Sucker bet - James Swain [17]
Running Bear frowned. “You getting this down, Harry?”
Smooth Stone picked up a pad and pen off the desk and started scribbling. Valentine suddenly felt warm, and tugged at his collar. There no longer seemed to be enough air in the cramped trailer. Then he realized what was happening.
He was having an epiphany.
He’d been having epiphanies most of his life. Long ago, he had accepted that a part of his brain worked on its own, filtering information. And what this part was telling him was that Jack Lightfoot was dead, and Running Bear and Smooth Stone knew it. If not, they would have been out in the Everglades with bloodhounds searching for him. That was the smart thing to do. In fact, it was the only thing to do.
A man was missing. Find him.
Only, they weren’t looking. Instead, they were concentrating on trying to figure out how Lightfoot had cheated them. They knew Jack Lightfoot was dead, but were they his murderers?
“So what you are saying,” Running Bear said, “is that it’s a miracle we haven’t had more cheating before now.”
Valentine blinked awake. Lois had told him he looked like a zombie when he had these episodes. Then he’d hit sixty, and people had stopped commenting about them.
“That’s right,” he said.
Running Bear opened his desk drawer and removed a videotape. Scotch-taped to it was a check. The chief’s long arm reached across the desk. “This is the surveillance video of Jack Lightfoot cheating us. We need to know what he was doing, so we can prevent it from happening again.”
Valentine slipped the video under his arm. He planned to overnight the video to Bill Higgins first thing tomorrow. Running Bear and Smooth Stone were either murderers or accomplices to murder, and he wanted nothing to do with them. Standing, he felt a bead of sweat roll down his face. He hoped the men did not see it.
“Call you in a few days,” he said.
6
The first thing Valentine did after he got into his Honda was to tear up Running Bear’s check. He was a man of principles. Principle No. 1 said that he didn’t work for crooks. It meant turning away business, as certain casinos all over the world routinely swindled their customers. Mabel didn’t agree, and felt he should take the money and give it to charity, but Valentine stuck to his guns and felt a hell of a lot better for it.
A gibbous moon gave his car a purple sheen, and he found himself thinking about Donny and his purple suit. Donny wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he was always entertaining, and Valentine realized how much he missed the big lunk. Then he thought about Vixen and her vegetarian cooking. No meat, no bones, yet most of it had tasted pretty good. Then he thought about Zoe and her barrage of annoying pubescent questions. One day, they would stop, he was sure of it.
And finally, he thought about Kat.
He’d planned to take her out to dinner tonight and give her the diamond pin while telling her how much she meant to him. He wasn’t good at expressing himself, so he’d composed a little speech and memorized it. Sitting there in the dark, the words came back to him. I go to bed at night thinking about you. You make me happy every day. I hope I do the same for you. You’ve made me look past who I am and try new things.
He gripped the wheel and stared across the parking lot. The wrestling had been fun, until Kat’s ex-husband had shown up. Seeing Ralph and Kat and Zoe together, he’d been reminded of what his own previous life had been like, and how much he still missed it.
He powered up his cell phone and called Mabel.
“You still down in the dumps?” she asked.
“Yeah, but I’ll get over it. Anything going on?”
“Our old pal Jacques called earlier.”
“What did he want?”
“He searched his employees’ lockers like you suggested. Well, you’re not going to believe this, but—”
Valentine felt something heavy bump his car. The parking lot backed up onto a swamp, and he was