That was three weeks ago.
What kind of crazy bullshit was this? Who took hostages to settle a gambling debt?
Leo got off the bus on the frontage road for Interstate 5. The Industry Casino was open 24 hours a day, but the parking lot was almost empty. Tony had repainted and put in new carpet, so the lifers were spooked.
Leo knew it was risky, but he needed all the luck he could get, so he snuck into the bushes beside the overpass and took off his pants, then his boxer shorts, turned them inside out, and put them back on backwards. If he was right about who and what waited inside, then nothing he could do would matter. To put to rights the imbalance they represented would cost more than everybody involved was worth.
Funny thing was, Tony Sherpa used to be the most generous loan shark in town. Even after he took over the Industry, he would still carry a guy way longer and higher than any mob-bonded bank would. He respected the tidal flow of luck, and all the rich diversity of life that thrived on its fickle bounty. Somebody put a bug up his ass. He might have known, even before he picked up the phone, who it was. He could hear her breathing, sucking the luck out of him through the connection.
The Three Lees worked the front door, but Leo would never go near it, anyway. A Buddhist monk blessed the entrance when it reopened. Good luck and prosperity—for the house.
The back entrance was usually watched by a uniformed rent-a-cop, but Dr. Kwak himself waited for Leo as he came ambling up, shuffling to nurse a sole which had come unglued.
“Dr. Kwak. I’m no Freudian, but a cigar never looked quite so much like a huge black man’s penis, as it does in your mouth.”
Kwak pursed his lips and waved Leo into the casino, but he crushed out the fat Macanudo in the nearest ashtray. As he did so, he chanced to brush the front of Leo’s trousers with the back of one nimble hand. Leo felt nothing at first, but halfway across the floor, his balls convulsed like they’d been smashed by a hockey puck. The pain overflowed his groin and poured like a string of bloodclot pearls down his leg. He staggered and nearly fell in the koi pond next to the buffet. Vicious Lee and Silent Lee took him by the arms and dragged him the rest of the way.
Only a few tables were lit and dealing as they crossed the casino floor to the entrance to the high rollers’ room. The two guards flanking the gold-plated doors tossed candy at Leo’s feet as he passed, to ward off any evil spirits that might be thinking of abandoning him for better prospects.
The lights were turned way down, except for the pinpoint spots on the dealer’s pit behind the pai gow table at the head of the room. Tony Sherpa sat there, nervously shuffling a pack of cards. Standing next to him, a head taller even if he stood on a stack of phone books, was Wanda, Leo’s spiritual nemesis.
A lifelong pro gambler like himself, and not much better than he in the end, but she was charged with good luck—the same way a rabbit’s foot is, after you cut the rest of the rabbit off it. She was born on a Leap Year Day in the Year of the Rabbit. She had deep red hair in ringlets, and unfreckled, milky white skin. She was also, according to local legend, a virgin. Asian men liked big redheads, and they paid broker’s fees to keep a beautiful virgin around. Be a shame, if somebody told them the truth.
“Aw honey, relax,” Leo said as he came in and slouched into a seat opposite Tony Sherpa. “This must be very exhausting for you.”
Her mouth opened to let killer bees and Ginsu knives fly out of it, but Tony cut her off. “You have both put me in an extremely awkward situation, which I do not wish to enjoy any longer than necessary. Your parasitism is at an end. You owe me three thousand dollars.”
“The hell I do! It’s eighteen hundred, and I was getting it for you, when you cut off my livelihood and kidnapped my daughter.”
She snarled, but let a lot of her venom boil off before she finally opened her mouth. “If you want to see your daughter again, you will settle your account with us, and the both of you will leave Los Angeles on the next train.”
“I don’t have that kind of money. Ask her.”
A little of Wanda’s hair color drained into her face. “Just give him the hat, Leo.”
Leo took his lucky hat off and spun it on his splinted fingers. “Well, I don’t have much, but there’s only two things in the world with my name on them. You already took one, and you can have the other, if your name’s also Leo. The wig, I’ll play you a hand of Low-Ball for. If I win, I get my daughter back, and I can come back and play the tables… and free buffet for a year.”
