Her nails dug into his shoulder blades, cutting the paper-thin skin. “Where is it, dammit?” she said, her breath hot in his ear. “We’ll hurt your wife. Is that what you want?”
A single tear ran down his cheek, followed by another. He shook uncontrollably. “Go away,” he tried to say. “Leave me alone.”
Now she was pinching his ear, squeezing, he felt it would pop like a grape.
“I want that disk, Mel,” she hissed. “And if you don’t give it to me, I’ll hurt you. Hurt you bad.”
There was a knock at the door then and the rattling sound of glass on metal. “Mr. Wisnewski,” a cheerful voice called. “Are you dressed? Can I come in?” It was the nurse who brought him Jell-O.
The bad woman sucked in her breath. He opened his eyes just a crack. She moved quickly toward the door, pushing it open, hard. Then she was gone, and he was crying. His ear hurt. Where was Pearl?
Cookie rattled the door so hard the whole trailer shook. “Let me in, Butch. I know you’re in there, you lowlife scumbag maggot.”
A woman riding by on an adult tricycle stopped pedaling and watched, open-mouthed.
Cookie took off one of her spike heels and hammered at the glass panel. “I’ll break the goddamned glass,” she screamed.
The woman gasped and started pedaling again.
Cookie whirled around and looked for another weapon. The yard of the trailer was weed-strewn, with dirt ruts. A long-abandoned tire swing hung from the branch of a pine tree, the only tree in the whole lousy trailer park as far as Cookie could see.
She stepped off the crude wooden landing and scooped up an armful of pinecones from under the tree, dumping them on the landing in front of the door. She got out a small gold cigarette lighter.
“I’m gonna set this goddamned cheese box on fire,” she hollered. “I’ll smoke you out if I have to, you sorry son of a bitch.”
She was bent over, holding the lighter to one of the pinecones, when she heard the door being unlatched. Cookie kicked the pinecones aside and threw open the doors.
The inside of the trailer was dark and rank-smelling. After her eyes adjusted to the dim she saw Butch. He sat at a plywood dinette table. A cigarette burned in the ashtray. He was unshaven, his thinning dark hair uncombed. He was dressed in a pair of grayed-out white Jockey shorts and an equally dingy pair of sweat socks. He squinted in the half-light. And he held a .45 aimed at Cookie’s chest.
“Shut the door,” he said quietly. “The light hurts my eyes.”
She pulled the door closed but didn’t take her eyes off the gun.
“I want my money back,” she said, her voice level.
He picked up the cigarette and inhaled deeply, coughing on the exhale. “What money?”
“The money you stole from me last night, you bastard. The money you took off Michael. There must have been at least five thousand. Give it back. Or I’ll go to the cops.”
“And tell them what?” Butch said, coughing.
He’d quit smoking months ago, but the first thing he’d reached for when he was finally ambulatory this morning was a cigarette. He’d found a half-pack of Kools in a jacket pocket. They tasted like roach droppings. He’d smoked them all, one after the other, saving just this one for the moment he’d been expecting.
“So. Michael’s dead?”
“You could say that.”
Cookie thought about things. Her discussion with Newby had been brief but profitable. They would be partners, in a business sense only. Maybe, she thought, he would be willing to deal with Butch.
“Give me back the jewelry,” she said finally. “You can keep the money. But I want the jewelry back. It’s no good to you. You can’t pawn it for anywhere near what it’s worth.”
“Probably not,” he agreed again.
“Just my Rolex and the diamond ring then. Please?”
She edged a half-step closer.
“Ah-ah-ah,” Butch said, waving the pistol. “Mother, may I?”
“Give me the ring and the watch, Butch. Give them back and I swear to God I’ll never say a word about what happened last night. So far the cops just think it was an assault and robbery.”
Butch laughed. “You ain’t sayin nothin’ to nobody, Cookie. Where’s the murder weapon? Better yet, where’s the body?”
