The Vig

Chapter Twenty-four

The eyes opened to darkness. Over by the opening for the window, where the light would eventually start, there was nothing. Gradually as he looked, the one darkness became several different shades of black and gray-the shapes of the desk, a poster, the window, one of the chairs. Stars flickered dimly in the black sky.

Rusty Ingraham sat up on the hard bed. The girl next to him was asleep, her long hair splaying over her pillow. He wearily tapped his good right arm on the mattress, as though asking it to quit being so unfriendly. He got up and went into the bathroom, feeling his way through the still unfamiliar house. Closing the door behind him, he turned on the light and watched the cockroaches scatter.

Outside were no living sounds, not even the birds that herald the coming day hours before the sky began to lighten. So it was very early, perhaps even very late the night before. How long had he slept?

Abruptly, he flipped the light off again, standing still and listening carefully now. Always listening carefully, keeping his eyes open. It was already getting old.

He could just make out the sounds of water in the bay -the slush slap against boat and piling, the gentler wash against sand. The house was north of the city, on the beach.

Something-a lizard? A tree rat?-skittered across the roof. Far off, a motor-a car or a fishing boat-started up, coughed once, then faded. He turned the light back on. The porcelain toilet didn’t have a seat. The mirror over the sink had rust spots through the glass. There was no curtain in the shower area.

Well, what did he expect on the notice he’d given? There would be time, and already money, for something better..

His arm was throbbing slightly and he tried to remember if he’d taken his antibiotics before going to bed with… whatever her name was.

Well, whoever she was, she had been just what he liked -pretty, enthusiastic, game for a good time. And going home to Atlanta today. And another one would arrive, or had arrived and was waiting for him. These vacation girls were the way to go. No promises, no pretense. None of the hassles a steady woman could bring you.

He touched the bandage gingerly, trying to see if the throbbing was the onset of infection, which could be trouble, or just the pain of rebuilding tissue. He tried to flex his left arm but thought he was still quite a ways from that.

No, it was a good solid dull pain. He mugged at the mirror, his lady-killer grin. His eyes were clear. No fever, therefore no infection.

He went back to the bed and stretched out next to the girl. The window remained a black hole in deeper blackness. A creaking sound, like a twig breaking, made him jump, and the girl stirred beside him. Then silence.

It was just the house settling.

He drifted back off into sleep.

It was only a hunch, but Hardy thought it was better than trying to cover twelve exits at one time.

He thought he would give it two more days and then start the long haul back home. This morning, still pretty fatigued from the drive down, he had slept in, but tomorrow he planned to get in one run at deep-sea fishing, maybe get a nice picture of himself and a sailfish to brag about back at the Shamrock.

He got to the stadium well after the games had started. He heard the loudspeaker and the applause from the edges of the parking lot. There’d been no blue Volkswagen Jettas parked in the street he had taken leading up to the stadium. Tomorrow, if nothing worked today, he would hire a lucky cab driver and put on some miles covering the streets all around the neighborhood. But today he would start with the parking lot.

There was no concrete. It was a dusty, grassless, pot-holed couple of square blocks surrounding the stadium, into which people had driven and parked in pretty much random order. If you were near the stadium, Hardy figured it would take at least an hour to let the lot clear enough to make your way out. There wasn’t anything resembling a lane where traffic should go, no white lines for parking areas. If your car fit, jam it in there.

Twenty-five minutes of walking in the bright hot sun got pretty depressing. The Volkswagen was a popular car in Mexico. The old Beetle was as common as it had been in the United States in the sixties. But there were also Rabbits and, unfortunately, Jettas. And two of them light blue in his first pass at the outside border of the lot.

Wonderful, he thought. A dozen exits to the stadium. Probably a dozen blue Jettas in the parking lot. He needed twenty guys, a week, and a ton of luck. And even then…

He sat on somebody’s fender near the entrance to the lot, sucking down an ice-cold Fanta, trying to come up with some plan that might work. The landscape of automobiles shimmered and glared in the heat.

California plates!

Acapulco was a long way from California, and almost no one, except for the lunatic fringe among whom Hardy was beginning to count himself, drove. There wouldn’t be more than twenty cars in the lot with California plates, and he guessed the odds of finding more than one blue Jetta with them were significantly on his side.

Whistling, he started walking through the lot.

“Woo, I’m dizzy.”

She pressed her body up against his good side.

She was fantastic. Long, leggy, a face for the movies. Hair a deep chestnut, green eyes. She was a secretary from Washington, D.C., and wore a white T-shirt from the Hard Times Café that said ‘I like mine all the way wet.’ The T-shirt was a little small-her breasts held the front up high enough to show her navel in the slim waist. Maybe she was twenty-two, and with a couple of margaritas already in her. Look out.

