The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
- Автор: Грейди Джеймс, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2002
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-12494-7
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2002». Краткое содержание книги:
I stepped over and put my quarter up for the next game.
Neither one of them seemed to pay any attention to me. The biker was studying the way the table lay. He was shooting stripes, and he had two pockets safed, his balls hanging on the lip, duck shots, but in the way of her making a ball. He took a harder shot, banking one up and back, and made it. She thumped her cue on the floor, acknowledging a good call. He kept moving around the table, sinking his other six balls, and then blew the eight, slamming it too hard so it popped back out of the side pocket. The girl dropped the rest of the solids and sank the eight in a corner. She glanced over at me.
It was probably then that I made my first mistake. I’d assumed they were a couple, although the biker had a good twenty years on her. He had red hair pulled back in a shaggy ponytail, and you could see the streaks of gray in it. And he had kind of a Zapata mustache, drooping past the corners of his mouth. It showed white next to his chin. The mistake was that I spent more time on him than her. Young girl, but skinny as she was, I still should have been looking down the front of her shirt after I put my money in, the balls dropped and I racked, and she bent over the table to break. Anybody else would have.
Like a dummy I went for the target too quickly. The girl was running the table on me, and I stood back a little, just outside the edge of the light that picked out the balls on the green felt, making the colors pop. She made six balls before I got a shot, and then she left me safed behind one of her own high balls. I called a bank, made it by some miracle, and then blew a much easier shot on the four in the side. I stepped away from the table again, shrugging philosophically, and went to stand next to the redheaded biker. “Need to get my chops up, I guess,” I remarked.
“Girl plays a mean stick,” he said.
She took the eight on a long bank, back up in the corner, and he went over to the table to rack. I put another quarter up to play the winner.
The thing was, their concentration on the game wasn’t fierce at all. The girl played deliberately but not as if anything were at stake. Her pride wasn’t involved. She simply took each shot as it came and seemed to be playing more against herself than the biker. For his part, it didn’t bother him if she had the better eye and control of the cue ball with English that would have made Minnesota Fats and Fast Eddie Felton give her a second look. He wasn’t indifferent, or just humoring her, but he wasn’t threatened by it.
I was watching him bridge to make a shot when I saw the jail-house tattoo on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger: 1 %. It took me a minute to get it. One percent.
Back when Marion Brando made The Wild One and biker gangs were exotic, some square made the remark that motorcycles were ridden by family men and it was only that one percent that gave bikes a bad name. Now, anybody who’s hung out with bikers knows they can be family men, for openers, but that’s not the point.
Bikes have never lived down that outlaw image, and of course it’s part of their appeal, especially riding a big Harley instead of a rice-burner, but Red was flaunting it. The colors, the attitude. Maybe he was for real, or maybe it was all show and no go. I had a funny feeling he was profiling, trying it on for size, and trying just a little too hard.
When he missed a shot and came back to where I was standing, leaving the table to the girl, I made a clumsy remark about speed. I wasn’t trying for subtlety, mind you, but it was all too obvious what I was fishing for.
“You looking to score some flake?” He sounded almost bored with the transaction.
“Weight, not just a couple of lines,” I said.
He nodded, not bothering to look at me, still watching the girl shoot pool. “I think you mistook me for somebody else,” he said without glancing in my direction.
I shrugged. “I figured to cut out the middleman,” I told him. “McGill steps on his product because he’s trying to make up in volume what he uses himself. I’ve got motivated buyers but they don’t like being cheated, and maybe it’s time you found a new pipeline.”
“Sing a different song, bro,” he remarked edgily.
“He’ll bring you all down, you don’t jerk his leash,” I said.
He looked at me finally, losing patience. “I’m trying to shoot a game here,” he said. “You’re rubbing up too close, and it’s giving me a rash.”
“You don’t think Chip McGill’s a loose cannon?” I asked. “How come he’s trying to muscle Andy Ravenant, then? Seems like a good way to attract the wrong kind of attention.”
I had Red’s interest now, but I didn’t think I’d struck a nerve. It was more puzzled curiosity, like how’d I come up with this angle and where the hell was I going with it.
“I hear Ravenant’s defending a couple of neighborhood kids on a drug fall, but he can’t plead them out unless they agree to burn Chip,” I told him. “Think there’s anything to it?”
“What in the name of sweet Jesus Christ is your game, pal?” he asked.
“I travel in a lot of weird company,” I said. “I make connections. That’s my stock in trade, putting things together. I’m what they call a rainmaker, seeding the clouds.”
“You’re a goddamn parasite,” Red said.
“Whatever,” I said. “I’m still in the market.”
He leaned his cue against the wall. “Let’s go out back for a taste, where we can talk more private,” he said.
He went through the fire door behind him, and I followed. We were outside by the dumpster behind the building. His bike was on its kickstand there. He opened the saddlebags and felt around inside. It was still light out, the sky pearling toward dusk, the shadows long across parking lot. The girl came out through the fire door.
“Hey, darlin’,” Red said.
“Hey yourself,” she said. “I’m starting to flag.”
“Got what you need,” he said, straightening up with a small Baggie in his hand.
And that was my second mistake, if anybody’s counting, to be watching him instead of watching my back, figuring her for a crank slut out to score a free pop. She kicked me so hard in the back of the knee that I went cross-eyed from the pain as my leg collapsed, and the two of them were on top of me like a snake on soap. She jerked the .40 Smith out of my waistband at the small of my back and wedged the muzzle into the base of my skull, notching the hammer back. The oily click sounded like a twig breaking. Red pinched the bridge of my nose between his knuckles and forced my head back, the gun digging into my spinal cord. I felt dizzy and ready to throw up. The girl giggled.
“No cop with any street sense would be that obvious,” Red said, leaning down to stick his face into mine. “You take the cake for stupid, bud.”
He had that part right. Stupid was my middle name.
“I ask myself, what’s your stake in it? And what I come up with is, you’re on your own. So what’s this jive you’re giving me about Chip McGill and the lawyer? My guess is you’re running interference for somebody, so who sent you?”
My mind wasn’t working fast enough to come up with a plausible answer. They say the prospect of an imminent hanging is supposed to sharpen your faculties, but a psychopathic meth groupie holding a gun to my head had filled it with white noise.
My tank was dry, and I was sucking air.
“Now, darlin’, you best let me have that thing,” Red said. “I think you’re liable to pop a cap on this old boy afore I even have the chance to loosen his tongue.”
He might have put his thumb between the hammer and the frame as he slipped the gun away from her, but I wasn’t breathing any easier. She could have shot me by accident, or just to see which way my brains went on the pavement. Red was likely to shoot me on purpose, if I couldn’t talk him out of it.