Farnsworth Score

by Rex Burns

“Tough shit.”

  The conversation faltered.

  Through the darkness, the tilting slabs of the giant Flatiron Rocks could scarcely be made out, but their weight loomed just beyond the trees as one might feel a wall in a black room.

  Floating on the warm night air that began to lift from the prairie to wash against the Front Range came the tinny voices of the park’s summer movie series, the steady rustle of distant traffic from the valley below, the pulsing howl of a faraway siren. From one of the shadowy cars that had slid past and parked ten or fifteen minutes ago, a dim figure emerged and walked slowly toward them.

  “That looks like him. Yeah, that’s him.”

  “Just take it easy, Larry. Just play it natural.”

  “Yeah. With you around.”

  The shadow leaned to Larry’s window. “That you, man?”

  “You know it. This here’s Gabe.”

  “Hey, man.”

  Wager grunted, “Get in—we been waiting.”

  “Yeah, well, can’t be too careful, man.”

  “You have the stuff?”

  “Not on me. But I can have it here in a half-hour. Where’s the front money?”

  “Larry didn’t tell me nothing about fronting—just a straight deal.”

  “It’s my thing with new people, man. I’m very big on security.”

  Wager hesitated; there was a dealer’s saying, “Never front the coin until you got the crap,” and anyone in the business would know the truth of that. But he’d waited a long time for this contact. He slowly peeled five twenties from the roll of bills, letting Bruce see the size of the wad of money. “I’ll front half.”

  The shadow’s arm reached across the seat back. “Cool.”

  Wager held a corner of the bills before letting them go. “I know you’re not going to rip me off—it ain’t worth losing a good customer for just a hundred bucks.”

  “Right, man—it ain’t that much of a deal.”

  The door closed after him, and his car turned out through the stone pillars of the park gate. Wager and Larry sat in silence. In twenty minutes, the car swung back and pulled in behind them. Bruce the Juice came to Wager’s window. “Here you go, man—tablets.” He palmed the plastic baggie at Wager, who took his time, snapping a tablet in two and looking carefully at its color under the dash light, touching it with his tongue for any taste. He handed the second roll of twenties to Bruce. “If my customers like it, I’ll be back. I’m very big on customer satisfaction.”

  “Cool.”

  “You got a telephone?”

  “Yeah, 258-4453. Just leave a number and I’ll call you back. That’s my old lady’s phone, and I don’t do business on it.”

  Wager would wait a full week before making the call; it was like fishing with a light line: you couldn’t pull too hard or you’d lose it all. On Wednesday, he checked in at the O.C.D. office. Mrs. Gutierrez, at her little window, was worried until he came close enough to be recognized. “My, Detective Wager! You do look different!”

  “Yes, ma am.”

  And Suzy just giggled and said, “A necklace?”

  Wager didn’t think there was much to laugh at. “Is Sergeant Johnston in?”

  She nodded and turned quickly back to the typewriter. Which remained suspiciously silent.

  “Morning, Ed. Here’s something I been meaning to bring you.” He handed him the photograph of the tree.

  He turned it first one way, then another. “What is it?”

  “The isolated individual confronting the mystery of darkness. Hang it on your wall.” He pointed to the stretch of plywood spotted with framed diplomas, membership scrolls, certificates, and awards. “Give the place a little class.”

  Johnston looked at it again and then handed it back. “I don’t have too much room in here.”

  “It’s state property now. I sure hate to just throw it away.”

  “State property? What’d it cost you?”

  Wager told him.

  “Thirty-five bucks!” Johnston looked at it once more. “For that much, we can’t afford to throw it away. Hang it out there by the office door. Your office needs more class than mine, anyway.”

  “Maybe I’d better ask Suzy first.”

  “Just don’t let the inspector know how much it cost.”

  “What’s the latest on the MDA factory?”

  “Jesus and Mary, haven’t I seen you since then?” His fingers moved across his freckled scalp and then patted down the limp red hairs. “Say, we really scored—it turns out the John Does were a couple guys the D.E.A.’s been after for three years. They had a factory up near Fort Collins and then moved to Pueblo, and then they moved again before D.E.A. could get a lead on them. The inspector’s really high about getting to them before the feds.”