It was a joke, but only Dr. Kwak laughed. Nobody got lucky at the Industry Casino Buffet.
Wanda said, “We just want the tickets, Leo.”
“Aw, shit. Is that what this is about? You sure know how to spoil a birthday, Wanda.”
“Don’t twist my tits here, Leo. You don’t even redeem the goddamned things.”
“You know why.” She looked away. He almost asked her if she was familiar with the art of Cassius Coolidge. “Fine, you can have them. But I want to see Eliza, right now.”
Dr. Kwak left the room through an unseen door. Tony reached for the hat, but Leo offered it to Wanda. “Close your eyes,” he told her.
Smirking at him, she indulged him and dipped her hand into his lucky hat.
Tony looked like he expected a mousetrap to go off. He sighed when she produced his Quik Pix card from today.
Tony snatched the hat and turned it over. Stuck to the hat’s liner by years of flop sweat and glacial accretions of dandruff, the layers of past lottery tickets gradually made a pretty pot in the table’s center.
A little guy who looked twelve-going-on-fifty checked them against the US Lottery Almanac. Of the twelve tickets on the table, seven were instant winners, while three were matching numbers in the Pick 6 in the California, New Jersey and Nevada lotteries, and the oldest one sent the winner to appear on the Big Spin, a lottery game show cancelled a decade ago.
The old unredeemed tickets were trash, but today’s ticket alone was worth $200,000.
“Where is my daughter?”
Wanda got in front of Leo. “Tony, can we have a minute?”
Tony glowered at her, but took the ticket from Wanda and left the room.
“A message would’ve been nice,” Leo said. “For old times’ sake. I would’ve played ball.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You wear that bad luck bullshit like a hair shirt. You’re a coward, and everyone knows it. They don’t pay out of respect, they pay to keep the stink of you away.”
He bit his tongue on a kneejerk thought. You used to like my stink, well enough. “I could change my luck, like you. Really nice setup, here. You and Tony. He’s a lucky guy.”
“It’s real work. I finally got a place. He’s not a cheapskate. The buffet hardly makes anybody sick, now.”
“That’s great. And all Eliza and I gotta do is drop dead, to make all your dreams come true.”
“That’s not fair. I tried to talk some sense into you ages ago.”
“You told me that since your lucky charm act involved playing a virgin, that it would cramp your style for anyone to know you had a daughter.”
“You sure know how to twist a story, Leo.”
“Sure, babe. Hey, waiter!” Leo shouted at Silent Lee. “CR&RC for the lady, and a tall glass of warm coconut milk for myself.”
Silent Lee tried to ignore him, but Leo dipped his fingers in Tony’s drink and tossed ice cubes at him. “Crown Royal and Royal Crown Cola, separately, with crushed ice. Try to slip Pepsi by her, and I wouldn’t want to be you. And the milk. Pretty please.”
Lee looked at Dr. Kwak, then slouched off to get the drinks.
“Liza can stay with me. I can keep a secret.”
“Tony’s not an idiot, Leo. He’s willing to stick his neck out for me, but he’s not Blue Cross.”
“Time was, Tony Sherpa would carry a guy right up until he stopped breathing. Somebody’s been riding him about making his own luck, I guess. I’ve never talked dirt to her about you.”
“I know that, Leo. She hates me all on her own.”
He wasn’t taking that bait.
Silent Lee came back. He slipped on Leo’s ice cubes and broke his nose on the edge of the craps table, flipped the tray onto the green, warm coconut milk and flammable liquid sloshing all over hand-painted baize and the ashtray where Tony’s last two cigarettes still smoldered.
“Oh shit, that’s gonna stain. Here,” Leo got up to blot up the mess and put out the fire that leapt out of the tray and hungrily bit into the gaming table’s unbelievably expensive surface. Dr. Kwak gently kicked the back of Leo’s leg and reduced him to spaghetti.
Wanda caught him before he fell over. “He doesn’t want to hurt you. He just wants you out of his casino, out of his town. It’s his now. It was never yours. A barnacle doesn’t own a boat, Leo.”
