Lawyers, Guns and Money

Friday Morning, 5 August 1977 MEATPACKING DISTRICT, MANHATTAN

Kane placed the five spot on the table in the corner of the diner while he put his green, stained map case bag against the wall.

"How are the hands?" Morticia asked as she placed a cup of coffee and glass of water with two ice cubes in front of him. She's been working at Vic's Diner for sixty-two days, which sometimes seemed like an eternity to Kane, given her constant suggestions on how to upgrade the place once she'd found out Kane and Thao, the cook, owned it.

"At the end of my arms," Kane said. He held them up to prove his point, exposing the pinkish scars on his palms from the rope burns acquired in the old Nabisco Factory three and a half weeks earlier. There were also marks around his wrists from the handcuffs by which he'd initially been hung. The ring of red around his neck from where he'd subsequently been hung was almost gone. He'd had better nights.

He had a bronze Montagnard bracelet around his right wrist along with a watch on a wide green nylon band secured with Velcro and a flap covering the face so that the glowing hands couldn't be seen at night unless it was peeled back. The band was smudged and no matter of soaking or washing would get the bloodstain out, not that Kane had any desire to since it was a connection to his best friend, dead ten years.

"Still the funny man," Morticia said. "Not." Six feet tall, she sported a long black wig with a silver streak in it. She wore a tight black dress on her slim figure. It went to her ankles and when she walked, it appeared more of a glide. "The leg?"

"Healing," Kane said. "It hurts when I laugh."

"Then you're not suffering," she said.

Kane feigned mock outrage. "Hey, I tried."

"Yeah. Okay. A point." She put a folded meal ticket on the table. "From Thao, as usual. Don't you have a phone at home? Do you have a home? Or do you live in a cave?"

Without waiting for an answer, she moved on to serve a quartet of meat truck drivers entering for breakfast after their late shift delivering fresh cut to butchers in the outer boroughs. There were several ladies of the night at the end of their tour of duty eating at the counter. Thao, the cook and Montagnard who'd saved Kane's life in Vietnam, appeared out of the kitchen to top off their coffee and bring them the plates he'd just prepared.

The diner boasted new covers for the booths; red with white stripes. Kane couldn't quite recall what color the old ones had been, other than worn and torn. He didn't like the new ones; too stiff and too bright. Kane and co-owner Thao had drawn a line in the tile on one of Morticia's prime ambitions for the diner: renaming it. The faded signs facing Gansevoort and Washington, the southeast corner of which the diner was perched, would remain the same:

VIC'S DINER

GOOD FOOD!

There was a new jukebox, which didn't make sense to Kane since who wanted to listen to music in the morning? It was quiet at the moment, which proved his point. He'd drawn her attention to that several times before her glare made it a negative return on the effort.

Kane was seated in the rearmost booth, adjacent to the kitchen door. From this perch he could see the booths along this wall, the counter and through a window in the swinging door into the kitchen where Thao worked the stove. Most importantly he could survey both outer doors, one on either street.

Kane unfolded the ticket revealing a short message encrypted in two five letter blocks. Kane took the moleskin notepad out his shirt pocket. Opened it to the trigraph and ran the letters through it using the diner's sign as his and Thao's personal one-time pad.

TONIA TTENW INDOW SONTH EWORL DXXXX

Not exactly the biggest secret when and where to meet Toni and in need of encrypting. Kane sometimes wondered if Thao did it as training, since he had the trigraph memorized or to keep Kane fluent in his old Special Forces skills. He struck a match from the book next to the ashtray and burned the ticket, stirring the remnants to dust in the tray, part of his morning blocked in.