“Hey-hey, this must be a lucky table,” Windell said.
No fuckin’ brains. Not one ounce.
Windell noticed Con Halliday on my other side. Con looked at him. Then he looked at me. And it struck me like Krakatoa blowing under my chair: we were both wearing the same red-tinted sunglasses.
I didn’t know what the odds of that were, but I’m sure Halliday could have told me. The dismay on Windell’s face said he had connected with Halliday’s thought, too.
“Gotta hit the head,” Windell said. He got up from the table and pushed into the crowd.
Windell left for the bathroom, but I was shitting my pants. “Hit the head” ricocheted around my head. Mindlessly, I scratched the table for a hit. A buzz went around the crowd.
Con Halliday leaned over to me and spoke very quietly. “You have a real interesting way of playing, son.”
“Yeah?”
“You just took a hit on twenty.”
I looked down at the table. I had three queens.
31
I took a seat in the security manager’s office. There had been no rough stuff. Con had taken me by the arm and led me through the crowd as if I was his date for dinner.
When I sat down and looked up at Halliday, he looked like a Sequoia ready to come down on me.
“When you go for the money, boy, you have to think about whose money it is. If I let a punk come in here and rip me off, why, punks would be on me like a pack of dogs after a coon.”
I was sweating blood, but I knew better than to show fear to Con Halliday.
“Mr. Halliday, I’ve heard a lot about you. I know you’re a straight shooter. And I’m going to accept your apology when this is all over. And I’m even going to let you buy me a drink.”
He started a chuckle that grew into a guffaw. “Why you fuckin’ little turd, when this is over, a glass of water’ll leak out your belly.”
Oh shit.
The door opened and Aaron Bous, the security manager, came in. He was red-faced and breathing heavy. Two of his men were behind him. “The other one got away. He was faster than he looked, ran like a goddamn jackrabbit.”
“Fuck ’em, we’ve got this one. Bring in the girl and the cards.”
“The girl … ?”
“The dealer.”
Bous’s red face went green. He turned to the two security officers. “Find the girl.”
“Find the girl? What’d you mean, find the girl?”
“I thought you wanted me to—”
“All three of you went after the squirrel?”
“We know where she lives—”
“You fuckin’ idiot, you think she’ll be sitting on her porch with six decks of marked cards in her lap? Those cards are flushed down a toilet by now, along with whatever other gimmick they had going.”
“Con—I—”
“Shut the door,” Con said. He was suddenly calm.
The two security men threw their chief a frantic look and quickly backed out, shutting the door. Bous stared at the big man, his mouth agape. He moved his jaw and finally got motor control to spit out some words.
“We’ve got this one—”
“We have no evidence. Nothing.” Con turned to me, his eyes registering snake eyes, and that flock of geese crawled back up my spine. Ember’s crippled hands flew through my mind.
I suddenly got calm. “I imagine cheating costs you a bundle every year.”
He didn’t say anything, just stared at me as if he was sizing up which of my arms to rip off first.
“What’d it be worth it to you if I told you one of your dealers was skimming?”
“You little punk—”
Bous started for me and I flew up, kicking back my chair. If they were going to take me down, I was going down swinging, but Con’s arm shot out and blocked his security manager.
“You got a few seconds before I cripple you. Make ’em good,” Con said.
“I spotted a dealer skimming as I sized up the action.”
“He’s talking about that bitch he was teamed up with.”
“Talk,” Con said.
I shrugged. “You’ve lost nothing from me. You got your money back and an extra thousand. I tell you which dealer is ripping you off, and I walk out of that door.” I grinned. “On my own feet.”
“Well, you know, you ain’t told me shit. I spotted you immediately and if anyone else was ripping me off, I’d know it.”
I took a deep breath. “You’re a betting man, aren’t you? I’ll bet you the five grand I won against the name of the dealer who’s skimming.”
“How do I know you’re not in with the dealer?”
“You’ll know the moment I tell you how it’s being done. I’ve been told I have a nose for telling this sort of thing. I spotted the grif immediately.”
