The phone rang behind the bar at The Happy Beaver. The name was unfortunate, but it was better than the alternative.
When Nunn opened the place – back when he actually spent time there – he thought about calling it something classy, like Cashmere or Sensations. It turned out those names were taken. So it came down to The Happy Beaver or Walter's Pussy Barn. He put it up to a vote. The dancers thought The Happy Beaver sounded better than Walter's Pussy Barn. Classier.
Soshi, the bartender, answered the phone. Soshi wasn't her real name. Her real name was Brenda. Soshi, she thought, sounded more exotic than Brenda. Brenda sounded like someone you take home to mom. Soshi sounded like someone you take out to the parking lot. Someone named Soshi made a lot more in tips in a strip club than someone named Brenda.
"Happy Beaver," she said, cheery.
"He there?" the voice asked.
There was only one "he." And he was there.
"Papa. Phone," she said.
Papa – Philo Papadopoulos – was in the middle of interviewing a new dancer, trying to come up with a good stripper name for her. Her name was Kathy Conley and Papa had suggested "Cat, like pussy cat" when Soshi interrupted.
"Yeah," he said into the phone.
"A little problem," Spew said.
"Not on the phone, asshole. Put Smith on."
There was some noise and then Smith came on the line.
"What the fuck's wrong with you, putting that shithead on the phone?"
"I told him he has to explain what happened."
"Well, whatever happened, you can tell me about later, OK? You know where. About half an hour."
Papa turned back to Kathy. She had told him she was a law student and needed money to pay for school. Papa liked that. He already had a dancer who was a doctoral candidate in Hellenic studies, another who was a sociology undergrad and two others who were investment bankers who lost their jobs when their firm imploded.
"So, Cat?"
"Yeah, I'll be Cat."
Half an hour later, Smith and Spew sat outside an old church. Years ago, it had been a Lutheran church, closed when its congregation fled the city for the suburbs. It was a bar for a few years and then a punk club and then a vacant building that offered shelter to junkies and crack whores. Most recently, it had been a Pentecostal church, which dissolved after the minister was found in his office speaking in tongues with a member of his flock.
Now, it was the worldwide headquarters for the First Church of Elvis, Scientist.
It was Papa's church, conceived during a religious epiphany that happened to correspond with a late night, self-pitying, broke-ass drunk. Smith was present at the conception of this new way of faith.
He was Papa's bag man. It was a decent gig. The hours weren't bad and the pay was good. All he had to do was kick up a percentage of what he collected to Papa and everything was kosher. He just sort of fell into it. He had been a bartender at a club Papa frequented. One day, he was sitting behind the bar reading "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" when Papa said, out of the blue, "You seem like a smart guy. You want a job?"
"I have a job."
"No, a better one."
And that was that. Papa figured any guy who read books that didn't have pictures of naked women was some kind of genius. He had enough idiots working for him. A genius would be a nice change of pace.
Smith said, "Why not?"
Smith had no illusions about the job. He knew who Papa was and what he did for a living. He figured it wouldn't be too bad. All he had to do was collect money. No muscle required, for the most part. For that, Papa had Fat Sam, called so because he weighed about 450 pounds and was expanding at approximately the same rate as the universe. Once, on a bet, Fat Sam ate 100 pieces of fried chicken – no wings – in one night at a neighborhood tavern. He looked like someone had tried to stuff 450 pounds of shit into a 50-pound bag. His features could best be described as melted. When someone needed the shit kicked out of him, Fat Sam was your man, provided he could catch his prey or somebody held it down.
Papa, on the other hand, looked like a gnome – a ring of graying hair on his head, playful eyes, and a crooked grin, like a character from "Lord of the Rings," one of the benevolent ones. He wasn't exactly benevolent, though. He was a small-time crook in a small-time town, a little Pennsylvania shithole that had seen better days. It was said that he had connections to the Jersey mob. Which was true. He was pretty much an employee of more powerful mobsters in Jersey. As long as he sent money, they left him alone.
