The Ultimate Good Luck

Начало книги

QUINN KNEW HE NEEDED to get lucky.

Rae was coming from Mexico City in the afternoon, and if they placed the money right, Sonny stepped out of the prisión three days later and disappeared.

Luck, Quinn thought, was always infatuated with efficiency. A Persian proverb said that very thing. And since he’d been in Oaxaca, he’d been efficient to every stinking particular. He’d been efficient, in fact, if he hadn’t been anything else. The only thing he couldn’t be sure about — and it worried him — was if it still ran in his character to get lucky.

In the afternoon he had met an Italian girl in the Portal de Flores. She had wandered out of the park through the street tables as though she was looking for someone in particular, and sat at his table. She smiled when she sat down and turned and looked back up the Portal at the hippies and the blanket beggars and the English tourists having coffees. She looked at him and smiled confidingly, as if he should understand why she was there. Quinn had begun to make it a habit to have no nonessential conversations. Talk was risky. You couldn’t tell what you’d say, and seven months alone had taught him to be quiet. But he didn’t mind sitting across from her. Nobody got pregnant looking. The Portal boundaried the central park with a long vaulted commercial arcade with the interior side open. It was the center of evil and good commerce in Oaxaca. He met Bernhardt in the Portal on the days they went to the prison, waiting underneath the suspended Raleigh package for Bernhardt’s Mercedes to turn the corner into Hidalgo Street.

Читать дальше →