Paydirt

15

Saturday, January 28-Miami

Never let them see you sweat.

Bobby and Scott sat inside the old rustbucket limo as it was dragged through the car wash. Bobby stared at the water streaming over the windshield, trying to clear his mind and steady his nerves.

He would have to remain calm. He would use logic and reasoning to convince Vinnie LaBarca to let him off the hook, to cancel the bet on tomorrow's game. In his mind, Bobby rehearsed his plea.

"I can't pay off the bet if you win, Vinnie, so what's the use of holding me to it?"

As the car jerked along, suds pouring over the car, Bobby vowed not to show his fear. Not to LaBarca and not to Scott, either. If he did, the boy would try to help him. A father's job is to care for his child, not the other way around.

Before becoming a father, he never knew he had the capacity for such love. But now, just thinking about Scott sometimes brought tears to his eyes. It was a love without limits. He once tried to quantify it, but the closest he could come was to realize that he would pass the ultimate test of love: he would take a bullet for his son. Without blinking, without thinking. Simple as that.

Scott had his mother's serene sense of logic. If the boy knew the extent of his father's problems, he'd plug all the facts into that computerized brain of his and come up with three alternative plans with predicted probabilities of success.

So different from me.

Bobby was self-aware. He knew he was impetuous and emotional. Sometimes, he envied Christine's imperturbability in the face of crisis. Other times, he found it irritating. Either way, he figured Scott was better off inheriting his mother's cool tranquility rather than his own mercurial nature.

Bobby had set up the meeting with Dino Fornecchio, LaBarca's bodyguard and the guy who reminded him to zip up when coming out of the men's room. Now, Bobby pictured LaBarca waiting in his penthouse condo, a squat man seemingly as wide as he was tall. His nose had been badly broken and ran east and west where it should have run north and south. Bobby knew that a decent plastic surgeon could easily fix the nose but figured it was a calling card. Tough guy. Mobster. Fuck with me at your peril.

Vinnie LaBarca wheezed and sneezed, his eyes tearing. "I'm living in a goddamn jungle," he yelled at Dino Fornecchio. "Get rid of these plants and fire that damn decorator."

"Okay boss," Dino said, through the screen door to the patio. Fornecchio was dark and sullen with a long neck and knobby wrists that peeked out of the sleeves of his black silk shirt. LaBarca considered him an idiot, but he was a second cousin once removed, or maybe a first cousin twice removed. If there hadn't been some blood relationship, LaBarca would have had him totally removed.

Once when Fornecchio was supposed to lay fifty grand of Vinnie's money on Penn State, he put the money down on Penn instead. "Don't you know the difference between the Big Ten and the Ivy League!" LaBarca fumed, after the Quakers failed to cover and he lost his bet.

"Oh, like you're a college man," Fornecchio replied. "Closest you ever got to Penn State was the state pen."

LaBarca would have killed him right there if not for his mother's cousin or aunt or whoever the hell the old bag was who gave birth to this retard.

LaBarca lived in the penthouse of a high-rise on the tip of Miami Beach, just a stone crab's throw from Joe's, the oldest and most famous restaurant in town. On the east was the Atlantic and on the south Government Cut where, barely a mile away, cruise ships were berthed in single file, preparing for their weekly pre-packaged excursions to various Caribbean ports.

With his bulk sinking into a groaning chaise lounge, LaBarca relaxed on his wraparound, tiled balcony that was overgrown with vines and plants and blooming impatiens in golden urns, all ordered by a prissy decorator who barely had avoided a swan dive to the pool deck thirty floors below after presenting LaBarca with his bill.

Now LaBarca's allergies were acting up. His sinuses were clogged. His head ached, and he kept hacking up phlegm and spitting it over his balcony railing into the easterly breeze, hoping it would splat on one of the sun tanned, Eurotrash club rats on the pool deck three hundred feet below.

LaBarca rocked himself out of the chaise lounge, his gut falling over his swim trunks like a bowling ball plopping into the gutter. He moved toward the balcony railing, then squinted through a fat-barreled telescope, aiming down Government Cut toward the S.S. Norway, wondering if he could hit the damn thing with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. He was letting the sun simmer his imagination, and in his mind's eye, he saw the vapor trail, heard the whoosh, and watched the orange flash, followed by streams of black smoke curling in the easterly breeze. LaBarca was wondering if he'd be able to hear the screams of the passengers on deck-probably not, the wind was against him-when dumb shit Dino slid open the screen door and told him the bookie was here.