“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, dumber than 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 a full 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 t
o 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 glamorous town. 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 customers mostly 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 it all 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 dropped the 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-o
o-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. Mark couldn’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!”