by Ed McBain
“Nettie, you say?”
“N-E-T-T-I-E,” Wiggy said, spelling it out for him. “You know what word that name is hidin’ in?”
“No, I has to admit I do not,” Tigo said.
“Counterfeit. That’s the word. You search that word, you find Nettie lurkin in there. You double-click on her name, you transported straight to Nettieland. You want to hear this, man, or you want to stay ignorant the ress of your life?”
Tigo did not want to hear anything but how Wiggy had killed Hoskins—but neither did he wish to remain ignorant the rest of his life. He nodded wearily, and listened as Wiggy began telling him all about his adventures in Nettieland. Gradually, he began to lean closer. Gradually, his eyes opened wide. He was listening intently, his attention completely captured, when all at once he heard footsteps pounding in the hallway outside. He turned toward the front door. An instant later, he heard the sound of rapid gunfire, and all at once the door flew off its hinges.
At that very moment, Steve Carella was turning his car into Decatur Avenue, never once realizing he was about to meet another lion.
TIGO WAS RUNNING FOR the window even before the two blond ladies burst into the room. Somewhere behind him Wiggy screamed in pain. Tigo dove through the glass head first, came through onto the fire escape in a cascade of shattering shards, heard more firing from inside the apartment.
“The window!” one of the women yelled, but he was already on his feet and charging down the ladder. The iron rungs were crusted with snow, slippery underfoot. He almost lost his balance, almost went over the rail, but continued running, sliding, slipping, almost flying down those steps while above him the blondes were on automatic, bullets kicking up snow everywhere around him, clanging against the iron of the fire escape. He jumped the dozen feet or so to the ground, began broken-field running across the back yard, the blondes still firing, and was climbing the fence between this yard and the next one over, when they finally found the range. He heard wood splintering everywhere around him, and then felt slugs ripping across his back as he came over the top of the fence. Another slug ripped through his right hand. He dropped to the ground, zigzagged toward the alleyway alongside the building, tucking his bloody hand in against his body, cradling it, blood leaking onto the white snow from his hand and his chest as he ran.
The storm had kept most people off the street.
He stumbled out of the alleyway, fell, got to his feet again.
He turned to look behind him, fell again, and began crawling toward the streetlamp on the corner. He was lying there under the lamp for perhaps two or three minutes when a tall hatless man came running around the corner. Tigo did not know whether the shots had attracted him or whether there’d been some other disturbance in the hood. He only knew he was glad to see him. The man knelt beside him. Tigo recognized him at once.
“You know who did this to you?” Carella asked.
Tigo nodded.
“Who, Tigo? Can you tell me?”
Carella’s lion had just followed Tigo’s trail of blood up the alleyway.
“Mother,” Tigo said.
“Yourmother shot …?”
“Nettie,” Tigo said.
“Is that your mother’s name?”
Carella’s lion was just running out of the alleyway behind them.
“Diana,” Tigo said.
“I don’t under …”
But Tito Gomez was already dead.
And Carella’s lion was almost upon him.
He turned just in time to see someone dressed entirely in black, carrying what was unmistakably an AK-47.
If you meet another lion, just look him in the eye. Stare him down.
This lion wasn’t a male.
There was merely a surprised instant that robbed Carella’s eye of steely intent and lessened the speed of his gun hand, but that was all it took to give the blonde the advantage she needed. He registered three things in the tick of a heart beat. A car pulling into the street. The blonde angling the weapon toward his head. A man getting out of the car.
The blonde was about to squeeze the trigger when Fat Ollie Weeks shot her in the back, dropping her in her tracks.
“That’s two, Steve,” he told Carella, and grinned into the flying snow.
11 .
WILL GUESSED this was why he’d never been to bed with a hooker.
You went to bed with somebody who you had to pay, she put on her clothes directly afterward, said, “Thanks, I had a nice time,” and went home. He guessed. But with a woman like Antonia Belandres, you sat here on a Saturday morning, drinking orange juice and coffee, and eating the chocolate croissants he’d gone down to the bakery to get, and it was … well … intimate. You could have sex with a hooker, but he didn’t guess you could get intimate with one.
Antonia was wearing nothing but a little silky peignoir she’d taken from her bedroom closet. Will was wearing the slacks and shirt he’d put on when he went downstairs for the croissants. It was a little past ten-thirty. The snow had stopped and the sun was shining. In the street outside, everything looked clean and white and sparkling. He told Antonia that maybe they should go for a walk later on, if she thought she might like that. She told him she might like that a lot. He smiled and nodded. She smiled and nodded back.
