Ramón wasn’t sure what to say next. If he told her, at least she would have an opportunity to protect herself. Cassini’s people could still come sniffing around long after he was gone, and if they got wind she’d spent time with him in a hotel room, they might torture her until she said anything they wanted to hear.
“I came here on the run. Was hoping I’d be able to get help from someone here, but it turns out the person I’m running from is here in town. I should’ve left weeks ago.”
Jessie sat down next to him. “Who are you running from?”
He took a deep breath and held it for a bit. Now was the time, if he was going to tell her anything at all. “I used to work for the Cassini family. Though I guess work is a loose word for it. I was doing jobs for them as a way to pay back a large debt I ran up a long time ago. But that’s ancient history. After thirteen years on the job, I decided enough was enough. I made off with some of their money and now I’m looking for help getting out of the country.”
She didn’t speak for a few minutes. Just stared at him. “Where are you looking to go?”
Don’t tell her, old man. Bad idea. You already told her too much.
“Somewhere in South America, I guess.”
“I had a feeling about you from the beginning, that there was more to you.” She grabbed her cigarettes off the nightstand and lit one. “Do I at least get to know your real name?”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“Oh give me a goddamn break. What do you think I’m going to do? Go to the cops? Get myself mixed up in this bullshit? You already got me in enough trouble here.”
“No, I don’t think you’ll go to the cops.” That much was true, though now that she’d mentioned it . . . Could he trust her to remain quiet? Oh listen to you. Already thinking of how you can shut her up before she has the chance to talk. Old dog, same tricks.
“If your gangster friends come sniffing for you, is it really going to matter whether I know your real name? Have an ounce of fucking respect for me.”
He felt his temper rising. Why did women always have to turn so emotional and make it about them? “Jessie, that’s goddamn unfair.”
“Unfair? You’re kidding, right? You’re going to tell me about fairness after the bomb you just dropped in my fucking lap? I’ve been nothing but honest with you. I’ve told you things about myself that I haven’t told anyone.”
“I never asked you to do any of that. I never asked for any of this.”
“Yeah, but you took it, didn’t you? You took everything I had to give, and you can’t even give me the courtesy of your real name. I thought you were a little aloof, but I didn’t think you were such a soulless fuck.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the cheap metal ashtray and grabbed her purse. “Well, it was nice knowing you, Hermann, or whatever your name is. Happy trails running from the mafia.”
She walked toward the door, and Ramón stood up. “Jessie, wait!” Let her go, old man. What the fuck are you doing? But he couldn’t let her leave angry. Angry people were volatile. They were liable to vent everything to the first person who asked.
He touched her shoulder, turning her around to face him. Tears were streaming down her face, highlighting the dark circles and old acne scars her makeup and the dim tavern lighting had covered up so well when they first met. So many of his fights with Maria had ended just this way. The last one had ended even worse, with his hands around her neck. Alejandro hadn’t known that. Hadn’t seen the part where his father, enraged and out of his mind, had wrung the life out of his mother and then arranged the rope around her neck to make it look like suicide. Didn’t know about how he’d indebted himself to Victor Cassini for life in exchange for making the murder suspicions go away. But the boy had known deep down, hadn’t he? His mother hadn’t raised a fool, and Ramón hated both of them for it.
He pulled Jessie close, kissed her. She responded with a hunger he hadn’t experienced from her before, even after so many days of total abandon. He pushed her toward the bed, ripping off her shirt on the way.
Oh God I can’t do this. I can’t.
But he could, and he did. He entered her and lost himself in her heat. “My name is Ramón,” he whispered as he thrust deeper, harder. “Say it. I want to hear you say my name.”
Her frenzied eyes found his, her nails dragging up his back, delicious burning. “Ramón.” She even rolled the “r,” and it only made him harder for her.
“Fuck me, Ramón. Oh God, yes, fuck me. Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.” She enveloped him in a warm, sweet flood and he did as she asked for as long as he could. At some point, in a delirious and exhausted post-coital haze, he slept.
***
The morning sun glinted in his eyes through the space in the room’s cheap vertical blinds. He sat up and immediately knew the motel room was empty. He knew, even before he rolled out of the bed and onto the floor, painfully squashing his exposed testicles on the way, the suitcase he’d carefully guarded for weeks was gone. He stared at the empty space against the wall, where his fortune and his future once lay, almost as if he could will it to reappear, his anger slowly increasing to rage, like the RPMs in a behemoth of an engine.
You brought this all on yourself, old man.
Alejandro was his conscience now . . . Alejandro, all along. Alejandro, who would have loved to see his old man down on the floor like this, vulnerable and broken. Lost. Ruined by an opportunistic woman. A slut. Desperate thieving whore. He’d lived among so many of them over the years and yet he’d missed the biggest one of all right under his nose, his blind cock.
