The Drop Read Online Free Page A

called them “10” because that’s pretty much what they looked like when they stood side by side.
    Fitz had the ski masks in the backseat and the guns in the trunk. He kept the blow in the console between the two seats. Bri needed the blow. Otherwise, he’d never go near a fucking gun.
    They found an isolated spot under the expressway. From there they could see Penitentiary Park, covered in crusts of ice and rags of snow. From where they were sitting, they could even see the spot where the drive-in screen had once stood. A few years before it was torn down, a girl had been found beaten to death there, probably the neighborhood’s most famous murder. Fitz cut their lines on a glass square he’d popped out of the side-view mirror of a junker. He snorted the first bump, handed the mirror and the rolled-up fin to his brother.
    Bri snorted his bump and then didn’t even ask before he snorted the one next to it.
    “I don’t know,” Bri said, which he’d been saying so much this week Fitz was going to fucking strangle him if he kept it up. “I don’t know.”
    Fitz took the rolled-up fin and the mirror back. “It’s gonna be fine.”
    “No,” Bri said. He fiddled with his watch, which had stopped keeping time a year ago. A parting gift from their father the day he decided he didn’t want to be a father anymore. “It’s a bad fucking idea. Just bad. We should hit them for everything or not at all.”
    “My guy,” Fitz explained for maybe the fiftieth time, “wants to see we can handle our shit. Says we do it in steps. See how the owners react the first time.”
    Bri’s eyes grew wide. “They could respond real fucking bad, you nut. That’s a fucking gangsta bar. A drop bar.”
    Fitz gave him a tight smile. “That’s kinda the point. If it wasn’t a drop bar, it would never be worth the risk.”
    “No. All right?” Bri kicked the underside of the glove compartment. A child throwing a tantrum. He fiddled with the watch again, turning the band so that the face of the watch found the inside of his wrist. “No, no, no.”
    Fitz said, “No? Little brother, you got Ashley, the kids, and a fucking habit. Your car’s been nursing the same tank of gas since Thanksgiving and your watch still don’t fucking work.” He leaned across the car until his forehead touched his little brother’s. He put his hand on the back of his neck. “Say ‘no’ again.”
    Bri didn’t, of course. Instead, he did another line.
    IT WAS A BIG night, lots of Buds and lots of bets going down. Bob and Rardy handled the former. Marv took care of the itchy, and always slightly bewildered, bettors and dropped the bets into the slot in the cabinet below the register. At some point, he disappeared into the back to tally it all up, came out after the crowd had thinned considerably.
    Bob was skimming the foam off two pints of Guinness when two Chechens came through the door with their close-cropped hair, two days’ beard growth, wearing silk warm-up jackets under woolen topcoats. Marv passed them and handed off the manila envelope without breaking stride, and by the time Bob had skimmed the rest of the foam off the pints, the Chechens were gone. In and out. Like they were never there.
    An hour later, the place was empty. Bob mopped up behind the bar, Marv counted the revenue. Rardy dragged the trash out the back door into the alley. Bob squeezed the mop out in the bucket, and when he looked up there was a guy standing in the rear doorway pointing a shotgun at him.
    The thing he’d always remember about it, for the rest of his life, was the quiet. How the rest of the world was asleep—inside, outside—and all was still. And yet a man stood in the doorway with a ski mask over his head and a shotgun pointed at Bob and Marv.
    Bob dropped his mop.
    Marv, standing by one of the beer coolers, looked up. His eyes narrowed. Just below his hand was a 9mm Glock. And Bob hoped to God he wasn’t stupid enough to reach for it. That shotgun would