“Things have gotten complicated. So we just hid them-”
“At the bank,” Mitch cut in. Jenn cocked her head, the two of them staring. Alex couldn’t tell what it was about, didn’t much care at that moment, their lovers’ quarrels not his problem.
“What do you think it is?” Ian asked.
Alex turned savagely. “Who cares? The man wants it back. That’s all that matters.”
“I was just asking.” Like a whipped dog.
“Yeah, well, I’m not too interested in you asking anything right now.” The anger in him turned like a hurricane, a spinning buzz saw that cut everything in its path. “What were you thinking?”
Ian pulled out a chair, slumped in it. “Will you let me explain?”
There was a long moment, and then Mitch sat down across the table, and Jenn followed suit. Finally Alex took out a chair. The four of them sat around the polished conference table like junior executives. Under any other circumstances the thought would have made him laugh.
“I… I might have a wee bit of a gambling problem.” Ian tried a wry smile that withered as the faces of the others told him charm wasn’t going to cut it. “Long and short, I owed this guy Katz some money. About thirty grand.”
“Jesus,” Jenn said. “How? Aren’t you rich?”
He laughed through his nose. “Two years ago, maybe. I made a killing on this one deal, a biotech company. That’s when I bought the condo, the suits, the car.” He shrugged. “And around then I discovered high-stakes poker.”
“So, the eye,” Mitch said, tapping at his own.
“Yeah. I fell behind, and that was Katz letting me know that the bill was due. So when the plan of taking down Johnny came around…” He shrugged.
“Gee, Ian,” Alex said. “That’s a real hard-luck story, what with you blowing a fortune while the rest of us were working hourly. But I’m still missing the part where you told your bookie what we were doing.”
“I know. And I’m sorry, believe me. I didn’t plan to. But after I talked to him about needing guns, he had his bodyguard hold me while he”-Ian looked down-“It doesn’t matter. Point is, he thought I was working for the police, and I had to convince him otherwise. But I didn’t say anything about who we were robbing, nothing. I swear.”
Mitch said, “There’s more, isn’t there?”
Ian nodded. “He said that since you were helping me, you were all responsible too.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
“That’s why I paid him. If it was just me, I would have risked it.” The man’s face was scrunched like a baby’s, his voice coming fast and earnest. “Don’t you see? I did it for you.”
Alex snorted. “You haven’t done any of this for us.”
“Look, I had a cigar held to my nuts, OK? Besides,” anger coming into his voice, “what about you? You just tried to dump everything on us.”
“That’s because I wasn’t fucking there.”
“No,” Mitch said. “You were just the one who pushed us into it.”
“Bullshit. Everybody was in equally.”
“Yeah? That how you remember it?” Mitch met his gaze unblinking. Something had shifted between them. A week ago, he could have stared Mitch down in a second. Now, he found himself wanting to look away. His friend had become a dangerous man.
“Enough.” Jenn’s voice broke the moment. “We’re missing the point. What are we going to do about Victor?”
“What we promised,” Mitch said.
“You believe he won’t kill us?”
“We’re white taxpayers. If he kills us, the police, they’re going to start digging. There’s no reason he would want the hassle.” Mitch reached out, laid his hand on top of Jenn’s. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t pull away. “Monday morning, we give him what he wants.”
It was too much. The robbery, the dead man, Trish, Jenn, Victor, all of it. Alex felt that narrowing tension he’d had back in college, the sense that everything that had seemed safe and fun had become sour and hurtful. Only now there were men with guns involved.
No. No way. He had one responsibility, and that was to Cassie. “Not me. I told Victor, and I meant it. I had nothing to do with this. You guys did the killing. You found this stuff. You hid it. You’re on your own, the three of you.”
Jenn wrinkled her lips like she’d bitten something foul. Mitch only nodded. “Fine.” He turned to Ian. “But it’s not the three of us.”
“Huh?” Stick-thin and hunched, the man looked like a bird as his glance darted around the table. “What do you mean?”
“You’re a fuck-up, Ian.” Mitch spoke calmly. “I know it’s not your fault. But you are. We can’t trust you.”
“Look at the boss man,” Alex said. He didn’t know why he bothered, what it mattered whether Ian was included or not. It was more the change in Mitch that he was reacting to. “Telling everybody how it is.”
“He’s right,” Jenn said, her voice emotionless. “I’m sorry, Ian.”
“But-” The trader looked around the table, his expression so pathetic Alex had an urge to hug him. “This is stupid. The four of us are best friends. We need each other.”
Mitch shook his head. “Not anymore.”
Part III. Game Theory
“We might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt.”
– George B. Leonard
CHAPTER 25
IN THE CAB ON THE WAY HOME, shaky and alternately scalding and freezing, Ian played a game with himself. Even now, he liked games. The thought made him sick.
This one was called Have You Ever Felt Worse in Your Life.
Round One, eighth grade. All summer he’d bugged his father for a trip to Six Flags, and finally the old man piled him and his best friend, Billy Martin, in the F-150. Dad paid the entrance fee, shaking his head at the price, and Ian had led them straight to the biggest ride in the park, a monster of plunging hills and loops. They’d waited for an hour, listening to the screams, watching people stagger off. At first he’d been giddy. But as they inched forward, a dark, flapping fear had grown in him. It was in the irrevocability, the way the car got higher and higher with no last chance. The terrible pause before it went over, and the screams started.
Then the bored teenager manning the gate had opened it, and they’d walked onto the platform, where the empty car was waiting. People were laughing and jostling, the air sweet with cotton candy and hamburgers, gulls shrieking above.
Just as they reached their seats, he said, “I don’t want to.”
His father had looked at him then with an expression he’d never forgotten, one he saw sometimes late at night. A twisted-lip sort of contempt, and behind it, a thought Ian could read clear as day.
What kind of a pussy am I raising?
“Fine,” his dad had said. “Wait here.” Then he’d turned to Billy, and said, “What about you? You want to?”
And the two of them had climbed into the front seat of the front car like father and son, leaving Ian to stand and watch.
That had been bad. But not as bad as now.
OK, Round Two. Junior year at the University of Tennessee. Madly in love with Gina Scoppetti, a fierce Italian girl with sharp brown eyes and a body that reminded him of his favorite picture in the stolen Penthouse that had held him through his teenage years, the shot of a girl stretched and spread and glistening beside a perfect California pool, a world a million miles from pork rinds and Friday night football. Gina said she loved him too, and they made silly plans and drew on each other with marker and dry-humped till he bled.
Then someone told him that she’d gotten drunk at a fraternity party and ended up blowing three brothers in a back room. He’d confronted her, and she’d cried, said that she didn’t remember, she didn’t think it was true, that she loved him, that she’d been drunk. And he’d wanted to believe her, but thought about the frat boys with their expensive clothes and bright white baseball caps trading high fives as they used her, and he’d started to cry, and called her a whore, and said they were through. It was a month before he found out it hadn’t been Gina, it had been a friend of hers, that Gina had just passed out on a downstairs couch, and he’d begged her to forgive him, said she was the best thing that had ever happened to a kid from Shitsville, Tennessee, and that he would never doubt her again, and she hadn’t even let him in, just shook her head through the crack in the chained door and called him a coward.