Ace thought about it. Then he shook his head.
"Yes, you do," Dave said. "Because that's the reason your ass is in a crack. Ducky showed you a lot of Baggies filled with white powder. One was full of good coke. The rest were full of shit. Like you, Ace."
"We tested!" Ace said. "I picked a bag at random, and we tested it!"
Mike and Dave looked at each other with dark drollery.
"They tested," Dave Corson said.
"He picked a bag at random," Mike Corson added.
They rolled their eyes upward and looked at each other in the mirror on the ceiling.
"Well?" Ace said, looking from one to the other. He was glad they knew who Ducky was, he was also glad they believed he hadn't meant to cheat them, but he was distressed just the same. They were treating him like a chump, and Ace Merrill was nobody's chump.
"Well what?" Mike Corson asked. "If you didn't think you picked the test bag yourself, the deal wouldn't go down, would it?
Ducky is like a magician doing the same raggedy-ass card trick over and over again. 'Pick a card, any card.' You ever hear that one, AceHole?"
Guns or no guns, Ace bridled. "Don't you call me that."
"We'll call you anything we want," Dave said. "You owe us eighty-five large, Ace, and what we've got for collateral on that money so far is a shitload of Arm amp; Hammer baking soda worth about a buck-fifty. We'll call you Hubert J. Motherfucker if we want to."
He and his brother looked at each other. Wordless communication passed between them. Dave got up and tapped Too-Tall Timmy on the shoulder. He gave Too-Tall his gun. Then Dave and Mike left the van and stood close together by a drift of sumac at the edge of some farmer's field, talking earnestly. Ace didn't know what words they were saying, but he knew perfectly well what was going on. They were deciding what to do with him.
He sat on the edge of the mud-bed, sweating like a pig, waiting for them to come back in. Too-Tall Timmy sprawled in the upholstered captain's chair Mike Corson had vacated, holding the H amp; K on Ace and nodding his head back and forth. Very faintly, Ace could hear the voices of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell coming from the earphones.
Marvin and Tarnmi, who were both the late great these days, were singing "My Mistake."
Mike and Dave came back in.
"We're going to give you three months to make good," Mike said.
Ace felt himself go limp with relief. "Right now we want our money more than we want to rip your skin off. There's something else, too."
"We want to whack Ducky Morin," Dave said. "His shit has gone on long enough."
"Guy's giving us all a bad name," Mike said.
"We think you can find him," Dave said. "We think he'll figure once an Ace-Hole, always an Ace-Hole."
"You got any comment on that, Ace-Hole?" Mike asked him.
Ace had no comment on that. He was happy just knowing that he would be seeing another weekend.
"November first is the deadline," Dave said. "You bring us our money by November first and then we all go after Ducky. If you don't, we're going to see how many pieces of you we can cut off before you finally give up and die."
8
When the balloon went up, Ace had been holding about a dozen assorted heavy-caliber weapons of both the automatic and semiautomatic varieties. He spent most of his grace period trying to turn these weapons into cash. Once he did that, he could turn cash back into coke. You couldn't have a better asset than cocaine when you needed to turn some big bucks in a hurry.
But the market for guns was temporarily in the horse latitudes.
He sold half his stock-none of the big guns-and that was it.
During the second week in September he had met a promising prospect at the Piece of Work Pub in Lewiston. The prospect had hinted in every way it was possible to hint that he would like to buy at least six and perhaps as many as ten automatic weapons, if the name of a reliable ammunition dealer went with the shooting irons. Ace could do that; the Flying Corson Brothers were the most reliable ammo dealers he knew.
Ace went into the grimy bathroom to do a couple of lines before hammering the deal home. He was suffused with the happy, relieved glow which has bedevilled a number of American Presidents; he believed he saw light at the end of the tunnel.
He laid the small mirror he carried in his shirt pocket on the toilet tank and was spooning coke onto it when a voice spoke from the urinal nearest the stall Ace was in. Ace never found out who the voice belonged to; he only knew that its owner might well have saved him fifteen years in a Federal penitentiary.
"Man you be talking to wearin a wire," the voice from the urinal said, and when Ace left the bathroom he went out the back door.