Murder in Vegas

MISCAST by Micki Marz

“Bounced him on his head till his neck broke,” Aram said.

“What a stupid sonofabitch,” Eugene said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Aram said.

The overturned bucket on which Aram sat rocked, because the handle ends bent but did not flatten on the floor. He scooted the bucket nearer the wall and leaned his spine against a stud for better balance, then closed his eyes as if to saw some Zs.

Eugene did worry about it. He said, “Bo had better get his ass in gear or he’s gonna be meat hangin’ on the rack hisself one o’ these days, go around actin’ like that.”

“Shuddup, Eugene,” Aram said, like a man mumbling in his dreams.

“Shuddup yourself, Armpit.”

Jim Daniels walked around the two men and stopped a few feet from the window with the yellow coating bubbled up and cracked. Behind it, a flit of wings became a fast shadow and then was gone. Jim rotated his head to give the chubby one, Eugene, that look that would catch a shirt afire. “You’re it, Eugene. You’re gonna kill him.”

“Not me! No way. No fuckin’ way. I ain’t killin’ him.” He pushed off from a short file cabinet on which he had been perched. “I ain’t killed nobody in my whole damn life and I ain’t gonna start now.”

Jim looked through a peeled portion of the coated window again and said, “Your choice.”

And poor Eugene knew right then that if he didn’t give in to Jimmy D this time he’d have to the next. That, or Jimmy D would mark him for doom down the road. You were either with Jimmy or ag’in him. Eugene broke out in a cool sweat in the shed that served as an office for the auto salvage yard Jimmy Downed on the edge of Henderson. The thermometer outside read 98 degrees.

It wasn’t Bo, the nutcase who bounced the life out of an enemy, that Jim Daniels had it in for. This month, anyway. It was an actor kid from L.A.

Jimmy opened the door of his shed-office and went to check on the new hire he had tasked with moving General Motors cars to a different spot in the yard, to the middle section instead of the end. He wanted the Jap cars at the back of the yard. While he strung a yellow line of plastic tape to demarcate the end of where the ShitZu-Itzi-Sans should go, he cast a gaze at the mesquite stand by the culvert this side of the south razorwire fence. Things there were still where they should be, no man or animal appearing to have worked the ground.

He approved the workman’s work so far and went on down the rows, mentally taking inventory. All the while, that actor squirt kept popping up in his mind, for Jim D was a bitter man. He didn’t start out that way, but it’s what the world made of him, is what he told his latest ex-wife. He even knew he was obsessing over that actor dumbo, but he learned a long time ago that he couldn’t fight it when something like that came over him, so he might as well make his plans.

Pinhead thought he was such hot steamin’ shit. Even that attitude Jimmy would have been able to overlook, if the clown didn’t have to go and shit on Jimmy’s doorstep. No, the shrimp took something from him, and that was not going to go unpunished. In a softer second, Jim thought maybe he wouldn’t kill him. Just mess him up. Yeah, that’s the ticket. See how many casting directors would slot him for a show then, buddy.

The actor entered his life one late afternoon when he and Aram and Eugene were coming off the water at Lake Mead, at a spot about fifty miles north of Vegas. Jimmy didn’t like talking away no prize, but the day had been restful, and at that hour he liked seeing the lake form a blue hole in its center as the ripples at the edges increased. He liked seeing how the reeds turned a deeper green on the underside as a stronger wind laidthem over. He enjoyed the ring of mountains turning rose at top and purple at the bottom with the sun’s slow going down.

Aram was driving. Eugene started in with his harmonica. Jimmy was cool about it all until the notes called up that picture again of how his wife looked the day she told him their account was dry and so was she, goodbye.

Jimmy was about to knock that bar of metal out of Eugene’s hand when Aram called their attention to a pair with their truck high-centered on a boulder. Dumb shits did it while hauling out their boat. Nice boat, too. Okay, thanks, thanks, all around when the rescue job got done. Now get the fuck out o’ my territory, dorko.

But Jimmy didn’t have that feeling right then. No, it was not until the next afternoon when the emotion formed itself into a thing that could be spoken, when they again returned from the lake with only a couple of stripers, no bluegill, no trout, no catfish. Again they met up with the actor and his woman, this time in Overton, thirteen or so miles from his fishing spot. At first it was just disdain for dumbfuck’s manner, his look, his too-happy take on the world. Take this, suckah, was the unarticulated feeling in Jimmy then. The three were eating hamburgers in the Red Rooster when they saw the actor again. Mark Mandelkorn was his name. He came in with his twig of a girlfriend and commenced to brag about what a great angler he was. Three sheets to the wind after only a couple of beers, when he starts giving a fishing lesson. Shit.

“Pretend you have a rock in your left armpit,” the twerp told everyone. “The rock keeps your arm in the proper position, preventing backlash, for better control of your cast.” Dumbfuck Eugene was taking it all in like a girl. Meanwhile, the actordork continued to hold forth: “Your bait held in your right hand should be even with the reel, so when you make the pitch the bait won’t come down like a stone and hit the fish on the head.”

