John Lescroart - The Vig

He sat on somebody's fender near the entrance to the lot, sucking down an ice-cold Fanta, trying to come up with some plan that might work. The landscape of automobiles shimmered and glared in the heat.

California plates!

Acapulco was a long way from California, and almost no one, except for the lunatic fringe among whom Hardy was beginning to count himself, drove. There wouldn't be more than twenty cars in the lot with California plates, and he guessed the odds of finding more than one blue Jetta with them were significantly on his side.

Whistling, he started walking through the lot.

"Woo, I'm dizzy."

She pressed her body up against his good side.

She was fantastic. Long, leggy, a face for the movies. Hair a deep chestnut, green eyes. She was a secretary from Washington, D.C., and wore a white T-shirt from the Hard Times Cafe that said 'I like mine all the way wet.' The T-shirt was a little small-her breasts held the front up high enough to show her navel in the slim waist. Maybe she was twenty-two, and with a couple of margaritas already in her. Look out.

"Watch out for the potholes," Rusty said. "Just lean against me."

"Could you believe those bodies?" she said.

"Pretty amazing."

"I mean, I've seen jocks before, but these guys…"

He let her go on. Fantasize all you want, he was thinking. And he'd been studying the guys, too. Getting to know them a little now, what to watch for. And getting lucky, hitting two, then three, four in a row, clearing over a thousand U.S. today, more than making up for last week's disaster.

He was glad the hurricane had enforced the time off. He had been starting to press. Just down here and thinking he had to make his mark right away. Wrong. He had time. He kept telling himself he had time. All the time in the world. So he took a few days off, met Atlanta, stayed indoors. It had been good for him. Now, starting a new week fresh, hitting it right away, this was it.

Most of the cars were out of the lot. He and D.C. were laughing, watching out for potholes. They were going to go down to the Esplanade and have turtle soup and a lobster dinner and blow a wad of this money, then maybe hit a cock fight. Or anyway, something with a cock.

He smiled. Whatever they did, it didn't matter. He was loaded. After being down here ten days, he had more than he had come with. And that's the way it would keep rolling. No more getting behind the eight ball. Study the game. Bet cautiously until you hit your roll. Then, like today, run it.

And he thought he was seeing it already. Some pattern. Some way to make a steady income. It wasn't exactly like the ponies, where there were all these variables. Horses were dumb animals. Jai alai was people, momentum, things you could understand, predict.

It was late afternoon. The green hill had a sepia tone through the dust of the lot. They got to his car and heard footsteps coming up behind them.

"Hey, Rusty! Rusty!" Hardy closed the distance between them. He took off his sunglasses. "It's you, isn't it?"

Rusty was good, Hardy gave him that. Barely a flicker of panic. "Diz!" He reached out his good arm and pulled Hardy into an embrace. "God, it's great to see you."

"Me? It's great to see you. I thought you were dead."

"Dead?" the girl said.

"Oh, hey, excuse me, this is D.C. D.C, an old friend, Dismas Hardy."

She nodded. "What do you mean, dead?"

Rusty laughed. "I'm not dead, thank God."

"Me, neither."

"I can see that. What are you doing down here?"

"Maybe great minds think alike. I'm waiting for your first call and watching the news and I see some girl has been killed on a barge in China Basin, and-"

"What? Who was killed?"

Hardy shrugged. "I don't know. But I knew that's where you lived, so I went down to check it out and it was the slip you'd given me. I didn't want to wait around so Louis Baker could find me. I just went back home, threw some things together and lit out."

"It was Maxine…" Rusty leaned up against the fender of his car. He put his hand up, shading his eyes.

"Who's Maxine?" D.C. asked.

"She was a friend, just a friend." His eyes were actually glazing, near tears. "God, Diz, she must have come over to visit and was there when Baker got there."

"That's what I figured. I just split. Especially since you didn't call me, I figured-"

"I know. I just spooked, same as you. When I got home from seeing you I sat around for an hour and realized I just couldn't do it, couldn't just wait there for Baker to come and kill me. What was the point? But I should have called you. I'm sorry."

"What are you guys talking about?"

Rusty was making a point of recovering from the shock of Maxine's death. He told a good story while Hardy and D.C. listened. It sounded romantic, frightening, kind of cool.

"So what happened to this guy Baker?" D.C. asked.

Hardy looked at Rusty and shrugged. "I don't know. I hope he's back in jail by now. He probably left some prints, don't you think, Rusty? Something, anyway." He turned to the girl. "They usually do. I figured I had some vacation, I'd take it and give the cops a month or so to figure it out. If not, time I get back, I can tell them what I think and they'll go get him, but I thought it would be safer to get away first. So I've been bumming in Mexico a couple of weeks."

"It's only my second day," she said.

"Hey, you eaten yet, Diz? We were going to go down and blow some of my winnings. You want to join us?"

"You win at this game?"

Rusty grinned now. He opened the passenger door. "Big time."

They were leaving the lot, bouncing over the dirt. "So what happened to your arm?" Hardy asked.

After he had located the car, Hardy had a good long time to work on the plan. Though it had still been early enough to get back to the El Sol and return with his gun, what good would that have done? He wasn't planning on kidnapping Rusty. It was a long way back home and they'd have to drive-there was no way Hardy could board a plane with the gun.

Hardy couldn't go to the local police, either. Rusty wasn't wanted for anything, here or in the States, and even if he was, Hardy wasn't a lawman. The only way to do it, Hardy realized, was to get Abe involved and somehow make things official.

But first he had wanted to make sure Rusty wouldn't suddenly cop to the whole thing and want, say, to fly home to work it out. Hardy didn't want to have Abe fly down just to have Rusty say, "Sure, guys, I'll go home with you." Figuring he could beat it. He wanted to make sure the guy was denying it, that Abe would be needed.

Any risk he ran in showing himself would be minimized by his own charade. He figured he and Rusty would hang out, Hardy sticking close, for a day or two until Abe could make it down, then they'd nail him.

Rusty had a charming smile. "I'll tell you, my life isn't dull," he was saying. "I got this arm the third day I was here. I was out fishing, sweating like a pig. Dove in to cool off. So I'm climbing back onto the boat and grab the gaff to come aboard. I slip and the damned thing goes through my arm."

"Both sides, in and out?"

"Yep."

"Ouch!" D.C. said.

Hardy had enjoyed it, watching the show. He tried to see it the way Rusty was telling it, and every little piece fit in just right. If he didn't know the truth, Hardy would have been convinced himself-the flight from vengeful Louis Baker, an insurance settlement that provided some ready cash, the accident with the gaff. Once, in the middle of dinner, another flirtation with tears over Maxine's death.

There was also the mental challenge of holding back, of biting his tongue. He had to remember he hadn't been to the barge, hadn't seen Rusty's blood on the bed, Maxine's body blocking the hallway. He hadn't visited Louis Baker in the hospital, and he'd never heard of Johnny LaGuardia, Ray Weir, any of them.