“You think so?”
“Damn straight.”
Ricky killed the tall boy, seeing Miss Axe come out of the convenience store and shoot him a dagger. He rolled down his window.
“Miss Axe?”
She was fitting her key into her door and turned. “What, Ricky?”
“I love you. I really do, Miss Axe. I always loved you. It’s why I did so poorly in your class. It was you.”
Scowling, she climbed into her car and drove away. Ricky slapped the wheel of his new car, the beer lifting his spirits to impossible heights. Roland frowned, no longer being cool, his anxiety paralyzing him. The coin was frozen in his hand.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s just…I don’t know.”
“You want me to do it?” Ricky asked him.
“Yeah,” Roland whispered.
Taking the ticket and the coin from him, Ricky scratched out the box in the corner. It was for $50,000. He showed it to Roland and watched his friend melt into his seat, and close his eyes.
“That was intense,” Roland said.
7
Mabel Struck had seen some strange things during her life, especially during the past two years, running Tony’s business and watching him catch hundreds of casino cheaters. But she’d never seen anything as strange as the item she was now holding, a candy bar worth a hundred thousand dollars.
She was going through the mail while sitting at Tony’s desk. Her boss had left a few hours ago for Slippery Rock, and she’d gone onto his computer and dealt with a dozen e-mails, then started sorting through his mail. It was heavy, and she put the priority letters in one pile, the it-can-wait items in another. The very last letter was a padded envelope. When she ripped it open, a giant 3 Musketeers candy bar fell out. With it was a letter from Ron Shepherd, the head of gaming enforcement for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Mabel held the candy bar in her hand. There was a price sticker on it. It cost a dollar thirty, Canadian. Their money was worth about 70 percent U.S., which made the candy bar worth about a dollar. So what made it worth a hundred thousand times that?
She put the candy bar on the desk and stared at it. There was an expression Tony liked to use.
“I thought you were kidding,” Yolanda said, putting the note down. “What do you think the scam is?”
“I have no idea. You know what frustrates me the most?” Mabel said. “Tony never told me he was doing a job for this man.”
“He probably did it as a favor. Gerry says he does that a lot.”
Mabel heard herself grinding her teeth. Tony had asked her to run his business, and she’d gone about it with the idea that people should be charged for her boss’s services. Yet it didn’t stop him from dispensing free advice and help whenever it suited him.
“At least he could have told me,” she said.
“Maybe he didn’t want to bother you. He thinks you work too hard.”
“Well, sometimes I do. But this is so…interesting.”
“So call him. He’ll be happy to explain it.”
Mabel examined the candy bar again. Ron Shepherd’s note said a convenience store manager was going to serve time. Had the manager covered the candy bar with a towel and pretended it was a gun? No, she decided, it was something infinitely clever; that was why Ron Shepherd had asked for Tony’s help. She glanced up and saw Yolanda holding the phone.
“You want me to call him?” she asked.
Mabel shook her head. “No, I’ll do it.”
Tony’s cell phone was turned off. Mabel left a message and asked him to call back. Her boss picked up his messages sporadically, which meant it might be a few hours, or even a day, before she got an explanation out of him.
Yolanda had to feed the baby, so Mabel showed her out. Shutting the front door behind Yolanda, Mabel suddenly had an idea. She didn’t remember Tony making any trips to Canada recently, which meant he’d probably solved the candy bar scam from the comfort of his La-Z-Boy. Going into the living room, she looked through the stacks of videotapes that were scattered around the room. Tony’s handwriting was hard to decipher—Gerry likened it to the cartoon character Bullwinkle’s—and she squinted at the labels.
She looked through every stack, then the tapes stuck in drawers and cabinets. It wasn’t anywhere to be found. Now she was getting mad. It had to be here somewhere.
On the La-Z-Boy was a yellow legal pad and the remote, Tony’s two main work tools. It occurred to her that the tape might still be in the VCR, and she powered up the TV, then hit play on the VCR. A grainy surveillance of a balding man with bare feet filled the TV screen. It was Ricky Smith at the Mint. She had read about Ricky’s exploits in the newspaper, but wasn’t prepared for what she now saw.
Ricky played like a man possessed. With one hand he bet; with the other, he rolled the dice or flipped over his cards. No movement was wasted.
According to MapQuest, the town of Slippery Rock, North Carolina, was six hundred and sixty miles from where Valentine lived in Florida, and nowhere near a public airport. So he’d gotten the oil changed in his ’92 Honda and taken to the highway.
He drove in the right lane most of the way, and caught the drivers of passing cars giving him the eye. The Honda was definitely showing its age, the navy blue paint job fading to a less vibrant color. He kept thinking of trading it in; only, the engine still turned over every time he fired it up. What more did he want in a car?
Crossing into North Carolina, he felt his ears pop, and he grabbed MapQuest’s directions off the passenger seat. He’d been a flatlander all his life and hadn’t bothered to check the town’s elevation when he’d printed the instructions off his computer. Slippery Rock was twenty-nine hundred feet above sea level and in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. No wonder it was taking him so long to get there.
He kept his eyes peeled for a gas station. He’d run out of nicotine gum an hour ago, and the craving for a cigarette was killing him. He fiddled with the radio and found local news and Billy Graham saving souls. A Sinatra CD was in the player, but he saved that for special occasions, leaving silence as his traveling companion.
His cell phone rang, jolting him out of a daydream. The caller ID said HOME.
“Sick of driving yet?” his neighbor asked.
“Just about,” he admitted.
“Not to say I told you so, but flying to Atlanta would have been much easier.”
“If I didn’t hate airports so much, I’d agree with you.”
“I know, they remind you of medium-security prisons,” Mabel said. “Look, I just had a look at this tape of Ricky Smith, and I’d have to agree with your friend Bill Higgins. Something is definitely not on the square, to use your favorite expression.”
