“You’re not going to be in there with me?” he anxiously asked Con when his old man told him he was taking him and his pals out to a chicken ranch.
“Hell, no, I’m not gonna be watching your little prick. I’m going to be sticking my own in Wanda.”
Wanda, Bic had been told, was a big redhead from Tallahassee who Con claimed wrestled him to the floor and mounted him the last time he went out to Sally’s.
“Stomp that goddamn pedal to the floor, Con, my dick’s yelling that it needs to be milked!” one of the Texas friends yelled from the backseat. The other one leaned out the window and threw a bottle at a parked car. It missed the car and shattered in front of it.
Con took a swig of whiskey and nudged Bic. “Take a shot, boy, it’ll calm your nerves. You look like you’re going to be the guest of honor at a cannibal’s feast rather than finally knocking off a piece. By the time I was your age, I had every woman in the county lining up to get theirs, like a goddamn bull in a corral full of milk cows.”
The big Packard came across the dividing line at a curve in the road and almost rocketed into a big truck coming from the opposite direction. Bic gripped the dashboard as Con whipped the car back across the line before a head on.
They went by a sheriffs patrol car parked on the other side of the road and Con stuck his head out the window and yippeed! He waved with the whiskey bottle. Bic tensed with hope that the deputies would pull them over, but they only waved back. He knew they’d drop around Halliday’s tomorrow and pick up drink, meal, and slot comps.
Out on the highway, one of the cowboys in the back leaned way out the left passenger side and threw a bottle high over the car. His buddy on the right side fired out the window at the bottle but missed. He cursed, then emptied his six-shooter at a road sign.
Con nudged Bic with the whiskey bottle and Bic took it reluctantly. He didn’t like hard liquor, but he took a swig to please his father. It exploded in his mouth and went down his throat like burning aviation fuel. He started coughing and Con leaned over and hit him in the back so hard he went forward and hit his head on the window.
“Goddamnit, boy, I’ve told you a man swallows whiskey without tasting it. Just shoot it down. You just can’t get it right, can you?”
Bic couldn’t get it right. And drinking whiskey “like a man” was just one of a long list of things he couldn’t get right. He was big, like his father, but where Con had the backbone of a grizzly, Bic had the spine of a rabbit. He grew up without the tough-skinned, barroom-brawler, ride-the-river cowboy tenacity of his father. The truth was Bic was scared of a lot of things. In school smaller kids beat him up. “It’s not the dog in the fight,” Con told him when he came home with his tail between his legs after a fight with a kid physically smaller than him, “but the fight in the dog. Get some fight in you, boy, and go back there and kick ass.” He spun Bic around and gave him a kick in the butt in front of people. “Don’t come back without the scalp of that kid who hit you.”
He came home from school with a red nose and a cut on his forehead after being whipped again by a smaller boy in his high school class. He went into the casino and to the corner table of Halliday’s restaurant where Con held court. Con looked up from a discussion with two of his pit bosses and stared coldly at Bic as the boy stood next to the table. Defeat was written all over the boy’s face. “You cunt,” Con said, and turned his back on him.
His reaction to his father’s disapproval was always the same—he screwed up worse. When he was little, if he got slapped for dripping mustard on his shirt while eating a hot dog, he ended up with mustard all over him.
“You’re like a goddamn steer that keeps butting a fence post because he ain’t got the brains to move to the side,” Con had told him over and over. “You fuck up and fuck up and fuck up.”
Con made the turn onto the side road to Sally’s Ranch, running into a ditch before getting the car centered on the road. The “ranch” was half a mile ahead, several “modular home” units linked together. Bic began trembling. His friends at school who had lost their virginity had almost always got their first piece at a drive-in theater. None of them had been taken to a chicken ranch by their father. He had seen the whores who hung around Halliday’s bar. Hard women with coarse voices and clothes that struck him as trashy rather than sexy. He didn’t want to have sex with any of them. There were plenty of girls at school he could’ve had sex with. One time he boasted to his dad that he had made love to a girl he had dated, Janey Wayne, and when Con had picked up the phone to call and ask her if it was true, Bic panicked and confessed his lie. That got him hit across the side of the head.