“Watch out for the potholes,” Rusty said. “Just lean against me.”

“Could you believe those bodies?” she said.

“Pretty amazing.”

“I mean, I’ve seen jocks before, but these guys…”

He let her go on. Fantasize all you want, he was thinking. And he’d been studying the guys, too. Getting to know them a little now, what to watch for. And getting lucky, hitting two, then three, four in a row, clearing over a thousand U.S. today, more than making up for last week’s disaster.

He was glad the hurricane had enforced the time off. He had been starting to press. Just down here and thinking he had to make his mark right away. Wrong. He had time. He kept telling himself he had time. All the time in the world. So he took a few days off, met Atlanta, stayed indoors. It had been good for him. Now, starting a new week fresh, hitting it right away, this was it.

Most of the cars were out of the lot. He and D.C. were laughing, watching out for potholes. They were going to go down to the Esplanade and have turtle soup and a lobster dinner and blow a wad of this money, then maybe hit a cock fight. Or anyway, something with a cock.

He smiled. Whatever they did, it didn’t matter. He was loaded. After being down here ten days, he had more than he had come with. And that’s the way it would keep rolling. No more getting behind the eight ball. Study the game. Bet cautiously until you hit your roll. Then, like today, run it.

And he thought he was seeing it already. Some pattern. Some way to make a steady income. It wasn’t exactly like the ponies, where there were all these variables. Horses were dumb animals. Jai alai was people, momentum, things you could understand, predict.

It was late afternoon. The green hill had a sepia tone through the dust of the lot. They got to his car and heard footsteps coming up behind them.

“Hey, Rusty! Rusty!” Hardy closed the distance between them. He took off his sunglasses. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

Rusty was good, Hardy gave him that. Barely a flicker of panic. “Diz!” He reached out his good arm and pulled Hardy into an embrace. “God, it’s great to see you.”

“Me? It’s great to see you. I thought you were dead.”

“Dead?” the girl said.

“Oh, hey, excuse me, this is D.C. D.C, an old friend, Dismas Hardy.”

She nodded. “What do you mean, dead?”

Rusty laughed. “I’m not dead, thank God.”

“Me, neither.”

“I can see that. What are you doing down here?”

“Maybe great minds think alike. I’m waiting for your first call and watching the news and I see some girl has been killed on a barge in China Basin, and-”

“What? Who was killed?”

Hardy shrugged. “I don’t know. But I knew that’s where you lived, so I went down to check it out and it was the slip you’d given me. I didn’t want to wait around so Louis Baker could find me. I just went back home, threw some things together and lit out.”

“It was Maxine…” Rusty leaned up against the fender of his car. He put his hand up, shading his eyes.

“Who’s Maxine?” D.C. asked.

“She was a friend, just a friend.” His eyes were actually glazing, near tears. “God, Diz, she must have come over to visit and was there when Baker got there.”

“That’s what I figured. I just split. Especially since you didn’t call me, I figured-”

“I know. I just spooked, same as you. When I got home from seeing you I sat around for an hour and realized I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t just wait there for Baker to come and kill me. What was the point? But I should have called you. I’m sorry.”

“What are you guys talking about?”

Rusty was making a point of recovering from the shock of Maxine’s death. He told a good story while Hardy and D.C. listened. It sounded romantic, frightening, kind of cool.

“So what happened to this guy Baker?” D.C. asked.

Hardy looked at Rusty and shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope he’s back in jail by now. He probably left some prints, don’t you think, Rusty? Something, anyway.” He turned to the girl. “They usually do. I figured I had some vacation, I’d take it and give the cops a month or so to figure it out. If not, time I get back, I can tell them what I think and they’ll go get him, but I thought it would be safer to get away first. So I’ve been bumming in Mexico a couple of weeks.”

“It’s only my second day,” she said.

“Hey, you eaten yet, Diz? We were going to go down and blow some of my winnings. You want to join us?”

“You win at this game?”

Rusty grinned now. He opened the passenger door. “Big time.”

They were leaving the lot, bouncing over the dirt. “So what happened to your arm?” Hardy asked.

After he had located the car, Hardy had a good long time to work on the plan. Though it had still been early enough to get back to the El Sol and return with his gun, what good would that have done? He wasn’t planning on kidnapping Rusty. It was a long way back home and they’d have to drive-there was no way Hardy could board a plane with the gun.

