Texas Hold'em

by Wild Cards Trust

  They’d filed no police reports before we tracked them down, which ate precious hours and more than a few dollars more of Daddy and Mommy’s patience. Also in our favor, Pocket Aces Pawn had failed to perform its due diligence to ensure the amp was really Billy’s before agreeing to lend him money for it. There was a chance the band may have stolen it themselves first, but that wasn’t our problem.

  Candace was doing most of the talking at this point. I did her share of fidgeting alongside my own. It was more than five hours’ drive back to the Tobin Center the quickest way, and as I mentioned before, the county Mounties and Staties along the way were ever eager to enhance their revenue. If we didn’t wrap this up quickly, it didn’t matter how things shook out here; we’d never make it in time.

  I just reckoned potential legal questions about the situation accounted for the amount of sweating the goateed young Asian dude with the unfortunate man-bun—if I do not repeat myself—was doing despite the surprisingly adequate AC blowing through the shop. Until a short black revolver barrel got stuck up against the side of Mindy-Lou’s neck from behind, and a voice that had grown unpleasantly familiar on really short acquaintance snarled, “Keep facing away from us, bitch. And don’t try none of that Darkness shit. Ain’t need to see to blow this little girl’s pretty head off.”

  “You don’t dare,” Candace said. For my part I stuck my thumb in my pants pocket and did a thing with it pretty quick. “LaCanfora will skin you alive if you hurt her.” But she didn’t turn around, or use her Darkness power.

  “Keep telling yourself that. Maybe them big bosses decided they’d rather have you back for a little talk than Little Miss High-Ass, here. And you, shitkicker—stop playin’ pocket pool and put your hands up behind your head.”

  “All right, all right,” I said, obeying. I turned to face him and his unlovely brother. Behind them Blood’s magic tunnel was just closing up in the front door and parts of the barred plate glass windows to either side.

  “Where the heck did y’all come from this time?” I asked. If they’d done the cell-tower trick on Mindy-Lou’s iPhone again, I hoped they’d enjoyed walking into the insides of the particularly rank-smelling carnicería dumpster we’d chanced to drive past yesterday evening. Blood, maybe.

  “The back room,” the clerk said miserably. “Sorry, man. I had no choice. They got my grandfather tied up back there. Dude said he’d let the dog-joker eat his face if I didn’t play along.”

  From outside an electrical-sounding voice snarled, “This is the Fort Stockton Police Department. We have the building surrounded. Come out with your hands up.”

  Well, that was fast, I thought. Did you know you could text 911? Turns out you totally can. Before we stopped by each and every station on our way, I paused to prep an SMS on Candace’s burner phone. When Buck and Blood finally caught up with us, as Candace and I reckoned they would, all I had to do was a couple quick blind thumb swipes to text, Armed robbery in progress this address.

  Quick response. Apparently the Pocket Aces Pawn made regular donations to the FSPD widows and orphans fund.

  Buck’s eyes went wide. As if on cue a whole slew of police cruisers hit up their light bars. Best light show ever. “Blood!” he shouted. “Get us the fuck out of here!”

  His canine-looking brother obediently opened a tunnel in the wall to my right, right through a rack of electric guitars. And Buck began blinking and gagging as I blanketed his and Mindy-Lou’s upper torsos with the biggest handful of dust I could handle, gleaned from shelves and shelves of random old junk. “What the fuck?” he choked out, and yanked the trigger.

  Now, as Candace kindly observed, I am a Texan and a proud American, and a lifelong rancher, so I know a thing or two about firearms. Buck’s little five-shot Taurus snubby was a double action with no spur to the hammer. Meaning to shoot, he had to cock the piece by hauling back pretty hard on the trigger, which pulled back the hammer and rotated the cylinder to bring a new cartridge into place beneath the firing pin.

  It’s kind of a clockwork mechanism, and turns out it jams up mighty tight when you suddenly stuff a bunch of pawnshop dust into the works. The hammer got stuck partway back, the piece locked up, and Mindy-Lou showed a surprising plucky streak by knocking the gun away, then wheeling around and knocking Buck on his skinny backside with a very creditable left hook.