He didn’t tell her his plan until they were in her bed together again, and then only after they’d made love yet another time. She was cuddled in his arms, the blanket pulled up over their shoulders, frost still limning the window across the room, sunlight striking the glass.
“I know how we can both become millionaires,” he said.
“Yes, how?” she said.
Black hair fanned out on the pillow. Brown eyes opened wide. Wearing no makeup. Her face looking as expectant as a child’s on Christmas Day.
“We use the bills.”
“What bills?” she asked.
“The super-bills.”
“Use them?” she asked. “How do you mean?”
“You said you send any suspect bills to the Federal Reserve.”
“Yes?”
“That’s what you told the detectives.”
“That’s right. That’s what we do.”
“Somebody brings in a bill that looks phony …”
“Right, we send it to the Fed.”
“You confiscate the bill, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you give the person a genuine bill in exchange?”
Which was just what the Treasury Department had done with the eight grand they’d taken from him. But he didn’t know that.
“Of course not,” she said. “That would be the same as condoning counterfeiting.”
“Do you give the person a receipt for the bill?”
“Not if we know for certain it’s counterfeit,” she said. “In that case, we simply take the bill out of circulation.”
“Even if the person didn’t know it was counterfeit?”
“Too bad for him.”
“How about if you’re notsure it’s counterfeit? If it’s one of those terrific bills you have to send to the Fed?”
“Then we give the customer a receipt for it, yes.”
“And if the Fed decides it’s phony?”
“It never comes back to us. They take it out of circulation, and notify us. We in turn notify the customer, and that’s that.”
“What if they say it’s real?”
“They return it to us, we notify the customer, and he comes to pick it up. No harm done all around.”
“Okay, what if youdon’t send a suspect bill to the Fed? What if you just take it from the customer, give him a receipt for it … and keep it.”
“Keep it?”
“Yes. And then two weeks later … or however long it usually takes the Fed to get back to you …”
“It varies.”
“Two weeks, three weeks, whatever, you call the customer and tell him Sorry, your bill was phony and the Fed has confiscated it. Goodbye, sir, and good l
uck.”
Antonia looked at him.
“That would be stealing,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “But it wouldn’t be stealingreal money.”
Antonia was still looking at him.
“It would be stealingcounterfeit money,” he said.
“What’s the difference?” she said. “I fail to see the difference.”
“That’s exactly my point. If nobody cantell the difference, we can use tons of fake money just as if it’s real money. We can use fake money to pay for anything we buy.”
Which was just what Jerry Hoskins had tried to do with the Mexicans. But Will didn’t know this, either.
“It still seems like stealing to me,” Antonia said.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with stealing,” Will said, and kissed her again.
“Do you like violin music?” she asked.
FAT OLLIE was eating.
He was also listening.
For him, he was eating lightly. That is to say, he was eating a baloney sandwich on rye with butter and mustard, and a sour pickle, and a potato knish, and a banana, and he was drinking coffee while he and Carella listened to the tape they’d retrieved from the recorder Tigo Gomez was wearing when the unidentified blonde—now in the hospital, andstill unidentified—shot and killed him. Carella was eating a tuna and tomato sandwich on white, and drinking a glass of milk. The two detectives were in the interrogation room at the Eight-Seven, where Ollie seemed to be spending a lot of time lately, now that he was responsible for Carella’s life two times over. Carella devoutly wished he would not save his life a third time, otherwise he might become a permanent fixture up here.
Ollie much preferred eating to listening to tapes.
The trouble with police tapes was that they were very rarely interesting. If you went to see a movie or watched a television show, or even if you were desperate and decided to read a book, there was usually a story you could follow. Listening to a tape was the same as hearing people talking, except that when you were in a room with people and they were babbling away, you didn’t always recognize how boring it was. Listening to a tape, you were always aware of the fact that you were hoping these people wouldsay something you could use against them. Usually, there was one person wearing the wire and the other person or persons present were totally unaware that they were being recorded. So they rambled on about anything under the sun, while you sat there with your thumb up your ass waiting for some kind of plot development. Even though Ollie did not much enjoy reading books, he knew all about plot development now that he’d started writing his thriller, which to tell the truth he’d found much easier than learning the first three bars of “Night and Day.” In fact, he couldn’t understand why the guys who wrote such shit got paid so much money for it.
