John Lescroart - Dead Irish

He grabbed his robe from the bathroom door and padded out to the landing, down the stairs through the alcove by the front door, and into the living room.

“How are you doing, Sam?”

He nodded and swallowed. “Alphonse,” he said, and seeing his daughter now behind him, “Linda.” He tried to smile. “What’s going on?”

“I was kind of wondering the same thing.”

“What do you mean?”

Alphonse was taller-far taller-than Sam, but he had an economy of movement, a swift jagged way of acting that made him all the more of a force. He was absently cleaning his fingernails with a pocket file, and Sam saw the quick flick outward before he checked himself.

“Today’s payday, man.”

Linda popped in. “Remember? You were gonna come in to sign the checks. I mean, Alphonse really needed the money…”

Alphonse smiled all around. “I don’t do charity, man, ’cept my own.”

Sam, feeling the sweat start to run down under his arms, tried to sound calm. “Right. No problem there.”

“See, Daddy,” Linda was saying, “so I figured it would be cool if we just came by. I mean, I knew where you were, so-”

Sam held up a hand. Sure, Linda, he thought. Take the man I most want to avoid and walk him inside my face. His daughter, he thought, was hopeless.

“No, it’s a good idea. Why don’t you go make yourself a drink while Alphonse and I go in the office?”

She seemed to look to Alphonse for permission. He definitely gave her some message before she started moving back to the bar off the kitchen.

“Linda?”

She turned.

“Would you mind telling Nika I’ll be out in a minute? She’s in the hot tub.”

“Nice place,” Alphonse said as he entered the office. Then, as the door closed, “What the fuck’s going on, Sammy?”

Sam, his stomach now a jumbled mass of razor blades and ice picks, leaned against his desk. “I think we’d better leave it Mr. Polk, Alphonse. Okay?”

Reestablish that old authority, he thought. Alphonse took the knife, and before Sam had seen it move, his arm was bleeding through the slash in the white robe.

“We do business and it’s Mr. Polk,” Alphonse said most reasonably as Sam felt the blood draining out of his face. “You fuck with me and it’s whatever I want.”

Sam looked down at his arm, registering the blood as interesting. He felt no pain, except in his stomach.

“I’m not fucking with you.”

“You didn’t come to work today. Fact, you didn’t come to work this week.”

“I didn’t know Ed Cochran was going to get killed Monday night.”

“You didn’t?” Alphonse had turned around and was running his hand over the leather on the back of one of the chairs.

“No, of course not. Why would I?”

Sam considered getting to the desk drawer and pulling the gun on Alphonse, who was getting way ahead of himself, Sam thought, probably thinking about his future riches. But then he remembered that until the deal was done, he needed him.

Suddenly his arm throbbed, and he looked down to see the blood. He lifted a thigh over the corner of the desk and slumped against it.

“I feel bad about Ed,” Alphonse said. “I really do. I liked the guy.” He turned back to his boss. “But, like you and me, we had business. Hey, you all right?”

Sam was feeling himself going over. Alphonse snapped the knife closed and crossed to the front of the desk. He held Sam upright, pulled the arm of the robe up roughly. “Come on, man, get a grip. You ain’t hurt.”

“Let me get in my chair. Go ask Linda to get me a drink.”

Force of habit, Sam thought. Alphonse still obeyed orders when they were given like orders. That’s the way to keep control -never show your own weakness. He was in his chair, the terry cloth now pressed tightly against the wound.

“Nothing. We’re just talking,” he heard Alphonse say to Linda.

Then he had the drink, a water glass filled with bourbon. He drank off half of it. “All right,” he said.

“All right what?” Alphonse swung his legs, heels tapping the front of the cherry desk.

“What did you want me to do? The place was crawling with cops. Didn’t you tell that to your people?”

Alphonse sucked at his front teeth. “My friends, the time thing is, like… it’s like critical with them.”

“I understand that.” The booze was working. He took another drink. “What’s the matter, Alphonse? This got you nervous?”

The boy had evidently worked his way up and past his earlier bravado. Now the rush was wearing off. “I’m not nervous. My friends got contracts they gotta fill.”

Sam forced a cold smile at his employee. “Don’t give me any of this pseudobusiness bullshit, Alphonse. They got a buncha junkies they gotta keep high-squeeze all the money they can out of them before they die.”

“That money’s your money.”

“A very small percentage, Alphonse. Very small.”

“But a nice package.”

Yeah, Sam thought. Four hundred twenty-five thousand dollars cash. A nice profit for his one-twenty investment. But only if it worked. If it didn’t, he was basically tapped out. He couldn’t think much about it if it didn’t work. Tapped out could be the least of it.

His stomach was arguing with the bourbon, but it felt so good everywhere else he ignored it. “My guys wouldn’t deliver. Not there, and not on that particular Tuesday. That’s all there was to it.”

“So where and when?”

Sam put his head back against the firm leather. This wasn’t going to fly very well, and he knew it. “They’re gonna let me know.”

“Shi-”

“What can I tell you? They said this weekend, tomorrow maybe. They want to find a better place.”

Alphonse pushed himself off the desk, walked nearly to the door, turned around. “So what do I do meanwhile?”

“What I’m doin’, Alphonse. You wait.”

He came right up under Sam’s nose, and Sam thought he could smell the fear. “I can’t wait, man, they’re on my ass. They been holdin’ their money a week now.”

Well, Sam thought, I know what a good time that is. “Couple more days. Tell ’ em by Monday night.”

“I’m wrong again, they’ll cut my nuts off.”

Sam finished the bourbon. “Every business has its risks, Alphonse. Point is, you gotta trust me. ’Cause if I’m scamming you, you’re meat anyway. You’re the one sold me to them, remember?”

He’d been in distribution his whole life. Buy something from one source, move the merchandise, and sell it to another for profit. That was the American way.

The only hitch was, in this cocaine business, you had people who were not entirely trustworthy. That was fine, Sam knew, as far as it went. People cheated wherever they could, at solitaire even. But it would be especially stupid to forget it here.

And he had done that with Cruz-forgotten that cardinal rule. After playing straight for all those years, the bastard had just walked away from the deal. Keep Cruz in mind, Polk told himself, if ever again you’re tempted to trust somebody in business.

The arm had stopped bleeding. Alphonse had been right-it wasn’t a bad cut, maybe four inches down the front of his arm.

Since he wasn’t about to trust anybody on this deal, he thought he’d set it up smart. He still thought so. The connection had been from years before. An importer, a businessman. Never touched drugs himself. They’d talked at a party-it must have been the early seventies, when cocaine was just starting to catch on.

But at the time, Sam was doing fine with newspapers-who wouldn’t in San Francisco with the Free Press, Rolling Stone and the other hippie rags, to say nothing of the majors? He hadn’t needed to risk anything back then.