The New Black Mask (No 8)

Bill Pronzini is a prolific writer and editor. Since 1971 he has written over forty novels, including collaborations with Marcia Muller, John Lutz, Barry N. Malzberg, Colin Wilcox, and Jack Anderson. His latest novel, the fifteenth in the “Nameless Detective” series, is Deadfall (St. Martin’s Press, 1986). He has also written some 275 stories and articles and edited over 50 anthologies, most of them in the mystery field. Among Mr. Pronzini’s recent books are: Graveyard Plots: The Best Short Stories of Bill Pronzini (St. Martin’s Press, 1985) and One Thousand and One Midnights, with Marcia Muller (Arbor House, 1986).

1

From where he stood in the shadow of a split-bole Douglas fir, Deighan had a clear view of the cabin down below. Big harvest moon tonight, and only a few streaky clouds scudding past now and then to dim its hard yellow shine. The hard yellow glistened off the surface of Lake Tahoe beyond, softened into a long silverish stripe out toward the middle. The rest of the water shone like polished black metal. All of it was empty as far as he could see, except for the red-and-green running lights of a boat well away to the north, pointed toward the neon shimmer that marked the North Shore gambling casinos.

The cabin was big, made of cut pine logs and redwood shakes. It had a railed redwood deck that overlooked the lake, mostly invisible from where Deighan was. A flat concrete pier jutted out into the moonstruck water, a pair of short wooden floats making a T at its outer end. The boat tied up there was a thirty-foot Chris-Craft with sleeping accommodations for four. Nothing but the finer things for the Shooter.

Deighan watched the cabin. He’d been watching it for three hours now, from this same vantage point. His legs bothered him a little, standing around like this, and his eyes hurt from squinting. Time was, he’d had the night vision of an owl. Not anymore. What he had now, that he hadn’t had when he was younger, was patience. He’d learned that in the last three years, along with a lot of other things — patience most of all.

On all sides the cabin was dark, but that was because they’d put the blackout curtains up. The six of them had been inside for better than two hours now, the same five-man nucleus as on every Thursday night except during the winter months, plus the one newcomer. The Shooter went to Hawaii when it started to snow. Or Florida or the Bahamas — someplace warm. Mannlicher and Brandt stayed home in the winter. Deighan didn’t know what the others did, and he didn’t care.

A match flared in the darkness between the carport, where the Shooter’s Caddy Eldorado was slotted, and the parking area back among the trees. That was the lookout — Mannlicher’s boy. Some lookout: he smoked a cigarette every five minutes, like clockwork, so you always knew where he was. Deighan watched him smoke this one. When he was done, he threw the butt away in a shower of sparks, and then seemed to remember that he was surrounded by dry timber and went after it and stamped it out with his shoe. Some lookout.

Deighan held his watch up close to his eyes, pushed the little button that lighted its dial. Ten-nineteen. Just about time. The lookout was moving again, down toward the lake. Pretty soon he would walk out on the pier and smoke another cigarette and admire the view for a few minutes. He apparently did that at least twice every Thursday night — that had been his pattern on each of the last two — and he hadn’t gone through the ritual yet tonight. He was bored, that was the thing. He’d been at his job a long time and it was always the same; there wasn’t anything for him to do except walk around and smoke cigarettes and look at three hundred square miles of lake. Nothing ever happened. In three years nothing had ever happened.

Tonight something was going to happen.

Deighan took the gun out of the clamshell holster at his belt. It was a Smith & Wesson .38 wadcutter, lightweight, compact — a good piece, one of the best he’d ever owned. He held it in his hand, watching as the lookout performed as if on cue — walked to the pier, stopped, then moved out along its flat surface. When the guy had gone halfway, Deighan came out of the shadows and went down the slope at an angle across the driveway, to the rear of the cabin. His shoes made little sliding sounds on the needled ground, but they weren’t sounds that carried.

He’d been over this ground three times before, dry runs the last two Thursday nights and once during the day when nobody was around; he knew just where and how to go. The lookout was lighting up again, his back to the cabin, when Deighan reached the rear wall. He eased along it to the spare-bedroom window. The sash went up easily, noiselessly. He could hear them then, in the rec room — voices, ice against glass, the click and rattle of the chips. He got the ski mask from his jacket pocket, slipped it over his head, snugged it down. Then he climbed through the window, put his penlight on just long enough to orient himself, went straight across to the door that led into the rec room.

It didn’t make a sound, either, when he opened it. He went in with the revolver extended, elbow locked. Sturgess saw him first. He said, “Jesus Christ!” and his body went as stiff as if he were suffering a stroke. The others turned in their chairs, gawking. The Shooter started up out of his.

Deighan said, fast and hard, “Sit still if you don’t want to die. Hands on the table where I can see them — all of you. Do it!”

