by Robert Ward
“Why not?” Marty countered. “ I have one of the best rooms around, and a table like you've never seen. I think you'll find it a unique experience.”
He smiled at Johnny in such an affable way that he couldn't be denied.
“Okay, then,” Johnny said. “Where do you live?”
“The Blue Wolf,” Marty said. “ Bungalow five. You know the place?”
“Sure I do,” Johnny said. “No problem.” He looked at Marty suspiciously, but finally gave him his cell phone number.
“Perfect,” Millie said, blowing Johnny a kiss. “I'll make us a nice dinner. You're gonna love it, Johnny. Trust me.”
Johnny nodded but felt funny inside. What the fuck was going on? Were they blowing him off, hustling his ass? These two old creeps?
He'd like to follow them outside and grab that bankroll. But maybe . . . maybe this way would be better. He'd get inside their home. No telling what kind of valuable stuff they'd have in there. Artwork and rugs, all kinds of stuff he could boost. Yeah, this could be just the beginning.
It was going to work out fine.
“I trust you both,” he said. “Just make sure you call me.”
“Fine, John,” Marty said. “We both look forward to it. Bye now.”
The two oldsters smiled and headed out of the pool room. Johnny
smiled, then hit the cue ball into the eight and drove it deep into the
corner pocket.
Just like the ace he was.
Chapter Twenty-one
Phil was hanging out at the bar looking for trim when it occurred to him that this Blue Wolf joint wasn't a hangout type of place. What he needed was to take a class, like yoga, or meditation. That's where all the broads would be. Of course.
(Meanwhile he kept thinking of Dee Dee, out again with Ziko, probably doing some kind of Kama Sutra thing with him. God, it made him want to break the little fuck's head like a melon.)
He picked a schedule up at the front desk. There was Pilates in an hour. He knew all about that. He'd been doing it for the last five years, before he sold out and retired. Supposed to improve your core strength. But he noticed that a lot of the women who did it weren't very feminine. They were superaggressive business execs, probably ate men for lunch. So Pilates was out. What else did they offer? Oh, here's one. Kundalini Expression: The Art of Zen Sitting.
That should be easy, and maybe there would be some cute chicks in the class.
Phil headed into the Crystal Desert Room. That was clever, the way they turned the desert idea—a bunch of cactus and fucking sand—into a crystal desert, like it was the magical seat of all learning. Sort of what he used to do in his old business days. Give a shithole a good name and watch the folks come running.
His place was called the Evergreen Retirement Community. He'd hired a local hack artist who had painted pictures of big strong evergreen trees with some attractive old people wearing sweaters tied around their waists, holding golf clubs and tennis racquets. He had insisted that they have stunning white teeth and attractive, muscular builds—unlike the real old folks who lived in the snake pit of a building. Most of the denizens of Evergreen were hugely obese old slobs who spent all day eating Twinkies and pounding down the swill he served at dinner. That was another of his gimmicks. “All you can eat” at dinner hour. He got the food cut-rate from a wholesale “meal maker” in Hamilton, Ohio. Third-rate hams, second-rate chickens, and half-dead veggies, and since he bought these “gourmet delights” in bulk he was able to practically give away the food. Of course, he made it up on the exorbitant prices he charged for the condos and the two-bedroom “villas” he sold to the old folks. Between that and the money he soaked them for on their private insurance, he was raking in the dough. The old-folks business was really terrific back in Ohio, but he had to admit it was even slicker down here in the Southwest. Here they not only soaked you for the rooms and booze but they had the phony spiritual thing going as well. What's more, the people who worked here almost seemed to believe it.
Once in the classroom, Phil soon found what he was looking for, a really cute blonde from Sacramento. Her name was Annie. She was in her forties, had the most adorable Doris Day nose, and a really nice figure. She seemed like a real nice girl, too. She told him all about her husband who had died suddenly last winter of a heart attack while snowmobiling up in Seattle. Perfect.
