The Ten-Ounce Siesta

FIVE

The little bastard wouldn’t eat.

Harold Ticks ran one hand over his bald pate and swore under his breath. What he really wanted to do was yank his.357 and plug the Chihuahua, but he wasn’t going to do that.

No. The furry little bastard had to stay alive for one more day. After that Harold knew that little ol’ Spike was a goner.

Tough luck, muchachito. Tomorrow night Harold would have a half a million bucks in cold hard cash. Man, what a trip. Harold Ticks rolling in the long green. Mr. Harold Ticks, moving among the money men in their Giorgio Armanis, investing in some shit that earned twenty percent. Senor Harold Ticks, a gringo ready for some serious Mexican-style kickin’ back while he watched the money roll in just like a warm Pacific tide.

But that was tomorrow. Right now Harold had to take care of business. And that meant getting the fucking can opener and opening another can of dog food.

This Harold did. He flipped the top of the can into the garbage and emptied a gelatin-spackled lump of turd-colored food into the Chihuahua’s bowl.

The dog sniffed the food and looked at Harold with its big brown saucer-eyes. Harold gave the little bastard a big smile and sniffed the empty can encouragingly.

“It’s good fucking stuff, Spike,” Harold said. “It’ll make you a fucking world beater. A couple bites of this and you’ll fuck like a German Shepherd. Turn your little pene into a ball bat. You’ll have hardcore pitbull bitches screaming for mercy, believe you me.”

The dog licked its muzzle and coughed feebly. Its spindly legs quivered and shook like pencils at a senior citizens’ art class.

The little bastard gave in and settled down on all fours, whining. Swearing under his breath, Harold tossed the empty dog food can into the garbage with all the others. Damn. Ten bucks’ worth of dog food wasted.

Harold’s ten bucks, too. Every penny. None of the others had chipped in on it. Just like with the tuxedo-the limo driver’s outfit he’d used to fool that asshole Baddalach. Harold had spent nearly a hundred bucks on that, every dime straight out of his own pocket. Plus a deposit he was going to lose because things were much too toasty to show his face in Vegas.

Harold wasn’t going into town. Not with Freddy Gemignani’s greaseballs sniffing around. The odds of getting caught like that were probably pretty fucking infinitesimal, because Vegas was a big place. But Harold Ticks wasn’t going to buck those odds. He was going to play this cooler than an Eskimo.

So ten bucks on the pup chow and a hundred-plus on the tux. Plus he’d gassed up the limo on the return trip to Hell’s Half Acre. There went another twenty-plus. And this shit wasn’t exactly tax-deductible. Not that Harold had seen many IRS forms, but he was stone fucking sure that there wasn’t one for expenses-dognapping.

But that was okay, really, because if things went the way Harold wanted them to, he was going to come up kickin’ it in the end. Half a million bucks. Hey, we’re talkin’ thick pockets. Plush. Fresh. Completely frosty.

Harold liked the idea of that. Come drop day his skinflint compadres would learn what was exactly what. They’d find out how a badass alumnus of Corcoran State Prison’s gladiator wars cuts up the swag with a bunch of clueless taters who didn’t ante up.

Clueless taters. Yeah. That’s what they were. Daddy Deke and his big bad Mama, daughters Lorelei and Tura, too. All of them. One big bucket of white trash, their skulls filled with crazy ideas fried up in the Mojave Desert sunshine.

They were expendable, as far as Harold was concerned. Especially the bitches, who grated on him something fierce.

Except for Eden. Eden was different. She was special. She had everything her sisters had and then some, but she wasn’t a desert rat. Eden could think. And so maybe the wiring in her head was a little twisted from growing up with a bunch of nuts in the nuke-proof concrete bunker Daddy Deke had built in the middle of nowhere. So what? Get tight with a body like Eden’s and a man had to expect to make a few concessions.

But Eden didn’t matter. Not now. Not with the damn mutt coughing. Huddled on linoleum the color of a mud puddle, shivering, looking all sick.

“C’mon, Spike.” Harold nudged the bowl under the dog’s nose. “Those pitbull bitches are waiting. Eat up.”

The dog coughed. Harold sweated. Maybe the pug was right. Maybe the dog really was sick. Man, Baddalach had warned them. Maybe Spike really did have lung cancer.

