“Yeah—huge fortunes passed hands. Sometimes as much as twenty-five bucks.”
His laugh echoed sharply in the plaster-walled, carpetless room. “Yeah, you and your Black Mariah. Fucking wild cards.”
“Threes and nines,” I said.
“That’s not real poker.”
I grinned and swigged. “It wasn’t real money.”
“Except once a year.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Every December, sometime between Christmas and New Year’s, we’d play one higher stakes game, bumping our quarter/fifty cents/a buck chips to a buck/five bucks/ten. On those occasions, hundreds of dollars had crossed this felt-covered table.
“Funny,” Tim said, with a faint smile, holding the beer bottle in his palm as if he were going to toss it, “how conservative Bill always played.”
I nodded, sipped the Pabst. “Even small stakes, he played like it was his life savings.”
Tim shook his head, laughed a single hollow laugh. “I mean, a guy that took the kind of risks he did, in real life—and on a night out with the boys, he was a little old lady.”
“You, on the other hand, were always a reckless fucker.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I know. Sometimes I bluffed my way into some pretty good pots.”
“Yeah, Tim, but you got greedy. Too much bluffing.”
“Oh yeah? Your problem was, you never did bluff.”
“I still don’t.”
He took another swallow, then nodded at the paper bag. “So what’s that, your supper?”
“That’s what I came to bring you. What Annabel Drury wanted you to have.”
“Yeah?”
I pushed the bag toward him, like it was a pot he’d won. “Take it. She said he would have wanted you to have it—Bill’s old partner, after all.”
Tim put the beer down in a built-in coaster, and emptied the paper bag onto the table; this time it made a bigger clunk, as Bill Drury’s nickel-plated, well-worn ivory-handled .38 police revolver dropped onto the felt tabletop.
“Oh Christ,” he said softly.
“He carried that same piece from the day he made detective till the day he died,” I said.
O’Conner was nodding, eyes glazed. “His late brother gave it to him. The reporter? Lots of…sentimental value.”
“It was in his glove compartment, with a box of shells, when those sons of bitches shot him…. Like I say, Annabel wanted you to have it.”
O’Conner hadn’t picked it up; he was just staring at it, leaning an elbow against the table, fingertips pressed to his head.
Then he finished his Pabst off in a big gulp, and said, “I can use another. How about you?”
“No, I’m fine.”
While he was in the kitchen, I took the nine millimeter Browning from my shoulder holster and held it beneath the table, where he wouldn’t notice. I’d carried this weapon a long time, too. Different sentimental reasons, though.
A few moments later, he stumbled back in, sliding on the floor in stocking feet, with a fresh sweaty Pabst in hand, and sat down, rather heavily. He sighed and took several swigs of the beer.
“I miss him, that bald-headed bastard,” O’Conner said. He had tears in his eyes. “I feel like I let him down.”
“Well, sure you did—setting him up like that.”
O’Conner looked up, sharply. “Is that what you think?”
I bestowed him a bland smile. “I don’t just think it, Tim. I know it.”
His forehead clenched, his eyes moving back and forth, as if trying to escape his head. “I loved Bill Drury. We were like brothers.”
“Ever hear of Cain and Abel, shitheel?”
He backed away in the chair. “I think maybe you oughta get the hell outa here, Heller.”
“No. Finish your beer. Let’s talk.”
He sneered at me—kind of a pathetic sneer, though—and picked up the .38 and pointed it at me. “Is this loaded?”
“Yeah. Just one bullet, though. Mine has a full clip.”
Not quite smiling, O’Conner looked at me carefully. “You want me to believe you’re pointing a gun at me right now, I suppose.”
“That’s right…. Of course, I could be bluffing.”