“He’s just bullshitting you, Con. Let me have him for a couple minutes and I’ll teach him a lesson he’ll never forget.”
“He does have a point,” Con told me. “You’re betting me with my own money.”
“Forget the money. I’ll up the ante. If I’m right, give me this dipshit’s job.”
Bous’s red-green face went a dark shade of purple and something akin to foam gathered on his lips. I had already cased out the security manager as being just part of the furniture and that Con prided himself on being able to sniff out grifters.
Con grinned. “You remind me of someone, kid. Me. I’m going to be real disappointed if you lose the bet and I’m going to have to geld you like a steer.”
“Your dealer’s dropping chips into her bra. Want me to search her?”
“Who do I have to kill?”
32
LAS VEGAS, 1977
I had been on the job over a year, as security manager for the past couple months. Seeing the guy who killed my mother playing craps caused my past to rear up and kick me in the face.
I left the security room, my head buzzing. It was Matt Kupka I had spotted on the security monitor, for sure. The guy who killed my mother wasn’t someone I would forget. It had been seven years since that bastard walked out of the courthouse and I was thrown into juvie. I knew what I had to do and my mind was wrestling with how to do it. I had thought about the guy a thousand times, had even toyed with the idea of asking Con for the name of an East Coast mobster who could put out a hit on the guy, but it had all been a fantasy. Now it was real. He was in the casino.
As I headed down the hallway to my office, Morgan Halliday, Con’s daughter, came out of his office. Morgan was seventeen, rather pretty in a freckle-faced, California girl way, and hated my guts. Last year when she had been seriously into boys and had put the make on me, I told her to turn it on to someone else. Not only the boss’s daughter, she was jailbait because of her age. On top of that, since she was a little light in the boob department and she had caught me making a crack about her using Band-Aids instead of a bra, she called me “street trash” and that was usually how our conversations went after that.
Con sent her off to Switzerland to something called “finishing school,” whatever the hell that was, and she was back now before she shipped off to some snooty Eastern college for poor little rich girls. I knew about what happened to her mother after Morgan was born. Her mother, Con’s second wife, had been a showgirl, heading East with a Broadway producer when their plane crashed, killing everyone on board. Morgan, like her half brother, Bic, grew up crawling under the feet of gamblers on the casino floor.
I barely looked at her as I hurried by.
“Screw you,” followed me down the hallway.
I didn’t bother to look back and went into my office. Finishing school hadn’t done anything for that mouth of hers. I paged Con but he was nowhere around; he’d gone to a private poker game. Someday he would lose the club at a game—if his jerky son Bic didn’t lose it for him first.
Using a couch as a hiding place had been my thing as a kid and I figured it was the last place anyone would look searching my office, so I kept my stash and
a few odds and ends there. I had over twenty grand in cash. All of Con’s “favorite” employees got “tax-free” bonuses off the top—he’d just grab some bills and hand them to you when you’d done something that particularly pleased him. I picked up maybe five, six thousand in a year that way, and had doubled that at craps. Not that I was any hotshot player. My system was simple: I would wander around one of the big clubs and check out the games. I never put down a bet until I found someone running hot, then I bet on them. The odds are with the house, but when you’re lucky, the gods change the odds.
Besides the money, I’d collected a few other things during my short tenure as security manager: the snub-nosed .38 that belonged to Bous, the previous security manager, and a bottle of knockout drops I took from a woman who lured men to their rooms and slipped them a Mickey Finn to knock them out so she could rob them. She chose married men because few of them ever filed police reports the next morning. I tucked the piece in one pocket and the drops in another.
When I got down to the casino floor, Kupka had left the craps game and was talking to a woman playing a slot, trying to put the make on her. I hoped to hell she iced him. The guy had been slugging down drinks and I figured he would take a piss before he left the casino, so I posted myself at the hallway to the johns. I had everything on my mind but a plan.
The door to the men’s room opened and out came Sally, putting on her lipstick. Sally was a prostitute. We tolerated the girls as long as they were discreet because it was good for business, but she knew a quickie in a toilet stall was a no-no. She saw me and did a double take, then tried to walk by me. I shot a look at Kupka, who was still talking to the woman, but I could see that she wasn’t buying his act. A plan started to germinate in my mind.
