Iceman

Las Vegas, 1985

The handsome man with the strikingly beautiful woman walked around the corner of the hotel corridor—that is she walked around the corner—as they moved through a pocket of tourists standing at some sort of information counter. He was what you saw first, but she was what you speculated about, whispering of her beauty, wondering if she was a showgirl or perhaps a high-priced courtesan.

She walked behind him, a comforting presence, and he had a fixed smile on his face as they moved through the hayseeds. She knew how he liked to be treated and it relaxed him a bit. He was always somewhat on edge right before heavy play, and one less thing to concern himself with was a definite plus. He could count on her.

She was a knockout, and it never failed to amuse and please him the way not just men but women too stared when she—when THEY—came into a room. He liked her best in low-cut necklines when they went shopping to those carefully selected stores that he considered accessible, to clubs, bars, restaurants, but not to the casinos.

When he gambled he wanted her decorous. Sexy but decorous. So he kept her in tailored suits. Sweater ensembles. High-necked cocktail dresses. It mattered not. They, the pair of them, still drew an instant crowd, but with the low tops guys would hover like buzzards, pressing around them at the tables for a closer look at those perfect breasts, the finest that money could buy. And it made nun uncomfortable and fucked his concentration over, so that's why he had her dress up her act a little for the tables.

The casino was buzzing tonight. Heavy play in the neon beehive. A swirl of activity, a cloud of smoke, a circumambience of continuous movement inside a vast and noisy arena. They were moving in the direction of the roulette table with the least action. Like most of the plush joints on the strip, this one only had two wheel tables and this was his action. Red and black. He was like the good-looking masthead on a ship's prow, cutting through the waves of moving jerks, slicing purposely through the congestion with his beautiful Nicki behind him, leaving the small fish gasping in their wake.

They reached the table and he beckoned her to him with a hand.

“I love your ass,” he whispered to her possessively as she smiled at him. A beautiful, dazzling, perfect smile. “You gorgeous bitch."

She smiled and kissed him very lightly, saying, “I love you, too,” saying something else endearing, whispering so softly he couldn't hear over the din.

He loved that soft, feminine voice. Jeezus. Who'd ever guess? In a million fucking years you'd never know that Nicki was a guy.

Of course she WASN'T. He never thought of her as a young man or a transvestite or anything like that. Even the first time they'd made love, when he'd drawn her on that weird outcall thing, back when she was tricking. He smiled. “Tricking.” What a word. Perfect for Nicki. She was a trick, all right. Even then, first time he'd found out about the “plumbing” problem, he'd accepted it as just one more terrific joke by the cosmic stand-up comic. Nothing about her was a turn-off. Least of all what she really was, clinically and legally.

She loved the way he treated it as nothing. Joking with her about it. Something something cock-and-bull story changing to a cock-and-balls story. He'd shrugged it off. Getting a smile out of her, then a guilty pleasure laugh or two, and then out of nowhere Nicki felt herself drawn into his life, falling head over heels in love with her handsome John.

He'd changed her life overnight. Immediately convinced her to give up tricking. He'd give her the operation money. Fine. The next thing she knew he was also talking her out of the operation. Not permanently, just as a holding action.

“I don't want to be apart right now. Not just when we're beginning our life together,” he'd reasoned. It made sense. She had to have the surgery, and he understood that, he said. Just not quite yet. But in truth he saw no reason for her to go under the knife. She was perfect as is. Beautiful. Docile. Obedient. Kee-rist—the perfect woman.

He wasn't all that crazy about the look of a female snatch anyway. Oral sex was fine. The best. He'd always had to fight back the revulsion when he'd had intercourse with a woman, especially older women. It wasn't so bad when he'd been poking his sister: she was so ... vulnerable or something. So nonthreatening. But older broads, they seemed to snap at him with those gaping pussies. Wanting to capture his male pride down there and squeeze the masculinity out of him. No, the plumbing was no big deal.

He thought of Nicki as a beautiful woman with one small physical flaw. So what? She had perfect breasts—tit jobs that had set her back a fortune. Her Beverly Hills he called them. That cute clipped nose like some fucking movie star. Skinny. Terrific tush. Great legs! An added bonus, as that was one of the things the sawbones couldn't redesign. Most of the guys who changed over just didn't have the legs for it. She was nothing short of a hundred percent sensational. And she gave head that was to die for.