“I can’t fucking believe this. You’re really kicking us out of LA. Banishing us. How far do we have to go? How am I supposed to make a living?”
“Get out of the life, Leo. Take care of Eliza. She loves you, and she’s smart enough to turn out better than you.”
Leo just stared at the wisps of smoke rolling up out of the hole in the table. Nobody moved to get him another glass of milk.
“You won’t have to work, if you don’t want to. You’ll get a cut of the ticket, and I’ll send—”
“You pretending you don’t understand? Maybe you don’t really believe in the system, but you know what I believe. I can’t touch that money.”
“No, I don’t understand. It’s the screwiest bunch of bullshit I ever heard.”
He didn’t want to waste his breath telling her again. He could just blow her off and see Eliza again, and she would have to leave, and then whatever happened next would happen. But it would happen fast and they would take no chances, because he was toxic. To touch the same cards and chips, to breath the same air, could rub off his luck on them. To lose to such a cursed man could permanently swap their fates. Tony would never face him over cards or dice, but Dr. Kwak was not a superstitious man.
He tried, anyway. “You remember the first time I bought a ticket.”
She started to get up. “Don’t.”
“I bought it for you, on our first date. You were lucky, even then.” It was a hundred dollar ticket. His car got towed. The yard fee was ninety-six. He used the change to buy a pack of cheap rubbers for their second date.
“I bought another one when you said you were pregnant. It paid ten thousand dollars, remember? You left with my car, so I thought that balanced it out… but funny thing, I had this pain in my arm, like a hot copper wire inside my bones, and I wondered how much a heart attack and a triple bypass cost.
“That’s nobody’s money, Wanda. It’s not just a sacrifice to keep my bad luck at bay. It’s a trap someone set up. If I tried to claim that $200,000… I don’t have anything in my life worth that, except Eliza.
“It’s my job to pick that ticket every year on my birthday, so nobody else will win it, because it’s nobody’s lucky day. If Tony can claim it, more power to him, but—”
Tony blew into the room, holding a napkin over one eye. Red-faced and hoarse from screaming at phones, he barked something in slurred Korean to Dr. Kwak, who gave him a lot of static.
“Oh God, Leo, what did you do, now?”
“I’m ready to leave. Where’s my daughter? And I distinctly recall coming in here with a hat…”
Dr. Kwak shuffled out the door Tony just came in.
Leo tried to be helpful. “Whatever just happened to you, Tony, I bet it was really expensive. You want me to go call you an ambulance?”
Tony pointed a gun at Leo and screamed, “In the back, now!” He grabbed another lottery ticket out of the hat and flicked it at Vicious Lee. “Run this one!”
The winning Pick 6 ticket was only a year old, but stiffened by sweat and oil, it sailed like a ninja’s shuriken, and steered by Tony’s anger and pure, cussed bad luck, it nicked Vicious Lee in the throat.
Lee fell back against the wall and said something in Cantonese, but no one understood the words, since they came out of the gushing hole in his neck.
Tony bit back a high, throat-shredding scream and tried to throw his own hand away. His men backed away from him and the fountain of blood from Vicious Lee’s cut throat.
“So Wanda,” Leo said, “don’t suppose you’ve talked to your daughter since you kidnapped her?”
“Just go, Leo.” She pushed him towards the door. No chance Tony was going to let him ruin any more of his high-toned casino with his unlucky blood. Oh, yeah—
He stopped and leaned in close. “They tested each other’s blood in school, you know, for biology class? And it got me to thinking, so I got a blood test, too. That’s how I found out Eliza’s not my biological daughter.”
He amiably waddled out the back door and down a hall to a counting room, where the floor was lined with dropcloths and all the cash machines were covered in plastic shrouds. One of them called him Daddy.
Leo ripped off the shroud. Eliza sat in a padded leather pit boss’s chair, wearing the same mismatched shirt and skirt combo he’d picked out for her this morning, and a white blindfold. White is the color of death in Asia. Were they afraid of her, too?