They weren’t stupid; they did what they were told. Deighan watched them through a thin haze of tobacco smoke. Six men around the hexagonal poker table, hands flat on its green baize, heads lifted or twisted to stare at him. He knew five of them. Mannlicher, the fat owner of the Nevornia Club at Crystal Bay; he had Family ties, even though he was a Prussian, because he’d once done some favors for an east-coast capo. Brandt, Mannlicher’s cousin and private enforcer, who doubled as the Nevornia’s floor boss. Bellah, the quasi-legitimate real-estate developer and high roller. Sturgess, the bankroll behind the Jackpot Lounge down at South Shore. And the Shooter — hired muscle, hired gun, part-time coke runner, whose real name was Dennis D’Allesandro. The sixth man was the pigeon they’d lured in for this particular game, a lean guy in his fifties with Texas oil money written all over him and his fancy clothes — Donley or Dona van, something like that.

Mannlicher was the bank tonight; the table behind his chair was covered with stacks of dead presidents — fifties and hundreds, mostly. Deighan took out the folded-up flour sack, tossed it on top of the poker chips that littered the baize in front of Mannlicher. “All right. Fill it.”

The fat man didn’t move. He was no pushover; he was hard, tough, mean. And he didn’t like being ripped off. Veins bulged in his neck, throbbed in his temples. The violence in him was close to the surface now, held thinly in check.

“You know who we are?” he said. “Who I am?”

“Fill it.”

“You dumb bastard. You’ll never live to spend it.”

“Fill the sack. Now.”

Deighan’s eyes, more than his gun, made up Mannlicher’s mind for him. He picked up the sack, pushed around in his chair, began to savagely feed in the stacks of bills.

“The rest of you,” Deighan said, “put your wallets, watches, jewelry on the table. Everything of value. Hurry it up.”

The Texan said, “Listen heah—” and Deighan pointed the .38 at his head and said, “One more word, you’re a dead man.” The Texan made an effort to stare him down, but it was just to save face; after two or three seconds he lowered his gaze and began stripping the rings off his fingers.

The rest of them didn’t make any fuss. Bellah was sweating; he kept swiping it out of his eyes, his hands moving in little jerks and twitches. Brandt’s eyes were like dull knives, cutting away at Deighan’s masked face. D’Allesandro showed no emotion of any kind. That was his trademark; he was your original iceman. They might have called him that, maybe, if he’d been like one of those old-timers who used an ice pick or a blade. As it was, with his preferences, the Shooter was the right name for him.

Mannlicher had the sack full now. The platinum ring on his left hand, with its circle of fat diamonds, made little gleams and glints in the shine from the low-hanging droplight. The idea of losing that bothered him even more than losing his money; he kept running the fingers of his other hand over the stones.

“The ring,” Deighan said to him. “Take it off.”

“Go to hell.”

“Take it off or I’ll put a third eye in the middle of your forehead. Your choice.”

Mannlicher hesitated, tried to stare him down, didn’t have any better luck at it than the Texan. There was a tense moment; then, because he didn’t want to die over a piece of jewelry, he yanked the ring off, slammed it down hard in the middle of the table.

Deighan said, “Put it in the sack. The wallets and the rest of the stuff too.”

This time Mannlicher didn’t hesitate. He did as he’d been told.

“All right,” Deighan said. “Now get up and go over by the bar. Lie down on the floor on your belly.”

Mannlicher got up slowly, his jaw set and his teeth clenched as if to keep the violence from spewing out like vomit. He lay down on the floor. Deighan gestured at Brandt, said, “You next. Then the rest of you, one at a time.”

When they were all on the floor he moved to the table, caught up the sack. “Stay where you are for ten minutes,” he told them. “You move before that, or call to the guy outside, I’ll blow the place up. I got a grenade in my pocket, the fragmentation kind. Anybody doubt it?”

None of them said anything.

Deighan backed up into the spare bedroom, leaving the door open so he could watch them all the way to the window. He put his head out, saw no sign of the lookout. Still down by the lake somewhere. The whole thing had taken just a few minutes.

He swung out through the window, hurried away in the shadows — but in the opposite direction from the driveway and the road above. On the far side of the cabin there was a path that angled through the pine forest to the north; he found it, followed it at a trot. Enough moonlight penetrated through the branches overhead to let him see where he was going.

He was almost to the lakefront when the commotion started back there: voices, angry and pulsing in the night, Mannlicher’s the loudest of them. They hadn’t waited the full ten minutes, but then he hadn’t expected them to. It didn’t matter. The Shooter’s cabin was invisible from here, cut off by a wooded finger of land a hundred yards wide. And they wouldn’t be looking for him along the water, anyway. They’d be up on the road, combing that area; they’d figure automatically that his transportation was a car.

The hard yellow-and-black gleam of the lake was just ahead, the rushes and ferns where he’d tied up the rented Beachcraft inboard. He moved across the sandy strip of beach, waded out to his calves, dropped the loaded flour sack into the boat, and then eased the craft free of the rushes before he lifted himself over the gunwale. The engine caught with a quiet rumble the first time he turned the key.

They were still making noise back at the cabin, blundering around like fools, as he eased away into the night.

2

The motel was called the Whispering Pines. It was back off Highway 28 below Crystal Bay, a good half mile from the lake, tucked up in a grove of pines and Douglas fir. Deighan’s cabin was the farthest from the office, detached from its nearest neighbor by thirty feet of open ground.

