Page 181 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Slow Burn

it comes to that. Maybe he knew the time would be wrong on that
particular machine.”
That sounded like grasping at straws. “Well, how much time did he
need to get to Al Carbone’s place, kill the old guy, and hightail it back
with his beer?”
“You can look at the map yourself. Half an hour round trip.
Minimum.”
Another dead end. “If all those guys are unemployed, maybe they
would lie for a small consideration.”
“Not for Quigley, they wouldn’t. He’s fleecing them, whether they
know it or not.”
I had missed it again.
“They’re not playing just for their amusement, Duncan. Those
chips have a real value, redeemable out of sight of prying eyes, you
can be sure. But Quigley is a card sharp. Didn’t you see the queen of
spades he had up his sleeve when he reached for that beer receipt?”
What could I say? That I was watching her watch him?

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It was getting monotonous, talking to what looked like the same
person over and over again. I wondered how Labelle could keep
them straight. The little notebook was indispensable, I could see that.
“Okay. Who’s next? Or is it last? I’ve lost track.”
She navigated between a bus on our right pulling out into our lane
and a huge truck coming toward us straddling the double line,
without flinching or slowing down.
“Quentin. He actually finished high school in prison. That makes
him the most educated of the quints.”
“What was his offense?”
“Like many teenagers of his generation, he saw the rapid growth of
personal computing as an opportunity for mischief. But while most
of his contemporaries were hacking away at secured systems and
using their programming skills to destroy databases, Quentin came up
with a way to squeeze money out of his fellow on-line users. With the
advent of dial-up bulletin boards in the Eighties came the
phenomenon of shareware, or free programs available to anyone with
a PC and a modem. Many of the early users were not wealthy, and

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