It was also said that anyone who crossed him wound up getting a visit from Fat Sam. The last thing you wanted to see was Fat Sam darkening your door. In a lot of cases, it was the last thing you saw before Fat Sam ran you through the car shredder at his cousin's scrap yard, or worse. Rumor had it Fat Sam once dismembered a guy who had crossed Papa and ate him. It wasn't true, of course. He fed the guy's dismembered remains to the Dobermans at the scrap yard.
That night, Papa was talking about his favorite topic, making money. Rather, he was bitching about it. He was involved in some smalltime stuff – bookmaking, loan sharking, running some of the nastiest, most disease-ridden whores this side of Tijuana. He was plankton in the organized crime food chain. He knew some guys and had done business with them, mostly sending a percentage of his proceeds to them to maintain exclusive rights to his territory.
He made a good living, but it wasn't as good as it once was. The state stole a lot of the gambling business, what with casinos and lotteries. The credit card companies horned in the loan sharking business. All of the disease-ridden whores went into business for themselves, advertising for free on Craigslist. He couldn't get into the big money with drugs because Jamaicans from New York had tied up that market and the last person who tried to compete in the marketplace wound up having a business meeting with a chainsaw.
Compounding his problems, the town's blue collar jobs had migrated overseas or to places where people worked for trinkets and bright shiny objects – China, Indonesia, South Carolina. The suburbs were full of people who commuted to more prosperous cities and who had moved here because of its depressed real estate prices. The pool of disposable income residents of the small town could throw Papa's way was a puddle.
He made a living, but he wasn't getting rich, and more than anything, Papa wanted to be rich. He liked to say that he wanted to have "fuck you money." He wanted to have enough cash to be able to say "fuck you" to anybody, which struck Smith as odd because Papa wasn't exactly inhibited in that regard now.
They were sitting at the bar of the Fish and Rifle Club, the place Papa went to collect his football book and count the proceeds from the weekend, when the old gnome uttered, "Look at this shit. Why even fucking bother?"
"The Steelers fucked us," Smith said.
Fat Sam grunted. Fat Sam probably hadn't spoken three words in all the years Smith had known him. He communicated through a range of grunts, hand gestures and scowls. His point usually got across.
"This is fucking pathetic," Papa said.
He looked pensive, staring into the distance sipping vodka.
"You know, that fuck L. Ron Hubbard had the right idea," he said.
"L. Ron Hubbard?" Smith asked.
"Yeah, science fiction writer. Pretty shitty one at that. He came up with the idea for Scientology, figuring that was the way to get rich, start your own religion. He figured people will believe any kind of crazy shit and give you money if you're the one telling them all about that crazy shit."
Smith said, "You're out of your fucking mind. People won't fall for crazy shit."
"They do it all the time. Jesus, if it weren't for people believing crazy shit, civilization would collapse. People need to believe in crazy shit. Keeps them from jumping off buildings."
Smith supposed Papa was right. People did believe some crazy shit. He wasn't one of them.
Papa continued, "I mean, shit, look at Scientology. They believe aliens came here from another planet on spaceships th
at looked like DC-8s and were dropped in volcanoes or blown up with hydrogen bombs or some shit like that and that's where human beings came from."
"You're shitting me. People buy that?"
"Lots of people. Rich people. Tom Cruise. He's one of them. So's John Travolta."
"Vincent Vega believes that shit?"
"Start your own religion. That's the way to do it. People believe and they'll give you everything they got. Like every white trash asshole in the trailer park sending their last nickels to some televangelist selling eternal salvation when they know, deep in their hearts, the motherfucker is just blowing their money on meth and hookers. They need to believe. It's the way to go."
From there, it was only a matter of devising a belief system. Papa settled on Elvis. People believed in Elvis. It wasn't that farfetched to convince people that Elvis was God's second child, Jesus' stepbrother, and was sent here to save humanity. Hell, he reasoned, it made more sense than that Scientology volcano bullshit. If people believed that shit, they would certainly buy that Elvis died for their sins.
Besides, he knew an Elvis impersonator who would work cheap on Sundays.
