0743217675-body by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain
Format: mobi

8 .

IN THIS BUSINESS , you do not expect fake money.

Fake names, yes, but not fake money.

Fake money can get you killed, whereas a fake name can save your life. Even the two Mexicans, whose real nameswere Francisco Octavio Ortiz and Cesar Villada, used fake names when they were doing business with types trading in controlled substances. No one buying or selling a hundred keys of dope gives you his real name, unless he isloco —which, by the way, was a distinct possibility with the people who’d paid a million-seven in fake hundreds to two dangeroushombreslike themselves. They suspected that the man the redheaded pilot had fingered as Randolph Biggs wasn’t a Randolph Biggs at all, nor was he even the Texas State Ranger he’d pretended to be. The problem was in finding him first in a good-sized town like Eagle Branch, and next in Piedras Rosas, the teeming border town just across the river.

If you are dealing in controlled substances, you do not buy radio commercials or newspaper ads announcing that you are in town looking for a man who paid you with bad money. You play it cool, which is difficult to do when you are eager to tie a man to a chair and pull out his fingernails. Villada and Ortiz merely kept flashing money everywhere they went. They were either rich tourists from Barcelona—in a shitty border town like Piedras Rosas?—or else they were looking to make a drug deal. There were drugs and drug dealers in Eagle Branch, and there were drugs and drug dealers in Piedras Rosas, too. You could not go anywhere in the world today and not find drugs or drug dealers, even in those nations where the penalty for possession was death. This was a very sad fact of life to Ortiz and Villada, but what could one do in a world obsessed with money?

The color of their money blinked like green neon. Money, money, money. The scent of human greed on their hundred-dollar bills floated on the hot Mexican air. Prostitutes blatantly tendered their sloppy favors. Men proffered high-stakes card games, cock fights, dog fights. Lower-level street pushers looking likebandidos out of old black-and-white movies offered rolled sticks of marijuana, dime bags of diluted cocaine. Urchins asked if the gentlemen would care to fuck their sisters. Ortiz and Villada were even afraid to drink the water.

Randolph Biggs—or someone who could have been Randolph Biggs—surfaced that afternoon.

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