“You dumb-ass,” Cookie said. “You’ll get caught. You always do. The cops will find the body and the gun. Face it, Butch. You’re a screw-up. And you know what else? Michael was connected. Yeah, big-time connected, with the Gianni family. Sallie Gee’s boys are gonna come for you. And if they don’t catch you, the cops will.”
Butch stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and yawned. “Wanna fuck?”
She turned on her heel and stalked out, one hand holding onto the wig.
“Is that a no?” he called after her.
“Hurry up,” Truman said, gripping the back of Cheryl’s chair. “Can’t you make it go any faster?”
Cheryl Kicklighter swiveled around in her chair to face her father. “Calm down, Dad,” she said. “The computer has to run an anti-virus program. It takes a minute or two.”
Her voice echoed weirdly in the empty classroom. Cheryl didn’t own her own computer. But she did have the key to the media lab at Bay Point Elementary School, where she taught.
“You mean computers get sick?”
“People plant deliberate problems in programs sometimes. It screws everything up,” Cheryl explained. “The anti-virus program tracks them down if they’re there.”
She punched some buttons and the screen began to fill with a grid full of names and numbers. “It’s some kind of chart,” she said. “Is that what you were looking for?”
Jackie leaned closer to get a better look. She pointed to a line on the chart. “This is it, Mr. K See this name, Kinda Kinky? I remember it ran the night we went to the track with Mel.”
Truman followed her finger down the chart. “Looks like some kind of numerical ranking is assigned under different categories, but they’re abbreviated. I can’t make heads or tails of it.” He felt let down.
“It’s numbered,” Jackie pointed out. “This is the first race. Are there other races on here too?”
Cheryl tapped another key. “I’ll scroll down.”
The next race appeared on screen, eight dogs, each one ranked one to five in six indecipherable columns. Cheryl tapped the button, held it down, and the screen scrolled through fourteen charts. The last four charts were incomplete.
“Fourteen charts, fourteen races,” Jackleen said. “This is what Rosie Figueroa got killed over.”
“And this is what put Mel Wisnewski in jail, and in that pisshole of a nursing home,” Truman said bitterly.
“And Miss Pearl in the hospital,” Jackleen added.
“But these charts are only good for those specific dogs that ran on that one night,” Cheryl said. “Why would someone break into Pearl’s room, beat her up like that, to get a program that predicts race results that are more than a week old?”
“For the charts themselves, the program, the system, whatever you call it,” Truman said. “Somebody’s convinced this thing is important enough to kill for.”
“Somebody like Rosie’s boyfriend, that Wade guy,” Jackleen said. “Or that blond woman, the one who was following him around.”
Cheryl knit her brow and chewed her bottom lip. “Dad, don’t you think you’d better turn this disk over to the police?”
“Not yet,” Truman said stubbornly. “I want to see how it works.”
“What?” Jackie said. “I thought we were just gonna get it and give it to the cops.”
“The chart and the ranking system,” Truman said. “They’re standard from what I can tell. All we need is somebody to help us fill in the blanks. Somebody who knows greyhounds, knows how to handicap ‘em. That’s what we need.”
“To do what?” Jackleen demanded.
“To try it out. You said it yourself, it must be good if these guys were willing to kill
to get it. All I want is one shot; one shot to see if it works. A day at the races. Then we’ll turn it over to the cops.”
“You’re crazy,” Jackie said.
But she was already calculating how much cash she could round up. How much was in the tip jar she kept in her bedroom closet? A hundred, maybe more?
Chapter THIRTY-TWO
The Fountain of Youth was a battlefield under siege. Workmen battered the old plaster walls of the lobby with sledgehammers, spewing the fine white dust everywhere. In the corner, behind the reception desk, an electrician on his knees snaked coil from a new receptacle box toward the desk, where a telephone lineman waged war with the receptionist.
“Dr. Mandelbaum promised me,” she said. “He promised he would never touch my switchboard.”