“Come ’ere.”
When the men’s room door opened again and a little man with a big belly came out, he took one look at me talking to Sally and hurried by.
She grinned. “His wife’s playing keno. With that belly, she’ll never see the lipstick ring around his dick when they go to bed tonight. Hey, don’t bust me, I was just picking up some change.”
“I’ve got a job for you and it pays two hundred.”
“Who do I have to kill?”
“I’m doing the killing. You see that big slob coming our way?” The woman playing the slot had definitely iced him and he was heading for the can. “He’s going to take a piss. When he comes out, tell him the casino’s providing a limo to take him to the Strip and you bring him out back.”
“That’s all?”
“During the ride, feed him whiskey that’ll be already set out. Don’t drink it yourself.”
I didn’t think Kupka would recognize me—I was a kid when he killed Betty—but I didn’t want to take the chance. I went out the back and got the club’s limo where it was parked down the alley. It was a ’42 Packard, a long black-and-red dinosaur from a golden age when cars had more curves than a dame. Con had said he made sure the car was part of the deal when he opened Halliday’s over thirty years ago. “I’m sentimental about it,” he told me. “I used it one night when I helped Bugsy Siegel and the Little Man rub out a guy.” Con drove the car when he went anywhere and once in a while we used it to give a big spender a ride to his hotel.
A storage cabinet behind the front seat had a bottle of Scotch and a supply of glasses. I dumped the whole vial of knockout drops into the Scotch and brought the car up to the back door. I was behind the wheel as Sally came out with Kupka and they got into the back.
When they were seated, I started driving.
“Offer the gentleman a drink, Sally. That’s twenty-five-year-old Scotch.”
He grabbed the bottle as she clumsily tried to pour Scotch into a glass while the car was moving. He drank from the bottle, sucking down enough to stupefy a stud mule. He sat back and burped—a real class act.
He put his big hand on her knee and worked his way up her inner thigh, pushing her short dress up, then grabbed her hand and rubbed it against his growing shaft. “Take it out. Suck me,” he commanded.
“Sure, sweetie, lay back and close your eyes. I’ll take real good care of you.”
She unzipped his pants. He wore no underpants and his phallus sprang straight up out of his pants. We were ten minutes out of Vegas and Sally had blown him when he noticed that the bright lights were gone.
“Where the fuck are we?”
A better question was, Why the hell wasn’t he asleep? The guy had the constitution of an ox.
“Going to the United Nations,” I said, “a private club where there are women of every color and creed.” I grinned at him in the rearview mirror. “It’s a special event arranged by the casino because of the trouble we gave you.”
“Don’t worry, honey, by the time we’re there I’ll have Tom standing at attention again and saluting.”
Kupka relaxed. By the time we pulled into a parking area above Hoover Dam, he was snoring. I parked the car and met Sally outside the car.
“I have to pee,” she said.
“Don’t come back until I call you.”
She looked at the gun in my hand and scooted off. As she disappeared into the bushes, I stepped over to the edge of the parking area. A stone wall about three feet high separated the area from a hundred-foot drop into the water. If you survived a body flop into the water, you’d get sucked into the dam. I didn’t know what happened when someone got sucked into the dam, but I had a pretty good idea that they got torn to pieces before they were spit out the other end. I wasn’t sure why I had brought Kupka out here, but I knew if I killed him, the dam was better than the desert to dispose of the body. He’d always be in a desert grave, ready to be found, but maybe he’d be fish food once he got ripped apart by the water pressure in the dam.
I looked down at the dark water and thought about what my next move should be. I couldn’t shoot the guy while he was asleep. Besides the cowardice of it, I wanted him to know why he was dying. It struck me that there were worse things than dying. The bastard hurt women. Maybe I should cut off his balls instead of killing him. I liked the idea. Con was always threatening to turn me into a steer. Why not turn Kupka into one? Footsteps crunched behind me and I swung around.
