Fiddle Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

weren’t going anywhere near any cop station. I went over to the bar and asked non-Lefty for a phone. He produced one from somewhere in or near the sink and plonked it down on the polished top with his dishwater-wrinkled hand, saying, “No long-distance.”
    “The least of my needs,” I said.
    I figured they’d notice and cut me off if I dialed 9-1-1, so I called my own office instead, and mentally cursed when I got my voice mail. After the piercing little beep, I said, “Listen, Agnes, get ahold of the cops as fast as you can. I’m about to be abducted from Lefty’s Poolhall by a couple of thugs posing as police detectives.” I gave her a quick description of my companions, including the names they were using. “After the cops, call Nickel Pete and tell him not to give the Amati to anybody, including me, unless I’m alone. Then call every damn bounty hunter we ever use and tell them…”
    “Done yet?” Evans loomed over me like a glacier about to calve.
    “Not quite.”
    “I think you are.” He pushed the button on the receiver cradle, and the phone went dead. I hung up and shrugged into my trenchcoat, which he had thoughtfully brought from the back of the hall, and we proceeded to the door. There wasn’t a lot else I could do. I began to wonder if I had any of my electronic tracer gizmos in my pocket. They wouldn’t help my present situation much, but I thought it might be nice if somebody found my corpse.

Chapter Three
    The Zen Moment
    The stairway to Lefty’s is too narrow for three people to go abreast, so the skinny guy went ahead of us while Babyface Evans stayed tight to me, on my left and slightly behind. He didn’t poke a gun in my ribs, but I figured he had one handy, if not already out. Stroud didn’t use the handrail, and I thought about how easy it would be to reach my foot out, tap the back of one of his knees, and send him crashing down the rest of the flight. Then I would only have the big guy to take out.
    Tempting. A lot of people assume that since bonding is a nonviolent, even sedentary profession, all of us are flabby little wimps who haven’t been in a fight since the age of seven and would faint dead away at the sight of a gun. In a lot of cases, it’s true. “Nothing but Milquetoast, on the gravy train,” is the saying.
    I grew up in a neighborhood where people thought The Godfather was a sitcom. Becoming a bondsman was a way of graduating, not running away, from my own violent past. If these two thugs didn’t know that, it could give me a significant edge. But only once. Not yet, I decided, since I couldn’t see what Evans was doing until I was already committed to a move. But soon. It had to be soon, or it wouldn’t work at all.
    We clumped down the sloped shaft and out onto the street, where both the daylight and the rain were running out of juice. Somewhere in the distance, some noisy pigeons were announcing the end of the deluge. I don’t know if any of them had an olive branch in his beak. Parked at the curb was a massive Chevy of the kind the cops use a lot, a Caprice or some such model, but without the extra bells and whistles. What it did have was a right rear tire that was flatter than my Aunt Hannah’s bra. When Evans and I came out the door, Stroud was already looking at it, fists on his hips, as if he had never seen such a calamity before. Evans acted more like he had seen a lot of them and took them all as personal insults.
    “Look at that, man. Is that all we need, or what? I mean, my God.”
    “I see it, Stroud. I’m sharp on that kind of shit, you know? Picked right up on it.”
    “So, what do we do?”
    “We? What I do, is I babysit our friend here. What you do is, you change the tire. That’s what we do.”
    “Why’s it always me that’s got to do the hard stuff?”
    “Yeah, why does he?” I asked. Not that I gave a damn who changed the stupid tire. I just liked the way the partnership was coming unglued, and I thought I’d help it along a