  Candace grabbed her arm. “Go!” I yelled, digging in my other pocket.

  “Blood,” Buck coughed out, “sic ’em, boy!”

  “No,” I said, bringing out the tennis ball I’d scavenged from outside a local court that afternoon. “Fetch.”

  And I bounced it off the linoleum tiles in front of him.

  He smiled in a way that made my heart go out, half kid, half puppy, and entirely disturbing as it was. His head bobbed up and down to follow the bouncing ball. But he was a good boy, according to his not-so-bright lights. And human enough to remember to keep open the tunnel his brother told him to make.

  I turned and dove through, with Candace, Mindy-Lou, and Billy right behind me. I managed to tuck my shoulder and roll right up onto my feet on the Persian-looking rug on the polished hardwood floor upon which I suddenly found myself. I have a little experience in falling off things, as you might gather. Though I did my back no favors.

  I found myself looking back into the Pocket Aces through a fancy liquor cabinet in an oak-paneled wall. I heard Buck squawk something, and saw Blood, tennis ball in mouth, get a stricken look in his all-human eyes. Then blackness blotted the scene.

  The tunnel vanished, making the rest of the cabinet appear. Some mighty fancy crystal work there. “Whatta we got here?” a voice sneered from behind us. “Candace? And our little girl lost?”

  Right behind us stood a couple of Hollywood Central Casting Heavies in Suits, down to the bulges beneath their armpits. One, the size of the shaven Kodiak he so resembled, glowered at us from beneath thick black eyebrows. The other, a shorter but no less wide Latino with a round shaven head, was grinning at us like we were a winning lottery ticket. He had a gold tooth, La Guadalupana protect us.

  “You know,” he told Candace, “we’re kinda gonna miss you.”

  Candace smiled. Though she had a nice face—not on a level with Mindy-Lou’s, but presentable—it was not a nice smile. “Ah. C’est si bon.” And Darkness poured from her mouth, her ears, her nose, filling the room like black fog.

  But I could see.

  Before we walked into the Pocket Aces, Candace had told me to shut my eyes, then kissed both the lids, lightly. “For luck?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  “Huh? I don’t—”

  “No. You’ll see.”

  I did. It was as if the fancy lighting got a bit dimmer, was all.

  “Why the knife?” I asked Candace in alarm. “I thought you didn’t kill anybody anymore?”

  “I make exceptions.” Suddenly she was on Bear Dude’s back with her legs clamped around his massive rib cage and the edge scoring his neck. “If you don’t surrender now, for instance, Bogdanovich.”

  Bogdanovich raised his paws. “Wait,” the vato said. “You can’t—”

  And then I nailed him in the nuts with the pointy toe of my boot from behind, and clocked him hard on the back of the head with a fancy green bottle off the cabinet.

  You may not knock ’em out that way. But you can make ’em feel too sick to do much for a minute or two.

  Enough. I went to work.

  The man beneath the wall full of photos of celebrities—mostly pop stars, unsurprisingly, and politicians—looked up from a desk you could have put wheels on and lived in down by the river. “Hog-tied with their own belts and neckties,” I said. “I grew up a working cowboy before I joined the PBR circuit.”

  “What? The fuck are you?”

  “Billy,” I said.

  Billy opened up his hands.

  “Ooh,” Mindy-Lou said, impressed despite herself. “Double rainbow.”

  I held up my phone. “Mr.—L
aCanfora, is it?”

  He nodded vaguely. “Sure. Yeah.”

  Candace had told me the Mob’s shot caller at Titan Records—he played the role of chief financial officer—was one Giulio “Julie the Weasel” LaCanfora. You could see why, with his pointy, chinless face and black button eyes. I have to say, a ferret face looks powerfully cute on an actual ferret—my oldest sister kept ’em as pets—but on a human being, not so much.

  “We’re your new best friends.” As long as you keep gazing at the pretty colored lights. “You want to help us, don’t you?”

  “Sure.” He looked eager as a high school kid about to make his first visit to a strip club. I glanced at Billy. When it was hitting on all cylinders, as apparently it was, that ace of his was pretty scary.

