LaBarca put a tissue to his nose and blew, the sound of a tugboat horn. 'Damn allergies,' he said as he wiped. 'My head feels like it's filled with seaweed.'
'You oughta check the air conditioning ducts for algae,' Bobby said.
'We check them once a month,' the mobster said, 'but only for FBI bugs.'
'So how's Tony doing?' Bobby asked, trying for a little father-to-father camaraderie.
'Quit school, the lazy punk,' LaBarca said. 'Asked me to set him up in the video poker business offshore. I wanted him to have a different life than me. Funny thing is, he wants in. All these years I thought I was protecting him, shielding him from the life, and now, all he wants is to be part of it.'
'Life's weird that way,' Bobby said.
'Ain't it, though.' LaBarca turned to face him head on. 'So, Gallagher, where's my friggin' money?'
'I don't have all of it.' Bobby placed a short stack of wrinkled hundred dollar bills on the coffee table.
'Jeez, I never thought you'd lay down on me.' LaBarca did a quick count on the currency and coughed up a laugh. 'You owe me 1.2 million and you bring me three grand?'
'It's a show of good faith,' Bobby said, feeling a shudder run through him.
Don't let him see your fear.
'It's an insult,' LaBarca said, shaking his head in disbelief, then hacking up some phlegm. 'If word got out that you could stiff Vinnie LaBarca…' He closed his eyes in sad contemplation of losing his reputation as a fearsome killer.
'I would never stiff you, Vinnie. I just need more time.'
'Time is what you ain't got. Time is a boa constrictor squeezing the breath out of you.' He rubbed his crooked nose, and Bobby thought he could hear the cartilage snapping. 'What the fuck am I gonna do with you?' LaBarca leaned over the glass coffee table and swept an arm across the stack of hundred dollar bills that Bobby had brought as a peace offering. The money — all three thousand dollars of it — went flying. 'I don't want table scraps, dickwad!'
Bobby's last shreds of dignity prevented him from getting on his knees and scooping up the bills. 'The Super Bowl's in two weeks. I can make some money, put a dent in the debt.'
'Only dents are gonna be in your skull.'
Bobby's imagined what it would feel like to be tossed overboard from LaBarca's boat, bound and gagged, weighted down with concrete blocks. He wondered if his body would drift north in the Gulf Stream or just settle at the bottom, and he thought of all the sharks he'd seen while fishing as a boy. He wondered, too, what his last thoughts would be, but then knew immediately that they'd be of Christine and Scott, just as they are each night as he drifted off to a shorter sleep.
'I'll get you the money. All of it. Day after the Super Bowl.'
Bobby didn't know how he'd do that, but he had to say something.
LaBarca looked off into space as if contemplating great issues, then turned back to Bobby. 'I always liked you, Gallagher, so I'm gonna cut you a break. I'm gonna be your banker. I'm gonna give you time to pay.'
There was a soft squishy sound as LaBarca sucked a wad of phlegm into his mouth from his nasal passages, then swallowed
'Whatever it takes, Vinnie, if you give me time, I'll get it.'
'Plus the juice! You bookies get your vig, and I get the juice. Two per cent a day, and because I like you, simple interest instead of compounded daily. So, that's 14 per cent interest…'
'A hundred sixty-eight thousand dollars,' Bobby said.
'Round it up to two hundred g's for my trouble. You owe me a million-four the day after the Super Bowl. And that's it. No more credit, no more Mr. Nice Guy,' LaBarca said. 'You hear me?'
'Yeah. No problem, Vinnie.'
'All right, get outta here. 'Desperate Housewives' is coming on the satellite in ten minutes.'
'I don't know whether I prefer Astroturf to grass. I never smoked Astroturf.'
— Joe Namath
'Joe Namath, you're not bigger than football! Remember that!'
— Vince Lombardi (shouting in his sleep as he lay dying in hospital)
24
Tuesday, January 31-Miami Beach
Five Days until the Super Bowl
Not bad for a country boy. No, not bad at all, Martin Kingsley thought.
An fifteen-hundred dollar a night bungalow by the pool, a shimmering blue thread of water one hundred fifty feet long that seemed to stretch right to the beach. Not that anyone was swimming. There were a few pretty boys lounging in the shallow water, some leggy, short-haired European model types in bikinis dipping their toes along the edge. A chess set with Alice in Wonderland pieces four feet high sat on the lawn amidst towering palms, mirrors leaning against tree trunks, and a kitchen table with mismatched chairs.
Bizarre, and what a hoot for the son of a West Texas wildcatter. He was waiting for three visitors but only two had shown up. His plans had been meticulous and, he chuckled to himself, damn clever. He would destroy Robert Gallagher, would crush him into dust, watch him blow away with the Texas tumbleweeds, or more appropriately here, the Atlantic sea breeze.
Kingsley wouldn't do it for revenge, of course. He was above that, he told himself. He would do it for Scott. God, how he loved that boy. What potential the child had. But if he stayed with that loser of a father, who knows what would become of him? Kingsley shuddered, picturing a grown-up Scott sitting in a cage at a racetrack, dispensing two-dollar tickets, living in a rented room, never fulfilling his potential. A small timer like his old man.
The boy's a genius for Christ's sake, and it's my job to take care of him, to mold his life in a way his father can't. And his mother won't.
Sad to say, but Christine is too soft. Too much sentiment, just like her mother, bless her memory. No matter, I'll handle it. I'll handle everything.
Kingsley sat on a white-cushioned chair inside his all-white bungalow-white orchid in a white pot, white TV, white fridge, white linens on the white platform bed-watching the surreal scene outside his window.
Toto, we're not in Lubbock anymore.
He wondered what his father, the sun-baked, squinty-eyed Earl Kingsley, would have thought of the Delano Hotel. The man who never could scrape the grime from the seams of his hands would have figured he'd been transported not to Miami Beach, but to another galaxy.
Not that his father couldn't appreciate extravagance. He loved the finer things if they were the largest and most expensive things. Subtlety was not old Earl's strong suit. When he had money, which is to say when the oil flowed and the dice were charmed, he built the biggest house in Dallas, a monstrous combination Greek Parthenon and Southern plantation with pillars the size of giant redwoods. He'd imported artists from Italy to paint the Kingsley version of the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of the giant rotunda. There, among euphoric visions of angels and puffy clouds was an oil derrick and a set of football goalposts. Though Earl Kingsley had never set foot inside a college classroom, he was a rabid follower of the University of Texas Longhorns and regularly slipped hundred-dollar bills to the fleetest and strongest of their so-called student-athletes.
As if the mansion were not sufficiently blasphemous in itself, Earl went on to offend the city's Baptists by proclaiming that 'God hisself would have built this house if he had the money.' Earl had the money but not the pedigree. He'd claimed to have been born so far west in Texas that the sun knocked a brick out of the fireplace every time it set. His hands were too callused, his humor too gruff for the folks at the Ashbrook Country Club. Earl Kingsley was not to be a part of the charity balls and coming-out parties. It only made him work harder, earn more, and spend more.
Martin Kingsley knew from early childhood that his father adored him. He remembered one Christmas when
