The Take Read online

  THE TAKE

  by

  MIKE DENNIS

  Bought by Maraya21

  kickass.so / 1337x.org / h33t.to / thepiratebay.se

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

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  1

  The question was, of course, where could Eddie Ryan scrape up nineteen thousand dollars.

  From down here in the warm street, he could almost hear his cell phone bleating up in his room. The bettors wanted their money now, tonight, and the bookie was always expected to pay up on the spot.

  The goddam Dodgers. The goddam lucky Dodgers. Cleveland was a lock, a mortal lock to win the World Series. So what if all the action was on the Dodgers? The more the better, he originally thought, because Cleveland couldn’t lose. They were twice the team the Dodgers were!

  He violated rule number one for any bookie: never, never, ever let your action get so one-sided that you wind up pulling for that team to win. That’s not what the business is about. Of course, Eddie knew that. He knew he was supposed to even out the betting on both sides, collect from the losers, pay off he winners, then pocket the ten percent juice.

  Sure, he knew that, but he went ahead and took all that Dodger action anyway, without even moving the betting line! And now, he needed nineteen dimes right away.

  The damn World Series hadn’t been over twenty minutes and already a stream of sweat had slinked its way down the gully of his spine.

  Eddie tried frantically to think of a way out, some kind of angle — anything — but he came up dry. He thought about just splitting town right now, walking out and leaving his players holding the bag. Then he eyed his old orange Toyota parked around the corner, and he thought again, realizing the car was even money just to get him to the Houston city limits. Even if it held up, he didn’t have the cash to go anywhere. He didn’t have a hundred bucks to his name, so leaving town was not an option.

  Besides, if he did leave, Danny B, who had five thousand coming, would dedicate his life to finding him.

  He knew of only one play he could make. Fishing some change from his pocket, he went over to the gas station and found a pay phone. He knew Raymond Cannetta’s number by heart.

  “Raymond? Eddie Ryan. I need to see you. Tomorrow? Where? Okay, Denny’s at noon? Got it. See you then.”

  He detoured into the liquor store for a pint of bourbon, watching a sizeable chunk of his remaining estate go to pay for it. Bag in hand, he crossed the street and headed up to his room to let the brown bottle work its magic.

  ≈≈≈

  Eddie was no stranger to hard luck. He could usually feel it sticking to him like black tar on a humid summer day, while the big chips always fell just outside his reach. It was that way his whole life. But this World Series was supposed to turn it around for him. He was ready to pick up a nice piece of change from it.

  If only the goddam Dodgers hadn’t gotten lucky.

  If only, if only.

  He gazed out the window from his booth at Denny’s, until a sharp glint flicked across his eye, snapping him out of his misery. It was the sun reflecting off Raymond Cannetta’s shiny blue Lincoln as it pulled into the parking lot.

  On first glance, there was nothing scary about Cannetta. His medium size and soft-spoken manner didn’t add up the beefy loan-shark stereotype. But when he slipped into the quiet booth across from Eddie, icing down the area with his volatile brown eyes, Eddie shivered. This close, he could see the dark streak, the violence lurking right under the surface, as though he’d held Cannetta up to the light.

  He tried to still the nervous hand that stirred his coffee. Cannetta poured a cup for himself from the pot on the table.

  “What’s up, Eddie?”

  “I had a bad week. I’m a little short, you know, and I-I need some cash to pay off my bettors.”

  “How much?”

  “Nineteen grand.”

  Cannetta didn’t reply right away. Rather, he gently blew on his coffee and sipped at it, letting the figure hang out to dry, so Eddie would understand this was no ordinary loan.

  “Where’d they make this shit?” His thin face contracted into a grimace as he set the cup back down. “My stomach’s been telling me for some time now to quit this stuff. I ought to pay attention. But you know, I been drinking it for thirty-five years now.”

  “Thirty-five years?” Eddie’s leg developed a slight twitch under the table, out of Cannetta’s sight.

  “Six, seven cups a day. That’s a long time, Eddie. Hard to break a habit that’s been with you for that long.”