They sat next to each other in the lotus position—well, Phil was sort of in the lotus position—and he thought they had a real vibe going.
The Zen master was a Japanese guy. There seemed to be as many Japs here as Mexes. Guess the crystal desert just lent itself to any fantasy you wanted to lay on it. American Indians, Mexicans, Japs. Ain't it funny that in America all the losers are mystics? After you kill about a million of them you sentimentalize the rest.
Anyway, the guy's name was Sensei Larry. Come to think of it, he might have been Japanese-Indian; they had all kinds of mutts down here.
He was very serious and spoke in a flower-soft voice about getting to the core of oneself by breathing in and out and getting the chakras, which were in your back, to rise up.
During the whole “sit,” Phil kept stealing little peeks at Annie, who was breathing in deeply. Oh, what nice breasts she had!
She smiled at him once and whispered, “Take this seriously, Phil. You'll learn a lot about yourself.”
Well, why the hell not, Phil thought. He'd get into the breathing and holding his back erect and maybe he would have some kind of mystical vision. He could be as spiritual as the next asshole.
He breathed in deeply seven times as instructed, and let it out slowly. Waiting, waiting for a vision. What would it be? A flower? A many-petaled flower that showed the, uh . . . many-petaled layers of existence? Or some kind of mystical animal? A jaguar? A peacock? A prancing caterpillar?
Phil listened to Sensei Larry's voice, low and reassuring. He knew for sure he was going to see something, something he could share with Annie to show her he was a sensitive guy, and pretty soon she'd be sucking his cock like a cheerleader under the stands at halftime.
The thing to do is keep the eyes closed and concentrate on seeing the void. No, not seeing it, becoming it. He'd read enough Zen books back in college to get it. You had to not see it, because then you were, like, not in it. The way to be in it was to be it.
You were not a viewer, you were the view, or some bullshit like that.
Phil scrunched up his eyes and tried, really tried (knowing that he shouldn't be trying but come on!) to become the void, or whatever, and see (no, not see, be) the many-petaled rose.
He felt his knee killing him from back when he played football. He felt his heart beating way too fast and wondered if anyone had ever dropped dead trying too hard to relax.
He just bet they had. (Or, even worse, maybe he would be the first!)
He shut his eyes harder, practically squashing his eyeballs.
He had to get it right.
Had to see, be nothing.
He rocked back and forth a little now, chanting a makeshift mantra (Go, Buckeyes, Go!), and trying to lose all self-consciousness, and lo and behold he began to have a vision in his third eye. At least he thought it was his third eye. That was what the other meditators were always talking about around Blue Wolf. How do you stimulate the third eye? How do you make it see, really see? How did the ancient Babylonians do it? How did they get the old third eye going, flashing amazing visions of a world past ours, the third eye that Hitler had sought as well, the third eye that could show you . . . show you . . . well, Phil wasn't quite sure what it could show you, but something really great and way beyond having biscuits and gravy at Bob Evans in Ohio.
And now, yes, there it was. A vision taking shape right in the middle of his head, exactly where the third eye was supposed to be.
He could see it forming but it was still kind of misty and ill-shaped.
Try harder to try less, Phil thought.
Or is it try less to try harder?
Only now the mist was clearing and he could really see the thing . . . oh, yeah, now he could really see it, and it wasn't a rose or any kind of flower. It was . . . oh, shit. . . fucking Thelma Jackson.
It was her, in all her tattered glory. The sixty-eight-year-old woman who had started a movement against Phil and the entire Evergreen community. Yes, the woman who had signed up fifty, then sixty, then over a hundred and fifty old people who lived at Evergreen. People who followed her into battle against Phil and the Evergreen lifestyle. Yes, Thelma, the evil bitch, who had attacked Phil for not taking care of the rooms, for not maintaining the light fixtures, for hiring sadistic ex-criminals to be on staff at the cheesy dump. (Ex-criminals were so much cheaper.)
