Don Winslow - A Long Walk Up the Waterslide

The applause sign lighted superfluously.

Candy rose gracefully from the couch and stepped up to her mark, next to Jack’s mark. The camera switched to a two-shot as Jack put his arm around her and she pecked him on the cheek. Then she turned her smart smile to the camera.

Normally, at this point the director would have switched to a close-up, but these days he was using as many two-shots of Jack and Candy as possible.

“On today’s show,” Candy announced, “we’ll meet a man who was declared legally dead but came back to own his own business.”

“And,” Jack read from the monitor, “we’ll talk to a U.S. senator who is fighting for you, the American family.”

Candy picked it up seamlessly: “I’m going to show you how to spice up that old ground chuck, and…”

“I’ve prevailed on Candy,” Jack said, “to sing one of our favorite old songs.”

“All that, plus a progress report on Candyland, on today’s ‘Jack-”

“-and Candy-’” Jack added.

“Family Hour,’” they said in chorus.

The director went to a commercial.

Polly polished off a salami-and-cheese sandwich, a large bag of potato chips, seven chocolate-chip cookies, and a Diet-Pepsi before Jack and Candy even sat down to her “Red Burger Surprise.”

“Where does all that food go?” Karen whispered to Neal as she looked at Polly’s skinny frame.

“Right to her brain,” Neal answered.

Karen elbowed him.

“By the way,” Polly asked. “Is there a doctor in this town?”

“Are you sick?”

Polly shook her head. “My friend hasn’t visited.”

“What friend?” Karen asked, then blushed. “Ohhh…”

That friend.

“I think we got trouble,” Joe Graham said into the phone.

He was sitting by the window of his fifteenth-floor hotel room in the northern suburbs of San Antonio. The window provided an interesting view of the foothill country, including the access road to the massive construction sight known as Candyland.

“Trouble is our business,” Ed Levine answered, having developed a sense of humor since his divorce. He had his feet on the desk and was also looking out the window, which gave him a picturesque view of garbage blowing across Times Square.

“I’m serious,” Graham insisted.

“Okay, okay. What kind of trouble?”

“Well, for starters, I’m stuck in this room doing this surveillance, so I order room service and I get the tacos. Have you ever tried to eat a taco with one hand?”

“Can’t say I have, Joe.”

“Every time you pick one it up, it shoots hot sauce out the other end.”

“Have you tried picking it up in the middle?” Levine asked.

“Yeah. Then it shoots hot sauce out both ends.”

“This is trouble all right,” Levine said patiently, figuring that Graham was suffering from stakeout syndrome, the combination of boredom, cabin fever, and loneliness that compels surveillance guys to invent reasons to talk on the phone. “What else?”

“It looks like a Teamsters picnic out here,” Graham said. “You got trucks coming and going, coming and going, coming and going all the time.”

“Uhhh, it’s a construction site, Joe,” Ed said. Maybe I’d better think about pulling him, he thought.

“Yeah, but when do they unload?” Joe asked. “I’ve seen the same truck go in, come out ten minutes later, and go right back in.

“You’re taking down the plate numbers, right?”

“No, Ed, I’m drawing pictures of the trucks with my crayons. What do you think?”

Testy, Ed thought. Another prime symptom. He picked up his coffee mug and saw something usually described as a foreign object floating on the top. He picked the foreign object out with his thumb and forefinger and took a swallow of the coffee.

“What else?” he asked.

“I think I’m starting to hallucinate,” Graham said.

Days of sitting by a window staring through binoculars will do that, Ed thought.

“Why is that?” he asked.

“Black limo comes up the road, guy gets out to talk to one of the truck drivers. Guess who the guy is?”

“Jimmy Hoffa?”

“No,” Graham answered. “Get this, Ed. I could swear I saw Joey Beans get out of that limo.”

Is this the coffee I bought this morning, Ed asked himself, or yesterday morning? And Joey Beans?

“You are hallucinating, Graham,” Ed said. “Joey Beans working for Jack Landis?”

“Or vice versa,” Graham observed.

“Naaah,” Ed said.

Joey “Beans” Foglio had been such a loose cannon in the greater New York metropolitan area mob franchise that the old men finally gave him a career choice: accept a lateral transfer down south or be recycled in a Jersey gravel pit. Joey Beans had opted for the sun and fun of the Lone Star state, and Levine had a vague knowledge that he was working card games or something out of Houston. But Joey Beans building water slides and kiddie-car tracks?

“Something is very sick here,” Graham said. “I’ll send you the plate numbers, names on the trucks, all that stuff. Can you get a look at construction invoices?”

“I’ll give it a shot,” Ed answered. Shit, a gangster like Joey Beans hooked up with Landis? No way.

“We’d better give Neal a call,” Graham said. “He’s not going to be happy.”

“He’s never happy.” Ed thought he’d try to cheer Graham up and added, “Hey, speaking of happiness, guess who went to that big tote board in the sky a few days ago?”

“Who?”

“Sammy Black.”

“No shit.”

“No shit,” Ed said. “Sitting in a bar at closing time. Guy walks in while the bartender’s taking a piss, pops Sammy and his bodyguard in the head, and walks out.”

“They must be having parties all over Midtown South.”

“They are. The homicide guys have a nickname for the shooter,” Ed said. “Preparation H.”

“Because he removed that itching burning hemorrhoid?” Graham said. Not that funny a topic, seeing as how he’d been sitting on this chair for three days.

“Listen, I’ll get on this Joey Beans stuff,” Ed said. “You take it easy with those tacos, okay?”

Yeah, okay, Graham thought as he hung up. He was worried. He had promised Neal there was no mob stuff, and now he thought he had seen Joey Beans. And although Ed Levine was very good at chasing paper, mob guys were pretty cute these days. It could be weeks before Ed could unravel the kind of twisted paper trail the mob was capable of leaving. And he wasn’t sure that they had days, never mind weeks. There had to be a quicker way.

Graham put his binoculars away.

Sammy Black in a box, huh? Old Walt must be standing for a round somewhere.

Martini please,” Walt Withers said.

Withers didn’t notice that the bartender scowled at him and didn’t move an inch to fix his drink. Withers was preoccupied trying to figure out where he’d been the past few days. He had woken up hard in a Reno hotel room and gone for a drink or two and then woken up harder in a different Reno hotel room.

Thank God Gloria had left the note in his jacket pocket, he thought. In other days, Gloria would have been what is known as a good broad, but those were different times.

So Withers had solved the mystery of what he was doing in Nevada, and he wouldn’t be the first private investigator in history to blow a few days on a bender. What bothered him was the money.

He was $1,327 short.

He had done the figures in his head thirty times. Five thousand had gone to Gloria for the tip, and he didn’t think Scarpelli could object to that. Twenty-three thousand had gone to Sammy, and certainly Scarpelli could and would object to that. Withers was just hoping that Scarpelli would be so pleased with his smutty pictures of Polly that he’d forget about it. Or maybe he could just short Polly on the up-front money. In any case, he’d much rather owe money to Ron Scarpelli or even Polly Paget than to Sammy Black. Ron Scarpelli or Polly Paget would not break his wrists.