“Tony,” the desk clerk said. “You look a lot better.”
“Oh?” I said. I wanted to grab him and shake the secrets of my history out.
“Yeah. When your nurse and Mr. Grog brought you in, you was just sittin’ in that wheelchair and mumbling.”
“Where are they?”
“What?”
“Mr. Grog and... and... and the nurse.”
“They left this morning. He told me that you’d be down later today. Said that you were fine after the operation... something like that.”
“How much do I owe you?”
“For what?”
“The room.”
“Paid up to the end of the month,” he said.
I wanted to ask what month it was and how close to the end we were but decided to hold off on that. All I had to do was look at a newspaper or tune in a radio program.
I had once been a disc jockey for a country station in Wyoming... no... no... Colorado. But I had lived in Wyoming. I used to ride horses for days at a time.
A chubby, young Latino man brought my car, a bright red, restored 1967 Mustang, to the front of the hotel. I gave him two dollars, which he accepted without scowl or smile.
Fifteen minutes later, I was pulling up in front of the Steadman Casino. I knew the direction without thinking about it; I knew many things.
A valet in a blue uniform ran out to take my keys. I handed them to him expecting to receive a ticket, but instead he was transfixed, staring at me. I looked past his head at a black van with tinted windows that was pulling up to the curb across the street. In my time, I had spied on people from vehicles like that, been spied upon, too.
“You,” the valet said. “What the fuck are you doin’ here, Lance?”
“You got me wrong, man. My name is Jack, Jack Strong.”
The valet’s face carried a lot of extra skin and was the color of an uncooked piecrust.
“Your hair is different and your voice sounds funny,” the valet, who was a head shorter than I, said. “But it’s you. I can tell by the scar under your lip. I remember when Arnie Vane give you that.”
“Keep the car where I can get it quickly,” I said. “I might not be here long.”
I turned my back on the thuggish doorman and walked into the plush Steadman Casino.
A wide scarlet ramp led down to the floor of slot machines, roulette, and blackjack tables. The Steadman was classy. The girls offering drinks were all beautiful and well looked after. Even the clientele was a cut above the run-of-the-mill tourists and gambling addicts.
After a few steps, my mind settled on the personality that had inhabited this casino. His name was Lance Richards, and he didn’t have a very compelling moral compass. He looked for opportunities and took advantage whenever he could. He was the kind of guy who would have stolen insulin from a type 2 diabetic, but I didn’t mind. It felt good to be ruthless, maybe even amoral. I could move through the world without all the guilt and neuroses that worried my waking and sleeping mind.
Here and there at the edges of the gambling aisles men with intent eyes were watching me. Tall and short, obese and gaunt they were dogging me, but I didn’t mind. I had been away, obviously sick, and now I had returned — of course, they were suspicious.
I came to a set of emerald double doors. The guardian of this portal was a broad, and quite powerful looking, Samoan. His name, I remembered, was Sammy. I wondered, not for the first time, if that was his real name.
“Sammy.”
“Mr. Richards.”
“I think I’d like to go on in and play a few hands of blackjack,” I said easily.
“You crazy, man?”
“That ain’t even the half of it, brother,” someone from deep inside me intoned.
The six-foot Samoan shrugged his bowling-ball shoulders and stepped to the side. The doors were opened by unseen hands, and I walked through ecstatic that I was, for the most part, just one man instead of the many.
The doorwomen were naked, one white and the other black, very beautiful, and somewhat worried to see me. I kept walking down a green hall toward a large room maybe a hundred feet away.
With each step, I experienced a growing trepidation. There was a reason that I shouldn’t have been there. There had been a break between the Steadman and Lance Richards.
I kept on walking, but never made it to the end of that green hall.
When I’d gotten halfway to my destination, invisible doors on either side slid open and two brutal-looking men lurched out.
Seeing their awkward movements, I realized that I had been walking just fine once I’d donned the identity of Lance Richards. This thought was cut short when a pair of powerful arms embraced me from behind. That was Sammy; I was sure.
The other two men were white and ugly. Their faces had enlarged over the years to contain all the evil they exuded. One had ruddy skin and a big nose that had been broken quite a few times. The other was pale with tiny ears that stood out like clamshells.
“Hello, Trapas,” I said to the man with the tiny ears.
Trapas jerked his head to the right, and I allowed Sammy to muscle me through one of the secret doors. The other two followed.
It was a small room with dirty yellow walls and no furniture. There were a few rolls of green wallpaper piled in a corner.
Kraut, the reddish white man with the broken nose, produced a jagged-looking knife.
“Mr. P says you got one chance,” the ex-boxer proclaimed. “Either you tell us where the cash is, or you die right here in this room.”
What happened next was not normal. A gray patch appeared inside of my mind. It was like a psychic workspace designed for clarity, integration, and survival. I was not a man but an agglomeration of potentials on one side and personalities on the other. From outside this space came a presence that was single-minded and confident in the task at hand. Reluctantly, Lance Richards submitted to this presence and the gray space abruptly ceased.
I was still standing there, Jack Strong, the frame of the many, but the person in control was Sergeant William Tamashanter Mortman. He/I jerked our shoulders to the left, and Sammy the Samoan tumbled to the floor. He grunted in surprise, but Tamashanter didn’t stop to gloat. He grabbed Kraut’s knife hand at the wrist, breaking the bone while crushing the ex-boxer’s throat with his other hand. Executing a perfect Shotokan sidekick, he broke Trapas’s neck at the side. Then, with balletic grace, he swooped down, picked up the knife that Kraut had dropped, made a fast and deadly arc that ended with the blade sunk deep in Sammy’s left eye socket as he was rising up from the floor.
We froze there for a moment — Tamashanter, Lance, and I — struggling over not only what to do but also who to be.
Finally, Lance took ascendance because he knew the place and we did not.
I struck a depression in the wall with my black-fingered hand, the sliding door came open again. I stopped, took a.38 automatic from a holster at the back of dead Trapas’s belt, and strode out into the green hall.
The doorwomen were gone. There was no guard outside the emerald doors.
The men who had been stalking me were still there, but they seemed confused. I wasn’t supposed to be coming out that way.
I wasn’t supposed to be coming out at all.
There was a red-and-white Checker cab in front of the hotel. The thuggish valet was standing maybe fifteen feet away, but I didn’t trust him to get my car so I dove into the backseat of the cab and said, “Take me to the Bellagio.”
Looking out the back window, I saw the black van pull away from the curb.
I got out at the main entrance of the hotel and went directly to a side exit, where I knew taxis waited to be called up for clients. I got into an aqua-colored cab driven by a man named Manuel Lupa, at least that’s what his limousine identity plate said. I gave Lupa the address of my extended-stay hotel and sat back wondering what I had done to make my friends at the Steadman so angry.