“What the hell does a muscle-head like you got on his mind?” Charlie asks, his eyes like small gray polished stones as they sparkle with amusement.
“Just business,” I say.
“You need to have your mind on the game,” he tells me. “Pool is like life, focus is everything.”
He breaks the rack, pocketing both the three-ball and the six, but also dropping the cue ball in the side.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he swears, his lips pulled back to show his canines. He turns, shakes his head angrily at me. “You see, Knucks, just like life a game of pool can shit all over you when you least expect it.”
I now have ball in hand. If I want to try it, I could place the cue ball behind the one and take a tough cross-table combo with the nine to win the game, but it’s a low percentage shot. I see Charlie spotting the combo and then trying hard not to look at it, trying hard to will me not to see it. But that’s not why I place the cue ball so I can easily tap the one into the side. It’s because the combo’s a low percentage shot and I don’t do those. I like to play it safe. After I make the shot I hear a heavy exhalation of breath coming from Charlie, a thin smile creeping onto his lips.
“You had the game, Knucks,” he tells me. “All you had to do was combo the nine and you had the game.”
“Low percentage shot,” I tell him as I sink the two-ball and set up an easy four-ball corner shot.
“You never get anywhere playing it safe.”
I give him a go-fuck-yourself look as I pocket the four and then the five. I don’t set myself up as much as I wanted with the seven and I end up rattling the ball around the corner pocket, but it doesn’t drop.
“Fuck,” I swear under my breath.
“Pool is like life, Knucks. You gotta make it look easy. Never let them see you sweat.”
I watch as Charlie takes the game from me, his shit-eating grin stretching wide. I drop another ten-dollar bill on the table.
“What’s wrong, Knucks? You seem so damn preoccupied.”
Preoccupied? Yeah, that was one way of putting it. I stop to polish off the pint of Guiness I’ve been drinking. “I told you before, just business.”
“Yeah, so what does Lombardo have you so worried about it?”
I wasn’t going to tell him. As I said before, I’m a guy who usually plays it safe. But Charlie and me have been buddies over twenty years, and I can see the concern spreading across his face. I shrug and tell him it’s because of the Voodoo Lady business.
“Oh Chrissakes, Lombardo still has that bug up his ass?”
I rack the balls up and wait until he breaks. It’s a bad break. Worse than bad. Not only does nothing go in, but he leaves a quick one-nine combo to take the game. I line up my shot, taking my time.
“He lost fifty grand on that,” I tell him without taking my eye off the shot. “And then you got the two hundred grand he didn’t make that he was expecting to.”
I sink the shot and look up as Charlie crumples the ten-dollar bill I had just given him and tosses it back in front of me. I smooth the bill out, taking my time with it before placing it in my wallet. I usually don’t beat Charlie and maybe that’s why I’m taking my time celebrating the victory, or maybe I’m just trying to stretch things out and avoid the unpleasantness that’s coming. I’m not sure. It’s already ten o’clock. But I just stand and watch as Charlie takes his turn racking the balls.
“I thought you already got that one figured out,” Charlie says.
I look at him, and he looks back, mostly bored. A month ago ten grand was spent fixing a dog race, and forty grand spread out among WIN and perfecta bets. If Voodoo Lady wins as she’s supposed to, Lombardo takes home a minimum of two hundred grand. The dog should’ve been shot up with enough amphetamines to guarantee a win, but more was used than should’ve been and the dog’s heart exploded in the middle of the race. Left the bitch dead where she fell.
“I thought so too,” I say. “But Lombardo found out ten grand was bet on the dog that won.”
Charlie strokes his chin as he thinks about it. “We were double-crossed,” he says. “I paid that kid ten grand to fix the race for Voodoo Lady. He must’ve intentionally overdosed our dog and pepped up the one that won. And the sonofabitch bet the ten grand I paid him on the winning dog.”
I nod. It could’ve been that way. Makes sense. But it also could’ve been Charlie who double-crossed us. Give the kid the hypo with enough junk to kill, then pay someone else to speed up the winning dog. You do that you get to walk away with all the money –what you’ve won with the ten grand bet, plus the remaining thirty thousand that was supposedly spread among losing bets. The question is why does Charlie only bet ten thousand on a sure thing? Well, I guess that’s pretty easy to figure out. He’d want to set up the kid at the track in case Lombardo’s able to get his hands on the betting info. That’s if Charlie’s the rat and not the kid. Charlie looks like he’s telling the truth, but then again, the kid stuck to his story when I broke each of his fingers, and kept breaking bones until he passed out. I tell Charlie what I did to the kid and the story he told. Charlie keeps looking at me straight on. Not a flinch, not a waver, nothing as he tells me the kid was simply sticking to the lie.
So there I am. If Charlie’s lying to me, I can’t tell. I can’t read it, just like I couldn’t with the kid. I shrug and tell Charlie that’s what I thought but it’s what’s on my mind. Then I break the rack. A pretty good one sinking three balls and leaving me an easy setup for the first three shots. I peek at Charlie as I make them. He looks unconcerned, just pissed.
“Nice break,” Charlie says.
I just make a face as I line up my next shot. I’m barely paying attention as I’m knocking down shot after shot before sinking the nine. I’m trying hard to get a read on Charlie, just like I did that kid.
“Sonofabitch,” Charlie swears. “Two games in a row. Fuck. When was the last time you took two in a row from me, Knucks?”
“Been a while,” I say.
The next game is more of the same. I hit some sort of streak where I can’t miss. For the first time I see Charlie looking worried. Not a fucking drop of perspiration when he thinks I might be suspecting him of ripping off Lombardo, but the thought of losing three games in a row to me has him sweating. Fuck, I just don’t know. I wish I could read him. He tries distracting me by telling me why people like nine-ball so much.
