Dragons Wild gm-1

by Robert Asprin

  “I don’t understand how people live like this,” he said. “I mean, I’m doing it myself, but I don’t understand it.”

  “After a while, you get used to it.” Mose sighed.

  “Uh-huh,” Griffen said. “They used to tell the freshmen at the University of Michigan the same thing during orientation…‘You get used to the cold after a while.’ The problem was, they never really did.”

  “That’s funny,” Mose said. “That’s what folks down here say about living up north. How can people live like that? So tell me, if you never really get used to it, how did you deal with the cold up there?”

  “That’s easy,” Griffen said. “It’s not like we sit out on our front lawns in it. We do the portable environment thing. We go from our heated homes to our heated cars to a heated office or shopping mall.”

  “Well, it’s kinda the same thing down here,” Mose said. “We go from our air-conditioned homes to our air-conditioned cars or cabs to an air-conditioned office or bar. See what I mean?”

  “Okay. You win. Still, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to having an accent.”

  Mose laughed.

  “Griffen, just because you don’t have the local accent, doesn’t mean you have an accent. Flip through any channels on any TV, and ninety percent of the people onscreen will sound like you. Midwestern is accepted American bland and normal.”

  “Well…but you sound that way, too…most of the time.”

  Mose smiled, eyes crinkling a bit more at the edges.

  “Tha’ suh, ’s ’cause I practice mighty fine.”

  Griffen noticed that the accent didn’t sound like the usual New Orleans accent. No, it sounded older. He decided not to pursue it, for now.

  “You win, again.” Griffen laughed. “So let’s get back to my lesson. I’ll tell you, Mose, all this stuff with the sports betting is crossing my eyes.”

  “Just be thankful you came down here in June when things were slow,” Mose said. “Not much happening in sports during the summer…except baseball, and not many folks bet on that. In about a month, football season will start and the action gets heavy. Then, when basketball cuts in, you’ll have your hands full. Most of the money comes from football betting, though.”

  “So let’s start there,” Griffen said. “How do you set the betting lines? I mean, some of those point spreads get pretty exact. How do you come up with them?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Mose said. “We’ve got experts to do that for us. You’re going to be primarily working the management side.”

  “Well, could you give me a rough idea of how it’s done?” Griffen insisted. “Even if I don’t get directly involved, I’d like to have some notion of the process.”

  “Well, it used to be harder in the old days,” Mose said. “Today, with the Internet and other electronic communication, it’s a lot easier. There are a couple services we subscribe to that have stringers and informants all across the country. They keep track of everything from the physical and medical condition of key players, not to mention their love life and family relationships, to the condition of the fields, weather forecasts, and the history of the various coaches and their staff members when they’ve gone up against each other before. All that data gets plugged into computers and they spit out what the most likely outcomes will be.”

  “They can actually calculate things that close?” Griffen said.

  “Sure. Of course, different services have different formulas they use or different things they consider. I mean, there’s one that factors in who the referees will be and their track records for making bad calls. Because of that, the results aren’t always the same. That’s where our experts sit down with the service results along with the latest betting lines from the newspapers and Vegas and come up with the spreads we’ll use.”

  “And then you take bets based on those point spreads?” Griffen said.

  “Oh, we take some direct bets on single games,” Mose said, “but most of the money comes from the bar cards.”

  “The bar cards,” Griffen repeated. “I’ve seen some of those around, but never really got into them myself. How do they work?”

  “It’s a really sweet system,” Mose said. “Whoever came up with it should get some kind of reward. I’d say they should get a piece of the action, but there would be no way to control it.”

  “What we do is print up a bunch of cards that list all the NFL games and the top fifteen or twenty college games along with the point spreads. We have runners that take them out and drop them off with certain bartenders around town. If someone wants to play, they take one of the cards, circle the teams they think are going to win, put their name or a nickname on it, and give it to the bartender along with their bet. The runners pick up the cards and money and bring them to us before the games are played. After the results are in, they take the money for the winners and drop it off at the bars for the players to collect.”

  He paused to laugh and shake his head.

  “The thing is, most people kill themselves getting greedy. You see, on the back of the card are the payoff odds. The more games you pick and the more you bet, the more you stand to win. Folks would usually be okay…break even or come out a little ahead…if they stuck with picking just three games. Instead, they get sucked into picking five or seven games because the payback is bigger. Of course, to win all their picks have to be winners…and the more games they pick, the worse the odds are that the games will all go the way they think. Folks like us who run gambling operations just love the players who go with long shots and try to buck the odds.”

  While Mose was speaking, Griffen got up, unasked, to freshen their drinks. Returning from the kitchen, he set his mentor’s drink in front of him, then resumed his seat.

  “So, when you say I’ll be working the management side,” he said, “what exactly does that entail?”

  “Well, first of all, you’ll have final say on who we take on as runners,” Mose said. “That can be harder than it sounds. The people we want representing us have to be dependable, presentable, and able to interact with folks from all walks of life and levels of income. People like that aren’t all that easy to find these days.”

  “You forgot to mention ‘honest,’” Griffen said.

  Mose sighed.

