“You look like the most pathetic dealer on the boardwalk,” she says.
“But do I look like me?”
“No,” she says with utter honesty. “You don’t.” She steps forward and taps the name tag fastened to his vest. “But then again, you don’t look like Lee either.”
He reads the name off the tag. “Lee Chon Yang?”
“He played football in high school,” she says. “Here, let me.”
She takes the safety pins from the bag, puts them in her teeth, removes his vest, and works, pin by pin, to cinch up the pants and corset the back of his shirt. When he puts the vest back on she walks around him, checking her work. “Not bad,” she says. “Just don’t breathe too deeply or it will all go kablooey.”
“All right, picture time.” He hands her the purple Polaroid camera she picked up in the mall. “Here, this wall should do.”
He stands in front of a light cement wall, glasses on, as she aims the camera at him. Flash. With a hum, the undeveloped photograph shoots out. They wait a moment as the picture develops, then compare it to Lee Chon Yang’s photo on his ID tag.
“Too big,” he says. “You have to get farther away.”
Two more attempts—flash flash—and they have a photograph the exact right size, which they cut out and place over Lee’s photograph on his Casino Control Commission tag, before slipping the tag back into its plastic case and clipping it to his vest.
“Now you at least match the photograph,” she says, “if not the name.”
“It will have to do. Anyone looks close enough, they’ll see through it anyway. How do I get in? Through the front door?”
“There’s a back entrance for employees,” she says. “We’ll wait for a bus from the parking lot to arrive and then slip in with the others. They won’t even check.”
“Sounds like a plan. And once you get me inside, I have another favor.”
“Don’t. Don’t even.”
“Just one more thing.”
Dolores hates this.
It isn’t bad enough that she sneaked Scrbacek into the casino, the place where she has worked steadily for five years and made what she’s needed to support herself and her daughter. It isn’t bad enough that she now has a seriously wanted man stashed in a storage closet beside the boiler room in the casino’s basement. It isn’t bad enough that she has done all this for a man who no longer wants her because of some old girlfriend and a boy who may or may not be his son. Now she has to do this one thing more, and the whispering doubts chatter monstrously, and she hates it.
Even as she walks to the front desk, she wonders why she is sticking her neck out so far for a now-ex-boyfriend, why she is willing to endanger and humiliate herself simply because he asked her. Isn’t it just another piece of deference toward another abusive man? Sure, Joe, I’ll have the abortion. No, Marty, my poor baby, I know you didn’t meant it, and it will heal, and yes I still love you. Sure, Sammy, I’d like my boobs to be bigger too, and you’re right, I hear they hardly ever leak anymore.
And now: Sure, J.D., I’ll risk everything and make myself out to be a whore to my friend if that’s what you need, you asshole.
Each time before, she ignored her doubts and lived to regret it. She wants to listen this time, to turn around and tell Scrbacek no, no, she is done tying herself in knots to please another faithless man, no. But she keeps moving forward. He’s in trouble, he needs help, he has come to her. There is some weakness in her character that compels her to ignore her doubts, to do everything she can for the man in her life. She hates this, what she is about to do, but she feels helpless to stop it.
Stacey is at the desk, former cocktail waitress, current clerk trainee, typing something into the computer, wearing her white shirt and blazer, her long nails clicking on the plastic keyboard keys, the tight rolls of hair beaded and piled high. It is slow at the front desk, and the three couples checking into the hotel are already being helped by others. Stacey smiles when she lifts her head and sees Dolores.
“Look at you,” says Dolores.
Stacey can’t stop herself from beaming.
“Moving up in the world like a rocket ship,” says Dolores.
“It’s not so grand as it seems,” says Stacey. “And I sure miss those tips.”
“I bet you miss the hands on your butt as you sashay by with a full tray, too.”
“Those you can keep. How’s the floor?”
“Lonely without you.”
“Give Pederson my regards.”
“The old dog.” Pause. “Stace. I need a favor, Stace.”
