Sucker bet - James Swain [76]
His limo was parked by the door, too big to fit into a conventional spot. He got his keys from the valet and jumped in.
Then he had to make a decision. The Honda had turned left, heading toward the causeway, while the Toyota was going north toward Bal Harbour. Who should he follow?
The old man, Rico decided, just to get him out of the way.
Mabel awoke tied to a chair.
She was in Tony’s office in the back of the house. The blinds were drawn, and she had no idea how much time had passed since the deliveryman had sent her into dreamland. By now, she imagined he’d taken Tony’s big-screen TV and anything else of value and hightailed it back to the hole he’d crawled out of.
A dull, aching throb clouded her vision. The guy had looked like a creep, so why had she let him in? Because she’d wanted to believe he was all right. A character flaw for sure, but one she was not about to give up on. Most people were decent. It was the minority that spoiled things.
She wiggled her chair over to the desk and banged it with the chair arm. The phone, which sat less than a foot away, did not move. Which left what? Yelling at the top of her lungs, she decided.
She was about to do just that when the door banged open.
“Oh, my,” Mabel said.
It was her attacker. He wore a pair of dirty blue jeans, no shirt, no shoes, his long, lifeless hair flopping on his shoulders. His upper torso was lean, the skin covered in angry red dots. He pulled up a chair and sat in it backwards. His breath reeked of marijuana.
“Don’t scream,” he said.
“No, sir.”
“You’re going to help me,” he said.
Mabel found herself staring at his feet. The soles were black, as were all his toes. Tarzan of the swamps, she guessed. “I am?”
“The guy you work for, this Valentine guy, you need to call him, tell him to come home.”
“Then what?”
He took a second too long to answer.
“Then I leave.”
Mabel glanced at the phone on the desk, then shrugged her shoulders.
“That’s easier said than done,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“He doesn’t leave his cell phone on. His number is there on the desk. Call him if you don’t believe me.”
Her attacker scratched his chin. There was not an ounce of fat on his body, and every time he moved, his muscles redefined themselves.
“I can relate to that,” he said.
He went into the kitchen and returned with two sodas that he’d taken from the refrigerator. He untied her arms and gave her one. “Okay, so we wait for him to call. Then you tell him to come home.”
“That could be a while,” Mabel replied.
“Your boss doesn’t care about you, huh?”
The comment caught her by surprise. She’d never looked at Tony’s not calling in that light. Tony was a wounded male, walking around the world without his mate of forty-plus years, and as a result now doing stupid things. But he still cared about her. Because if he didn’t, she’d stop working for him, plain and simple.
That was, if she lived through this.
“He’ll call eventually,” she said. “May I ask you a question?”
He took a long swallow of soda. “Sure.”
“What’s your name?”
“Joe,” he said. “My friends call me Slash.”
Mabel felt a knot tighten in her chest. What kind of name was that? You’re a goner, she thought.
“Mine’s Mabel,” she said.
Tony’s study was the largest room in the house and contained his library of gambling books, a weighted roulette wheel, several boxes of marked cards and loaded dice, a rigged poker table from a gambling club in Gardena, California, and other assorted ephemera.
Slash searched the room, looking for money. Finding none, he began examining the equipment.
The Kepplinger holdout caught his eye, and he took it off the shelf, strapped it to his body, and tried to make it work. The device was used by hustlers to secretly hide cards up the sleeve of a jacket. Tony said it took hundreds of hours of practice to properly use it. After five minutes, Slash ripped the device off his body and threw it on the floor.
Then he noticed the painting hanging over Valentine’s desk. “This must be worth something,” he said, taking it down.
The painting was a