Hardy couldn’t go to the local police, either. Rusty wasn’t wanted for anything, here or in the States, and even if he was, Hardy wasn’t a lawman. The only way to do it, Hardy realized, was to get Abe involved and somehow make things official.

But first he had wanted to make sure Rusty wouldn’t suddenly cop to the whole thing and want, say, to fly home to work it out. Hardy didn’t want to have Abe fly down just to have Rusty say, “Sure, guys, I’ll go home with you.” Figuring he could beat it. He wanted to make sure the guy was denying it, that Abe would be needed.

Any risk he ran in showing himself would be minimized by his own charade. He figured he and Rusty would hang out, Hardy sticking close, for a day or two until Abe could make it down, then they’d nail him.

Rusty had a charming smile. “I’ll tell you, my life isn’t dull,” he was saying. “I got this arm the third day I was here. I was out fishing, sweating like a pig. Dove in to cool off. So I’m climbing back onto the boat and grab the gaff to come aboard. I slip and the damned thing goes through my arm.”

“Both sides, in and out?”

“Yep.”

“Ouch!” D.C. said.

Hardy had enjoyed it, watching the show. He tried to see it the way Rusty was telling it, and every little piece fit in just right. If he didn’t know the truth, Hardy would have been convinced himself-the flight from vengeful Louis Baker, an insurance settlement that provided some ready cash, the accident with the gaff. Once, in the middle of dinner, another flirtation with tears over Maxine’s death.

There was also the mental challenge of holding back, of biting his tongue. He had to remember he hadn’t been to the barge, hadn’t seen Rusty’s blood on the bed, Maxine’s body blocking the hallway. He hadn’t visited Louis Baker in the hospital, and he’d never heard of Johnny LaGuardia, Ray Weir, any of them.

The girl was gone now, dropped off dead drunk at her hotel after dinner.

Rusty had driven himself and Hardy back up to the cliffside restaurant for a few nightcaps-shots of tequila and wedges of lime. Hardy thought he would get Rusty drunk, drive him home, maybe misplace his keys. Then he’d call Abe and talk him into getting down here.

They walked around to where the boys jumped. The ocean roared far down below them. There was a grotto to the Virgin Mary for the obligatory prayer before going off the cliff. A smell of kerosene-for the torches-overlaid the sea air. The divers had all gone home.

“This is something,” Hardy said. The crescent moon hung over the sea to his right. “I was over at one of the restaurants the other day and couldn’t watch it,” Hardy said.

“It’s Mexico, life’s cheap.” Rusty was standing next to him. He’d brought a bottle with him.

“Still. It’s not done with mirrors.”

Rusty lifted the bottle, shrugging. “You lose a few beaners, who’s going to notice?”

“Not exactly the words of the burning idealist who used to work for the D.A.”

Rusty sounded like he was feeling the drinks. “Diz, let me tell you something. I just wanted to win cases. Same as everybody else.”

“I don’t know. I like to think I cared about justice a little.”

“That why you quit? That passion for justice?” Hardy looked sidelong at Rusty, deciding he wasn’t going to have to try to get him drunk. Rusty staggered a few steps further toward the edge of the cliff and Hardy walked behind him.

Rusty’s good hand held the bottle down at his side. He turned around, his back to the cliff.

He drank again, tipping the bottle up. He staggered back a few steps. “I guess in a way Baker did me a favor giving me this opportunity to drop out.”

Hardy moved up beside him. “Watch out here,” he said. “That’s a long way down.” It was time to start herding him back to the car. “So you’re not going back?” All innocence.

Rusty turned again. He seemed to be looking at the moon. “You know how they always tell us don’t burn your bridges? Well, that’s what I’ve done. I’m dead, Diz. Nobody in the whole world knows I’m alive. Except you.”

“And you like that?”

“It’s freedom. You never realize how much you’re held back by what you’ve done before. Your habits. Other people’s expectations. I don’t know which is worse. But now there’s neither of them. It’s like being given a second chance, born again.”

“A lot of people go look up Jesus, say the same thing.”

Rusty laughed. “This isn’t forgiveness, Diz. This is a clean slate.” He nipped at his bottle. “How about you? Anybody know you’re here?”

Hardy decided to keep running with his own game. He shook his head. “Not a soul,” he lied. “But I still feel like me. Same baggage.”

“Only if you think of it that way.”

Rusty walked to the edge of the cliff, bottle in hand. Hardy kept his distance four or five steps behind him, still close enough to the cliff edge to see a phosphorous wave break far below, the sound carrying up like distant thunder.

“Maybe you don’t have so many things tying you up,” Hardy said.