  “Now that’s another part of management,” he said. “Every so often, one of your runners is going to try to steal from you. You’re going to have to sort it out and decide what to do about it.”

  “I’m missing something here.” Griffen frowned. “How can they steal from us with the setup you’ve got going?”

  “The most common way is when they start skimming,” Mose said. “As you can see, most of the people who do the bar cards don’t get any money back because they lose. A runner can figure that out, so he gets the idea to hold a couple cards back along with the money instead of turning them in. If the cards are losers, he gets to pocket those bets free and clear. Of course, if there’s a winner in there, he has to cover the payoff out of his own pocket.”

  “How do you catch something like that?” Griffen said.

  “Just like the players, the skimmers get greedy,” Mose said. “If they settle for a couple cards a week, they can probably get away with it. If they do, they start holding more and more back. That’s when we can spot it. A runner’s take is pretty consistent from week to week with some minor variations for big game weekends. If someone’s turn in starts consistently falling short of what we’ve learned to expect, there’s probably some skimming going on.”

  “Then what do you do?”

  “What you get to do is investigate.” Mose smiled. “You have to check around and find out if there really is some skimming going on, and if there is, if it’s the runner or the bartender or both who are doing it.”

  “And if we find out that someone is skimming?” Griffen said. “What do we do?”

  “Now don’t be thinking Hollywood gangster scenes again,” Mose said. “If it’s the runner, we fire him and
put in a replacement. If it’s the bartender, we just take that stop off our list…or recruit another bartender.”

  “That seems fair enough,” Griffen said. “Do we do anything about recovering…”

  Just then, his cell phone started ringing.

  “Excuse me a minute, Mose.”

  He glanced at the caller ID, but didn’t recognize the caller. For a moment he debated letting it go to voice mail, but decided it might give Mose the wrong impression about his diligence.

  “Griffen here,” he said into the instrument.

  “Mr. Griffen? This is Jumbo. You may not remember me.”

  It took a second, but Griffen placed the name and voice. If was the man who had been serving as Gris-gris’s bodyguard when they first met.

  “I remember you, Jumbo. What’s up?”

  “Something’s happened I thought you should know about,” Jumbo said. “I hate to bother you, but…”

  “No problem,” Griffen said. “Tell me what’s happened.”

  He listened for several minutes, his mouth tightening into a grimace.

  “Okay. I think I get the picture,” he said at last. “Are you on a cell phone? I’ll get back to you in a little while and let you know. Thanks for the call.”

  He flipped his phone shut, cutting off the connection. Then he leaned back in his chair and thought for a few moments.

  “Okay, Mose,” he said. “You’ve been saying that we have to take care of our people. Exactly how far does the definition of ‘our people’ extend?”

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  “Well, it seems that Gris-gris has been picked up by the police under some rather strange circumstances,” Griffen said. “Is he considered one of ‘our people’? Should we do anything about it?”

  “You tell me,” Mose said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Gris-gris pulled out of our network under my management, then signed back on directly with you,” Mose said. “Since then, he steered a lot of new independents our way. More important, Jumbo called you, not me. I figure that makes it your call as to whether or not he’s one of ours. He thinks so, and Jumbo thinks so. The only question now is if you think so.”

  Griffen took a deep breath, then blew it out slowly, puffing his cheeks.

  “In that case, I guess he’s one of ours,” he said.

  “In that case,” Mose said, “there’s an attorney and a bail bondsman we usually use when our people get into trouble. Hang on and I’ll get you their numbers.”

  “Actually, Mose,” Griffen said, “let me try something else, first.”

  He flipped his cell phone back open, scrolled through his directory, and hit the “send” button.

  After four rings, there was a pickup on the other end.

  “Yeah?” came a gruff voice.

  “Good evening, Detective Harrison,” Griffen said with a smile, even though he knew it couldn’t be seen at the other end. “This is Griffen McCandles.”

  There was a brief pause. Mose’s eyebrows went up and Griffen smiled at him.

  “Okay, Griffen. What’s up?”

  “Something has come up, and I was wondering if you could check into it for me.”

  Another pause.

  “It seems that one of our people has been picked up by your colleagues,” Griffen said. “He’s known as Gris-gris, but his real name is…”

  “Yeah. I know him,” the detective said, cutting in. “What’s the charge?”

  “That’s sort of what I was hoping you could check for me,” Griffen said. “According to the information that was passed to me, they haven’t charged him with anything.”

  Again, a pause.

  “Actually, they can do that,” Harrison said. “Legally, they can hold someone for seventy-two hours for questioning without charging them.”

  “I’ve heard that,” Griffen said. “This seems to be a special situation, though. From what I’ve been told, he was picked up because he was walking down the street arm and arm with my sister. Strangely enough, they let her go.”

  He could hear a deep sigh at the other end.

  “Look, Griffen. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but we don’t do that kind of crap anymore. This town runs on tourist dollars, and that would go away real fast if the cops started hassling every mixed race couple they saw in the Quarter.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Griffen said, winking at Mose. “As a matter of fact, the way I heard it, the officer that picked him up was also black.”

  “So what’s the problem?” the detective growled. “Am I missing something here?”

