Money Men

dollar out of his wallet, given it to Joe the Grinder, and walked out, instead of blowing her away like he did.'

'You're right,' Carr said. 'But that's just the way Howard is. He couldn't help himself any more than Freddie Roth could hold back if he's near a printing press and somebody offers him ten points on the dollar. Same with Rico's murderer. He'll keep going until he's stopped…'

'Imagine us sitting here talking about old Howard as if he's a criminal?' Kelly said. 'If he could hear us, he'd knock our heads together like two coconuts.'

'He probably would,' Carr said. He laughed.

Kelly closed his eyes for a few minutes. 'Listen,' he said without looking at Carr. 'I know I'm always the one to say the wrong thing at the right time, but there's something we should work out.'

'Shoot,' Carr said.

Kelly wiped his hand on his shirttail and tucked the shirt back in. 'I see the whole thing like this. From what the mushhead U.S attorney said yesterday, it looks like once we find Ronnie, he is going to walk. If we arrest him, he goes to trial and beats the rap. He will have killed Rico for free. Blair is a hundred-percent right. The jury is going to be made up of a bunch of housewives who watch TV soap operas. When the judge instructs them on reasonable doubt, they are going to say, 'Gee whiz, there must be reasonable doubt because I can't imagine anyone being mean enough to blow somebody's head off.' I can see it now.'

'You may be right,' Carr said.

Nothing was said for a while.

'You and I have been through a lot,' Kelly said finally. He was looking straight ahead. 'You can trust me if you think we should go all the way on this one.'

Carr put the binoculars down. 'Ideas?' he said.

'If we find him-I mean, if it's just you and I alone, with no one else around-I say it's our ball game right then and there. He resists and we cancel his ticket,' Kelly said. 'We both shoot.'

Carr put the binoculars to his eyes. He waited before speaking. 'We have to be patient, Jack,' he said. 'We have to wait till everything is right.' He put the binoculars on the dashboard. 'And it's probably best if we don't talk too much about it. Eventually we may end up sitting on the lie box. It's better not to have discussed such things. You know what I mean.'

'Yeah, sure,' Kelly said.

When darkness fell, they parked closer to the apartment house, because of the lighting. Using the binoculars, Carr made out a soft flicker of light coming from the opening in a curtain.

'He's watching TV,' he said.

'I wish he'd make a move. My ass is sore.' Kelly popped open a soda. 'Wouldn't it be great if the asshole would get in his car and go to a movie. We could just sit there and watch the movie, or, better yet, a restaurant…'

'Dream on,' Carr said.

Clad only in boxer shorts, Red Diamond had been lounging on the fat, smelly sofa all day. His tiny apartment was filled with light and sound from a rabbit-eared portable television. Resting on a dinette table, it provided flickering illumination for the dark, bare-floored room and two plastic-covered chairs, an open suitcase, and a phone with a cord long enough to reach the bathroom.

Red's bandaged hand throbbed with the waves of canned laughter emanating from the set.

He crawled off the couch and stretched. It was time for stomach therapy. In the undersized kitchen he pulled open the refrigerator and took out a bottle of real, not imitation, ginger ale. He opened the bottle at the sink. Throwing his head back, he opened his mouth wide and poured fully half of the icy ginger ale down his throat. The half bottle of bubbles tingled and stung all the way to his sour, rumbling stomach. He quickly placed the bottle back in the refrigerator and put his hands on his hips to wait for the belch. It came moments later as a strident, head-down bark.

The poison worry gas had been emitted. He was sure that if he had been able to get real ginger ale during the stretch in Terminal Island, his stomach problems could have been kept under control.

He went back to the sofa and fluffed up a pillow. It was getting dark outside, but he did not feel that the day had been wasted. Alone, with nothing but the television, he had been able to relax, to think. Having had time to treat his body with ginger-ale therapy, he had not had a loose bowel movement all day.

The television crackled with applause. A cuff-linked, effeminate game-show host held a housewife's hand and pointed to the stage set behind him. 'You keep five hundred dollars or try for the wild-card prize in one of the boxes!' he quacked. 'Take your choice of Prize One, Prize Two, or Prize Three!' Chewing her fingernails excitedly, the housewife jumped up and down. Her breasts were bouncy, youthful, her waist firm. Perhaps as firm as Mona's? For the fiftieth time he saw Mona in the front seat of the car, the look in her eye as she stabbed him. The hole in his hand throbbed again.

'What will it be?' said the game-show man. 'The money or one of the wild-card boxes? Five hundred dollars or a chance at gifts worth as much as ten thousand dollars.'

'I'll keep the five hundred dollars,' squealed the housewife.

She chomped on her knuckles. The box opened. 'A new car!' screamed the announcer.

'Dumb bitch,' Red said to the television. He got up and turned it off. He knocked a dirty towel off a dinette chair, sat down, and flipped a spiral notebook that was on the table.

He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. Then he picked up a ball-point pen and wrote the following:

RECOVERY OPERATION

The need for cash flow is now imperative, but falling back to quick con game would be disastrous because of being known by the cops. Cannot trust Gabe-he is probably a snitch; much too friendly. Only one to trust at this point is Ronnie. He has proved himself under fire. Dio's deadline is up and it means that plans must be changed to meet the current needs. Dio is to me a barrier, a stone wall that is holding up all further success. He has shown himself to be what he always has been, a person lacking full understanding of people and situations. He is nothing more than a cheap gunsel who lucked out for a few scores and saved his money, like the peasant wop motherfucker that he is. To deal with Dio is a task requiring full commitment. Yes, an all-or-nothing is now upon me. I have survived before because of my mental speed and ability to decipher the codes of life. I picture myself at this moment as a guided missile fueled by the mental speed energy I have been able to develop using the nuclear resources of concentration. Dio's weakness is that, even in the Beverly Hills days, he accepted other people as stereotypes. He could never change an opinion of someone once it was made. His supposed mastery of power is a sham. I want to stick a burning cigar right into his eye and push it into his activating, rotten shit brain. He has challenged my energy by his failure to understand my mental speed. I must maintain control of the resources at my own command in order to return to the home plate of life. I have waited five years. I have been patient. I have not been remorseful. I have not been anything other than a gentleman who requests his seat at the table back. I am fifty-four years old and the little things mean more to me now. There is no question that I can handle the problem with Mona. Time is a healer. Dio, if he was a man instead of a phony rotten prick, could give me more time by just snapping his fingers-but he won't. I have never been afraid to face the music of life. It is time for a plateau decision.

It took him almost an hour to write this. After completing it he took another ginger-ale-belch treatment. Almost simultaneous with the emission of the worry gas, as if by the magic healing properties of ginger, he was aware of what he had to do. He picked the phone up off the floor and dialed. A woman answered.

'Hello.'

'I wanna speak to Tony Dio. This is Red Diamond.'

A click. 'Hello, Red, this is Tony. What can I do for you?'

'I know tomorrow is the deadline, but something just came up and I wanted to check and see if I could get a slight extension. This is not a stall. I give you my word on that. It's just that I'm in the middle of a project that I have capital tied up in. Right now it would be so much easier if I could just have a little more time. That way I can pull off my caper without having to shortstop the whole thing right in the middle. I'm only asking for a few more weeks.'

'Are you telling me you don't have what you are supposed to have by tomorrow?'

Red hesitated. He felt as though a faucet had been turned on in his intestines. 'Oh, it's not that. Not at all. I