The lineman set his metal toolbox on the floor with a loud thud. “Listen, lady,” he said. “I got a work order right here. It says we put in a new BelTron 2000 system, call waiting, auto answer, auto dial, you name it. That thing you got is a dinosaur. It goes.”
Tammi and Wade picked their way gingerly through the debris in the lobby and into the coffee shop, where the campaign had yet to advance.
They took a table close to the door and ordered coffee and cherry pie from a thin, horse-faced girl with a ponytail and thick ankles.
“The old guy’s not here,” Tammi said after searching the room. “I saw him at the nursing home, when he went to visit his buddy. He’s skinny, maybe five-six, got funny-looking red hair.”
“Is that the girl?” Wade asked in a low voice, nodding toward the back of their departing waitress.
“No,” Tammi said, her eyes sweeping the coffee shop, looking for the young woman who’d accompanied Truman to the track. She spied Jackleen coming through the swinging doors of the kitchen, a pot of coffee in her hand.
“That’s her,” she said, lowering her head. “Don’t stare.”
Wade averted his eyes. For the next thirty minutes the two of them sipped coffee and nibbled pie and watched while Jackie buzzed about from table to table, most of them filled with elderly women.
“Let’s go,” Tammi said finally. “We can come back around six. They’ve missed the matinee. If they’re going at all, it will be tonight.”
“You’ve got the charts?’ Jackleen asked anxiously. “You’re sure?”
Truman patted the pocket of his tan windbreaker. “Right in here. How much money did you bring?”
Jackleen gulped. “One hundred and sixty dollars. All my tip money, plus a little bit I had stashed away for some new work shoes.”
He looked around to see who might be listening in. Only half a dozen people were scattered about in the lounge. They’d gotten to the track early, claimed a seat in the fourth-floor lounge, and ordered beers.
“Four hundred bucks,” he whispered. “My rent money.”
“No!” Jackie said, her face registering her alarm. “You can’t be gambling your rent money, Mr. K. What happens if we lose?”
He shrugged. “You’ve seen what they’re doing to the hotel. These church bums could throw us out in the street any minute if they want to.”
Truman opened the race program and laid it out on the table next to one of Rosie’s charts.
The program print was tiny, nearly illegible. He ran his fingers across the columns in it. “Look,” he said, jabbing his finger at a line of print “This is for finishes: how many times the dog has finished in the money. The computer chart has something labeled F, maybe that’s what it stands for.”
Jackie leaned over and stared at Rosie’s chart. “This all might as well be a foreign language. Martian, maybe. I just don’t see how you can decide what dog can win based on all these numbers.”
Truman was looking idly around the room, waiting for Jackie to calm down. A woman entered the lounge, sat down at the bar, and started chatting with the bartender. Her auburn hair shone in the dim light.
“Maybe she does bring luck,” Truman said.
“Who?”
“Rosie’s friend. Marian.”
She was sipping a glass of iced tea and smoking a cigarette. The blond bartender was the same one Truman remembered from the last time.
He sat down beside her. “Remember me?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Oh yeah. Dick Tracy. You still looking for clues?”
“We found one,” Truman said. “But we could use some help. Could I interest you in a business proposition?”
“It’s my night off,” she said, shrugging.
She brought the iced tea and the ashtray to the table. Jackie smiled brighdy at her and gave her the charts.
“Well, well. Rosie’s sysem.” Marian ran a practiced finger down the columns of the first chart. “Looks good.” She read in silence for a moment, turning the pages, studying the grids.
“Rosie knew breeding,” she said, taking a puff of her cigarette. “She weights the charts that way. She knew the trainers and kennel people too.”
“We don’t know how to fill in the blanks on the charts,” Jackie said meekly.
“I do,” Marian said.
Her pencil flew over the stack of papers, scratching out numbers, adding and subtracting for differing variables. A cloud of smoke hung over the table. “Too bad we don’t have a laptop,” she said, not looking up from her calculations. “My math’s lousy.”
At one point she chuckled softly to herself. “Old Rosie liked the big black dog, all right.”
“What’s that?” Jackie asked.
