The Odds (10 page)

“Maybe. I think. If he went to the hospital, it would be pins, all that, but there are other ways.”

She moved forward and touched the man’s foot. “Let him try.”

He groaned and lay back down.

“He has a fever,” Joel said.

“Do you?” she asked.

“I think so,” the man whispered. “Sorry to waste your food.” He coughed and laughed.

“Do you have any money?” Meg asked.

“Sure, take it, the wallet.” He gestured to his back pocket and put his head down, making a jagged moan. There didn’t seem to be any way he could move that didn’t hurt him. Then she saw he had a chip of wood, a bit of floorboard tied to the back of his leg with a handkerchief, intended to hold on the pathetic piece of wood.

Joel leapt forward and grabbed the wallet and leapt back to her. He opened it and took out two twenties. “That’s all there is,” he said, handing her the wallet as if for verification.

She tilted the open wallet toward the light that came from the hole in the roof. Nicholas Banks. Picture on a driver’s license. Nicholas Banks. She dug around in all the pockets of the wallet.

“Won’t buy much,” he said.

“I have to try to cut some wood for your leg,” Joel said.

Nick Banks nodded. They started to move away. “If anybody sees you,” he said, “it’s too late. If somebody sees you, don’t come back.”

Joel grabbed up the bag, a burlap bag he’d found in their basement. He and Meg went down the steps.

On the way out, Meg saw she had blood on her from something, and her stomach heaved. But she didn’t stop, just looked left and right, back and ahead. “Keep going,” she said to Joel. They kept walking. Out of the grass, out of the alley, out of the other alley, and up the street proper into an even worse section. She let Joel lead.

Joel asked, “See anything? Anybody?”

“No.” But she couldn’t tell for sure if anyone had been watching them.

“I looked, too.”

He told her haltingly how he went up there and found the man in trouble. He explained the man had asked for food and water, and that he wasn’t going to take anything to him, just keep the money, but then he changed his mind and took supplies up. Then Meg arrived.

“You recognized him. How do you know him?” Joel asked now.

“He’s the pizza man.”

“Oh. You think we should turn him in?”

“I don’t know.” Meg couldn’t catch up with her own mind. She picked carefully through what she was feeling, questions about whether she would help the man if she didn’t owe him anything. Or if, like Joel, she didn’t recognize him. “It could have happened the way he said, I guess. I don’t know. I feel sorry for him.”

“See all that blood?”

Viscid, she thought. Viscous. She had looked at the other body on the floor and not fainted—surprised herself. “How much did he bleed?”

“Some. Mostly it was the other man’s,” Joel said.

Meg kept walking. Joel was taking her away from the direction of home and she kept following.

“So you believe him?” Joel asked.

“I think I do.”

They were headed up to a wooded section—scrub woods, dumb old woods, not pretty, but thick with junk and trees.

“I have to find two branches. I have to guess at the size.”

She didn’t know what Joel was going to do, but she knew he would be good at it, that she knew.

They went up into the woods and looked around. Joel chose a tree and climbed it. She handed up the saw.

   COLLEEN’S HEAD HURT. SHE gave sidelong glances to Potocki as he worked at his desk. They’d made it through moving his clothing and cooking utensils to his new place without mentioning last night’s flirtation, and then they sat tight at their desks for three hours.

He tapped, tapped, tapped at his computer keys. She’d told him to find her any Metzlers outside of Chicago, to try variations on the name BZ and also the De-Mott variations and then to run Nick Banks again.

Colleen could never get over how much faster he was than she at digging through Internet sites. She looked at her watch. It was time to head for the pizza shop. “So I’m ready to try Nick Banks again,” she told him. “Give me a lift? You should take a break.”

He left his computer reluctantly it seemed. She was perfectly happy to leave hers. They asked for one of the Narcotics cars, the LTD, but Pete said, “Sorry. It’s reserved.” He handed them the keys to a Century.

“A grandmother car,” Potocki teased.

“It has a good sound system,” Pete said.

Colleen put on the radio. Might as well enjoy the big sound. She chose jazz and sat back. “Grandmothers might have a point. The seats are comfortable.”

“They are. Made for when your butt gets all bony.”

