by Bobby Byrd
Lyman reached forward as the Undertaker came up with a gun, took it from him, grabbed the back of his suit collar, and shoved forward with everything he had.
The Undertaker’s face got very personal with the windshield.
The car came to a stop in the sand at the side of the road and fetched up against a culvert, hard. The Undertaker flopped back in his seat, out cold.
“Should have buckled up,” Lyman told him. “It’s the law.”
He dropped the snub-nosed .38 he’d taken from the Undertaker onto the floorboard and kicked it under the seat in front of him.
Lardman was slumped over the steering wheel. He had a hole in his back. Probably the bullet had gone through the seat of the Crown Vic, through his back an inch to the right of his spine, and most likely was lodged in his right lung. His days of eating linguini were over.
Lyman got out, opened the driver’s door, fished out Lardman’s wallet, and found a driver’s license. The license was out of state. Samuel Rosario. No middle name. Some address in Brooklyn, New York. There was nothing else. He replaced the wallet, went through the man’s pockets, and came up with a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, a gold lighter, and a wad of cash about the size of a small horse apple.
“I’m giving this to Carlos’s family,” Lyman told him.
He went back around to the passenger side and checked the glove box. Nothing.
He went through the Undertaker’s pockets and found an ancient calfskin wallet and with it a name: Victor Cicchese.
Victor sported a nose that grew in size and kept emitting a stream of blood and mucus as Lyman continued the search through his pockets.
“One pocket comb. Check,” Lyman intoned. “One prophylactic, unused. Check. One tin of Altoids. Check. Aha,” he said. “What have we here? One slightly tarnished photograph of a little cutie-pie.”
The photo was a black-and-white studio shot of a platinum-blond young lady of that indeterminate age somewhere between seventeen and twenty-five.
He flipped it over.
Blue ink told the tale: Linda, sophomore year, NYU.
In the inside pocket of the Undertaker’s jacket he found a magnetic key card with a bright Motel 6 logo emblazoned across it.
At that moment, Mr. Victor Cicchese let out a low moan.
“Doesn’t feel so good, does it?” Lyman said.
Victor’s head lolled to one side. His eyelids fluttered for a moment and then slowly opened.
“Hello,” Lyman said.
“Uh … what?”
Lyman punched him, hard. His eyes closed.
“Sometimes I just can’t help myself,” Lyman said.
A truck was coming, trailing dust.
“Ah, hell,” Lyman said.
The truck slowed. It was his own pickup, and as it drew closer, he recognized the face behind the wheel. It was Cassandra from the restaurant.
Cassandra got out, raced over to Lyman, and threw her arms around his neck. She kissed him on the cheek. It took not a little effort to get her to stop.
“I thought you’d be dead,” she said.
Lyman chuckled, holding her in the air. After a moment he had to set her back down.
Charles Lyman’s first thought was to turn the Undertaker into a hood ornament and strap him across the front of his truck like a trussed deer, but then he reminded himself that he wasn’t looking for more attention than he could handle at the moment.
Cassandra found a spool of twine in his truck, which he used to bind up their captive and ensconce him in the bed of his pickup truck. He took a moment to get the Crown Victoria off the road and into the corn.
He walked back to the road.
“Darlin’,” he said, “where’s the Motel 6?”
Cassandra directed him to the motel.
“Be right back,” she said, and climbed out. “I know the girl who works the counter here. This won’t take a minute.”
True to her word, she was back beside him in the pickup in seconds.
“Around in back and down on the end, number 167,” Cassandra said.
“What’d you tell her?”
“I told her that we were borrowing our friend’s room. I told her I got lucky and found a man.”
Charles laughed. “I wouldn’t want to make a liar out of you,” he said.
* * *
The door had a Do Not Disturb sign hanging from the handle.
They found Linda Sneed inside, barely alive. Charles had to fish out a pair of bolt cutters from his pickup in order to get the handcuffs off of her while Cassandra held water to her swollen lips. She was dehydrated, had fouled the bed linens underneath her, and was talking out of her head.