Who’d this L.A. crud think he was? Make it worse, Pauline, the bartender, who was at least a hard 50, posed her body in a way so Jim knew she was flirting with Mr. Ass-a-minute, and that made him sick.

The moron said, “I like your sign, Pauline.”

“What sign would that be?” She smiled and walked around tothe jukebox, casting a glance back at the girlfriend, preparing to slip in a coin.

“That one.” The actor read from a placard:

There ain’t no town drunk here!

We all take turns.

“Oh yeah. I don’t hardly see it no more.”

“And I’ll bet you’re about to play my favorite song there, hon, aren’t ya?”

“Now what song would that be?”

“My favorite: ‘I Been Roped and Throwed by Jesus in the Holy Ghost Corral’? Got that one in there, Pauline?”

But the topper was when the prick and his snatch made to leave. The better part of two hours Jim had been dropping quarters in the slot machine nearest his stool; he could just lean to the side and plunk it. He’d turn back before the spinners even stopped, casual-like, as if winning or losing were the same thing.

Then fuckmouth up and says, “Tiff, go see if you can fix that machine for the man.”

One quarter. One quarter, and the machine coughs 4,000 of them out for her. Or flashes the sign, same thing. For him. The actor.

Jimmy D was an unhappy man. He snagged no fish that day, he, a damned good fisherman, and some chump-fag actor walks off with his dough.

Tiffany hadn’t drunk anything but soda that evening, so she was at the wheel pulling the boat back to Vegas, where it was rented from a friend for a few days. She said to Mark, “Jeez, honey, I wish you wouldn’t get so loaded.”

“I wasn’t that loaded.”

“You are.”

“Nah. I could drive.”

“And I could walk the moon.”

“Well, listen. Are you happy? Are you happy, huh? Girl justwon herself a thousand bucks. A thousand bucks! Man. Is the girl happy, huh? Happy?” He tickled her where her shirt spared the waistband of her jeans. She wagged her head in assent and gave off with a grin that said, “It’ll do.”

Aram didn’t like looking at the pockmarks in Eugene’s face on his right side, where they were more volcanic than on the left. Therefore, Aram always chose to drive. Coming away from the Red Rooster, the three were silent. Eugene’s harmonica was in the hip pocket that didn’t hold the can of Red Devil snuff.

Jimmy stared straight ahead as if on the lookout for wild burros that sometimes cross the road like part of a hill broke off and slid. Now and then, Aram shot a glance Jimmy’s way to see if he could detect how bad a mood he had been put into by that girl winning at the juke.

Before turning to Jimmy, Eugene poked Aram with his elbow, winked, and then said, “I got it figgered now, pal. Only reason you didn’t get lucky today is your pole’s too short.” Eugene entertained himself with his own hearty laughs. Jimmy said nothing, though there was a twitch at the back of his jaw. So Eugene grew more thoughtful. This time he said, “That guy going on about how anglin’ is an art? I bet you didn’t know anglin’ is an art, the none of us did, did we? Who-o-ee!”

Jimmy said to the windshield: “I don’t need no pussy lessons outta some Jew-boy from L.A.”

Eugene replied, “No, we don’t need none o’ that. Nope,” and rode silent.

When Tiffany came back into the hotel room from a workout in the downstairs gym, she found Mark shaving. She said, “Those guys last night? They sure gave me the creeps.”

“What for? I didn’t see anything wrong with them.” She looked sweet, a little bit damp for her effort. Yesterday’s outing had toasted Tiffany to a honey shade. Her light-brown hair held wheat-colored stripes, all of it tied up on top of her head now in a dust-mop ponytail.

She frowned and said, “I hope we don’t see them again.” She made him recall how Pauline followed them outside, saying to no one in particular, “I got to get some cigarettes from my car.”

Though it had cooled down a lot, Tiffany still had to wrap a Kleenex around the car door handle to open it. Mark opened his door then, and the two stood letting the heat out, looking off into the distance where the jagged, treeless mountains were a flat rust color coated with milky haze. At the end of the street, heat waves still shimmied. In the other direction, a bunch of cars lined up at the Inside Scoop, the ice cream parlor, even though near dinnertime.

Pauline came up and said, “Just a word of advice.” Her skin was of a grayish hue and the pores of her forehead were tiny tattoos. Sunlight fired the fine hairs on her upper lip and the sturdier ones along her jaw. She shaded her eyes and said, “I’d watch my step with Jim Daniels and that bunch.”

Mark said, “They seem all right to me. Good guys, matter of fact.”

“You’re not from around here. But in case you’re thinking of staying a few days, just so you know, Moapa Valley police have been looking at Jimmy for a murder about two months ago.”