“Where we at?” He was a little rummy. He had not only the body of an ox but the single-mindedness of one.
“Sally needed to drop a load.”
He stared at my features in the moonlight. “Don’t I know you? Your voice …” He got closer, squinting.
“Yeah, you know me. Remember the woman you beat to death in your hotel room? She forgot to give you something.”
“Her fuckin’ kid!”
I swung at him, bringing the gun in a roundhouse punch to the side of his head. It bounced off his temple like it hit a brick wall. He punched me, his big fist catching me in the chest, and I staggered backward. My chest felt like someone had laid a tire iron across it. I brought up the gun but a hand the size of a baseball glove grabbed it and twisted it out of my grip. The gun went flying. I hit him with a left to the face, his nose crunching under my fist. I waded in with a right and then two more lefts. He caught the blows on the back of his forearms and head-slammed me, almost knocking out my eyeballs as my head flew backward. I staggered back, hitting the short wall at the edge of the cliff and started over it. I rolled to the side, feeling nothing but empty space at my back for a second before I got up, still dazed, but my feet under me.
Affected by the knockout drops, his movements weren’t fast, but he still had the single-minded instinct of a gored water buffalo. He staggered into me and got his big hands around my throat. I couldn’t gag or breathe; he was too strong for me. I heard a thump. Kupka grunted and released the pressure around my neck. A big rock fell to the ground and Sally stumbled backward. Kupka went down to his knees and I used the side wall for support to get my wobbly feet up from under me.
I had to finish him before he got me. I saw the gun in his fist, my oxygen-starved mind slowing down the frames. The gun came up
and went off. The bullet knocked Sally backward, and she disappeared over the side of the cliff. I kicked him in the side of the head. He rolled over sideways and I dropped on his back with both of my knees and heard the breath swoosh out of him. But he rolled back at me and I went stumbling over him and to the ground. As I started up, he grabbed me by the throat again and forced me down to my knees. My right knee hit something hard.
The gun.
“I’m going to kill you like I did your mother, you stupid shit.”
My hand closed over the gun butt. I brought it up into his crotch and fired. He screamed and staggered back, holding on to his bloody crotch.
I stood up. “That was for Betty. This is for Sally.”
I shot him in the stomach. He fell to his knees and I put one between his eyes.
I dumped his body over the cliffside and hoped the hell he’d be ripped into fish food by the action of the dam.
Tears burned my eyes as I drove back to Halliday’s, not for what I’d done, but for my mother and Sally. Most people would have fled before taking on a mean bastard like Kupka, but Sally had picked up a rock and gone after him. She owed me nothing and I don’t know why she did it. Maybe she was tired of being used and abused by all the Kupkas of the world and wanted to strike back.
33
LAS VEGAS, 1978
Windell Palmer II was a schmuck, a rock-solid nerd, and he knew it. His father, Windell I, owned a big jewelry store located near a freeway exit off-ramp to the Strip. You could buy a wedding ring set and get a discount certificate for a marriage ceremony good at a wedding “chapel.” Their best gimmick, though, was an offer to buy the “used” wedding rings from a previous marriage. With the country in the throes of a sexual revolution and a war between the sexes, the divorce rate was the highest ever and business was good.
But Windell was never part of the business. When he was ten, he got busted for shoplifting. It wasn’t the first time he had lifted stuff, just the first time he got caught. His mother had spotted the bulge in Windell’s shirt when they got into the car and found a small steel toy car with real rubber wheels. She marched Windell back into the store to teach him a lesson and stood by helplessly sputtering as the store manager called the police and had her ten-year-old son busted. It cost five hundred dollars for a lawyer, two trips to juvenile court for his parents, and a lot of anger from Windell I because he had to leave his jewelry store to go to court. After that, they sent Windell to an aunt in L.A. who lived near Silver Lake so he could attend a private school in the hopes it would reform him. Windell stopped stealing but learned another vice, masturbating. Had Windell kept it a private sport it would’ve been okay, but he spanked his monkey in class and the aunt shipped him back to Vegas.
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