“That’s for letting me call your bluff—with a bluff. Don’t play cards you can’t handle.”
Sally was a surprise. Bic had expected a “madam” but Sally was a barrel-shaped man with big ears and a round face.
“Get the crew out here,” Con told Sally. “My boy’s gonna pick the filly he’ll ride.”
The four “girls” lined up next to each other. Bic was shocked when he recognized one of them. She was the mother of a boy he knew. He avoided looking at her.
“Go ahead, boy, pick one.” Con slapped Bic on the back. “Hell, pick two or three if you think you can ride ’em all.”
“I—I don’t know—”
Con grabbed his arm and steered him to a Latino woman. She was a little younger than most of the other women. Bic guessed she was in her early twenties.
“What’s your name, honey?” Con asked.
“They call me Tijuana Rose.”
“Well, T-Rose, you think you can fix up my boy here? He’s been pumping his Long Tom by hand so often, you’d think he was milking it to fill baby bottles.”
Con’s pals howled with laughter and Bic turned redder than he already was.
Rose took Bic’s hand and winked at Con. “When I’m finished with him, the girls at school will drop their panties every time he walks down the hallway.”
The dimly lit corridor was lined on both sides with room doors. Bic heard noises coming through the thin walls; a squeal of female laughter, a man grunting like he was lifting heavy weights. His mouth was dry and his stomach knotted. She held his hand as they ventured down the hallway, a wet, sweaty hand full of fear and panic.
They went inside a room that had tacky budget motel furniture, the smell of perfume from Woolworth’s, and another odor that couldn’t be hidden, a scent more primeval than perfume, his first smell of cheap sex.
Rose closed the door behind them and stood only inches away from him, her breasts jutting against the restraints of the sheer silky blouse. She took his hands and put them flat on the bare skin below her neckline and slowly moved them down, squeezing his hands tight over her breasts.
“These don’t feel like the girl’s at school, do they?”
“Uh-huh,” came out as a dry mouth mumble.
“Why don’t you take off my blouse?”
His hands fumbled with the buttons and she helped him, unable to suppress a grin. “Don’t be nervous, I’m not going to bite you—except where it’ll feel good.”
She laughed lewdly and it increased his nervousness. When they left the room, Con would cross-examine her about how he performed and he’d be humiliated again. His dread of what would be said later panicked him and he did what he always did in those moments, he tried harder and failed worse. Unable to get a button undone, he jerked at the blouse.
“Take it easy, honey, don’t damage the merchandise.”
She undid the last button and slipped off the blouse. Her brown breasts were barely restrained by the size thirty-eight bra. She unhooked the brassiere and let it fall on the floor. Taking his hands, she put them under her breasts and had him hold them. “Like ’em, honey?”
Not waiting for a reply, she pushed him back to the bed. He sat on the edge and she pulled his shirt off over his head. “Stand up, sweetie.” She undid his pants and dropped them and his underwear, then had him sit back down and pulled them of
f his legs. She slipped out of her skirt and stood in front of him wearing only bikini panties. “Like me?” She did a little tiptoe dance step in a circle, then moved in closer, putting her large breasts in his face. The breasts had the same cheap perfume scent of the rest of the room. Instead of turning him on, his stomach turned and he felt nauseated. He pushed her back so he could breathe.
Shaking her head, she stepped into the bathroom and came out a moment later with a bowl of warm soapy water and a wash cloth. “Lay back for me.” She spread his legs and gently washed his penis and testicles, massaging them as she did. His organ stayed limp.
“Lay the other way on the bed, honey.”