  “That’s fine. All that stuff was for real?”

  “You better believe it! When the D.A. down in the Springs saw all the crap we had in our evidence locker, he couldn’t believe his eyes.”

  “Since we’re going to court on it, I should pay off the snitch.”

  Johnston reached for a voucher. “How much?”

  Wager shrugged. “A thousand?”

  “Do you think that’s high enough? That was a hell of a big haul.”

  “I don’t want to spoil him. Make it fifteen hundred. He’ll be real happy with that.”

  “O.K.”

  Wager took the fifteen-hundred-dollar voucher and the thirty-five-dollar photograph to his desk and gazed around at the walls cluttered with various official scrolls. If he hung the picture where Johnston wanted, he’d have it in front of him whenever he sat at his desk. But behind his back, on the wall that hid the stairs going up to the attic storage area, there was a good spot. It would be in front of Hansen then. “You got a thumbtack, Suzy?”

  “Here. What’s that?”

  “A little art. We’re going to have us a little class.”

  “Gee, that’s a good one! I didn’t know you were into photography.”

  “What’s a good one?”

  “The picture—it’s like somebody standing all alone, and night’s coming on.”

  Wager studied the print. “You really think so? Why?”

  “Well, the white trunk: no leaves, but it’s still standing solidly, almost glowing against the darkness, like it knew what was happening to it, but it’s daring the softer trees to come after it. Did you take it?”

  “No, I bought it. It cost thirty-five dollars!”

  “Well it’s sure worth it. Maybe I’ll bring in some of my shots sometime. Maybe you’d like to see them.”

  “Sure—that sounds good.” He had never wondered what Suzy did when she wasn’t working; all of her family was back in Wisconsin or Michigan or somewhere, and she wasn’t pretty enough to have boyfriends. Not that she was really bad; just that she was like a stretch of flat road—nothing to notice. It was strange to imagine her as an amateur photographer or as anything else other than Suzy, secretary for the Narc Section. “You really think it’s worth thirty-five dollars? I mean it’s just a picture.”

  “Yes. It makes a clear statement, and the technical aspect’s good, too. I like the way the light-on-dark gives it depth—it makes the dead tree come toward you, so that you get a feeling of how solid and determined it still is.”

  “Oh.” He handed the cardboard to her. “Maybe you’d better hang it, then. You’ll do a better job.”

  “If you want me to.” She busied herself with a couple of loops of Scotch tape, “This way there’re no holes in the frame,” and then studied the wall. Finally she stepped back. “Is it straight?”

  Wager looked up from dialing the telephone; it was the happiest note he had ever heard in her voice, and he felt in some obscure way that he had played a mean trick on her. “It really does look fine, Suzy.”

  The bell rattled at the other end of the line; after four rings, Ernie’s cautious whisper said, “Yeah?”

  “This is Gabe.”

  “Hey, I saw it in the
paper—pictures and everything. The inspector said it was the biggest lab he’d ever seen. What’s his name? Songbird?”

  “Sonnenberg.”

  “Yeah, him. How come your picture didn’t get in? Hey, that was a big bust. Did I lead you right or did I lead you right?”

  “It was a good tip, Ernie. I’m mailing you a token of appreciation from a grateful citizenry.”

  “How much is a token?”

  “Fifteen hundred.”

  “Hey! That’s all right!”

  “Don’t act too rich too soon—those dudes are out on bail and are probably very suspicious about a tip.”

  “Hey, you’re right. Maybe you’d better hold on to it awhile. If I get it, I’ll spend it sure.”

  “Put it in the bank and forget about it.”

  “How the hell can I forget about fifteen hundred bucks? You better hang on to it.”

  “All right. I’ll send it down in four weeks—they’ll have had their preliminary hearing and be worried about a hell of a lot more than a tip. You want any now? A couple hundred?”

  “Naw, I’m smooth for a while—you keep it. Four weeks, and things’ll be cool again.”

