Never Play Another Man's Game (10 page)

I
called Sully's Tavern and asked Steve who was around. Steve didn't miss a beat. “The only guy you'd know is Bruce.”

“Fuckin' Bruce?”

“The one and only.”

Fuckin' Bruce was a bad luck charm. He never had a penny to his name because every scheme he tried always blew up in his face. Any job I heard he was a part of ended up scoring nothing but jail time. The weird part was Fuckin' Bruce never got pinched. The one bit of luck he had hovered around him like a hula hoop. Word got out that he was cursed and he spent a few years stocking shelves in a convenience store, cans only — no one let him near glass or produce — until a bunch of cons figured out how to harness the power of Fuckin' Bruce. A few underground gambling operations decided to put Fuckin' Bruce in as a cooler. No one was able to get a hot streak going when the angel of debt was in the room. His days of stocking shelves were over and Fuckin' Bruce was into some real money. He never held onto any of it, though; the money, like everything else, went south sooner than later. The irony of it all was that, despite his constant bad luck and the huge amount of misfortune he brought to other people, everyone loved Fuckin' Bruce. He was the nicest guy you could ever meet.

“Tell Fuckin' Bruce to be outside in twenty minutes. I need to talk with him.”

“You sure that's a good idea?”

Steve wasn't superstitious and neither was I. We didn't believe that Fuckin' Bruce had some kind of tangible power that could stick to you if you hung around him long enough. What we did believe in was hard facts. Things went bad around Fuckin' Bruce. No one knew why, but it was the truth, so it was best to keep your distance.

“I'm not going to take a drive with him. I just want to bend his ear.”

“I'll tell him,” Steve said before hanging up the phone.

I drove downtown and waited a block away from the bar for Fuckin' Bruce to come outside. About five minutes into my wait, I saw him come outside. Fuckin' Bruce was maybe five feet tall with no hair on the top of his head. He grew the sides and back long into something that resembled half a mullet. He had a handlebar mustache and the hairiest arms I had ever seen. From a distance, dressed in an old parka, he looked sort of like an Eskimo child who fell asleep first at a slumber party and had part of his head shaved.

I drove up the street and double-parked beside the row of parked cars at the curb in front of Fuckin' Bruce. I rolled down the window and let him see it was me.

“Hey, man.” He started around the car at the curb towards the Neon.

“Stay on the sidewalk, Bruce,” I said.

“Oh, sure, I get it.” Fuckin' Bruce had a look on his face like he was just picked last in gym for the hundredth time in a row. I instantly felt like I did something wrong. I never really felt bad about anything, but Fuckin' Bruce had some way of yanking on whatever short heartstrings I had left.

“I didn't mean anything by it, Bruce. You just don't want to be seen with me right now. Trust me.”

“Things are hot?”

“I'm running a fever, Bruce.”

“Can I help?”

“I need to know who's doing off-the-books medical care.”

“You hurt? I can get you to a hospital.”

If I drove with Fuckin' Bruce to the hospital, I'd never make it there alive.

“I'm looking for someone who would need a doctor, but not a lot of noise.”

“Gee, I don't know a lot of guys like that, but I know someone who does. You know Ox Ford?”

I shook my head.

“Ox is a broker. He sets people up with other people.”

“Sounds like a dating service,” I said.

“It's something like that, man. Let's say you're pulling a job and you know there's going to be a safe. Not just any safe. One of those new models with all the bells and whistles that you wouldn't be able to crack with a jackhammer and a month. For a fee, Ox will put you in touch with a pro who can open it on the spot with his eyes closed.”

“Good business,” I said.

“He does alright for a guy who never has to get off his ass.”

“Where can I find him?”

“He spends every day at a social club in Stoney Creek playing cards. Place is on Maple. He'll be there now.”

“Thanks, Bruce,” I said.

“You want me to come with you? I can introduce you. Let Ox know you're on the level.”

I didn't want Fuckin' Bruce anywhere near the Neon. The car was hot — with Fuckin' Bruce in the car it would be nuclear. A cop would probably rear-end me at the first light.

“Nah, it's okay. I got this. I owe you a drink next time I see you.”

“Thanks, Wilson. But you don't gotta do that. We're friends, and friends look out for one another.”