“With eight ball you have so many choices,” he’s saying. “With nine-ball the order’s set. You don’t have to think so much. You just do what’s laid out in front of you. Simplicity, Knucks. That’s what people strive for in life.”
He’s right about that. It’s when you have choices to make when you get yourself in trouble. Thinking about that does distract me, at least enough so I miss the nine ball shot. But at least I leave him a tough cross-table bank shot. At least it’s no gimmee. Still, he’s grinning from ear-to-ear seeing how he psyched me out.
I stand back and watch him line up the shot. He’s off on the shot. You can tell from the sound the cue ball makes when it hits the nine that it’s too flush, but I watch as the damn nine-ball does a slow spin towards the side pocket and falls in. Charlie starts laughing at that. Damn near busts his gut.
“Like in life, better to be lucky than good,” he forces out, still cracking up over his luck. “I was shooting for the corner.”
“No shit.”
His face is turning red as he’s laughing harder to himself. I just stand watching trying to get a read on him. I mean, we’ve been buddies over twenty years. I need to know which one’s lying to me, Charlie or the kid. But the thing is the kid never changed his story, even when I slapped him awake and sliced him open from neck to groin. Even as he was gurgling out blood, he insisted he was telling the truth. But there’s nothing Charlie’s saying to make me think otherwise either. Except he should’ve noticed when Donnegan’s cleared out an hour ago. That was when I was supposed to do the job. He should’ve realized it was too quiet in there. But then again, it could be nothing more than being worried that Lombardo’s falsely suspecting him since he was the guy responsible for the bribe and laying down the bets. I just don’t know. But then I realize it doesn’t matter. I’m just dumb muscle. I’m not paid to think. I’m just one of those guys who does what’s laid out in front of him. Charlie was right. Like everyone else I seek simplicity in my life. I start joining Charlie, laughing also as I pick the nine-ball out of the pocket and start tossing it in my hand. That just makes him laugh harder.
“Charlie,” I ask, “you know what a nine-ball’s like?”
He’s just about choking with laughter now, his face turning a bright red. Barely able to spit out the words, he mutters something about how this is going to be good.
I’m laughing hard too at this point. I catch the nine-ball and stare at it. I turn to him, a hard grin etched on my face. He’s barely able to keep from pissing his pants, his round body convulsing as he laughs himself sick.
“Come on, Knucks,” he forces out between tears of laughter. “What’s a nine-ball like.”
“It’s like a hard fucking rock,” I say to him. Before he’s able to connect what I’m saying I slam the ball hard into his forehead. He drops like a sack of guts. With the ways his eyes are staring open I know he’s dead, but I stomp down on his windpipe to make sure. Maybe he was telling me the truth, maybe he wasn’t, but it wasn’t my call to make. As I said before I’m just dumb muscle. As it is, the job should’ve been done an hour ago. It wasn’t my place to figure anything out. I call and arrange for the cleanup. I know the guy on the other end is pissed. I’d kept him waiting. I hope my fuck-up doesn’t get back to Lombardo.
Before leaving I give Charlie one last look and think there but the grace of God, and realize that’s as much thinking as dumb muscle like me’s entitled to.
###
About the author
Dave Zeltserman:
I was born in Boston and have lived in the Boston area my whole life except for five years when I was at the University of Colorado in Boulder working on my B.S. in Applied Math and Computer Science.
I spent a lot of hours as a kid watching old movies with Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers, and film noir being my favorite, especially
The Roaring Twenties
,
The Third Man
and
The Maltese Falcon
. I also always read a lot, everything from comic books, Mad Magazine, pulps (Robert E. Howard being my favorite), and science fiction. When I was 15 and spending a few weeks during the summer at my uncle's house in Maine, I picked up a dog-eared copy of
I, the Jury
by Mickey Spillane, and from that point on was hooked on crime fiction. From Spillane, I moved on to Hammett, Chandler, Rex Stout, Ross Macdonald, and many other crime writers before eventually discovering Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford in the early ‘90s. Thompson, in particular, had a big impact on my writing, not only in the way he got into the heads of broken psychopaths and had you rooting for them, but in the way he took chances in his writing. For years before I read my first Jim Thompson novel,
Hell of a Woman
, I was trying to write what amounted to bad Ross Macdonald. Once I started reading Thompson, it opened my eyes to how I could break every rule I wanted to as long as I could make it work, and this led me to finding my own voice. My first book,
Fast Lane
, was probably equally inspired by Macdonald and Thompson—it had the sins of the father theme that Macdonald did so well, but written from the unreliable narrator and mind of the killer that Thompson excelled at. Years after writing
Fast Lane
, I read about Macdonald's last unfinished Lew Archer novel, and was amazed to find that it had a major plot-point in common with
Fast Lane
. Of course, my Julius Katz stories are heavily inspired by Rex Stout, and are almost the polar opposite of my crime noir novels.
Fast Lane
was sold first to the Italian publisher, Meridiano Zero, in 2004, and was later published by a small U.S. publisher. Since 2008, I’ve had ten books published, and have seen two of them (
Small Crimes
and
Pariah
) named by the Washington Post as best books of the year, one of them named by NPR as one of the five best crime and mystery books of the year (
Small Crimes
), and another short-listed by the ALA for best horror novel of the year (
The Caretaker of Lorne Field
). My books are now also being published in Italy, France, Germany, Holland and Lithuania, and my latest crime novel, Outsourced, has been optioned by Impact Pictures and Constantin Film.
To learn more about my books and writing, please visit me at http://www.davezeltserman.com
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Other Books by Dave Zeltserman