Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [76]
He did a good job, pocketing one of each and leaving himself a nice open table. He only had two striped balls left when he finally missed.
“You gonna run out now?” he asked me.
“Sure.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay.”
“You wanna—?”
“Yes!” Gem interrupted, before he could finish his offer to bet.
He turned toward her. “How much?”
Gem’s face was a mask of concentration. Finally, she said, “Five?”
“You sure you want to go that deep?” he sneered at her.
“You are correct,” she answered. “Let us make it for two, all right?”
A couple of the men watching laughed.
The blond’s flush turned angry. “Hey, you think it’s such a lock, maybe you—”
“Oh, lighten up, Wally,” one of the watchers said.
He slapped two singles on the table. Looked over at me. Gem reached in my jacket pocket like it was her own, pulled out my roll, extracted a pair of hundreds, put them next to the blond’s money. As she did, she looked down, said “Oh! You meant two dollars.”
That threw the watchers into convulsions. I moved quick to head things off. “Stop playing around,” I told Gem, snatching the two centuries off the table, replacing them with a pair of singles of my own.
“Hey, pal,” the blond snarled at me. “If you want to—”
I ignored him. Stepped to the table. The balls looked as big as grapefruits, the pockets as wide as bowling alleys. I made all the solid balls disappear in a couple of minutes, then closed with a tap-in on the eight.
I spotted two of the watchers high-fiving each other out of the corner of my eye. Gem slipped all four singles off the table and tried in vain to stuff them in the back pocket of her shorts.
“Ah, Christ. You’re a pro,” the blond guy said, not mad anymore.
“What was that all about?” I asked Gem, as soon I had the Subaru out of the lot and aimed back toward Portland.
“What do you mean?”
“Were you trying to start a fire?”
“I only wanted to race. I thought it would be fun.”
“Uh-huh. So, when I cut that short, you …”
“Oh, don’t be so foolish. I would never do anything to endanger you.”
“No? Well, you’ve got a pretty bratty way of playing, then.”
“Oh, you liked it,” she said, bending her face forward and nipping at my hand on the gearshift knob.
We were in the middle of keeping my windows closed when the cellular trilled next to the bed.
“Damn!” Gem hissed over my shoulder. “I should have—”
I thumbed the phone open, said: “What?”
“We got the gen,” Byron said.
“And …?”
“And it wants analysis. Doesn’t speak for itself. At least not clearly.”
“When do you want to—?”
“We’re way south of you. How’s breakfast tomorrow work?”
“Perfect.”
Somewhere in space, a satellite synapse snapped, leaving the phone dead in my hand.
“Do you remember where we were?” Gem whispered. “My … mind does. But—”
“I can fix that,” she said, pivoting on her knees and sliding toward me across the sheets.
“The one on the left is Robert Alton Timmons,” Brick told us, tapping the photograph on the table. It was one of the surveillance shots, now hyper-digitized, as sharp as a studio portrait. “His partner’s Louis B. Ruhr.”
“You had them on record?” I asked him.
“Half the agencies in the country probably have these two on record. Timmons served two terms for arson.”
“A pro torch? Or a pyro?”
“Neither. He was a cross-burner. Graduated to synagogues and individual dwellings back in the days before we called stuff like that ‘hate crimes.’ He was AB on the inside, but that doesn’t mean much—white guy locked down anywhere in California better link up, he wants to serve out his whole bit.
“Timmons is a floater, a maggot looking for fat corpses. He’s been with the abortion-clinic bombers—still a suspect in a major arson of one in Buffalo—but he’s also put in time with the Klan, survivalists, the common-law courts people, couple of those bizarro true-white religions. Even claimed to be a Phineas Priest for a while—”
“What is that?” Gem interrupted.
“Phineas was a