“A murder?” Tiffany said. “That man who helped us out at the lake?”

Pauline said, “I’m saying a stranger got caught out in a flash flood, stranded to the axles. Somebody saw them three helping him out there, too, just like y’all. Next time they saw the fella, turkey buzzards picked him pretty much to pieces. His truck was stripped, and his family said his blackjack winnings was gone. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

As Pauline stepped away, Tiffany turned her shoulders as if to watch a passing car and rolled her eyes for Mark’s benefit.

“Thanks for the tip,” Mark said to the woman. “Take it easy now.”

Today, however, Tiffany apparently had second thoughts. She said, “Honey, I know you came up here to fish, but could we not go back to the lake, just stay in town and do the slots and shows? I mean, I know gambling you can take or leave, but look what I won last night, and I don’t see you complaining. You said you wanted to see those cars…”

“The vintage automobiles, yes.”

“What car was it you said you wanted to see?”

“Duesy,” he said. “A perfect specimen among the eight hundred cars at the Imperial Palace Hotel. Ever hear someone say ‘It’s a doozie?’ Means something superb, something you wouldn’t believe. From Duesenberg, one beautiful Roadster made in the late twenties. Howard Hughes and Wayne Newton used to own the one that’s in the collection now.”

“Somehow I can’t see those two together,” Tiffany said, teasing.

“Sure, it would seat them and Elvis and his ham sandwiches too.”

“So we can stay?”

“How ’bout we compromise. Two days in town, one more on he lake. You first.”

“Oh, good,” she said. And Mark knew she was thinking naybe he’ll change his mind about that last day too.

He said, “So, are you going to win us a million dollars? What would you do with a million dollars, sweetheart?”

Without a pause, she said, “Fix Grandma.”

“Fix what?”

“My grandma is the sweetest, gentlest, kindest person in the world. She scrubbed other people’s clothes and washed their dishes and took care of their kids when she had four boys of her own to do for. Now she’s the one needs care and tending.”

“But she’s in a nursing home, isn’t she?” He hadn’t been going with Tiffany long. He didn’t have that much of a grip on her family.

Tiffany answered, “And she doesn’t remember her name.”

“Baby, you can’t fix that,” Mark said. “Even Mrs. Reagan couldn’t fix that. A whole president on her hands, and she couldn’t fix that.”

“It’s my money. I’ll do what I want,” Tiffany said. She went over to the small fridge in the room and pulled out a mocha milk.

Mark was right there behind her when she turned around. He took the bottle from her so he could open it and help her not ruin her nails. “I thought we were a team,” he said. “We move as one.”

“My money is your money then?” she asked. “My money,that I win fair and square on the slot machines, you not dropping any coin?”

“If I won, I’d let you have half. Come on.”

“But you aren’t even going to win, because you don’t really want to play, you want to go be sleeping with the fishies, or whatever.”

“Just let me finish shaving, get dressed, we’ll go. Hey, you know what? C’mere.”

He held out his arms, and she came to him with her fists balled up under her chin, as if in protection or supplication.

Tiffany said, “Know what? If I won a million dollars? I mean, what if? Like, who would’ve thought I’d even win a thousand? Well, I’d first want to give Grandma something to walk up and down the halls with. A teddy bear.”

“Uh, we don’t have to win a million dollars for that. Seems manageable, you know, without winning the big one.”

“But see, the patients in those hospitals, they’re all so bewildered. They don’t know where they are but they do know something’s not right. The ladies carry empty purses around. That’s some comfort to them, a purse. They can still recognize a purse. Some of them have soft toys, but they go missing.”

“Go missing.”

“Yes, well, maybe staff takes them home to their little kids, who knows? I mean, those people are paid less than minimum wage, so you might expect it. Or maybe five stuffed animals wind up in one room, one of the women thinking they’re all hers. Sometimes staff puts the toys up high so the patients won’t get them, won’t squabble, but can only look at them, not reach them, and that’s terrible to me. What if I bought dozens and dozens and kept replacing them? Like each week, boom, here’s your twenty new teddy bears. Go give them to the ladies. Dozens of clean, fresh teddy bears.”

“Ah, honey…”

“You laugh. But see, I’ve been doing pricing. I’d like to buy some big soft rag dolls, too, that I saw. They stand about three feet high. They sell them at truck stops. I saw one at the truck stop in Jean, when we stopped for gas.”

“I thought you were looking at Indian jewelry.”

“Mostly these, because I saw them first in Barstow when westopped to get something to drink. Guess what? They’re only ten dollars, and they’re, like, huge. I wrote down the name of the manufacturer. I could call, order up a ton. Or some teddy bears. See, I can get them for six or seven dollars, but they’re the bigger ones, the ones that don’t sell out at Christmastime or Valentine’s Day. You go in and ask the store manager for a discount. He’d as soon sell them to you for six dollars, even if they normally go for fourteen, than bother sending them back or keeping them around gathering dust till summertime. I already asked this one guy, at Albertson’s, the manager, and that’s what he said.”

