Sucker Bet

21

Hey, rube!

The words made Ray Hicks’s head snap. Carny slang for trouble. He was helping out at the cotton candy stand. The sun was low in the sky, the carnival starting to empty out. An employee hurtled past, then another. Hicks caught the second man’s arm.

“Talk to me.”

“Shooting,” the man said breathlessly.

Hicks looked up and down his carnival. Everything looked fine. “Where?”

“By the trailers.”

A line of dirty-faced kids was waiting to buy cotton candy. The man who dispensed the candy had run out of change, so Hicks was standing there with a pocketful of coins, helping out. The man who dispensed the candy knew damn well that Hicks was not going to give him his money to hold. In a whisper, he asked Hicks, “Should I shut down?”

Hicks looked at the kids’ expectant faces. He’d been swindling people for years, but he was not in the business of disappointing them. “Give them free candy.”

“Free candy?”

“You heard me.” Hicks hitched up his trousers and hurried across the lot. If there had been a shooting, it would mean a visit from the town clowns, and another fat bribe to keep everyone happy. Some days, it just wasn’t worth getting out of bed.

The trailers were behind the concession stands, and he came around the corner to see a dozen employees running around like headless chickens. Pushing his way through the crowd, he found a ticket-taker named Smitty who had more brains than all of them combined.

“It looks bad,” Smitty told him.

“How bad is that?” Hicks said.

“He might die.”

Hicks twirled the plastic toothpick that had resided in his mouth since breakfast. “Who we talking about here? A customer?”

Smitty’s eyes went wide. “You don’t know?”

“Spit it out, boy.”

“Mr. Beauregard got shot by a robber.”

Hicks nearly knocked Smitty down as he barreled up the ramp to his trailer. Inside, a gang of employees was clustered around the desk. Mr. Beauregard lay with his eyes shut while a Mexican fortune-teller named Princess Fatima pressed a bloodstained towel to his forehead. Kneeling, he said, “Mr. Beauregard, it’s me. Mr. Beauregard, look at me.”

The chimp’s eyes did not open. Hicks thought of all the times Mr. Beauregard had feigned playing dead, just to get a rise out of him. From the cage he removed the ukulele and plucked a few chords. Mr. Beauregard’s eyelids fluttered. Princess Fatima caressed his brow and silently cried, knowing all too well what the future held.

An ambulance came, accompanied by two police cruisers. Hicks knew the best thing to tell the police was nothing at all, and he climbed into the back after Mr. Beauregard was wheeled in on a gurney. The EMT person was a bottled blond with a kind face. As the ambulance pulled out of the carnival grounds, she said, “We’re going to take him to a good animal hospital over in Fort Lauderdale. They deal with the circus animals when they come to town.”

“No,” Hicks said.

“Excuse me?”

“I want you to take him to a people hospital.”

“But, sir . . .”

“Please do as I say. I’ll pay you. Cash.”

The EMT woman discussed it with the driver. Hicks laid his hand on Mr. Beauregard’s forehead and tuned them out. Ten years ago, he’d found Mr. Beauregard in a strip shopping center in Louisiana, huddled in a cage. He’d bought him for a hundred dollars and moved him into a cage in his trailer, hoping to train Mr. Beauregard to do some simple tricks. But Mr. Beauregard had already been to school. Play a tune on the radio, and he would duplicate it on his ukulele. Tell him the name of a city, and he’d find it on a map. He could think, and add numbers, and he also knew things, just as people knew things—like hate and fear and jealousy and betrayal—and it had all sunk home for Hicks one day when Mr. Beauregard kicked a carnival worker in the balls for calling him a “dirty monkey.” That was when Hicks had realized that Mr. Beauregard wasn’t just a clever animal, but an evolutionary marvel. He heard the EMT woman talking to him and looked into her kind face.

“I said, we’re going to take your friend here to a regular hospital. Okay?”

Mr. Beauregard’s forehead had grown cold, and Hicks took his hand away.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said.

Opening a topless joint on South Beach had been Victor Marks’s idea.

“A man needs a place to do business,” Victor had told Rico. “It should be a strip club, too. No one knows how much money a strip club is supposed to make.”

