Tumblin' Dice (6 page)

J.T. said, “Ankle holster,” and the hangaround grabbed the guy's foot, his five hundred dollar leather shoe coming off, and snapped his ankle. No holster.

Boner already had the two hockey bags out of the minivan and was tossing them in the back of his truck, and J.T. got a bag from the trunk of the
BMW
.

The hangaround said, “The fuck you want me to do with him?” and J.T. said, put him in his car, so the hangaround picked the guy up by his shirt and slammed him onto the hood of the
BMW
and then let go. The guy scrambled around, falling onto the dirt of the parking lot and getting into his car, the whole time saying, “You stupid fucks are so dead. You have no fucking idea what you're doing, you fucking hick morons,” looking at the hangaround as he was saying it, but when he got behind the wheel he looked over at J.T., who was looking right back at him, and the guy shut up, put the car in gear, and took off.

The hangaround said, “Fuckin' A!”

J.T. said to Boner, “You play goalie?” and Boner, getting into his
F
350, said, “Every Wednesday, you should come out.”

J.T. said he'd think about it, and Boner said, “See you at the club,” and pulled out. J.T. dropped the bag, the smaller one he knew had a hundred grand in it, into the trunk of his orange Challenger.

The hangaround watched, still pumped, looking for something else to hit, and then said, “Shit, this new Challenger, first one of these muscle cars cool as the original.”

J.T. said, better. “The old one, it was all power. It was great for straight line acceleration but it couldn't corner for shit, had no suspension. This one, it's got a Hemi
V
8 but it's also got
ABS
, coil springs, and stabilizers.”

The hangaround said, “Cool.”

J.T. said, “Why don't you go back inside, get laid. That Valerie, she can deep throat like a shop vac.”

The hangaround laughed, said, cool, then stuck a thumb towards the strip club and said, “What about the asshole?”

J.T. said, “Fuck him. He doesn't make his delivery, it's his problem,” and the hangaround smiled, said, fuckin' A, and went back inside.

J.T. put his Challenger in gear and drove slow out of the parking lot. He liked this. Assholes thought they had everything nailed down, then they got lazy, got sloppy. Yeah, he liked the idea of taking back the whole province — made him feel patriotic again, like he did in the army.

• • •

Loewen was sitting at the bar with a woman he figured to be in her late thirties, maybe a couple years older than him, listening to her tell what a hero she was in the boardroom, saying how there may be more women in business, but not that many in sales. “And almost none in group sales.” Which was where, she told him, the big money was.

When Loewen had come into the bar after dinner, the rest of the cops still in their own groups, Anjilvel and the black G.I. Joe long gone, he was surprised this woman was by herself. Now she was saying, “They asked five insurance companies to make bids, one right after the other all day long at their head office on Bay. I think Bay and Adelaide — I don't know Toronto that well.”

Loewen said, where you from?, and she said, “Winnipeg.” Before she'd said her name was Miriam and Loewen had thought it sounded like a grandmother name, but he didn't say anything. “I'm actually from Brandon, just outside Brandon, really. Now it looks like head office is moving to Calgary. Better than Toronto, anyway.”

“Just as expensive.”

She said, yeah, “But not as dark, if you know what I mean.”

Loewen didn't but he didn't say anything.

She said, “So, we're third on the list, going in right after lunch. I have my whole team with me, five of us.”

Loewen said, “It takes five guys to sell an insurance policy?”

“A group plan, thirteen thousand employees. And it's not just insurance, it's a drug plan, dental, corrective lenses, all kinds of disability.” Looking around the bar, she said, “Are you one of these Mounties?”

“City of Toronto cop.”

She thought about it for a second, screwing up her face, and Loewen saw how if this Miriam ever stopped talking she might be a lot of fun in the sack, probably make a lot of noise, try anything, in a businesslike way. Maybe get her to keep her glasses on.

“So you're with Grantham Life. It's not a bad plan. We could do better. Anyway, they'd given us a list of twenty points they wanted to go over in the meeting, and we put together a presentation. Probably exactly the same as the other four companies in there.”