  Eddie mumbled something in agreement, while rattling his spoon against the sides of the cup.

  “I’ll let you have twenty,” Cannetta finally said, his eyes burning into Eddie’s. “Every Friday at noon you meet me here” — his index finger poked the tabletop —“and you pay me a grand plus another grand worth of vig. In twenty weeks, it’s paid off.” The expression on his face asked Eddie if he agreed.

  “Agreed,” Eddie replied.

  “Let’s go out to the car.”

  Cannetta retrieved a briefcase from the trunk of the Lincoln. They got into the front seat, where he opened it. Eddie saw a flash of stacked currency inside. Cannetta pulled out a few of the banded bundles, then counted out twenty thousand dollars.

  He held out the thick handful of hundreds, and Eddie reached for it. But before Cannetta released it, he warned, “Remember, Eddie. One grand every Friday plus another grand in juice. No excuses. No bullshit.”

  “Right, Raymond. Two grand. You’ll get it.” Eddie surprised himself at how confident he sounded, as he took the money and stuffed it down his pants.

  ≈≈≈

  Back in his room, Eddie returned the calls from his cell phone, arranging to pay off his players, as well as booking their bets for that weekend’s college and pro football games. He encouraged them to make bigger bets. He had to. Clearing two thousand a week wouldn’t be easy, but what was the alternative?

  When all the bets were in, the action was divided more or less evenly on each game. He silently congratulated himself on doing it right, and he kept the juice.

  That next Friday, Eddie delivered his first payment of two thousand dollars to Raymond Cannetta in Denny’s parking lot.

  The following week, the action was a little more one-sided, especially on Sunday’s NFL games. He moved the lines around, but the betting just wouldn’t even out. He sweated out the Sunday games, but a couple of upsets saved the day, so he made his second payment on schedule.

  The third week was rough going. A lot of teams failed to cover the point spread. In addition, there were no major upsets. Fortunately, however, one of his players had dropped thirty-three hundred on a middleweight fight, and Eddie was literally saved by the bell.

  He knew his luck — and that’s really what it amounted to — couldn’t hold out forever, and for him, forever meant exactly seventeen more weeks.

  Even under ideal conditions, which were prett
y scarce these days, he could barely come up with the two grand payment plus his meager living expenses. And of course, if it came down to a choice between the two, he’d have to make the loan payment, because if he missed it, there wouldn’t be any need for living expenses.

  ≈≈≈

  Eventually, the piano fell. After a serious run of one-sided losses on the Saturday college games and the Sunday NFL action, he had no money for Raymond Cannetta. Almost as bad, he owed his bettors over thirty-five hundred. The Monday night football game, which he hoped would pull him out, had just ended in disaster, and his cell phone was already going off.

  Groaning, he flipped off his black-and-white TV, and sank back into the thin cushions of his cheap couch. Truth showed itself now like a dirty little secret. He remembered what Raymond had said about excuses and bullshit. His future had started to decompose before his very eyes.

  All available options rapidly narrowed to one. Thinking about it made him sick. Seeing Val Borden’s phone number on the matchbook made him sick.

  He had never committed a crime in his life — not a real crime, anyway — but here he was, about to stick his head inside the jaws of a big one.

  He just knew this was crazy — his churning insides told him so. This is wrong! Wrong! they screamed. All wrong! His stomach shook and quivered, while he considered running to the john. The spasms backed up into his brain, as he wriggled in the grip of uncertainty. But then … why was his hand so steady as he dialed the phone?

  2

  Val Borden lived in one of those budget apartments off McCarty, slapped together in the early seventies during Houston’s frenzied stampede for development. Back then, “garden apartment living” meant escape from the hardscrabble redneck neighborhoods of junk cars and dirty yards and dirtier kids. It didn’t take long, though, for the rednecks to fill these places up, turning the garden into a garbage heap, similar to the neighborhoods they’d just fled.

