“You thought I kept that key in my wallet. You thought you could get away clean and leave me holding the bag in my dead, cold hands.”
“You sound funny. You’re talking funny.”
“I been through some shit,” Stumper Brown said through my lips. He’s the one who had been on death row. He’d hung himself from the bars of his cage rather than let the officials of the prison have the satisfaction of executing him.
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
“The safe-deposit box key.”
“Half of it is mine.”
“You lost your claim on that when you tried to kill me.”
“I was afraid. I thought that if they caught you that they’d make you tell about me. Or... or... or you’d turn me over offering them the money using my key.”
“Tell me something, Lana.”
“What?”
“Why don’t I remember how you did it?”
“You were unconscious,” she said mechanically. “I shot you in the heart after putting laudanum in your whiskey.”
That made sense. But the train of thought led me on a tangent.
Most of the personae in my head didn’t remember the moments of their deaths. Of the suicides — some did and some didn’t. But even there, they remembered the fall or pulling the trigger, falling asleep or sudden unexpected pain; my congregation of souls remembered flipping the switch but not exactly when the lights went out.
“Lance?” Lana Santini said in my ear.
“Yeah, babe?” I could see a light go on in the kitchen at the side of her little home.
“That’s what you used to say to me all the time.”
“What’s that?”
“Yeah, babe.”
“And then you tried to slaughter me.”
“You would have done the same.”
Lance retreated at the accusation. He didn’t believe it, instead felt he was the victim of the classic heartless vamp. If it were his mind alone hearing Lana’s indictment, the words would have fallen on flinty denial.
But Lance was a member of an intimate society the likes of which had never before existed upon this earth. He was one of a multitude of minds and partial souls that judged in unavoidable concert. We all knew that Lance would have killed Lana if it were necessary. He killed his own stepbrother, Bernard, when a heist they’d planned went awry.
“Nothing personal,” he said before pulling the trigger.
He didn’t mourn Berry’s passing.
He’d loved his brother more than any woman he’d ever hooked up with.
“Lance?” Lana asked.
“Hold up a second,” one of the many uttered.
I couldn’t speak because I was busy experiencing a miracle going on inside me. It felt like all the cogs and gears, weights and pulleys of a great clock coming into epochal alignment. Lana’s simple declaration, Lance’s memories, and his peers’ reaction broke down a part of the immoral character that had been forged so long ago. There was a mental gasp, and part of Lance changed... actually changed. His remorse was a dark red sunset in a gaseous sky. It was beautiful and repugnant, a dying and a rebirth in the same wrenching revelation.
“It’s like this,” I said to Lana Santini. “You betrayed me and now you got to pay.”
“I deserve something.”
“Yes, you do,” I agreed. “And you’re lucky that I no longer want to pay that debt in full.”
“You’re talkin’ funny again.”
“But you get my meaning.”
“What do want me to do, Lance?”
“Meet me at the bar in Tyson’s Playroom in thirty minutes.”
“Thirty minutes? I just got out of bed.”
“In thirty-one minutes, I call Mr. Petron and tell him about the safe-deposit box at Phoenix National Trust.”
“Okay. I’ll be there.”
“Come alone,” I said. “And bring the key.”
“Okay.”
She hung up, and I touched the red icon on Rosetta’s fancy phone.
I sat there for the next quarter hour watching lights go on and off in Lana’s house while Lance Richards wailed at the back of the great chamber that made up the central part of my mind. He cried like a child found in the wilderness or the mother seeing her baby brought home safely. There was joy and deep sadness, repentance and inescapable shame, not at what he had done but because of the recognition of who he had been.
Lance was giving up part of his psyche willingly. He was killing a part of himself, maybe the largest part. It was a weight dropped in deep waters; he had been tethered to a stone that was meant to drown him, but the rope had been cut. And now, in the face of his mortality, he felt a quivering fear.
Lana came out of the front door with a largish man with sloping shoulders. He was wearing a light-colored suit but would have, most of us agreed, looked more comfortable in overalls. They got into an old Buick parked in the driveway, backed up, and drove off toward the Strip.
There were six lights across the back of the car. This was an unusual configuration, and so I could afford to wait awhile before taking off after them.
I followed at a distance not thinking at all. Lance was still lachrymose. This felt like healing. Lana and her contraband passenger were headed for a meeting, and I had yet to see where the chips would fall. I decided on the drive to buy gloves. My hands were the biggest giveaway I had.
Tyson’s was a freestanding establishment with few slot machines and no other forms of gambling. People went there to drink and play pool. They didn’t want to fleece tourists or to be encumbered by any hope of instant wealth. This was a room in which a true gambler could relax.
Lana parked the car at the curb, got out alone, and walked through the front door of the twenty-four-hour pub.
There was no sign of the man she drove off with.
I waited a ninety seconds and then sauntered over to the car. I loitered a few feet away while a couple came out of Tyson’s arguing. After they had moved on, a homeless man down on his luck staggered past. He was a white guy, wearing a suit that was old and tattered but fit him so well that he might have acquired it when it was new. When he stuck out a hand, I gave him a hundred-dollar bill.
His eyes widened, and he clutched the lucre with both hands. He didn’t say anything, just rushed down the street — the money already spent.
When he was a block away, and no one else was in sight, Sergeant William Tamashanter Mortman broke the back window of the four-door with the butt of the pistol he’d recently taken off a corpse. He reached inside, jerked the handle, and pulled the door open.
A man-shaped form in the backseat was trying to throw off the blanket that covered it. Sergeant Mortman and I grabbed the form by the collar, pulled it out, and slammed it against the passenger’s side front door. While being astonished at my own strength, I hit the nameless Latino man in the forehead with the butt of my pistol. I figured I was doing the guy a favor. Lana would have certainly killed him once she’d recovered my key to the loot.
After searching his pockets for weapons, I tossed the unconscious conspirator into the backseat and covered him with the blanket. Then I walked into Tyson’s feeling very good about the operation so far.
She was sitting at the bar, as beautiful as the day Lance had met her. He had called her his golden girl because of her skin, hair, and eyes. The metallic hardness of Lana’s tanned body, copper-blonde hair, and ocher eyes made her both cold and precious. Her eyes widened when I approached. Her nostrils flared. These sexual expressions used to excite my heartless skull mate, but now both he and I knew that she could summon such physical innuendos on command.
“You’re late,” she said.
“I been watching you.”
I took the stool next to her, turning slightly to check out my environs.