"'Roland, the Headless Thompson Gunner,'” Leaning Man mouthed as Hat Boy took another chunk out of me. “Talkin’ about the man...” He smiled, absently scratching his threadbare beard. He took another swig of his bottled water.
Hat Boy cocked back again like Roger Clemens goofy on the juice and let another one go. The leather sizzled on my flesh and the edge of the buckle dug another groove.
"Ke-Rist,” I screamed into the gag tied around my mouth.
"He looks about primed,” Leaning Man said, yawning. He straightened from the skeletal wall, wire conduits snaking through the holes cut into the framing lumber. He removed his earpieces and methodically wrapped them around his iPod. He then placed it carefully on a juncture of wood beams.
"Yeah?” Hat Boy said dubiously. “A few more love taps would make sure."
Eager bastard.
"He's got to be conscious when Bishop George gets here,” Leaning Man pointed out. “That sonofabitch'll skin our hides if sugar lips here isn't conscious."
"I suppose,” his compatriot agreed reluctantly. He wiped at his forehead with his forearm, the Vegas heat particularly stuffy inside the raw plywood shell of the house's second floor. Despite this, Leaning Man wore a bulky nylon windbreaker, shades, and a baseball cap.
We were in what the blueprints indicated was the master bedroom—the homes in development on one of the higher plateaus of Red Rock Canyon. On the other side of the ridge, down in the womb of a valley, was an eighteen-hole golf course I frequented. Beyond that was the tail end of Summerlin, this where my latest operation was bivouacked.
Leaning Man walked over and doused my back with what was left of his water. It wasn't much, but I was mutely thankful. Funny how things work out, I reflected, as we waited for the big boss to arrive. Less than two weeks ago, my golf game was improving, my off-shore bank accounts were fat, and I was in my office doing, with gusto I might add, the wonderfully preserved late-'70s sexpot Jerri Rocklyn. She of the Ava of the Underground WWII actioners, wherein each installment included heady doses of sadomasochism.
"Thank you, kind sir,” she joked as we finished up. On the lower right cheek of that gorgeous Nautilus firmed butt of hers was the mole made famous in the photo layout the real Jerri Rocklyn had done for Gallery, one of the slick skin mags, back in ‘78. Looking dreamily from that image I gazed out of my office window, which offered a view of Rainbow Boulevard. Life sure was good.
Back in her clothes, Jerri sat on my desk crossing tanned, muscular legs. She lit a blunt and inhaled. Her real name was Helen Hobart. She was thirty-six years old, originally from Redondo Beach, California. But for the escapade we'd just pulled, she'd been modeled to look like Rocklyn, whom she happened to favor.
"Do I really have to go back under?” she asked, blowing fumes and offering me a toke.
I took the joint, sampled it, then answered, “We can't have the mark spotting you at the craps table, now, can we?"
She sighed heavily, getting off the desk with a flourish, those marvelous gel-filled breasts of hers swaying hypnotically. “But I like this look. And so do you.” She sucked in more smoke and put the joint on the edge of the desk.
I stepped forward and we kissed while she guided my fingers slowly along her leg. Momentarily lost in lust, I eventually got back on track. “Doc's ready to go, baby. And we've already agreed you can keep the tatas,” I murmured as I nibbled her scented neck.
"But,” she started, then didn't finish. She knew I couldn't force her to get re-cut. But she also knew it would mean the end of any future lucrative assignments if she insisted on keeping the Jerri Rocklyn look. For like me, Helen was addicted to those pretty little green ones.
"Fine,” she said, giving me a last peck and sauntering out of my office after putting the dead blunt in her handbag. I checked my appearance in the mirror of my tiny private bathroom, making sure my hair was just so and my eyes weren't red from the weed. Then I opened the floor safe beneath the rug upon which sat a cylindrical glass case of sports memorabilia I'd pushed aside. I took out the acrylic-encased page from the 7/21/73 program book of the Braves versus the Phillies at Atlanta. I smiled crookedly, like Mel Gibson speaking at a synagogue, and put everything back in its place. Aluminum attache case in hand, I left.
