‘That your safe room?’ Billy asks.
‘Yeah. And do you know what? I forgot the fucking combination.’ Then he shakes his head. ‘Nah, that’s bullshit. I blanked on the combination. Just four numbers and all I could remember is the second one’s a two.’
‘What about now?’ Billy asks.
‘6247,’ Nick says, and actually laughs.
Billy nods. ‘It happens to the best of us and it happens to the rest of us.’
Nick studies him. He wipes his lips, which are shiny with spit. ‘You sound different. You even look different. You were never as stupid as you made out, were you? Giorgio told me that and I didn’t believe him.’
‘Before you had him killed,’ Billy says.
Nick’s eyes widen with what Billy could swear is genuine surprise. ‘Giorgio isn’t dead, he’s in Brazil.’ He studies Billy’s face. ‘You don’t believe me?’
‘After the shit you pulled, why would I believe a word that comes out of your mouth?’
Nick shrugs as if to say point taken. ‘Can I sit down? My legs are all weak.’
Billy gestures with the barrel of the Glock to the three spectators’ seats beside the pool table. Nick walks unsteadily to the one in the middle and sits down. He reaches behind him and flips a switch that turns on the three hanging lights over the green felt.
‘I never should have taken the contract. But all that money … it blinded me.’
Billy reckons he has some time. It would be a mistake to push it too far, but he may do so anyway. Because he wants answers. The money seems secondary. Not to mention unlikely. It’s only in movies that the gangster has a wall of cash in his safe room. These days it’s all computer transfers. Money hardly exists at all. Money has become the ghost in the machine.
‘Pigs has got liver disease. You would’ve put money on his heart going, fat as he is, but it was his liver that turned out to be the problem. He needs a transplant. Doctors said no way unless he loses some weight, like two hundred pounds. If he doesn’t, he’ll die on the operating table. So he went to Brazil.’
‘A fat farm?’
‘A special clinic. The kind where once you sign in you can’t sign out until you reach your target weight and they let you sign out. He knew that’s the only way it could work, otherwise he’d be gone the first time he got a yen for a Triple Whopper with Cheese.’
Billy is starting to believe it. Nick is talking about Giorgio mostly in the present tense, and he hasn’t slipped up. In a way it’s like Edison flushing the toilet as he fell, mortally wounded. Some things are too bizarre not to be true. Georgie Pigs in a fat farm gulag is surely one of those things.
‘Giorgio knew he’d be ID’d after you killed Joel Allen, he’s a fucking whale, but he was okay with that. He said it was a way of making sure he wouldn’t back out at the last minute, new liver or no new liver. Plus he wanted to retire.’
‘Really?’ Billy would have believed Giorgio was one of those guys who would die in harness.
‘Yeah.’
‘Sunset years in Brazil?’
‘I think Argentina.’
‘Sounds expensive. What kind of a retirement bonus did he get for helping to set me up?’
Nick hesitates, then says, ‘Three million.’
‘Three for Giorgio and six for bringing me down.’
Nick’s eyes widen and he sags in the chair. He’s thinking that if Billy knows that, any chance he might have had of getting out of this alive just flew away. He’s probably right.
‘But you stuck at paying me the lousy million and a half you owed? I knew you were cheap, Nick, but I didn’t peg you for a chiseler.’
‘Billy, we were never going to—’
‘You were. I want to hear you say it or I’ll kill you right now.’
‘You’re going to kill me anyway,’ Nick says, and although his voice is steady enough, a single tear rolls down one plump and beautifully shaved cheek.
Billy doesn’t reply.
‘Okay, yeah. We were going to kill you. That came with the deal. Dana was going to do it.’
‘I was going to be your Oswald.’
‘It wasn’t my idea, Billy. I told the client you’d stand up no matter what. He insisted, and like I said, the money blinded me.’
Billy could ask how much Nick got, but does he want to know? He does not. ‘Who’s the client?’
Instead of answering, Nick points to the door leading to the panic room. ‘I’ve got money. Not a million-five but at least eighty thousand, probably more like a hundred. I’ll give it to you and I’ll get you the rest.’