Inside he sat in darkness except for flickering light from the television. The set was an old one; the picture was riddled with snow and kept jumping every few seconds. But he didn’t care; he wasn’t watching it. Or listening to it he had the sound turned off. It was on only because he didn’t like waiting in the dark.

It had been after midnight when he came in — too late to make the ritual call to Fran, even though he’d felt a compulsion to do so. She went to bed at eleven-thirty; she didn’t like the phone to ring after that. How could he blame her? When he was home and she was away at Sheila’s or her sister’s, he never wanted it to ring that late either.

It was one-ten now. He was tired, but not too tired. The evening was still in his blood, warming him, like liquor or drugs that hadn’t quite worn off yet. Mannlicher’s face... that was an image he’d never forget. The Shooter’s, too, and Brandt’s, but especially Mannlicher’s.

Outside, a car’s headlamps made a sweep of light across the curtained window as it swung in through the motel courtyard. When it stopped nearby and the lights went out, Deighan thought It’s about time.

Footsteps made faint crunching sounds on gravel. Soft knock on the door. Soft voice following: “Prince? You in there?”

“Door’s open.”

A wedge of moonlight widened across the floor, not quite reaching to where Deighan sat in the lone chair with the .38 wadcutter in his hand. The man who stood silhouetted in the opening made a perfect target — just a damned airhead, any way you looked at him.

“Prince?”

“I’m over here. Come on in, shut the door.”

“Why don’t you turn on a light?”

“There’s a switch by the door.”

The man entered, shut the door. There was a click and the ceiling globe came on. Deighan stayed where he was, but reached over with his left hand to turn off the TV.

Bellah stood blinking at him, running his palms along the sides of his expensive cashmere jacket. He said nervously, “For God’s sake, put the gun away. What’s the idea?”

“I’m the cautious type.”

“Well, put it away. I don’t like it.”

Deighan got to his feet, slid the revolver into his belt holster. “How’d it go?”

“Hairy, damned hairy. Mannlicher was like a madman.” Bellah took a handkerchief out of his pocket, wiped his forehead. His angular face was pale, shiny-damp. “I didn’t think he’d take it this hard. Christ.”

That’s the trouble with people like you, Deighan thought. You never think. He pinched a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, lit it with the Zippo Fran had given him fifteen years ago. Fifteen years, and it still worked. Like their marriage, even with all the trouble. How long was it now? Twenty-two years in May? Twenty-three?

Bellah said, “He started screaming at D’Allesandro. I thought he was going to choke him.”

“Who? Mannlicher?”

“Yeah. About the window in the spare bedroom.”

“What’d D’Allesandro say?”

“He said he always keeps it locked, you must have jimmied it some way that didn’t leave any traces. Mannlicher didn’t believe him. He thinks D’Allesandro forgot to lock it.”

“Nobody got the idea it was an inside job?”

“No.”

“Okay then. Relax, Mr. Bellah. You’re in the clear.”

Bellah wiped his face again. “Where’s the money?”

“Other side of the bed. On the floor.”

“You count it?”

“No. I figured you’d want to do that.”

Bellah went over there, picked up the flour sack, emptied it on the bed. His eyes were bright and hot as he looked at all the loose green. Then he frowned, gnawed at his lower lip, and poked at Mannlicher’s diamond ring. “What’d you take this for? Mannlicher is more pissed about the ring than anything else. He said his mother gave it to him. It’s worth ten thousand.”

“That’s why I took it,” Deighan said. “Fifteen percent of the cash isn’t a hell of a lot.”

Bellah stiffened. “I set it all up, didn’t I? Why shouldn’t I get the lion’s share?”

“I’m not arguing, Mr. Bellah. We agreed on a price; OK, that’s the way it is. I’m only saying I got a right to a little something extra.”

“All right, all right.” Bellah was looking at the money again. “Must be at least two hundred thousand,” he said. “That Texan, Donley, brought fifty grand alone.”

“Plenty in his wallet too, then.”

“Yeah.”

Deighan smoked and watched Bellah count the loose bills and what was in the wallets and billfolds. There was an expression on the developer’s face like a man has when he’s fondling a naked woman. Greed, pure and simple. Greed was what drove Lawrence Bellah; money was his best friend, his lover, his god. He didn’t have enough ready cash to buy the lakefront property down near Emerald Bay — property he stood to make three or four million on, with a string of condos — and he couldn’t raise it fest enough any legitimate way; so he’d arranged to get it by knocking over his own weekly poker game, even if it meant crossing some hard people. He had balls, you had to give him that. He was stupid as hell, and one of these days he was liable to end up in pieces at the bottom of the lake, but he did have balls.

He was also lucky, at least for the time being, because the man he’d picked to do his strong-arm work was Bob Prince. He had no idea the name was a phony, no idea the whole package on Bob Prince was the result of three years of careful manipulation. All he knew was that Prince had a reputation as dependable, easy to work with, not too smart or money-hungry, and that he was willing to do any kind of muscle work. Bellah didn’t have an inkling of what he’d really done by hiring Bob Prince. If he kept on being lucky, he never would.

Bellah was sweating by the time he finished adding up the take. “Two hundred and thirty-three thousand and change,” he said. “More than we figured on.”

“My cut’s thirty-five thousand,” Deighan said.

