One-Eyed Jack (14 page)

“You’re not going to get him to drink that tonight,” the assassin said, finger-combing his hair. “We need bargaining power. Offer him his partner’s life.”

Stewart blanched.

The assassin blew Angel a kiss. “And in the meantime, love, I have people to kill.”

She climbed off the bed and came across to him, leaving the mug on the dark wood desk beside an industrial-looking beige telephone. She lifted her chin and stared up at him, challenging; he kissed her for real this time, ignoring the Suicide King’s snort of disgust. “Come home safe,” she said, and laid a possessive hand on his upper arm. “I’d hate to have to find another partner with your qualifications.”

“Never fear. And be careful of the poof while I’m gone, Angel.” He winked. “You do look good enough to eat.”

Tribute and His Cross to Bear.

Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

Before I went to kill anybody, I took a walk through the Neon Boneyard. Las Vegas is a city without a history, but the history it doesn’t have was piled up here, baking under the unforgiving sun.

It wasn’t the old Las Vegas, of course—not the Vegas I lived in—but it was an echoing ghost of it, acres of boot-marked hardpan and a hodgepodge of metal and glass radiating the heat of the day back into the desert night. Cooling plastic ticked; signs were piled by signs, big ones, medium-sized ones—some of them two or three times taller than me. Familiar names: Sam Boyd’s, the Silver Slipper, Joe’s Longhorn, all fenced around with green-laced chain link, like the damned things might spook and stampede.

I stopped by the Aladdin’s golden lamp, which sat in a protective sort of bay formed by the curve of the Gold Nugget sign, and cocked my head back to look up at it. Funny how it looked so dated, thirty-odd years later.
Quaint
, that’s the word I want.

Somebody moved in the darkness, the drifting night air bringing me the rankness of tobacco and cheap bourbon and unwashed man. A lot of bums slept in the Boneyard; it was safer than sleeping on the street. Until I got to town, that is.

I thought about it for a minute. It would be clean, easy. I could do what I had to do and get back on duty following those ridiculously charming escapees from the idiot box around.

All right, it wouldn’t be clean.

And I was hungry, but I could still afford to be choosy—and some down on his luck drunk wasn’t choosy enough for me. Especially not when Jesse frowned at me translucently from the shadows, disapproval plain in his expression though he was holding his tongue. Most people in Vegas are prey, it’s true; the city’s got teeth. But I wanted something that wouldn’t keep me up days feeling guilty about it.

I slipped into the walkway between the Sassy Sallie’s sign and the chain link, jumped over, and caught a cab downtown, looking for irony if I couldn’t find evil. Jesse didn’t follow, and I didn’t blame him. I’d only get a lecture if he were there, anyway.

There were a lot of people sleeping on the street. I only had to spend a few minutes hanging around the courthouse and the bus station to get the feeling Vegas doesn’t offer much in the way of safety nets. People slept rough on the grass or on park benches, or moved around looking for something to eat now that the heat of the day had pulled back a little. I killed five minutes watching happy couples being panhandled as they left the courthouse with their marriage licenses in their hands; the bureau’s open ’till midnight weekdays and twenty-four hours on weekends. No blood test, no waiting, and all the papers on public record.

I could walk in there, pay a couple of dollars, and pull my own marriage license application, if I wanted it.

Yeah. Plenty to choose from, and easy pickings. Jackie kept his city clean of people like me. What he couldn’t keep out were the people like people everywhere, because they made him as much as he watched them. And I comfort myself that there are worse predators in the night than me.

It’s a lie, but I comfort myself.

There were still a couple of street preachers working the crowd. The true Las Vegas wedding experience; pick your minister from those on the sidewalk shouting their wares, like hookers jostling on the corner.

“Hey, mister,” one said, as I wandered close, “do you want to get married tonight?”

God forgives us the sins of our mortal lifetimes, if we ask real nice. My religion doesn’t talk much about the ones committed after you die. I turned around and looked him in the eye, and shrugged.

“My fiancée’s just run back to the hotel. You wanna come with me to get her?”

