Ralph did not understand any of this. Not the naked people. Not the pile of clothes in the center of the table. Not the revolver. Not the prosthetic limb. Certainly not the apparent reference to Peter. It was as if he’d stumbled into a poetry reading. He’d been on the lookout for poetry readings since Peter had described the way they worked, and he half expected someone to start reciting a rhyme or two now. Either all of this was crazy or all these people were drunk or that pill that Sully had given him during the noon hour, which had made him feel like a visitor from another planet, was releasing another spurt of medication.
“Don’t worry about the snowblower,” Sully said, returning his attention to his hole cards. “I’ve got a pretty good idea where he’s hid it.”
Ollie Quinn, who’d been sleeping with his head back and mouth open, snorted awake when Carl sat back down at the table. The chief of police rubbed his eyes. “How come she’s naked?” he said, noticing the girl. Sully had tossed her Carl Roebuck’s shirt when Ralph and his grandson entered, and she was slipping it on over her head.
“What do you mean, how come she’s naked?” Carl Roebuck said.
Ollie started. “Jesus,” he said. “So are you.”
“Why the hell not?” Carl said. “Why not let this be the day I lose everything, right down to my shorts?”
This was in reference to the Ultimate Escape deal having gone south, as Carl had known it would, and to Clive Jr., the putz, the man everybody in Bath wanted answers from, having gone off on vacation to the Bahamas. Some people were whispering that he hadn’t gone to the Bahamas, he’d just gone.
“You fell asleep during my horse story,” Carl told the police chief. “Now that you’re awake again, I can finish it.”
“Go back to sleep,” Sully suggested to Ollie Quinn. “Nobody wants to hear him tell hard luck stories.”
“Ten lengths,” Carl Roebuck said, starting in where he’d left off. “He had a lead of ten fucking lengths coming into the far turn.”
Ollie Quinn seemed immediately engrossed in the story.
“Guess what happened,” Carl insisted.
“He was shot by a sniper in the grandstand,” Sully guessed.
Carl, who had been about to continue, glared at Sully.
“Let me make this long story short,” Sully said. “Carl’s horse was outrun down the stretch, and he doesn’t think things like that should happen to him. They usually don’t either.”
Carl turned back to Ollie Quinn with the air of a reporter who’s just learned he’s been scooped. “Ten lengths he gave up in the last two hundred yards,” he told the police chief.
Ollie Quinn looked disappointed, like he was still waiting for the end of the story or as if he’d preferred Sully’s version with the sniper.
“Wouldn’t you swear he’d never seen a horse race before,” Sully said. “He can’t stand it when his luck doesn’t hold, even for a minute.”
“It’s not enough I’ve got to lose all my money,” Carl continued, going back to his cards now. “I have to lose the last of it to the dumbest man in Bath.”
“I said this was Sully’s lucky day,” Ollie Quinn reminded them. He stared dully at the collection of items at the center of the table, including Wirf’s prosthesis. “Whose gun is that?”
“Yours,” said Carl, who had disarmed the police chief in his sleep just before Ralph and the boy entered. “It’s your ante.”
Ollie Quinn checked his empty holster and saw that this was true. “I should have busted this game two hours ago,” he observed.
“If we could ever finish this fucking hand, there’d be no need,” Carl pointed out, then, to Sully, “Tell your lawyer to shit or get off the pot.”
Wirf, who looked half asleep himself, tossed his cards into the center of the table. “I play better poker drunk,” he said, taking a sip of his club soda.
“Not much better,” Sully told him, raising the bet.
“We just come to tell you Peter’s over at the flat,” Ralph said. “He said he was going to start unloading.”
“Okay, I’ll go over,” Sully said. “Hang around for a minute, why don’t you. I’ll be done here real quick.”
“We’ll wait outside,” Ralph said, motioning for Will to join him. “Don’t take too long.”
Out in the bar, Ralph, wishing he could escape with Will out into the street and its clean cold air, helped Will up onto a stool and ordered sodas. “Can’t let the boy sit at the bar,” the fat bartender told him. “Sorry. It’s the law.”
“That’s okay,” Ralph said guiltily. Vera, who was staying the night in the hospital for further observation, would have wanted to know what was wrong with him for putting the boy on a bar stool to begin with, and he would have had to say he wasn’t thinking. He was glad that at least Vera had been spared the sight of the goings-on in the next room. She’d have had a week’s worth of opinions on such degradation, and she’d be right. Ralph made a mental note to warn the boy not to tell her what he’d seen. “You stand down there,” he told Will, “until the man brings us our sodas.”
A roar went up in the next room and there was the sound of scraping chairs. Ollie Quinn, returning his revolver to his holster, was first to emerge from the room, then Sully, who had a wad of money in one hand and Wirf’s leg in the other. He planted the leg upright on the bar, stuffed the money into his front pants pockets and helped Will back up onto a bar stool just as Tiny returned with the sodas. “He can’t sit at the bar, Sully.”
Sully frowned. “Why not?”
“It’s against the law.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s against the goddamn law, Sully.”
“So’s poker,” Sully said. “You saying you didn’t know there was a poker game going on back there?”
“Don’t start with me, Sully,” Tiny warned. “You’re on thin ice tonight. You’ve already punched one of my customers. Jeff should have run your ass then. This is thin fucking ice you’re skating on here.”
Sully nodded at him, “Well,” he said to Ralph, who had already gotten off his stool and had the boy under the arms, “maybe we better go over there to one of those tables. Because if this is thin ice we’re on, we don’t want this fat fuck anywhere near us.”
Carl Roebuck and the girl Didi, both fully clothed again, emerged from the room. “Let me take another one of those magic pills,” Carl Roebuck said. “I think you broke my jaw.”
Sully handed him the vial of Jocko’s pills. “I hate to say it,” he said, studying Carl’s face. The jaw had gradually ballooned all afternoon until now it looked as though it had grown a tumor. “But you may be right.”
Carl swallowed the pill with the last of his Jack Daniel’s and set the glass in the center of the table Sully and Ralph and the boy had selected. Then Carl collapsed into a chair, pulling the girl onto his knee. “What a day,” he said. In fact, he said it with such conviction that Sully was on the verge of feeling sorry for him, when he turned the girl toward him, buried his face between her breasts and commenced to make blubbering noises.
“Don’t let him drive, dolly,” Sully warned the girl. “The second one is really magic.”
“I won’t,” she said, her eyes meeting Sully’s seriously and soberly, as they had done several times during the afternoon. She’d been drinking as heavily as the men, but she looked to be in a lot better condition for it. So this was the girl who had wrecked Peter’s marriage and talked dirty to Vera on the telephone, Sully thought. No wonder his ex-wife had gone into a tizzy. Vera was, and always had been, a close-your-eyes, missionary-position sort of woman. She probably hadn’t done much to prepare Peter for the likes of Didi. Apparently even Carl Roebuck hadn’t been prepared. “If you see Peter, tell him I said hi,” she said.