“You divide fast.” Bellah counted out two stacks, hundreds and fifties, to one side of the flowered bedspread. Then he said, “Count it? Or do you trust me?”

Deighan grinned. He rubbed out his cigarette, went to the bed, and took his time shuffling through the stacks. “On the nose,” he said when he was done.

Bellah stuffed the rest of the cash back into the flour sack, leaving the watches and jewelry where they lay. He was still nervous, still sweating; he wasn’t going to sleep much tonight, Deighan thought.

“That’s it, then,” Bellah said. “You going back to Chicago tomorrow?”

“Not right away. Thought I’d do a little gambling first.”

“Around here? Christ, Prince...”

“No. Reno, maybe. I might even go down to Vegas.”

“Just get away from Tahoe.”

“Sure,” Deighan said. “First thing in the morning.”

Bellah went to the door. He paused there to tuck the flour sack under his jacket; it made him look as if he had a tumor on his left side. “Don’t do anything with that jewelry in Nevada. Wait until you get back to Chicago.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Bellah.”

“Maybe I’ll need you again sometime,” Bellah said. “You’ll hear from me if I do.”

“Any time. Any old time.”

When Bellah was gone, Deighan put five thousand dollars into his suitcase and the other thirty thousand into a knapsack he’d bought two days before at a South Shore sporting goods store. Mannlicher’s diamond ring went into the knapsack, too, along with the better pieces among the rest of the jewelry. The watches and the other stuff were no good to him; he bundled those up in a hand towel from the bathroom, stuffed the bundle into the pocket of his down jacket. Then he had one more cigarette, set his portable alarm clock for six A.M., double-locked the door, and went to bed on the left side, with the revolver under the pillow near his right hand.

3

In the dawn light the lake was like smoky blue glass, empty except for a few optimistic fishermen anchored close to the eastern shoreline. The morning was cold, autumn-crisp, but there was no wind. The sun was just beginning to rise, painting the sky and its scattered cloud-streaks in pinks and golds. There was old snow on the upper reaches of Mount Tallac, on some of the other Siena peaks that ringed the lake.

Deighan took the Beachcraft out half a mile before he dropped the bundle of watches and worthless jewelry overboard. Then he cut off at a long diagonal to the north that brought him to within a few hundred yards of the Shooter’s cabin. He had his fishing gear out by then, fiddling with the glass rod and tackle — just another angler looking for rainbow, Mackinaw, and cutthroat trout.

There wasn’t anybody out and around at the Shooter’s place. Deighan glided past at two knots, angled into shore a couple of hundred yards beyond, where there were rushes and some heavy brush and trees overhanging the water. From there he had a pretty good view of the cabin, its front entrance, the Shooter’s Caddy parked inside the carport.

It was eight o’clock, and the sun was all the way up, when he switched off the engine and tied up at the bole of a collapsed pine. It was a few minutes past nine-thirty when D’Allesandro came out and walked around to the Caddy. He was alone. No chippies from the casinos this morning, not after what had gone down last night. He might be going to the store for cigarettes, groceries, or to a café somewhere for breakfast. He might be going to see somebody, do some business. The important thing was, how long would he be gone?

Deighan watched him back his Caddy out of the carport, drive it away and out of sight on the road above. He stayed where he was, fishing, waiting. At the end of an hour, when the Shooter still hadn’t come back, he started the boat’s engine and took his time maneuvering around the wooded finger of land to the north and then into the cove where he’d anchored last night. He nosed the boat into the reeds and ferns, swung overboard, and pushed it farther in, out of sight. Then he caught up the knapsack and set off through the woods to the Shooter’s cabin.

He made a slow half circle of the place, keeping to the trees. The carport was still empty. Nothing moved anywhere within the range of his vision. Finally he made his way down to the rear wall, around it and along the side until he reached the front door. He didn’t like standing out here for even a little while because there was no cover; but this door was the only one into the house, except for sliding doors to the terrace and a porch on the other side, and you couldn’t jimmy sliding doors easily and without leaving marks. The same was true of windows. The Shooter would have made sure they were all secure anyway.

Deighan had one pocket of the knapsack open, the pick gun in his hand, when he reached the door. He’d got the pick gun from a housebreaker named Caldwell, an old-timer who was retired now; he’d also got some other tools and lessons in how to use them on the various kinds of locks. The lock on the Shooter’s door was a flush-mounted, five-pin cylinder lock, with a steel lip on the door frame to protect the bolt and strike plate. That meant it was a lock you couldn’t loid with a piece of plastic or a shim. It also meant that with a pick gun you could probably have it open in a couple of minutes.

Bending, squinting, he slid the gun into the lock. Set it, working the little knob on top to adjust the spring tension. Then he pulled the trigger — and all the pins bounced free at once and the door opened under his hand.

He slipped inside, nudged the door shut behind him, put the pick gun away inside the knapsack, and drew on a pair of thin plastic gloves. The place smelled of stale tobacco smoke and stale liquor. They hadn’t been doing all that much drinking last night; maybe the Shooter had nibbled a few too many after the rest of them finally left. He didn’t like losing money and valuables any more than Mannlicher did.