Thelma, who said the food was shitty, that the doctors were tenth-rate, and that the on-site grocery store was the biggest rip-off of all time. Thelma Jackson who went to the papers and television and made the goddamned state inspectors come down on Evergreen like killer mosquitoes, probing and prodding and asking questions that Phil couldn't answer.
That bitch cost him millions of dollars in fixes, not to mention the deep embarrassment of being known as a slumlord, the sworn enemy of old folks not only in Ohio but all over the United States of America.
And Thelma Jackson had received some kind of good citizen's medal, while Phil got loads of shit dumped on his head.
And now he had to see her in his supposedly crystal, mystic vision.
His head reeled and he felt his breath come hard as he opened his eyes.
Next to him Annie, of the cute nose and double-pert breasts, smiled, opened her eyes, and said, “ I saw myself a thousand years ago. I was an Indian princess in Bombay!”
“That's great,” Phil said. “That's just fucking great.”
“What did you see, Phil?” Annie asked, smiling in her innocent way.
“I saw ... I saw a great desert,” Phil said. “And coming across it was this . . . this woman in a white caftan, and she beckoned to me. She really did. At first I couldn't see her face at all, but then she got closer and closer and I saw her. And she was . . . she was you, Annie. She really was. It was as though you had something wonderful to teach me.”
Christ, Phil thought, what total, weak bullshit. She'd see right through that. For sure.
But no, Annie was smiling. A three-hundred-watt smile now. Man, she ate it right up.
“Did you really see me, Phil?” she asked, beaming.
“I sure did,” Phil said. “ I felt it when I walked in here today, but I wasn't really one-hundred percent sure until I had my vision. What is it you want to teach me, sweetheart?”
She reached over and touched his hand. Her skin was warm, nurturing.
“I can't tell you now, Phil. But I want to see you, so much. I felt the same kind of thing when you walked in. Can I call you a little later? I have a surprise for you!”
“You bet you can,” Phil said. He quickly gave her his cell phone number.
Phil was so excited he was nearly out of his skin.
“Don't worry, sweetheart,” he said. “I'll be waiting for your call.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Jack and Oscar took a walk on the square and sat on a bench in the park. The shooter had escaped and they had looked for Tommy for an hour but found only his cycle tracks. Tracks that disappeared into the desert.
“He's probably out of the state by now.”
“Yeah,” Jack said, “but we really need to find out what he was talking about. He told me about this ceremony tomorrow night. The winter solstice. I think he was talking about somebody using Jennifer as a human sacrifice.”
“Jesus. He never gave any clue where it was going to be held?”
“Yeah, he did. ‘Under,’ he said. Underground, somewhere.”
“What else?”
“Well, he mentioned the Anasazi Indians. The ancient tribe from New Mexico. And something else. The Nombee?”
“Jesus,” Oscar said. “It's not Nombee . . . it's gotta be the Namba . . . the Tupinamba.”
Jack looked at him in shock.
“How the hell do you know that?”
“I studied Latin American culture at UCLA, partner. I was thinking about being a diplomat at one time. I was hoping I might get a post in Brazil. I even went down there on a student exchange deal one semester. I found out all about the Tupinamba. They were a very well-organized tribe in the rain forest. Mostly were naked and self-sufficient. But there were a lot of wars with other tribes. Eventually most of them were wiped out.”
“That's fascinating, but what the hell does it have to do with Jennifer's kidnapping?”
Oscar stood up and began to pace.
“I don't know. I wish I hadn't spent so much of my time in college comparing brews. I know more about freaking beer than what I studied. But there was something ... I know it. C'mon, amigo. We got to do some research.”
In Oscar's room they did a Google search on “Tupinamba.” Within seconds they had thousands of sites. The first few said basically the same things that Oscar had remembered.
Then they came to another site. Oscar pounded the desk.
“Look at this.”
The link said: “Tupinamba prisoners.”
Oscar began to read aloud.
