Step to the Graveyard Easy by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online

pocket. “One more time. Put the satchel on the table.”
    Boone obeyed finally. He took a couple of sideways steps, jammed the bag down hard enough so that the two top halves parted like a gaping mouth. He didn’t look soft and pudgy any longer; he looked small and hard and swollen with corruption. Boone the boil, ready to pop.
    “You won’t get away with this,” he said between his teeth. “This is my goddamn money!”
    “Our
goddamn money,” Tanya said bitterly.
    “Take it away, and you’ll regret it, Matt. Guaranteed.”
    Cape got to his feet. “Go over and sit on the bed with your wife or girlfriend or whatever she is.”
    “You think I’d marry him?” she said. “A little toad like him?”
    “Now
you
shut the fuck up, Tanya. This is all your fault. Why’d you let him in here? Why’d you let him get hold of your gun?”
    She just looked at him, a faint sneer on her mouth.
    “I ought to break your neck.”
    “Try it and see what it gets you.”
    “On the bed,” Cape said again, gesturing with the automatic. “Go on.”
    Glaring, Boone went over and sat down apart from the woman.Cape picked up the black bag. “I wouldn’t try setting up another game tomorrow night, if I were you. In fact, I’d be a long way from San Francisco by then. Word’s going to get around when I return this money.”
    “Go to hell.”
    “If I do, maybe the three of us can play poker with the devil.”
    Boone and Tanya both had something to say to that, but their angry voices commingled, and he didn’t pay much attention anyway. He was already on his way out of there with the satchel.



8
    Cape made sure the blinds were tightly closed, then upended the satchel over the motel-room bed. Packets of rumpled green, a dozen or so, loosely held together with rubber bands. Something else, too: a nine-by-twelve manila envelope, mostly flat, closed but not sealed.
    The money first. Six packets of hundreds, three of fifties, two thicker ones of twenties, another of tens, fives, and singles. He made a riffling count without removing any of the rubber bands. Eighteen thousand and change. The night’s score was around sixteen thousand, by Cape’s estimate and Boone’s announcement on entering Tanya’s room. The remaining two thousand belonged to the grifters—seed money to grow a bigger crop of seed money.
    He fed the cash back into the satchel, opened the manila envelope. Photographs. Four eight-by-ten color glossies. Two of them were candid shots of the same woman, taken at relatively close range; the angles and her expression said she hadn’t known she was being photographed. Sleek, big-eyed, tawny hair worn long enough to caress the swell of her breasts, some kind of beauty mark at one corner of a broad-lipped mouth. In one snap she was dressed in an expensive cream-colored outfit and getting into a silver BMW. In the other she wore a pale yellow sundress and was standing in front of the purple-and-gold entrance to what appearedto be a hotel-casino complex. Part of a name was visible in the background, the words LAK and GRAND.
    The other two photos were studio portraits of men. One: sixtyish, distinguished looking, flowing silver mustache and wavy silver hair. The other: around forty, olive-toned skin, curly black hair, handsome in a slick, hard way, eyes like fragments of black ice.
    Cape looked at the backs of the glossies. Nothing written on any of them. He checked the envelope again, examined the satchel inside and out. Nothing. He put the photos inside with the money, set the satchel on the nightstand.
    The digital alarm clock read 5:10 when he finally crawled into bed.
    Edges of daylight and street noise woke him. Nine-fifteen. Four hours’ sleep, but he didn’t want much more than that. Downtime was lost time; each night’s rest was one less place to see, one less thing to do.
    Before he left the room, he wrapped Tanya’s little automatic in a plastic clothes bag from the closet. Outside he hunted up the motel’s