Fuckin' Bruce and I weren't friends. He was a good guy, sure, but he didn't mean anything more to me than the stolen car I was riding in. I would buy him a drink down the road to pay him back for pointing me in the right direction. That way, we'd be even. I had enough of doing favours for people who said they were my friend.

“I'll still buy you that drink.”

“You want me to call ahead? I still got his number around somewhere.”

“Nah, I'll surprise him,” I said.

“Then do something for me,” Fuckin' Bruce said. “Instead of the drink.”

“What's that?”

“I've seen your surprises. Just don't tell Ox that it was me who gave you his name.”

I grinned at Fuckin' Bruce. “It'll be our secret.”

I
found the social club on Maple without any trouble. The white stucco building had not been painted in a long time and the white exterior had faded to a jaundiced yellow after years of sitting in the sun while it marinated in city dust. I parked on the street and walked inside, where immediately the natural light was absorbed and eliminated. The club was a windowless box with a bar on the far side of the room, four pool tables, six card tables, and a medium-sized mounted flat-screen. Two of the pool tables were in use and the flat-screen had a handful of admirers watching darts. There was only one card table in use, so I headed there.

The four men seated were playing euchre. The game was lively and mostly silent outside of calling trumps and passing. When the hand ended, I said, “I'm looking for Ox Ford.”

Two of the elderly players introduced me to Ox when they quickly glanced at him. Ox saw the looks and sighed. “I don't know you, kid. How is it that you know me?” Ox Ford was old, maybe in his mid-sixties, but he was young in comparison to the other men in the club. Everyone else was shrivelled, bent, and worn, but all of them still had a hard look about them. The kind of look that men who had seen combat couldn't scrub off. Ox had it too.

“Can we talk?”

“Can I finish my game?”

I nodded and watched the euchre continue. Ox looked like a guy who should be named Ox. He had a huge head; his forehead was large like Cro-Magnon man. He had a wide jaw with crooked teeth. Supporting the bovine skull was a body belonging to a smaller man. He resembled a paunchy Easter Island statue.

Ox played aggressively, calling risky trumps to keep the other two players from getting their way. In between hands, he took drags on a fat cigar. The smoke pooled above the table and smelled foul — I guessed for all his success as a broker, Ox never got away from smoking cheap stogies. The game lasted five minutes and ended when Ox played a hand alone and took four points. The old men left the cards on the table and slowly got out of their chairs to give us some privacy.

“Take a seat,” Ox said gesturing to the seat across from him with his cigar.

I sat across from the old man.

“What can I do for you?” he asked as he collected all the cards into a neat pile.

“I need information.”

“What makes you think that's my game, friend?”

The word
friend
had a bit of edge to it.

“What say we start with the basics. Who told you my name?” There was the unmistakable sound of a hammer being pulled back. The metal on metal click was a sound I knew well.

“You're a sly one, old man,” I said. “You that good at drawing cards under the table?”

Ox spoke around the cigar in his mouth. “I don't cheat at cards, kid. Just like I don't talk to people I don't know. Now spill it. How did you find me?”

I didn't answer right away. Instead, I let Ox watch my mouth form a grin. The grin was cold and nasty; I had inherited it from my uncle. His grin had always unnerved me because I only saw it when things were going to shit. Whenever it looked like my uncle was about to step into the afterlife, that grin would show up. The grin that said,
I know something you don't
. I practised the grin as a teenager until mine matched his. It was the only memento I kept.

“Hey, someone dropped a twenty over here.” My voice was loud enough to cross the room and penetrate the hearing-aid-clogged ears of the old men hanging around. All three of Ox's Euchre buddies swung their heads in our direction. Ox saw them look at us and he was forced to shrug his shoulders and grin.

The three old men walked towards us, patting their pockets while they tried to remember where they had been sitting. As they neared, Ox shifted in his seat and hid the gun from view.

“I was sitting there,” said a grey-haired man, sporting an old pilled sweater over creased-front khakis.

“Must be yours then,” I said.

A blue veined hand snatched the bill from my hand. If the old man knew it wasn't really his, he didn't let on.

One of the other men looked at Ox and said, “You up for another game?”