Beautiful little thing, a little on the too-small size, Mark was thinking while he finished up at the mirror. Win scads of money, he’d feed her cheesecake till the cows came home. He said, “Whatever you want is all right with me, Tiff,” and saw that smile come back in her eyes. He turned on the shower, and there she was, in the room with him, unbuttoning her jeans. She challenged him with what he could do with his Duesy. At first he answered like a straight-man: “Drive it down Sunset, Hollywood and Vine. Attract an agent. Next step, I’m a famous actor, just from that one serendipitous event.”

“Fool.”

“That’s why you lub me, idn’t it, baby? I am your lubbin’ fool.”

“Well, serendipitous your Duesy into this, fool,” she said.

In the lobby of the hotel later, they did stop at a slot machine, and while Tiffany plied her luck once more, Mark obtained and delivered soft-serve ice cream and the news that there was a million-dollar jackpot waiting for her at a number of places around town. “Well,” Tiffany said, a light in her eyes, “pick one.”

“Let’s go to Terribles. With a name like that, it’s got to be good. Isn’t that what the Smucker’s ad used to say?”

“If you say so.”

He said, “It’s got what they call a progressive Triple-Seven Millionaire Jackpot. It’s not on the Strip, though. It’s north of town.”

“Nah, nah, nah, nah. You stuck me in this rinky-dink hotel onthe outskirts already. Henderson? Where in hell is that? I want to go where the action is.”

“I thought I just gave you some of that.”

“My boots are itchin’ to go walkin’, baby. I feel it in my bones. I am a winnah tonight!”

Damned if she wasn’t.

Damned if the girl didn’t have a streak of gold built right into her. Make that not precisely 1 million, but 1.83 million. His baby did it! She broke the bank. She had faith. She was anointed.

Mark told her, at four in the morning after the first hullabaloo celebrations were done with, after the first meeting with the casino bigwigs had vouchsafed the truth of it all, after the phone calls to their loved ones, the sex, the promises, the spoken dreams, the tears and spasms of giggles, Mark told her, “Baby, I know you are not likely to believe this after what happened, but if you could erase what all went down tonight, erase the jackpot, put us back in L.A., in that Tujunga bungalow we found together, both of us slinging dishes and searching for gigs, I would just have to ask you to be my wife. You are the one. I knew it from the start.”

“You bullshitter.”

“You adorable, perfect, glorious Hepburn, you.”

“You only say it ’cause it’s true,” Tiffany said.

They had taken ten thousand dollars cash and went back to the cheap hotel in Henderson that first night and slept upon it, despite the entreaties of the staff at Terribles to stay in one of the premier suites. Mark and Tiffany promised they’d come back later, although he didn’t really know in which splendid hut they would install themselves. Now Mark got up from the bed, went to the closet, and brought out a white teddy bear the size a grandma might be. He said, “Happy Millions, baby. It’s only a start.”

He couldn’t believe it. He told the new guy not to bother beyond the yellow tape. Now there he was, zipping up after takinga leak by the mesquite. “Fred! What the hell you doin’ back there?”

Fred was a rugged old ex-trucker, maybe sixty, sixty-five. He walked like he had stickers in his shoes. When he came up to Jimmy D, he said, “Got you a stinker back there,” and held his pale blue eyes on him a while before he spit to the side. “I’d cover that up with a load of dirt, I was you, before you lay down more tin.”

“Come on back to the office,” Jim D said.

There he peeled off a hundred and gave it to Fred and said, “Thanks for your work. I’ll give you a ring if I need you some more.”

“A pleasure workin’ for you, Mr. Daniels.”

The air conditioner louvers were aimed right down on Jimmy when he called Aram. “Get Bo to call me, pronto.”

“He ain’t on my dance card, Jimmy. I don’t know where to-”

“Raghead, get Bo to call me to-fuckin’-day, or you’ll be eatin’ your own balls for breakfast, dig? Dig?”

Noon, Ron Bodella called. “I know I owe ya,” he told Jim.

“Listen and listen to me carefully,” Jim said. “Your product is stinking. You did a piss-poor job in covering it up, Shit-for-brains.”

“I put lye on it. That shouldn’ta-”

“Did I tell you to listen? Did I?”

The line was silent.

“Your assignment, asshole, is to get you two skunks. I don’t care how, I don’t care where, I don’t want questions, I don’t want explanations, I don’t want delays. I want two skunks. Dead or alive. You put them out on that heap… no. Back up. I’m going to dump a load of scrap there, but I want them skunks out by the trees like they been pests and I had to kill ’em. I want them there by tonight. That’s it. Over and out.”

He hung up the phone, loosened his shirt, rose from his desk and stood right in front of the blowing airstream and said, “Shit for brains. All of ’em. Shit for brains.” But then his eyes took on the smile his lips barely formed.

