Lucky at Cards by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page B

high. We couldn’t make it without money, Wizard.”
    After a few more minutes I took our glasses to the bartender and he filled them up again. I brought them back and we drank. She asked me if I’d managed to work up any ideas. I told her that Murray could go insane or skip the country or get himself conned for a fortune.
    “We’d go insane before he did,” she said.
    “Probably.”
    “I was thinking,” she said. “We could kidnap me. I could disappear and you could call him on the phone and tell him to get a hundred grand in small bills and leave it somewhere. He would pay, Bill. And then we could go like the wind.”
    “A fake kidnapping?”
    “Why not? I would whimper into the phone and say how they were going to rape me and kill me and everything. What’s wrong with it?”
    “A lot of things. The money would be marked, it’s always marked in kidnap deals. There are people who buy marked money for something like thirty or forty cents on the dollar, more or less depending how hot it is. And it would be hotter than hell on this deal because when you didn’t turn up they’d figure you were dead. Even if he didn’t go to the cops right away, he’d go to them afterward. With the FBI in the picture we wouldn’t stand a chance.”
    “I could go back to him after the payoff. Then I could leave him later.”
    “I still don’t like it,” I said. “Too many things can go wrong. With all those variables to play with, one thing’s sure to turn sour and ruin the whole game. Picking up the money is hard enough with a whole mob in the show. It’s tougher than hell to work two-handed.”
    “It was an idea.”
    “A cute one. But it won’t play.”
    She worked on her drink. I stared down at the table and told myself it was time to skip. There was no way to have the girl and the money, and the girl wouldn’t come along unless the money came too. This wasn’t my type of scene. In the morning I could be on my way, headed for New York and a world I knew.
    Then I lifted my eyes and threw the thought away. I looked at her and wanted her so bad I could taste the desire rising in my throat. My hotel room, and her hair on my pillow. A muscle worked in my jaw.
    “There has to be a way, Bill.”
    “I can’t find it.”
    Her eyes dropped. “So we can go to hell then. Go to hell, go directly to hell, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”
    “You mean go to jail, don’t you?”
    “This is the adult version. Monopoly for hippies.”
    The idea was there all at once. Small talk had triggered it, and then the whole scheme was there, fully developed, perfect. Would I have thought of it sooner or later anyway? A good question.
    “Bill? What’s the matter?”
    “Go to jail,” I said.
    “I don’t get it.”
    “I do,” I said. “And it’s pretty.”

6
    She dropped me at the avenue. I picked up the rental and headed for the hotel, then changed my mind and took a left turn. I drove through the Negro neighborhood and into the old Polish neighborhood, and I sat on a stool in a tavern and drank boilermakers for a few hours. The tavern was painted a bright yellow on the outside, and the interior was done in equally bright red and blue. It was enough to blind you. I drank slowly and steadily, tossed a handful of nickels into an illegal pinball machine, tossed a handful of dimes into a legal bowling machine, and had a sandwich of Polish sausage on black bread.
    It was a cool and windless evening. I didn’t want to think about Murray Rogers or Joyce Rogers, and if I had gone back to the hotel I would have thought of little else. The Polish tavern was a handy escape. I bought the first two drinks myself, and then I taught a pair of steelworkers how to play the old match game, and after that they did most of the buying. In the end I was drunk enough to have trouble fitting the key into the car’s ignition, but still sober enough to drive it once I had the key business mastered. I reached the hotel and fell