Stacey looks at Dolores for a moment before turning to a man working beside her, motioning that she’ll be a minute, and then taking Dolores around the desk and into a back room where they can be alone. Stacey closes the door behind them and leans against it.
“What you got?” says Stacey.
“Something stupid.”
“Go ahead.”
“Really stupid.”
Stacey just waits.
“I was at a party in one of the rooms last night,” says Dolores. “Just a quick invite that I accepted. It turned pretty . . . well, whatever. I somehow left my rings and a bracelet in there, beside one of the beds. It was stupid, and it ended badly, and I don’t want to go back, but it was my rings.”
“What room?” asks Stacey.
“Twenty-four-oh-two. I was just up there with Tamara’s elevator pass and knocked on the door, but there was like no answer. I waited for a while, really, and nothing. If I could just get into the room and get my rings and get out, it would be so great. I am so stupid, but it’s my rings, Stacey.”
“The Sammy diamond?”
“Uh-huh. It’s about all that asshole left me with after the divorce. And if Pederson ever found out, he’d . . .”
“You know what you are, Dolores? You’re a crazy lady. What are you doing up there in the first place?”
“I don’t know. Some gray-hair with too much money said there was a party. Charlene was with her father. I was bored. It was something to do.”
“And you were probably too polite to blow the guy off. You know your problem, Dolores? You don’t know how to say no. Repeat after me. No.”
“No,” says Dolores softly.
“Say it again, girl.”
“No.”
“Say it loud.”
“NO.”
“Say it proud.”
“NO, YOU ASSHOLE, NO.”
“There you go. Now you got it. I’m sorry, but our time’s up. We’ll begin again next week. Twenty-four-oh-two?” Stacey winks and pushes herself off the door. “Let me program a key card. Be back in a jiff.”
While Stacey is gone, Dolores winces at what she has just done—told a lie that could cost a good friend her fancy new job. Why is the equation so instinctual? Ignore the doubts, help the man, screw the woman. Why is this pattern so ingrained, even when the woman getting screwed is herself?
Generally, she can’t see it so clearly. Generally, there is some desperation that compels her to comply with what is asked of her. I want the man to still love me, and so I’ll do whatever he says because that will make him still love me. I want the man to stay because I don’t want to be alone. I want . . . I need . . . I’m afraid . . . But here, now, Scrbacek has already exploded those excuses. Scrbacek needs the help—truly, she can tell—but he isn’t playing on her emotions to get it. He’s not promising anything, or threatening anything, or twanging her false hopes. And somehow, because of his honesty, she finds herself somehow freed to make an actual decision.
There is J.D. on the one side, in deep, deep trouble, desperate for her help. And there is Stacey on the other side, trying to help a friend and hoping not to get screwed in the process. Dolores is confused, unable to balance the two, overwhelmed with the sound of the doubts she is fighting to ignore. And then, with a sudden start, she realizes she doesn’t have to.
When Stacey comes back into the room, looking nervously behind her, she has a
key card in her hand. “Got it,” she says.
“Are you allowed to do this?” asks Dolores.
“Not really,” says Stacey.
“And if they find out?”
“Back to the floor for me, if I’m lucky. But you’re a friend, Dolores. I trust you.”
Dolores steps over to her and gives her a hug. “Thank you, Stacey. Thank you so much,” she says before she leaves.
“Hey, girlfriend,” says Stacey, waving the key card. “You forgot this.”
“It’s not worth it,” says Dolores, her chest swelling with a strange elation. “I’ll find some other way.”
41
ROOM 2402
Room 2402.
From the crack of a stairwell door, Scrbacek could see the entrance to the room. The twenty-fourth floor was not your usual stack-them-into-the-casino-like-Japanese-salarymen type of floor. When Scrbacek had first stepped out of the elevator, he had walked the corridor, back and forth. As best he could tell, there were only seven numbered rooms on a floor that would usually have forty, and the room he was looking at, 2402, was the grandest, at least by size. It must be some hell of a room, 2402, the Bridal Suite, or the Syndicate Suite, or maybe, in keeping with the city’s presidential motif, the Nixon Suite. It was a room for oil-mad sheiks, for tycoons from Macau, for Panamanian middlemen.