But maybe the dog was really okay, too. Maybe it just had a cold or something. And shit, everybody knew that Chihuahuas were nervous little fucks, almost as bad as French poodles. Maybe Spike was just freaked out about being dognapped.

Well, it wouldn’t matter after tomorrow. As long as the dog stayed alive until drop time, everything would be fine and dandy.

Shit. It was pretty fucking crazy. Kidnapping a Chihuahua, holding it for ransom. But Harold was sure that Gemignani would pay up. Maybe not at first. But once phase two of the plan kicked in and Harold ran a shuffle on the old Guinea. .

The Harold Ticks shuffle. It was a good one. Harold was going to do an end run around the casino boss. He had set up Gemignani with the first ransom note, but all further communications would go directly to Angel Gemignani’s suite at the Casbah.

And Angel would bite. Harold was sure of that, just as he was sure that Angel could get her hands on a half a million bucks in a hot minute. He had the Gemignani tramp cased good. She loved that Chihuahua more than anything. She never went anywhere without her little Spikester. He was always right there in the mix. Even when she visited a man behind closed doors.

Harold almost laughed. Man, that was a good story. The one about Angel and Spike behind closed doors. According to the coconut telegraph, the Spikester was quite the little Hercules. When he wasn’t sick, anyway.

Spike whined. Harold knelt, knees cracking under his weight, and patted the little bastard’s bony head. Those big brown eyes looked up at him again. Man. Harold couldn’t take them right now. He rose and looked out the little pillbox window.

Dirty fucking window, but that didn’t matter. This was a dirty fucking land. Nothing but desert and scrub, a useless patch of Joshua trees and tumbleweeds separated from the highway by forty miles of literally bad road. Useless. Hell, the government couldn’t even give this shit to the Indians. Hadn’t even tried. At the dawn of the nuclear age, they wouldn’t even test the fucking atom bomb here, and it was damn sure that the Russians weren’t going to waste one on a big hunk of nothing during the cold war. Try convincing Daddy Deke of that one, though. He’d come along in 1966 with a brand new bride and plans for a concrete homestead. What a tater, a big ol’ spud who looked at this scab of dirt and saw a grade AAA nuclear-proof Promised Land.

Some fucking promise. Harold called the place the Radiation Ranch. To him, the whole set-up was as useless as tits on a-

Gunfire stitched the silence. Lorelei and Tura were out there somewhere, off behind the rise. Dressed in their leather bikinis, early morning Mojave sunshine baking their finely boned skulls, brains shriveling like apricots in a food dehydrator, machine guns kicking in their hands.

Yeah. Harold had them nailed. Guns but no brains. Sure, they had bodies that wouldn’t quit. But grow tits on a tater, and you’ve still got a spud.

Harold knew how to handle spuds. That’s why he carried the.357, a twin to the gun he’d used on Jesus all those years ago. He’d blown the postman’s fucking tater head clean off. Just like Dirty Harry. Huge gun kicking up a huge fucking slug, only Harold didn’t waste his breath with all that do-you-feel-lucky-well-do-you-punk shit. Hell, no. He was a cowboy, Harold was. A stone fucking killer. A cowboy robot. Forget Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven; think Yul Brynner in Westworld.

Harold stared at the slick lump of dog food and remembered what had happened to Jesus’ head out there in the woods. Busted up white bone and raw flesh smearing red as it splattered the green green grass of home.

Harold looked at the dog. Man oh man, what to do?

Harold didn’t know what to do. There was too much in the way right now. All this damn dog food. Ten bucks’ worth. Every penny gone to waste.

The dog wouldn’t eat, and the really funny part of it was that Harold was hungry. Really starved.

All this talk about taters. .

Harold set the.357 on the counter, where he could get to it fast if danger reared its ugly head. Then he cooked up a mess of hash-browns, bone white and hot, just this side of crispy.

He slathered those taters with catsup.

Lots of it.

A pair of fiery redheads, Tura and Lorelei, inseparable as always. The both of them tall and tan and young and lovely-just a couple of gals from Impanema in their black leather bikinis, enjoying the morning sun.