Tiffany cruised the penthouse suite. “How can people live like this?” she asked Mark.

“They do, all over the world. Not just for a day, not just for a night.”

“Where does all the money come from?”

“Only the Shadow knows.”

She lay down on the king-sized bed and said, “I mean really.”

“I don’t know, doll. It’s there, right under us poor slobs’ faces, but it’s invisible to us. You don’t really see what’s so far above your station you can’t imagine.”

“I keep seeing all the poor people in the newscasts. Flood victims. Starving Africans. Neglected kids.” She lay on the bed in her white sundress with the lavender swirls. Spread around her were sheaves of green, like brittle leaves from an exotic tree. The teddy bear sat in a white wicker chair on a cushion of deep-green velvet and gazed out at the horizon thick with yellow smog.

Mark said, “It’s time for me to go, hon. I can get in maybe five hours on the water, then I’m done.”

“Go. Go,” she said. “Bring back a mermaid, if you like. I’m napping, and if this is only a dream I’ll soon find out.”

He walked over and kissed her warmly on the lips, and said, “What good’s a mermaid to me when I’ve got the whole enchilada?”

“Animal,” she murmured, and shut her eyes. Then she opened them as he was going out the door, and added, “Mark? You’re not going out there by yourself, are you? You said Tommy would go along?”

“Sure. Then he can take his boat back when we’re done, drop me off here, or, shoot, guess what? I got a rich girlfriend. I bet she’d pay for a cab.”

Jimmy couldn’t fuckin’ believe it. Again. There they were! That actor shit. That twat shit! On the friggin’ front page!

The headline again. He stared at it. The caption. The photo itself. It was them, that pair from the lake. She, in a white dress with leetle-bitty strings holding it up. Snip, snip, take it down,but there’d be nothin’ under it. The guy, MarkMouth, holding up one corner of a giant check that had 1.83 Million written on it. What the holy fuck was this? Somebody playin’ tricks on him? He tasted something in his mouth like after the dry heaves, like years ago when he was still a drinker and he puked a dozen times with nothing finally coming up but the taste. He felt the inside of his nose prickle. He thought, for a moment, he would cry.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a frumpy woman in a cop uniform and a man he recognized as the Moapa County Sheriff sitting at a table two away from his in the restaurant. What the hell? The sheriff raised a finger at him, as in greeting, and nodded. Then he rose and came over to Jimmy’s table.

“Howdy.”

“Howdy back.”

“I’m Sheriff Thompson.”

“I seen you around the Lake.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about a fella named Dean Aspey, would you? Fella got killed over there around Red Rock? You probably read about it in the papers.” He put a finger on the newspaper laying on the table.

“What are you talkin’ about, Sheriff? I wouldn’t know anything about that. Why would you come and talk to me about it?” He met the eyes of the frumpy cop with a name tag that read just JONES.

“Well,” the sheriff said, “this fella mighta been the same fella you and your friends mighta helped out on the roadside, according to someone who seemed to know.”

“I don’t mean to sound rude, sir, but why don’t you go back out to that someone and ask some more questions, because I surely do not know to which you refer, and I am just taking me a break here. I run a busy business, and I don’t have a lot of time for chit-chat.”

“Thank you, Mr. Daniels. I may just be calling on you again sometime.” The sheriff turned, but then he eased back and said, “I b’lieve I read in the papuhs your bidness was sufferin’ some, didn’t I? You file for bankruptcy protection, sumpin’ like that?”

“Sheriff,” Jim Daniels said, “I’m sure you don’t discuss your personal finances in public. Why would you think that I would be so inclined? Have a nice day.” He gave Jones a look, dumberthan a stump she appeared to be, probably Polish or Russian by the look of her, who took a common name. He rummaged in his pocket for his roll of bills while setting his eyes back on that blasted photo with the two grinning punkin-heads and the fat casino cats beside. Dolts, them two, who never earned an honest buck in their lives.

It wasn’t the blood on the walls that set investigators back on their heels. Red-patterned walls they’d seen before. It wasn’t even the blood on the money. The money, well, you have to admit it, the money was more eye-catching than the mayhem, given the circumstance. Guessing, one could say there might have been a couple hundred grand on the bed. Piles of it. Pillows of it. In the center there was about a yard of blood-soaked bills, but so what? Throw the notes in the washer: Good as new.

No, it was something else that sent chills down the spine. A teddy bear. A big, happy-faced, cuddly, white, blood-soaked teddy bear, lying off to the side, dead as can be.

“You were supposed to find him, that’s all,” Jimmy said.

“We did find him. Jeez!”

“Don’t you jeez me!”

“Jimmy,” Eugene said, “we went to the casino like you said. We knock on the door to their room. She recognized me. Took her a sec, but she recognized me. She opens the door, says, ‘Something happen to Mark?’”