Loewen said probably.

“And each one of us on my team had four points that we'd completely researched and knew inside out, up and down, six ways from Sunday.”

“Right.” Watching her tell her story, coming to the part where she was smarter than everybody else, Loewen was starting to see how she was an odd combination of old-fashioned country girl, with her grandmother name and grandmother expressions, and fully modern businesswoman sitting on a barstool in her short skirt, her tight silk blouse unbuttoned enough so he could see her frilly bra holding up her very nice tits, drinking her vodka tonic. He was starting to like her.

“Then when we get into the meeting, this huge boardroom, it's on, like, the fiftieth floor — what a view — there's like twenty people we're giving the presentation to. I make my opening remarks, but before I can get any further Jim Conacher stops me.”

She was looking right at him, so Loewen knew Jim Conacher was important. He shrugged.

“The president of the bank? Of the biggest bank in the country?”

Loewen said, okay, sure.

“So he says to me, he asks if maybe I could explain something in point number eight.”

This Miriam was looking at him and Loewen was looking back, seeing her mascara was dried out a little, some of her lashes stuck together, and he figured she'd had a long day. Still, she seemed like she could just keep going. He said, “Yeah?”

“Well, I said, sure, we can do that. We had the whole presentation up on the screen, ready to go over point by point, but the guy's the president, right? So, I say to Dave Mikalchuck — it was his department — could he go over that point, and he says sure and stands up and explains it.”

Loewen, still no idea what she was talking about, said, “Wow.”

She stared at him serious and then laughed, turning on her barstool and finishing her drink, then saying, “You don't get it, do you?” and Loewen said, no, I don't, but he was smiling, too, and she said, “Conacher did it in every presentation, interrupted and asked to skip around. You know why?”

Loewen thought because he's a bank president, he's a control freak jerk like every high-ranking asshole, but he just said, no, why?

“It was a test. I bet every other person giving a presentation told him they'd like to go over it the way they prepped it and they'd get to that point in order. He was trying to see what we were like to deal with, if we really knew our stuff, if we were flexible, if we really thought he was the customer and we were there to serve him.” She waved her empty glass at the bartender and then looked back at Loewen. “So many of these guys, the big insurance companies, they think you work for them. They don't treat you like customers; they treat you like an inconvenience.”

Loewen said, “No shit, you got that right.”

The bartender brought Miriam another vodka tonic, and Loewen said he'd have another Bud Light.

She said, “So, needless to say, we waltzed right into Bay Street and took away the biggest account.”

Loewen said, “You did,” and she looked at him serious and he knew he was in.

A deep voice said, “Loewen,” and he turned around to see a tall Native guy, short black hair standing straight up, wearing an expensive blue suit custom tailored to fit his wide shoulders.

“Hey,” Loewen said, “you made it.”

“Yeah, I haven't been out here since I worked that one — Eddie Nollo went crazy, killed that Colombian guy, remember? Cut him into pieces: they were finding them for days. Found his hands in the ice machine like a week later.”

Loewen said, “Shit,” looking sideways at Miriam, and the big Native guy said, “You're not with the cop thing here, are you?” and she said, no, “I'm with the insurance thing.”

He said, “Sorry. I'm Detective Armstrong,” and he held out a hand.

Loewen watched her shake, her tiny white hand in Armstrong's big brown one, not too happy about it, thinking that wasn't her big-time successful businesswoman grip, and he was glad about that. Usually a woman in a bar would be way more interested in Armstrong than in him, so this was good.

Then Armstrong said, “What room are you in?”

“What?”

“Just wondering, you know. The Colombian was killed on the top floor, east side, I think. You could see the runways.”

“Oh well,” Miriam said, “I'm on six, not even halfway up.”

Armstrong said that was good. “Didn't find any pieces of the guy on six, that's for sure.”

Loewen saw the look on Miriam's face, pissed off, grossed out by the cop talk, so he said, “Now you're a big
TV
star,” and Armstrong said, what bullshit.