  Trembling, Eddie walked up the redwood steps, then down the concrete landing past cracked windows and peeling paint. He knocked on the last door. It opened, and Val stood in the doorway, T-shirted, with a bottle of beer in his hand.

  He stood a little shorter than Eddie, but more solidly built. A neat, close-cropped beard covered his negligible chin. The intensity in his face sprang from his dark promising eyes, the ones all the women loved.

  “Hey man, c’mon in,” he said.

  The door opened directly into the shag-carpeted living room. The grisly green carpet, which probably looked pretty good as a swatch in the salesman’s book thirty-five years earlier, now looked merely god-awful, a worn, sticky remnant of better times. The TV was on. The pungent odor of Swisher Sweets had permanently seeped into the room.

  Val led Eddie over to the recliner. Eddie took a seat, noticing a hole the size of a fist dominating the wall right behind him. Then, after a full stretch, Val plopped down onto the sofa, covering up a shock of brown naugahyde protruding from open cuts. After he stubbed out his Sweet into the ashtray on the end table, the little cigar smoldered, its sugary smoke drifting directly into Eddie’s face. Eddie waved it away, but it kept coming.

  Val held up his beer. “Want one?”

  “Sure.”

  “Honey,” he said in a raised voice toward the kitchen. “Bring Eddie a beer, will you? And another one for me, too.”

  Eddie’s blood rose hearing the tap of light footsteps. He twitched to the jabbing tingle of pins and needles on his skin, while his head turned slowly toward the kitchen.

  Felina!

  She paused at the entrance to the living room, and for that second, Eddie drank in her image in one long swallow, and boy, did it go down easy.

  Her slender body was tightly wrapped in a plain black cotton dress, which on her looked like a Paris tailor-made. Long bare legs, visible from about mid-thigh down, tapered into the cheap gray flats on her feet. Glancing upward, he saw her pouting face, dominated by fiery black eyes and a narrow, expressive mouth. Lots of tousled black hair topped it off. Even in these two-bit surroundings, she looked like a Mexican million. And she knew it.

  “Hi, Eddie,” she said, passing him his beer. “How you doing?” Her voice was just right — feminine, but forceful. It hinted at her hard interior.

  “Okay, Felina. But I’ll be a little bit better once I get this brew in me.” His smile hid his jangling nerves. Or so he thought.

  His mind wasn’t on the beer as he watched her slip onto the sofa next to Val. He just couldn’t figure it out. Val wasn’t that great-looking. What was he doing with a sizzler like Felina? Or any of the other women he had on the side. Eddie had seen a few of them and they were all gorgeous. Maybe it was the beard, he didn’t know. Nevertheless, he did know that whatever it was Val had, Eddie wanted it.

  Val spoke. “So, how’s it been goin’, man?”

  “Well, not so good, actually. You know, I paid off the money I owed on the Series a few weeks ago, but now I owe more … um … a lot more’n I can pay. I thought we might, you know, go somewhere and talk about, um …”

  “Talk about knockin’ over Chico Salazar,” Val stated in a very matter-of-fact tone. He took another long swig from his longneck.

  Squirming like a kid in a barber chair, Eddie shot a quick glance at Felina, then back to Val. One of those whaddya-tryin’-to-do glances.

  “Don’t worry, buddy boy.” His voice was crisp and aggressive, matching his pushy personality. It was covered with a raspy overlay, picked up after years of the Swisher Sweets. “I got no secrets from Felina here.”

  He put his arm around her as an underline to that statement. She responded by snuggling up to him. Turning to look her in the eye, he smiled and added affectionately, “‘cause she’s my lady, aren’tcha, baby?” She purred in the affirmative.

  “Val’s told me all about it, Eddie,” she added. “I think it’s a great idea. We can all use the money.” She ran a hand under Val’s T-shirt, stroking his stomach. Eddie felt the beginnings of arousal down below.

  “We? Wh-what’s —“ His uncertain eyes shifted to Val, then back to Felina. Finally, they settled on Val.