“Not yet, we’re thinkin’,” Aram said.

“You don’t think. You do not think,” Jimmy said.

“Sorry.”

“You killed her. Right there in the effing casino, you kill her.”

“No we didn’t,” Eugene said.

Jim Daniels looked at him stupidly. Eugene had red all over his shirt, and some on his pants, the biggest portion soaked onto his torso, only partially hidden by his black windbreaker. It was night, and they were outside the office-shed, the light from inside cutting a shaft to where they stood, and the moon, almost afull moon, thrusting its brightness across the geometric patterns of the junkyard and over the features of the men so that the two looked like shades of themselves. “And that is… what?” Jimmy asked, pointing to Eugene’s chest. “Paint bullets?”

“She fought like a sonofabitch,” Aram said. He had scratches on his face dragging down to his collar bone. A black blob was coming out his nose.

“Wipe your nose. Jesus,” Jimmy said.

Aram wiped it on his sleeve, looked at it, wiped again. “She punched me. I smacked her hard, but she got in a good punch before that. It was all I could do not to shove my fist down her throat.”

Eugene stepped up to Jimmy, his hands hooked in his rear pockets, fear and amazement in his voice. “Jimmy, she took out Bo. Big Bo. She took him out, swear to God.”

“What are you telling me?”

Now he heard it: thumping, banging, the sounds like anchors hitting rock under water. Only they were coming from the bed of the truck.

“You got him in there too?”

“Who? Bo? No, I told you,” Eugene said. “She-” He stopped himself. Jimmy could tell he didn’t want to say it, whatever it was. Eugene stepped backwards so he could utter it. “She broke away from us. Bo come in. I know you didn’t tell us to use him, but we figured we needed the three of us if we was going to handle the two of them in a crowded place. Don’t get mad, Jimmy. It shoulda worked. We just didn’t figure on her being all that.”

Aram was shaking his head in agreement, an imploring look in his eyes, one that Jimmy had not seen before. He said, “Here’s how it went down. She jumps on the bed, starts throwing money around, saying, ‘Here, here, take it, just take it and get outta here!’ Bo rushes her. She jumps off, takes this thing off a table, I don’t know what it was, and whams the shit out of him. He’s bald, you know, it cracks him on the skull and he spurts like a fountain. Goes down on his knees in the middle of the bed. I mean, there is money all over the place, and he’s a-wailin’. I thought the next-door neighbors would come in. I say shut the fuck up, don’t be a fuggin’ baby. She up and whams him again, on the fingers covering his head, his ear,man, his eyebrow. It about shook me up. Like a goddamned Tasmanian devil. Bo’s a big guy, and he was whinin’ like a puppy dog.”

“Where is he?”

“Bo?”

“The Easter Bunny, you fuck.” Jim looked back and forth at them. If it wasn’t so serious, he’d laugh. Like teenagers caught during their first burgle, their minds racing to see which lie would be believed.

At last Aram said, “Bo went off the balcony. Down to the parkin’ lot. He thought the door was the door-the way out, I mean. He couldn’t see, with what she did to him. He ran right into Eugene here. Pepper in her eyes is not too good for her, way I see it. She’s got to be hurt before it’s over, know what I mean? It’s only right.”

Inside the office, Jimmy took a spare shirt off the hook behind the door and threw it at Eugene. He pointed a finger at Aram and said, “You. Sit. Cool your heels. Shut your mouth.”

“I know you want to know, and we didn’t tell you yet,” Eugene said as he was delicately removing his shirt to put in the paper bag Jimmy set out. He was using a tone of voice to curry favor with the angry man before him, while Jimmy looked at him with a portion of made-up hatred in his eyes. Eugene said, “The guy wasn’t there. She, that spitfahr, she did the whole thing herself. We don’t know where that actor guy is. Honest Injun. We did, we’d have him by the ears, and you know that, Jimmy, you do.”

Mark got drunk again that night. Only a little drunk, though. It felt good. He could release from his former-former, Mom-money woes in Hollywood, as well as the tensions of having hours ago become the kept man of a very rich woman. His friend took him to his house and fed him caffeine, and they reminisced about the New York days when Tommy himself had aspirations for the screen. Now Tommy ran a software company producing modules to support military satellite systems, and he confessed that he was gay, and was so happy now that he had what seemed to be an endless string of beauties in this glamoroustown. He waved ta-ta to Mark at the Puerto de Moros Hotel and Casino, and zoomed off in his Porsche, and Mark looked after him with some little sadness, this man the same man he knew before his confession and yet not the same.

When Mark tried to go to the penthouse, the elevator was blocked. When he gave up trying and inquired and got an answer, he felt the blood leave his face and his knees give ever so slightly as if some invisible hand had playfully karate-chopped him there.

Sheriff Thompson spoke to Mark by phone, but the Las Vegas police spoke to him in person for nigh onto two hours. Only because one of the officers let slip Sheriff Thompson’s name and suspicions was Mark able to reach out to him at all. At two o’clock in the morning, though.