Rose hit the on switch of an eight-track player next to the bed and a Spanish disco beat started blaring. With Bic lengthwise on the bed, she stood on the bed with his prone body between her legs, her legs spread wide enough so he could see the pink between her legs. She swayed and moved her body seductively to the beat of the music, fondling her own breasts and smiling at him. She slowly came down on him, and spread her soft moist pink zone across his virile part, rubbing against him as she slipped down his body until her head was in his groin area.
He still hadn’t gotten hard yet. She ran her hands up his naked abdomen and felt his tension. She teased his virile parts with her tongue, starting below his belly button and moving down and under, tickling his balls and taking his limp shaft in her mouth and sucking. She sucked off and fucked hundreds of men a year, so many that the only sexual response in her was artificial, but she found herself getting a little turned on by the boy’s limp cock, her mouth getting hotter and warmer. Most men’s cocks were hard red stems. The softness and pliability of his was refreshing. But no erection came.
She shook her head in disbelief as she glanced at a black curtain that covered one wall of the room.
“I’m sorry,” Bic said. “I’m really sorry.” His voice quivered embarrassingly. “Can I pay you just to talk for a while?”
He heard giggling come from the curtained area, not a girlish sound but that of a drunk man. Con Halliday jerked open the curtain. Standing next to him was one of his Texas buddies bending over with mirth.
“You’d fuck up a wet dream, boy.”
60
LAS VEGAS, 1987
“Do you know why I’ve always hated that bastard Riordan?” Bic said. “He reminds me of my father. He’s an arrogant bastard who thinks he is king shit. My father said he hired him because he walked tall. The guy was nothing but street trash, a cheap hustler, and a crook. Know what my old man caught him doing?”
Janelle grinned as he talked. She knew only too well what Con Halliday caught Zack doing.
They were in the living room of the house that was on the ranch Bic inherited from Con. Like everything else he touched, the ranch had gone from a money-making spread with two employees to a dry hole Bic retreated to when things got too hot for him in town, which was most of the time.
“Dad always favored Riordan, liked him better than his own son. And Riordan played him, sure as hell, he knew how to ingratiate himself with my father, kiss his ass.”
Janelle let him blow off steam. She had her own opinion of why Con and Zack had clicked and it had nothing to do with ass kissing. Bic was almost dead right when he said that the two were cut from the same mold. But they weren’t twins.
She never thought of Con as particularly smart; instead of real smarts he had an ability to read people, along with a bravado that mowed them down. She thought of Zack as having real smarts. She had smarts, too, and she was finally going to use them to get what she wanted. Zack owed her. She felt that Zack had cheated her. Yeah, she had played that creep Windell, manipulating him into scamming Halliday’s, but in her own mind she had been driven to it by Zack. He had treated her like dirt, drawing away from her after he got his break at Halliday’s, acting like a lap dancer wasn’t good enough for him, wanting her to give up the dancing and constantly slamming her because she needed a fix once in a while to face the dirty world around her. She hated Zack, hated him for his arrogance, for his strength, for getting her busted.
She met Bic purely by accident. After getting out of jail, she left Nevada with her probation officer’s permission and knocked around L.A. and San Diego for a while, serving cocktails in lounges and doing tricks out in the parking lot. She made a connection with a small-time drug pusher who supplied her and moved in with him and was soon introduced to the “business” of selling drugs.
When a friend who hauled the products to Vegas got busted, she drove a kilo herself across the state line and delivered it to a man in a bar on the west side of town. Bic was with the buyer, financing the deal for a piece of the kilo at wholesale prices. He recognized her as a former Halliday’s dealer and Zack’s girlfriend, and as soon as she bad-mouthed Zack, she and Bic became old friends.
“He turned my father against me, turned Morgan against me, and stole the club. I should own half of it, but I’ve only got a third and I don’t really own that. Morgan controls it and he controls her. Now that bastard is going to lose even that to make himself a big shot on the Strip. My father knew better than to mess with the Strip. It’s nothing but an ego trip.”
Janelle’s eye caught a picture of a woman on the end table next to the couch. “Who’s that?”
“My mother. She was beautiful, a Follies dancer, a real star.”