Rusty chuckled. “You can bet on that one.” He turned to look at Hardy. “You think things have got to tie you up? I tell you, Diz, I tried that for about, I don’t know, ten years. It sucks.”

“I gave it up for about ten years and that sucks too.”

Rusty swigged from the bottle. “Well, there you go,” he said. He walked to the lip of the cliff and leaned over looking down. Straightening up, he half turned. “I guess I just don’t want to think so much anymore. Or try to do anything anymore. My ambition done gone south. Especially since coming down here. I do some betting, keep on top of my game, score a few chicks. You want to know what living is, take my advice and don’t go back to San Francisco. Hang out.”

“I don’t think so.”

Rusty shrugged, brought the bottle again to his lips. Then, abruptly, he sat down, hanging his legs over the edge of the precipice. He patted the ground next to him. “Sit down, Diz, have a hit.” He held the bottle out.

“I’m good,” Hardy said. “What do you say we head back?”

The temptation was getting to Hardy. Rusty had killed Maxine Weir and stolen her money. He had helped undo nine years of Louis Baker’s prison rehab. Hardy knew that as long as Rusty was free, he himself would never be safe. Rusty couldn’t really let him go back. The word might eventually get back that Rusty was down here-just the ‘might’ was enough. Rusty had already killed for the life he wanted, and Hardy didn’t doubt he’d do it again. And now the guy was sitting on the cliffs edge, dangling his feet, half in the bag. A little nudge and Abe’s order of the cosmos would be restored.

Hardy looked around the deserted plateau. There was no sign of life except for him and Rusty. He took a breath and did a deep knee bend, scratching the dirt. “Come on,” he said. “I’m ready for the sack.” He’d get back to the El Sol, call Abe, put things in gear for tomorrow or the next day, figure how they would get Rusty back to the States.

But Rusty did not move to get up. Instead he pulled at the bottle again, barely tipping his head enough to splash some tequila into his mouth. Hardy wondered how he could function with as much alcohol as he must have had in him. Then he wondered if he was functioning.

He moved up a step. “Rusty?”

Suddenly shaking his head like a wet dog, Rusty put the bottle down on the dirt. He seemed to try to balance himself with his good arm, to push up, but the effort was too great and he settled back heavily, swearing.

Hardy waited.

Rusty lay down flat on his back, staring at the stars, his legs hanging over the cliff. “I am fubar’d,” he said, the words coming out very slurred. “Fucked up beyond all repair.”

Hardy, moving no closer, nodded. “So I’ll drive,” he said. Without looking back, he wheeled and started walking.

It was 12:15 when he got to the car. At 12:30, sitting on the hood with his feet on the fender, he had to decide if he was going to walk home or what. He still didn’t know where Rusty lived, and he didn’t want to lose track of him. Of course, he could leave him passed out on the cliff, hoping he would walk in his sleep and settle the issue, but that really didn’t seem too promising a plan. No, he had to keep Rusty in his sights, keep playing this game as Rusty’s friend, get Abe down here, then blindside him.

He crossed the open plateau again. Rusty hadn’t moved an inch, The bottle glinted in the moonlight next to him. His good arm was outstretched behind it. He was breathing heavily, noisily, his mouth open.

“Goddammit, Rusty!” Hardy came up behind his head and nudged it with his foot. “Come on, let’s shake it.”

He didn’t stir. For an instant Hardy thought that maybe he was dead, then reminded himself that dead men almost never breathed so loud.

He shook his head, thinking it out. Rusty had one bad arm, in a sling, and was pretty obviously drunk as a skunk. There wasn’t much real threat there, was there, Diz?

He could grab the good arm, pull him back away from the cliff like a sack of bricks, get him up and moving somehow. Unless he wanted to sit here all night, or walk home and maybe lose him.

He leaned over and took hold of the good arm around the wrist with both his hands. It was dead. There was no resistance. He got a better footing and started to pull. Rusty finally made a noise, half-turning. Hardy moved back, letting go. “Come on, get up.”

Rusty rolled again onto his back. This was getting old in a hurry. Hardy said fuck it and grabbed him under both armpits, leaning over, off balance for one second, to pull.

Which was when Rusty moved. Both arms came up, grabbed Hardy at the shoulders and pulled him forward, over, covering Rusty’s body in a somersault, legs out on no purchase, reaching out, trying to grab onto Rusty-something, anything-but there was only the night air, the cold far moon.

Then there was something under his feet, some small ledge, and one of Rusty’s feet, still dangling where it had been, over the cliffs edge, right there, grabbable. But it moved, kicking out, hitting him in the shoulder, pushing him out into the darkness.