“Atsa boy. Travel light.” He jerked his head at the car. “Hop in. I’m Lucius Breen.”
“Pierce Duncan. Everybody calls me Dunc.”
The car was almost as luxurious as Arnie’s Cadillac, and there was no honeybun to get him kicked out into the desert. The big man drove fast and well; his hands had distended knuckles but were carefully manicured. He swung the massive head Dunc’s way.
“How long you been on the road?”
“Three, four weeks. Just bumming around.”
“Atsa boy — do it while you’re young.” He kept snuffling and blowing. A thought drew down heavy scar-tissued brows. “Three weeks and just that little bag?”
“I got rolled last night in Juárez.”
Black rage creased his features. “Fucking greasers!”
Dunc didn’t know who had rolled him, but it sure as hell hadn’t been Mexicans who had driven off with his duffel bag.
“Did you used to fight?” he ventured at last.
“Yeah. Twelve years pro. I was my own manager, invested my money in houses and lots.” He gave a great roar of laughter. “Whorehouses and lots of whiskey.”
He got suddenly serious.
“Actually I didn’t booze, I didn’t chase skirts, and I didn’t pay any taxes. Boxers didn’t then. I invested. In land around Dallas. Then I brought in a couple wells on my spread, a couple more...” He shrugged. “I pump oil, pump my wife, raise kids and horses. I hate niggers, spies, farmers, and anybody from Houston or San Anton. Going up to Vegas now to referee a fight. They do two, three a year there, little no-’count things usually, but these boys are ranked heavyweights.”
Last year Dunc had listened on the radio while Rocky Marciano KO’d Jersey Joe Walcott for the title.
“Would either of ’em have a chance against Marciano?”
Breen snuffled through his nose. “Five years ago Nitro Ned Davenport might have given Rock a fight. Still might, on a good night. But Ned’s a fool, stays loyal to...” He paused with a calculating look. “Anyway, lousy judgment, lousy management. Tiger Terlazzo is young, fast — but they say he don’t like to take a punch he don’t have to take. We’ll see.”
Dunc had played a little stud poker, but Vegas would be real gambling. Gambling and professional boxing and all-night excitement. And a good place to earn traveling money.
“How about I ride straight through with you?”
“Atsa boy! Now you’re talking.”
Dunc was running from one side of El Paso’s switching yard to the other, trying to get across before a train got him. But the yard was half a mile wide, and trains were coming on every track with only a half-inch clearance between the sides of the passing cars. Two rushing trains met just where Dunc cowered. He threw crossed arms up in front of his face and screamed...
“Hey! You okay, kid?”
Dunc was bolt upright on the seat, eyes staring, arms still crossed in front of his face. The 98 had come down out of the mountains and was starting across a flat arc of concrete highway laid on the top of a vast curved structure. Yellow lights illuminated the roadway. There was water close up on one side, an endless drop into nothing on the other. Twin ghostly towers flanked the upriver side of the road.
“Just a bad dream,” Dunc finally got out. “Where are we?”
“Boulder Dam. Greatest dam in the world. Lake Mead on your right. Those castle-looking things are silt towers. They work the way they ought to because of a damned good engineer named Will Corfitzen.”
They were across the dam, climbing back into the mountains again. The 98’s lights cut a twin swath from the darkness.
“I worked on this dam back in the twenties,” said Breen. “It was my first job, I was fifteen looking eighteen. Gov’ment farmed the contracts out to engineering firms that knew how to build dams.” He chuckled. “Kaiser and Bechtel got the biggest pieces of the pie. They were bastards to work for, but I learned from them. Learned enough so that after Boulder Dam, I never worked for wages again. And I never will.”
The next time Dunc woke up, they were coming down into the desert. Everything was dark except for the broad thin glow of reddish light flat on the horizon, pulsing in the clear air like the northern lights when he and his dad used to go out poaching rabbits on full-moon nights after a new snow.
“Las Vegas,” said Lucius Breen in a voice laced with conflicting emotions Dunc could only guess at: love and hate for sure, maybe nostalgia and anger and anticipation. Excitement.
Three
Whores, Fours, and One-Eyed Jacks
Chapter Nine
The little town of Las Vegas baked in the desert sun. Dunc walked down lower Fremont Street, gaping up at the facades of the gambling halls. The Gladiator had to be somewhere in this five-block area of the Main Stem known as Glitter Gulch, wall-to-wall gaming clubs for high rollers and penny-ante players alike.
He went by the Hotel Apache’s ornate sign, the Las Vegas Club, the Pioneer with its huge neon cowboy in jeans and tight shirt and neckerchief, cigarette in his mouth, ten-gallon hat on his head, his cocked thumb pointing toward the casino. Dunc had already passed the Golden Nugget and the Eldorado Club.
At the curb was a gray 1942 Ford four-door sedan like the one he’d driven up to Fairbanks two summers before. He’d loved that little car, and here was its twin parked only half a block from the gold neon boxing glove marking the Gladiator Club.
On the carved wooden door a pair of heavyweight fighters duked it out, one sinking a left hook into the gut of his opponent — who was just landing a roundhouse right on the first fighter’s chin. Dunc could almost smell the sweat and rosin, hear the thud of blows, the grunts of effort.
Inside, two women in slacks with bandannas around then big pink hair rollers played the slots as if the lives of their kidnapped children depended on the whirring dials.
Over the bar crowded framed photos of tough-looking men in Everlast trunks and sparring poses. A faded blowup was captioned as the last bare-knuckle world championship fight: on July 8 in 1889, the great John L. Sullivan had beaten Jake Kilrain for the title in seventy-five rounds of boxing at Richburg, Mississippi.
No clocks were visible anywhere. You’d have to check your watch for the time — if you hadn’t hocked it for a few bucks to lay down at the tables. In his single afternoon of wandering around town, Dunc had learned that much about Vegas.
He slid onto a stool near a slight, slender man with the most alive eyes Dunc had ever seen, shining darkly in an ascetic olive face as thin and sensitive as a woman’s. He wore a tuxedo and black tie at five in the afternoon, and there was nothing feminine about him: strong chin and high cheekbones, dark brown curly hair. Large, even, gleaming white teeth flashed in his dark face when he laughed.
He chuckled and sipped white wine and said to the bartender in musical, unaccented English, “Everybody but me says Siegel was nuts, Nicky, putting up the Flamingo on the L.A. highway six, seven years ago when you couldn’t get building materials—”
“Hell, Pepe, he was nuts — they killed him, didn’t they?”
Nicky was beefy of neck, massive of chin, dark heavy brows, getting thick around the waist but with no marks of professional fighting. His pink shirt had a high rolled collar and French cuffs with miniature silver boxing gloves as links.
“Maybe. But look at Vegas today. Population almost twenty-five thousand by the last census, growing by leaps and bounds. It’s—”
“In the middle of the fucking desert.” Nicky gave a deep rumbling chuckle. “I’ll believe that Las Vegas News Bureau crap about beating Reno as the gambling capital of America when—”