The sheriff said he would meet with Mark first thing tomorrow. Say nine o’clock for sure; he’d meet Mark at the casino. Mark liked the man’s tone; his cooperation. But what Mark liked most of all was that the man did not hold back the way some officers-at least in the movies-do. The sheriff, in his quiet, sleep-drugged voice, named a suspect; no, a whole party, after Mark related the encounters he’d had with anyone since arriving in Nevada. Then Mark said, his mouth as dry as alkali, “My girlfriend is missing, Sheriff.” You’d think that news would rouse the sheriff further. All the sheriff advised, however, was that he had full confidence that city police would be surveiling the business owned by Jim Daniels if he was in the least under suspicion, and that most abductees, if that was what she was, especially now with her new-found fortunes, were brought home safe and sound.

Blessed be the light. The light be damned! Too much light! Light, it seemed, as bright as stage lights almost.

Vegas, The City That Never Sleeps, had a military surplus store that stayed open round the clock. It carried, in front, all kinds of dollar items, the army/navy gear attended to by customersmostly in the daytime, the dollar items purchased by the ragtags at night. But Mark glommed onto a camo coverall for sixteen bucks and camo face paint and an MP’s baton. He also came away with a U.S. Army Ranger knife, serrated, evil-looking, satisfying in a way an actor who was only acting could never know.

His heart tore when he thought of Tiffany and anyone touching her, hurting her, doing damage to that perfect, sweet, precious heart. He would beg, if he could, any supernal power to not let it be so, if only he believed, but it was himself he had to look to, and he would not be conquered, no.

Now, stationed in the auto-salvage yard, he was Rambo. He was Schwarzenegger. He was Fairbanks and Ty Power and Quinn. Cagney and little-Mafioso Edward G. Robinson; and the leanest, meanest, unforgiving monster short of the Werewolf of London. Bob Swagger, the guy in the Stephen Hunter books: Yes, he was Swagger, the man of deadly control.

He was under the witness of moonlight, and he would take them down!

Peering into the cracks of the coated office windows, he saw that Jim and the two flunkies weren’t there. A smell about the shed that he couldn’t name set him to more animal stealth than even before.

He heard voices, tuned to them. Moving toward them, he wondered how he himself would not be heard, boots cracking the surface of the dry earth.

A pile of yellow tape was coiled by a rod used for a stake at the left. To the right of the picture, which could have had a frame, sat a bulldozer, inert, gleaming dully in the moonlight. The three men were about the same height, but Mark could identify by heft the one on the eastern end as Eugene, and then Aram by his monotone. “It’ll fit two,” Aram said.

A beat, then Jim D said, “May have to fit more than that.”

“Pee-yew, it stanks,” Eugene said. “That’s nasty, I mean nasty.”

Mark detested the air, the air he breathed the same as those beings did, whether it was putrid or not, but the stench made itall the more pernicious, generating the first turn of fear he’d felt so far.

The men started on their way back. Aram said to Jimmy, “One thing. I want you to know I’s the one who clocked her. Cowboy here was staring off the balcony like a pure idiot. You think you could have yanked Bo back, dummy, by looking over like that?” Now to Jim again: “She’d have shoved him over too, I swear, if I was not on my toes.”

“Congratu-fuckin’-lations, Twinkle Toes,” Jimmy said. “You’re both fuckups, so quit shootin’ your faces.”

“Hm,” Aram said, halting in his stride. “She quit makin’ noise. Wonder why.”

Eugene said, “I can hear her now.”

Mark, hunched down by a Toyota SUV with its top half-sheared off, knew they meant Tiffany, even with so little to go on. She was alive, then!

Jimmy said, “Get her out.”

They were so close now. Mark wanted them now!

Eugene, on the end of the row of men closest to Mark, went down by the force of the MP baton against his collar bone. Crack! He screamed in agony, collapsed, rolled, and appeared to be paralyzed, still moaning.

The two others scattered, Jim running down the aisle for the office. Aram hustled behind a car, but he couldn’t escape Mark’s sight. “Who the hell is it?” Aram yelled.

Mark closed on him and felt the wind of a thrown object blow by. The rat scampered. Again, the rat called out: “It’s you. Come get me, cocksuckah! See what you’re made of.” He dared to move out from the shadows, up against a wimp actor who had got lucky once. He moved on him with a bar of some kind, some detritus with length and weight, and it did catch Mark’s baton and send it flying. Aram swung again. Mark dodged, ran two cars down the aisle, ripped an antenna off its rusted base, yanked on it to see if it would extend. Two inches. Two inches more was what he had, and two inches more is what he used. As Aram swung the next time, the moonlight showed a softened pleasure in Aram’s face as if the deed was done, the act was closed, the curtain down. But illusion is what the game is about, asshole, is what Mark felt as he whipped the antenna across his assailant’s face. “Ya!” Aram exclaimed, and droppedthe rod or post or whatever it was that clamored noisily over the hood of a car.

