by Victor Koman
"Can I get up, Doc?"
"Sure, Dell, sure." His fingers tapped against his jawline like a dancing spider.
"Is it something worse?" I reached for my slacks.
The tech moved around the two of us, preparing the machine for the next patient. I dressed and kept an eye on the good doctor. He looked like a sinking ship.
His first words in five minutes were, "Have you had a bowel movement today?"
His skill at charming banter was exceeded only by his taste in conversational topics.
"No," I said. "I haven't."
"Go to the lab."
The whole process was growing repulsive. With a sigh, I went to the lab to do what he wanted.
La Vecque told me that the computer analysis would be ready the next day.
"Go home and get some rest." He shook like a youngster commanding a firing squad for the first time. Or a man standing before one. His bedside manner instilled little hope for my future.
I hardly noticed the walk back to my office except to observe that my wheezing had eased up a bit. I stopped in the garment district to buy some evening clothes with money I'd taken from another bank under another name. I have that sort of build upon which even new clothes look as if I'd slept in them. I felt better, though, strolling to Auberge. If the news was as bad as La Vecque's demeanor indicated, I figured I should have some fun before I cashed it all in.
And maybe I had another reason to go there.
The redhead was there at the cloakroom again. As I headed toward the Casino of the Angels, I was aware of a feeling of... anticipation.
What if I saw
her
again?
The thought stopped me in midstride. What was I looking for-a final adventure? A last fling with a woman half my age?
Someone bumped me from behind. A sensation of enormous rage radiated from about two feet below my eyes. I turned around to see a kid. Not a normal kid, of course. My luck's not that good.
She wore a slinky peach satin dress that clung to what would in a few years be called her body. Her makeup, expertly applied, made her look mature and sensuous. Her long nails mimicked the color of her dress. I guessed that she wore high heels from the audible scuff they made on the carpet. She brushed back her long mane of tousled auburn hair and spoke in a low child's voice.
"Watch your fucking step, asshole."
I looked at her for a confused moment, then broke into a bellyful of laughter.
Her orange lips pouted. "Whyn't you watch where you're going?" she demanded. Small fists rested angrily on her hips; innocent green eyes stared up at me, filled with a child's fury.
"Why don't
you?
" I snapped back. "You were behind me." I expected her to run off crying. I wasn't in any mood to coddle.
"Ah, shut up." She whipped ahead of me and walked with womanly grace down the hallway. In a few steps she quickly vanished from sight in the twists and turns of the maze. I shook my head-half in amusement, half in pity.
I turned a corner and the kid stepped in front of me, her arms folded. The cigarette nipped between two of her small fingers looked as big as a cigar.
"Aren't you on the wrong level?" I asked. "Hooking is two floors down."
"Rules are made to be broken for a price. I've got a couple of the guards up here on the take. I walk around till someone picks me up, then we go down to Three."
"In that case," I said, "I'm restricting your business by hanging around. So long." Stepping past her, I noticed a look of amazement that her youth left undisguised.
"Hey, mister!" She trotted up behind me to pull at my coattails. "Don't you want to go to bed with me?" She struck a sultry pose.
"I'm not a politician, kid. I don't kiss babies."
"But every man I talk to wants to make it with me. And give me things."
I shrugged. "Consider me your first strikeout."
She pulled close enough to me that I could smell the heavy scent of Opium perfume. Her voice dropped half an octave lower.
"I can do anything you want. I can take it anywhere you want to give it to me."
"Can you take it out of here and bring it back when you've grown up?" I resumed my walk. She kept up with me, two steps to one, trotting alongside me like an unwelcome puppy.
"I give really good head."
"Good." I pointed. "Head in that direction and get lost."
She stopped and glowered. "You're supposed to want me!"
"Says who?"
"They
all
want me!" Her eyes narrowed in fierce concentration. Her face scrunched up like a bulldog's.
I felt a tremble inside me, as if the cancer were eating deeper. I looked at her. She wasn't wearing a satin dress anymore. An image appeared to me of how she would look naked except for stockings and high heels. She squatted astride me, her hands on my chest. Moving slowly, with an expert's skill.
We both looked ludicrous. Hideous.
I fought to shake the picture from my mind and regain my bearings. I glared at her. "Someone ought to give you a spanking."
"You can," she said with a smile. "Let's talk price."
I clammed up, figuring her to be hopeless. With a muttered curse, I muscled my way through the crowd toward the casino.
She practically yelped in shock. Her gaze shot daggers into my back. That satisfied me just fine.
The interlude distracted me so much that I followed a crowd of noise and people into the wrong casino.
Or maybe the right one.
3 The Contract
I stepped into the Casino Grande, realized my mistake, and turned to go. At the edge of my field of view shimmered silver and gold surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. A gasp of amazement escaped from them.
The lady was at the craps table of the Grande tonight.
I wandered over to watch her for a few moments in her deep concentration. She laid down her chips. In a blur of action the rest of the players faded the bets. The dice rattled in her hand for an instant, then scampered across the felt.
Seven.
She let the money lie. It took a little longer for the crowd to cover her bets, but newcomers arrived every few seconds to add to the crush of gawkers and gamblers. She rolled again. The red cubes knocked along the table to stop at six and four.
