Ed McBain - Downtown by Ed McBain Read Free Book Online

sight.
    Michael looked at his watch. 9:05. He had to get out of here and find a way to get to Kennedy by subway. His plane would be leaving in exactly two hours, the last plane to Boston
    tonight. He wandered over to one of the crap
    67 games, thinking he'd ask one of the players how to get to a subway stop that would connect with the Kennedy train. A short Hispanic--who looked remarkably like the young man who'd asked him not to lean on his car--picked up the dice, blew on them, said, "__Mama necesita un par de zapatos _nuevos!" and promptly rolled snake eyes. "_Mierda!" he shouted, and immediately walked away from the blanket. On the television screen, Andy Williams was singing "Jingle Bells." Michael stepped into the space the little Hispanic had vacated. Taxi fare would be nice, he thought.
    There were five players in the game now: two blacks, two Chinese, and a white man. One of the black men was named Harry. Michael discerned this when the dice were handed to him and one of the Chinese men said, "Come on, Hally, ketchum up hot," sounding like the cook in an old movie about the Gold Rush. At the mah-jongg table, one of the Chinese men there shouted something that sounded fierce and warlike, but everyone at the table laughed. Here at the blanket, Harry laughed, too. Michael figured he was laughing not because he spoke or understood Chinese but because it was now his turn to roll the dice, and a man holding a pair of dice in his hand is--for the moment, at least--in control of his own destiny. Harry did indeed look like a man with the world on a string. Tall and wiry and chocolate-colored, he possessed in addition to his good looks a dirty Eddie Murphy laugh, a mischievous Bill Cosby twinkle, and the calm, confident air of a man about to make a fortune. Michael would have bet all the oranges on every tree in his groves on the roll of the dice this man held in his hand. But he had only the ten dollars Charlie Bonano had loaned him. "Bet a hundred," Harry said, and put five twenty-dollar bills on the blanket. The hundred was covered in thirty seconds flat; apparently most of these players had seen Harry roll before and the air of confidence he exuded impressed them not a bit. The only man at the blanket who seemed to have any faith in him at all was the Chinese man who'd earlier urged him to ketchem up hot. He now said, "Twenny say Hally light."
    "Ten says he's wrong," the other
    69 black man at the blanket said. "Me, too, hassa ten long," the other Chinese man said, sounding like a stoker on an American gunboat during the Boxer Rebellion.
    "Ten more says he's right," Michael said, and tossed onto the blanket all the money he had in the world. The white guy--a burly man wearing a blue sweater and a blue watch cap, and looking like a seaman off a cargo ship--said, "Ten says he's wrong," and tossed his money onto the blanket.
    On the television screen, Andy Williams and what appeared to be the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir began bellowing "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen." "Come on, sugah," Harry whispered, and shook the dice gently, and let them roll easily off the pink palm of his hand and onto the blanket. The dice rolled and rolled and rolled, and hit the wall, and bounced off the wall, and one of them flew to the right and came up with a six-spot, and the other one flew to the left and came up with a five-spot, for a total of eleven, which was a winner. Michael now had twenty dollars. Was twenty enough for a taxi to Kennedy? He looked at his watch. 9:15. His heart almost stopped. The girl walking toward the blanket was tall. Five-nine, he supposed. Much taller than the girls who'd worked the Saigon bars. But every bit as beautiful. So achingly beautiful, those Vietnamese girls. Girls, yes, some of them were barely in their teens. That long glossy black hair and the slanted loam-colored eyes, the complexion as pale as a dipper of cream, a faint tint to it, not yellow, you could not call any Oriental on earth yellow, any more