The sisters were lookers, that was for sure. Except for the machine guns in their hands and the snakebite scars which nestled like marble grave markers on the rich brown earth of their flesh, they might have been models for the Victoria’s Secret lingerie catalog.

The machine gun bucked in Lorelei’s grasp. She flexed up, taut biceps and forearms rippling, and she gentled that sucker down ASAP, the gun barking the whole time.

Slugs ate metal.

Three cans of pineapple juice spouted thick yellow streams.

“Wish we had tomato juice,” Lorelei said. “With tomato juice, the cans look like they’re bleeding when you hit ’em.”

“Yeah, but you missed the first three. In a real firefight, you don’t have time to make adjustments. Waste a couple seconds like you just did and you’re the one spoutin’ juice.”

“Guess I’m lucky that pineapple juice cans don’t shoot back. What do you think the problem is?”

“I think your sight is off. You should go back to the Swarovski instead of that Israeli piece of shit you got on there.”

“Could be.” Lorelei popped the clip and reloaded, then jammed it back in the Steyr AUG. “Well, let me give it another try. If I miss this time, you can call me Swarovski.”

A series of sharp blasts erupted behind Lorelei, and the remaining three cans of pineapple juice were blasted airborne. A second later they descended pissing sweet yellow streams.

Tura laughed, blowing on the barrel of a 9-mm full-auto TMP machine pistol. “That’s how it’s done, sis.”

“You bitch.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“And I know this one.”

“You think you do. I got plenty of tricks up my sleeves you know nada about.”

“You got tricks, all right. And their names are Felix and Raoul and Pablo. . and then there’s your favorite, that doctor who outlived Methuselah.” Lorelei wrinkled her brow, a coy little pause. “Now what’s his name?”

“You know as well as I do. Just the way you know they all used to come to me. You remember that right. Girl, you’re lucky we didn’t stay in Vegas. If you had to make your living as a lap dancer, you would have starved-”

“You girls stop your chitchat and get back to work!”

Simultaneously, Tura and Lorelei turned toward a little rise to the east. Mama had her old Ford pickup parked up there. Her lounge chair was planted in the bed, which was lined with tinfoil that reflected the morning sunlight on the back of her legs.

Mama slathered cocoa butter on the brown belly that had once been home to Lorelei and Tura and their younger sister Eden. That belly was pretty firm for a sixty-two-year-old woman, but then again there weren’t too many women like Mama. Today she was sunbathing in a black leather bikini accessorized with a shoulder holster and a Heckler amp; Koch USP40. Usually she didn’t wear the shoulder holster because it gave her tan lines something fierce. The only reason she made an exception this morning was because of the kidnapped Chihuahua and all.

“You girls answer your mama when she talks to you!”

“Yes, Mama.” The words came out of their mouths in one voice, because Tura and Lorelei had spoken them many times before.

“Now get back to work!”

The twins sidled up alongside one another, nearly putting their heads together. Lorelei whispered, “The old bitch doesn’t miss a trick.”

“No she don’t. Look at her, sittin’ up there like the mistress of all she surveys. One eye on us, and the other eye on the house.”

“Probably got a TV hooked up so she can keep her eye on Daddy, too.”

“She wouldn’t dare. Not with Daddy.”

“Yeah. He keeps her in line.”

“I can hear every word, girls,” Mama yelled. “Get back to work! Get them cans set up!”

Tura fed the 9 mm’s clip and slammed it home. “Think she really hears us?”

“If she does, she ain’t gonna anymore.” Lorelei slipped a CD into her battered boom box and pumped up the volume. Joan Jett screamed “Bad Reputation.”

Lorelei said, “That’ll show the bitch.”

“Yeah.”

Tura and Lorelei set down their guns and set up the cans. Mama sure knew how to get them riled. She’d never let things be. Everything had to go her way, right down to the color of their skin.

Eden had it easy. She couldn’t tan. All she did was bum. It was hard to believe that Eden was really their sister, because everyone else in the family tanned as brown as nuts.

Tura and Lorelei weren’t so lucky. Mama insisted that Eden’s older sisters be the same shade-the far side of bronze, not quite as dark as she was. Mama’s skin was the measuring stick. She was forever holding her arm against those of her daughters. Her dry saddlebag skin chafed like fine sandpaper. Then she’d tell them more sun or less sun. They were never just right.

