The sharp smell of mold made Rigby’s sinuses burn something fierce, and he felt the stirrings of what promised to be an agonizing headache. He stood across from Billy Knox at the latter’s dismal, tiny crib on Ventura Avenue, failing to grasp more than the broadest outlines of the story the glue-addled little turdbucket was trying to get across.
“What happened to the money, Billy?”
Knox was confused, his acned forehead contorted into knots of unaccustomed concentration. “Nothing happened to the money.”
“Then why aren’t you giving me the money?”
“Because I don’t have it?” He seemed to think he’d explained all this sufficiently already, and he winced as if in anticipation of a blow. Knox Senior must either have hit little Billy too often growing up or not often enough, Rigby thought.
“All right. You don’t have the money. Where’s the product?”
“The product?”
Jesus. When they’d met in the Shanty, Knox had given off an air of sullen, taciturn badassery so pure it hadn’t occurred to Rigby that he might be enlisting a certified moron to assist him in the commission of a serious felony. He’d been almost scared of the little man at the time, so convincing was his mien of barely suppressed violence. Now that the shit-for-brains was finally speaking more than three words at a time, Rigby understood that he’d torpedoed the whole operation, just by trusting his gut and not digging deeper. “The backpack you had with you.”
“Oh. The dope, you mean?”
Now Rigby winced. It was his practice to avoid saying potentially troublesome words out loud. “That’s it, Billy. Where is it?”
“Those Devil Hammers got it.”
“Did they rob you?”
“No, sir. They took it with them like they were supposed to.”
“Then what happened to the money?”
Knox looked up at Rigby as if considering the possibility that he was just being fucked with for a laugh. “Already told you, nothing happened.”
“Then give me the money.” Rigby was aware of an increasing edge in his tone of voice, a threat of violence that he didn’t really mean to project. But if this fuckwit didn’t start talking sense in about thirty seconds, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to resist the urge to beat the fuck right out of him.
“I don’t have it! They never came back!”
A dim light began to dawn in Rigby’s brain. He had failed to understand Billy Knox’s story because he had failed to appreciate the pure, sublime depth of his stupidity. “So you’re telling me you gave them the product and allowed them to leave without paying first?”
“He said he had to take it back to this one guy for a taste, then he’d come back and settle.”
The sure knowledge that he’d been robbed settled on him and clung like a shroud. He accepted it and pressed ahead with his dim interlocutor. “And you’re sitting there in the motel room in Needles waiting for them to come back for how long?”
“Waited till this morning, then thought I should get back and tell you.” He swelled momentarily with pride. “I remembered you didn’t want me using my phone up there, calling you, ’cause the five-o might trace it.”
Rigby shook his head in disbelief at his own idiocy. He’d thought of himself as being smarter than the average bear. He wouldn’t do the dirty, direct part of it himself, he’d decided. Instead, he’d hire a mean motherfucker to do it, a man on the wrong side of the law: an outlaw, to be sure, but also a man with a code. He should have administered an IQ test instead. “Well, there, Billy, that was a very smart move on your part. Not phoning me, just hightailing it back down here.” The rage that had been building earlier was gone now, replaced by an eerie calm. “Why do you guess they needed to leave for a taste?”
“I guess their Secretary of the Army needed to taste it first, and he wasn’t there in the room.”
“Sergeant-at-Arms,” he said, resisting the temptation to add “you dumb fuck.” Rigby was blaming himself now. The half-hour’s worth of conversation with the dolt the night before he sent him out should have revealed the limits of Knox’s intellect; Rigby’s own lack of criminal experience had fucked him.
“Crumdog’s what he called the guy. Seemed kind of scared of him. I sure could understand how he’d want the guy to make sure they didn’t get burned.”
Visions of bankruptcy, disbarment, divorce and prison pinwheeled in Rigby’s mind. He could maybe stay afloat until old Glenn Haskill died, but that wouldn’t be long, and once it happened they’d be looking at all his accounts. Even with Haskill’s kind of money, two hundred grand was a large amount to go missing.
It was his own fault, though, not Knox’s; there was no use blaming a mentally handicapped guy for behaving like a mentally handicapped guy. “I guess we’re done here, then.”
“Uh, except one thing. Where’s my five grand?”
“Excuse me?” Surely he jested! Who would have expected a pinhead to have a sense of humor?
“The five grand you owe me, I’ll take it now.”
“The five grand I was going to pay you before you lost my—” He stopped himself before saying the word out loud. “My backpack. See, you don’t get the five grand because that was going to be your share of the money, and there’s no money because you let yourself get ripped off.”
Head cocked boldly to one side, Knox no longer seemed afraid of Rigby. Maybe the notion of being owed money was making him brave. “No, sir, that’s not the way I see it. You were going to pay me five grand. I didn’t hear nothing about a share of anything.”
“Let me explain something, Billy,” he said, both hands tingling, his face getting hot. “You fucked up my deal so badly I may never recover. You cost me as much money as you see in ten years. You’re getting jack shit.”
“You know what I call that? I call that not being a man of honor. Might be I’ll just have to go see John Law my own self. Tell ’em you ripped me off, motherfucker.”
