Fiddle Game

Poisoned Pen Press

Chapter One

On the day of the first killing, it rained. Not an easy rain, but the kind of endless, pounding deluge that makes people wonder if they really did throw out that old boat catalog, and if not, whether it listed any arks. Personally, I gave up looking for arks a long time ago, the wooden ones or any other kind. I like the rain. Agnes, my secretary, says that's just perversity, liking anything that puts other people in a bad mood, but she isn't always right. Not always. On that particular wet day in 1996, nobody was right.

I looked out the streaked glass of my single storefront window, past the neon sign that says "24-Hour Service" backwards, and assessed the prospects of a flash flood.

You can tell a lot about a city by what's in its old, core downtown. Across the street from me is an old time resident hotel, long ago gone to seed. There used to be a nightclub on the ground floor under it, but that's been boarded up and closed for longer than anybody remembers. Farther down is a place called Pawn USA, a hole-in-the wall deli, and a pornographic book store. They've all been around long enough to be landmarks. The pawn shop, run by a sometime friend of mine named Nickel Pete Carchetti, just expanded and got its trendy new name, which I suspect came from the title of a textbook on modern economics. Farther down the street lie a Dunn Brothers coffee shop, an upscale tattoo parlor, and a manicure emporium called Big City Nails. Kitty-corner across from me stands the newly renovated Courthouse, taking up a whole square block, and behind it, connected to it by tunnel, is the County Jail. The long fingernails, tribal markings, and chi-chi coffee are current hot-ticket items, but I don't expect them to last. The trendy shops come and go. Here in St. Paul, Minnesota, the capitol of Midwest niceness, the only really solid growth industries we have are government and crime.

Strangely enough, the cops don't have a building in downtown proper, merely one on the fringe of it, though they definitely have a street presence. Maybe that's the way it should be, since they are really just the gatekeepers to the criminal justice system. And if that's the case, then I'm the man in the tollbooth. My name is Herman Jackson, and I'm a bail bondsman.

Behind me, Agnes sat at her PC clattering keys sporadically. I could tell by the rhythm that it wasn't work-related, but since she is my chief office organizer, accountant, PR expert, and generally indispensable confidant, as well as my secretary, she's entitled to spend her time as she sees fit. The computer was making funny noises, like tinny fanfare or electronic oohs and aahs, and occasionally she would make an "ooh" of her own.

"Video games, pornography, or the stock market?" I asked, without turning around.

"Stocks. I don't do games." She said nothing about porn, I noticed. "You should look at this, Herman. Amtech-dot-com is down to sixteen and a half today. It's a fluke, has to be."

"The market is reacting to news of an outbreak of moldy sowbellies in Katmandu." Which made exactly as much sense as most of what I hear out of market analysts.

"Seriously, at that price, you could make a killing. Double your money in a couple months, tops. You could afford to take a little flier like that now and then, you know. On your latest profit-and-loss sheet, you showed ..."

"I don't gamble, Aggie."

"You gamble on pool."

"That's not gambling, that's social intercourse. I never bet more than a hundred on a game, and I never try a double-back off the side rail if I've had more than two drinks." And if that isn't prudence and self-discipline, I don't know the stuff. And I do. I paid full price for it, and now it's my biggest asset.

"The market's not really gambling, either," she said. "It's more like reversible bidding at a garage sale. After all the hype blows away, there's always a real piece of merchandise of some kind there."

"Except when there isn't. How much did you lose on Enron? Isn't that why you're still driving to work in your beat-up Toyota instead of your new Lexus?"

"That's not fair, Herman. People a lot smarter than me got burned in that scam."

"And people smarter yet didn't play."

"Like you? Like that time you got arrested for somebody else's homicide and had to liquidate your business in Detroit and run off to the boonies?"

It was her ultimate weapon in any argument, and I had no defense for it. The incident she referred to was back in my high-roller days, when my ship really had come in, but I was dumb enough to torpedo it at the dock. Sometimes I let myself think those days might come back, but I don't really believe it. There aren't any big scores in the bonding business. Not usually, anyway. What you see up front is what you get, and sometimes you don't even get that. And in any case, the great god Odz doesn't forgive that kind of stupidity. St. Paul is my Elba, and if a delegation of leaderless Frenchmen came one day to rescue me from it, I would run from them in terror.

"Low blow, Aggie. I wasn't as smart then, in a lot of ways, and I admit it."

"You want a cookie for 'fessing up like a good boy?"

"You want to answer that ringing thing? It might be the phone."

She picked up the phone, and the pulse of the day's real business began.

Most of my business comes to me by phone, or at least the first contact does. I get a call from a defense lawyer or a PD, with the daily list of souls in bondage who want to buy a ticket to freedom. The logistics of paper and money flow are worked out, and the wheels begin to turn. I'm not allowed to start the process by approaching them, in the courtroom or the jail. It's sort of like ambulance chasing for a lawyer; not actually illegal, but sudden death to a professional reputation. Instead, I imitate Mohammed and wait for the accused mountains to come to me.

For most customers, it's a standard proposition: ten percent non-refundable fee and some kind of negotiable security for the rest. If you think about it, it's a crummy deal for the client. He's paying a hell of a wad of cash for a short burst of liberty that he's probably going to lose anyhow, and if he jumps bail, or even appears to, he loses the security, to boot. But of course, they're all going to be acquitted, so they don't worry about that. Meanwhile, they wait for the authorities or the gods or the odds to come around, and the prospect of a short time in jail is horrifying. The prospect of a much longer time in prison doesn't seem to bother them so much. People have no grasp of time. All they can deal with is never and forever. They don't handle cause and effect real well, either.

If the first call is from a lawyer I know, sometimes we work out some other terms. It's a quid pro quo thing. I give up a little quid, in the form of reduced or eliminated security for a trustworthy customer, and the lawyer gives me some quo in the form of telling me what his clients are really like, including which ones are going to run like rabbits the minute the cuffs are off. I could do away with this little part of the whole game, treat everybody the same, but I like the action. And that's not gambling, either.

Most of the time, I never see the actual client. But I do see a regular parade of siblings, parents, friends, lovers, business partners, and significant-whatevers, come to do the dirty job of bargaining for...