Deighan went through the front room. Somebody’d decorated the place for D’Allesandro: leather furniture, deer and antelope heads on the walls, Indian rugs on the floors, tasteful paintings. Cocaine deals had paid for part of it; contract work, including two hits on greedy Oakland and San Francisco drug dealers, had paid for the rest. But the Shooter was still small-time. He wasn’t bright enough to be anything else. Cards and dice and whores-in-training were all he really cared about.

The front room was no good; Deighan prowled quickly through the other rooms. D’Allesandro wasn’t the kind to have an office or a den, but there was a big old-fashioned rolltop desk in a room with a TV set and one of those big movie-type screens. None of the desk drawers was locked. Deighan pulled out the biggest one, saw that it was loaded with Danish porn magazines, took the magazines out and set them on the floor. He opened the knapsack and transferred the thirty thousand dollars into the back of the drawer. He put Mannlicher’s ring in there, too, along with the other rings and a couple of gold chains the Texan had been wearing. Then he stuffed the porn magazines in at the front and pushed the drawer shut.

On his way back to the front room he rolled the knapsack tight around the pick gun and stuffed them into his jacket pocket. He opened the door, stepped out. He’d just finished resetting the lock when he heard the car approaching on the road above.

He froze for a second, looking up there. He couldn’t see the car because of a screen of trees; but then he heard its automatic transmission gear down as it slowed for the turn into the Shooter’s driveway. He pulled the door shut and ran toward the lake, the only direction he could go. Fifty feet away the log-railed terrace began, raised up off the sloping ground on redwood pillars. Deighan caught one of the railings, hauled himself up and half rolled through the gap between them. The sound of the oncoming car was loud in his ears as he landed, off balance, on the deck.

He went to one knee, came up again. The only way to tell if he’d been seen was to stop and look, but that was a fool’s move. Instead he ran across the deck, climbed through the railing on the other side, dropped down, and tried to keep from making noise as he plunged into the woods. He stopped moving after thirty yards, where fems and a deadfall formed a thick concealing wall. From behind it, with the .38 wadcutter in his hand, he watched the house and the deck, catching his breath, waiting.

Nobody came up or out of the deck. Nobody showed himself anywhere. The car’s engine had been shut off sometime during his flight; it was quiet now, except for birds and the faint hum of a powerboat out on the lake.

Deighan waited ten minutes. When there was still nothing to see or hear, he transcribed a slow curl through the trees to where he could see the front of the cabin. The Shooter’s Caddy was back inside the carport, no sign of haste in the way it had been neatly slotted. The cabin door was shut. The whole area seemed deserted.

But he waited another ten minutes before he was satisfied. Even then, he didn’t holster his weapon until he’d made his way around to the cove where the Beachcraft was hidden. And he didn’t relax until he was well out on the lake, headed back toward North Shore.

4

The Nevornia was one of North Shore’s older clubs, but it had undergone some recent modernizing. Outside, it had been given a glass and gaudy-neon face-lift. Inside, they’d used more glass, some cut crystal, and a wine-red decor that included carpeting, upholstery, and gaming tables.

When Deighan walked in a few minutes before two, the banks of slots and the blackjack tables were getting moderately heavy play. That was because it was Friday; some of the small-time gamblers liked to get a jump on the weekend crowds. The craps and roulette layouts were quiet. The high rollers were like vampires: they couldn’t stand the daylight, so they only came out after dark.

Deighan bought a roll of quarters at one of the change booths. There were a couple of dozen rows of slots in the main casino — flashy new ones, mostly, with a few of the old scrolled nickel-plated jobs mixed in for the sake of nostalgia. He stopped at one of the old quarter machines, fed in three dollars’ worth. Lemons and oranges. He couldn’t even line up two cherries for a three-coin drop. He smiled crookedly to himself, went away from the slots and into the long concourse that connected the main casino with the new, smaller addition at the rear.

There were telephone booths along one side of the concourse. Deighan shut himself inside one of them, put a quarter in the slot, pushed o and then the digits of his home number in San Francisco. When the operator came on he said it was a collect call; that was to save himself the trouble of having to feed in a handful of quarters. He let the circuit make exactly five burrs in his ear before he hung up. If Fran was home, she’d know now that he was all right. If she wasn’t home, then she’d know it later when he made another five-ring call. He always tried to call at least twice a day, at different times, because sometimes she went out shopping or to a movie or to visit with Sheila and the kids.

It’d be easier if she just answered the phone, talked to him, but she never did when he was away. Never. Sheila or anybody else wanted to get hold of her, they had to call one of the neighbors or come over in person. She didn’t want anything to do with him when he was away, didn’t want to know what he was doing or even when he’d be back. “Suppose I picked up the phone and it wasn’t you?” she’d said. “Suppose it was somebody telling me you were dead? I couldn’t stand that.” That part of it didn’t make sense to him. If he were dead, somebody’d come by and tell it to her face; dead was dead, and what difference did it make how she got the news? But he didn’t argue with her. He didn’t like to argue with her, and it didn’t cost him anything to do it her way.

He slotted the quarter again and called the Shooter’s number. Four rings, five, and D’Allesandro’s voice said, “Yeah?”

“Mr. Carson?”

“Who?”

