He set Spike on the seat next to him and reached for his jacket, a worn leather thrift shop special with a faded red lining.
His fingers found the inside pocket. In the rearview, Pack O’ Weenies eyed him suspiciously. The guy was already sweating. Jack grinned, and that made Pack sweat all the more.
The driver was going to be easy. Jack let the grin grow into a smile. Kind of a frosty smile, lots of incisor showing. Just the way he’d done it in the old days, standing in the ring and staring down an opponent when he was the undisputed light-heavyweight champion of the whole fucking planet.
“Sorry,” Pack O’ Weenies said. “I didn’t mean to go on like that, champ. I’m probably boring the shit out of you. Maybe I better just pay attention to the road. Maybe—”
Jack’s hand came away from the coat.
“Hey,” Pack O’ Weenies said. “What you got there, champ?”
Jack held it up.
The conversation ender to end all conversation enders.
“Don’t sweat it,” Jack said. “It’s only a book.”
***
Outside the limo, the Mojave Desert whipped by. Jack ignored it. Not much of a stretch, actually. He found it inordinately easy to ignore acre upon acre of absolutely nothing.
He didn’t have as much luck ignoring the Chihuahua, which had curled up on his lap and fallen asleep. The damn thing was pretty pathetic, taking little rasping breaths, fidgeting now and then as if it were having a doggy nightmare. Jack hoped the dog didn’t have lung cancer. Jesus. Just thinking about that gave him a shiver. He didn’t want to hear those words from the vet in Vegas. He didn’t want to live Old Yeller. Not with a Chihuahua named Spike, and not with his boss’s punker granddaughter. Complications like that . . . well. Jack Baddalach didn’t need them in his life. That was for sure.
Jack tried to concentrate on the book. It was an old Dan J. Marlowe paperback from the fifties. One Endless Hour. He’d found it at the same thrift shop where he bought the leather jacket. It was a first edition, a primo score at fifty cents. Not that Jack Baddalach was the type of guy to get his shorts in a bunch over a first edition. No way, Jose. But Jack thought that Dan J. Marlowe was one hell of a writer. That was the thing.
The book was a good one. It pumped right along. But Jack found that his mind kept drifting back to the little scene which had highlighted his morning.
Palm Springs sunshine warm on his back. In front of him, a girl who had to be ten (let’s face it. Jack, more like fifteen) years his junior. A girl in a T-shirt that said Sweet Cherry Love.
A girl with her tongue in his mouth.
There was a little fridge in the back of the limo. Jack took a cold Kirin from the compartment and rolled the bottle back and forth across his knuckles. A year and a half since he’d quit the ring, but still his knuckles ached.
He tried to think about nothing at all.
He thought about Sweet Cherry Love.
Suddenly, the cellular phone on his hip felt as heavy as a wedding ring.
Jack swallowed uncomfortably.
Jesus, Baddalach. Get a grip.
He did. He got a grip on a bottle opener, popped the Kirin, and let that golden Japanese beer wash the taste of tarnished virtue from his mouth.
***
Jack had intended that only one woman have the number for his cellular phone. One woman, and one woman only. Her name was Kate Benteen, and to make a long story short she had saved Jack Baddalach’s bacon during the first job he’d ever done for Freddy G. Jack had been waiting for Kate to call him for the better part of a year. Jack thought that the better part of a year was a long time to wait for anything, but he had stuck it out because Kate Benteen had told Jack to stick close to the phone. Jack, a man who tended to take thinks way too literally, had done his damnedest to comply, because if there was ever a woman who was worth a long wait it was Kate Benteen. But in all that time, his cellular phone hadn’t rung. Not once. And now he’d given his phone number to another woman. A woman named Angel, who had written his number on her arm with bright red lipstick.
Jack thought about Pack O’ Weenies, a guy who knew exactly when things were over. A guy who could close a hotel room door, and leave a woman behind without a word, and never give any of it another thought.
And then he thought about Kate Benteen and Angel Gemignani, and he wondered which woman would call him first.
