Nightlife Read Free Page A

at Hugo, just shifted it to his belt. “I want your ten grand tomorrow by five, and then once a month. Be on time.”
    “Ask me how I knew they were cops.”
    “All right. How did you know?”
    “They’re wearing microphones,” said Hugo Poole. “See you, Steve.” Hugo Poole walked down the concrete riverbed, away from Steve Rao.
    “You don’t walk away from me,” said Steve Rao. “You wait until I walk away from you.” His voice sounded strained and thin, as though his throat were dry.
    Hugo Poole walked on, his pace the same smart stride he always used on the street that kept his head up and his eyes on the world in front of him and let him scan the sights beside him. He had decided that it would be best not to return to the street by the same path he had used to come down here, so he walked on for what he judged to be an extra two blocks before he came to the next ramp built for the flood maintenance people. At the top of the path he had to climb an eight-foot chain-link fence, something he hated to do, but since his suit was beyond repair, he supposed he could hardly ruin it twice.
    He swung himself over, dropped to the ground, then walked back up to Radford. Just as he was coming out of the dimly lighted, quiet street toward Ventura Boulevard, he heard the distant pops of four shots in rapid succession, then seven more. They seemed to echo from the direction of the river. As he walked along, he considered the eleven shots. Eleven was a bad number for Steve Rao. The magazines for pistols like Steve Rao’s held no more than ten in a single stack.

3
    H ugo Poole parked in front of the Hundred Proof Bar and slipped a twenty-dollar bill to the bouncer outside the door in exchange for protecting his car from the tow trucks. The frightening late-night clientele of the Hundred Proof would keep the hot-wire artists away. As he walked along Sheldrake Avenue toward the Empire Theater he looked respectable but tired, like the bartender of an intermittently violent nightclub. He wanted to get this suit off. He would get a shower, put on a clean shirt and a new suit, and feel right again. Hugo Poole never wore a tie, because during his formative years he had watched a fight in which a man had been choked out with his Windsor knot.
    He walked under the big, ornate marquee that announced EMPIRE THEATER CLOSED FOR RENOVATION. He stepped into the alcove across the terrazzo inlay of 1920s bathing beauties and stopped beside the ticket booth in front. He stared up and down Sheldrake Avenue. Hugo Poole did not simply glance: he took his time, his eyes narrowed to impart sharpness and definition to distant shapes. When he decided he had outlasted any possible duckers-behind-corners or walkers-the-other-way, he took a full turn and stopped with his back against the door to be absolutely sure he had not been followed. He had not. Hugo Poole unlocked the door to the movie theater, opened it, slipped inside, closed it, and tugged it once to be sure it had locked behind him.
    He turned. The dim pink glow of the light inside the candy display case let him see the gilded plaster-cast sconces and the ancient painted murals of women who seemed half nymph and half movie star getting out of long antique limousines. Behind them, aimed upward in the sky, were beams from big spotlights. He heard a noise and turned to the carpeted stairway across the lobby that led up toward the balcony.
    “Evening, Hugo.” Otto Collins and Mike Garcia came into the lobby from upstairs. They had been waking up the building, doing the evening walk-around, turning on lights and unlocking the inner doors.
    “Hello, guys,” Hugo Poole said. He was not about to forget that the easiest way for somebody to kill him was to pay these two to do it here in the theater, but he had already studied them and acquitted them for tonight. Every night he looked at them for signs that they were going to betray him.
    Hugo Poole was not watching for nervous twitches and