Potocki looked nice in light cords and a dark blue shirt. His slightly long hair, light brown, had probably been blond in his youth, but now showed a trace of gray. He wore glasses sometimes, sometimes not. He had a broad Eastern European face, friendly and open. There were a lot of such faces in the city. Blue eyes, but not a bright blue, not like the startling eyes of Nick Banks.

She’d seen the inside of his life this morning—yellow kitchen walls, tomatoes on the windowsill, cartons of pots and pans.

He drove her past the shop, intending to drop her three blocks farther on. They both craned their necks on the way past the pizza shop. The Dona Ana wasn’t open. She and Potocki just looked at each other.

Potocki said, “He must be as hungover as we are.”

“Right. Let’s get lunch somewhere else and come back later. Pastrami or something. Western Avenue.” She pointed back over her shoulder. She had a terrible headache.

   AFTER LUNCH, THEY CHECKED the address Carl had given them. It didn’t exist. Nope. Number and street did not go together. For a while, they looked for Carl on the street and in the park. They didn’t find him in those places either.

And then they went back to the Dona Ana. It was still closed.

“Don’t say anything,” she said.

“About what?” He was all innocence.

She started to laugh at how largely she was rejected. “My God,” she said, “he probably left town! There goes my career.”

“Not if you solve a homicide.”

“How close am I to doing that?”

“We’ll do it. We need real names and addresses. Such a small thing.” He smiled whimsically.

“I liked him. A lot. Nick.”

“Huh,” said Potocki. “Yeah, you said. And where’s K, George White, George Victor, and whatever else he goes by?”

Colleen shook her head. They started back to Headquarters.

A kid lugged a bucket up the hill. Industrious.

   MARKOVIC DROVE PAST THE Dona Ana several times with Billy in the passenger seat. He knew something had gone bad the night before, but he didn’t know what. Earl had never disappeared on him.

Billy had proved himself utterly useful today—first at Carl’s place on Veto, where he jimmied the lock. The place was completely torn up. “Earl was here all right,” Billy said. Next they’d gone to Earl’s little apartment, where Billy jimmied another lock. The third place they stopped was Nick’s apartment; the Pontiac was parked out front. Markovic was thrilled to see the car, but it didn’t make sense that Nick was just sitting inside, waiting for them. They knocked. Billy had to work hard at that lock. Finally they got in. The place was neat. Laundry folded in a pile. No Nick.

Markovic started looking in drawers. Right away, in the top drawer in the bedroom, he found money. “Fuck, look at this.” He started counting. “This is five hundred bucks. Start looking,” he told Billy. “Money. Rings. Anything of value.” He felt like he was going to explode or have a stroke. Where the hell could Nick be? The guy owed him forty thousand; five hundred and an old car were not going to cut it.

Billy said, “I can’t get the sense of this. Leaving the money. He must be dead.”

Markovic called his cousins at the auto shop and Stile answered. He tried to keep it positive. “Yeah, Billy’s good. Yeah. He got in everywhere—Carl’s, Earl’s, Nick’s. It’s coming along. We have Nick’s car.”

Stile wasn’t buying it. He started in on why the hell Marko had brought Nick into things to begin with.

When the tongue-lashing was over with and he’d hung up, Marko said simply to Billy, “Stile said to get the Pontiac over to the shop, pronto. He’ll probably have one of us watching this place. So let’s go. I need you to hot-wire the Pontiac. We have to be quick, nobody seeing us.”

“No need.” Billy held up a car key he’d found right on the dresser. It had a string around it and appeared to be a spare.

“Way to go.”

So Billy drove the Pontiac over to Stile with Markovic following in his van. They watched Stile look into the Pontiac cursing, then kick it hard. There were no clues at all to tell them where Nick might be.

They left and drove up and down alleys and streets again.

Finally Billy said, “There you go. Up the street.”

Marko looked and saw Earl’s Ford.

Nobody was around to see Billy break into it except an old man who shuffled by without taking his eyes off the pavement.

   ONCE MORE, NOW, HE TRIED to pull himself up by hanging on to a door that was propped against the wall, but the pain traveled the whole way up his body, exploding into his head, his ears. The door began to slide. Crying, he let himself back down to the floor and reached for the gun. If someone came to finish him off, he would use it.

