“You were supposed to find him, that’s all,” Jimmy said.
“We did find him. Jeez!”
“Don’t you jeez me!”
“Jimmy,” Eugene said, “we went to the casino like you said. We knock on the door to their room. She recognized me. Took her a sec, but she recognized me. She opens the door, says, ‘Something happen to Mark?’”
“Not yet, we’re thinkin’,” Aram said.
“You don’t think. You do not think,” Jimmy said.
“Sorry.”
“You killed her. Right there in the effing casino, you kill her.”
“No we didn’t,” Eugene said.
Jim Daniels looked at him stupidly. Eugene had red all over his shirt, and some on his pants, the biggest portion soaked onto his torso, only partially hidden by his black windbreaker. It was night, and they were outside the office-shed, the light from inside cutting a shaft to where they stood, and the moon, almost afull moon, thrusting its brightness across the geometric patterns of the junkyard and over the features of the men so that the two looked like shades of themselves. “And that is… what?” Jimmy asked, pointing to Eugene’s chest. “Paint bullets?”
“She fought like a sonofabitch,” Aram said. He had scratches on his face dragging down to his collar bone. A black blob was coming out his nose.
“Wipe your nose. Jesus,” Jimmy said.
Aram wiped it on his sleeve, looked at it, wiped again. “She punched me. I smacked her hard, but she got in a good punch before that. It was all I could do not to shove my fist down her throat.”
Eugene stepped up to Jimmy, his hands hooked in his rear pockets, fear and amazement in his voice. “Jimmy, she took out Bo. Big Bo. She took him out, swear to God.”
“What are you telling me?”
Now he heard it: thumping, banging, the sounds like anchors hitting rock under water. Only they were coming from the bed of the truck.
“You got him in there too?”
“Who? Bo? No, I told you,” Eugene said. “She-” He stopped himself. Jimmy could tell he didn’t want to say it, whatever it was. Eugene stepped backwards so he could utter it. “She broke away from us. Bo come in. I know you didn’t tell us to use him, but we figured we needed the three of us if we was going to handle the two of them in a crowded place. Don’t get mad, Jimmy. It shoulda worked. We just didn’t figure on her being all that.”
Aram was shaking his head in agreement, an imploring look in his eyes, one that Jimmy had not seen before. He said, “Here’s how it went down. She jumps on the bed, starts throwing money around, saying, ‘Here, here, take it, just take it and get outta here!’ Bo rushes her. She jumps off, takes this thing off a table, I don’t know what it was, and whams the shit out of him. He’s bald, you know, it cracks him on the skull and he spurts like a fountain. Goes down on his knees in the middle of the bed. I mean, there is money all over the place, and he’s a-wailin’. I thought the next-door neighbors would come in. I say shut the fuck up, don’t be a fuggin’ baby. She up and whams him again, on the fingers covering his head, his ear,man, his eyebrow. It about shook me up. Like a goddamned Tasmanian devil. Bo’s a big guy, and he was whinin’ like a puppy dog.”
“Where is he?”
“Bo?”
“The Easter Bunny, you fuck.” Jim looked back and forth at them. If it wasn’t so serious, he’d laugh. Like teenagers caught during their first burgle, their minds racing to see which lie would be believed.
At last Aram said, “Bo went off the balcony. Down to the parkin’ lot. He thought the door was the door-the way out, I mean. He couldn’t see, with what she did to him. He ran right into Eugene here. Pepper in her eyes is not too good for her, way I see it. She’s got to be hurt before it’s over, know what I mean? It’s only right.”
Inside the office, Jimmy took a spare shirt off the hook behind the door and threw it at Eugene. He pointed a finger at Aram and said, “You. Sit. Cool your heels. Shut your mouth.”
“I know you want to know, and we didn’t tell you yet,” Eugene said as he was delicately removing his shirt to put in the paper bag Jimmy set out. He was using a tone of voice to curry favor with the angry man before him, while Jimmy looked at him with a portion of made-up hatred in his eyes. Eugene said, “The guy wasn’t there. She, that spitfahr, she did the whole thing herself. We don’t know where that actor guy is. Honest Injun. We did, we’d have him by the ears, and you know that, Jimmy, you do.”
Mark got drunk again that night. Only a little drunk, though. It felt good. He could release from his former-former, Mom-money woes in Hollywood, as well as the tensions of having hours ago become the kept man of a very rich woman. His friend took him to his house and fed him caffeine, and they reminisced about the New York days when Tommy himself had aspirations for the screen. Now Tommy ran a software company producing modules to support military satellite systems, and he confessed that he was gay, and was so happy now that he had what seemed to be an endless string of beauties in this glamoroustown. He waved ta-ta to Mark at the Puerto de Moros Hotel and Casino, and zoomed off in his Porsche, and Mark looked after him with some little sadness, this man the same man he knew before his confession and yet not the same.
When Mark tried to go to the penthouse, the elevator was blocked. When he gave up trying and inquired and got an answer, he felt the blood leave his face and his knees give ever so slightly as if some invisible hand had playfully karate-chopped him there.
Sheriff Thompson spoke to Mark by phone, but the Las Vegas police spoke to him in person for nigh onto two hours. Only because one of the officers let slip Sheriff Thompson’s name and suspicions was Mark able to reach out to him at all. At two o’clock in the morning, though.
The sheriff said he would meet with Mark first thing tomorrow. Say nine o’clock for sure; he’d meet Mark at the casino. Mark liked the man’s tone; his cooperation. But what Mark liked most of all was that the man did not hold back the way some officers-at least in the movies-do. The sheriff, in his quiet, sleep-drugged voice, named a suspect; no, a whole party, after Mark related the encounters he’d had with anyone since arriving in Nevada. Then Mark said, his mouth as dry as alkali, “My girlfriend is missing, Sheriff.” You’d think that news would rouse the sheriff further. All the sheriff advised, however, was that he had full confidence that city police would be surveiling the business owned by Jim Daniels if he was in the least under suspicion, and that most abductees, if that was what she was, especially now with her new-found fortunes, were brought home safe and sound.
Blessed be the light. The light be damned! Too much light! Light, it seemed, as bright as stage lights almost.
Vegas, The City That Never Sleeps, had a military surplus store that stayed open round the clock. It carried, in front, all kinds of dollar items, the army/navy gear attended to by customersmostly in the daytime, the dollar items purchased by the ragtags at night. But Mark glommed onto a camo coverall for sixteen bucks and camo face paint and an MP’s baton. He also came away with a U.S. Army Ranger knife, serrated, evil-looking, satisfying in a way an actor who was only acting could never know.
His heart tore when he thought of Tiffany and anyone touching her, hurting her, doing damage to that perfect, sweet, precious heart. He would beg, if he could, any supernal power to not let it be so, if only he believed, but it was himself he had to look to, and he would not be conquered, no.
Now, stationed in the auto-salvage yard, he was Rambo. He was Schwarzenegger. He was Fairbanks and Ty Power and Quinn. Cagney and little-Mafioso Edward G. Robinson; and the leanest, meanest, unforgiving monster short of the Werewolf of London. Bob Swagger, the guy in the Stephen Hunter books: Yes, he was Swagger, the man of deadly control.