Mark whipped again and again, yet Aram managed to rise and run, swearing death threats and torture unimaginable upon Mark when the time would come.

Now Mark heard the sounds from afar, the “ummmming” and the clunking, and knew it was Tiffany, bound or buried or both, somewhere. His adrenaline kicked into even higher gear to pursue his prey: Aram, slipping again into the shadows as he zigzagged through the yard. A spotlight from atop the office pinned Mark, blinding him before he could turn away. He ducked behind a car carcass, blinking residual blots away.

Then all was quiet, and Mark realized he’d lost his foe. Worse, Mark had dropped-when?-the stainless-steel antenna whip. He still had the Ranger. His hearing was tuned to what had to be its finest. Every whisper of wind, every far-off passage of a wheeled object, the creak in the power lines as they rocked in the breeze, was claimed. Aram could not take him by surprise. The knife he held was at the ready, out of its holster, gripped sideways for slashing, as he had seen it done in the action films.

“Oo-oo-oo-oo.” Jimmy D spoke quietly in her ear. “Hop along, Little Miss Hopalong Cassidy. Or shuffle, if you please. Hurry! Hurry, or it will be worse for your Markie boy.”

That, too, Mark heard, though not distinctly. But he knew that Jimmy had moved her. She was up. Moving. Life!

Jimmy had to be taking her to the shed because there was no other structure around. He’d get to her. Think Swagger. Swagger would not go off half-cocked, expose himself. Take out Aram first. Aram on a Stick: take-out. Jesus, he was getting looney and he knew it.

Up popped the head, as if on cue. Checking. Aram didn’t see Mark. Didn’t mark the Mark.

A wheel-cover leaning against a Caddy caught Mark’s eye. He dashed for it. Aram would hear the thumping feet. Markcouldn’t help that. All the better. When his opponent rounded a pickup, Mark was ready. Three minor belts earned in Tae Kwan Do while in acting school is all Mark had, but hey, he’d always been a good student and a hardy kid. He didn’t even see Aram’s head. It was the shoulders he saw reflected in the windshield of a vehicle, but that was all he needed. He used the hubcap as a heavyweight Frisbee as Aram lurched into the space. The hubcap struck him hard on the temple, and he went down. Straight down; no motion in the mound.

Funny how you can have all this going on, Mark thought, and balance so many images in your mind. I see the cops who aren’t here to help me but should be. I see the boat, the way it cut through the sun’s reflection on the surface water. I see myself, decked out in camo gear, and I am proud! Proud to be a Marine, or what the devil it is they say. Man, where’s a casting maven when you need one?

“You’re thinking I’m a rotten guy,” Jimmy D told his captive. “I know you do. But, dear, I am a misunderstood guy. Really. Don’t believe?” He started laughing. “Neither do I!”

“But see? Am I hurting you? No. I’m letting you sit, like a person, not a bag. Now, I can’t unbind your feet because I heard what a hellion you are. I can’t unbind your wrists, ’cause, well… you know.”

The single overhead light inside was off. The spotlight he had turned on Mark only for that one moment was out. Now it was only his role to wait. Wait for The Mark to come. “Daddy, are we there yet?” he said, grinning.

Mark took his time. Ten minutes. Fifteen. He’d peeked inside. Black, of course. But Mark had played a blind man once. He’d learned about echolation, cramming for the part, and he knew he could enter, go anywhere, without sight, and know withoutseeing; feel, on his face the things which surrounded him.

When Mark turned the door handle and opened the door, he heard Tiffany going “Mmm-mmm,” in warning. He said, “Shhhhh.”

Jimmy D, the Evil One, said nothing, nothing at all. Mark held up a car mat with a waist, the shape of a man. Jim Daniels let go a round. Blam! God, it was loud! Tiffany screamed behind her tape.

Blam! Blam!

Instantly Mark moved in, knowing that Jimmy D would himself be sight-impaired from the flare where the cylinder shot out a circle of flame upon firing.

Mark wrist-flicked the Ranger into Jim D where he stood prepared to fire again. The gun barrel pointed at the floor, the shoulders sagged, and the whole weight of the man collapsed, the knife deep in his chest by the heart. The eyes, when Mark stood over him, shone like eggwhites without a yolk to surround.

Parts, anyone? It took a couple of months for the noise of the incident to settle enough so that Mark’s agent-and Tiffany’s-could sort through the offers and select the best ones. There were parts, all right. There were promises. There were contracts now, signed.

Tiffany could take them or leave them, she said. But she took them. Mark had his hands full too, but he shifted the obligations handily to spare the time for the wedding plans. No helicopters, gentlemen, please. But you can take as many pix of his replica-kit Dusey as you want, boys.