“Isn’t this Paul Carson?”

“No. You got the wrong number.”

“Oh, sorry,” Deighan said, and rang off.

Another quarter in the slot. This time the number he punched out was the Nevornia’s business line. A woman’s voice answered, crisp and professional. He said, “Mr. Mannlicher. Tell him it’s urgent.”

“Whom shall I say is calling?”

“Never mind that. Just tell him it’s about what happened last night.”

“Sir, I’m afraid I can’t—”

“Tell him last night’s poker game, damn it. He’ll talk to me.”

There was a click and some canned music began to play in his ear. He lit a cigarette. He was on his fourth drag when the canned music quit and the fat man’s voice said, “Frank Mannlicher. Who’s this?”

“No names. Is it all right to talk on this line?”

“Go ahead, talk.”

“I’m the guy who hit your game last night.”

Silence for four or five seconds. Then Mannlicher said, “Is that so?” in a flat, wary voice.

“Ski mask, Smith & Wesson .38, grenade in my jacket pocket. The take was better than two hundred thousand. I got your ring — platinum with a circle of diamonds.”

Another pause, shorter this time. “So why call me today?”

“How’d you like to get it all back — the money and the ring?”

“How?”

“Go pick it up. I’ll tell you where.”

“Yeah? Why should you do me a favor?”

“I didn’t know who you were last night. I wasn’t told. If I had been, I wouldn’t of gone through with it. I don’t mess with people like you, people with your connections.”

“Somebody hired you, that it?”

“That’s it.”

“Who?”

“D’Allesandro.”

“What?”

“The Shooter. D’Allesandro.”

“...Bullshit.”

“You don’t have to believe me. But I’m telling you — he’s the one. He didn’t tell me who’d be at the game, and now he’s trying to screw me on the money. He says there was less than a hundred and fifty thousand in the sack; I know better.”

“So now you want to screw him.”

“That’s right. Besides, I don’t like the idea of you pushing to find out who I am, maybe sending somebody to pay me a visit someday. I figure if I give you the Shooter, you’ll lose interest in me.”

More silence. “Why’d he do it?” Mannlicher said in a different voice — harder, with that edge of violence it had held last night. “Hit the game like that?”

“He needs big money, fast. He’s into some kind of scam back east; he wouldn’t say what it is.”

“Where’s the money and the rest of the stuff?”

“At his cabin. We had a drop arranged in the woods; I put the sack there last night, he picked it up this morning when nobody was around. The money’s in his desk — the big rolltop. Your ring, too. That’s where it was an hour ago, anyhow, when I walked out.”

Mannlicher said, “In his desk,” as if he were biting the words off something bitter.

“Go out there, see for yourself.”

“If you’re telling this straight, you got nothing to worry about from me. Maybe I’ll fix you up with a reward or something. Where can I get in touch?”

“You can’t,” Deighan said. “I’m long gone as soon as I hang up this phone.”

“I’ll make it five thousand. Just tell me where you—”

Deighan broke the connection.

His cigarette had burned down to the filter; he dropped it on the floor, put his shoe on it before he left the booth. On his way out of the casino he paused long enough to push another quarter into the same slot machine he’d played before. More lemons and oranges. This time he didn’t smile as he moved away.

5

Narrow and twisty, hemmed in by trees, old Lake Road branched off Highway 28 and took two miles to get all the way to the lake. But it wasn’t a dead-end; another road picked it up at the lakefront and looped back out to the highway. There were several nice homes hidden away in the area — it was called Pine Acres — with plenty of space between them. The Shooter’s cabin was a mile and a half from the highway, off an even narrower lane called Little Cove Road. The only other cabin within five hundred yards was a summer place that the owners had already closed up for the year.

Deighan drove past the intersection with Little Cove, went two-tenths of a mile, parked on the turnout at that point. There wasn’t anybody else around when he got out, nothing to see except trees and little winks of blue that marked the nearness of the lake. If anybody came along they wouldn’t pay any attention to the car. For one thing, it was a ’75 Ford Galaxy with nothing distinctive about it except the antenna for the GTE mobile phone. It was his — he’d driven it up from San Francisco — but the papers on it said it belonged to Bob Prince. For another thing, Old Lake Road was only a hundred yards or so from the water here, and there was a path through the trees to a strip of rocky beach. Local kids used it in the summer; he’d found that out from Bellah. Kids might have decided to stop here on a sunny autumn day as well. No reason for anybody to think otherwise.

He found the path, went along it a short way to where it crossed a little creek, dry now and so narrow it was nothing more than a natural drainage ditch. He followed the creek to the north, on a course he’d taken three days ago. It led him to a shelflike overhang topped by two chunks of granite outcrop that leaned against each other like a pair of old drunks. Below the shelf, the land fell away sharply to the Shooter’s driveway some sixty yards distant. Off to the right, where the incline wasn’t so steep and the trees grew in a pack, was the split-bole Douglas fir where he’d stood waiting last night. The trees were fewer and more widely spaced apart between here and the cabin, so that from behind the two outcrops you had a good look at the Shooter’s property, Little Cove Road, the concrete pier, and the lake shimmering under the late-afternoon sun.

