give him the proper outlook on life. So we will lock him up for a good long time with a bunch of other rats just as vicious as he is, and see if by the time he gets out he’s lost interest in raising hell. Maybe he’ll be too old to have the energy to do it again. Maybe he’ll never get to be old because somebody’ll throttle him with a piece of steel cable in the machine shop, or stick a screwdriver in his belly. Maybe he’ll throw one gob too many of his own shit at the wrong guard some night, and get pounded to death in the corridor before anyone else can come and pull the guard off him. Just admit it. Come right out and say it. ‘We don’t like it, and we know it’s no good, but then again, you’re no good and we caught you at it, so we’re going to put you inand if you’re lucky you’ll come out. If you aren’t, you won’t, but it’s your life and you made the decision to take the chance on wasting a good chunk of it this way. You lost your bet. In you go.’ ”
    “Yeah,” Riordan said, “but Magro’s apparently coming out again.”
    “It looks that way, Pete,” Walker said. “Lemme put it this way: Nobody won’t tell me for sure that he isn’t, and that usually means he is. Why’s it bother you? Guy’s a short-hitting hood. That guy he took out, David Holby? When I got wind of Magro getting ready to check out of my little fantasy island here, I pulled his folder. Holby wasn’t much, so far as I could tell. Oh, he was taking up singing, like you said, but the only guy he had a real chance of making, far as I could see, was some fence in Millis that handled mostly hot washing machines and television sets. The only thing the fence had going for him was that he did time down Cranston with some buddy of the boss, and he called up the guy and asked him for a favor and the guy was feeling generous and got it cleared.
    “Hell, it’d been a big project, they wouldn’t’ve put Magro on it. He was a thief. If he ever did any contract business before that, nobody was sure enough to put it in his file. He stole furs, and they couldn’t prove that. He was just turning an extra dollar, doing a piece of work for a guy that might be able to bail him out in the future, getting a few points. Cripes, look at the mess he made of it. The guy came home in his own car at nine-thirty at night and drove it into his own garage. Magro’s car’s parked a hundred yards up the street, where of course none of the victim’s small-town neighbors’d ever notice a strange car parked on a dead-end street in the bushes. The town cops’d already come by once and taken down the license number, while Magro was hiding in the guy’s garage and the guy’s dogs’re raising hell in the yard. The cops ran that registration number through the computer and they hadMagro’s name and home address before he ever pulled the trigger. There he is, waiting in the garage, the dogs yelling in the yard, the neighbors looking out from behind their curtains, the cops coming right back to where the car was, and the victim drives in the garage and Magro shoots him.
    “This is a professional hit man?” Walker said. “This is a guy that couldn’t spell
cat
unless you spotted him the
c
and the
a.
That victim wasn’t on the floor of the garage before Magro was practically running out and jumping into the cops’ arms. At least he showed a little sense then, four of them with their guns out. I’m surprised he

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