Smith always remembered that story when he visited the worldwide headquarters. He was thinking about it, mostly to avoid talking to Spew, when he saw Papa and Fat Sam pull up in Papa's Cadillac.
"Jesus Christ!"
"You should see the guy's fucking driveway. Nothing left of that fucker. Used a bunch of C4 and some Thermite…"
Smith smacked Spew on the back of the head.
"And the AAA guy. Shit, nothing left of him except his feet, still sitting there, smoking…"
Smith smacked him again.
It was quiet for a moment.
"You know," Spew said, "it could have been my feet smoking in the driveway..."
Papa glared at him. He didn't look very gnome-like at that moment, more like an evil midget who would have been glad to see Spew's feet smoking in a driveway.
"Oops?"
Spew started to say something else. But the words caught in his throat. Papa broke the silence.
"Shane, wait for us outside, OK?"
"Sure, Papa. Look, mistakes were made. I think we all agree on that. For the sake of Elvis."
"Get the fuck out of here."
Spew slunk out of the room.
Papa turned to Smith and asked, "Well?"
Smith had no idea what he was asking. It could have been a lot of things. He knew he wanted Nunn dead. He wasn't sure why. Papa had converted Nunn to Elvisology and had pretty much taken over the Happy Beaver and was milking Nunn for every cent he had, a process that Nunn did not seem to object to. He must have his reasons, Smith thought. He always did.
"I know this other guy…" Smith started to say.
"No. What I meant was, when can you guys go back?"
Nunn sat on his front steps, looking at what was left of his German luxury car and his driveway. Nothing left of that fucker, he thought.
The ambulance had taken Traci With an I away a short time ago. The EMT told Nunn it looked like she tore the ACL of her left knee. Nunn thought that was just fucking perfect. He believed in the whole what goes around bullshit, but having to take care of a lame stripper wasn't the kind of coming around he had in mind.
Hell, he probably deserved it, he thought, but still.
The firefighters were hanging around the Red Cross truck, drinking coffee and talking to the Red Cross woman. Word was she liked firefighters. A lot. The cops stood around, waiting for the detective to get there.
The detective arrived, took a look at the damage and called the fire marshal. The fire marshal arrived, took a look at the damage and called the feds. The feds arrived, took a look at the damage and huddled to discuss who they could call to handle this big steaming pile of shit.
And that's where it stood when the detective, Donovan Wiley, approached Nunn and asked, "Can you think of anybody who would want you dead?"
Nunn scratched his chin and thought. Sure, he thought, there were probably about 12, maybe 14, or 28, or 100 people who would want him dead, depending on what day of the week it was. Eliminate ex-wives who lacked the mechanical and explosive acuity for such a task and it reduced the number by at least three. That just left the dozens of other people buried under the rubble that was his life.
Nunn looked the detective in the eye and said, "Nope. Can't think of a one."
Wiley knew he was lying. He had been a cop a long time and his experience had helped him develop a fine-tuned bullshit detector. It also helped that everybody lied to him. The clerk who sold him a Powerball ticket that morning, she was completely full of shit when she told him, "Have a nice day." She didn't give a damn whether he had a good day. In fact, she probably knew his day would soon turn to shit. She probably knew his Powerball ticket was worthless and he'd be sentenced by the ping-pong ball gods to work at least another week trying to lock up America's Most Dumbest.
Wiley wrote "nope" in his notebook. He stared at it for a moment, tapped it with his pen and then said, "Well, if you remember anything, don't hesitate to give me a call."
Wiley turned and walked away.
Nunn didn't say anything. The detective was already climbing into his blue Crown Vic when it occurred to Nunn he had no idea who the cop was.
Chapter Three
Sunday morning and the church was rocking. Something that sounded like "Jailhouse Rock" blared from the speakers mounted on the ceiling, and a reasonable facsimile of Elvis and some of the altar boys were recreating the big dance scene from the movie.
The reasonable facsimile bore a slight resemblance to The King. He had the paunch, the hair and the muttonchops, but that was about it. He had Elvis' basic features, but they seemed to have been broken somewhere along the way. And his dancing could best be described as epileptic. He was a pretty half-assed Elvis. Which was OK because it was a pretty half-assed religion.