The interesting thing about the tape Gomez had recorded was that Wiggins hadn’t shot him at once. Because anyone listening to it—as Ollie and Carella were listening to it now—had to recognize from minute one that Tigo was on a fishing expedition and that what he was fishing for was an admission of murder. But Wiggins had something else on his mind, and as the detectives listened and ate—Ollie’s banana was particularly tasty with a baloney sandwich smothered in mustard—they began to become more and more interested in what Wiggins was saying than in Gomez’s inept attempts to wring a confession from him.
Since Gomez’s voice was the only one they’d heard before now, they cleverly detected which of the two speakers was the one wearing the wire and doing the fishing, which easily enabled them to assign the other voice to Wiggins. And since both detectives were used toreading transcripts of tapes, they automatically beganlistening that way, labeling each voice as it came from the recorder. They were frankly getting bored stiff with Tigo’s clumsy interrogation, expecting Wiggy to yell “The fuck youdoin, man?” and shoot the silly jackass dead, when all at once Wiggy began talking about the computers he’d tapped into up at Wadsworth and Dodds. Ollie wondered what the man had been doing up there at his future publishing house, but Wiggy wasn’t about to explain that. Instead, he began talking about what he’d found on the computers. Ollie looked at Carella. Carella shrugged.
WIGGY:
All these files labeled with girls’ names.
TIGO:
Whut you mean names?
WIGGY:
Rina and Bela and Ada and Gina and Tessie, and here’s the one really got me … Diana.
TIGO:
Like Princess Di?
WIGGY:
Yeah, but it’s Diamondback. It’s code for Diamondback.
TIGO:
How you know that, Wigg?
WIGGY:
It was on the PC. Man left it wide open for me when I showed him the ugly. D-I-A-N-A. Right there in the name Diamondback, juss mixed up and turned all aroun, is all.
TIGO:
If the man put a code in there, why he want to gosplain it to you?
WIGGY:
Nobody splained it to me, man. I doped it out all by myself. Same as how B-E-L-A is for Lebanon. And G-I-N-A is for Nicaragua.
TIGO:
Why they want to do that for, Wigg?
WIGGY:
To hide what theydoin in those places. Man, don’t get me wrong. I don’t give a shit bout the mischief they into anyplace else. But when they buyin dope in Mexico and sellin it up here in Diamondback …
TIGO:
We selling dope here, too, Wigg.
WIGGY:
It ain’t the same thing, man. They sellin dope up here for altogether different reasons. Man, they shittin on us black folk is what they doin.
TIGO:
I just don’t know, Wigg. I mean …
WIGGY:
What is it you don’t know? I justtole you what’s happening, what is it you don’t unnerstan?
There was a long silence on the tape. Ollie peeled another banana. He looked at Carella again. Carella shrugged again.
TIGO:
You really think all this is true, huh? Cause to me …
WIGGY:
Man, I was lookin straight in they computer! I seed all this stuff with my own eyes!
TIGO:
It just sounds, you know, like science-fiction, you know? This file named Mothah you can’t open cause you need a password, an all this money floatin aroun, and these people causin trouble all over the world, an tryin’a fuck us right here in Diamon’back, I mean, man, it sounds like suppin you’d see in amovie, you know what I’m sayin, man?
WIGGY:
It’d make agood movie, that’s for damn sure, but it’strue, man! I got it from theycomputer
TIGO:
That don’t mean it couldn’t of been garbage in there.
WIGGY:
The point is, whut we gonnado about it, Tigo? I mean, these guys are messin with ourpeople!
There was another long silence.
“What the hell’s he talkin about?” Ollie asked.
“Shhh,” Carella said.
WIGGY:
I think we should go to the police, tellthem the story.
“Good idea,” Ollie said to the tape.
There was the sound of a phone being dialed.
“He’s calling me,” Ollie said.
“I figured.”
They listened to Wiggy’s end of the conversation. Ollie opened a bag of potato chips. Carella finished his glass of milk. There was the sound of the phone receiver clicking onto the cradle. Ollie dipped into the bag of chips.
WIGGY:
Weeks is on the way.
TIGO:
That’s just great.
WIGGY:
You maybe seed him aroun the streets. Fat Ollie Weeks. He’s this big fat guy.
“Hey, watch it,” Ollie said.
TIGO:
You goan tell him you a drug dealer?
WIGGY:
No, I don’t have to tell him that.
TIGO:
Then how come youknow these people are sellin dope up here?
WIGGY:
I coulda heard.
TIGO:
Howyou coulda heard, Wigg? You goan tell the fuzz this man Hoskins come up here Christmastime, sold you a hundred keys of coke to distribute to li’l kiddies in the streets?
