House Odds Read Free Page A

only uses him when one of his regular long-haul guys is doing something else. He used to work at a government shipyard up there in Kittery, but he’s retired now and he pisses away his money on booze and lotto tickets. He lives in a fuckin’ shack and most the time, unless Donatelli has work for him, the only thing he eats is fish and crab, and it don’t matter to him what fish are legal.”
    Ted was jogging on a treadmill in the casino’s fitness center wearing only shorts and running shoes. A short, white towel was wrapped about his neck. His body glistened with sweat and he knew he looked good; he’d just seen a lady giving him the eye. If she had been closer to twenty than forty, he might have invited her to sit with him in the jacuzzi when he finished his workout. Half the women he slept with he met in the gym.
    He glanced down at the heart-rate monitor, to make sure his pulse was staying above one thirty, then looked at Gus and said, “Get to the point.”
    Ted was convinced the term “knuckle-dragger” had been coined with Gus Amato in mind. He was about forty and he wasn’t very tall—only about five foot nine—but he had a broad chest, massive shoulders, and long, powerful arms connected to huge, hairy hands. His nose was broad and his dark hair was curly—so curly that Ted suspected he was the direct descendant of some Moorish invader who’d screwed a Sicilian a few centuries ago. He was wearing gray slacks and an orange golf shirt, which Ted didn’t mind, but on his feet were white alligator-skin cowboy boots, and dangling from his left ear was a gold hoop the size of a man’s wedding ring. The boots and the earring were something he’d just started wearing, and Ted thought they looked absurd.
    “Last week,” Gus said, “Gleason got a brand-new pickup—well, almost brand-new, only twenty thousand miles on it—and he bought a new motor for his fishing boat.”
    “Where’d he get the money? From Donatelli?”
    “No, that’s the beauty of it. Donatelli would be totally surprised that all of a sudden this loser is driving a new rig.”
    “So where did it come from?” Ted noticed his pulse was rising, but he didn’t think it was because he was running. It was rising because Gus, as usual, was annoying the shit out of him.
    Gus laughed. “Two years ago, this useless dick filed a disability claim against the shipyard where he used to work, saying the job had destroyed his hearing. And the government, for whatever fuckin’ reason, decided to settle with him. They sent him a check for thirty-eight thousand dollars two weeks ago.”
    Now, that made Ted smile. “Anything else?”
    “Yeah. He has a granddaughter and Gleason takes the little girl fishing with him when he’s not drunk and she’s not in school.”
    “Perfect,” Ted said.
    As Ted had told Greg, he needed something to distract McGruder momentarily, and he needed something to convince him that the casino’s books hadn’t been doctored the way McGruder thought they had. Ted didn’t need a lot of time, just a few days, maybe a week at the outside.
    And the good Lord, it seemed, had chosen to drop this poor slob, Gleason, right into his lap.
    * * *
    Mahoney sat, his chair tilted back, his big feet up on his desk. His tie was undone, his suit jacket off, and he held a tumbler of bourbon in his thick right paw. As he talked to DeMarco he looked out at the National Mall, at the protest in progress.
    The protesters were as close to the Capitol as the U.S. Capitol Police would allow them to get, but too far away for DeMarco to read the signs they were holding aloft. It seemed to him that there was always someone on the Mall protesting, that hardly a day went by when some group didn’t exercise its constitutional right to assemble and complain.
    “If it was Maggie, I might believe it,” Mahoney was saying. “Even Mitzy, but if Mitzy did something like this, she’d be doing it to save the redwoods or the whales or some fuckin’