"Ten," the croupier announced, sliding the dice back to her.
She rolled again. Ten. Several frustrated bettors left the table, looking at her as though she'd robbed their babies of pabulum. She ignored them and scooped up some of her winnings. I scanned the table, found a bet of hers that wouldn't wipe me out, and faded it.
She rattled the dice carelessly in her slender hand and let them loose. Boxcars.
"Twelve," the croupier said with relief, raking in the dice to give to someone else.
Blondie looked directly at me as if it were my fault. One of the boys handed her a tray with her pile of chips. She tipped heavily and left the table.
I picked up my share and sauntered to the bar.
While watching a whiskey sour fill up before me, a familiar metallic sheen approached and slipped into the chair at my right.
"Margarita. No salt." She spoke slowly. A low, intimate tone.
When the bartender slid the drink over to her, she handed him a couple of chips. He looked at them for a moment.
"Lady," he said, "there was a devaluation two days ago. A hundred new dollars is quite a bit."
She smiled and shrugged her lovely shoulders. The barkeep argued no further. A grin spread across his ruddy face.
"Thank
you
, lady!"
She ignored him to turn to me. "You don't belong here," she said in a quizzical voice.
"Okay," I said, "I don't. And what's a nice girl like you-"
"You're different. You notice me. You
see
me."
I eyeballed her up and down. Her long legs, as far as I could see, possessed the sleek lines of a professi
onal dancer's. From there on up, she pulled in at the right places and flared out at the righter places. Her piercingly blue eyes imparted a startling power to her defiant visage. Anyone who trifled with her, it read, paid the price.
"You're hard to overlook." I turned back to my drink.
She sipped at her margarita. Her eyes continued to watch me.
"I want to thank you for what you did the other night." She smiled with friendly ease. "Things such as that don't usually happen to me."
"Me neither."
"What's your name?"
"Ammo. Dell Ammo."
She nodded. "It fits." She returned to her drink.
She wasn't going to tell me her name-that much was obvious. I gave the whiskey my undivided attention.
After a few minutes of nursing her drink, she spoke without turning to face me.
"What do you think they did with them? The robbers."
The thieves most likely had been sold to the kink caves on Auberge's lowest level. Both the living and the dead. I didn't think she wanted to hear that.
"I don't know" was all I said. "If you think they're after you, don't worry. They won't bother you again."
She set her glass down. "And what makes you think they were after me?" Her baby blues gazed at me with penetrating force.
"Someone's after you." I leaned back and groped around for a cigarette. "If it wasn't the little rat that happened to point his rod in your direction, then it must have been someone else. Why were you in such a hurry to leave?"
"Wouldn't most people try to run away from a shooting?"
"Most people last night stuck around to watch."
She shuddered. "Death... repels me." She took a long sip of her drink, then gulped the remainder down. The glass returned to the bar with a resounding clank. She stood, gazing toward the craps table.
I grinned. "Going to risk the management's curiosity at this casino, too?"
"Not after the way you changed my luck. I'm going to watch
you
play."
I shrugged and followed her over. It wasn't as if I'd had any plans for the money. I edged into the playing order behind several quick losers. She moved behind me to watch.
My turn came up fairly quickly. A lot of losers haunted that table. I asked for a new pair of dice, got them, twiddled with them awhile. What money I had went on the table. The crowd faded the bets, and I cut loose with the cubes.
"Nine," said the croupier-a woman my age with an expression of Stakhanovite gloom about her. She slid the dice back to me.
I rolled again. A three and a six. The money piled up, but I let it lay. The onlookers plunked their chips down. I glanced behind me to see Blondie watching me. Her beautiful brow frowned in vague puzzlement, as if the numbers the dice generated were some secret code she had to break. I grinned and returned to the work at hand.
I rolled a seven and left the chips showing. It took longer for the bets to get covered. More rubberneckers drifted to the table, drawn by the noise the others made every time I won.
The dice bounced across the green again. Seven. The crowd gasped. So did I. This time the covering bets came faster. I had to lose sooner or later, didn't I?
Roll. Seven!
A mania seized them. Chips clacked on top of chips, and paper rustled onto the cloth. I grinned at the lady behind me. She smiled and nodded at the dice, urging me on.
A pair of threes. Carefully maneuvering between the piles of chips, the croupier slid the dice back to me. I threw them down the emerald field, a pair of rubies dancing.
"Again six," the woman said.
I was beginning to amaze myself.
I picked up the dice, checked that my bets were faded, and rolled. Two and four.
The crowd had polarized into two factions. The bettors desperately wanted me to crap out. The onlookers cheered for me to roll another six. An intoxicating amount of wealth covered most of the table.
I rolled.
When the crowd gasped, I peered at the dice. A one and a five.
"Jesus Christ," I muttered. As I said it, the one tipped on its side to expose the two spot.
"Seven," the croupier announced with smug finality. I'd been obliterated. Sort of the way I'd be in a few months.
For the moment, though, I had a hundred friends. The gamblers all loved me. They gathered up their huge winnings and offered to buy me drinks, dinners, women.