  “Ah, don’t sweat it,” Val said. “We split fifty-fifty, just like I was tellin’ you that night. I take care of Felina with my end. Plus, she won’t be there when the deal goes down. She’s out of it.”

  “I’ll be right here at home, Eddie,” she said in her sweetest Tex-Mex lilt. “Val’s got it all worked out. You can pay off your debts and I can quit my job at the cleaners. Then me and Val can move into someplace nice.”

  Eddie continued fidgeting in the recliner. He took a hearty pull from his Pearl longneck. It didn’t calm him down any.

  “Look, buddy boy,” said Val, letting go of Felina and turning to face him, “when I brought this up to you a couple of weeks ago over at T&T’s Tavern, I wasn’t just talking out of my ass. I meant it. We can do this.”

  Val’s face glowed with confidence, but none of it rubbed off. Eddie still wore the jittery look of a man with a deuce in the hole.

  He remembered their little talk in the darkness of the tavern: a few beers, a little moaning about their hard financial straits, and then in walked Chico Salazar with a glittering blonde. Coming back to the old neighborhood to show himself. Five hundred-dollar shirt, gold and platinum hanging all over him, diamonds on the blonde, the Lamborghini parked out front in the red zone. It was like somebody flipped on a bunch of floodlights, illuminating all the forbidden corners of the dingy joint.

  “I don’t know, Val. It’s — it’s too dangerous, man.” He set his beer on the floor and got up out of the recliner to leave.

  Val reached for his arm and yanked him back down into sitting position.

  “Eddie. Eddie. I said we can do this.”

  “We can’t just rob the son of a bitch. I mean, he’s probably surrounded by torpedoes twenty-four hours a day.”

  “That night in T&T’s, he was only surrounded by blonde pussy.” He let go of Eddie’s arm.

 
“Yeah. In a bar, sure. But he’s a drug dealer, man. When he’s holding serious money, you can bet there’ll be major firepower all over the damn place.”

  Val pulled a pack of Sweets from his pocket. There were two left. He broke the pair and lit one, then gazed off at the far wall, exhaling the smoke. He held the wooden match, still burning.

  “No matter who you are,” he said slowly, through the smoke, “no matter how well-protected you are, there’s always one point, one moment when you can be taken. Generals, presidents, kings … they all know it and they all fear it.” He blew the match out, as he watched the dark smoke sail outward.

  “Val’s right, Eddie,” Felina spoke up. “There’s someplace, sometime when he’s vulnerable.” Her accent tripped her up on that last word. She went on, “That’s your advantage. You plan it out for the time when he doesn’t expect it.”

  Eddie had a hard time keeping his eyes off her lovely legs and his mind on the matter at hand.

  He said, “Well, it’s a cinch he’s not gonna go down without a fight. If he’s carrying sixty or seventy grand on him like you were saying the other night, he’s not just gonna hand it over to us because we ask him nice.”

  Val rose impatiently from the sofa. “God damn right! We’re gonna have to take it from him.” His agitation showed in exaggerated hand gestures and a raised voice. “Look, buddy boy, I’m up against it just like you. I got bills. I been borrowing money all over the East End. My landlady’s all over my ass ‘cause I’m behind in the rent. I got Felina here to take care of. Her job doesn’t pay shit.”

  “Go hustle up a game of pool like you always do,” Eddie said. “That’s how you’ve gotten by ever since we was kids.”

  “Yeah, twenty, thirty bucks a game. I’m tired of that shit, man! Been doing it since I was fifteen. It’s gettin’ harder and harder for me to find a game anywhere around town anymore. I had to go all the way down to Galveston last week, where they don’t know me too well, just to make a hundred bucks.”

  Eddie wasn’t much of a pool player, but he knew that was the chief occupational hazard of the professional. You practice and practice, getting really good, then eventually, everybody knows how good you are. Pretty soon, nobody wants to play you, not even if you spot them five balls. Even in a city the size of Houston, Val’s reputation preceded him. Very few were willing to throw their money down for a crack at him. They might as well throw it out in the street.