Hard Case Crime - 14 - The Girl With the Long Green Heart by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
Published: 2011-06-11T15:03:07+00:00

Ten

Doug said, “We must have crossed a wire or two, Johnny. I was expecting to see you yesterday.”

“I wound up staying an extra day.” I stirred my coffee. “It looked as though it would play better that way.”

“You should have called. I thought maybe a wheel came off.” He put a match to a cigarette and winked at me. “You got something going with Evvie?”

“Hardly.”

“No? I didn’t figure you to pass up something like that.”

“Not my type,” I said. “And never when I’m working.”

He laughed. “Work or play, some kinds of games are always in season. What do you think of her?”

“She’s all right.”

“Is she holding up her end of it?”

“Sure, I’ll give her that.” Then, grudgingly, “She’s got the talent. She plays the game like somebody who knows the rules.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“She’s still getting too damned much of the pie,” I told him. “She’s getting about double what she ought to get.”

“We needed her, Johnny.”

I allowed that we probably did, after all, and we let it lie there. We were in a coffeepot around the corner from the Barnstable office. I needed a shave and a shower, but I didn’t have to impress anybody just now. I lit a fresh cigarette and finished the coffee and we switched into a rundown on the way the play was heading.

One thing you try hard not to do is lie to your partner. It’s not a particularly good policy. You generally have enough lies to keep track of without creating new muddles for yourself.

This was an exception. Evvie didn’t want him to know about us, and that would have been reason enough; if he had struck out with the girl, he wouldn’t be tickled to hear that I was swinging for the bleachers and connecting. And there was more to it than that.

Evvie and I had suddenly become a team. If he thought of us as a combination, he was going to become very unhappy about the split. It was still the same split, still the same money going into the same pockets, but I knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t see it that way. He’d see himself dragging down forty thou while the team of Hayden & Stone walked off with fifty between them.

So I’d let him have the glory. Afterward, when it was all over, it would not matter much anymore. Doug would be too busy getting rid of forty thousand dollars over a dice table to worry about his personal prestige. And Evvie and I would be back in Colorado, with Bannion’s place in our pockets and the world swinging for us from a yo-yo string. Once it was over, we would have more important things on our minds than Doug Rance.

I signaled our waitress and scouted down two more cups of coffee. Doug wanted to talk and talk and talk; he had to cover every angle of the operation once again to make sure we were rolling free and easy. He didn’t have to bother, but

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