Foul Ball

The dead-drop had been behind the loose tile in the men's room of O'Malley's Pool Hall for seven years. Nobody questioned why the bathroom wall had a slight give to it if you pressed just right. That's how long I'd been running the same betting operation, taking a piece of the underground poker games that rotated through the back room, and that's how long it took me to realize that Elena, the woman who'd been serving me drinks every Thursday for three years, was nobody's bartender.

I found out because her husband walked in—a man I recognized from surveillance photos I'd pulled myself when I was still freelancing as a private investigator, before I graduated to taking points off illegal card games. The intelligence community called him 'the Carpenter.' He built the back doors into corporate security systems, the kind that got you ten years in federal prison if you were caught and a corner office if you were the one paying him.

'Baseball,' he said, sliding onto the stool beside me like he'd been there a hundred times. 'Yankees are down three in the eighth. You got anything riding on it?'

I should have walked out right then. Instead I watched Elena's hands as she poured his whiskey—not the practiced casualness of someone working for tips, but the precise economy of someone who measured everything. She knew what I was. She knew what he was. She'd been sitting between us for three years, collecting.

The eight-ball was still rolling across the table when I asked the question that burned through me: 'How much?'

Elena's face didn't change. 'Nothing you can't afford.' She pushed a folded cocktail napkin across the bar. 'Names. Dates. The games you've been bankrolling. The fact that you're still officially listed as deceased in three states.' She paused. 'The real question is what your old employers at the Agency will pay to know you're still breathing.'

Outside, summer rain slicked the parking lot. Inside, the smell of chlorine and stale beer pressed close. I'd spent years thinking I was the one doing the spying—collecting secrets like bottle caps, keeping them in a box beneath my bed. Turns out I was just the one being collected.

'What happens now?' I asked.

'Now,' Elena said, 'you finish your drink. Then we all walk out of here. You've got a choice about whose ledger you end up in.' She set the bottle down, and her wedding ring caught the light. 'Consider this your notification that the game's changed. The question is whether you're still playing.'

The baseball game on television cut to commercial. Someone racked the balls on table three. I looked at her—really looked at her—and realized I'd never seen her at all until she'd decided to let me. 'And if I walk away from both?'

'Then someone else takes your chair,' she said simply. 'There's always someone else willing to play.'

I finished my drink and stood up. Some games, you realize, you lost before you ever sat down at the table.