“Breeding theory. Mostly only old-timers believed in it, but Rosie could be old-fashioned like that. The idea was, a male black dog has an edge over other dogs. Especially a big one. Black dogs are dominant, so the theory goes, and more likely to be lead dog in the pack. In a race, the other dogs will get out of the way and let the lead dog run.”
Jackleen’s eyes widened. “For real?”
“That’s what some people think. Rosie thought so.”
Truman picked up his program and looked at the listings for the first race. “Here’s one, Smoochie Boy, black, male, weighs seventy-seven pounds. What’s the chart say?”
Marian studied her notes. “That’s the eight dog? Just using the basics of her system, I’d say the eight dog’s good at least to place.”
She did some quick calculations. “Quinella box seven-eight-three. You’re gonna play the daily double, right?”
“What’s that?” Jackie asked.
“That’s where you pick the winners in the first and second races and you bet both before the first race,” Truman said.
“There’s a dog in the second race, Cavalier Cad, number seven, charts out good, according to Rosie, and it’s a long shot too, eight to one odds. Let’s do a seven-one- three box,” Marian suggested.
Truman raised an eyebrow. “You sure?”
Earlier he had brushed aside Jackie’s worries about risking too much. Now, when it came time to put his money down, he felt a rush of misgiving.
“It’s Rosie’s call,” Marian said, shrugging.
The tourist wore baggy white jeans that hung from his hips and a loud flowered shirt. He walked casually by Truman’s table, then quickly back to a table in the corner.
“They got it,” he announced.
Tammi pushed her sunglasses down on her nose. “You sure?”
“They’re my charts,” he said. “The ones we did for the first night. They had to have the disk to print them out. They’ve got my fuckin’ charts,” he said with gritted teeth.
“Shut up,” Tammi said. “Look—the old guy’s going up to make his bets. Get in line behind him, see what he bets. Bet the same.”
“I thought we were gonna get the disk away from him,” Wade complained. “It’s mine. I want it back. The Festival of States race is this Saturday. It’s the biggest betting pool of the season. I gotta have it by then. Besides, they got the charts, but they don’t mean a thing unless you’re a handicapper. Rosie used her own codes. No way a couple of neophytes like those two kno
w what they’re doing. Besides, I got my own picks.”
“You really are an idiot, you know that, Wade? See that woman there with them? She must be telling them how it works.”
“That Marian? So what?” Wade said indignantly. “She sells tickets. That’s all. They’re my charts.”
“Forget it,” Tammi said, getting up. “I’ll do it myself.”
She arrived at the betting window just in time to see Truman collect his tickets and walk off.
Tammi took the glasses off and smiled engagingly at the cashier.
“I’ll bet what that gentleman who just left bet.”
The cashier shook his head. “Can’t do it,” he said. “Against the rules.”
She pushed a ten-dollar bill across the counter toward him. “It’ll be our secret.”
The cashier took his thumb and forefinger and flicked the bill back at her. It fluttered in the air and landed on the floor at her feet.
“You have a bet to make?” he asked. “I’ve got customers waiting.”
Tammi gave him a venomous look. “I’ll remember you.”
“You do that,” he replied.
She stepped away from the window and looked around in time to see Wade walking away from another ticket seller. The bell announcing post time rang before she could call out to him.
Wade was pouring himself another beer from the pitcher when she got to the table. Betting slips poked out from the breast pocket of the shirt. She felt herself fill with sudden, white-hot rage.
“Next time I tell you to do something, you do it,” she said savagely. “Or you won’t have to worry about Butch and Curtis. Because I’ll personally take care of you.”
He took a long gulp of beer. “Okay. No big deal.”
Another bell rang. The lead-outs put the greyhounds in their starting boxes and scrambled off the track. The mechanical rabbit went whizzing by and seconds later the dogs burst from the start in a flash of color and noise.
Tammi wasn’t watching the dogs. She was watching the three figures at the table across the room.
Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 01 - Lickety-Split Page 19