If the Lutherans had seen what the First Church of Elvis, Scientist had done to their church, they would have never stopped throwing up. Huge gold lightning bolts framed the chancel. The letters "TCB" – standing for The King's motto, Taking Care of Business – floated above. Replacing Jesus on the cross in the apse was the symbol derived from Elvis' crucifixion – Elvis sitting on a golden toilet.
The song wound down and the congregation quieted down. The reasonable facsimile of Elvis approached the lectern and began his sermon.
"Jailhouse Rock," he intoned. "What does it mean? What was Elvis telling us?"
He paused and gazed at the ceiling.
He thought, Fuck if I know.
This was going to be rough. He knew he shouldn't have picked "Jailhouse Rock" for this morning's sermon. If that wasn't bad enough, he had a gig at a Legion the night before, and by the time he crawled out of that waitress' bed, he didn't have enough time to get his shit together. "Jailhouse Rock." What the fuck was I thinking? he thought. His head hurt and he was sweating cheap scotch through the polyester of his jumpsuit. His balls itched, but he couldn't do anything about it at the moment.
"Elvis spoke of, uh…"
His voice trailed off. He was under strict instructions not to recite the song's lyrics. Papa was pretty clear about that. When he first started as the titular head of this new religion, he would give sermons based on the lyrics of Elvis' songs. It didn't take long before the church was hit with a bill for royalties and a cease and desist order. After that, Papa instructed Elvis to paraphrase or else – the else being Elvis would lose one of his favorite appendages.
"Um, Elvis spoke of some guy, somewhere, by himself, in jail. He was expressing what a lot of us feel when we are lost and alone. Elvis spoke of this often. It's like he knew we were lost and needed to be found and he found us. Somewhere else. Maybe jail."
He paused again and looked over the congregation – a few homeless guys passing around a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English malt liquor and a gaggle of stoned hipsters who came to gape at the craptastic splendor of the First Church of
Elvis, Scientist. There were few true believers, and they tended to be people who lived in trailers festooned with Elvis gimcracks. They also tended to be people who slept in Sunday mornings.
Yes, he found us," Elvis intoned. "Where we were. Somewhere else. In jail. Or maybe not. Maybe we were in, um, I don't know, the bathroom. That's where Elvis was found."
His voice trailed off. He bent over the lectern.
Jesus, Elvis thought, listen to me, I really should have done "Love Me Tender" again.
Nunn hated to miss church, but he had little choice. Traci With an I had just gotten out of the hospital, sporting huge braces on both knees now, and she needed him.
Right now, though, Traci With an I was nodding off, having swallowed three times her recommended daily allowance of Oxycontin, and Nunn had time to ponder the events of the past 24 hours.
Who would want him dead?
The exes were out of the question. He was already dead to them. His former partner? After all, he had fucked him out of the business. He was banging the guy's wife, and one thing led to another and the guy wound up getting the very shitty end of a divorce and Nunn wound up with the business. You couldn't blame the guy, Nunn thought. He had every right to be pissed off.
But it couldn't have been him. Last Nunn heard, the guy had moved to Idaho and was living in a shack in the woods. He got a letter from him a few months back. Written in what looked like various bodily fluids, it described various conspiracies involving the CIA, the Masons and Regis Philbin.
That guy was harmless. He wasn't the variety of crazy that would blow up his car.
Nunn walked to the front bay window and looked at what was left of his driveway. He reviewed the list he kept in his head of the various people he had fucked over in his 46 years on the planet. It was a long list. There was that woman he dated for a while between ex-No. 2 and ex-No. 3, but she couldn't possibly still be pissed off. He took that video off the Internet months ago. And there was his coke dealer and that business about ratting him out, but he was still in prison. And there was that bouncer from the club he canned after catching him wearing the girls' G-strings. Nunn didn't mind, but the girls complained that all of their G-strings were all stretched out and kept falling down when they didn't want them to. The bouncer eventually moved to Minnesota to have an operation to become a woman.
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