Not forty minutes later I was sitting across from retired dental-clinic king Eldon Dudley in the Blue Velvet Lounge on Bridger. In fact, there was a Dr. Dudley Discount Dental facility several blocks away on this street. His big smiling face, circa thirty years ago, beaming down on the abscess-plagued and broken-toothed citizenry from the 3-D logo.
"Wonderful,” Dudley said, examining the inauthentic certificate of authenticity I'd laid on him. I was especially proud of the hologram work on that bad rascal. That lab in Taiwan knew its stuff. He picked up the encased program page again, savoring the item. On that date in 1973, Hank Aaron hit home run number 700 in his irrefutable quest to equal, and eventually surpass, Babe Ruth's home runs. Say what you want about Barry Bonds, Hank did it without ‘roiding up, while also putting up with racist death threats from jealous crackers. Sure I was a con artist, but I could appreciate the real thing when it came along.
Scouring, as I do, antiques stores and estate sales, I'd chanced upon the actual program book from that auspicious day. The rest, faking Aaron's signature and the certificate, then working the network I'd established for high-end sports memorabilia, was simply reeling in the right fish.
"Okay,” he said, sipping his cranberry juice. “You've got yourself a deal."
"This,” I said, reverently touching the artifact, “is not only a wise investment on your part, but a legacy to leave your children."
He snorted. “My grandkids, maybe. ‘Fraid my son and I don't see eye to eye,” he lamented.
He was like that, regurgitating those cliched homilies now and then. I said nothing, merely sat back, tenting my fingers as he wrote a check for fifteen grand. The waitress came by our table.
"Can I get you gentlemen refills?"
"I believe we'll settle up,” I said, adding after the right pause, “Noreen, is it?"
Dentist Dudley looked up from his checkbook.
"Yes, it was my grandmother's name.” She put on a neon smile and glided away in her skimpy outfit after laying the tab on us. Naturally I picked it up. Dudley stared after her.
"You okay?’ I asked.
"Yes, uh-huh,” he said, handing me the payment. “Was she our server originally?"
I hunched my shoulders. “Maybe her shift just started.” I rose and said my goodbye, reassuring him once again about the timeliness and efficacy of his investment. I strolled out, sure that he was staring at the waitress named Noreen as I passed near her. She was earning her tips laughing politely at the inane GirlsGone Wild level of word foreplay of a couple of ‘SC frat boys. I'm sure they were in Vegas to show us hairy-knuckled droolers how to party. I got in my platinum-colored 300, put on the factory air and a Celine Dion CD—what can I tell you, I actually like the way that broad belts out a tune. I drove over to the kitchen of a downtown casino to make a pickup. Then out to see my man.
Dr. Mathias Steiner was the cat you'd cast to play the Nazi doctor if you were of a mind to make another Ava of the Underground flick. He was about medium height, stocky, with good-sized shoulders even at his age. Apparently back in the day he wrestled at Dusseldorf U or whatever the institution in Germany he attended was called. He wore a pencil moustache, touched up his gray locks, and his fashionable rimless glasses stood in relief over his steel-blues. His hands were long like a pianist's, and it annoyed me to no end that his golf game was better than mine, even though he had a couple'a decades on me.
"I'll have Shauna call Helen. I'll schedule her for the day after tomorrow,” he told me in the hallway of his cut shop after his new receptionist had buzzed me into the back.
"Where'd this one come from?” I said, meaning the new receptionist called Shauna. She was a statuesque hottie I took to be no more than twenty-four or -five. Onc
e upon a time, Helen had been his receptionist.
Steiner took my elbow and guided me toward his open office. He liked nothing better than thinking about, touching, smelling, and pursuing women. He had an invalid wife. While he was a sucker for female flesh, he did right by the wife when it came to care and whatnot, so he wasn't a total ogre.
"Shauna Cheung. She's studying Economics and Nineteenth Century English Lit at UNLV.” We were standing just inside his office and he gazed around the room as if worried his wife had planted a bug. “She made her college money with one of those Web sites where you watch her in the morning, rant about her boyfriend, feed the cat, and all that.” The tip of his tongue wet the center of his top lip as he grinned. “Of course she did these tasks mostly in short nighties and silken underthings, earning quite a few male and female subscribers."
