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
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Lewis loosened up then and joined in the laughter, although normally he was not the laughing type. He tried never to show any emotion; he did not consider emotion appropriate for a gambler. But with these two men, it did not seem unfitting in any way. Despite the conspicuous differences among the three of them, along with the fact that it had taken them more than two months to even say “Good morning” in the waiting room, Lewis now began to feel at ease with them and sensed that each one of them felt the same with him and with each other. All of a sudden, it seemed as if they had been friends for a long time.
When their laughter subsided, and before they could order more beer, Lewis began to feel sick and said he had better leave; he needed to be back in his apartment before the intense nausea hit him. Hoxie said he would leave, too, since his own nausea was imminent. Potts decided he would leave with them, saying, “No sense in drinking it if you can’t taste it.”
It was then that Potts suggested that they meet there again Saturday afternoon to have a few pitchers and watch the Bears game on the bar’s big-screen TV. Lewis and Hoxie, to their mutual surprise, readily agreed to the plan.
On his way home on the bus, with the numbers and odds and calculations in his mind beginning to spin about from the buzz of the beer, Lewis inexplicably blocked them out and again began thinking of Alan Lampley. Lewis had thought it was bad to have to spend the last months of his life in cold and dirty Chicago, but what must it be like to have to spend them locked in a prison cell?
The three of them began to meet at the bar several times a week: Wednesday nights before their treatment; Thursday afternoons following treatment; Monday evenings to watch a preseason Bulls game. They began to talk about Alan Lampley. Casually, at first, wistfully.
“Too bad that boy can’t join us for beers,” Potts said at one point.
“Yeah,” said Lewis. “Hell, big spenders like us, we’d even buy for the guards.”
Another time, Hoxie said, out of the blue, “Damn shame, kid that young having to deal with cancer and prison.”
“Yeah, it ain’t like he killed some upright citizen,” said Lewis. “All’s he done was ice a drug dealer.”
“It ain’t right,” said Hoxie.
“They call that justice?” Potts demanded.
“Don’t confuse justice with the law,” Lewis said sagely. “Them’s two different things.”
On Thursdays now, when the guards brought Alan in, the three began bobbing their chins at him, nodding, giving him a wink. Potts even stood up one day to talk to him, but one of the guards got between them and said to Alan, “Just keep moving, Lampley.” To Potts, the other guard said, “Sorry, the prisoner isn’t allowed to talk to anyone except medical personnel.”
But they knew that Alan had recognized their overtures of friendliness, understanding, even commiseration, because he began to nod back their greetings, and even grin a little. The little signals they passed to him seemed to say: You’re not alone.
In the bar, the three new friends, after a pitcher or two, began to daydream of helping Alan. “If I was to win me the lottery,” Potts said, “you know what I’d do with part of it? I’d hire the bes’ damn criminal lawyer in the city to try and get that boy paroled or something, so’s he could die in some real nice place.”
“Yeah,” Lewis said drily, “like us.”
“If I was to win the lottery,” Hoxie said, “I wouldn’t mess with no lawyers. I’d hire me three or four real tough street dudes to jump them guards and turn that boy loose. Give him enough money to skip out to South America or someplace.”
“Now that’s a good idea,” Lewis allowed.
“Only thing bad about it is ain’t none of us gonna win no lottery,” Potts said glumly.
“Seems like,” Hoxie said, “I always be reading how some group or organization or something be trying to get some worthless piece of shit off death row ’cause he’s got a low IQ, or his mama whipped his ass too much when he was a kid, or something. But don’t nobody seem to be helping this boy. Leastwise, nobody we know of.”
“People don’t help other people ’cause they’ve usually got something to lose by doing it,” Lewis said. “Only time people really go out on a limb for somebody is when they got nothin’ to lose.”
“You mean people like us?” Potts asked.
Neither Lewis nor Hoxie answered.
For a long time, nobody said anything. But they all knew what the others were thinking.
They got down to it the next time they met, when Potts said, “I wish there was some way we could help the kid.”
Without consciously realizing it, that was what Lewis had been waiting for.
“We could,” he said simply.
“What do you mean?” Hoxie asked. “How?”
“Get the jump on those two guards. Be easy. They ain’t expecting no trouble from three sick guys like us. We could take ’em down with no problem, let the kid go, and use them shackles they got on him to chain up the guards and the radiology tech in the scan room. Before anybody knew what was happening, we could all be out of the hospital and gone.”
“Yeah, but gone where?” Potts asked. “The hospital knows who we are, where we live — hell, we’d be caught before lunchtime.”
“Not if we had an escape plan,” Lewis said.
Hoxie frowned, but with interest. “What kind of escape plan?”
“I ain’t sure,” Lewis admitted. “But it’d have to be a plan where we could all get out of the country. Go to someplace where we couldn’t be extradited. And where we could still get our treatments. Like Argentina.”
“Lewis, good buddy, you are dreaming,” Potts said. “An escape plan like that would take a whole hell of a lot of money.”
“Well,” Lewis said quietly. “I just happen to know where we can get our hands on a whole hell of a lot of money.”
He told them about the four suitcases of cash that he saw being brought into the betting parlor run by his friend Ralph every Thursday morning. Hoxie’s eyebrows went up.
“Man, are you talking about sticking up one of them parlors that’s owned by Cicero Charley Waxman? If you are, that ain’t too smart.”
“Who’s Cicero Charley Waxman?” Potts asked.
“Bigtime rackets boss who runs the gambling on the North Side,” Hoxie told him. “We steal from him, he’ll have his hoods after us like fleas after a junkyard dog.”
Potts shrugged his skinny shoulders. “So what? Look, if we busted this kid loose, we’d have the Chicago cops and the Illinois state police after us anyways. A few hoodlums wouldn’t make no difference.”
“He’s right,” Lewis said. “If our escape plan worked, we get away from everybody. If it didn’t, what’s the difference who catches us? We go to jail or we get killed. We’re dying anyways.” Lewis leaned forward with his elbows on the table and lowered his voice. “Look, I’m gonna be straight with you guys. I want those four suitcases of dough as much for myself as I do for the kid. I don’t know if I’m gonna beat this cancer or not — just like you guys don’t know if you’ll beat yours. But if I don’t beat it, I’d like to spend my last days in someplace clean and warm; maybe some little beach village not too far from a city where there’s a modern hospital where I can get my treatments—”