The lady in silver laughed, her voice tinkling like small clear ice cubes in a glass of purest crystal.
I smiled at her over the heads and shoulders of the happy crowd. "The old man's had a big night and has to go to bed now." I pocketed what little money I had left.
"Don't fool yourself, Mr. Ammo. You're not quite as old as you think. Take a long hard look at yourself when you get home."
"Yeah, sure, dollface." She would take the opportunity to get away right about then, I thought. And sure as clockwork she turned away. She hesitated, though, like a vixen curious about a strange creature she sees before her.
"I-" She turned back to look at me, a desperate decision forming behind her eyes. "My name is Ann Perrine. I work at the Bautista Corporation on Cordova. If you ever need help, give me a call."
"What makes you think I'll need help?"
Her smile said it all. "I'm in charge of Final Accounts. Extension four-eighteen."
With that, she spun around in a swish of silver and gold. She walked quickly away, leaving me with a snappy reply left unspoken.
I cashed my few chips, found that I'd only just broken even. I retrieved my coat from the cloakroom and stepped into the cool L.A. night.
On the way up to my office, I decided to stop at La Vecque's floor. A puddle of light spilled out from under his door.
I rapped a few knuckles against the rotting wood veneer.
"Who the hell's bothering me at this hour?" He paused. "I've got a shotgun!"
"Relax, Doc. It's me."
"Dell? Get in here." The door unlocked.
I pushed it open and entered to see La Vecque duck into his record room. He emerged a moment later with a plaque and a file folder.
"Take a look at these." He punched the tiny keys on the plaque, calling up two nearly identical body-shaped images. Their only difference lay in their coloring.
"Me, right?" I balanced the plaque on my fingertips.
"Right. Last month's scan and today's. Notice the changes in coloration where your bones are? And the changes in places such as your intestines and prostate? They correspond to absorptive and transmissive differences in the oscillations of the magnetic waves we used to make the scan."
"Of course," I said with as much authority as I could. He had me stumped. The pictures seemed to be almost exact opposites in coloration.
"Your lab reports show large amounts of cancer cells in your urine and feces. I was sure it meant that the cancer had spread to your vital organs. The scan says otherwise. The incidence of cancer cells in your body has sharply declined. I don't understand the mechanism, but somehow you're excreting your sarcoma."
"What?"
"Damn it, Dell, you're pissing out your cancer. I couldn't be totally sure from the scan, but your lab reports and blood tests show it. You've gone into some kind of spontaneous remission and you're rapidly expelling both your metastatic cancer cells and the osteogenic cells." He ran a spotted hand over his bald, sweat-dappled head and waved his other hand around in helpless circles.
"I don't know what's causing it, I don't understand the transport mechanism, I don't even know if I'm just crazy. You're
healing
."
"Oh."
"`Oh' is all he can say. Look, Ammo, you're not dying anymore. You're-" He stared up at me and narrowed his eyes. He looked as if he'd seen his mother in a cathouse.
"Your hair!"
My hands shot up by reflex. It felt the same. "What's wrong?" He'd gotten me all fidgety.
"Your roots are black!"
That might have angered a sh
owgirl. I was stunned. I turned to see my reflection in his sink mirror. My mess of grey hair seemed to float a millimeter above my scalp. Peering closer, I saw black roots at the base of the dull, old fibers.
"What is this?" I didn't like surprises.
"Don't ask me, Dell. I never majored in miracles. Give me a million bucks and I might be able to find an answer for you. Or just pay me the fifty you owe me and we'll call it square."
I peeled off a few orange sawbucks and handed them over. He tossed them onto an instrument tray and shut off the plaque. "Thanks. Now get out before scientific curiosity overwhelms me and I decide to vivisect you."
Easing the door shut behind me, I walked down the silent, musty hallway toward the stairs. I decided to perform my own test. The stairs seemed less formidable. I ran up two at a time.
My legs and lungs hardly noticed.
Mystified, I walked toward my office door. It stood halfway open, throwing a trapezoid of light across the cracked linoleum of the corridor.
There are times when the answer to a burning question lurks just beyond a door such as that. This was one of those times. I quietly slid my automatic from its holster. Something clattered inside my waiting room. A pair of feet scuffled about.
I edged closer to the door, keeping an eye on the shadow that flitted about into the hall. One step brought me inside the doorway.
His athletic body neatly filled the light gray suit. His back turned to me, all I could see was a head of brown hair and gloved hands clasping a walking stick.
"Mr. Ammo," he said before turning to see me.
"Reverend Zack." I slipped my pistol away and leaned against the jamb, arms folded.
"I'm expected, then?"
"Like famine after flood." I stood my ground. "What do you want?"
"The project we discussed. You've had time to reconsider my offer."
"The answer's still no."
He looked me up and down. A smile spread across his smooth face. "Nice head of hair you might be getting there."
I knew what he was getting at. I played dumb. Inside, something began to quiver.
"Yeah. So what? Maybe I've read a book on life extension."
"And your aches. Gone?"
"Yeah. Gone. For a while. What of it?" I knew what of it. And I knew what he would say next.