He tipped back momentarily on his heels as he conjured up those carnal cyber images in his head.
"You hint to her about our sideline?” I asked, conversationally. Her online thing struck me as someone who had a taste for larceny. Or maybe she was just a stone exhibitionist. Either way, she seemed to be a likely candidate.
"Not yet, but yes, she certainly seems prime material. There must be plenty of these bourgeois fools who have fantasies about the Asian goddess or Dragon Lady."
Steiner was a study in contradictions. He justified his arrangement with me as a way to strike back at the nabobs of convention and conformity. Going on about his patients, the vain, jowled men and the sun-aged, vodka-breathing blondes deluded they could defy gravity and time. Yet I also knew he was spiteful that he got the low-rent chin nip or outpatient tummy tuck, with the high-end work those vodka blondes wanted flying out to Beverly Hills to get done.
"Here you go,” I said, laying the packet of blow on his desk. That was the item I got from my connection at the casino. Women weren't Doc's only weakness.
He put the dope away, relocking the drawer. Randolph Scott looked down on us from behind him. Steiner was also a movie cowboy aficionado, and had several such portraits—Glenn Ford, the Duke, Eastwood, and so on—tacked to the walls. All of them were autographed. I'd sold him his Ford. Hey, Western memorabilia brings in a decent buck.
"Noreen make contact?” We were walking back out of his office.
"Yeah,” I said. “I still think it was too dead-on to use the name of his dead wife."
"We all want to believe that the second chance can be had,” he said wistfully. “The heart forever overrules the intellect, does it not?"
I demurred. Since my research had shown the dentist was into mysticism, it did seem Dudley was more inclined to fall for the bit the more he glommed that this Noreen could be the spirit of his departed. This was the first time we'd done the Kim Novak this nose-on, and I hoped it didn't jinx the con.
Shaking Doc's hand in front of the receptionist, it looked like I was simply some sort of pharmaceutical salesman making his rounds. Which in a way was true. I gave her a nod and she returned that with a brief smile that could be interpreted a couple of different ways. Could be Doc had let on more than he allowed. Yes by golly, she was a candidate.
* * * *
The slap across my face brought me out of my daydreaming and back into my current unpleasant situation.
"Got your attention now, asshole?” Hat Boy followed his question with a jab from his steel-toed boot into my chest. They'd untied me from the makeshift table and dumped me in a corner. A brief wind rippled the blue plastic covering the cutouts for the windows.
"The bishop will be here soon,” Leaning Man said, pocketing the cell he'd been talking on. He crossed his arms and looked down at my pitiful form. “Then we'll get down to it, won't we, sugar lips?"
I feebly managed to give them the finger. Instead of knocking the crap out of me, which I expected, Hat Boy and Leaning Man laughed like they were watching a Chris Rock routine. Hell, why not? They were holding all the cards.
* * * *
I know I should pace my intake. I am a doctor, for God's sake. Once I was in demand, and know more than some windshield-washing addict what this heavenly narcotic does to you physically and mentally. But the feeling it purveys, that, well, that is almost like sex itself, is it not?
I know too that as I sit here in the tomblike dark of my office, Wagner softly on my stereo, the hum of the thoroughfare beyond a desensitizing lullaby of normalcy, current matters are far from that. And yet a kind of throttle of inertia embraces me as I ingest more powder, my self-image that of the immigrant gangster Pacino played in that movie all those rappers sample. The cocaine gives me spine. The coke will give me the eier to reach for the pistol in my middle drawer should I need to.
This I must believe because I know my erstwhile partner in the doppelganger enterprise is not a heroic man. I dip my head and partake of more of the powder. Mein Gott, it is an amazing substance. I wipe the residue from the rim of my nostrils and lick some left off the back of my index finger. I certainly don't mean to say that he is a coward. You can't be gutless and perpetrate the sort of bold swindles he pulls off. You have to project the veneer that reflects what the person you're taking wants to see, and he certainly has that.