Rico hadn’t understood Victor’s reasoning.

“You need a way to launder your money in case the IRS comes calling,” Victor explained. “That’s how your old boss, John Gotti, screwed up. He put on his tax return he sold kitchen fixtures for a living. And look at what happened to him.”

So Rico had opened Club Hedo. A former Arthur Murray Dance Studio, it sat a block removed from the beach. Every day, guys strolled in wearing flip-flops and sand stuck between their toes, paid a stripper twenty bucks to give them a lap dance, then went back to their families and their beach chairs. Weekends saw a lot of Europeans, but mostly it was the beer and T-shirt set.

It was Friday night, and the club was packed. Rico was in his office in back. Through a one-way mirror, he kept one eye on the action while watching basketball on TV.

Miami College, who he had money on, was getting slaughtered. They were a brand-new team and they stunk. The starters were freshmen, and the pressure had done a number on their heads. They hadn’t won a game all season.

His phone rang. It was big Bobby Jewel.

“You sweating through your underwear yet?” Jewel asked.

“It ain’t over till it’s over,” Rico said.

“I know who said that,” the bookie said.

“Hundred bucks says you don’t.”

“Yogi Bear.”

“It was Yogi Berra, you idiot. Yogi Bear was a cartoon character. You owe me a hundred.” Through the mirror he saw Splinters enter the club. He said good-bye to the bookie, expecting Splinters to come back and tell him how things had gone with Candy. Only, Splinters didn’t do that. Bellying up to the bar, he ordered a rum and coke and clicked his fingers to the music. The DJ liked disco, and Splinters sang along to an old Donna Summers song, having the time of his fucking life.

Rico picked up the phone and called the bar—“Send that asshole back here”—and looked at the TV. Fifty seconds left in the game, and Miami College was down by six. Splinters sauntered in. His starched white shirt was covered in tiny red dots.

“What did you do, cut her fucking head off?”

“I drowned her,” his driver said.

“In the ocean?”

“In the swamps, where we dumped the blackjack dealer.”

“So what’s with the shirt? You cut yourself shaving?”

Splinters glanced at the TV. He knew a little bit of what was going on, and how important Miami College was to the scheme of things. He removed two stacks of hundred-dollar bills from his jacket and dropped them on the desk.

“Where did you get that?”

The phone rang. Rico answered it.

“You’ve got a visitor,” his bartender said.

Rico stared into the mirror. Goofy Gerry Valentine from Brooklyn was sitting at his bar, nursing a Budweiser. What the hell did he want?

“Tell him I’m not here.”

“He says his father’s in town, wants to set up a meeting.”

“His father?”

“That’s what he said.”

An alarm went off in Rico’s head. Gerry’s old man had blown up the Mollo brothers in Atlantic City and was not someone to take lightly. “Tell him to come back tomorrow morning.”

The bartender relayed the message. Through the mirror, Rico watched Gerry leave. Splinters started to walk out.

“Tell me where you got the money,” Rico demanded.

“You don’t know?” his driver said.

Rico leaned back in his chair. That was the crazy thing about Cubans; they never answered you directly. “You shot the carny owner,” he guessed.

“His chimp.”

“You shot his chimp?”

“Fucker attacked me.”

Rico massaged his brow with his fingertips. The night before, he’d dreamed he was five years old and visiting the Bronx Zoo with his parents. They’d gotten separated, and Ray Hicks’s chimp had walked out of a cage, taken Rico by the hand, and led him to his mom and dad. Everyone had been smiling, and then Rico woke up.

Through the wall, Rico heard hooting and hollering, the strippers taking turns spinning naked on a barber pole. He removed a leather bag from beneath his desk and tossed Ray Hicks’s money into it. Standing, he shoved the satchel into Splinters’s hands.

“I did good, huh,” his driver said.

Rico looked at the TV. A Miami College player was at the free throw line. He missed both shots. The buzzer sounded, ending the game. In one swift motion, Rico drew his .45 Smith & Wesson and shoved the barrel into the satchel’s folds.

“Not really,” he said, pulling the trigger.