It happened before he was consciously aware of it: right fist forming, right arm cocking back, then shooting forward into Knox’s jaw with a loud crunching sound, followed milliseconds later by a pitiful animal wail of pain and self-pity. Knox was on the floor, his face contorted like that of a six-year-old who’s just fallen off a jungle gym onto concrete.
“Think I broke your jaw there, Billy.”
Billy hollered something unintelligible, probably either a threat of vengeance or a plea for medical assistance, or maybe some combination thereof. He was spitting blood, and only now did Rigby notice that his hand hurt, too. That was a pretty good punch, he thought, not without a hint of the sin of pride.
Heading home, he considered the degree to which the sock on Knox’s jaw had lightened his mood. Just for that moment, he felt pretty wonderful. All he had to do was come up with a couple hundred grand before Glenn Haskill went tits up and he’d be fine.
He had, he reflected, a great deal to be grateful for. A beautiful wife, sexier at forty-two than on the day they’d met, three wonderful kids, a lot of terrific friends and a certain standing in the community. He was banging his late partner’s smoking-hot widow on practically a daily basis, and she didn’t even want him to leave Paula.
Speaking of which, why not stop by Beth’s house for a quickie? She wouldn’t appreciate the short notice, but her kids would be asleep by now. He had a bottle of twenty-year-old Balvenie in the trunk as an offering. Pity it was a good bottle; Beth’s affections could be bought for Chivas Regal, whereas his wife wouldn’t settle for a bribe short of single malt.
The booze would earn him some goodwill, though, at least enough for a blow job, maybe the whole deal if he was charming enough or she got loopy enough. He’d had an extraordinarily shitty day, and though he couldn’t share with her the details, he knew she’d want to make it better.
Beth was kind of a bitch about being phoned awake at one-thirty on a weeknight, though as Rigby was quick to point out, she didn’t have a job. All she had to do in the morning was get up and oversee the nanny taking her kids to school, whereas Rigby had a law practice to run practically single-handedly. This last was a cruel but necessary guilt trip on Rigby’s part. It was a plain fact, though, that if Beth’s husband hadn’t checked out of the land of the upright in the stupidest accident Rigby ever heard of, he wouldn’t be in the position he was in at the moment—to wit, stealing from the one rich client the firm had left. He left out the part about the stealing, naturally, but he knew Beth felt bad about what had happened to the firm since Britt’s death.
“All right,” she said. “An hour, that’s all you get. Bring a bottle.”
She sipped at the Balvenie, smiling in the feline way she had when she’d had too much to drink, which meant she’d probably already emptied half a bottle before she went to bed. They were drinking on the sofa in her bedroom, and he noted that she’d made the bed since he called and woke her. Presentation was everything.
“You’re bad, getting me out of bed at this hour on a school night. What are you doing out so late?”
One of the things Rigby really hated was people asking him questions the answers to which were none of their fucking business. “I was at the office trying to make sense of some numbers.” How was that for meaningless?
“Numbers. Well.”
She was fully made up, too, short blond hair perfectly coiffed, wearing a blue silk nightdress he liked, and he hoped it wouldn’t take long to coax her out of it. All he really wanted was a quick orgasm to wash the toxins out of his brain and body. He lunged for her, hoping she’d respond and let him have what he wanted so he could go home and sleep.
“Jesus, Rigby, you’re such a pig,” she said, but there was guttural pleasure in it, and soon enough the nightdress was on the floor, the bed unmade again as he ground away inside her, listening to her repertoire of sex noises, throaty grunts and high-pitched sighs. She moved swiftly enough between one and the next that he knew she, too, expected it to be quick. He finished with what would have been a loud moan if not for the need to keep his presence a secret from her kids—it was a clenched growl instead, after which he pulled out and fell down on the sheets next to her.
Of course, the first thing he thought about afterward was his old pal Britt. He hardly ever got to screw Beth at the house because of kids and neighbors, but for Rigby, part of the thrill and repulsion of her bedroom was his inescapable sense there that Britt was witness to their posthumous betrayal. Hope you weren’t watching, pal. Mea culpa!
Once home, he showered and slipped into bed next to Paula, careful not to wake her. She smelled so good he started to get hard again and he nearly woke her, but thought better of it and rolled over to go to sleep. No need to be greedy.
She stirred and reached out for his forearm. “Where you been?”
“Saw a man about a horse.”
“That’s nice,” she mumbled. Her lack of interest in the truth filled him with a rare, sentimental burst of fondness, and the urge to confess—partially, anyway—manifested itself.
“Babe, that deal I didn’t exactly tell you about?”
“Mmm.”
“When I said don’t worry, I got cash coming through?”
He turned on the lamp on his side of the bed and she sat up, leaning on her right elbow, squinting at him. “Yeah?”
“Well, I just got royally fucked. I mean royally, baby. And the seed money came out of Haskill’s account.”
She was wide awake now. “My God. Okay. Don’t panic. How likely is Haskill to notice?” she asked. Then, after a thoughtful pause: “Can you take any more?”
He caressed her cheek with the back of his hand. Bless her naïve, black little heart.