Eventually, he climbed to his feet, all his long years settling into his bones like a block of cement. He stood there for an indeterminate amount of time, his mind completely blank of all emotion and thought, until that block of cement turned to ice, the only sensation that had ever made him feel alive. Afterward, he searched the room for a note, something to tell him she only did it because she wanted to get her son back, or because the money was a curse from which she only wanted to relieve him, that she was taking that half-million to the ocean and tossing it in, freeing them both of its grip so they could, what? Stumble through life in this empty shithole of a fake paradise, broke, subsisting on sex and whatever they could scrape together on her bartender salary. Any of that might have lessened that blank fury in his mind, at least a little. Anything but this wordless, sneaking departure, this blatant robbery.
He found no note, no trace of her but her keycard on the nightstand and the remaining scent of her well-fucked cunt on the sheets. He went to his suitcase to see if she’d taken anything else. Particularly the thing he’d been keeping there since the night six weeks ago when he had taken care of another meddling bitch and left her on the side of the road. He reached his hand into the deep side pocket and grasped the cold metal of the Magnum and pulled it out. The Madam’s pistol.
It was an appropriate tool for the job that lay ahead. The only real recourse he had left at this point.
Ramón took a shower and packed the rest of his things. Then he made a very important phone call. It didn’t take long. He only had to say who he was and his request was granted, as if they’d been expecting him. This could be a good thing, but he didn’t really care by this point. The meeting would be short and sweet.
He left his room key next to Jessie’s and carried his bag out to the car. There was two hundred dollars and change in his wallet—at least the bitch hadn’t left him completely high and dry—and he spent part of it on a huge breakfast at the little Polish restaurant Jessie mentioned last night. Part of him hoped to run into her here, but that would have been silly. If she was half as smart as she appeared to be, she was long gone. One thing was for certain, though. That money was cursed. He believed this now. She wouldn’t get far before it turned her into a coward and a fool, but unlike him, she lacked a killer’s instinct and his years of experience. She would spend it carelessly until it killed her, and that would be just fine with him. It was
coming for us all, sooner or later.
He ordered the special from a huge woman who looked like she was carved out of white soap. Potato pancakes and a pile of kielbasa and scrambled eggs, toast and jam, and a lot of black coffee. It wasn’t his preferred breakfast. Ramón would live and die a huevos rancheros kind of man, but for what would probably be his last meal, it was good. Flipping through the newspaper but not actually reading it, he noted the date. Halloween. It wasn’t Dia de los Muertos, but it was close enough.
After paying the bill, he stepped out of the little diner and into the chilly morning. He only had to drive less than a half mile for his appointment, but he drove slowly, taking in the sights. Some people were already dressed in costume, preparing for a full day and night of holiday debauchery. But Ramón wouldn’t need a mask. For the first time in years, he’d taken his off.
He parked on the street, a block away from the Blue Diamond Hotel and Casino. It was time to meet with the man he should have met three weeks ago, but he didn’t intend to stay long.
Chapter 16
Madam Sacrifices Her Queen
It was a quiet night of business at the Weeping Willow, though there had been decidedly fewer visitors to the house than usual in recent days. She didn’t have to look at the ledgers to know this. The lack of squeaking bedsprings and muffled moans that normally populated the house was evidence enough. But it was also Halloween night, which was typically slow even in the best of times. Even Victor’s babysitters were taking the night off. Some of them were family men, with kids to take out trick-or-treating. How quaint.
This was to her advantage. She had to pick the lock to get into her office and conduct a few important items of business before settling in to wait for Victor. Undoubtedly the buffoons running the joint now had ransacked the place of all its hidden treasures, but she was counting on them missing a particularly well-concealed panel in the back corner of the room. To her delight, she was correct. Even she had to spend a moment looking for the little hairline crack in the baseboard, which was a testament to the craftsmanship of this old roost and its little nooks. She slid back the plank hidden behind the baseboard, revealing a space that was far deeper than it was wide. In it she found her “emergency kit” filled with essential odds and ends she’d collected over the years without any strict purpose in mind, other than they fulfilled her more macabre and violent interests. Hank Ballas, or whatever freak was living in his house now, might have understood.
The last two days had been a waking nightmare, but it also had the benefit of waking her up completely from the stupor she’d been in since the night Ramón had shot her. After ignoring more than a dozen calls from Benny on the first day, she took the battery out of her phone and threw it into one of the more cluttered corners of her room. When anyone knocked on her door, she barked at them to go away. They would summon Victor soon enough to deal with her, and that’s exactly what she’d hoped. She could imagine how the call might have gone.
“Hey, boss. She’s gone full gonzo. Won’t even come out of her room. I think she’s been talkin’ to somebody. Yeah, I heard she’s been messin’ around down in Jersey with that nosey Jew. You might want to come handle this.”
Yes, let him come. She was counting on it. As for the nosey Jew, she’d decided the deal was dead in the water. He pretended to care, titillating her with the flesh and promises of power and riches, but he was just another alpha male gorilla who thought the dangling meat between his legs made him special. She might take care of him one day soon, but she had more immediate matters to tend to.