  “Then listen real carefully to what we say, and repeat it, word for word, into my phone, here. You got that?”

  He nodded. “Repeat what you say. Listen hard. Sure.”

  “Candace,” I said, “take it away.”

  Fifteen minutes later LaCanfora was glaring bloody blazing death at us across the deck of the USS His Desk. Not pictured: Billy’s rainbows.

  He had already discovered that the emergency backup-goon call button under his desk didn’t work so good when it was all choked up with dust. His cleaning service did a pretty good job; hadn’t been easy to find enough. Then again, mostly what else I had to do was click the voice recorder app on my Galaxy III on and off as Candace prompted him, line by line. Line by astonishingly, fatally incriminating line. I was kind of in awe of her, and not even for her totally overpowered ace, this time.

  I clicked off the replay.

  His face had gone a purplish color, underneath a real torrent of sweat. That was not a good look for the ferret features, either.

  “What … the fuck … is that?” he managed to choke out after a couple tries.

  “You recounting enough crimes in enough detail for the Feds to lock away half the district bosses across the American South,” Candace said, with obvious relish. More than a little Louisiana Red, too. “Including your boss, Shevardnadze.”

  His round eyes got so much rounder you could see white all around the irises.

  “More to the point,” I said, “the contents of this brief but enlightening recording, should it come to the attention of said bosses, you would most assuredly find yourself hanging from a hook alongside the Houston Ship Channel minus some of your favorite body parts. Though maybe not so short as you’d prefer.”

  He kept his mouth opening and closing as he processed that. That pointed-face thing also makes you look like a carp, when you do that. TIFO.

  “You are now going to record a contract, releasing both Mindy-Lou here and Candace from all ties and obligations. And promising not to try to take out your understandable frustrations on either me or, uh, Billy, here. In fact, in case any of us stub our toe real hard in the next few years, it’d be a good idea to have your affairs in order.”

  He glared from one of us to the other. “You’re joking, right?”

  I looked at Candace. “Can I?” She nodded.

  “Okay. I know what you’re thinking, Mr. LaCanfora. And it won’t work. Here’s something I forgot to tell you. Everything you said earlier was recorded using a nifty little app called FiVo-Film. It’s designed to record encounters with the police, in case they get a bit overzealous in the pursuit of their duties. As they sometimes tend to with those of us of a darker-skinned persuasion. Now, what this does is regularly dump the feed, in this case audio, to a Dropbox in the possession of the app company. You can’t get to it. We can’t get to it. But if something should happen to us, it will be released to the public, including WikiLeaks. So if your goons intercept us on the way out, you’ll have only bought yourself a ticket to getting hung out to dry in a most literal way.”

  “My partner likes to talk,” said Candace. “He means, you fuck with us, your friends will peel you like an orange.”

  “You wouldn’t,” LaCanfora said. “This is a good little girl here. All-American, even if she is a Mexican. Brought up all prim and proper and middle-class. She’s not gonna go along with that. Are you, sweetheart?”

  “It would almost be worth letting your pigs take us out,” Mindy-Lou hissed at him, “just knowing what would happen to you, you motherfucker. You were gonna sell me to some sheikh as a sex toy!”

  “Actually, our best offer came from Punjab—”

  “You’re not helping yourself.” I shook my head. “Kids these days. No respect. Right? So, time is running out for us, which means it is also running out for you.”

  “Do you wish to wiggle on the hook anymore, Mr. the Weasel?” Candace asked.

  He could only shake his head. The look in his eyes reminded me of the sadness I’d seen in Blood’s eyes, when his nasty brother hadn’t got him worked into feral fury. Except it stirred less sympathy. None, point of fact.

  “Great! Win-win for everybody.” I held up the phone. “And go.”

  Is Nobody Going to San Antone?

  by Walton Simons

  JERRY HEARD A POP and experienced the expected moment of vertigo as he was sent hundreds of miles from the comfortable confines of his office at Ackroyd and Creighton. He heard voices behind him. Well, voices and noises.

