Grifter's Game by Lawrence Block Page A

was there. Unless, of course, it was a wrong number. There was always that possibility. It could be a wrong number.
    Then it started to ring again.
    I got a quick mental picture—Brassard coming into his office any minute, finding the heroin. I got that picture and my knees started to shake. The envelopes were a nice gimmick but I couldn’t risk them. I snatched the one from the desk blotter, then grabbed three more from the desk drawer. I crammed them into my pockets and prayed that he wouldn’t look in the bottom drawer.
    And that the cops would.
    I took a look around and prayed again for salvation. Then I got out of that office and rang for the elevator.
    There was a fruit juice stand across the street. I found a free stool, ordered a hot dog and a glass of piña colada, and watched the doorway to his office building. It was almost five, and I started regretting the moment of panic. I should have left the envelopes there. He wouldn’t head for the office, not at this hour.
    I looked down at my attaché case. No heroin, not any more. Now I had heroin in my pockets instead. A lot of it. I worked on the hot dog and sipped the piña colada through a narrow straw. I watched the entrance, watched office girls head home from work, watched cleaning women get set for haphazard mop-up operations. Then a cab stopped and he got out of it. He paid the driver and the cab went away. My eyes stayed on him while he vanished into the building.
    He was there for fifteen minutes.
    It was a nerve-wracking, stomach-knotting quarter of an hour. On top of everything else, I had to justify my presence at the fruit juice stand by consuming two more hot dogs and two more piña coladas. Food had a tendency to stick in my throat, and it was hard.
    Waiting was harder. Waiting, and wondering what he was finding, and what he was thinking, and what mistakes I had made. Waiting, and wondering where in the world to go from here. Waiting.
    He came out, looking the same. I wondered if he was worried, or if I should be worried. I wondered how I was going to do it if he had discovered the boxful. There would be no way then. If my pigeon had tipped, there was only one thing to do. I had to throw up the whole thing, leave New York, forget Mona. It ought to be easy enough. I’d left many cities, forgotten many women. You just got up and went.
    I remembered her, and what she was like, and what it was like to be with her. And I knew that I couldn’t leave, couldn’t give it up. We were in it no matter what happened.
    I watched him get in a cab and go away. I finished slurping my piña colada and took a very deep breath of stale air. I walked across the street, walked into the building, rode the elevator to the fifth floor. I jimmied the door again. It was getting tiresome. I opened the desk drawer and checked. He hadn’t found the heroin. It was still there, the contents of that bottom drawer undisturbed.
    A world of tension drained out of me. I reached into my pocket, rescued the four envelopes, returned them to their places. I glanced at the desk pad—the numbers weren’t there anymore. He’d torn up my slip of paper. I sighed. It was a weird little game all right. I hauled out my wallet, found the slip of paper again, copied the numbers back onto the desk pad.
    I played the let’s-wipe-away-our-fingerprints game again, then slipped out of the office and left the building. I was beginning to think of it as my office and my building. Hell, I spent more time in it than he did.
    I walked a few blocks, pitching my attaché case in a convenient trash can. I didn’t need it any more. I wasn’t lugging heroin around town now. It was planted properly. A fortune in heroin. An amusing plant, I decided. An expensive investment.
    I was too tired for the subway. I hailed a cab and sank back into the seat, suddenly exhausted. It had been a busy day. Too busy, maybe. I wondered how busy the next few days were going to be. Very busy, probably.
    Then I thought some