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CHAPTER 1
WHEN MAX GOT BACK THE RESULTS OF THE BIOPSY HE knew he wasn't going to pay any more tribute to Nicky Tortino. No more laundering the guy's hooker money, no more vig right off the top. Fuck Nicky T. Way Max figured, a guy who only had six weeks to live could thumb his nose at people like that. Besides, if Nicky clipped him or hired it done it'd be better than lying in bed with an IV in your arm, waiting for it to happen.
So Max had chased off Nicky's torpedo, Gerry Knucks, last time Knucks came by. Gerry got the name Knucks because way back he carried these brass knuckles that had a pewter handle with the word, Knucks, engraved on it. Yeah, this is the kind of people Max Shapiro had gotten himself involved with. Guys with little kid nicknames they engraved in brass knuckles. Could you believe it?
Max had made himself a ton of money as a real estate developer but had to admit that back in the seventies with the interest rates hovering around 22 percent and nobody building shit, except disco owners who always defaulted, Nicky Tortino had been a windfall. Max set up some dummy development corporations, then took out phony loans which Nicky wrote off on his taxes. Then Reagan and the eighties came along and it was boom again so Max had made enough money that he didn't need Nicky's laundering business anymore. By the mid-eighties Max had a beach house in Malibu next to a movie star, two Jaguars in his garage, and a line of credit like the defense department. But he still had to piece off all his action and they sent Gerry Knucks around every month to collect and inform him of any deals that Nicky T had cooking. Max was sick of it.
But you don't get to quit the wiseguys. They had no retirement plan.
So Max had to keep working.
It was funny how he had taken the news about the cancer. Like something was happening that was just part of the next thing he had to do. Like watching it on television or something. He didn't really feel sick or anything. He'd had these pains in his stomach, sure, but they weren't unbearable like his Uncle Ray who had just withered away to nothing, a bowling ball head on top of a neck that was all corded muscle and skinny, the bones in his face and shoulders pushing against the skin as the cancer ate him up. Wasn't like that. It was more like he had indigestion or something.
Max was fifty-seven years old and was still in pretty good shape even though he had the beginnings of some love handles and his hair was receding. He got out and golfed every week. Played racquetball down at the club about five times a month. And he could still water ski, which he loved. So, he decided that he was going to spend his last days in Aspen, maybe learn to ski and hit the spots where he could watch the swells drinking Dom Perignon and pretending they didn't have shit where their brains were supposed to be.
Besides, he hadn't seen much snow in his life and that would be different. Snow was clean. Aspen was clean and the mountains were nice. Might as well get shot in a picturesque place as not.
So, when Gerry Knucks came around, Max was waiting for him. He'd gone out and bought himself this Beretta nine, like the one Mel Gibson used in the Lethal Weapon movies and when Gerry Knucks came by Max had whipped out the gun kinda off-hand, like he did it all the time, and Knucks said, "Come on, Max, cut the fucking horsing around, I ain't got no time for it," which Max had to admit was kind of cool on Knucks's part.
"I'm not paying you guys nothing anymore," he'd said.
Then Knucks had frowned, a little furrow of skin forming between his eyebrows like he'd just been given an algebra problem he hadn't seen before. Even though he had a dumb nickname Gerry Knucks was sharp. "Come on, Max. What the fuck is this about? You been paying for twenty years. You know Nicky's not going to like this. And, then I've got to give him the bad news and he'll act all pissed off and then I'll have to come back. You know how it works."
Max thought about it a moment, shrugged his shoulders and said, "Well, I'm not doing it anymore."
"Why not?"
"I got cancer."
"I guess that makes sense. But you don't need the money. Just pay this time and let me get going."
"I'm not paying."
Gerry Knucks looked around the room as if he'd landed on Mars or something and said, "Dammit, Max, just give me the fucking money and go die in peace. Take a vacation, go somewhere, spend some money, have a good time. Get drunk. You gotta pay. That's the way it is. You know what's going to happen if you don't and I won't like that. Hell, we been friends."
"Nothing personal, Gerry. Just don't want to pay anymore. It's the principle of the thing."
Knucks nodded his head. "Well, I can sorta understand that. But, you know what Nicky's reaction's gonna be."
"Well, fuck him."
"Yeah. Fuck him, fuck me, fuck you. Fuck us all. That's what you're doing. You're just creating extra work."
"Tough all over," said Max.
Gerry Knucks rubbed the side of his face. "Well, I'll go then. Unless you're gonna shoot me or something." Real cool. Gerry was a tough guy, no doubt about that. "You gonna shoot me, Max?"
Max shrugged. "I don't think so."
"I appreciate it. Always were a decent guy, Max. I may have to shoot you, though."
"I understand."
Knucks sighed. Puffed out his cheeks and exhaled. "I won't enjoy it though. And I'll make it quick. You won't feel a thing, I promise."
