Дэвид Гейтс - The Blue Mirror

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.

“Care to set my mind at rest, bro?” he asked me.

He’d let go of my nose and the Smith wasn’t cutting into my neck anymore, but I was scared to tell him nothing and just as nervous about saying something dumb.

“I can’t hear you,” he crooned, leaning close again like a father confessor.

“Hear this ?”another voice inquired, and the next sound was unmistakable, the slide on a pump shotgun being racked.

Red went absolutely still.

“We’ll do this by the numbers,” the new guy said. I’d heard his voice before, but I couldn’t place it. “Point the weapon away from your body and safe it.” Red uncocked the Smith. “Good. Now put it down and back away. You too, girlie. I got no compunction about taking you off at the knees.”

I felt them give me some room. I glanced around.

“You’re looking a little the worse for wear, Jack,” Max Quinn said to me, grinning. He was holding a Mossberg pump at port arms, relaxed and obviously enjoying himself. “You able to walk?”

I picked up my gun and got carefully to my feet. I had to favor my left leg to get it to hold my weight.

“Now, about these two,” Max said. I had some ideas on that score, but what I wanted to do was likely to see me pulling eight to ten at MCI Cedar Junction.

“No?” Max asked. He shrugged. “Well, in that case, we’ll take our leave of you lovely people,” he said to Red and the girl. “I’d think it right intelligent if you’d just lie down on the pavement until we left.”

The girl hadn’t even looked at me while this whole business was going on, but Red was watching me with a hostile squint.

“I meant now, people,” Max said. They got down and assumed the position.

I limped toward my car, and Max backed away behind me, the shotgun held down next to his leg, where it was less conspicuous.

The lights were coming on in the parking lot.

He leaned down to the window when I got behind the wheel. “This probably isn’t the place to talk,” he said.

“I’ll call you,” I said. “Thanks.”

“No sweat,” he told me.

I watched him cross the street to where he was parked and put the shotgun in his trunk. He’d probably had me under surveillance from the time I walked into the bar. I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, but it seemed a little too convenient.

Max gave me a wave as I drove away and climbed into his own car. I went home to pack my sore knee in ice and brood about how big a dope I’d been.

~ * ~

“So you figure the bikers are a red herring?” Tony asked the next morning.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “I think Quinn set me up, yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re not dirty.”

“Quinn just wants to make himself look good?”

“Pulling my chestnuts out of the fire? That’s one way of looking at it. Or he could be using me as a stalking horse, get them looking in the wrong direction.”

“Andy Ravenant?”

“Yeah, something’s hinky,” I said. “But I don’t see how it connects to the Stanley problem.”

We were driving out to the hospital in Ayer to see Stanley. He’d collapsed the day before while I was busy getting myself washed, dried, and folded. He wasn’t home — he was out cruising junkyards or something, up in apple orchard country — and the paramedics got him to the closest ICU. Once he was stabilized, he’d probably be moved into town to Peter Bent Brigham if things still looked bad.