“Not YOU again,” the croupier joked. One of his favorite dealers, Alberta, was working. Good. He pulled out a precounted ten and fanned it out across the blue felt.

“No.” He smiled at her and offered the bucks. “It's somebody else this time."

The other dealer laughed.

“I told you it wasn't him this time,” the other girl said.

“Nine thousand dollar chips, nine hundreds, four quarters,” he told Alberta.

“Yes, sir,” she said, stacking up the chips next to the toke glass. A pit boss whom he didn't recognize was right on top of it telling them to examine the money carefully, but obviously speaking to the new girl, clearly just starting on the job, without a name tag on her pocket.

“Always look at the back of the bills,” he said in a loud voice, oblivious to the man in the wheelchair.

Satisfied, the pit boss backed off and noted something on a pad of paper. The man in the chair was already rated so he'd be in the hotel's computer. Come on, he thought, but he only held the fixed smile as they put the money down the table slot into the cashbox.

He was pushed up against the table, Nicki behind him with a slim hand resting lightly on his left shoulder so the guys would know she was his property. He was in the first position next to the wheel, first base, and the chair put him slightly below the level of the other players seated on stools around the side and end of the roulette layout.

Alberta slid the tall pyramid of stacked chips across to him. Actually twenty-two chips was not a tall stack—only if you knew there was ten thousand dollars there. The pit boss glowered at him as he slid his first chip out. A crowd had already begun to gather, guys moving in for a closer look at Nicki, and then the yahoos and hayseeds gathering to see the man stacking thousand-dollar chips. He was always conscious of the eyes of the watchers, self-conscious of the jerks who would whisper about the man in the chair.

He had pushed a twenty-five-dollar chip onto the black, and he moved his head from side to side, head going back as he smiled up at the one-way mirrors of the eye-in-the-sky surveillance, feeling his beautiful bitch lightly massage his neck. It was so tiring when you had to sit all the time. Normal movement was something people took for granted, but how lucky they were. These lucky, hayseed schmucks with legs that worked.

He'd show them luck. It was red, and Alberta took his chip, raking it with the others. He pushed another quarter out as soon as she cleared the table of losing bets. Nobody won. He put fifty dollars on black and went down. A heavy man with gold chains and an immense diamond ring won a big combination bet on the bottom dozen. The man in the chair never bet anything but straight-up bets. He shoved three hundred dollars onto the black, and the wheel spun.

“I gave you a second chance,” Alberta teased the players as it hit red again, his bet swept away. He pursed his lips up in a silent kiss to her and she gave him a big smile. She wondered what sex would be like with a guy in a wheelchair. Could he have sex at all? The beautiful woman who usually accompanied him was obviously very devoted. No gorgeous woman would love a man like that unless the sex was okay. He had a great mouth, maybe he gave dynamite head. She had to jerk her mind back on the job. She loved dealing roulette because you didn't have to think. Mindlessly she watched the good-looking guy shove seven hundred dollars in hundred-dollar chips out. He'll hit this one, she thought, and when he missed again, she raised her eyebrows and shrugged as she raked the chips. The fat guy had hit the lower twelve again—what a chump bet.

The man in the wheelchair slid a thousand-dollar chip toward Alberta and caught her attention. “Give me hundreds, babe,” he said, and then slid another one over. She gave him twenty hundred-dollar chips and he kept the stack where it was. “Put ‘em down for me, doll. Please cover all the blacks.” She supposed it was hard for him to reach all the numbers on the layout.

“Yes, sir,” she said as she quickly dropped a chip onto each of the eighteen black squares. She knew as she did it he was hitting this time for sure. Smart gambler, she thought. She started to hand him the two hundred dollars back and he said, “Cover the zeroes please,” and she did. She didn't mind helping him. He always toked her at least a hundred.

“Way to go, sir,” she told him when black hit. She payed him $3,500 on the number, and saw he'd covered black with a thousand-dollar chip.

“Cash me out, hon,” he said. He'd been at the table maybe five minutes and hit the casino for fifteen hundred. True to form he toked her a hundred. Then he changed his mind and dropped four hundred dollars back down on black and hit again, and the “model” wheeled the gambler away with an easy nineteen hundred dollars. Chicken feed on his way to dinner.