The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes after she regained full consciousness. Ten minutes after that, the sheriff came knocking.
“What was it all about?” Ralph Bigham asked him.
“It was about money and revenge. She knew her life wasn’t worth anything if she told them where it was stashed. So she rode it out.”
“What money?”
“Lardman’s,” Lyman said.
“Who?”
“His name was Sammy Rosario. I call him Lardman because I like that name better. Linda met him at a bar in the Bronx. He bragged about being a hit man who had just made a big score and was going to retire. She took him to bed, robbed him blind, and cut out.”
“How much?” Bigham asked.
“Quarter-million. That is, if she’s telling the truth.”
“What about the other guy?”
“The Undertaker? His name was Victor Cicchese. Lardman’s cousin.”
“Okay. What about McDaniel? Why’d they kill him?”
Lyman released a long, slow breath. The answer came to him, and as he said it, he knew he was right.
“Because. Some guys are lucky. Some ain’t. They make their own luck, good or bad. Carlos put himself in the path of the tornado. In that respect, he was a lot like my brother.”
“I don’t understand,” Bigham said, knowing it was the only way to finally pull it out of the craggy-faced, teal-eyed man in front of him. But Lyman shifted the subject from himself, from his own past, and back to McDaniel.
“McDaniel screwed up pretty bad. Linda Sneed was his client, and he broke a rule. He took her to bed. Word got back to Lardman somehow, where she was, what she was doing, who she was screwing, and they came looking for her. But they found him first.”
The silence grew around them. The restaurant had grown still.
“I’ll go ahead and tell you,” Lyman said. “Because you want to know, and it’s secrets that always get us. My brother made his own bad luck. I caught him in bed with my girl. We were going to be married, you know.”
A moment passed. Then another.
“I killed him with my own bare hands. It was rage, Ralph. Consuming rage.”
“When was that?” Bigham asked.
“Twenty years ago. My parole expired last month. I’m a free man now. I can go where I want, do what I want.”
“Yeah?”
“But we’re never free, I think. That is, until we somehow make it right.”
Ralph Bigham looked down at the table, weighed his own words before speaking. “I hope,” he said. “I hope you’ve made it right again, Chuck.”
Lyman smiled. “Me too,” he said. “Oh. I almost forgot.” He reached into the large paper bag beside him, pulled out the leather gun case, and pushed it across the table. “I gave it a thorough cleaning.”
“Thanks,” Ralph said.
A horn blared.
Lyman turned toward the restaurant window and waved.
Cassandra waved back.
“Impatient, isn’t she?” Bigham said, and then laughed.
“Yeah. Women. I gotta go,” Lyman said. “My girl’s waiting, and I think she’s waited long enough.”
CHERRY COKE
BY MILTON T. BURTON
Tyler
Sam MacCord was at the poker game at Matty’s Truck Stop in Kilgo
re, Texas, the night Cherry Coke got his nickname. Cherry claimed it was his first time playing poker. When he said that, one of the players laughed and remarked that he’d come to the right place to bust his cherry. With a last name like Coke, the handle was a natural, and it stuck with him from then on. It was also easy for the players who’d been there to remember Cherry because he walked away from the table the big winner. And that just doesn’t happen the first time around. At least not in the kind of games Sam MacCord played in. So everybody assumed Cherry was an experienced gambler who ran out a strong line of con about not ever having played before. But after an incident that happened at a game down in Lufkin one cold, rainy night about a year later, Sam wasn’t so sure about that.
Cherry was a slim guy of medium height who appeared to be about forty. He had a face-shaped face that fronted for a head-shaped head and a pair of unassuming eyes whose color hovered somewhere between pale gray and hazel, depending on the lighting. His neatly combed hair was dark brown with a little gray at the temples, and he usually wore dark pants, white dress shirts, and a sand-colored tweed sport coat. Nothing about him stood out. In fact the opposite was true. If you’d asked Sam to describe Cherry and then given him a minute to think before answering, he would have said there was something blurry about the man, something vague and indefinite that made it hard to remember what he looked like even while you were staring directly at his face.