"I'd expect nothing less."
"Aw, you know. Old friends and everything. You care if I have a cigar before I go?"
Max nodded at the humidor on his desk. It was walnut and had three drawers and gold handles like a piece of bedroom furniture. "Help yourself. Take one of the Cubans. Third drawer. Got a couple of Montecristo number two's in there."
Knucks opened the drawer and pulled out the torpedo-shaped cigar. "Thanks, Max."
"It's a good smoke."
"Well, gotta go. Be seeing you, Max."
Max nodded. As Knucks reached the door, Max said, "Hey, Gerry."
Gerry Knucks paused at the door and turned around. "Yeah, Max?"
"Knucks is an asshole name."
Gerry looked down at the floor, nodded his head, then looked up and smiled at Max. "Yeah, guess you're right. Thanks for making it easier for me, Max. Gonna miss you."
And he left.
So Max packed some stuff and caught the next flight to Colorado.
And then after he'd moved to the Aspen lodge he'd bought a couple of years ago on spec, Max got the call from the doctor telling him he wasn't going to die, after all.
"Well, that's just fucked up, Doc," Max had said. "What kind of thing is that to tell a guy? I'm going to live now. That it? Where'd you get your medical degree? Correspondence school?"
"I thought you'd be happy to hear this." Max's doctor was some goy asshole from a bigshot California family whose father-in-law had been a candidate for governor back in the eighties. See what happens when you back a loser, thought Max.
"I'm supposed to be happy because I'm going to live? What's the matter with you? How's a guy supposed to plan anything if you can't make up your mind? You want to tell me about that?"
"Well ... a ... I'm sorry about this, Max. I'm sure it's a shock to you and all, but after it sinks in I'm sure you'll realize that you've got a long life ahead of you."
"You'd think that, wouldn't you?" "We still on for golf next week?" asked the doctor.
Max said, "No, I'm afraid you wouldn't give me the right score. By the way, what's wrong with me if I don't have cancer?" "Looks like you have an acute case of indigestion."
Max hung up the phone.
Could you believe it?
CHAPTER 2
"SO WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO, NOW?" SUZI CHANCELLOR asked him. Suzi was Max's girlfriend. She used to be a cigarette girl in Vegas. Her name used to be Suzi Craig but she changed it to Chancellor when she became a dancer. Great legs, nice smile. Ears were a little big, but she kept them covered with this cascade of red hair, same color as Ann-Margret's. Suzi was no dummy. She wasn't no genius either but had a lot of sense. She'd attended UNLV for a couple of years before she decided to see if she could make it as a showgirl. Max had met her while he was playing the tables at MGM Grand, Suzi bringing him cigars and him tipping her big.
Suzi liked him because he hadn't come on to her like the other guys did who came to Vegas. He didn't tell her how great her legs were, which were spectacular, but seemed more interested in her background and seemed genuinely interested. Max thought it was charming and fascinating that she was a Mormon girl from Salt Lake City who'd came out to Vegas. He wanted to know if things really did float on the Great Salt Lake. She'd told him how when she was in high school she and her friends used to get some beer and drive out there and float on their backs. "But, you had to make sure you toweled off real well or the salt would eat up the upholstery on the car."
He'd ask how her parents felt about a Mormon girl working in Vegas and she told him that her dad had died in a plane crash years ago. "He was coming back from a business meeting in Provo. It was a charter. Somehow, one of the turbines fouled and they went down in the mountains." He told her he was sorry about that and she said it was okay because her dad had cancer anyway and didn't have much longer to live. Go figure that one, would you? thought Max. Then, she'd told him she had a business in Vegas, a dress shop for large-figured women and she did the cigarette gig because it got her out among interesting people and she made some business contacts that way. "They have to buy somewhere," she said. "And they don't want to be embarrassed by trying on something next to the chorus girls that buy clothes around here."
Max said that made sense and he knew this girl was pretty sharp and he asked her to have a drink with him and she accepted even though he was twenty years older than she was and it had gone from there. They'd been going together about a year now and even though Max had offered to pay to expand her dress shop, Suzi didn't want that. "I'm your girlfriend, not your business partner."
So when he told her that the doctor had said he wasn't going to die, she asked him what he was going to do now.
"I thought about calling Nicky T and telling him I'd pay." He pursed his lips and confessed, "Well, anyway, I thought about it."
"And now you don't want to." Her hands on her hips, looking at him. "That it?" The snow was coming down through the big window behind her. Max liked the snow. He'd been raised in L.A. and hadn't seen any snow except in the mountains when his parents took him to Denver once. He'd loved the way it looked, like a big ice cream sundae and had loved the mountains ever since then. He liked the way she looked with the snow coming down behind her.
