“Bitch ran up a thirty-thousand-dollar tab on my fucking MasterCard. I said, Bitch, you ain’t getting away with that. But I fucking loved her. It fucking broke my heart.”
“Is that what you got sent up for?”
“Fuck no, that was just a little cocaine beef. This deal with Betsy was just last week. Don’t you fucking tell anyone what I just told you, got it? Cause I’d hate to have to have you killed too.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” I say, wondering how worried this should make me and cursing the white crosses popped in the course of the day’s drive. Five? No, six. Seven? No, six. Three at 4 in the morning at the first motel, and three in Utah. Was it Utah?
“Cause I really would fucking hate that, cause I like you, baby. You’re pretty good-looking, you know that?”
“Thank you very much,” I say, the way my mother taught me to respond to a compliment.
“When I said I was a hundred percent lesbian, I meant more like eighty, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh.”
“You have really big lips. Just like a spade’s, almost. Anybody ever told you that before?”
“Not in those exact words.” I look over at the bartender, but this apparently isn’t the kind of place where patrons are discouraged from bothering one another.
“I can’t help thinking how they’d feel on my pooss-ay. You like the taste of pooss-ay, Tate?”
In fact, pussy is one of my favorite flavors in the entire world; at this juncture, however, my gag reflex is struggling with the back of my throat, trying to force it open to disgorge the beer I’ve swallowed.
A strange hand on my shoulder ought to come as a relief, but it makes me spill my beer on the foul carpet. I turn to face a woman with long, dark hair drawn up behind her long, graceful neck in a ponytail.
“Tate?” she says, her voice high and surprisingly sweet. “I’m Skip’s friend, Babs.” She looks over at Nicki. “Sorry, Nicki, I need your new friend.”
Babs is apparently higher than Nicki in the pecking order, because Nicki scurries back to the bar without a word. “I came in a cab,” Babs says. “Can you drive?”
“Sorry about that,” Babs says as we leave the parking lot. She struck me immediately as pretty, with the kind of sweet, big-eyed face I love, but the more I look at her the more character her face shows; the truth of it is she’s a beauty. “If I’d’ve known I was going to be that long in coming, I would’ve told you someplace nicer.” She spends a few seconds appraising my appearance, which makes me a little nervous, since I’m wearing the clothes I slept in last night. “You’re a big guy. That’s good.”
I don’t know how to interpret the remark, favorable though it seems, so I file it away for future obsessive, feverish rumination. “Kind of hard to picture you as a regular back there.”
“I’m not, exactly. I own it.”
“Really?” Skip said you were some kind of stripper, I almost add. Because I’ve been expecting somebody more like Nicki and less like Babs. She has on a loose-fitting shirt and jeans and not much makeup, and I can’t help thinking that she sounds smarter than any woman I’ve talked to in months.
“Yeah, the last owner died and my boyfriend was a regular there, and I thought, what the fuck, I’ll buy it and let him run it. Well, that didn’t work out, did it? That was him behind the bar.”
“The, uh, that guy tonight?”
“Yeah, the shitfaced guy. He didn’t used to be like that. Guess I shouldn’t have bought him a bar.”
“I guess not.” I’m stopped at a long light and a tiny old woman shuffles across. She doesn’t look like she belongs in Vegas at all, let alone out on the street at 1:45 in the morning.
“Look at that poor old gal,” Babs says. “We should offer to take her home, except we’d probably scare her into a heart attack. So what brings you to Vegas?”
“Going back to L.A. Bugged out after the Northridge quake and spent a few months tending bar in Wichita.”
“Wichita? Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“I grew up in Wichita! For a few years anyway. My dad was stationed at McConnell. I had a little dog named Teenchie.”
“Teenchie? You a Song of the South fan?”
“Yeah, I love it. I know it’s supposed to be all politically incorrect and it probably is, but I saw it when I was little, so I can’t be objective. The other one I really love is Saludos Amigos. Ever see that one?”
“Part of it. I wrote my master’s thesis on Disney animation.” As a matter of fact I didn’t, my cousin did at USC, but I do know more than the average guy on the subject, and I’m truly bowled over to be asked such a nerdy question by this magnificent creature.
“Just loved all that shit when I was little. When I first started dancing, I used Teenchie as my stage name, can you believe that?”
So she is a dancer after all. I’m slightly more than half in love with her at this point in our ten-minute-long acquaintance, and I figure if the lush behind the bar at the Tumblin’ Dice is my competition, I’m in like Flynn.
But it’s late, so the aforementioned Midwestern politeness fails to stop me from asking the first question that pops into my head: “How can you afford to buy a bar on what a dancer makes?”
“Who said I was still a dancer?” She grins, a lopsided thing that shows a big expanse of teeth. She has, I finally notice, a slight overbite that makes her face perfect. She doesn’t offer any more than that, so I don’t pursue it further. “Turn left up here.”
Something that should have been nagging me all along starts doing so. “Hey, you know that gal Nicki I was talking to?”
“God, do I.”
“She told me she had her girlfriend murdered.” When I say it, I can feel microscopic particles of Dexedrine racing up my spinal cord to my brain.
Babs snorts. “Jesus.”
“Said this girl ran up a thirty-thousand-dollar tab on Nicki’s MasterCard.”
“Think about it, Tate. If you were the bank, would you give that crazy bitch a MasterCard with a thirty-thousand-dollar limit?”
“I guess not.”
“I mean, what would she put on the application where it says occupation? Crack whore? Meth cook?”
This sends the Dexedrine particles back down out of my brain, and a feeling of relative calm comes over me. We’re heading into a nice neighborhood now, a strangely empty subdivision. There aren’t any cars on the street, not even parked, and there aren’t any lights on anywhere; no late-night TV viewers or insomniac readers or dog walkers.
Finally, we get to a McMansion with all its lights blazing and two cars parked on the street in front despite a three-car garage.
“Did you ever see The Omega Man?” I ask. “This is sort of like his place.”
“Kind of spooky, isn’t it? The subdivision went bankrupt before it was all the way finished and the developer’s on trial. They managed to rent out a few of ’em to people who sublet the extra rooms.”
“Is this where you live?” I ask, hoping she’s bringing me home, even as I recognize the pathos of the fantasy.
“Hell no. I own, in a hell of a lot better nabe than this. This is where we’re getting your present for Skip. Park on the street, not too close to the streetlamp.” She opens up her bag and hands me a pistol. I’m a Kansas boy and I’ve hunted since I was little, but I’ve never had a real pistol in my hands, and to her consternation I hold this one like it’s a live fish.
“Hold it straight up and keep your index finger on the trigger guard.”
“What’s this for?” I ask.
“This guy’s an asshole. I just want you to stand there and look big, and if things get tense you pull the grip out of your waistband so he can see it.”