Spike squirmed on his lap. An anguished little whine escaped the Chihuahua’s muzzle. Jack knew exactly how the little bastard felt. Absently, he started petting the dog. Spike stopped squirming almost instantly.
Outside the window, the town of Amboy drifted by. Then Essex. Needles coming up. But the Mojave Desert didn’t change a bit. The limo rocketed over a midnight stripe of pavement that split a whole lot of very white nothing. Jack stared at the desert but couldn’t see it at all. He found himself staring instead at his reflection in the limo window.
And then, through his reflection, he saw something else. An exit off the highway. And beyond that a gas station. Or what used to be a gas station, because now the broken windows were scabbed over with large slabs of plywood.
Pack O’ Weenies took the off-ramp. The limo kicked up a cloud of dust as they crossed the dirt lot and pulled to a stop on one side of the gas station. Pack ratcheted the gear shift into the park position. The ash-colored cloud caught up in a second, and the big Caddy was enveloped in a shroud of swirling dust.
“What’s up?” Jack asked.
At first Pack O’ Weenies didn’t answer him. He stepped out of the car, and into the cloud, without looking back.
“Gotta see a man about a snake,” he said.
And then he slammed the limo door.
***
The door had only been open a second, but in that second Jack caught a mouthful of Mojave dust.
He almost took another sip of beer, but he decided against it. He just didn’t want it anymore. He set the bottle on top of the limo fridge, watching Pack O’ Weenies disappear around the back corner of the old gas station.
Jack waited, his left hand drifting over Spike’s fur as the dog slept easy. Outside, the cloud began to settle around the limo. Lazy dust devils danced in the sunlight. Jack watched them, listening to the limo’s big engine ping hotly in the dry desert silence.
A moment later, someone came around the comer of the gas station.
Someone who wasn’t Pack O’ Weenies.
The woman was dressed in black leather. Black pants, black go-go boots, black bikini top. She was definitely something to see. The cows that had given up their hides for her wardrobe could rest easy in the knowledge that they’d made a much more significant contribution to human society than their brothers who’d given it up for hamburger meat.
The woman came through the dust, ash-colored particles swirling around her, moving forward through it step by step as it settled lower, coming finally into sharp focus as if spied through a camera viewfinder. Everything tight on her long lean body. Everything black save her very white skin. Hair as black as night, and sunglasses that gleamed black as the armor of a carrion beetle scuttling away from the noonday sun, and lipstick as slick and dark as black roses kissed with dew.
She wore braces on her wrists and hands. They almost looked like some kind of medical braces . . . but Jack knew that couldn’t be. That was crazy. Because these braces, whatever they were, were covered with black velvet and fringed with black lace.
The slender ivory fingers that escaped the braces ended in long nails polished as black as the inside of Satan’s own pocket.
Jack kept his eyes on those fingers as the woman walked toward the limo.
Because those fingers clutched a machine gun.
The woman didn’t move fast, but the way she moved was something to see. Sinuous, almost hypnotic.
Much too quickly, the barrel of the machine gun tapped sharply against the limo window.
Spike came awake at the sound. Frightened and wary, the dog whined, shivering aga
inst Jack’s outstretched hand.
Jack snapped out of his reverie and rolled down the window.
The woman said, “Give me the Chihuahua, and no one gets hurt.”
JACK LOWERED THE LIMO WINDOW. “THERE ARE EASIER WAYS TO GET A DOG, you know. You could always call the SPCA.”
The woman in black ignored the wisecrack. “You look kind of familiar. Didn’t you used to be somebody?”
“My name’s Jack Baddalach. I used to be the light-heavyweight champion of the world.”
“You don’t look like you’re exactly in fighting trim, Jack.”
Now it was Jack’s turn to ignore her. He set the Chihuahua on the seat and opened the door. ‘Take it slow” was all the woman said, and she kept the machine gun barrel aimed at Jack’s chest as he stepped from the limo.
The desert heat hit him all at once. Jack instantly missed the limo’s air-conditioned cocoon. As he closed the door, he glimpsed Spike burrowing under his leather coat. Jesus. Maybe the pooch knew something that its bodyguard didn’t. Jack hoped he wasn’t witnessing a display of canine precognition.
Sweat beaded on Jack’s forehead, but the heat didn’t seem to bother the woman. She stood there as cool as a tall glass of lemonade, watching his every move.
Jack took a final glance at the gas station before turning to meet the woman head on. He was hoping to catch sight of Pack O’ Weenies, but his view was obstructed by a rusted tire rack heaped with tangles of twisted metal. Whatever or whoever was behind the station would remain a mystery. At least for now.
Jack wondered what had happened to the driver. He wondered if the Modesty Blaise clone standing before him had already taken Pack O’ Weenies down. Or maybe she had some help. Maybe there were a couple others just like her behind the building. Maybe they were aiming machine guns at Pack right now. Maybe he was down on his knees with a gun barrel to the back of his neck, ready to feel the sizzle of hot lead through those pink weenies. Or maybe Pack was—
“The Chihuahua,” the woman insisted. “I don’t want to drag this out. Hand it over.”
“It’s not my Chihuahua.” Jack stepped toward the woman. “Spike belongs to a friend of mine. And the fact is that Spike’s a very sick puppy. He’s got lung cancer.”
“C’mon. Dogs don’t get lung cancer.”
“Yes they do. Canine lung cancer. It’s the number three killer of Chihuahuas. See, Chihuahuas have a very small lung capacity. Once they get it, it’s adios muchacho, PDQ.” Jack shot a thumb over his shoulder in Spike’s direction. “And the muchacho in question is about two syllables into ad-i-os.”
The woman’s upper lip jerked as if she were about to laugh. Then she cocked her head to one side, just the way a dog does when it doesn’t understand something. Jack stared at her sunglasses but couldn’t glimpse her eyes through the black carrion beetle lenses, and when his gaze returned to her lips they had clamped into place once more, transforming her mouth into a determined line the color of blood oranges.
“I still want the dog,” she said.
“All right.” Jack took another step toward her. “Maybe we can work something out. You got a wallet in those tight leather pants? Make me an offer. You’ll be wasting your money, but hey, that’s your problem, not mine—”
“That’s close enough.”
Jack took another step.
The machine gun jerked in her hands. “I said stop.”
This time Jack did as he was told. He kept his eyes on the machine gun and the braces she wore on her wrists. Braces covered with black velvet and lace.
“Turn around,” she said.
“Uh-uh. Never turn your back on a lady with a gun. That’s what my mama always told me.”
“You’re not carrying, are you?”
“Carrying?”
“A gun.”
“Not the last time I looked.”
“Maybe I’d better look for you.”
As she one-handed the machine gun and reached for him with her left hand, her right wrist dipped under the weight of the weapon. The gun barrel dipped as well, and it didn’t rise for several seconds.
Yeah. The braces weren’t for show. There was something wrong with the woman’s wrists. She might look like an Amazon, but she had a weakness.
“Arms in the air, Baddalach.”
Jack raised his arms, and her left hand eased over chest and explored his lats.
It occurred to Jack that she was playing with him. Enjoying herself. He smiled at her. Shrugged. And she smiled back.
“Pretty good, Jack. Pretty firm. About a forty-four, huh? At least when you’ve sucked a lungful of air and you’re all flexed up.”
Jack didn’t say anything. Her hand drifted lower, to his waist, lingering just above his belt.
“Thirty-two,” Jack said.
“In your dreams, Baddalach. Thirty-six, at least.”
She was only touching him with one long finger now, and that finger dipped below his belt-line.
Jack took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
The woman laughed. Jack opened his eyes. In her free hand, the woman held his cellular phone.
“I guess you won’t be needing this, Jack.”
“C’mon.” Jack reached for the phone, but she pulled away.
“Hey . . . you’re wasting your time here,” he said. “You should listen to me. I know what I’m talking about. You don’t want this Chihuahua. The poor little fella’s really sick.”
The woman shook her head. The machine gun weaved a little in her right hand, the barrel dipping from Jack’s belly to his knee.
Braces or no braces, the weight of the gun was getting to her. If he could catch her just right. She was about the same height, maybe just a hair taller. If he could knock the machine gun out of her hand by smacking her on the wrist, and then clip her on the jaw with his fist—
The cellular phone rang.
The woman in black looked at it, amused.
“You expecting a call, Jack?”
That question was the understatement of the century as far as Jack Baddalach was concerned, but he wasn’t up to answering it at the present moment.
Jack was busy doing something else. As the woman in black’s lips parted and she spoke the final word of her question, Jack chopped the heel of his left hand against her right wrist. Her hand opened reflexively and the machine gun toppled from her grip. The right hook Jack launched a split second later began at his waist, and by the time it connected with the woman’s jaw it was traveling at a felonious velocity. She was biting off the last letter of that last word when the punch hit her, and her jaw snapped closed and the word came out shorter and much less sarcastically than she had intended. Her sunglasses flew off just as her eyes rolled up in her head, and she went down like a femme fatale Halloween costume dropped off a hanger, and she did not move.
The machine gun lay on her left. The phone on her right.
The phone rang again.
Jack snatched it up, reaching for the machine gun almost as an afterthought.
Gunfire stitched the air above his head.
The voice that followed was somehow more intimidating.
“Drop the gun, you miserable cocksucker.”
***
Forty-five years worth of Marlboros, who the fuck cares how many packs, but certainly enough unfiltered cancer sticks to heap several ashtrays Mount Everest high. Cutty Sark on the side, shots consumed per night averaging in the low double digits. An upper denture plate that didn’t quite fit no matter how much Poligrip she globbed over it. Vocal chords that had suffered the strain of a lifetime’s worth of tantrums, cat fights, and other assorted trials and tribulations.
All those factors had combined to create the voice Jack Baddalach heard behind him, and that was why it was more intimidating than the sound of gunfire.
Jack dropped the machine gun and turned to face the voice’s owner. She had come around from the back side of the gas station while Jack faced off with the woman in black. And in the time it
took Jack to dance his little dance with the weak-wristed machine gunner, this woman had entered the limo and swept Angel Gemignani’s Chihuahua into her hands.
Her hands were sheathed in black leather. So was the rest of her. In fact, she might have been a twin to her weak-wristed counterpart if not for three factors that Jack could not ignore.
First off, there was her voice.
Second, she was wearing a jacket over her bikini top. But the jacket was obviously mostly for show, because she wore it unzipped to her navel.
It was the view Jack spied through that unzippered opening which lead him to difference number three. And that was the simple fact that this woman was much older than the one Jack had punched out. While the younger woman’s bikini top was fashioned from nothing but leather, this woman’s top was equipped with subtle lengths of supportive wire. The top itself was without question a cantilevered wonder that worked an amazing magic with the woman’s breasts. The breasts themselves were deeply tanned globes marred only by a fine dusting of wrinkles— the price often paid by lifelong sunbathers. And while some might remark that the woman’s breasts looked like full round grapefruits kissed too long by the warm California sun, even the most jaded observer would be forced to admit that these twin wonders were forced up and out in a way that was in equal parts startling, amazing, and dramatic, and if the image of youth and vitality impressed upon the viewer was indeed an illusion—a mere result of engineering acumen—then, in Jack Baddalach’s opinion, the device which provided said illusion was certainly worth every penny the woman had paid.
Jack looked at her face. Tanned skin taut on a skull blessed with a sharply dramatic bone structure, crowned with a bubble of heavily sprayed white hair that from a certain distance might be mistaken for a motorcycle helmet.
Of course, the sight of a little old lady in black leather wouldn’t have slowed Jack down for an instant, no matter how amazing her breasts were. No. Not when he had a Chihuahua to protect. What slowed Jack down were the two women who bookended the woman with the cantilevered grapefruit breasts.
The Ten-Ounce Siesta Page 2