Frag Box (Herman Jackson Mysteries) - Hardcover

Thompson, Richard A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590586786 ISBN 13: 9781590586785

Verlag: POISONED PEN PR, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Herman Jackson never thought his past would catch up with him, least of all via a murdered Vietnam veteran named Charlie Victor.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard A. Thompson is a former civil engineer and construction manager who traded his hard hat for a laptop and now writed full time.

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Frag Box

A Herman Jackson MysteryBy Richard A. Thompson

Poisoned Pen Press

Copyright © 2009 Richard A. Thompson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59058-678-5

Chapter One

Blood Game

It was a day for pocket billiards, snow, and death. The snow came in the late afternoon, in fat, globular flakes that swirled in the eddies of the urban canyons, stuck to the rough brick of old buildings, and covered the streets in a layer of slush for cars to splash onto pedestrians. On the windows of Lefty's Pool Hall and Saloon in downtown St. Paul, they dribbled down the dirty glass and made mushy heaps on the sills, leaving crooked, wet trails behind them.

I was inside Lefty's at the time, shooting eight ball with Wide Track Wilkie. And while the hapless man on the street below was lost in a world of pain and despair, we were lost in the click of the balls and the smell of smoke and stale beer and the electric tension of money being put in harm's way.

Lefty's is an old-fashioned pool hall, a walkup flight above a not-quite-downtown street, with high ceilings and lazy Bombay fans and green-shaded hanging lamps. It has pool tables with real leather pockets and no coin slots, and snooker and billiards tables, too. And it has high, multi-paned windows. You have to stand on tiptoe to see anything out of them except the sky. It's an easy world to get lost in.

Wilkie likes eight ball, because it's slow and it gives him a lot of time to hustle side bets. I like it because it lets me get more mileage out of finesse than power, which means I can beat him sometimes. At snooker, I almost always can. At nine ball, never. He can sink the money ball on the break one time out of every six, and those are odds that I can't ignore. And I am nothing if not a believer in odds. So for our separate reasons, we agreed to play straight eight.

Back about a hundred years ago, in the shiny chrome city of Detroit, I worked for my Uncle Fred, a bookie and numbers man and the smartest handicapper I've ever known. He taught me that the secret to all of life is nothing more than being able to figure the correct odds. That, and knowing who the house is and always betting with it.

After he went upstate for the second time, I used his money to start a bail bond business, which I figured was as house as you can get. And I was doing okay, with more cash flow than any of Fred's games produced and none of the risk. But I forgot his second secret to life, which is never to be your own customer. I foolishly used my office to recruit some talent for a caper that went not at all well, and I wound up having to flee The Motor City for good. I kept my old name, Herman Jackson, since it's a common enough one, but I changed everything else. I started a new bail bond business and a new life in St. Paul. It's the capital of Minnesota, of course, and I suppose that makes it important, but I always think of it as an uneventful old shoe of a city, which was exactly what I wanted.

Now I spend my days quietly, playing low stakes pool in Lefty's and writing get-out-of-jail cards for small-time losers too stupid to stay there. I bet only the smart odds, and I spend a lot of time looking over my shoulder.

Sooner or later, I suppose, that had to change.

That afternoon, the odds didn't seem to matter. I was on a roll, and I had just dropped the seven ball with a long-green shot as soft and subtle as destiny's whisper, leaving the old timers in the place thumping the butts of their cues on the floor in muffled applause.

"Nice," said Wilkie.

"I thought so," I said.

"Yeah," he said, rocking on his heels and making the floor groan in the process. "Slicker than snot on a doorknob. It ought to make you feel so good, Herman my man, you forgive yourself in advance for missing the next one, which you are definitely going to do."

"You wish."

"I know. Look it over, man."

I looked. I had only the solid-colored black eight ball, the money ball, left to shoot, while Wilkie still had three striped balls on the table. But the eight was backed up in a corner, frozen against the end rail and totally hidden by the thirteen. In the other direction, down the table, there wasn't enough English in a whole bottle of Beefeater's to let me miss the nine and fifteen and do a two-cushion double around the far corner. I could do a deliberate scratch, without touching the eight, and stay in the game, but that would give Wilkie another turn at shooting, which was never a very good idea. For reasons I will never fathom, I decided to go down with style.

"Massé," I said.

"You can't be serious."

"Have you ever known me otherwise?"

"A hundred bucks says you can't make it."

I looked over the setup again. He was right; I couldn't make it.

"A hundred to my twenty," I said.

"Five to one? Are you nuts? I wouldn't give my sweet old grandma five to one."

"If I had your grandma shooting for me, I'd give you three to five. But you're so damn sure I can't do it, you ought to be willing to be a little sporting."

"Hey, I am a little sporting. I promise not to bounce on the floor while you're setting up to miss. Five to three, then; my hundred to your sixty."

"You bounce on the floor, and all bets are off." Wilkie is over four hundred pounds on the hoof. When his stomach rumbles, so does the earth around him.

"I said I wouldn't, didn't I?"

I looked at the shot again and made a few practice strokes. It really was a terrible setup. A massé is a bizarre shot where you actually stroke the cue ball vertically, as if you were trying to drive it straight down into the table. But you hit it off center, and it goes drunkenly spinning off, waltzing around the ball you have to avoid and back to the one you want to hit. Sometimes. It's never all that easy to do, let alone with exact control. And with the eight ball frozen against the cushion, this one had to be perfect. But for any event in the entire universe, there are odds. And if the odds are right, you have to play. That's another secret of life, which my uncle Fred did not teach me. "Four to one," I said, "nonnegotiable."

"Remind me never to buy a used car from you. All right, against my better judgment, your lousy twenty-five bucks to my hundred."

"I've only got twenty on me, Wide. I told you that up front." And truth to tell, I shouldn't even be risking that. My cash flow situation just then was a disaster.

Wilkie groaned. "I'll carry you, Mr. High Roller."

"Nope." I shook my head while he looked as if he were about to blow a gasket somewhere in his vital machinery. "I never play for what I haven't got. You know that."

"Listen, Superchicken, if you—"

"Call the cops!"

All heads turned to a shapeless character in a dirty parka and watch cap, charging in the main door and screaming at Lefty, who was at his usual spot behind the bar.

"They killed a man out there!"

"Who did?" said Lefty.

"The hell difference does it make, who? Call the cops, will you? And gimmie a beer. And a shot, while you're at it."

Part of the crowd went to the windows and gave out a bunch of noises like, "awgeez," and "willya lookathat?" The rest of them headed for the door. I leaned toward a window.

"Screw that," said Wilkie. "Take the damn shot."

"Who's dead?" I said, looking over the setup with the eight again. It didn't get any better with further study.

"Looks like old Charlie Vee," said one of the voices at the window.

"Oh, shit," I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: POISONED PEN PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1590586786
• ISBN 13: 9781590586785
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 222
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar