***
“Goddamn,” Jack said. “Goddamn."
The carpet blazed in the trunk. He’d escaped just in time. He beat back the flames with his leather coat, then doused them with the seltzer bottle from the limo’s wet bar.
The snake was well done. The woman’s corpse was blackened but definitely rare. Jack threw the former into the desert and closed the trunk on the latter.
He put some distance between himself and the limousine. The hot desert wind blew at his back, strong and clean. Cars rushed by on the highway, passengers oblivious, their minds blissfully free from speculative exercises involving kidnapped Chihuahuas, women with machine guns, men with top hats, and rattlesnakes.
Jack wiped rattler blood from his mouth as he walked to the rear of the gas station. There was no sign of Pack O’ Weenies. As he returned to the limo, Jack wondered what had happened to the driver.
Pack’s fate wasn’t important at the moment. Getting to Vegas was. Jack had to explain things to Freddy G.
He was behind the wheel, ready to key the ignition, when he heard his cellular phone ringing.
The dognappers had left it behind.
Jack followed the ringing sound—by now it was surprisingly familiar—and found the phone in a tangle of brush. C’mon, Kate, he thought as he picked it up. I’ve waited damn near a year. Don’t let me down now. Not today. Not after all this corpses ‘n’ reptiles shit.
If it’s you, I’ll take all this shit in stride.
If it’s you, I’ll forget every damn bit of it.
Jack answered the phone.
Angel Gemignani said, “Where’s my goddamn dog?”
THERE WERE FOUR OTHER MEN WITH JACK BADDALACH AND FREDDY GEMIGNANI in the big penthouse office high atop the Casbah Hotel & Casino, but it was Freddy who held Jack’s attention.
The casino boss furiously crunched a stalk of celery that wore a sheen of Snap-E-Tom tomato cocktail and vodka, all that remained of the third Bloody Mary he’d mixed since Jack walked through the big double doors of the suite of rooms overlooking the Las Vegas Strip.
“The woman in the trunk was our driver,” Freddy said between bites. “Kitty Crocetti, from Chicago. Jimmy Two-Nose Crocetti’s niece. Christ on a cross, Jack. First someone does her point blank with a hand cannon, then you set her on fire with an emergency flare, and now I gotta ship her ass home in a box. Jimmy Two-Nose is gonna be pissed.”
Jack wanted to ask how a guy got a nickname like Jimmy Two-Nose, but he knew that this was not the time to play name-that-gangster. Freddy G had been grilling him for almost an hour, his cohorts watching the action without a word.
It was plain that Freddy wasn’t happy. Neither were his companions. Their expressions grew sterner in direct proportion with the level of Freddy’s unhappiness. Jack couldn’t blame them. As employees of the last old-guard casino owner on the Vegas Strip, they knew all too well that an unhappy Freddy Gemignani was a dangerous thing.
When Freddy G became unhappy, somebody usually ended up taking a dirt nap in a remote comer of the Mojave Desert. Jack Baddalach did not want to be that somebody. He looked at the other men in the room and was distressed to find that none of them would make eye contact. Most likely they figured there was no use getting attached to a man who might very soon be sleeping with the prairie dogs. That’s how bad Jack’s story was playing out.
Jack massaged the knotted bruise high on his forehead. Right now he could have done quite nicely without it, but it was too late to tell that to the woman who’d slugged him with the butt of her machine gun. If he wanted to keep on sucking air he’d better start playing detective, and start playing good. But he had to have a place to start.
Not with the kidnapped Chihuahua. Obviously. And not with the bullet-ridden, toasted Mafia princess.
“So the driver was a plant,” he said, because he had to start somewhere. “He was working with the dognappers.”
Gemignani cringed at the very mention of the last word. “Yeah. Must be. Most likely he’s the one popped a cap on Miss Kitty, then took her place.” Freddy shook his head. “Christ on a cross. Poor little girl got her head blown off over a Chihuahua. Thank God it wasn’t my grandbaby in that limo. This crew we’re dealing with must be nuts.”
“Yeah.”
Freddy made himself another Bloody Mary. “Now about this driver. Let’s talk about him. What was he like?”
“Well, the guy seemed a little squirrely. He talked an awful lot. Told me all kinds of things about himself. Too many things. Especially for a guy who was a plant. That’s the only thing that makes me wonder how he fits into the deal.”
“He probably fed you a bunch of bullshit, Jack. Wanted to get you to drop your guard. Make sure you wouldn’t suspect him until it was too late.”
“Yeah. Could be. But maybe not. Maybe the stuff he told me was true. Maybe he figured I was a dead man, and it didn’t matter what he said.”
“Slow down, Jack. First things first. Let’s start off with the basics.” Freddy nodded at one of the other men—a thin guy with a big bunch of stencils and some kind of sketch pad. “Guido here is an artist. Used to work for Vegas PD. Now he works for me. He’s gonna ask you some questions about the driver and his gang, then come up with some pictures that we can use to track ’em down.”
Jack nodded. Freddy came around the desk. He looked Jack dead in the eye—Jack looking up, Freddy looking down.
Jack got the funny feeling his boss was looking for something specific. A sign of some sort.
The casino owner didn’t blink. After a moment he turned away and headed for the doors with his Bloody Mary in hand and the three other wise-guys in tow.
Freddy said, “Do your best, Jack.”
The double doors swung open. As they started to close Jack heard the casino owner take a big bite out of a fresh celery stalk, and then all that was left of Freddy was his shadow, a heavy blotch on the white carpet.
The door slammed closed.
Freddy’s shadow was gone.
***
Guido passed a stack of stencils to Jack, who shuffled through them intently.
Every stencil held a different nose. Noses that resembled potatoes or yams or bananas. Roman noses. Hooked beaks. Gnarled W. C. Fields specials, Michael Jackson chop jobs, Dick Nixon ski jumps.
Jack thumbed through the samples, trying to remember the limo driver. The thing he’d mistaken for a sketch pad lay before him on Freddy G’s big mahogany desk. It was the kind of pad used by police artists, and the only thing it held was an empty head, round and bald. That part had been easy to remember. But it was Jack’s job to fill in the rest of it, and right now he couldn’t seem to remember—
Guido coaxed him along. “Just take your time, Jack.”
Jack sighed. “I’m having kind of a hard time with this. I mostly only saw the guy from the back.”
“Okay. But you must remember something about him. Maybe his eyes. Maybe you saw them in the rearview mirror. Or his mouth.” Guido patted Jack on the shoulder. “Try closing your eyes and picturing him. Sometimes that helps.”
Jack closed his eyes, trying to remember the driver. The guy’s voice was in his head, right there, telling that goofy story about his ex-wife’s anaconda tattoo, and Jack concentrated on the voice, reaching out . . . and he felt that he was getting closer . . . closer.
“One thing I remember—”
“Yes? His eyes? His nose?”
“His neck,” Jack said. “I remember the guy’s neck. The back of it, anyway. He was heavyset, lots of folds on his neck. You know what I mean?”
“I think so. But I’m not sure where this will get us—”
“His neck. You understand what I’m saying? It looked like a pack of weenies.”
Jack opened his eyes. Guido stared at him, suddenly as expressionless as Freddy G had been during the interrogation. Then Guido looked down at his stencils.
“Does that help any?” Jack asked.
“I’ve got to be honest with you
,” Guido said, looking over the noses and lips and eyes. “I’ve got a lot of stuff here. But I don’t have any weenies.”
***
Jack didn’t like the way Guido took his leave. Stalked off was more like it—the artist tucked the pad with the empty bald head under his arm and went through the big polished doors muttering about packs of weenies. His last words to Jack were: “I think maybe we’d have had some luck if I’d brought along a Mr. Potatohead.”
And the hell of it was that Guido was right. Really. Because Pack O’ Weenies did have a head kind of like Mr. Potatohead’s. It was the God’s honest truth. Only Pack O’ Weenies was white, not Idaho spud brown.
Describing the dognappers hadn’t gone any better. Jack did okay with the first woman, the one he’d punched out. He remembered those lace-covered wrist braces she wore, and he remembered her sunglasses and those determined lips that were the color of blood oranges. But when it came to remembering the other women—in particular the older one he’d begun to think of as “Grandma”—well, that was tougher. He did okay with Grandma’s white snow-cone helmet of hair, but when he started describing her wizened grapefruit-sized breasts and that cantilevered S & M black leather brassiere, Guido threw up his hands and made some crack about bringing in a comic book artist.
That was when Jack gave up on the whole thing. He sure wasn’t going to mention the old guy with the beef jerky face and the top hat, let alone the fact that the guy wore a rattlesnake for a necktie.
Man, it was really something. The only face he remembered really well belonged to the dead limo driver. The poor kid. Jack didn’t think he’d ever forget her. Staring at him with that one hazel eye, a scarlet hole blasted where her other eye should have been . . .
Jack went over to Freddy G’s bar, opened the fridge, and grabbed himself a beer. He didn’t open it. He sat down on a plush leather sofa that ran the length of the window facing the Strip. He ran the cold bottle back and forth across the knuckles of one hand, then the other, watching an animatronic British frigate do battle with a pirate ship at the casino across the street.
A little less than a year ago he sat on this sofa, listening to Freddy rave about two million in mob money that had disappeared along with a mob courier somewhere between Las Vegas and Dallas. Freddy had asked Jack to find that money. And Jack had found it. He’d had some help from Kate Benteen, but he’d brought Freddy’s money back all by his lonesome.
Freddy was impressed. Sure. Anyone would be. He’d used Jack a couple of times since then, when he needed a guy he could count on. Used him in “situations,” which was Freddy double-speak for trouble.
But “situations” didn’t come along every day, even in Vegas. Freddy liked having Jack around. Jack liked being around. He didn’t sweat the little stuff.
Not usually, anyway.
But this last thing. This Chihuahua thing. It had grated on him. Just that Freddy would ask him to do something like that hurt. Like he was an errand boy. Sure, Freddy’s granddaughter was involved, and maybe it was just that Freddy didn’t want to send some tacky little half-a-mozzarella to his daughter’s house in Palm Springs, some gumbah he couldn’t trust around a young thing like his granddaughter, but still—
Jack shook his head. That last part was a laugh, anyway. After all, Jack Baddalach was the guy who had started the day with his tongue in Angel Gemignani’s mouth. He didn’t figure that particular performance met anyone’s definition of “trustworthy,” especially not Freddy Gemignani’s.
But Freddy had sent him after a Chihuahua, for Christ-sakes. And Jack Baddalach was the former light-heavyweight champion of the world. And you just didn’t send the former light-heavyweight champion of the world after somebody’s dog. Not even if that somebody was your granddaughter.
You didn’t send a champ after a mutt.
Jack shook his head. No. You wanted that mutt to come through in one piece, you had to send someone a lot smarter than a champ. You had to send someone who knew how to do something besides get hit in the face, because a champ would fuck things up. He’d get strung along by a guy with a pack of weenies for a neck, and he’d roll over for a bunch of leather girls with machine guns, and he’d end up locked in a limo trunk with a pissed-off rattlesnake and a dead Mafioso-ette.
Jack’s foolish pride had its ass down on the canvas. He counted ten over it. If he wanted to make things right with Freddy G, he’d better straighten up.
If it wasn’t already too late for that.
Jack rolled the cold beer bottle back and forth across his aching knuckles. Across the Strip, the frigate’s cannons spit blinding gouts of flame. Then the pirate ship returned fire, and very shortly great belches of fire and smoke poured from the frigate’s belly.
The frigate began to sink. Jack watched it disappear into the concrete deep, the British captain standing proudly on the deck, going down with his ship.
***
Freddy’s hand closed over Jack’s shoulder, and the former light-heavyweight champion nearly jumped out of his skin.
The casino boss sat next to Jack on the sofa. “You’re in the clear, champ. None of the boys think you had anything to do with it.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “But I don’t really care what those bastards think. I care what you think, Freddy.”
“C’mon, Jack. You and me go back a ways. I’ve known you since you came out of the amateurs. Most of your title fights were right here at the Casbah. I never figured you’d go dog on me.”
“Good. I just want to know where I stand, is all.”
“Now you know.”
“So what’s next?”
“We wait for a ransom note or a phone call. We wait to find out what some crazyass dognapping crew figures a Chihuahua is worth to the mob.” Freddy threw up his hands. “Christ on a cross. This business. Sometimes it drives me nuts. Sometimes it makes me wish I could call in the fucking cops.”
“Look,” Jack said. “I know I messed up—”
Freddy’s harsh laughter cut him off. “Yeah. You really screwed the pooch on this one. Jack. Or maybe I should say you wished you’d screwed the pooch. That would have been better than letting the little fucker get dognapped. You should see my Angel. Oh, man, is she pissed. She takes after her grandma, that one. Only difference is her grandma carried a razor.”
“As the French say, vive la difference.”
“Viva shit, Jack. Angel carries a gun.”
The beer was getting warm in Jack’s hands. He realized that he was sweating. “What I’m saying is that there has to be a way to track these idiots. The cops do it all the time. So can we.” Jack stood up and paced in front of the big window. “Now, it’s pretty obvious these guys knew what was going on. I mean, the whole thing was a complete setup. That means they know something about you—”
“Or about Angel.”
“Right. Now, if we can figure out how they set up the snatch—”
Freddy G waved Jack off. “We’re way ahead of you, champ. My boys are on it. We’re checking out the limo right now. The limo company, too. If the driver left a trail, we’re gonna find it.”
“Like I said before, the driver talked a lot. He told me about a stretch he did for murdering a guy. In California, I think. There’s got to be a way we can trace him.”
“Don’t sweat it.” Freddy was up now, patting Jack on the shoulder again, turning the boxer toward the double doors. “I’ve already got a guy on it. He’s a sharp one. Could find Jimmy Hoffa if he had to. He’ll probably phone you tonight. You give him the whole story. It’s probably bullshit, but it can’t hurt.”
“Okay.” Jack talked fast as they headed toward the doors. “But what can I do in the meantime?”
“Just take your ease, champ.” Freddy walked Jack down a corridor, heels clicking over Carrara marble. “Just take your ease.”
The casino owner punched the elevator button. The door opened instantly. Jack didn’t need Freddy to draw a diagram for him. He stepped inside.
“One th
ing you can tell me, champ. That rattlesnake. The one that was locked in the trunk with you and Jimmy Two-Nose’s dead niece.”
“What about it?”
“Did you really bite the damn thing in half?”
“Yeah.” Jack pressed “L” for lobby, and the elevator doors started to close. “And it’s true what they say about snakes.”
“What’s that?”
“The sonofabitches do taste just like chicken.”
SPOILED PALM SPRINGS PUNKERS, ARMED AND DANGEROUS DOGNAPPERS cinched in black leather dominatrix gear, rattlesnakes and corpses and irate Mafioso to spare—it didn’t matter how much shit Jack Baddalach went through in one day; none of it was as frightening as the prospect of facing a hungry geriatric bulldog.
Jack dumped thirty cans of dog food into his shopping cart. The brand that was recommended by world-renowned pooch breeders. The brand that contained no fillers or harmful additives. The expensive brand.
It didn’t seem like he’d be scamming many free meals at the Casbah in the very near future, so he figured he might as well do some shopping for himself while he was at it. He heaped the cart with six boxes of ready-to-heat frozen White Castle hamburgers, three boxes of cherry-flavored Pop Tarts, a couple cases of Diet 7Up (because at heart Jack Baddalach was a rebellious uncola kind of guy), two six packs of the one decent beer that was on special, three huge bags of pre-popped popcorn (no palm oil!) that reminded him of the stale stuff upon which he’d gorged as a movie-going youth, and a couple pounds of coffee beans that were blacker than sin.
A couple weeks’ shopping, done in less than ten minutes.
Four squeaky wheels bore his cart to the check stand, where he topped off his selections with a Weekly World News. He could have resisted the story about the Nazi U-boat captain who ruled Atlantis and the one about the sasquatch recruited by the NBA, but there was a new Bat Boy story—“Half-Bat, Half-Boy Eludes Air Force Radar Team!” Jack couldn’t pass that up.
He paid for the groceries and the tabloid, skinning several twenties from his wallet. It had been a bad day. Spending a fortune on groceries didn’t improve things. Neither did the song spilling from the in-store stereo system.
The Ten-Ounce Siesta Page 4