I kept the gun aimed at him, hoping he’d sit up, halfway hoping he would just so I could shoot his ass again. Anger seeped out of my skin, leaving me shaky. The painted eye on Squire’s chest smoldered. I had an urge to throw the gun into the marsh, but I didn’t have enough fire in me to follow through and I dropped it on the ground. Thing to do, I realized, was to gather food and whatever else I could use from the lodge and hightail it into the marsh. I’d need the gun. My chest felt scraped hollow and filled with cold gas. It cost me some effort to reach for the gun. I bent over halfway, put my hands on my knees, and stalled there. A black rope was being pulled through my head, scouring out the positive thoughts.
—Stand up straight, motherfucker!
Rickey was leaning against the side of the porch, holding a sawed-off 12-gauge with a taped grip. Didn’t appear he could see out of one eye, but the other was working good and pinned on me.
—Come thisaway! he said.
I walked a few steps toward him. He gestured with the sawed-off and told me to sit.
—You a cocksure son-of-a-bitch, leaving me alive. Rickey spat a dark wad of blood and saliva.
The wet soaked through the seat of my pants. Rickey started toward me, weaving a little, then thought better of it and leaned back against the porch. His face was all lumped and discolored, like an atomic war radiation victim.
—I saw you kill that boy, he said. Kill him how you’d do a sick dog. You didn’t useta be that cold, man. Something happen in Raiford make you that way?
I didn’t have no answers for him.
—You liked to kill me, but I don’t kill so easy. Rickey fumbled in his pocket and fetched out a cell phone. One fine morning a few years from now, they be strapping you down and fixing to kill you. You remember me on that day, Maceo.
He thumbed three numbers, gave a show of doing it so I’d know he was calling 911. I drew up my knees and rested my head on my arms. Rickey talked for a minute, too low for me to hear.
—Hey, Maceo!
He’d moved to the steps and was sitting on the bottom one, the sawed-off angled across his knees.
—Hands up! Who wants to die? he said. How you like them apples, huh?
A queer little road of moonlight slithered off along the water into the east. I wished I could follow it. I wished there was a tree with hundred dollar bills for leaves growing out behind the lodge, and that Rickey was too weak and sore to pull off both barrels before I could reach him, and that the end of this world was the beginning of the next, and I wished I’d had more time with Leeli.
—I feel them police dogs panting, Rickey said, stretching out his legs and getting comfortable. I feel that heat humming out along the road.
It come to seem all like a painting, then. One you’d see in a museum with a brass plate on a frame enclosing a night on the marshlands south of South Daytona, a night wild with stars and a wicked moon hanging like a bone grin among the remains of the running clouds, a gray tumbledown lodge with a stove-in roof and a lumpy, bloody man sitting on the steps, aiming a chest-buster at another man sitting in the grass, and a corpse lying near the water’s edge, gone pale and strange. It would look awful pretty and have the feeling of something going on behind the scenes. Like silver nooses were hanging from the stars and important shapes were hiding back of the clouds, big ones with the heads of beasts, showing a shade darker than the blue darkness of the sky. It was that rich, dark blue give the picture a soul. The rest of it was up to you. You could study it and arrive at all sorts of erroneous conclusions.
—Damn if I don’t believe I can smell ’em, Rickey said. Y’know the smell I’m talking about? That oiled-up leather and aftershave smell them state pigs have? He spat again. You shouldn’t go fucking over your friends, man. It just don’t seem to never work out.
I took another stab at explaining things to myself. Witches and spacemen and scum of the earth. Somewhere in all that slop of life was a true thing. I knew in my gut it was an amazing thing, unlike any you’d expect to meet up with on your way through hell, and I believed if I was to chew on it a time, jot down a list of what I saw and what I thought, I might understand who Ava and Carl and Squire were. But I’d always been bound for this patch of chilly ground. It wasn’t worth pursuing how I got there, whether it was some old dog of a reason bit my ass or fate jumped the curb and knocked me down an unknown road.
A thought of Leeli twinged my heart. Appeared I’d cared about that old girl somewhat deeper than I knew.
The air-horn of an eighteen-wheeler bawled out on the highway, something huge going crazy, and trailing behind it, almost lost in the roar of tires and engine, a siren corkscrewed through the night.
Rickey spat up more blood.
Like they say, shit happens.
I figure that about tells it.
Dead Money
I knew slim-with-sideburns was dead money before Geneva introduced him to the game. Dead money doesn’t need an introduction; dead money declares himself by grinning too wide and playing it too cool, pretending to be relaxed while his shoulders are racked with tension, and proceeds to lose all his chips in a hurry. Slim-with-sideburns-and-sharp-features-and-a-gimpy-walk showed us the entire menu, plus he was wearing a pair of wraparound shades. Now there are a number of professional poker players who wear sunglasses so as not to give away their tells, but you would mistake none of them for dead money and they would never venture into a major casino looking like some kind of country-and-western spaceman.
“Gentlemen,” Geneva said, shaking back her big blonde hair. “This here’s Josey Pellerin over from Lafayette.”
A couple of the guys said, Hey, and a couple of others introduced themselves, but Mike Morrissey, Mad Mike, who was in the seat next to mine, said, “Not the Josie? Of Josie and the Pussycats?”
The table had a laugh at that, but Pellerin didn’t crack a smile. He took a chair across from Mike, lowering himself into it carefully, his arms shaking, and started stacking his chips. Muscular dystrophy, I thought. Some wasting disease. I pegged him for about my age, late thirties, and figured he would overplay his first good hand and soon be gone.
Mike, who likes to get under players’ skins, said, “Didn’t I see you the other night hanging out with ‘A Boy Named Sue’?”
In a raspy, southern-fried voice, Pellerin said, “I’ve watched you on TV, Mister Morrissey. You’re not as entertaining as you think, and you don’t have that much game.”
Mike pretended to shudder and that brought another laugh. “Let’s see what you got, pal,” he said. “Then we can talk about my game.”
Geneva, a good-looking woman even if she is mostly silicon and botox, washed a fresh deck, spreading the cards across the table, and shuffled them up.
The game was cash only, no-limit Texas Hold ’Em. It was held in a side room of Harrah’s New Orleans with a table ringed by nine barrel-backed chairs upholstered in red velvet and fake French Colonial stuff—fancy swords, paintings with gilt frames, and such—hanging on walls the color of cocktail sauce. Geneva, who was a friend, let me sit in once in a while to help me maintain the widely held view that I was someone important, whereas I was, in actuality, a typical figment of the Quarter, a man with a few meaningful connections and three really good suits.
It wasn’t unusual to have a couple of pros in the game, but the following week Harrah’s was sponsoring a tournament with a million dollar first prize and a few big hitters had already filtered into town. Aside from Mad Mike, Avery Holt was at the table, Sammy Jawanda, Deng Ky (aka Denghis Khan), and Annie Marcus. The amateurs in the game were Pellerin, Jeremy LeGros, an investment banker with deep pockets, and myself, Jack Lamb.