The Caddy Eldorado was still slotted inside the carport. It was the only car in sight. Deighan knelt behind where the outcrops came together to form a notch, rubbed tension out of his neck and shoulders while he waited.

He didn’t have to wait long. Less than ten minutes had passed when the car appeared on Little Cove Road, slowed, turned down the Shooter’s driveway. It wasn’t Mannlicher’s fancy limo; it was a two-year-old Chrysler — Brandt’s, maybe. Brandt was driving it: Deighan had a clear view of him through the side window as the Chrysler pulled up and stopped near the cabin’s front door. He could also see that the lone passenger was Mannlicher.

Brandt got out, opened the passenger door for the fat man, and the two of them went to the cabin. It took D’Allesandro ten seconds to answer Brandt’s knock. There was some talk, not much; then Mannlicher and Brandt went in, and the door shut behind them.

All right, Deighan thought. He’d stacked the deck as well as he could; pretty soon he’d know how the hand — and the game — played out.

Nothing happened for maybe five minutes. Then he thought he heard some muffled sounds down there, loud voices that went on for a while, something that might have been a bang, but the distance was too great for him to be sure that he wasn’t imagining them. Another four or five minutes went by. And then the door opened and Brandt came out alone, looked around, called something back inside that Deighan didn’t understand. If there was an answer, it wasn’t audible. Brandt shut the door, hurried down to the lake, went out onto the pier. The Chris-Craft was still tied up there. Brandt climbed on board, disappeared for thirty seconds or so, reappeared carrying a square of something gray and heavy. Tarpaulin, Deighan saw when Brandt came back up the driveway. Big piece of it — big enough for a shroud.

The Shooter’s hand had been folded. That left three of them still in the game.

When Brandt had gone back inside with the tarp, Deighan stood and half ran along the creek and through the trees to where he’d left the Ford. Old Lake Road was deserted. He yanked open the passenger door, leaned in, caught up the mobile phone, and punched out the emergency number for the county sheriff’s office. An efficient-sounding male voice answered.

“Something’s going on on Little Cove Road,” Deighan said, making himself sound excited. “That’s in Pine Acres, you know? It’s the cabin at the end, down on the lake. I heard shots — people shooting at each other down there. It sounds like a war.”

“What’s the address?”

“I don’t know the address, it’s the cabin right on the lake. People shooting at each other. You better get right out there.”

“Your name, sir?”

“I don’t want to get involved. Just hurry, will you?”

Deighan put the receiver down, shut the car door, ran back along the path and along the creek to the shelf. Mannlicher and Brandt were still inside the cabin. He went to one knee again behind the outcrops, drew the .38 wadcutter, held it on his thigh.

It was another two minutes before the door opened down there. Brandt came out, looked around as he had before, went back inside — and then he and Mannlicher both appeared, one at each end of a big, tarp-wrapped bundle. They started to carry it down the driveway toward the lake. Going to put it on the boat, Deighan thought, take it out now or later on, when it’s dark. Lake Tahoe was sixteen hundred feet deep in the middle. The bundle wouldn’t have been the first somebody’d dumped out there.

He let them get clear of the Chrysler, partway down the drive, before he poked the gun into the notch, sighted, and fired twice. The shots went where he’d intended them to, wide by ten feet and into the roadbed so they kicked up gravel. Mannlicher and Brandt froze for an instant, confused. Deighan fired a third round, putting the slug closer this time, and that one panicked them: they let go of the bundle and began scrambling.

There was no cover anywhere close by; they both ran for the Chrysler. Brandt had a gun in his hand when he reached it, and he dropped down behind the rear deck, trying to locate Deighan’s position. Mannlicher kept on scrambling around to the passenger door, pulled it open, pushed himself across the seat inside.

Deighan blew out the Chrysler’s near front tire. Sighted, and blew out the rear tire. Brandt threw an answering shot his way, but it wasn’t even close. The Chrysler was tilting in Deighan’s direction as the tires flattened. Mannlicher pushed himself out of the car, tried to make a run for the cabin door with his arms flailing, his fat Jiggling. Deighan put a bullet into the wall beside the door. Mannlicher reversed himself, fell in his frantic haste, crawled back behind the Chrysler.

Reloading the wadcutter, Deighan could hear the sound of cars coming fast up on Little Cove Road. No sirens, but revolving lights made faint bloodred flashes through the trees.

From behind the Chrysler Brandt fired again, wildly, Beyond him, on the driveway, one corner of the tarp-wrapped bundle had come loose and was flapping in the wind off the lake.

A county sheriff’s cruiser, its roof light slashing the air, made the turn off Little Cove onto the driveway. Another one was right behind it. In his panic, Brandt straightened up when he saw them and fired once, blindly, at the first in line.

Deighan was on his feet by then, hurrying away from the outcrops, holstering his weapon. Behind him he heard brakes squeal, another shot, voices yelling, two more shots. All the sounds faded as he neared the turnout and the Ford. By the time he pulled out onto the deserted road, there was nothing to hear but the sound of his engine, the screeching of a jay somewhere nearby.

Brandt had thrown in his hand by now; so had Mannlicher.

This pot belonged to him.