“Sure, sure, in a minute fellas. I just gotta talk to my friend here for a bit.”

The three men got the hint and went back towards the bar. Ox watched them walk away. When he looked back at me, he heard the slide of my Glock ram back and then forward. Watching the game, I had walked around a bit and saw the ankle holster Ox was wearing when his pants rode up. I had moved my own gun to my pocket while Ox was busy throwing down his winning hand. When I heard Ox cock his gun, I let the Glock out for a little air. What he thought was me shifting uncomfortably in my seat as I realized he had a gun was really something much different. My gun already had a round in the chamber; I just moved the slide so that Ox could hear it. His breath caught in his throat and all of the sureness I saw in the card game drained away.

“Who are you?” The cigar drooped in his mouth and hung like a limp dick.

“My name is Wilson. Fuckin' Bruce gave me your name.”

I could see from the way that his eyes darted to the left that he knew my name.

“I knew your uncle.”

I was tired of people who knew my uncle. “Then you know what's going to happen if you keep that gun on me,” I said.

“I'm bringing it up,” Ox said. “Don't kill me.”

“Two fingers,” I said.

Ox brought the gun up with his thumb and index finger like the revolver was a rotten banana peel. He put the gun on the table and pulled his hand away fast. I took off my watch cap and put it over the gun. The Glock went back into my pocket, but I kept my hand on it and the sights aimed at Ox.

“We're all friends now,” I said.

Ox nodded and put his cigar in the ashtray. He seemed unsure about it. “So, uh, Fuckin' Bruce gave you my name?”

“Fuckin' Bruce said you were a broker. Said you knew everyone in town.”

“Not everyone. Most,” he said with pride, “but not everyone. What do you need?”

“A doctor who works off the books.”

“What kind of doctor? I know surgeons, general practitioners, specialists . . .”

“All of them,” I said.

“What?”

“I need all of them.”

“I don't know what Fuckin' Bruce told you, but that's not how this works. You tell me what you need and I contact the other party. They have the option to agree or disagree with meeting you. Everyone is kept anonymous until they decide different. That way, both are protected. I don't give out numbers. If I did, I'd be out of business.”

“You must be good at keeping things anonymous because your customer service is shit.” I nodded towards the revolver under my hat.

“It's a dangerous world,” Ox said.

“Getting worse by the minute.”

“I'm in the business of danger,” Ox said. He smiled and I got a good look at his bad teeth. “I know better than anyone.”

“Then you know the Forty Thieves.”

Ox made a face like he had just bit into a lemon. “Bikers. I try to avoid working with those animals.”

“Business must be good if you can turn down clients.”

Ox spread his arms and smiled. “I do alright and best of all, I'm my own boss.”

“I'm not. I'm something of a procurer. A finder of things.”

“I know who you worked for,” Ox said.

I knew he would. If he knew my name, a rare thing, he knew my resumé. He also knew that I didn't work for Paolo anymore. “I'm a contractor now, and I'm not picky like you. The guy that needs finding crossed the Thieves.”

“Shit,” Ox said. “Money?”

“Money and blood,” I said.

The colour was draining from Ox's face; he could see where the conversation was going. “I'm getting paid to find this guy and the doctor angle is all I have. The guy I'm looking for is hurt and I need to find whoever is bandaging him up. I understand loose lips would hurt the business, but pissing off the Thieves is terminal.”

“Fuck,” Ox said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. I'm finished.”

“It doesn't have to be that way,” I said.

“It does so. You said it yourself. I either blow it with my medical contacts or a bunch of angry bikers blow me away.”

“They'd probably torture you first.”

Ox ran a hand over his huge head.

“There's a third option,” I said. “I don't need every number. I just need doctors who could deal with bullet wounds. Of those guys, I just need the numbers of doctors who say no.”

“Say no?”

“If you ask them if they can work tonight and they say no — that means they're busy. It's the busy doctors I'm interested in.”

“How does that make things better? Those guys will still know I gave you their name. Word will get out that I'm not the anonymous service I said I was and the whole thing withers and dies.”

“The doctors won't see me. I'll keep my distance while I check them out. If they're clean, they'll stay that way. I just want my guy.”