A room fit for a magician.
Scrbacek eyed the door from within the stairwell and tried to figure out how to get inside. He could knock, of course—that was always the polite way—but polite didn’t cut it when you were on the run and the bastard inside was leading the effort to kill you. Excuse me, could I have a word? No? Oh, in that case, sorry to bother you. Enjoy the rest of your hunt.
He stared at the door and felt helpless. He had thought he would have the key. Why was he up there if he didn’t have the key? If he had the key, he could just slip in, hide here or there, reconnoiter. The whole plan had depended on Dolores getting him the key.
She had hesitated when he asked, stepped from one foot to the other and back again, tensed her face in frustration. She hadn’t wanted to get him the key in the worst way, but he had been certain in the end that she would. Dolores was one of those people who could be moved easily enough with the right kind of pressure. He didn’t know what it would cost her to get him the key, hadn’t really cared. He was fighting for his life here, dammit. Dolores would simply have to take some risks, that was all there was to it. And he had been dead certain that in the end she would do as he bid, until she came back to the storage closet, where he had been sitting in the dark upon a great tub of cleaning fluid, leaning against a phalanx of mops, his foot resting on a rolling bucket with a wringer attached, came back to tell him that getting the key was out of the question.
“But, Dolores, it’s life or death.”
“Whose?”
“Mine.”
“Then, no.”
“No? What do you mean, no?”
“I’m sorry, but no.” She stopped. “Actually, I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry at all. And it feels pretty damn good to say no. No.”
“Dolores?”
“No.” She exaggerated the roundness of her pronunciation. “No.”
“What’s going on, Dolores?”
“I won’t get you the key card. It’s too risky for a friend of mine. You’ll have to get in the room on your own.”
“How am I going to do something like—?”
Dolores put up a hand. “You’ll figure it out. But the twenty-fourth floor requires special access. I’ve arranged to get you up there. That, at least, won’t cost anyone her job. Let’s go.”
She walked quickly down the basement corridor, and he stared at her for a moment before struggling to catch up. They caught the elevator from the basement. The buttons only went up to twenty. After that, you had to access the floors with a key card. Dolores pushed the buttons for the fifteenth and nineteenth floors and then stepped back. “There’s a camera on,” she said quietly, without turning to him.
At the casino level the doors opened upon the glittery chop-chop-slash of coin and bell. Two old ladies stepped on with them before the doors closed again. They rode with Scrbacek and Dolores, laughing to each other about some cousin named Treat, who was drunk as a snake and losing his shirt at craps, until they stepped off at twelve. On the fifteenth floor, as soon as the door opened, Dolores stuck her head out for a moment. Quickly, a maid pulled her cart into the elevator.
“I’m sorry,” said the maid, tall and pretty, with the name Tamara on her tag, “but the service elevator is busy and I needed to get up one flight.” She pushed the button for the sixteenth floor and then, almost too quickly to catch, slid a card in and out of the slot for the twenty-fourth floor. At the sixteenth she backed out with her cart and smiled at Scrbacek.
When the door closed, Dolores, without looking at him, slipped a key card into his palm. “This will get you back to the basement. Good luck up there. I appreciate your honesty this afternoon, and I really hope everything turns out for you. Good-bye.”
The elevator slowed, the light stopped at nineteen, the doors opened.
“Oh, and J.D. One favor, please?”
“Sure,” said Scrbacek.
She stepped out onto the nineteenth floor and turned around to look him square in the face. “Here on in,” she said just before the doors closed in his face, “stay the hell out of my life, too.”
All of which left him alone and keyless on the twenty-fourth floor. He stood now in the stairwell, staring out from the crack of the barely opened stairwell door, waiting. Waiting for what? Who the hell knew?
