“Too true. You know how that mob museum craze Downtown and on the Strip stirred up the media and the tourists. Our checkered pasts here in Vegas are a big-time money machine nowadays for everybody but the mob, which was always a myth anyway.”
“Yeah, a myth. Mythconception.” Ox eyed Matt. “I can see this guy on TV. So what’d we owe him a story for?”
“I told you. He hails from Chicago, ain’t that right, Matthew?”
He hated being called “Matthew” when his baptismal name was Matthias, after a Disciple, but Matt knew he should keep quiet, and had to anyway. He’d been sipping the beer to quell the hard liquor hit to his stomach and was unable to answer right away. If Wetherly’s elbow jabbed him in the bullet wound once more, he wouldn’t answer for his reaction. This charade was useless. He could never swim with the barracudas.
Matt nodded like a Howdy Doody puppet.
Wetherly lowered his voice even more. “Freaking Effinger.”
The other guy regarded Matt with awe. “How’d someone like you ever know anyone like freaking Effinger?”
“My mother’s cousin married him.”
“Oh, gawd. Was she institutionalized at the time? Oh, hey. Kid. Just…like, uh, kidding.” He’d noticed Matt’s hands fisting on the table and probably felt the whiskey fire in his eyes.
Wetherly put an apparently restraining hand on Matt’s well-muscled forearm. “I’d be obliged, Ox, if you would put my young friend’s questions to rest as to the fate of said Effinger. If some bad actor we are all very grateful to hadn’t of offed him, my boy here might be facing thirty years to life on a homicide charge. He’s going back to Chicago soon, and would like to have some peace of mind about the guy.”
“Yeah. I can see he’s touchier than he looks. You really going back to Chicago?”
Matt nodded. He was going to Minneapolis, for sure, and maybe not to Chicago if the talk-show gig didn’t come through, but he figured nodding was not really a lie…and that whiskey shot had hit him harder than he’d like if he was doing this confession dance in his head, worrying about lying to someone who was the scum of the earth, although it was wrong to judge…
“Okay, Matthew…whatcha need to know for your peace of mind’s sake?”
Matt knew he needed to do this just right. St. Jude, the saint of the Impossible came to his rescue with the words that came out of his mouth, just the right thing to elicit what he wanted/needed to know.
Matt leaned over the table like his mentor, and lowered his voice. “You see, I’m afraid the bastard isn’t really dead.”
“Oh, man.” Ox looked from Matt to Wetherly. “Isn’t really dead? I tell you. We—um, he…the police (poe-lease, he said), they found him wrapped up like a mummy, you know about that?”
Matt nodded quickly to keep Ox’s words and shock flowing.
“Well, only not dry as a mummy from some pyramid like at the Luxor but wet, drowned, and not in any good shape when he hit the water. You cannot get more dead than Cliffie Effinger in this city. At least, not since the Chicago outfit got pushed out by the FBI in the eighties. You, ah, have connections in Chicago?”
“Sure thing, but my generation is bit behind on current protocol in Vegas.”
“Current protocol?”
“Yeah, uh, they sent me to college. When I was back in Chicago recently, a couple of made men searched his widow’s apartment, not on any orders we knew about. Maybe these freelancers were Effinger’s ex-associates and were looking for something valuable he might have left there a long time ago. What bothers me, see, is the way Effinger was offed, seemed kinda…I’m not being critical here…but kinda an old-fashioned hit. If you know what I mean.”
Wetherly intervened. “A message was being sent. My question is, was it the right message?”
Both men stared at Matt, who explained, “Here’s the thing. Before Effinger sailed off into the sunset, I learned a body with his ID on it, get this, fell to a craps tabletop at the Crystal Phoenix and was taken for, uh, Cliffie, by the poe-lease.”
Matt glanced at Wetherly, and lifted his beer glass. “Any more of these? Ox might need a hit.”
Three fingers shot up.
Ox commandeered what was left of Matt’s beer and downed it. “I don’t know nothin’ about that. That was…nobody I know is doing Strip hotel whack jobs. I don’t know any hit man could pass going into the Crystal Phoenix’s front lobby, or back stairwell, not with that wall-to-wall Fontana muscle all over the place. It’s also like they’ve got some secret robot surveillance unit on duty there. Why, some grifters with a sweet party pickpocket game got IDed there by a freaking black cat. Who needs K-9 mastiffs when you have undercover vermin? Whoever dumped a body in the Eye-in-the-Sky system at the Phoenix has balls.”
“Robot surveillance.” Matt, who’d been present at that very pickpocket targeted event, had to tap his lips with his fist to hide a smile. Luckily, that gesture read like impatience. And by then the returning round brown tray had been emptied of three beer pints and accompanying shot glasses.
This time Matt poured the shot glass contents into the beer. “That’s interesting. Could Effinger himself do that? Dump his double’s remains in the Phoenix spy areas?”
“I said ‘balls’. Does that word mean something else these post-college days in Chicago?”
Matt made an apologetic face. “I haven’t been quite honest, guys,” he said.
“Oh?” the word, spoken in tandem, sounded ominous.
“I need to know who offed both guys, Effinger and Effinger clone. Chicago doesn’t like muddy waters, even in the pirate ship attraction. Chicago wants to know what Effinger knew that a minor rat fink like him killed someone else to cover his tracks, or who did it for him. Chicago wants to know what results any enhanced interrogations on Effinger himself produced. It’s like before with Bugsy Siegel. Chicago wants to know. And what Chicago wants to know, Chicago gets. It’s a toddlin’ town, not a coddlin’ town. Capiche?”
Meanwhile half the bar had gathered around, drawn by the words “Chicago” and “Effinger”. Matt sensed a noose pulling tight around the circular booth.
“Hey,” Wetherly shouted, because Ox was up on his feet along with six other heavy-muscled guys who moved when he did.
“So ‘Chicago’ is critical of hits on our turf?” Ox demanded. “And sends an errand boy to slap our wrists? We had our reasons and we’re not done with what got Effinger killed—the bastard never squeaked—and we don’t like accountants from Chicago coming around to crunch our numbers ’cuz we’ll crunch his nuts first.”
The Vegas nutcrackers leaned in, fists looking as big as boxing gloves moving toward Matt.
Uh-oh, he figured, go big or go home. He stood, overturning the huge round table, then crouched behind it, using it as a giant shield. Glass shattered, waitresses screamed, men cursed. Woody had dived to the floor off to the side.
Matt spun the bulky table onto its edge.
Matt half-stood to see the six guys grabbing for the table. He stood all the way up, pushing the heavy table’s single stainless steel support pillar into their midsections. They were the bowling pins and he was the ball. They clutched their guts in a chorus of grunts. Onlookers showed jaw-dropping disbelief as Matt rushed for the door, the six guys from behind recovering enough to lunge for him, tightening like a noose.
“Watch out, kid!” Wetherly shouted from somewhere faint and far away.
He busted through the exit door after smashing a waitress’s tray to the floor, now wet and paved with glass shards. More curses and thumps and chaos behind him.
Barely through the door, he hesitated to gulp in the hot, stale air.
“And away we go,” said someone outside, someone much too close, who grabbed the back of Matt’s plaid shirt and slung him out down along the sidewalk like sack of garbage. Gasping, Matt felt himself flung around a corner out of sight, against a dark wall by tall guy with a lot of moxie, muscle, and hair darker than the night around them. A half block away, the roar the Strip was again dominant.