Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online

two guys kick in the door and shoot Cappadocia. Whether they were just trying to do a holdup and recognized him, or he resisted, or if they were after him to begin with, nobody knows. But the minute the door hits the floor, the guy who organized the game is in trouble. The rich guys know he put a mobster in their game. The friends of Jerry Cappadocia think he sold their buddy. The police want to talk to him. The people who shot Cappadocia also have to be interested, because the others are, and even if he didn’t see anything, if the inducements were right, he might make a plausible guess. Jerry Cappadocia’s father is semi-retired, but the people who know him say he could make Harry want very much to come up with a name. So suddenly Harry has enemies."
    "What did you do for Harry?"
    "I asked some more questions. He didn’t think the three men arrested with him were trying to kill him for the Cappadocia thing, because they weren’t armed. He admitted he had also given them fresh personal reasons to hit him. He had been picking up traveling money by doing card tricks without saying ’Abracadabra.’ I thought about it for a while. It seemed to me that what he had been doing wasn’t nice, but it wasn’t a capital offense, so I held the others overnight, put down a name for Harry that he was too scared to make up for himself, and let him go."
    "Where did he go then?"
    "I don’t know. Maybe here. I didn’t hear from him again until a few days ago."
    If this one was a liar, he was good at it. He had the facts, or some of them, right, and they were the ones he could be expected to know. But he was also telling her something she wanted to hear. She wanted to believe that Harry was still all right, that someone had seen him alive a few days ago. "Where did you run into him after all that time?"
    "I didn’t. He called me."
    "Why?"
    "He knew I was in trouble. He told me that if I needed to disappear, there was a door out of the world. He told me that this was where it was."
    "And you believed him?"
    Felker looked at her, his eyes unblinking but showing puzzlement. "He had no reason to lie to me."
    "You didn’t know him very well, and what you knew wasn’t very good. Why trust him?"
    Felker seemed to look back on it with the kind of incredulity that people feel when they try to figure out the reasons for the decisions they have made. "Maybe it was the story. It was so ... odd. He said that years ago he had met an old guy on a cruise ship. Gambling is legal on the sea. They have pools on things and slot machines, and on some of them even a couple of tables. Cruises are expensive, so the long ones have mostly people with money."
    So he knows that too, she thought. Was there any way to know that besides having Harry tell him? She listened for a mistake.
    "So Harry bought a ticket and posed as an amateur who was bored with slot machines and went to find more amateurs. Only there’s an old guy in the game that Harry just can’t beat. No matter how long he waited, all his practice never swung the odds over to his side. The old guy is a South American industrialist. From Venezuela or someplace. One night they’re playing in the old man’s suite and it comes down to where everybody else goes back to his own cabin broke except Harry. They’re playing one-on-one now, and Harry is still losing. Finally, Harry is in for the price of his return ticket, and they show their cards. Harry loses."
    He was watching her now too, probably thinking he must be doing all right because she hadn’t shot him yet.
    "The old man stands up to rake in the money, and he gets a funny look on his face. His eyes bulge out and he freezes like a statue and starts to topple over. Harry makes a grab for him and gets one hand on his arm, but the other one kind of brushes his face. The guy’s mustache comes off."
    She listened, and she began to hear what, she had been listening for—not mistakes, but evidence. He was beginning to sound more and more like