  “Right.” He wrote a note for Suzy to process the voucher and send the cash by registered mail in four weeks. Ernie would still have to poor-mouth; the MDA people would have friends. But there was no sense making him crap his pants by telling him now.

  Hansen, moving with the briskness that said action, swung into the office, “Gabe, babe—Lord, you look like something else! How did Larry work out?”

  “He didn’t like it, but he did it. Hombre, if he was in my stable—”

  Hansen interrupted, “He works fine for me. You handle yours your way, I’ll handle mine my way.”

  He turned back to his desk. Hansen was right, but that didn’t make Wager like it. As he started through the stack of correspondence that Suzy had been saving for him, he heard Hansen dial out, and say, “Willy, Willy, fat and silly—this is your old buddy Rog. What’ve you got for me?”

  At the end of the week, Wager made his call. A child dropped the receiver in his eagerness to answer the telephone, and a moment later an irritated man’s voice said, “Hello?”

  “Bruce? This is Gabe. We met in that park in Boulder.”

  “Got a number, man?”

  “Yeah, 934-9491. In a half-hour.”

  “Right, man.”

  It was the pay-phone number in his apartment lobby, seldom used at all and never in the afternoon. Bruce the Juice would probably call from a pay phone also. Wiretaps, like other ways of gathering evidence, went through cycles: for a while they would work fine; then dealers would be paranoid about wiretaps; then they would forget the wiretaps as some other means began to surface in court. This seemed to be a paranoid phase. Smart dealers, usually those higher up than Bruce, set up meets from different public telephones—and as far as Gabe knew, no judge had yet granted a warrant to tap a public phone. He lifted the receiver on the first ring. “Hello?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Gabe.”

  “Sorry for asking, man, but I don’t know your voice yet.”

  Wager heard the background noise of tires on gravel and the clink of a gas-station bell. “Just do your thing, Juice. We’re all in this together.” More than you know.

  “Right on. I’ll see you at Sugarloaf Road and Boulder Canyon in two hours. You know where it’s at?”

  “I’ll find it.”

  Gabe drove his pickup west and then swung north along the Foothills Highway to Boulder. It was one of those mid-September afternoons when autumn was noticed for the first time. The light was hazy and soft with thin dust, and over the highway and wheeling through the long afternoon shadows of the mountains, white specks of sea gulls glided across empty yellow prairies. When the sea gulls came to feed on the grasshoppers, summer was at an end. He remembered that from his boyhood, when it had been a short walk from home to open fields and ranchland, and even now some of the old feeling came back: the excitement of school about to begin, the restlessness and unease that was maybe part of all animals after the sun had begun to swing south, the sense of loss for a summer that was never long enough. Now the tourists were gone and the roads empty in a mid-afternoon light that held more glow than heat; the Front Range seemed to jut up sharper in this quiet time, and Wager felt more keenly the obscenity of the people who made his work necessary. All this beauty, this sunlight and air, this solid quietness, and it wasn’t enough for them. They wanted things that only a lot of money could buy—fast money from stupid children, from high-school kids spoiled for kicks and good times, from college kids and young swingers who already had more than they could value, from old men and women whose kicks and good times had gone, leaving them with a hunger to be numb to what was left them, from skinny addicts drifting big-eyed and filthy like flies through the garbage of Denver. And they saw it all as a game—a game of profit and loss, overhead and net and gross; a game of cops-and-robbers. Maybe that was what he disliked most: that he had to play a game, too.

  The junction, a single road to the right, was a short way up Boulder Canyon; Wager pulled in behind a sagging 1969 Buick, faded green roof over a cream body scraped and patched with rust. License ML 3109. Bruce the Juice got out and came to the truck window. In the sunlight, he looked even younger than he had seemed in the dark of Chautauqua Park: medium height, thin build, brown eyes, struggling yellow beard, and hair bleached into strips of light and dark and tied in a long ponytail down his back.

  “Just leave your truck here, man. We’ll go in my car.”

  Wager rolled up the windows and locked the doors. Bruce watched him.

  “What’s the matter, man? No trust in humanity?”

  “I got this thing about security,” Wager said, smiling.

