Billy paused the tape. “There. Look at that.”
The man had his head back and mouth open, searching for Jo, and she was about to touch him again, her long fingers extended toward the nape of his neck. Her smile was, I thought, unreadable, yet the longer I stared at it, the more self-satisfied it seemed. The image trembled slightly.
“Anybody doing that job is going to look bad from time to time.” I said.
“But that’s the job she does, honey,” Billy said. “You can’t get around that.” He unpaused the tape and muted the sound. “Know what it puts me in mind of ? Those women who marry men on death row. It’s all about being in control for them. They control the visits, letters… everything. They don’t have to have sex, yet they have all the emotional content of a real relationship and none of the fuss. And it’s got a built-in expiration date. It’s a hell of a deal, really. Of course our Miz Verret, she took it farther than most.”
A jump in the film, another edit. The man’s eyes blazed a fiery green that appeared to overflow his sockets. His coordination had improved, he made coherent gestures and talked non-stop. He struggled to stand and nearly succeeded. Then, after making an obviously impassioned statement, he fell back, dead for the second time. Jo stood beside the body for almost a minute before closing his eyes. A faint radiance shone through the lids. An orderly removed the body as Jo made notes on a clipboard. The screen whited out and another countdown started. Billy switched off the TV.
“Forty-seven minutes,” he said. “Scratch one zombie. You got to be careful around that girl.”
“Billy, I was…”
“I know. You were trying to get a little. But I’d hate to see you screw this up over a piece of ass.” His voice acquired a pinched nastiness. “Especially since the bitch is such a freak!” He peered at me over the top of his glasses, as if assessing the impact of his words. He sighed. “Let’s go have a chat with them, shall we?”
We went back into the living room. Clayton and the other bodyguard stood at ease. Billy took a chair opposite the sofa where Pellerin was sitting and I hovered at his shoulder. Behind Pellerin, Jo tried to make eye contact with me, but I pretended not to notice.
“Mister Pellerin,” said Billy. “I have a question for you.”
Pellerin looked at me and said, “This dab of cream cheese is the badass you warned us about?”
“Clayton?” said Billy. “Would you mind?”
Two strides carried Clayton to the sofa. He backhanded Pellerin viciously, knocking his sunglasses off. Jo shrieked and Clayton stood poised to deliver another blow.
“In the stomach,” Billy said.
Clayton drove his fist into Pellerin’s belly, and Billy signaled him to step back. Jo hurried around the couch to minister to Pellerin, who was trying to breathe, bleeding from a cut on his cheek.
“I’m not a very good businessman,” said Billy sadly. “I let things get personal. I miss out on a lot of opportunities that way, but I’ve learned if you can’t have fun with an enterprise, it’s best to cut your losses. Do you need a moment, Mister Pellerin?”
“You could have killed him!” Jo said, glancing up from Pellerin.
“Precisely.” Billy church-and-steepled his fingers. “Your boy there’s a valuable commodity, yet because of my intemperate nature I might have done the unthinkable. Do we understand each other? Mister Pellerin?”
Pellerin made a stressed yet affirmative noise.
“Good. Now… my question. Is your ability such that you can control the play of seven or eight good card players so as to achieve a specific result?”
With considerable effort, holding his belly, Pellerin sat up. “How specific?”
“I’d like you to arrange it so that you and a certain gentleman outlast all the rest, and that he have a distinct advantage in chips at that point. Let’s say a four to one advantage. Then I’d like you to beat him silly. Take all his chips as quickly as you can.”
“That’s risky,” said Pellerin. “The guy could get a run of great cards. It’s hard playing heads-up from that far down. You can’t bluff effectively. Why do you want me to do it that way? If you let me play my game, I can guarantee a win.”
“Because he’ll want the game to continue if he thinks you lucked out. He’ll offer you a check, but you tell him it’s cash or nothing.”
“What if he…” Pellerin began, and Billy cut him off: “No what-ifs. Yours not to wonder why, yours but to do or die.” He looked to Clayton. “Is that Byron?”
“Tennyson,” said Clayton. “‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’”
“Yes, of course!” He gave himself a pretend-slap for having forgotten. “Well. Can you do the job, Mister Pellerin?”
“I’ll need a little luck, but… yeah. I guess I can do it.”
“We all need a little luck.” Billy popped out of the chair. “You’ll be leaving for Fort Lauderdale day after tomorrow. The Seminole Paradise Casino. I’ll have my people watching, so don’t worry about anything untoward. You will be closely watched. I’ll give Jack the details. He can tell you all about it.”
He walked away briskly, but then he turned and pointed at Jo. “I got it! Big Brother All-Stars. The seventh season. You remember, Clayton?”
Clayton said, maybe, he wasn’t sure.
“Come on, man! Erica. The tall bitch with the big rack. She played the game real sneaky.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Clayton. “Yeah, I can see it.”
The Seminole Paradise Hard Rock Hotel and Casino was a hell of a mouthful for what amounted to your basic two-hundred-dollar-per-room Florida hotel complete with fountain display and an assortment of clubs and bars notable for the indifferent quality of their cuisine and the bad taste evident in their decor. Particularly annoying was Pangaea, a club decorated with “authentic tribal artifacts” that likely had been purchased from a prop supply company. The entire complex was a surfeit of fakes. Fake breasts, fake smiles, fake youth, fake people. Why anyone would choose such a place to put a dent in their credit cards, I’ll never know—maybe it offered them the illusion that they were losing fake money.
We went down to the casino early the same afternoon we checked in, and Pellerin nabbed a chair at one of the poker tables. I watched for a while to ascertain whether he was winning—he was—and went for a stroll. I wanted to see how far my leash would stretch. There were several men hanging about who might be Billy’s people and I was interested to learn if any of them would follow me. I also wanted to get clear of the situation and gain some perspective on things. Once I reached the entrance to the grounds, I turned right and walked along the edge of the highway, working up a sweat in the hot sun, until I came to a strip mall with about twenty-five or thirty shops, the majority of them closed. It was Sunday in the real world.
A Baskin-Robbins caught my eye. The featured flavors were banana daiquiri and sangria. Sangria, for fuck’s sake! I bought two scoops of vanilla by way of protesting the lapsed integrity of ice cream flavors and ate it sitting on the curb. I tried to problem-solve, but all I did was churn up mud from the bottom of my brain. The assignment that had been forced upon us—upon Pellerin—was to attract the interest of a wealthy developer named Frank Ruddle, an excellent poker player who frequented the Seminole Paradise. Pellerin’s job was to play sloppy over the course of a couple of weeks. That way he would set himself up as a mark and Ruddle would invite him to the big cash game held each month at his Lauderdale home. According to Billy’s scenario, once Ruddle went bust, he would feel compelled to open his vault in order to obtain more cash. At this point Billy’s people would move in on the game. He wanted something from that vault. I thought it might be more of a trophy than anything of actual value, and that his real goal was purely personal. The plan was paper-thin and smacked of Billy at his most profligate. There were a dozen holes in it, a hundred ways it could go wrong, but Billy was willing to spend our lives for the chance to gain a petty victory. Had the aim of the exercise been to secure the item at any cost, it could have been far more easily achieved. That he was willing to squander an asset with (if Jo were to be believed) unlimited potential was classic late-period Billy Pitch. If we failed, it was no skin off his butt. He’d wait for his next opportunity and while away the hours throwing Tanqueray parties for his fellow reality-show addicts. And if we succeeded, he might decide that his victory would not be secure so long as we were alive. I saw a couple of outs, but the odds of them working were not good.