  “The interesting thing is, the way I hear it, that officer also happens to be the older brother of a girl that Gris-gris was dating before he took up with my sister.”

  This time, the pause was lengthy.

  “You know, Griffen,” the detective said at last, “you have a bad habit of pushing my buttons. If there’s anything I hate worse than protected gambling operations or the Feds messing around on my turf, it’s cops who abuse the power of their uniforms. Okay, I’ll check into it…and this one’s worth a beer, not a lousy cup of coffee.”

  Thirty-eight

  The Irish pub had never been so damned noisy before. It wasn’t people noise either. Griffen had yet to live through a Mardi Gras, but had run into some nights when even the slightly out-of-the-way pub had been packed enough that there were no seats available and the press of strangers had pushed him out into the night to find something a bit calmer. So he could have lived with a certain amount of uproar in the form of men and women looking for a good time.

  Dogs on the other hand. That was another story.

  It was one of the strange customs of New Orleans, particularly the Quarter. Apartments were so small, open spaces so rare, that those with canine companions tended to bring their dogs everywhere. Everywhere. Outside restaurants, groceries, and shops one could often see an animal or two tied up waiting for its owner. Bars, though, bars were notoriously lassie fair, or was that laissez-faire?

  There were seven of them in the pub that night. Not only in, but unleashed and running free. As one, they started barking when Griffen walked in. From the incessant yap yap yap of something that looked like it should be at the end of a mop, to the deep rawlf of a Great Dane whose head was easily higher than the pool table. They moved toward him, barking their heads off, as various owners tried to quiet them down. Their shouts, and those of the bartender, were almost enough to drive Griffen back out.

  Stubbornly, he ignored them and pushed his way over to where Jerome sat at the bar. The dogs quieted eventually, except for the little mop that followed Griffen the whole way and sat on its haunches as he took a seat. Yap yap without end. Jerome’s eyes were shiny with mirth, and his smirk was broad and annoying.

  “What’s so funny?” Griffen said.

  “Just thinking that maybe Mose needs to start giving out report cards to his student, Young Dragon,” Jerome said.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “And the parrot says, ‘Mine, too, must be the salt water.’”

  Jerome’s smirk broadened, and Griffen glared. Those who knew the abominable and obscure joke Jerome was referencing glared as well. A balled up napkin hit him from parts unknown. The little dog kept yapping.

  “I didn’t even try anything to set them off,” Griffen said sourly as his drink arrived.

  “Ah, but did you try and quiet them?”

  “Didn’t occur to me. That racket hit, mainly what I thought of was that it was time for a drink.”

  “We need to work on your reflexes more.”

  Which was the perfect time for the fight to break out.

  Scuffles in the Irish pub were damned rare, and even more uncommon were serious ones. Whatever had triggered this one had started at the back of the pool tables. A shout, the sound of flesh hitting flesh, the screech of chairs as those around responded and rose from their seats. By the time the bartender was out from behind the bar and headed toward the trouble, a ma
n, easily six-five, was pulling a pool cue back. It was clear that he intended to strike his much smaller opponent, and equally clear that the other wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop it.

  The big man started to swing. Those closest started to move forward, knowing they would be too late. Griffen and Jerome were on their feet, too far back to do any good, but moving forward like everyone else. And before the man could get any momentum, his arm stopped with such a painful jerk that the entire room heard his shoulder pop.

  The room seemed to stop as one, taking in the scene. The big man, turned around, fist raised to strike whoever had grabbed his cue. The sight before him stunned and stopped him just as quickly as it had done everyone else. Holding on to the end of his cue, in a jaw that would have done a horse credit, was the Great Dane. Its tail was wagging.

  Later reports, unconfirmed, claimed the dog waggled his eyebrows.

  What came next was one of the reasons Griffen enjoyed this pub so much, and why it had so few incidents like this. Both parties in the fight were not locals, but everyone who had rushed forward was. Together, under the guidance of the bartender, the two were pushed outside where they couldn’t damage the bar. The big man in particular got a lot of attention. Outside, shouting erupted as he tried to pick the fight back up, but the momentum of the anger had been broken. It was clear the smaller man wanted no part in more, and the larger was persuaded to head off before police patrolled by and got involved.

  Slowly people began to filter back in. Of course, they were talking about the events. Drinks were picked back up, and several people patted the Great Dane, who seemed content to curl up in one corner and receive adoration. Griffen was one of the first back to his seat, and Jerome wasn’t far behind. The little dog sat back in his seat, and began barking. Griffen looked hard at the dog, and it rolled over sticking all four legs in the air and going quiet.

  “Not too shabby, Grifter,” Jerome said.

  “Thanks.”

  “But don’t get cocky. Dogs is easy. They want to make people happy.”

  “Thanks for the pep talk. Sheesh.”

  The room went quiet again as the smaller man from the fight walked tentatively back into the bar. Usually, if anything like this happened, all parties were eighty-sixed, or banned, for the night. Repeat offenders, or those who pissed off the bartender too much, were banned forever. The bartender, and most of the bar, gave the man a hard stare. Finally, shyly, he spoke.