The gun felt heavy in his hand; it was only a 9 mm, but it had managed to cripple him. He put it down.

His face went tight with a sob he tried to stifle. He’d never get out now, he’d made too many mistakes. He lay down, the gun in his hand.

He tried to get his mind right, but ideas came and went, and he couldn’t get any of them to hold still.

His shirt, the blue plaid shirt, very light wool, had once been among his favorites. He looked at it sorrowfully, knowing he wouldn’t make it far without attracting attention. It was crusted with blood.

He went still, trying to think. His car was parked on the street. He needed to get to it. No … no. By now they would have sent someone to his apartment, started a lookout for him on the streets in this neighborhood, the shop. Getting to his car was risky. Did he have a choice?

He realized he was waiting for the boy to come back. The boy had got him what he asked for; the girl made less sense to him, not afraid somehow, stooping down to touch his foot.

Of all the mistakes he had made in his life, the biggest one was calling Markovic.

How it had happened last night, he thought he knew, but there were parts he wasn’t sure of. He tried to remember beat by beat. But what he felt like now—mixed up, thoughts careening—is what he felt like last night, too.

They’d gone to Carl’s place on the first floor, just a bed, some kind of old couch, kitchen table and chair, livable, but everything was turned inside out and Carl wasn’t there. Okay.

They stood in the single room, yes. The toilet was running. Suddenly Nick understood nobody else lived upstairs in the building. The man with the sideburns said, “I shoulda waited here. He got away.”

Then they were driving. When Nick saw Carl walking up ahead, he didn’t say anything about it; he pretended to be fixing his shoe, said, “Marko wants it this way? You sure?”

“K. K. You don’t learn fast, do you? Yeah, he does. He wants a cleanup. And he wants all the money there is. There’s more stashed somewhere.”

At that point, no, he didn’t know for sure, but he
thought
it was Carl walking up the hill. Nick kept hoping, if it was, Carl would cut in somewhere, but he didn’t, and the man said, “There’s the bastard.”

Nick remembered he wanted to slow it all down. The guy with the sideburns fingered his gun, and Nick wanted to distract him. Stalling for time. “I know where he’s going. Somewhere around here is a house he uses.” And Carl was near that house, only a couple of buildings away from where Nick had seen him go last night. “Maybe he stashes there. We could look.”

“Okay. Better than the car anyway, for what we’re gonna do.” The man pulled over and jumped out of the car. “Move it. C’mon. Fast.”

Seconds later they were on top of Carl, and the other man had the gun in Carl’s side. Carl didn’t run; he just stopped dead, dropped a bunch of books.

“We know what you done,” the man said. “You’re going to take us into your place. Which is it?” he asked Nick.

Carl had looked to Nick, panting.

Nick tried to nod very slightly to Carl, to give him a sign. He said to the boy, “Take it easy.” To the other, he said, “It’s that one. He goes around back.”

They marched the kid up there, around the back, through the weeds, and nobody saw, nobody saw. They made the kid open the plywood door. Nick thought, Slow it down, something will happen, some lucky break, if I can slow it down.

“Fucking dark in here. This where you keep the rest of your money?” the man asked, “ ’cause Marko wants it.”

“Get it,” Nick said. “It’s just money. Let them have the money.”

Carl looked at Nick. His face, even in the dim light, was awful to see. Betrayed me, the face said, you betrayed me. “I don’t have any money,” he said. “I had a little. Someone stole it out of my place.”

The man put his gun to Carl’s temple. He talked to Nick. “We’re going to hog-tie the bastard. You’re going to help me with that. Then you’re going to start slicing his balls. He’ll talk. They always do.”

The downstairs of the place was mostly rubble. And dark, really dark.

“You have anything stashed upstairs?” Nick asked Carl, buying time.

“I have nothing.”

“Let’s see about that.” The man kept the gun at Carl’s temple, pushed the kid to the banister, telling him to hold on to it, both hands on it, then saying to Nick, “Empty his pockets.”

Nick hurried to do that. He tried to let Carl know he was looking for a way out for him. He tried to give Carl a look that said,
I’ll try to help
. In Carl’s pockets he found a ten and some ones. A tissue. A pen. A key. Two keys. Nothing else.