According to Cherry, he’d gotten into poker almost by accident. His car was a coal-black Mercury Marquis he’d bought from a dealership in Henderson. Cherry was an amiable sort who paid the sticker price on the car without quibbling, and the dealer, who was himself a gregarious individual, took an instant liking to him. While the dealer’s secretary was finishing the paperwork, the conversation drifted around to poker. Cherry mentioned that he’d recently acquired an interest in the game and would like to give it a try sometime. Right then the dealer invited him to sit in at Matty’s that coming weekend in Kilgore. This, Cherry claimed, had been his start.
During the year we knew him, he played mostly in East Texas. Though Sam now lived in Dallas, he was from East Texas and gravitated back homeward whenever he got a yen for the cards, even though the really lucrative action was to be found in the western part of the state. “A man can hide better where there’s lots of trees,” he always said with a friendly smile when anybody asked why he’d never tried the big games out around Lubbock and Odessa. The truth was that as far as poker went, Sam was nothing more than a recreational gambler, even though he sometimes won or lost several thousand dollars at a sitting. Back in his younger days he’d been a hijacker whose name was linked in the papers with a collection of Southern criminals who journalists tagged with the lurid name Dixie Mafia. He’d also been the main suspect in a couple of contract killings, but that was back then. Now things were a lot different. That was because one fine fall afternoon a decade earlier, a light of sorts had gone off inside Sam’s head, and he’d suddenly realized that he was the only one of his associates who’d never been to prison. Not one to travel too far on luck, he pulled up on the heavy stuff. Then, after getting the go-ahead from the right people a few weeks later, he opened what eventually became a very successful sports book. And Sam really liked Cherry Coke, which was why he was supremely irked the night Jackie Fats Reed pulled out the .357 snub-nose and stuck it in Cherry’s face during that Lufkin game.
Jack J. Reed, who was still called “Jackie Fats” years after his health had forced him to slim down from 300 pounds to his current 180, was a surly whiner who’d never been known to lose a hand with any degree of grace. Indeed, he was only allowed to play because he lost consistently, and because he was a hoodlum and a known killer who could not be safely excluded from the table. Jackie Fats was not a happy man. The cardiac he’d suffered in his late thirties and the subsequent triple bypass had forced him to get his life and his diet under control, but they’d left him very disagreeable because he missed lolling indolently around and scarfing up gargantuan quantities of whatever caught his fancy—things he certainly couldn’t do anymore unless he wanted an early checkout date. He also wanted to win at poker, which he almost never did. Consequently, everybody had mixed feelings whenever Jackie Fats showed up at one of the games. Regulars were happy to see such a steady loser bring his bulging bankroll to the table, but his propensity for violence also set everybody on edge.
Cherry and Sam became casual friends, and often after a game broke up they went out for breakfast, where Cherry always requested double and sometimes even triple orders of sausage. From time to time they’d meet at some club to hoist a few, though both were light drinkers. Cherry’s real name was Richard, and once Sam got to know him well enough to mount a personal question, he asked if there was any chance he was related to Richard Coke, Texas’ beloved Restorationist governor who ran all the carpetbaggers out of the state at the end of Reconstruction.
Cherry shook his head and said, “No honchos in my family, Sam. My dad was just a dirt farmer.”
“Where, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“A little ways outside Athens.”
At the time, Sam naturally assumed he meant Athens, Texas, a small agricultural town about seventy miles southeast of Dallas. Then, a week later at a game in Longview, somebody said something about Socrates. That was when Cherry, who rarely volunteered anything, smiled and said, “He was queer as a three-dollar bill, you know.”
