Just blame Santa Claus
Look, I’m not going to kill myself over it.
People make mistakes all the time.
But I knew when Lenny sold that fix to Santa Claus down on 7th and 4th, we were in for a bit of trouble.
You can’t go doing things like that on Christmas Eve and expect nothing to come of it.
I told Lenny it was bad luck. And that the only thing worse was to mug a priest.
He told me to shut my mouth. He had to make a buck and if Santa Claus wanted a fix, he would sell it to him.
“It’s hard enough getting people to buy around the holidays when they don’t have spare cash, you don’t think I’m going to turn anything down?” he said.
But he must have felt the same strange feelings I felt because after that he decided to call it a day – and blamed me for being superstitious.
I might have warned him more, told him that we couldn’t defy fate. Yet I already knew it was too late.
I blamed that Santa for the nark picking up our trail a block later, a creeping shadow that gave me the shivers the minute I noticed him.
A hound would have seemed less determined, sniffing at us as if he would smell Lenny’s dope from a whole block away.
Perhaps he even saw us passing the stuff to Santa, and wanted us to make another deal so he could catch us in the act.
Finally, Lenny got smart, and pulled two crumpled paper bags out of his pockets, putting all the dope in one and all our money in the other.
He figured to dump the dope in the trash so that the cop wouldn’t find it one us. We’d take the other to the bank before the cop caught on.
I think the cop suspected something and decided to make the move and hurried after us.
But we got into the bank before he could stop us.
But as I said fate played a hand. Lenny poured out the contents of his bag to count just as the nark came through the door: fifty small packages of smack dropped onto the table. The nervous Lenny had dumped the wrong bag in the trash.
Lenny cursed and blamed me for making him nervous. I blamed Santa Claus.