6

Fran was in the backyard, weeding her garden, when he got home late the following afternoon. He called to her from the doorway, and she glanced around and then got up, unsmiling, and came over to him. She was wearing jeans and one of his old shirts and a pair of gardening gloves, and her hair was tied in a long ponytail. Used to be a light, silky brown, her hair; now it was mostly gray. His fault. She was only forty-six. A woman of forty-six shouldn’t be so gray.

She said, “So you’re back.” She didn’t sound glad to see him, didn’t kiss him or touch him at all. But her eyes were gentle on his face.

“I’m back.”

“You all right? You look tired.”

“Long drive. I’m fine; it was a good trip.”

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to hear about it, not any of it. She just didn’t want to know.

“How about you?” he asked. “Everything been okay?”

“Sheila’s pregnant again.”

“Christ. What’s the matter with her? Why don’t she get herself fixed? Or get Hank fixed?”

“She likes kids.”

“I like kids too, but four’s too many at her age. She’s only twenty-seven.”

“She wants eight.”

“She’s crazy,” Deighan said. “What’s she want to bring all those kids into a world like this for?”

There was an awkward moment. It was always awkward at first when he came back. Then Fran said, “You hungry?”

“You know me. I can always eat.” Fact was, he was starved. He hadn’t eaten much up in Nevada, never did when he was away. And he hadn’t had anything today except an English muffin and some coffee for breakfast in Truckee.

“Come into the kitchen,” Fran said. “I’ll fix you something.”

They went inside. He got a beer out of the refrigerator; she waited and then took out some covered dishes, some vegetables. He wanted to say something to her, talk a little, but he couldn’t think of anything. His mind was blank at times like this. He carried his beer into the living room.

The goddamn trophy case was the first thing he saw. He hated that trophy case; but Fran wouldn’t get rid of it, no matter what he said. For her it was like some kind of shrine to the dead past. All the mementoes of his years on the force — twenty-two years, from beat patrolman in North Beach all the way up to inspector on the narcotics squad. The certificate he’d won in marksmanship competition at the police academy, the two citations from the mayor for bravery, other crap like that. Bones, that’s all they were to him. Pieces of a rotting skeleton. What was the sense in keeping them around, reminding both of them of what he’d been, what he’d lost?

His fault he’d lost it, sure. But it was their fault too, goddamn them. The laws, the lawyers, the judges, the system. No convictions on half of all the arrests he’d ever made — half! Turning the ones like Mannlicher and Brandt and D’Allesandro loose, putting them right back on the street, letting them make their deals and their hits, letting them screw up innocent lives. Sheila’s kids, his grandkids — lives like that. How could they blame him for being bitter? How could they blame him for taking too many drinks now and then?

He sat down on the couch, drank some of his beer, lit a cigarette. Ah Christ, he thought, it’s not them. You know it wasn’t them. It was you, you dumb bastard. They warned you twice about drinking on duty. And you kept on doing it, you were hog-drunk the night you plowed the departmental sedan into that vanload of teenagers. What if one of those kids had died? You were lucky, by God. You got off easy.

Sure, he thought. Sure. But he’d been a good cop, damn it, a cop inside and out; it was all he knew how to be. What was he supposed to do after they threw him off the force? Live on his half-pension? Get a job as a part-time security guard? Forty-four years old, no skills, no friends outside the department — what the hell was he supposed to do?

He’d invented Bob Prince, that was what he’d done. He’d gone into business for himself.

Fran didn’t understand. “You’ll get killed one of these days,” she’d said in the beginning. “It’s vigilante justice,” she’d said. “You think you’re Rambo, is that it?” she’d said. She just didn’t understand. To him it was the same job he’d always done, the only one he was any good at, only now he made up some of the rules. He was no Rambo, one man up against thousands, a mindless killing machine; he hated that kind of phony flag-waving crap. It wasn’t real. What he was doing, that was real. It meant something. But a hero? No. Hell, no. He was a sniper, that was all, picking off a weak or a vulnerable enemy here and there, now and then. Snipers weren’t heroes, for Christ’s sake. Snipers were snipers, just like cops were cops.

He finished his beer and his cigarette, got up, went into Fran’s sewing room. The five thousand he’d held out of the poker-game take was in his pocket — money he felt he was entitled to because his expenses ran high sometimes, and they had to eat, they had to live. He put the roll into her sewing cabinet, where he always put whatever money he made as Bob Prince. She’d spend it when she had to, parcel it out, but she’d never mention it to him or anyone else. She’d told Sheila once that he had a sales job, he got paid in cash a lot, that was why he was away from home for such long periods of time.

When he walked back into the kitchen she was at the sink, peeling potatoes. He went over and touched her shoulder, kissed the top of her head. She didn’t look at him; stood there stiffly until he moved away from her. But she’d be all right in a day or two. She’d be fine until the next time Bob Prince made the right kind of connection.

He wished it didn’t have to be this way. He wished he could roll back the clock three years, do things differently, take the gray out of her hair and the pain out of her eyes. But he couldn’t. It was just too late.

You had to play the cards you were dealt, no matter how lousy they were. The only thing that made it tolerable was that sometimes, on certain hands, you could find ways to stack the damn deck.