Nope. Just right wasn’t part of Mama’s vocabulary. There was no pleasing the woman.

By the time the sisters returned to the firing line, Joan Jett had finished up “Bad Reputation.” “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” kicked in as Lorelei took aim.

The gun felt wrong against her shoulder. The damn leather bikini strap was sawing at her skin like a knife. She checked her weapon and adjusted the strap.

“Black leather bikinis and black leather panties. Black leather Wonderbras. Black leather miniskirts and long black leather gloves. I’m so fucking sick of wearing black leather anything.”

Tura nodded. “Me too. We get that half a million and they’ll be no more hijacking trucks off the highway. No more living off whatever we can steal. No more drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon because we got a hundred cases stored down in Daddy’s bomb shelter. No more eating tuna sandwiches and tuna burgers and tuna surprise because we hijacked an ocean of canned tuna. No more wiping our asses with pages from the May 1997 issue of Cosmopolitan because we’ve got three hundred of those and toilet paper costs money. And no more wearing black leather just because we knocked over a truckload of S amp; M gear headed for some kink shop in Vegas.”

“Yeah,” Lorelei said. “If this deal works out. I’m done with hijacking. I’m sick of playing lot lizard so I can climb up into some trucker’s cab. I’m sick of the way the goobers laugh, even when I pull out my gun. And I’m sure as hell sick of cleaning up the mess when we get done with them. It’s too damn hard to get goober bloodstains off of black leather.”

“Don’t worry about it, sis. A half a million, and all those worries are dust in the fucking wind.”

“You really think it’s going to work out? I can’t believe someone would pay half a million dollars for a dog.”

“Go figure rich folks. They never have to eat tuna sandwiches or wipe their asses with Cosmopolitan magazine. The whole problem with rich folks is that they’ve lost touch with reality.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“And you gotta admit it’s been easy so far. That boxer. Shit. Light-heavyweight champion of the world, my ass. Even little ol’ Eden could handle him.”

Lorelei laughed. “That was something to see. The way she slammed him between the eyes with the butt of her AUG, I mean. Maybe Mama will grow our baby sister a backbone after all.”

“Backbone, hell. Wrist bones are what that girl needs.” Both sisters laughed now. So hard that their red manes danced, blazing hair brushing their bronze shoulders like wildfire.

“Tura! Lorelei! You girls stop horsing around!”

“Yes, Mama.”

“You girls get back to work!”

“Yes, Mama.”

They took aim and opened fire.

Yes, Mama.

Eden closed lead shutters over the pillbox window in her bedroom.

She hated waking to the sound of gunfire, but waking to Mama’s voice was even worse. At least she didn’t have to listen to Mama bark instructions on the shooting range anymore. Mama had excused her from target practice because of her wrists. That was the only good thing about having carpal tunnel syndrome.

Eden stood naked before her closet, looking for her white silk robe. She couldn’t find it, and that pissed her off. It meant that one of her sisters had probably “borrowed” it. If she saw it again in this lifetime she’d be lucky.

Eden had many faults, but modesty was not one of them. If her sisters had stolen her robe, why then she’d just do without. The house was empty, anyway. Harold had taken the dog outside. He said the sunshine would probably do it some good.

Naked, Eden padded to the kitchen on bare feet. The room stunk of dog food. A bowl of the stuff waited on the floor. She stepped over the bowl, took a bottle from the fridge, and poured herself a cold glass of pineapple juice. Then she headed for the bathroom, taking small sips as she walked, thankful to be free of the rank, meaty odor.

She got the shower going good and hot and climbed in, turning this way and that, letting the water pulse against the spot on her jaw where the boxer had punched her.

When the soreness was gone, she reached for the soap. The good kind. The honey-oatmeal bar she’d bought at that fancy shop in the mall at Caesars Palace.

The soap was gone.

Eden swore under her breath. She knew who’d used it.

She opened a bottle of shampoo and poured some into her palm, lathering up, soaping her breasts and her belly. The smell of coconuts filled the shower. It was Tura’s favorite shampoo.

The bottle was still pretty full when Eden finished her shower, so she unscrewed the cap and poured the remaining shampoo down the drain.

“Bitch,” she whispered. “That’ll show you.”