“Sure,” he said, and fell into step. Tall man, heavy set, his hair shaved close to the skull. We walked a few yards, and it was easy enough to grab a wrist and snake him into the shadows. They make it sound so pretty in the books. Tidy little puncture wounds, and orgasmic pleasure spiraling into death.

It isn’t pretty. You wouldn’t want to know. Still, plenty of blood in that one, and if I couldn’t find a record producer, a man of God would do.

You figure they’ll get home safely, right? And if they don’t, it’s their own damned fault.

I never could stand a hypocrite.

One-Eyed Jack Walks the Plank.

Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

The John Henrys made good company, and I needed all the company I could get. Beside which, it was fun to watch them walk through the press of bodies on the boardwalk in front of Treasure Island—
through
it, quite literally, as I threaded between. Hard going; the pirate battle was underway, and the thoroughfare was jammed.

There was no possible way I was making the railing until the tourists wandered inside, but I staked out a spot between a stout couple arguing in Lithuanian, two California lesbians, and a tour group of Southeast Asians. Doc wound up standing more or less inside me, and John Henry bisected both the Lithuanians, but at least all three of us had a pretty good view of the pirate side. Of course, the problem with standing there was that when the powder magazine on the fiberglass cliff behind the ship “exploded,” the heat of the special effects about singed my eyebrows off. I lit a cigarette and smoked it while I waited. The Californians edged away.

The bad guys won, the good guys sank, the British captain went down with his ship, and the tourists shuffled into the casino to feed their souls and their livings into the slots. I pressed forward against the fake pilings and ropes, a John Henry on either side, and dropped cross-legged to the boardwalk.

I wouldn’t have much time before casino security came to roust me as a drunk, but everything I needed was here: fire, and water in the desert, and pageantry and illusion, and willing marks. Everything Vegas is built upon.

I flopped on my belly, wriggled under the rope and over the lip of the boardwalk, then stretched my hands down to the water, the cigarette still smoldering between my lips. Behind me, the gaudy-painted British ship started to rise from the moat, to be reset and do it all over again in ninety minutes.

I liked the pirate ship better. It had dragons.

Black water chopped inches from my fingertips, even when I writhed forward until my hips overhung the edges of the boardwalk. I’d changed into a black T-shirt emblazoned with a mushroom cloud and the legend “America’s Nuclear City,” a backup pair of cargo pants and the Docs. The boots counterweighted my upper body nicely, but I still couldn’t reach the water and the ragged wooden edge of the boardwalk was doing a pretty good job of emasculating or at least disemboweling me.

Somebody shouted for help. I’d run out of time.

My cigarette hissed when I flipped it into the moat, but the ember stayed lit. The dull red light drifted through crystal-clear water, sterile as a swimming pool, and images blossomed behind it, swimming, not stable yet. A big blur of white, a swirling glow expanding around the light of the ember. Coughing, Doc crouched beside me and put a steadying hand through my shoulder. I didn’t even feel a chill.

“The posse’s en route, son. Better dive for it.”

“Thanks, Doc.” A hand clutched my ankle. Somebody yelped. I felt the grip skitter off leather as I grabbed a quick breath, shoved over the edge and followed the ember down.

Cold water—Christ!—and I hit it badly, but not as badly as I might have. It smacked me in the back like a kick in the kidneys, but I held on to my short lungful of air and stroked down until my fingers scraped the bottom and the cigarette swirled lazily in the countercurrent, the ember’s glow flickering out strangely like the light of a much bigger fire. The glow spread through dark water like coils of ink, twining my hands, and I felt it brush my face with a warmth like fingers. Chlorine stung my eyes and burned my sinuses. I saw stars.

And between the stars I saw a vast winter-white wall, Hoover in the floodlights as it had looked as I fell past it, as a freak gust of wind had lofted me and thrown me clear of the power plant at the base of the dam.

Yeah, I know. Just lucky, I guess—

The dam bloomed up, whistled past, and suddenly that blossoming was underlit with the glow of the cigarette, red as a drunkard’s nose, billowing—the dimpled membrane of a wall of desert dust, the wall of a storm, a towering thunderhead . . .

A mushroom cloud.