To Janelle the woman in the picture was just another Vegas showgirl, a product cranked out by the town by the thousands, but if Bic wanted to think of her as something special, that was okay with her. She usually wasn’t submissive to a man, but in this case she had her reasons. Bic needed a woman he could dominate and she needed what he had—an inheritance worth millions.
“She killed herself when I was seven, walked in front of a train. She couldn’t stand my old man. She killed herself because she couldn’t take his abuse anymore. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself. He used to tell people she greased the railroad tracks. I heard him say that a dozen times. He’s not capable of loving anyone.”
“What about Morgan?”
“He treats her okay because she knows how to handle him. If she had ever got in his way, he would have treated her like shit, too. But I was never tough enough, smart enough, or fast enough for him. The old man said the only thing I succeeded at was failure. Real encouraging words, huh.”
Janelle listened and stroked him. She cooked heroin in a teaspoon over a candle and soaked a cigarillo in it. Bic smoked the dope and soon was relaxed. She learned how to manipulate his drugs, sometimes giving him cocaine to elevate him and heroin to bring him back down. Right now she was expecting company and wanted him out of the way. As he was slipping into sleep, she stroked him and rubbed his groin. She knew he was impotent from wasting his body with drugs, but she kept up the pretense with him.
She waited outside and smoked a joint until sunset, when the yellow Camaro she was expecting drove down the road. The man who stepped out of the car was big, over six-foot-two and weighing in at two hundred twenty. He wore sunglasses, thousand-dollar cowboy boots, a Stetson, and five-hundred-dollar silk shirts. His tight black jeans bulged in the crotch.
“Hello, lover.” She gave him a wet kiss.
Diego Gomez squeezed her buttocks. “Missed me, baby?”
“Yeah, I missed your cock and your dream powders.”
“I can fix that real quick.”
He retrieved a gym bag from the trunk and followed her into the house.
“Where’s your friend?”
“Sleeping, but keep the noise down. He might wake up.”
“Nice place,” he said, throwing the gym bag on a couch. “But not exactly a millionaire’s ranch.”
“It is a millionaire’s ranch, but Bic doesn’t spend much time out here. Neither did his dad. He said his father bought the place for old times’ sake, so he could keep up the pretense of being a Texas rancher. They own Halliday’s in town.”
Diego whistled. “And the guy’s
a drugged-out slug?”
“He’s getting there. You bring me the stuff?”
“In the bag.”
She opened the bag and pulled out a kilo of cocaine, a metropolitan telephone book—sized package wrapped in plastic and aluminum foil. “I’ll need more heroine, too,” she said.
“I’ll get it, but you should get your contacts into crank and away from coke. It’s the drug of choice for the future. Crank can be made anywhere; people mix the meth and other shit in their kitchens, it’s dirt cheap, and gives a better kick than cocaine.”
He sat down on the couch and pulled her onto his lap. He kissed her as he put his hand between her legs.
“So what’s the scam, baby?”
“You mean what’s in it for you.”
“What’s in it for us?”
“I’ll bet you if we swept the property with a metal detector, we’d find millions in gold and silver buried. That’s how these casino owners are. Con Halliday used to fill a suitcase with money from the counting room before the feds put a stop to it.”
“So let’s do it. I’ll buy a metal detector.”
“No, he’d have the sheriff after us in five minutes. Besides, there’s more involved than that. Bic’s sister is married to a guy I used to know, Zack Riordan. Zack’s building a five-hundred-million-dollar casino with money from Bic and his sister.”
“You’re shitting me. Five hundred million bucks?”
“And Bic owns a third of the club. Can you imagine what life would be like if we controlled a third of the biggest club in Vegas?”
“Christo, it would be like being a king. The goddamn president would kiss your ass.”
“That’s why we forget about the buried crap. This is my opportunity to connect big time, as big as it can get. And to exact some revenge on a bastard who has it coming. When I’m—”
“Don’t forget it’s we, baby, we.”
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