“Who?” one of the other players asked.
“Socrates.”
“Some people claim that,” said Tom Wilkins, who was a fine player besides being a history teacher at the junior college in nearby Tyler. “But I don’t think anybody really knows for sure.”
“Oh, I know for sure,” Cherry said.
“How so?”
“Because the old rascal made a pass at me the first time my dad took me into town. I was about fifteen at the time, and he was famous. Everybody knew who he was.”
For a few moments there was a befuddled silence at the table. Then one of the players, a boisterous older fellow from Nacogdoches who was reputed to be rich as Midas himself, laughed and slapped Cherry on the back and said, “This boy comes on so sweet and innocent that if a man didn’t watch himself he’d wind up believing everything he says.”
They all had a good laugh and Cherry gave them a bland smile and the game resumed. But that business about Athens and Socrates came back to haunt Sam after Cherry had his little dust-up with Jackie Fats in Lufkin.
Cherry gambled around East Texas for a year or so. After that first night, he rarely took home the big money, but he won steadily if undramatically, and he always left with enough to live well for a couple of weeks. Which was highly unusual. Everybody goes all the way down to broke sometimes. It’s just in the nature of a gambler to do so. But not Cherry. He didn’t cheat either. Too many of the people he played with were far too savvy not to have eventually spotted something if he had. In fact, he seemed to win more consistently when he hadn’t even touched the cards than he did when he was dealer.
Spooky.
Now, as a general rule, it’s not considered polite to ask personal questions across the poker table. But it happens, especially when a group of guys have played together here and there over several months and feel like they have gotten to know one another. After all, even seasoned gamblers are human, and we humans are a snoopy lot whose curiosity sometimes gets the better of us. Finally, one night when a cattleman named Bob Robbins got to bitching about the sorrows of the beef market, a couple of other businessmen at the table chimed in with their grievances about the general economic condition of the country. Then somebody broke the ice and asked Cherry what he did for a living. Cherry ran out a song-and-dance about how he’d sold advertising novelties “up until a couple of weeks ago,” and then went on to say he was out of work and looking for a job. Nobody believed a word of it, of course. But the message was clear, and it was the only thing Sam MacCord ever knew for certain about Cherry Coke: t
he man might have started late in life and learned fast, but he was a professional gambler.
The Lufkin game that finally ended Cherry’s run in East Texas took place every weekend in the back room of a very successful used car dealership owned by a guy named Eddie Ray Atwell Junior. Eddie Ray Senior had been one of Sam’s Dixie Mafia cohorts. Almost forty years earlier, when Eddie Junior was just a little tyke, somebody had let the hammer down on the old man in a motel out in San Gabriel, a sinfilled little West Texas city that sprawled on both sides of the aptly named Rio Diablo—the Devil’s River. Nobody ever had a clue as to who was behind that dastardly deed, or why they were behind it, not even Sam, who knew as much about the Southern criminal underworld as anybody. Not that it really mattered. In the final years that Senior graced this world with his presence, he’d come to be known as Eddie the Rat, a man willing to screw his own partners anytime the opportunity presented itself. So his passing was mourned by few, and probably not even by his wife, a smart, tough woman who had been the brains behind the car lot in the first place, and who kept the business going while her husband was off running up and down the roads in a fancy Lincoln convertible, cranked to the gills on speed and trying to get something going in the Mexican heroin trade, an endeavor for which he was uniquely unsuited. She never remarried. Instead, she devoted her energies to teaching her kid the ins and outs of the used car trade. Eddie Junior was a fast learner who wound up even more successful than his mother. He also loved poker, and a lot of money passed across his table every weekend.
It was a Friday night in late fall. The area had been plagued with storms and tornado warnings all week. Thunder could still be heard rumbling in the distance, but by dark the rain had slacked off to a steady drizzle. The weather forecasts called for more bad weather in the next few days, and the temperature was expected to drop below freezing before dawn.