Max shrugged. "Not sure. Maybe. I'm tired of working for Nicky. I didn't mind Gerry Knucks so much except sometimes he made my secretary uneasy because he's a thug, even though he's pretty polite for a guy from the Bronx. He doesn't look like a thug so much as he has this ... I don't know, some sort of menacing thing going. And, he's not a dumb guy, either. Smart. Smarter than the guys he works for who're a bunch of wop dimwits. But ... aw, you know."
"You know what?"
"After I decided not to pay him it felt pretty good. Like I was a free man or something."
"Not if they kill you."
"Some things are worse than that. Paying some festuring asshole like Nicky T part of your business and washing his sleazy whore money as if he were some desert rajah makes me feel like a putz."
"Desert sheik," said Suzi.
"What?"
"You mean desert sheik. Not rajah. That's Indian."
"Like Indian from India?"
"Like that."
He nodded. "So, anyway, it started to feel good, not paying. I like it. I got money and I've been busting my hump for ten years longer than I wanted to and I don't need Nicky in my life. Besides, I don't think it'd make any difference if I called and said it was all a joke and I'd start paying again. Nicky's thought processes went stagnant in about the fourth grade and all he's thinking about is respect and how this affects his reputation with the wiseguys downtown. He wants to be a made man, which I never understood."
Besides, and this is the part he hadn't told her, he was kind of looking forward to living large and dangerous. Max liked to visualize things. Dying from cancer and Nicky sending guns after him didn't scare him so much because he imagined doing all the things he wanted to do before it happened. It was like a kind of freedom. At first, it had been like that old TV series with Ben Gazarra where they tell him he has only one year to live and so he goes around having adventures. Then, after the doctor had told him he was going to live, the irony of the show's name came to him. Run for Your Life.
"You given any thought to what you're going to do?" Suzi asked. "You know he's going to send Gerry or some other thug to come after you. You better put something together."
Max liked the way she approached it. She didn't panic or get emotional. She thought things through. She had good business sense. She just wanted to make sure he had a plan.
"I can shoot pretty good. I was in the service, you know? Went to Vietnam in'sixty-five. But I didn't see any action. Supply. What the guys get shot at call a REMF."
"REMF?"
"Rear echelon motherfucker. Only shot my gun on the range once in a while but I was a pretty good shot anyway. I thought about that, you know, walking into Nicky T's and blasting him like the Wild West or something where we shoot it out."
"That's not using your head, Shapiro," Suzi said. "That's letting your testosterone do the thinking and that won't work."
He nodded. "I'll give you that." But he didn't tell her how he secretly fantasized about busting a cap on Nicky Tortino. Just walking up to him and pulling the Beretta and shooting him in the nose job he'd got himself. Mess up all that cutting and plastic surgery. At first, when he thought he was going to die and he had nothing to lose, it had made sense. Different now. Boy, was it different now. "But, I don't know what else to do."
She put a finger to the corner of her mouth like she did when she was looking at a new fashion line at the dress shop. Considering it, looking at it from different angles. She was a thinker, that's for sure. "Didn't you say you knew a guy here in Aspen? Some guy who used to be a secret service agent or something that played piano in some lounge here in Aspen?"
"Yeah," said Max. "Guy's name's Springer. Cole Springer. He plays the piano and tosses off smart remarks at the ski morons who tip him, not knowing he's making fun of them. Used to work on the president's detail until he quit. I heard he got canned because he made some funny remark about the president to a newspaper guy or something."
She cocked her head and smiled. "A man with a sense of humor."
"Maybe what I need is a man with no compunction about shooting a greaseball degenerate like Nicky T who would think no more of whacking me than what shoes to wear to the mall."
"This guy's got experience protecting people. Who else are you going to be able to get on such short notice?" He thought about that. "Nobody, I guess."
"That answers your question then."
"Yeah, well, he'd be good but I sold him a plot of land once that was in a red zone."
"A red zone?"
"Yeah, a fly-over. Where they re-route jets from SAC headquarters in Colorado Springs while they were making some changes. He was going to put up a piano bar in Colorado Springs but the noise from the jets screwed it up so he had to sell at a loss and blames me. Took the money and moved here. That was about five years ago."
"Why'd you do that?"
He shrugged, his palms up and level with his shoulders. "I didn't know they were going to fly the damn things over. I'd never even seen the land. I sold it for Nicky T. That's who he should be mad at."
"You need him now."
"He doesn't like me much."
She leaned over and stroked his chin with her thinking finger. "Then, charm him, Max."
It was eleven o'clock on a snow-covered October night when the football players tried to throw the little guy out of the Whiskey Basin Tavern. Normally Cole Springer was neutral about such events but it was the tattoo on the man's forearm that caused him to intervene. Also, you couldn't have that kind of stuff going on in this business as it made the crowd nervous — especially in Aspen — and they would soon move on to someplace where people didn't get picked up and hurled bodily from the place where they came to relax.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Springer's Gambit"
by .
Copyright © 2001 W. L. Ripley.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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