“That came from way up the chain of command, up in the stratosphere somewhere.”

Loewen said, “Armstrong's working a homicide, looks like a gang hit.”

Miriam said, “Like a drive-by?” Not grossed out about this cop talk, it didn't seem to Loewen. He was having some trouble figuring this Miriam.

“Sort of,” Armstrong said, “except they walked along the sidewalk.”

She said, like they own the place, and Loewen said yeah.

“That's why the big boys wanted it all on
TV
,” Armstrong said. “Show the city what's really happening here. Makes me feel like an asshole, you know.”

Loewen could see Miriam agreed with that too much and he could feel he was losing her. He wanted to move this along, so he said to Armstrong, “So, there's Jones over there.” He watched Armstrong look across the room and recognize Homeland Security Special Agent Jones sitting at a table with a few other American cops up for the conference and say, “Oh, yeah,
Jones
. You know what, Loewen, you're busy here, I'll just go over, see what this is about,” and he walked away.

Miriam drank her vodka and Loewen could feel it, the way she let out a sigh of relief, a little overdone, kind of dramatic, when Armstrong walked away. Figured it was the gross crime talk, which was too bad because it didn't leave him much to talk about, meant he'd be listening to more insurance bullshit. He watched Armstrong shaking hands with the cops, sitting down next to Jones, comfortable, confident, easing his way into their conversation.

Miriam made a sound like a harumph, another grandmother sound, and said, “Affirmative action, eh? That's Toronto.”

Loewen looked at her and said, yeah, well, “What're you gonna do?”

She looked at him sideways, sympathetically, nodded her head, and smiled.

He figured what was he gonna do? Call her a bigot and walk out? Now she thought they were bonding and she'd told him what a mover and shaker she was in the boardroom, she was ready to show him how fantastic she was in the bedroom. He said, “So your room is on six?”

She said, “Yes, it is. But it's on the south side — you can't see the planes taking off.”

Loewen said, “I'm not interested in the planes taking off.”

Miriam smiled at him as she drank her vodka, actually winking at him over the glass.

Loewen figured, what the hell, he was putting up with this boring conference, might as well get something out of it.

• • •

Sitting on the edge of the bed, arms behind her back hooking her bra, Angie said it'd been a long time since she'd had a nooner, and Ritchie said, it's like, six o'clock.

She said, “Shit, is it that late? I've got to get going,” and Ritchie said, why, you're the big boss lady.

Turning to look at him, still stretched out on the bed, naked and as skinny as he was when he was a twenty-five-year-old rock star-to-be, she tilted her head, hair parted on the side and falling over one eye, and she said, well, you know, “I still have a job to do — I can't spend all day in bed,” thinking about Felix Alfano, telling him Frank couldn't be bothered to show up, he had something better to do, and imagining Felix saying, oh yeah?

Ritchie was lighting a cigarette, dropping the match in the ashtray on the bedside table, and she watched him take a drag and let the smoke out and then put his head back on the pile of pillows. He was smiling at her like a kid who got away with something, and she liked that, it made her feel like he thought she was something.

She reached out and took the smoke from his hand, a strong guitar player hand that could still stroke her in just the right way, and she said, “I'll tell you though, you're better than ever.” She inhaled, blew smoke at the ceiling, and Ritchie smiled and said, it's not me, Ange, it's you, “You finally caught up,” and she said, what?

“When we were screwing before, you were what, twenty-one?”

She said, yeah, sure, not about to tell him it was closer to seventeen.

“Hell, chicks don't really get interested in sex until they're well into their thirties.” He held out his hand for the smoke, but she pulled it away, saying, “We're interested, we just don't hit our peaks till thirty-five.” She took another drag watching him smile that got-away-with-something smile through rising smoke.

“You start peaking at thirty-five,” he said, “or forty. I've known women didn't really get going till forty-five, but once they start, they can just keep peaking. You want to smoke? Here.” He tossed the pack on the bed, but she handed the lit one back to him, saying, “I quit three years ago.”