But what am I to him? I, who used to be a surgeon and now create cartoon heart-shaped derrieres for the self-perpetuating, self-absorbed class. I have more coke and I wait. I could go downstairs and get in my Cadillac CTS with the temperature-controlled seats and the surround sound, the vehicle purchased from the profits I made doing my part, but where would I go? I am very comfortable in my newly obtained condo in nearby Summerlin. And really, as I have more coke and analyze it further, I am an asset, am I not?
Here I was, having driven to his office to tell him the important news I'd discovered about Shauna, anxious as I was not to speak on the phone. Cocaine makes one wary. But then spying that large one with the cowboy hat taking him away forcibly. The other one I couldn't see so well at the wheel of their car. Together those Macheaths will squeeze my name along with the other particulars of the operation out of him. What if they aren't giving him the works, and will simply offer him money? Or drugs. The judicious use of psilocybin or scopolamine, that would disorient him or create fright or paranoia and that could get him babbling as well.
Yet when he does give them my name, why would they give me the treatment? It would seem to me their boss would want to keep me in the picture, assuming he wants to keep the effort going. And why wouldn't he? Whoever was in charge of the hoodlums must be a man of means, a gangster of some sort, surely. Unless it was over a personal matter that he was taken away as he was. That might be. And if so, then all my worrying is unfounded, and I should cease my consumption. I will, just after this next line.
* * * *
"You do have amusing qualities,” Shauna Cheung said condescendingly. She set her margarita down on the pub table and fluffed out those raven tresses. “But why should I kick back anything to you or to Herr Doktor?” She put a finger up. “More than, say, the cost of getting the remodeling done, as you call it, and some sort of finder's fee? Though when you really think about it, why are you necessary at all?"
I pantomimed for two more drinks from the waitress in the faux-moll outfit. The third-floor game room in the Riverhead Casino was called Nitti's. Leaning just so across the pool table, Shauna steadied herself and smacked the cue ball dead-on. She dropped her solid into the awaiting hole. I appreciated a woman who could work the stick. She walked to the short side of the table, eyeing her next shot.
"It's not just setting the job in motion that matters,” I said. “But lining up the marks does take a certain specialty.” That had come out more harshly than I'd intended. I couldn't let this chick get ahead of me. “But sure, you're right, you don't need me. Only, who's gonna soothe that old croaker sack's nerves when you're off playing slap and tickle with the mark? Riddle me that, Green Hornet."
"It's not hard to find a crooked cutter,” she said. “Half of them are sniffing their Xylocain or whiffing their p
atient's panties ... or want to."
The cue ball glanced off the solid seven and it spun on its axis but didn't have much trajectory. She left me with much of nothing on the table but I was cool. I positioned myself confidently. “You figure to branch out with my idea, that it?"
She smiled radiantly. “I'm not saying that, homeboy. I could see where you might be an asset."
"Now you're just jerking me to make me miss.” I did anyway. My striped ball bounced off the padded corner.
She lined up her next shot. “No. But I was thinking this hustle could be a two-way thing."
"How you mean?"
"There're plenty of lonely widows, you know. Fact is, statistically, there's more older broads with some savings than older men.” She let loose with her cue stick and, banking her shot, knocked in another solid.
"I'm not taking the denture-cream money from some gummy grannies. That is not what this is,” I insisted.
"My bad.” She gave me that smile of hers again, well aware that it got to me despite my anger. “The point remains, you're not tapping your market's full potential."
"Maybe that's where you come in,” I suggested. “Lining up some of these beefcake boys for the work."
She seemed to consider that while she sunk her last solid. “Who knows? I might take a semester off and show you how to properly expand your operation.” She pointed the cue stick at the middle pocket and put the eight ball away in a smooth stroke. “See you, champ."
I stood watching her walk away, allowing as she did a bit of a swing of those wonderful hips in those designer jeans. Yeah, Ms. Cheung was a real go-getter. And if I wasn't careful, she was going to run me like she did this pool game, and put me out of the picture.
* * * *
"Really, you don't need to keep doing this."
"It's my pleasure to see that look on your face,” I said.
She yawned and stretched on the bed. The diamond and white-gold pendant I'd just given her was resplendent against her magnificent bronzed skin. Noreen—and I understood she wasn't that Noreen, the woman I met in those days of want in Tulsa—pulled me closer from where I stood gazing down on her.
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