Immediately, Eden felt guilty. She knew she shouldn’t feel that way. Mama and Daddy always said guilt was a trap for the weak. They said a person should take what they wanted from the world, whatever it might be. But Eden couldn’t take the way Tura and Lorelei could, leastways not without guilt getting hold of her.

She hated having a conscience. It got in the way and made her angry. She didn’t want to be weak. She wanted to be strong.

She went to Tura’s room and poked around. Her sister never threw anything away. Dozens of Polaroids lined the frame of her dresser mirror, photos of Tura posing with drunken men when she was a lap dancer at that Fremont Street dive called Harlot’s Hollow. Sure, some of the men in the photos were famous. But a lot of them were just scuzbags with money. So they’d peeked at her beaver and given her a few bucks. Was she going to send them Christmas cards every year, or what?

Eden searched through Tura’s dresser drawers. Boytoy skin magazines, a bottle of Rio de Plata Tequila Anejo, several unopened packages of nylons-nothing she found seemed equal to her anger.

She came across Tura’s vibrator, and that was okay for starters. Eden took the batteries and returned the vibrator to the drawer, but she still wasn’t satisfied. She pawed through Tura’s cosmetics and perfume, finally turning her search to Tura’s underwear drawer. There she found a package of Fig Newtons hidden in a tangle of black leather panties. Tura loved Fig Newtons. Eden tore into the package and nibbled a cookie as she returned to her bedroom.

She lay on her bed and ate Fig Newtons. The cookies made her thirsty, so she got another glass of pineapple juice. She combed her hair and put on her makeup and sprayed herself with jasmine perfume.

But she could still smell that damned coconut shampoo on her skin. It really bothered her. She dug through her dresser drawers until she found another bar of honey-oatmeal soap.

Then she took another shower.

Damn but she was tired of this. Tired of living in a concrete bunker in the middle of nowhere, tired of hustling for every dollar, tired of living with a mother and father and a couple of sisters who could win the Dysfunctional Family Olympics hands down.

Things were going to change when they collected that fat ransom. Eden called it her good-bye money. She and Harold would use it to make a fresh start. They’d leave Hell’s Half Acre together, just like Prince Charming and Cinderella in that old fairy tale.

That kind of cash and she’d have just what she wanted when she wanted it. White silk robes to wear for her man and honey-oatmeal soap for their bath.

She knew Mama and Daddy didn’t approve of Harold. They didn’t like their daughter devoting her life to just one man. Monogamy went against everything her parents believed. But Eden couldn’t imagine thinking of another man. If she even so much as tried-

She felt guilty.

Damn. Eden stood in the shower, hot water pulsing against her lithe body. She was always going around in a circle. No matter how hard she tried to change, she always came back to the same place.

Maybe she could try looking at things differently. The way Mama did. Mama had stayed with Daddy a long time, but she’d had plenty of other men, too. She said those other men made her feel good about herself.

Eden wanted to feel good. She closed her eyes and tried to think about someone besides Harold.

He would have to be strong, Eden knew that much. She liked strong guys. He’d have to be in good shape. Like that boxer. That Jack Baddalach. She remembered the way his muscles danced beneath her fingertips.

But Baddalach was on the wrong side of things. Besides that, he was dead. But that made it okay to think about him. She couldn’t feel guilty about a guy who was dead-

Hot water jetted against Eden’s skin. She closed her eyes and eased the soap over her belly. Rising steam carried the sweet, sweet honey smell to her delicate nostrils.

“Eden, you in there?”

She nearly dropped the soap. That’s how startled she was.

“Eden?”

“Just a minute, sugar. I’ll be out in a minute.”

A slick laugh echoed through the bathroom. “If you need a lifeguard, just give your Harold a holler.”

“Sure, baby.”

“Anyway, your daddy’s watching the dog. So if you wanna-”

“In a minute, sugar.”

She listened to Harold’s footsteps as he walked to her bedroom. Then she knelt and picked up the honey-oatmeal soap.

Guilt burned her. She felt awful. Weak. Small.

No, she wouldn’t feel that way. It was all wrong. She had to stop it. Right now.

Filled with a newfound determination, Eden rubbed her belly.

She closed her eyes.

She only found one man in her imagination, and his name was Harold Ticks.