“I suggest that Jonn keeps watch on his mini-vault from the inside.” Georgia and Smythe concurred with my proposal. They would smuggle the body out of the hotel in a laundry basket. But not before Georgia had agreed to star in my next venture, a brand new show, and the senator had consented to support my planning application for a stunning new venue on the Strip. Naturally, I’d be the artistic director. I could almost hear the ecstatic applause of the audience, see the stacks of cash that rolled in at the box office. Lilah Starr proudly presents…
Damn, don’t henchmen announce their arrival by kicking down doors anymore? These two had probably disabled theelectrics, in order to creep with fox-like stealth into the faux forest clearing. So Jonn had managed to get a signal out after all. I suspected that his pockets would yield a hi-tech signaling contraption.
“Put your hands on your head,” one of them barked. As they were dressed from head to toe in black and brandished mean automatic rifles, we all sensibly complied. While one of them dropped down to one knee in the entrance, the other took a cautious route to Jonn past us startled deer. He glanced at the blood-soaked body then turned round to face us, peering intently at each of us in turn. In my opinion, he rather lingered over the exquisitely toned and shapely view of Lilah Starr that this posture afforded. All natural, unlike some.
“That’s Jonn Brooks. My employer, you know?” He spoke softly, with a faint Irish brogue. We all mumbled nothing in particular. “Hold on, you’re Senator Smythe, aren’t you?” he added.
“That’s right, son.”
“You, the one with the gun. You mentioned something about a new show?”
“Er, yeah.” Who says my mind freezes up in a crisis?
“I can sing. Very well too, though I say so myself. Name’s Craig Anthony.”
We all kinda mumbled hello.
“Over by the door, that’s James Quinn Marshall. He’s one killer dancer. You may have heard of him, he moonlights in several chorus lines. Goes by the name of El Gato.”
We turned about for further mumbled greetings and a serious case of the nodding heads. El Gato? A bell of recognition jangled slightly.
“We’re not sorry he’s dead,” James/El Gato declared, in an accent that could’ve hailed a New York taxi at half a mile. “In fact, if you hadn’t killed him, our own plan was well on the way to fruition. And I don’t believe that ours was the only plot.”
“I’m Lilah,” I announced. “This here is Georgia. Before we get roles in the new production assigned to each of you, Georgia and the senator could use a little help with disposing of the body.” They mucked in like true backstage troopers.
On my way to Calico, I vowed to never force the showgirls in my revue to get implants. With pecs like theirs, Craig and ElGato certainly didn’t need them. Hmmm, I considered stretching Georgia’s cheerleader idea to include a tribute to Jocks.
So, my gamble had paid off. In Vegas, the gamble always does, when you have the guts to make your own luck.
IGGY’S STUFF by J. Madison Davis
A true connoisseur of weed-and Herbert “Exemel” Knapsdale certainly qualified in all respects-knows that a new batch takes some adjusting to. Normally he bought his weed from Chuckster, but Chuckster was lying low in Tijuana, so he bought an ounce of Iggy’s stuff. Soil, light, acid rain, age, mold from a bad drying: all these things can tweak the chemistry of a natural substance. Your brain’s, like, test-driving a used car. The brakes are a little spongy; the steering’s tighter or looser.
That’s why Exemel didn’t immediately react to what he saw through the patio doors. Listing to the left because of the fifty-pound bucket of chlorine tablets and loops of vacuum hose on his right shoulder, he squinted behind his sunglasses. The wind was gusting, lifting dust off the desert. The light glinting from the pool slashed at his image in the glass.
But, yes, there, hovering above the reflection of the desert behind him, through himself, within his image, he could see the creamy white of a woman’s buttocks, their perfection narrowing pear-like to her broad shoulders, black hair, and her arms stretched over her head. She was dancing for him. She was stripping off a tee shirt. Her hands stretched above her. And she held-No, she didn’t hold. It was a rope, looped over an iron hook on the pine beam, wound around her wrists six or seven times. She was hanging there like a side of meat, swaying slightly.
Exemel blinked. He tore off his sunglasses leaned forward into the bright light, bending sideways to see better.
“Holy-!”
Exemel dropped the bucket and the hose and charged the door. He clawed at the latch, but it was locked on the inside. He put his face flat against the glass and was certain she was dead, but he banged on the glass. “Lady! Lady!”
She pushed the marble floor with her toes and twisted slightly. She only got halfway around before her foot slipped and she twisted back. He saw a blood-red rubber ball gagging her. There was frenzied terror in her eyes.
He clawed at the door again, then reached for the bucket of pool tablets. He swung it twice to build up power, then hurled it. The tempered glass exploded into a million rough diamonds. He skidded and slipped on the pebbly fragments as he rushed to her across the granite tiles.
“Are you okay, lady? Watch the glass. Who did this-?” He put his arms around her naked waist to hoist her up and get the rope off the hook. The scent of a strawberry oil came down to him from her bare breasts rubbing against his forehead, and the loop wasn’t slipping over the edge. The woman’s body tensed against him, and he looked up. She whined panicky noises out her nose against the gag. He turned and followed her line of sight.
A bulldog of a man had come out of the corridor wearing a leather mask, a spiked leather dog collar, and leather pants he hadn’t finished lacing down the side. He was bare from the waist up, wooly gray hair covering him like the unruly fleece of a neglected ram.
He looked at the glass on the granite tiles, then at Exemel.
“What the-?”
“You don’t move, dude,” said Exemel. “Who are you anyway?”
“Why, you son of a bitch!” he growled and started for Exemel with his huge fists raised.
“Hey! Hey!” said Exemel, backing away. “Stop it! I mean it! Don’t make me-! Stop-!”
Exemel didn’t even see the first punch, as it whizzed by, just clipping his nose. He stumbled backwards down two steps into the pit area around the fireplace, landing hard next to a campaign trunk used as a coffee table. The woman was twitching and swinging, screaming against her gag, trying to get off the hook. “Shut up!” said the man. He grinned with crooked teeth, snatched up the poker.
Still on his back, Exemel grabbed a tall bronze statue of Shiva off the trunk and held it across his torso to block the blows. The man raised the poker and savored the pleasure of what he was about to do. “You need a lesson, you son of a bitch!”
Exemel, however, kicked out, somehow tangled his shoe in the loose laces of the man’s leather pants, and with the downswing of the poker, it caused him to lose his balance and fall on Exemel. His bleary eyes stared into Exemel’s, and his whiskey breath beat on Exemel’s lips.
Exemel turned his face away but was pinned under the man, who hardly moved, as if he’d got the wind knocked out of him. The puffs of his breath, hot and wet, came out at long intervals, and Exemel began to squirm, pushing at him, desperately trying to get out from under him.
The man howled then, raised himself on all fours, then rolled onto his back. Shiva hung on his chest. The arm of Shiva had gone into him up to the bronze god’s shoulder.
“Man” whispered Exemel. “Man.” He crawled toward him and gingerly reached out to pull the statuette out of him, but hesitated, not sure how to grip it or even if he should.