Two dead guys and some loon naked from the waist down, covered in shit and vomit. I said, “A little food poisoning, that’s all.”
I heard a car engine turn over; then the room was bathed in headlight glare. The manager turned to the parking lot. I didn’t have to see for myself to know it was Winona’s car.
“Hey! Get back here! Hey!” The manager took off after her, leaving me alone. It was a safe bet. Even my sense of survival was sick at that point. I fell back into my puddle with a loud plop, thinking that maybe after they let me out of prison, I could be a massage therapist. I’m telling you, if the girls would just let me rub their backs, they’d never want anyone else.
Private Craps Shooter at Dawn by Steven M. Messner
The rising sun tries to lift the heavy blanket of smog off the sleeping city, but it is only partially successful. Nothing too beautiful can ever fully come out in a place like this.
I look down from where the sun should be and inhale on my cigarette. “Would you roll the damn dice?”
“You’re holding them,” Billy Strap says.
I look in my hand and I’ll be damned if they aren’t in my palm right next to the knife scar. “Right,” I say, and hand him the dice.
Some nose-to-the-ceiling dame with curves like a violin tramps right through the middle of our game. She’s expensive looking: tailored business suit, leather briefcase, and one of those classy Dutch boy haircuts.
“Hot, hot, hot,” Billy Strap says. “I’d like her in my stable.”
She doesn’t look back. Her kind never looks back. Looking back would be admitting someone like me exists. In a world like hers I don’t exist until something goes wrong.
Billy’s dog, Cordoba, starts to bark and pull against its choker. This breed is something designed in the deepest pits of hell by demons with too much time on their hands.
“Shut that beast up and roll the dice.”
Billy studies the dice, rolls them back and forth in his palm, talks to them, cajoles them, and all but fucks them until I’m pretty sure I’m going to strangle the little bastard.
“Roll!”
He rolls the dice. They bounce off the brick wall and land on an oily piece of cardboard in the alley.
Billy jumps up. “Eleven!”
The one die seemed to me to roll real funny, as if it were somehow off center, as if Billy Strap were a dirty low-down cheater. I hate cheaters.
“What the hell is going on with that die?”
Billy tucks his Afro under his purple fedora. “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with that die.”
I look for a weapon and spy a loose brick. I pick it up over my head and come down hard.
“Oh, no you didn’t,” Billy says.
“If didn’t means did, then yes, I didn’t. You low-down cheater.”
I lift the brick. We look. There’s nothing there but pieces of broken-up dice.
“It looks like you owe me some motherfuckin’ dice,” Billy says.
I toss him a balled-up ten spot. “Here, take it. Buy yourself some real dice and not the fuzzy kind either. The fleas on that leopard-print coat of yours would send all their young ones into a pair like that, and then when you’d roll them they’d dance around all funnylike. Wait, your regular dice do that already.”
“You’re crazy, Ludlow.”
“Yeah, well, at least I know it. I don’t go around pretending to be something I’m not.”
I stand and my knees creak like the doors of a rusted-out Impala. My body isn’t so much a temple as it is a lean-to. Hard living, I suppose.
Billy Strap stands using his gold cane for support. “If I were a younger man I’d whup your ass, Ludlow.”
We stare each other down until a fruit fly from the Dumpster hits my left eye and I’m forced to blink. Billy smiles triumphantly as if he’s just won something and struts off down the sidewalk holding his gold cane in the air like some sort of deranged high school bandleader. Cordoba follows reluctantly glancing back at me every few steps. He wants a piece of me.
It’s noon and I’m eating a sandwich at Ritz’s Diner. Billy Strap rushes up to my booth. “Burma, Burma, someone stole Cordoba.”
“Stole? I don’t think so. He’s probably off eating a pack of Cub Scouts.”
“I had him tied up outside the bank. When I looked outside I saw some guy jam a needle in his neck and then throw him in a van and take off.”
“Did you get a look at the guy?”
“Not really…yes, wait, he was wearing a Yankees baseball cap.”
“Well, let me get right on that. I’ll check every man, woman, and child in the city who wears a Yankees hat. That should only take about forty years.”
Billy grabs my arm and I spill coffee all over my lap. “I read about this in the paper. They’ve been kidnapping dogs and putting them in fights. They’re gonna kill Cordoba. Come on, you have to go find them.”
“Can I at least eat my breakfast?”
Billy scoops my eggs up with my toast and makes a sandwich. “Here, you can eat this on the way.” He slaps down a sawbuck on the table and pulls me out the door.
“I don’t have time for this. I have a case I need to work on.”
This of course is a complete lie. I haven’t had work in weeks.
Billy pulls a thick wad of cash from his pocket and hands it to me. I have a soft spot for dogs, kids, sexy women, and money. That bastard knows all my weaknesses. I’ve been too candid with him.
“So, you’ll do it?”
“Sure, sure, I’ll do it. I’ll find your damn dog.”
As a kid I had a dog, a Chihuahua named Tank. At my command he’d latch on to the ankles of my enemies and rip with his little needle teeth. I loved that goddamn dog. His life ended one night in our driveway when my stepfather, weaving his way home on a drunken bender, squashed him underneath the wheels of his Pinto. Funny thing, the Pinto disappeared that night. If I were a betting man I’d bet it was at the bottom of Lansing’s Quarry collecting silt.
The sign reads HARRISBURG CITY DOG POUND. What a fucking dump. It wouldn’t surprise me one damn bit if a tumbleweed suddenly rolled by. The building itself looks like an old car dealership: big plate-glass windows, a huge broken-up parking lot, and four garages.
I go inside the building and make for the front desk. The dogs are stacked in cages against the big windows. I avert my eyes. The last thing I need is to see some abandoned Chihuahua that reminds me of Tank and end up taking the mutt home with me.
There’s a guy behind the counter reading a Dog Fancy magazine. He looks like he might be Howdy Doody’s twin brother, only he’s fat and doesn’t wear the cowboy getup.
I figure small talk is the way to go. “Is that any good?”
“You’ve never read it?”
“I don’t read anything with ‘Fancy’ in the title.”
“What?”
“We need to talk.”
He sets his magazine down. “Okay.”
“First of all wipe that smirk off your face.”
He touches his lip. “I’m not smirking. I had a harelip. It was surgically repaired when I was an infant. It’s a scar.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“They do?”
“No, not really but I won’t hold that against you. Now, tell me what you’re doing selling these dogs.”
The color drains out of him. I gambled and laid it all on the line because that’s the only way I know how to do things and I got damned lucky. First stop and I’m on to something.
He sits down on a stool. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t ‘what are you talking about’ to me, Howdy Doody. The word’s out you’ve been selling dogs to lowlifes for fighting. We have you on video making several of these transactions.”
“Are you a cop or something?”
“Or something is right, now spit up the details or I’ll have to rough you up.”