Deadly Greed by Joe Sharkey

Author:Joe Sharkey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

TEN

Panic

If Matt Stuart had a motto, it would have been: “No problem, man.” Amiable, laidback, usually open to suggestions for a good time or a quick buck, Matt nevertheless had learned early in life, growing up as the youngest among six children who were starting to become sick of each other in the crowded three-bedroom house on Lowe Street, that the best way to get along was to go along. If you could prosper in the process, all the better. But if there was a single major force that drove Matt, it was the impetus to keep everybody happy and off his case.

To some extent, he had succeeded at that. His friends liked him fine. Except for the few typical minor scrapes with the local cops, some of which involved behavior during drinking, he had managed to stay off the police blotter growing up in Revere. As was expected of him, he had graduated from high school, in 1984. He got a job, first in a liquor store stockroom where his brothers Michael and Mark had worked before him, then at an outdoor lighting-fixture company where he impressed people by his fearlessness in scampering up ladders to change lamps at heights that would terrify most workers, then at the paint factory in Malden where he was making $10 an hour in 1989. His employers, in jobs that required mostly the ability to show up on time and do what you were told, would describe him in roughly the same words: Good kid, no trouble. Avoiding trouble, at least to the extent of not getting caught, was something Matt did fairly well.

And now as he drove from Mission Hill like a bat out of hell, he suddenly knew that he had plenty of trouble.

Matt was no rocket scientist; he knew that as well as anyone. But he was smart enough to figure that Chuckie wasn’t paying him all that money for returning an overdue library book. He knew the deal in Mission Hill had to be big enough to be worth well over the $10,000 that was supposed to be in it for him. Chuck had described it as a lead-pipe cinch—Matt had been around the block enough times to know that nothing worth ten grand was easy—but the stricken expression he had just seen on his brother’s face had told him that whatever it was that Chuckie had going, it had gone terribly wrong.

Once on Tremont Street after the fleeting rendezvous with his brother in Mission Hill, Matt knew he had to let up on the gas pedal. No sense in attracting the attention of a cop right now, before he knew what was going on himself. He watched the red lights, the speedometer, and his turn signal. When he got back to Revere, sweating and scared, he took the bag up to his room and looked inside.

The gun, of course, was the first thing he saw.

Chuck hadn’t said anything about a gun. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know that the gun meant major trouble.

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