Ike stood in the center of the bedroom lecturing T-Bird, who sat on the bed, staring at the floor. T-Bird’s posture was peculiar: sagging shoulders, head down, like a boxer collapsed on his stool between rounds of a fight, getting ready to call it quits.
Ike kept talking to his partner, and T-Bird kept staring at the floor. Not a lecture, Billy decided, but a pep talk. Ike was trying to cheer up T-Bird, who was clearly depressed.
He tried to put himself in T’s shoes. The bird man was past his prime, maybe nursing a bad knee or suffering memory loss from too many hits to the head, all the while holding on to some thin dream of wealth. Then he’d seen Billy’s mind-blowing collection of threads and jewelry, and the crushing weight of his own crummy reality had hit him, and all he wanted to do was go to a bar and get loaded, because that’s what dumb guys did when they got depressed.
And Ike was saying no, we got a job to do, come on, man.
He had caught them at a vulnerable moment, and a Roman candle went off in his head with the most glorious of colors. They were his for the taking. He just had to handle them right.
He picked up the room’s phone and dialed 9 for an outside line and called his condo. On the Droid, he saw the punishers’ heads snap as the phone in the condo rang. He repeated this three more times. On the fourth try, Ike snatched the phone off the bedside table.
“Who’s this?” Ike said.
“It’s me, Cunningham. I’m watching you and your partner.”
“You’re watching us? How the fuck can you be doing that?”
“Through my cell phone.”
“Don’t fuck with me, asshole.”
On the Droid, Billy saw T-Bird get off the bed and stand next to his partner with a pensive look on his face. T-Bird wasn’t sure what was going on, and he started to gather the stacks of money they’d pulled out of Billy’s safe and cradle them in his arms the way a nervous parent might hold a newborn baby. T-Bird was going to bolt-Billy was sure of it-and he said, “I’m not fucking with you. T-Bird just got off the bed and is now grabbing the money you took from my safe. Tell him he needs to hear what I have to say.”
“How can you be spying on us?” Ike said. “There ain’t no surveillance camera in here.”
“The smoke detector on the ceiling has a closed-circuit TV camera with a fish-eye lens hidden in it. There’s one in every room.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I shit you not. Take the cover off one if you don’t believe me.”
Ike found the smoke detector on the ceiling and yanked off the cover. His arm was so long that he didn’t need a chair to stand on.
“Fuck, look at this,” Ike said.
T-Bird stared into the tiny camera, his face so close that Billy saw forests of nose hair.
“It’s Cunningham,” Ike explained. “He’s watching us.”
“That’s fucked up,” T-Bird said.
“So what do you want to talk about,” Ike said to the camera.
“I have a job for you. I’ll pay you life-altering money.”
“What kind of money?”
“Life altering. As in lots.”
“How much?”
“Enough to retire on. You interested?”
Ike turned to stone, thinking hard.
“Ain’t no harm in talking to him,” T-Bird said into his partner’s ear.
“When?” Ike said into the phone.
“Right now,” he replied.
“Where?”
“In my suite at the hotel. I’ll order room service. You guys hungry?”
“We’re always hungry. Get me a filet, well done, french fries, hollandaise sauce on the side. Same for T, only make his medium rare with a baked potato and sour cream.”
“Got it. See you soon.”
“Listen, Cunningham, you’d better not be fucking with us.”
“I’m not fucking with you.”
Ike ended the call. He slapped his partner on the shoulder at their sudden good fortune, then remembered the CCTV camera in the ceiling. He flipped Billy the bird before ripping it out.
THIRTY
Billy ordered the punishers’ steaks from room service along with a large shrimp cocktail for himself. The room service attendant explained that the kitchen was backed up and that it would take forty-five minutes for the meals to be delivered. Billy wanted the food on the table when Ike and T-Bird arrived, and he said, “Make it twenty, and I’ll be happy.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but that’s impossible,” the attendant replied.
Nothing was impossible inside a Vegas casino. “What’s your name?”
“It’s Hinton, sir.”
The incoming caller ID on Hinton’s phone said that Billy was calling from a high-roller suite. “If you don’t get those meals up to my suite right now, I’ll check out of this crummy dump and tell the rodeo clown at the front desk you were rude to me. Got it?”
“Please don’t do that, sir,” Hinton said.
“I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”
“You’ll have your food in twenty minutes. I’ll deliver it myself.”
“I’m counting on you, Hinton.”
While waiting for the food to arrive, Billy went to work on the suite. He was about to sell a bill of goods to Ike and T-Bird, and to do that, he needed the suite to look just right. He started by positioning the chairs at the dining room table so that Ike and T-Bird sat together and would face him while they ate. He wanted to gauge their expressions while he made his pitch and know how each man was leaning. More importantly, he didn’t want them communicating with each other, even if it was with their eyeballs.
The suite’s bar was filled with top-shelf brands. He set a bottle of Hennessy XO on the marble bar top along with three snifters to toast their newfound partnership. By setting the bottle out ahead of time, he was signaling his desire to work with them.
Hinton arrived with a few minutes to spare and set the covered plates at the appropriate spots on the table under Billy’s instruction. When he was done, Billy shoved a hundred-dollar tip into Hinton’s breast pocket and made a new friend.
Ike and T-Bird arrived a short while later. T-Bird carried the money from the safe in a Nike duffel bag he’d taken from Billy’s closet.
The bag was popping at the seams, and Billy wondered how many other items they’d filched from his condo.
“What’s your fancy?” he asked from the bar.
“Whatever’s cold,” Ike said. “You having a party?”
He pulled three bottles of beer from the fridge, popped their tops, and brought them across the room. “Call it a celebration. Here’s to getting rich together.’
“Sounds good to me,” Ike said.
“Same here,” T-Bird said.
They took their spots at the table and started to eat. Ike and T-Bird were vacuum cleaners, weapons of mass consumption. Billy took his time and savored his shrimp cocktail. More shrimp got eaten in Las Vegas than anywhere on the planet, and the shrimp were always succulent and delicious. When he was done, he sprayed lemon on his fingers and washed away the remaining taste with beer. The punishers had already crossed the finish line and were watching him.
“Taste good?” he asked.
Ike grunted that his steak was decent, nothing great. T-Bird said the same. They did not act nearly as fierce with their bellies filled with red meat and potatoes.
“Want some dessert? The kitchen’s open all night,” he said.
“What we want is for you to talk to us about life-altering money,” Ike said.
“That’s right, tell us about the money,” T-Bird chimed in.
They wanted to hear about the payoff before they knew the risk. It was an amateur mistake, born out of desperation and greed. He took another swig of beer, just to make them wait. “Let me ask you a question. If I said there was a rich guy that could be ripped off, and that you’d walk away with enough money to retire on, would you do it?”
“Someone we know?” Ike asked.