If Scrbacek’s guess was right, inside that room was the Contessa’s magician, who had orchestrated the campaign to destroy J.D. Scrbacek. Which was why Scrbacek was desperate to know who the hell was behind that door. Once he found out, he could begin to plot his next couple of moves. All he needed was a glimpse. But there was another reason, too, for getting himself into room 2402. His past, his present, his future. He had revisited the lost opportunities of his past with Jenny Ling; he had seen the desolation of his present with Thomas Surwin, and now he couldn’t shake the strange suspicion that the person inside that room was the designated spirit to show to Scrbacek the shade of his future.
The elevator opened. Slowly something moved closer—surface metal groaning, wheels squeaking—moved closer and closer until it came within the narrow ambit of Scrbacek’s sight.
A room service cart. The obligatory room service cart.
In the back of his mind, Scrbacek had known it would arrive. The room service cart always arrives at the Nixon Suite. The crisp white linen, the bud vase with a bright-red flower, the food staying fresh under two gleaming silver domes, the twin bottles of champagne on ice. The room service guy knocked and, when there was no immediate answer, knocked again. The room service guy always knocks twice.
The door was pulled open by a beautiful young woman with a weary smile, clutching a toweled robe at her throat, strands of dark-blonde hair falling wetly on the white terrycloth. From the bottom of the robe, the bright pink of her toenails glittered on the carpet like tiny jewels.
“That’s fine,” said the woman as the man and the cart brushed by her. “Leave that here. The old cart’s in the back. You can take it down now.”
The door began to drift closed.
“That was quick,” said the room service guy.
“We were thirsty,” she said as she snatched one of the bottles out of the bucket with a swift rustle of ice and led the room service guy away to another room.
As the closing door picked up speed, Scrbacek stopped its progress with his shoe, gently pressed it open, and slipped inside.
42
SWEET SUITE
Scrbacek stood alone in the entrance of a suite furnished in astonishingly bad taste. The foyer held a painting that looked to be done on a spinning table at a kid’s fair, and a gold table on which stood a plaster sculpture of a naked woman, legs spread, as
if modeled straight from the pages of Hustler. A few steps beyond the food cart was a massive living room with a wall of windows overlooking the ocean, which was catching the last bits of the late-afternoon sun. A huge flat-screen faced a large wraparound leather couch, a wet bar with high stools, and a great black sculpture of a horse rearing on its hind legs, its prick oversize even for a horse. In the distance he could hear soft music, laughter.
The sound froze Scrbacek for a moment before he scrambled around the cart and dived behind the living room’s leather couch. He could hear them coming toward him now, the man pushing the other cart, the woman in her bare feet walking beside him.
“Looks like you’re having fun back there,” said the man.
“He’s having fun,” she said, her voice tired.
The door opened, the cart wheeled out, the door closed again. Scrbacek could hear the woman rustle her way to the cart, lift one of the lids, then another, snatch a piece of something between her teeth. She let out a weary sigh, something slumped to the floor, and her bare feet brushed the carpet as she made her way back toward the music.
Scrbacek waited a moment and then a moment more before slowly raising his head above the edge of the couch. The living room was empty of all but its gaudy furniture. On the cart, a silver dome had been moved to the side, revealing a bounteous plate of cocktail shrimp. On the floor, in a heap, was the woman’s terrycloth robe.
He made a quick reconnaissance. There was a kitchen, a small dining room, and two bedrooms branching off to the left, all empty. To the right was a hallway that led toward the music and the voices.
Before heading any farther, Scrbacek approached the cart to see if there was any bill or receipt that would give him a name. As he looked around, he absently took a shrimp, dipped it in the sauce, bit it off at the shell. He immediately spit his fake teeth into his palm and gagged at the sensation of biting with the plastic in his mouth. Then he finished the shrimp. It was firm and cool, tangy with iodine, the sauce saucy-hot.
The Four-Night Run Page 27