More Twisted

that?
    Sloan gave Tony Windham five hundred in cash.
    The killer shook Sloan’s hand. Then he frowned. “You’re probably wondering, now that I’m out, am I going to clean up my act? If I’m going to, well, keep behaving like I was before. With the girls.”
    Sloan held up a hand to silence him. “I’ll give you alesson about my business, Tony. Once the deal closes, a good salesman never thinks about what the buyer does with the product.”
    The boy nodded and started for the station, the bag over his shoulder.
    Sloan got back in his company car and started the engine. He opened his attache case and looked over the sales sheets for tomorrow. Some good prospects, he reflected happily. He turned the AC up full, pulled out of the parking lot and headed east, looking for a hotel where he could spend the night.
    You believe in God, Sloan?
    No. I believe in selling. That’s about it .
    That’s your soul then.
    Dave Sloan reflected, It sure is.
    Warmed to ninety-eight point six.

A N ICE P LACE TO V ISIT

    W hen you’re a natural-born grifter, an operator, a player, you get this sixth sense for sniffing out opportunities, and that’s what Ricky Kelleher was doing now, watching two guys in the front of the smoky bar, near a greasy window that still had a five-year-old bullet hole in it.
    Whatever was going down, neither of them looked real happy.
    Ricky kept watching. He’d seen one guy here in Hanny’s a couple of times. He was wearing a suit and tie—it really made him stand out in this dive, the sore thumb thing. The other one, leather jacket and tight jeans, razor-cut bridge-and-tunnel hair, was some kind of Gambino wannabe, Ricky pegged him. Or Sopranos, more likely—yeah, he was the sort of prick who’d hock his wife for a big-screen TV. He was way pissed off, shaking his head at everything Mr. Suit was telling him. At one point he slammed his fist on the bar so hard glasses bounced. But nobody noticed. That was the kind of place Hanny’s was.
    Ricky was in the rear, at the short L of the bar, his regular throne. The bartender, a dusty old guy, maybe black, maybe white, you couldn’t tell, kept an uneasy eyeon the guys arguing. “It’s cool,” Ricky reassured him. “I’m on it.”
    Mr. Suit had a briefcase open. A bunch of papers were inside. Most of the business in this pungent, dark Hell’s Kitchen bar, west of Midtown, involved trading bags of chopped up plants and cases of Johnnie Walker that’d fallen off the truck and were conducted in the men’s room or alley out back. This was something different. Skinny five-foot-four Ricky couldn’t tip to exactly what was going down but that magic sense, his player’s eye, told him to pay attention.
    “Well, fuck that,” Wannabe said to Mr. Suit.
    “Sorry.” A shrug.
    “Yeah, you said that before.” Wannabe slid off the stool. “But you don’t really sound that fucking sorry. And you know why? Because I’m the one out all the money.”
    “Bullshit. I’m losing my whole fucking business.”
    But Ricky’d learned that other people losing money doesn’t take the sting out of you losing money. Way of the world.
    Wannabe was getting more and more agitated. “Listen careful here, my friend. I’ll make some phone calls. I got people I know down there. You don’t want to fuck with these guys.”
    Mr. Suit tapped what looked like a newspaper article in the briefcase. “And what’re they gonna do?” His voice lowered and he whispered something that made Wannabe’s face screw up in disgust. “Now, just go on home, keep your head down and watch your back. And pray they can’t—” Again, the lowered voice. Ricky couldn’t hear what “they” might do.
    Wannabe slammed his hand down on the bar again. “This isn’t gonna fly, asshole. Now—”
    “Hey, gentlemen,” Ricky called. “Volume down, okay?”
    “The fuck’re you, little man?” Wannabe snapped. Mr. Suit touched his arm to quiet him but he pulled away and kept glaring.
    Ricky slicked back his greasy dark-blond hair. Easing off the stool, he walked to the front of the bar, the heels of his boots tapping loudly on the scuffed floor. The guy had six inches and thirty pounds on him but Ricky had learned a long time ago that craziness scares people a fuck of a lot more than height or weight or muscle. And so he did what he always did when he was going one on one—threw a weird look into his eyes and got right up in the man’s face. He screamed, “Who I am is the guy’s