If she hadn’t gotten out of the car at the Ballas place, things might have been very different right now. She would have still been deluded enough to think she had a horse in this race, that she could play with the boys, follow their old boys club rules, and still come out on top. Even Dante, the one who knew her better than anybody, who understood her cunning and propped her up from the shadows of his monstrous son’s misdeeds, had fallen victim to the same old bullshit in the end, and ultimately he was the reason she was sitting here now, like some deformed freak locked away in a bell tower, waiting for a man to decide her fate. It was a heavy mantle to leave on a man so many years in his grave, but she had a feeling Dante himself would have agreed, and if he was watching her now from the great beyond, she liked to think he would be satisfied to see her do what he’d lacked the balls to do himself.
She remembered Clayton’s warnings not to get out of the car. The driver, perhaps the only decent man-monkey left on the planet, seemed genuinely to care for her safety.
“I don’t like this place, Ma’am. We need to go now.”
“Shut it, Clay. You don’t know me very well, but trust me I can handle myself just fine.” She knew her scarred face was a direct contradiction to this statement, but her remaining eye dared him to say something about it. She would have brained him if he had.
The silhouette in the window thirty feet away had been too alarming to just let go, and the Madam had to see the girl up close. Part of her insisted it couldn’t have been Nina. This girl had been too pale, too thin. More like a ghost than an actual person. The Madam didn’t have rescue on her mind, exactly. Just an inexorable curiosity and an insatiable anger and indignation that her property had been treated in such a manner. She hadn’t always been the kindest mistress, but she took care of her own. She looked after her girls. Punished them harshly when they went astray, yes, but she never starved them, never degraded them or tortured them for the pure enjoyment of it.
The curtain fell back across the window before the Madam even got out of the car, but she didn’t doubt for a second what she’d seen. She only had one eye, but it was her best one and it was working better than ever to compensate for its missing mate. The girl was there, without question.
Dead leaves and twigs crunched underfoot like old bones as she approached the house. It loomed over her, its shadow both cold and heavy. She could still feel it on her heart, even now, telling herself that if she’d known about the madness of the Ballas place, she never would have sent her girls up there. Or so her good friend hindsight assured her. She’d heard the commotion inside before she even reached the window. There was someone in there, all right. More than one someone. She heard two voices, both female.
“Who is she? Who is that bitch?” one of them said.
“I don’t know. Please don’t hurt her!” That was Nina. Her voice was weak and hoarse, but the Madam remembered that flat Midwest accent well. She also remembered it, because when she sat in her office and gave Nina the choice to stay on at the Willow or go visit her final client, it was the last time she had been in control of anything. It had been her final administrative act in her running of the Willow, and that had an important place in her memory. She also knew that voice, because at one time, she’d owned it, and as far as she was concerned, the ties of ownership were deeper than blood.
Before she could even question whether it was a smart move, she reached through the wrought iron bars and pounded a fist on the grimy glass. “Hey! That girl is mine, do you understand me? I never agreed to a sale! I want my property back!”
All commotion behind the window ceased. A moment later, the Madam heard a rolling sound echoing off the walls inside, followed by the creak of door hinges. She backed up and looked over to see the front door standing wide open. From where she stood, the house was as dark as ink inside.
“Ma’am, please come on back!” Clayton called out behind her. He was standing outside the car now, gripping the top edge of the door, his complexion faded to an ashy gray.
He was right, of course, and strictly in the name of self-preservation, she should have listened to him—there was that damn hindsight again, cooing out its would’ve should’ve could’ve lullaby—but she was too incensed in that moment to care about a cowardly negro’s case of the vapors.
“Stop clutching your goddamn pearls,” she muttered and stomped toward the porch, pulling out one of her special stiletto hair pins as she went
and concealing it in her fist. It was no gun—stupidly, she’d left her gun at the Willow before her last trip down to Benny’s—but she could use it in a tight spot to jab out an eye or pierce a carotid artery. She knew the anatomy well.
Mounting the steps, climbing ever closer to the yawning blackness, a chill fell over her and a quiver began in her belly that might rage into a full bodily earthquake if she didn’t keep hold of herself. Her foot hesitated taking the final step onto the landing. She could see a shape in there now, a silhouette of head and shoulders outlined by orange flambeaux lighting. Ballas. Had to be. Only something seemed very wrong with him. Wrong enough to fill her with the purest revulsion. Get out of here. Get out of here now, you stubborn old woman.
“I want to know why you thought it was okay to steal from me,” she said, defying the terrified voice in her head. “We never made any sort of deal for you to buy my property. I’ve come for what’s mine.”
“Come inside. We can discuss it over tea,” he said.
She frowned. There was something wrong with the man’s voice. Not merely the raspy sound of it, but its location. It seemed to be coming from high above him. The dislocation of it made her head hurt a little.
“No, you bring her here,” she said. “And I’ll leave and not involve anyone else in this matter. You should consider yourself lucky you haven’t been arrested.”
He laughed, or at least a harsh series of coughing gasps she thought was a laugh. The sound was as cold and lifeless as a grave, and she fell back a step, her heart thrumming double time. She resented the fear, clawed at it before it could overcome her fury. She would not be laughed at by another man, not in this life. Not after everything she’d been through. The next man who underestimated her would have his testicles turned into a pair of earrings.
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