My shirt, of course. Oracles are notoriously easy to influence. Struggling in the water, lungs burning, I stripped it over my head and let it slip to the bottom of the moat. Darkness turned the ink into unhealthy mottles on my skin.

Hoover
. It was right the first time; the dam, the water, the ancient, chained Colorado toiling oceanward, grooving the desert. Green filaments of strength ran through the water; life and breath in a thirsty place, the firefly flicker of old holiness.
Through caverns measureless to man/ Where Alph the sacred river ran
 . . . or something like that.

Right. It’s about the river. I knew that—

The oracle shimmered and nearly went dark; they get sulky if you snap at them. I coaxed as best I could with black lightning flickering behind my eyes.
Who?
I asked it.
What? Why?

It showed me Angel, of course—her skyline, sunlit and then gleaming in the darkness, hungry and ragged as a row of tiger’s teeth. It showed me a dark-haired man with a scar on his face wasting a cop in the bathroom of a by-the-hour hotel room, and then cutting his tongue and whatever was left of his heart out with tidy precision, the sheets from the bed keeping the blood off his shoes.

Then it showed me Stewart in a dark weird place, the feathered branches of tamarisk moving in the random beams of flashlights. The lights glared off Stewart’s eyes and his teeth, and the scarred man standing before him with the same expression and the same knife. A glimpse of wings—hard bronze wings, the angry wings of seraphim—and Angel’s touch on the arm of the man with the knife, a dirty kind of benediction.

“You were born to serve the dam,” she said, and her voice went through me like the sound of a stripping gearbox. “And the dam was born to serve me. Your poor little ghost of a city, your mirage, your desert hallucination”—she blew across her hand—“pfft. Your power is my power, Las Vegas. If you won’t serve me, you’ll make someone who will.”

There was more. There had to be more. Stewart reached for me, reached out, his back against seamed concrete, his eyes in a tight squint of panic. There had to be more, but my vision was blackening around the edges, and the thin stream of bubbles I let edge through my teeth wasn’t enough, and I couldn’t come up where I’d gone down. A flashlight beam whispered through the water, piercing Stewart, and he vanished just as I reached for him, all seaweed and ghosts. I stood in the middle of a silted plain, streaked sunlight falling through brown water, catfish flickering among drowned streets and foundations stretched around me like Atlantis. Unreal shells crunched under my boots, the last touch completing the vision.

There has to be more
.

I hesitated one long second, and then kicked off against the bottom of the moat and swam under the boardwalk, stroking for the pirate vessel and a place out of the lights where I could cling to a rope or a piece of fake cliff and gasp for a while. If I was lucky, nobody would see a dark head bob out of dark water.

Minutes later, still shaking, I hauled myself from the water into the shadows one-handed, something hard and ridged pressing my other palm. Cumbersome soaked leather chafed my legs, and icy water squelched through my socks every time my feet squished them against the inside of my Doc Martens.

Those poor boots. Second time in a month. There wasn’t enough saddle soap in Las Vegas to make it up to them.

Shirtless, the moat water already drying off my skin in the arid night, I edged under a street lamp and held out my hand flat to see what had made its way into it.

A sooty brown object patterned with white ripples, some kind of freshwater clamshell, water still dribbling from inside. I shook it around on my palm. The halves fell open, butterfly wings, a rivulet of sand left behind when the water ran out.

A transparent shadow fell over me. I looked up into the eyes of John Henry. Doc hovered at his side, long white fingers fretting the leather of his holster. “Whatcha got, Jackie?”

“I dunno,” I said, and held it up so he could see. “Something from a dream.”

The American and the Fine Kettle of Fish.

Somewhere in Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

One of the great simple pleasures of the American’s life was watching his partner eat. The process of conveying nutrition from the Russian’s plate to his mouth usually continued unabated long after the American had been reduced to picking at tempting crumbs. Furthermore, the food was apparently metabolized directly into sarcasm, because not a trace of it ever appeared at the Russian’s beltline.

But even the Russian eventually got tired, or full, or both. He yawned, pushed his stool away from the wreckage atop the sushi bar, and rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. “I thought of something,” he said. “The assassin—”

“Yes?”

“—he’s not living up to his reputation, is he?”