“You think these guys are stupid? If you show up after I call them, they'll know who sent you.”

“You think I'm some fucking thug, Ox? If I tell you they won't see me, they won't.”

“Blood doesn't make you your uncle, kid.”

“Count your blessings I'm not, Ox. That gun shit you pulled would have earned you a stay in the hospital. I'm not my uncle, you're right, I'm still here. I do things different than my uncle. He would have put your teeth out and a gun down your throat until your fingers got to dialling. I'm just going to force you to make a decision. You either do this my way, or I call Roland and he sends some people to talk to you. Maybe it'll be D.B. You ever meet D.B.?”

“I know who he is.”

“You ever meet him?”

“No.”

“You want to?”

Ox shook his head.

“Then get on the phone and tell me who's not taking patients tonight.”

“What, I just call up every doctor I know and start quizzing them about their schedule? That won't seem suspicious at all.”

“No, you call up everyone you've ever heard of who has done bullet work and you ask them if they're up for some on-call work tonight. Tell them there's a good chance the people you're in contact with will need a doctor and if they do, they'll pay through the nose. That way if you don't call back, they will just think everything went the way it should have. They'll be disappointed but not suspicious.”

“That will take some time,” Ox said.

“Then hurry the fuck up.”

Ox got up and started for the bar. “Do the calls here. I want to make sure you don't get clever.”

Ox sat back down and pulled a BlackBerry from his hip. While he scrolled through the phone with his right hand, his left picked up the cigar. He put the wet end in his mouth and used a lighter to get it going again. I checked out the room and saw that a few of the old timers at the bar were eyeing us. They probably wanted a game of cards with Ox. I ignored them and listened to Ox as he started talking to someone. The first caller said, “Sure,” right away. Ox said he'd be in touch and hung up. He gave me an apologetic look before he started scrolling through the phone for the next number.

The old guys at the bar must have gotten tired of waiting for Ox; they walked over to the table furthest from us and started a three-man game.

Ox kept getting yesses. He looked nervous each time, but I didn't care. I just needed one name to say no. Twenty minutes into my wait, Ox pulled a pen from his pocket along with an old receipt. He wrote a name on the slip of paper and then started looking for the next number. Another name went down on the paper right away. He struck out four more times after that before coming up with another busy doctor. The third name turned out to be the last.

Ox put the phone on the card table and stubbed out the cigar. “This one,” he said pointing to the second name. “He says he's out with his girlfriend tonight. He's married and his wife only goes out once a month. He wouldn't miss fucking his mistress for anything.”

“The other two?”

“Just said that they were busy.”

“Write down where I can find them.”

“Fine, fine. You know if this gets out, I'm dead.”

“If your pen doesn't start moving, I don't like your chances.”

Ox said “asshole” under his breath. I let it slide.

“The addresses you're giving me. This is their offices?”

“Yeah.”

“They do house calls?”

“They might, but if we're talking a bullet wound like you said, they'd want to deal with it at their office.”

“Seems risky.”

Ox lifted an eyebrow. “These aren't your average give you a lollipop after your checkup kind of doctors. They moonlight with some dangerous guys mostly because they're in debt to someone worse. They could be addicted to anything — drugs, whores, gambling, whatever it is it put their services on the black market.” Ox pulled the cigar from his mouth and looked at the dead end. He gave it another dose of fire from the lighter and pulled hard on the stogie until it smouldered again. He pointed the cigar across the table like a professor gesturing with a piece of chalk and went on. “Most of these guys aren't even good doctors. How could they be? How many addicts do you know that are good at what they do? They're too busy using to care about anything else. Locking a guy away in a back room isn't an issue when your waiting room is mostly empty. They would rather take care of things on their turf. These guys might be shady doctors, but you got to remember they're not workers like you. They don't want to be anywhere near a place that might suddenly be full of cops. In the office they can always make the claim that they were just doing their job and they planned to report what they saw when the patient was stable. Plus, no one is going to hire someone who can't deliver. They want to be in their office so that they have access to everything they might need. If they travel, who knows what problems they might run into. If you let a guy die, maybe his partners won't want him to go alone. You keep things in an office and the patient's life expectancy rises, as do the chances that everyone will keep their cool.”