  He turned and saw a blond woman straddling a man on a king-size bed. She was wearing a cowboy hat, gun belt, spurs, and nothing else. The man was totally naked.

  “Oh shit,” he said out loud without meaning to.

  The woman swiveled her head in his direction and screamed. “It’s the ghost!”

  The man snatched the gun out of her holster and pointed it at Jerry.

  “No, wait. Please, I’m not a ghost.” Jerry held up his suitcase. “Ghosts don’t have luggage. I’m not even sure how I got in here.” Over the years, Jerry had faced a loaded gun plenty of times and had gotten very good at reading the intent of the person holding the weapon. He figured this guy was going to pull the trigger and dived headlong for the door.

  The reports from the gun banged in his ears and plaster rained down from the wall. He wrenched the door open and ran toward a stairwell. Once inside, he ditched his coat and luggage. If he ran down the stairs he might take a bullet if the man pursued him and he was unlucky; better to defuse the situation.

  He changed his face to Jack Elam’s. Elam was one of his favorite grizzled character actors and he rarely had the opportunity to use his features in New York. Physical and vocal impersonation was Jerry’s stock-in-trade, courtesy of the wild card. It was one of the things that made him an ace detective.

  He stepped back into the carpeted hallway just as the naked gunman bolted out of the doorway, weapon at the ready.

  “Son,” Jerry said, stroking his chin, “would you mind not pointing that in my direction.”

  The man lowered the gun. “Did you see anyone else here a second ago?”

  Jerry shook his head. “I didn’t mean the gun.” He pointed at the man’s crotch. “Waving that thing around is probably a felony in these parts.” Jerry looked closer. “Then again, maybe just a misdemeanor.”

  “So no one else?” The man’s voice trailed off. “Maybe it was the ghost.”

  The blond woman peeked out, clutching a bedsheet, and took the man by his shoulder. “You need to get back in here, hon. This ain’t a bull-riding contest, so an eight-second ride won’t earn you no prize.”

  The man shook his head, but reluctantly went back inside.

  Welcome to Texas, Jerry thought.

  A few minutes earlier Jerry had opened the door to the offices of Ackroyd and Creighton and stepped inside like he was sliding into an old, comfortable shoe. The office space was located in a stately Manhattan brownstone, appropriate for the most respected detective agency in the city.

  Jay and Ezili were waiting in the interior office. She’d taken the investigator spot vacated by Peter Pann when he’d opened his own agency out in L.A. “Good morning, Jerry.” She gave him a wink. “I mean, Mr.
Creighton.”

  Calling him by his made-up last name was a bit of a running joke. Everybody in the office—Ezili, Topper, Sascha, and Jay—knew his real name was Jerry Strauss. He’d invented the Creighton moniker partly out of paranoia at being outed as an ace, but more to honor Lon Chaney Jr. Jerry, like Chaney Jr.’s once famous father, was the man of a thousand faces.

  His Creighton face was similar to that of Richard Denning, a 1950s Hollywood leading man who never hit star status. Jerry spared a moment to glance at Ezili. She looked great, of course. Then again, she’d looked great for the two decades or so he’d known her. She didn’t look the same, though. Nobody around the office did. Everyone’s hair was a little grayer, their faces a little more lined; everyone, that is, except him. Unless he was on the job, Jerry always kept his looks at early thirties. He felt kind of bad about the unfairness of it, but no one else seemed to mind. They were his surrogate family.

  He entered the main office, plopped into his chair, and nodded at Jay. “Morning, partner.”

  Jay looked up and his mouth twisted ever so slightly. “What?” Jerry asked.

  “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”

  “Why do I have a feeling the bad news is pointed in my direction? Let’s have it.”

  Jay raised a hand. “First the good news. We’re set to finish up the Nesbitt case tonight. I expect our client to be completely satisfied with the result.”

  “Right. I knew that already.”

  “Yep, you did. Here’s the rub, you won’t be there tonight.”

  Jerry cocked his head. “Where exactly am I going to be?” He drummed his fingers nervously on the mahogany desktop.

  “San Antonio, Texas.” Jay smiled. “I hear it’s beautiful this time of year.”