  They drove silently for half a mile or so, Bruce swinging the spongy sedan through the sharp bends up Sugarloaf Hill. At a graveled turnout on a spur high over the valley, he slowed to a stop. “So let’s deal.”

  “What do you handle?”

  “I run a full-service drugstore; you name it, I either got it or I can get it.”

  “How about an ounce of clean snort?”

  The Juice was silent a moment and Wager wondered if he’d come on too fast. “You got the customers for that?”

  He could almost hear the thought behind the question: anybody dealing in that much cocaine should have a reputation, and the Juice never heard of Gabe. “That’s what I’m in business for. The people I talk with say they want to try coke. What’s your price?”

  “Twenty-five hundred.”

  “Screw that—I got to make a living, too. I can’t build up customers if my overhead’s too high.”

  “This is close to eighty percent, man. And even whores don’t give it away.”

  Wager shook his head and hoped he was playing it right. “Maybe I’m just a poor dumb Texas boy, but no way am I gonna get ripped off like that. Give me a fair price or I’ll look up somebody else.”

  “Cool it, babe, cool it! I had to find out if you’re legitimate. A narc would’ve paid that without blinking. How’s two thousand sound?”

  “That makes a sound like going down. You got it on you?”

  “No way. I only carry the merchandise on a confirmed deal. And a deal ain’t confirmed until I count the money.” He looked at Wager. “Well?”

  He dug into the back pocket of his Levis for the wad of bills. “You can see it, you can touch it, you can count it. But you don’t get nothing until I test the dope. It’s a lot of money this time.” Wager smoothed out the flash roll on his thigh and leafed through the bills slowly. “Satisfied?”

  “Right on.” He started the car and swung out to the narrow blacktop heading back into Boulder Canyon. “I’ll see you in an hour at the North Broadway shopping center. I’ll park in the southwest corner of the lot.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Anything else your customers want? Speed, acid, grass, hash?�
��

  “Grass is no problem—they can get that anywhere.”

  “I carry quality merchandise. There may be some as good, but there ain’t none better, man. I can even get Hawaiian pot, and if your customers ain’t tried that, they ain’t really had good stuff.”

  “All right. Give me a lid and I’ll see how they like it. Mescaline or peyote—you got any of that?”

  “In a couple days. It sounds like you’re servicing a bunch of dippers. Most people can’t hack that stuff more’n once.”

  Wager smiled. “They’re willing to pay, I’m willing to deal.”

  “That’s business, ain’t it?” He stopped beside Wager’s truck. “Anything you need, I can get. We’ll catch your act in an hour.”

  “Right.”

  He arrived at the crowded parking lot a bit early and waited, his rear-view mirror capturing occasional housewives rattling shopping carts from the supermarket, towing stiff-armed children through the hesitant cars nosing for parking spaces. The old Buick finally entered the lot from Broadway, circled once through the sun-glinting traffic, and then disappeared behind a panel truck two rows away from Wager. He walked to it and sat in the rider’s seat. Bruce the Juice handed him a brown lunch bag. Inside lay a wrapper of cocaine and a plastic baggie of loose marijuana. Wager unwrapped a homemade reagent kit, using a glass rod to dip a film of the powder into the tiny bottle.

  “You make that kit yourself?”

  “Yeah.” He shook the mixture and then studied its color.

  “There’s an outfit in L.A. that manufactures real ones. You ought to get yourself one. There’s a head shop in Denver that sells them. You can test all sorts of dope with it, man.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” said Wager.

  “How’s it look?”

  “It looks fine.” He handed Bruce the thick roll of twenties and waited while he counted them. “How much for the grass?”

  “It’s yours, man. If your customers like it, buy from me. If not”—Bruce’s thin blond beard parted in a smile—“I’ll take it off my advertising account.”

  On his way home, Wager stopped by the custodian’s office to drop off the dope. The civilian employee—Elizabeth M. Miller, as her name tag reminded him—looked as if she had not slept very well. She handed him an evidence envelope. Wager was finishing the date and time line when a familiar voice spoke over his shoulder: “Liz, honey, got time for a cup?”