Dr. Kwak stood behind the chair with his gun pressed against her red curly hair. Tony Sherpa came in behind him and shoved him towards his daughter.
“Hi honey,” Leo said. “You about ready to go?”
“Daddy, please just do what they say. They said if you don’t, they’re going to kill Mom.”
Staring mind bullets at Kwak, Leo kissed his daughter on the forehead and stroked her hair. “I wouldn’t worry too much about Mom, sweetheart.”
“It doesn’t matter where you go,” Tony growled, dropping the napkin. His eye was drooping and filled with blood. The whole right side of his face sagged oddly, muffling his words. “A curse can’t be banished… only broken, burned and cut away.”
Leo knew Tony would never do it, himself. “Deal her out. I’ll do anything. What’re the new rules?”
“You end yourself now, or you watch the girl die, before we end you.”
“Wow, Tony, you are way out of your league, here. You know, this is probably just the blood hemorrhaging into your frontal lobe talking, right now.”
Tony looked down at his patent leather wingtips, which had tracked Vicious Lee’s blood all the way in here from the high roller’s room. “This is survival, now.” Dr. Kwak stroked Eliza’s hair with his gun.
“How am I supposed to do it, swallow my tongue? C’mon, Kwak, give me a gun. We can settle this with a few rounds of Russian roulette.”
Kwak sneered, “I do not gamble, liao.”
“Oh, you’re gambling right now. Go ahead.”
Kwak laughed and pointed the gun at Leo.
He knew Dr. Kwak wouldn’t shoot Eliza. The man was a stone douchebag, but whatever he was a doctor of in Korea, it probably wasn’t executing little girls.
Leo took a quick inventory and found he didn’t regret much about dying, aside from doing it with his daughter in the room.
In the moment before Dr. Kwak pulled the trigger, Leo closed his eyes and instead of his life, he saw that little runt-dog from the calendar.
How his eyes screwed up in his little head with a seizure of emotion the uninitiated could easily mistake for surprise and joy. Only Leo could know the terror that little dog must have felt, the sick sense of falling out of his own body as he tried to calculate the price of those aces. Whether or not he collected the pot and made it off the train, he was never going home. Such was the fallout of the lousy hand he’d been dealt before his birth. Ages before any of this shit existed, the game was rigged.
“I love you, Eliza.”
“I love you too, Daddy—”
“Cover your ears, baby.”
He heard a click. A curse.
He opened his eyes and saw with preternatural clarity the cylinders in the drum rotating as Kwak pulled t
he trigger past the empty chamber under the hammer. Nothing but bullets, now, his smile said. Leo forced himself to smile back and blow Kwak a kiss, trying to put all his bad luck into it.
Then he looked down the barrel, and started laughing so hard he didn’t even duck when Dr. Kwak pulled the trigger.
So that’s how you get chewing gum out of hair!
The gun went off. Leo fell back across the pai gow table untouched.
The revolver exploded in Kwak’s hand. The plug of brittle pink chewing gum from Eliza’s hair fouled the barrel, and the gun backfired in his face.
Eliza cried. Wanda barged into the room and took her in her arms, cooing, but Eliza didn’t seem to recognize her. In shock, she screamed, “Daddy!”
“We’ll go,” Leo said. “You take the tickets.”
Tony Sherpa dabbed at his eye. “If you ever come back—”
“We won’t.” Leo went to Eliza and pried Wanda’s hands away. Without removing the girl’s blindfold, he led her out of the room.
When they were back in the VIP room, he peeled off the white scarf and tossed it. Eliza blinked and hugged her father. She looked around, but her eyes passed over Wanda without recognition. She hadn’t seen her mother in almost five years, and Wanda had changed.
“Where will you—”
“I don’t know. Don’t look.”
“I just want you to—” Wanda handed Leo his hat, with the toupee in it.
“No way. He took it for debts, and we’re settled.”
“Tony is my partner.”
“You bought into this dump? I thought you were—”
“I saved it. He’s not anything to me. But I’m the house. If you want to play for it—”
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Page 11