The Tupinamba seemed to be one of the most enlightened tribes. If they took a prisoner, they gave him a house, food, and a woman to sleep with, and, basically, treated him like an honored guest. For years this is all anyone knew of them. They seemed civilized compared to the other tribes. But anthropologist Mark A. Reynolds of the University of California, Berkeley, found evidence that there was one more step in the prisoner's incarceration. After being wined and dined and treated like a prince, he was, on an appointed day, tied to a stake, burned alive, and eaten by the Tupinamba tribal members.
“Holy shit,” Jack said. “And the Anasazi?”
“I don't know about them. I always thought they were peaceful. There was something about them that I read once, though. They believed they had discovered the secret to eternal life. Some kind of black magic.”
Oscar quickly Googled that, too, and found a connection to the Tupinamba. Within seconds they were reading about how recent scholarship had destroyed the ancient myth of the Anasazi as ancient, peace-loving Indians.
“Listen to this. ‘The Anasazi Indians of New Mexico and Arizona believed they had found the secret of eternal life.’” Oscar scrolled down the page. “Jesus, look here! ‘By eating the flesh of their victims they took part in what they called sacred cannibalism. They took their enemies’ spirit and youth. They believed that through this ritual they could return to their own youth and live forever.’”
The two men looked at each other in shock.
“That's madness,” Oscar said. “Who would believe such a thing now?”
Jack shook his head. “ I'll tell you who. People who are going to die. Old people looking for the answer to the most terrifying question in the world: Why must I die? And it's been there all along, staring us right in the face. Christ, they even have a department at Blue Wolf called Ancient Ways, run by that woman Sally Amoros.”
“But you said that no one would care that they didn't have the answer to aging.”
“Exactly,” Jack said. “ No one would. Everyone knows it's a sham, a mere cosmetic procedure, a kind of make-believe weekend in which older people pretend they can become young again. No one would kill anyone for telling people that it was all bullshit. But what if they really could reverse the clock? What if they had found something that worked, or half worked anyway? That's got to be it, Oscar. Think of Tommy, his skin . . . half old, half. . . something else. Maybe he was in the middle of changing. He told me there are many levels. You see?”
“Many levels? So maybe it's like if y
ou pay so much you get to turn the clock back ten years? But if you pay more you get the full treatment? You get to become really young?”
“It must be something like that. They must be using young people's body parts as replacements for older ones. And somehow cannibalism has to be a part of what they do. And now I see something else. Why was Kim Walker so anxious to get me to go back to the Jackalope? To make me think that this whole thing was about girls being sent into prostitution.”
“A wild-goose chase?”
“Exactly. And the pig. They must have some kind of animal testing lab somewhere around here, too. They were using Ole Big as a test animal and Zollie was trying to save him, but they had already operated on him. That's why his intestines were gone. It's wild but it all adds up.”
“That means it isn't Lucky,” Oscar said. “He couldn't come up with any of this.”
“That's right,” Jack said, “but he could use his bikers to grab the people for somebody who then did the operations.”
“Alex Williams and Blue Wolf,” Oscar said. “ But Lucky and Alex hate one another.”
“At least that's what they want us to believe,” Jack said. “ Maybe that fight they had in the Red Sombrero was staged. And now that I think about it, that woman I saw in the hospital, Mary Jo. She said they promised her she'd be young again. Not feel young again but really be young. She even showed me a picture of herself as a girl. Said they'd make her look like that again.”
Oscar shook his head.
“Okay, I don't say I buy it all, but just theoretically what does all this have to do with them kidnapping Michelle Wu?”
Jack looked hard at Oscar, and smiled.
“What did you just say?”
“ Oh, right, I said Michelle Wu but I meant Jennifer. Just a slip of the tongue, amigo.”
“No,” Jack said. “You just might be a genius, Oscar.”
“What do you . . . You mean that they may have kidnapped . . .”
“Yes, whoever did this might have kidnapped Jennifer Wu by mistake. Maybe Michelle found out about their secret, and maybe she tried to deal herself in.”