Ask the Dice by Ed Lynskey Read Free Book Online Page A

"Hey, is this some kind of a sick joke?"
    Clearly it wasn't.
     
    I better come clean. Holes—big, ragged holes—exist in my Swiss cheese memory. Call it convenient amnesia, if you like. Whatever. But understand I have to live with myself, and I can't be preoccupied by a conscience racking me with guilt and anguish. The next frame I can summon up was me scuttling into a different yellow-top taxi (Mr. Ogg owned a fleet of them), and it whisked me out of her neighborhood. This cabbie also belonged to the Laconic Men's Club, and that suited me. My mood was anything but chatty.
    I arrived at Mr. Ogg's Taj Mahal and found him enthroned in a burgundy brocade armchair. After he ponied up the rest of my fee (another tax-free grand) we talked, him first.
    "How do it go down, Tommy Mack?"
    "Bloody."
    His aviator shades bobbed with a sagacious nod. "They always do, kid, but are you good?"
    "Good enough."
    "Splendid. Here's the key thing to keep in mind: It's just business. Nothing personal. Never overlook that part."
    "Uh-huh."
    "Here: take a look at this." He pulled up his polo shirt. A wormlike scar stitched his lizardy skin an inch above his navel. "She did that. The crazy bitch shot me."
    "Sorry, but you've lost me."
    "Her button man came gunning for me."
    "She paid to get you killed?"
    "That's what I'm saying, but it's business. What you did was tat for tit, so to speak."
    "Did you lose the cops' phone number?"
    His head arched back as he blurted out a hyena's cackle for a laugh. "The cops are clowns."
    "Your business is like that, huh?"
    "My business is about profits, and this is how I do it."
    I took in his Italian marble floor, the unread first editions gleaming on his library shelves, and out the spotless bay window at his koi pond in front of his terraced floral gardens. I’d eaten snacks in his chef’s kitchen gleaming with enough polished granite to erect an art museum. All he needed for the crowning touch was a stuffed boar's head mounted over the granite mantle and a Seth Thomas clock ticking away on the mantle. "You must be good at your business."
    The blind Mr. Ogg snorted in disgust. "All these fancy trappings bore the living shit out of me. I'm downsizing, and it's overdue."
    "You're giving all this up for what exactly?"
    "My new domicile will be a bungalow."
    Young, I was also impetuous. "You must be nuts, plain and simple."
    Unruffled, he smiled, no teeth. "Things kept plain and simple please me."
    Before long, I gleaned the actual strategy for his scaling back was his gambit to drop off law enforcement's radar screen. He strove to be the quietest, most invisible of dons, a monkish recluse who abhorred any publicity. D.C. was never a mobbed up town since the feds made their main headquarters downtown, and their pall was cast over the suburbs. But the audacious Mr. Ogg operated in those shadows, running his rackets—dogfights, prostitution, and of course, the truckloads of narcotics—and piling up his ill-gotten gains.
     
    A few days later, Mr. Ogg made his pitch to recruit me to be a cog in his outfit. My smashing triumph in New Yvor City had been my initiation rite.
    "If you've got the fire, kid, I've got the work," he told me.
    "Time out here. What do you see in me? An underprivileged, stupid ghetto kid beholden to a rich fool like you to drive around a pimpmobile, strut with swagger, and flash his gold? Is that it?"
    "Don't get so bent. This is a job offer. Point blank. If you like it, welcome aboard. If you can't dig it, forget what I said, step off, and don't gaze back. No hard feelings go either way."
    "I'm not 18 until next May."
    "All the better since you minors catch a big break."
    "If I'm collared, do you have the juice to spring me? I ain't big on pulling any hard time in a federal prison and playing some big ass con's bunk bitch."
    "I take care of my own. Ask around if you like. That's my reputation. I've got lawyers up the wazoo. They're the best and brightest, and they score me results. My success