Ground Money (36 page)
Authors: Rex Burns
He unlocked the door to his silent and dark apartment; the red gleam of his answering machine’s light caught his eye. Before flipping the tape on, he went past the refrigerator for a beer and then into the bedroom to take off his tie and shirt and slip out of his hot shoes. Then, cooling feet splayed in the short nap of the carpet, he screened the message tape.
Most of it was blank, the caller hanging up without leaving word. Finally, a garbled voice stopped him and he reversed to get it from the start: “Wager, you know who this is. Call me now.”
He knew who it was, but he finished the tape first, finding the same voice two more times. Then he dialed a number from the back page of his little green notebook. As expected, a different voice answered, giving the name of the bar.
“Is Fat Willy there?”
“Who wants him?”
“Gabe.”
“I’ll see.”
A minute later the lurch of the big man’s breath came over the wire. “Wager, I hate that fucking answering machine of yours.”
“It got your message to me, Willy. What’s the problem this time?”
“The problem is I need to collect.”
“Collect what?”
“What you owe me, Wager: a favor.”
He didn’t deny that he owed, but his question was, how much. “What kind of favor?”
“A couple of my people. They been busted. I want them out.”
What Willy wanted and what he got were two different things. “Who’s got them and what’s the charge?”
“That Nick-the-Greek, son of a bitch. Papalopoulos, or whatever his name is. How come the Denver police ain’t hiring Americans no more?”
Nick Papadopoulos worked out of Assault in the Crimes Against Persons division. Wager knew the man but not very well. “What’s the charge, Willy?”
“Arson and assault. But that’s only what the police say.”
“They don’t have to say a hell of a lot more than that. That’s a couple of felonies.”
“It’s a bunch of bullshit, is what it is. You don’t know nothing about it, Wager—I’m telling you it’s bullshit and I want them out. You owe me!”
“Willy, you’ve got a couple cruds beating up on people and burning down their property and you want them sprung? I don’t owe you that much.”
“That’s not the way it was, God damn it all!”
“If that’s what they’re charged with, I don’t care how it was. They don’t need me, they need a lawyer. Besides, if the charges have been filed, there’s nothing I can do about it, anyway.”
“They ain’t been filed—they was just arrested. They being held for questioning—ain’t no charges filed on them yet. That comes Monday.” He added, “And don’t give me no shit about you not being able to do nothing. I know and you know the police drops charges all the time, Wager. You owe me—you owe your ass to me. And now I want to collect!”
It was bound to come sooner or later, Wager knew. He’d used Willy and his information to solve an earlier series of homicides along the Colfax strip, and now the fat man was calling in his marker. “Have they been arrested before?”
“Who ain’t?”
“Convictions?”
“That’s the problem, man. They get convicted on this, it’s the third conviction inside ten years. Shit, six more months and they be past the ten-year limit on their first one—that goddamn Papalopoulos!”
A third felony conviction within ten years meant an automatic twenty-five-to fifty-year sentence. A fourth felony, regardless of how much time passed, meant life. Willy and his people were right to be worried. “I’ll ask.”
“You do better than that.”
“No, I won’t. I’ll see what I can find out. Then if I can help you, I will. If I can’t, I won’t.”
“Damn you, Wager—”
“I know, you’ve told me: I owe you. I’ll see what I can find out.”
He dropped the receiver on another squawk and stretched against the stiff pull of his back. Slowly finishing his beer, he stood in the cool night air of the small balcony above Downing and gazed out without seeing the flickering restlessness of the city. Maybe, by now, he was tired enough to sleep.
There had been times when he was this tired that he and Jo would just hold each other, their naked bodies pressed tightly together beneath the thin protection of the sheet, not thinking sex but only wholeness. Together—her eyes even larger and darker in the room’s dimness and only the twitch of lips against his cheek to tell him she was smiling. Those were times so good he didn’t think they needed words, the union of their slow breath and heartbeat making the only statement. But he should have told her how nice it was; how—despite his silence—he found a kind of peace in those times that existed nowhere else. But he’d said nothing, until the chance for saying anything was gone.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1986 by Rex Raoul Stephen Sehler Burns
cover design by Michel Vrana
This edition published in 2012 by
MysteriousPress.com
/Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA
