Hot Dish (31 page)

“You’ve got a crowbar!” He picked up the crowbar, relishing its weight in his hand.

“Yeah?” Cash said.

“I used a crowbar to make
Muse in the House
,” he said wistfully. “A crowbar, a hammer, and an acetylene torch. And some aluminum tubing.”

“
Muse in the House
?”

Steve nodded. “My seminal piece. Someone stole it from my ex-wife’s house just before our divorce.”

“Sorry.”

He shrugged. “It’ll probably show up again someday. Great art cannot be hidden forever.”

At this, Cash dug his hands into his back pockets and tilted his head, studying Steve. “That’s what you do? Great art?”

“Yes. At least, I did once.” His gaze fell to the crowbar, Jenny’s words from the night before playing out in his thoughts. Her honesty and her obvious deep-seated and real concern for his art had been bracing. Biting, yes, but refreshing, too. And she’d been right; Verie should have been telling him that stuff. Not that he blamed Verie. He’d only been doing what Steve had been doing—enjoying the view without paying any attention to the fact that they were driving in circles.

It didn’t matter to him that her comments hadn’t been particularly, well, positive. He had file cabinets full of positive comments. What he didn’t have was direction. He saw it now. He’d been on a celebrity treadmill. Just like she’d said. Or at least inferred. Really, when you thought of it, it was downright flattering that she’d cared enough to tell him the truth. He didn’t know a woman like her—a woman who wasn’t impressed with his celebrity, but just his art, a woman without pretenses who lived in the media world of pretense, a woman who didn’t want fame for fame’s sake but for safety’s sake. A woman truly screwed up in some ways yet breathtakingly sane in so many others. A woman who made him feel eager to create. To explore. To seek inspiration. A woman with lips as soft as
semlors
and a body as pliant as …

“Steve?” Shit. Her father was studying him through narrowed eyes, as if he could read his mind.

“Yeah?”

“What do you mean, you did
once
?” Cash asked.

Whew
. Steve looked the older man in the eye. “I’m a sellout, Cash.”

“Huh?”

“I’ve been trading on my celebrity for years, satisfied to produce, forgetting how to create. I like celebrity. I like people knowing my name, recognizing me, knowing that they’ve seen things I’ve made. I’m a sellout for celebrity.”

Cash cast a critical eye over him. “You seem sort of proud of it.”

“I’m proud I’ve realized it. You can thank Jenny in part for that. You are witnessing an epiphany, Cash,” he said gravely. “I have decided to eschew my present course. Ultimately, I want to be known because of what I do, not who I am.”

“Oh.”

Steve narrowed his eyes thoughtfully as he considered his decision. Where to begin? How to go about the Second Rebirth of Steven Jaax—the first rebirth being the butter head? How to begin and where? Like all great art, he supposed he ought to hark back to the past to discover the future. What better place to begin than with
Muse
? He would find it, liberate it, and set it up as his lodestar.

Plus, it would really piss Fabulousa off when she found out he had the thing in his possession.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly the most magnanimous motivation in the world. So what? He’d never claimed to be the poster child for altruism. Revenge would be sweet. Then, balance thus restored, he could be done with her once and for all.

His gaze fell on the acetylene torch again. Give him five seconds with the butter head and that torch and he’d have the key to his past, literally in the palm of his hand. And yet he intuitively knew he would need more to bring about the resurrection of his latent talents. Something fundamental. Something that would snap the commercial ties binding him to his celebrity. Something momentous and unambiguous.

“Damn,” Cash said suddenly, drawing his attention. “It’s almost nine o’clock. I promised Nina I’d wake her at eight thirty. Not that I’m supposed to tell you that. She’d like to maintain the illusion that as a healthy, hardworking Northerner, she rises early to greet each dawn.”

“But I’m already up.”

“She’s made assumptions based on herself, and one of those assumptions is that anyone who lives in the city sleeps till noon given any opportunity. She’ll be mortified you’re up before her.”

“Should I go back to my room and come down in a while?”

“Nah,” Cash said and grinned. “It’ll teach her not to make assumptions.”

He exited the barn, waiting until Steve had followed before closing the door behind him. Bruno showed up to lead the way back into the Lodge, where Cash left Steve in the kitchen, after pouring a cup of coffee from the thermos Jenn had filled earlier to take to Nina. The silence after he left was amazing. No cars. No planes. No street noise. No voices. Nothing but Bruno’s soft breathing.

As Steve had trailed behind Cash back to the house, he realized how he would go about stimulating his decaying talent.

He was going to buy the Lodge.

As soon as the idea came to him, he knew it was perfect. He also knew, within a few seconds more, that his idea might not exactly please Jenn. Oh, her words said clearly enough that she despised Fawn Creek, the Lodge, and everything and everyone in between, but her attitude wasn’t quite so clear and sometimes her expression whispered of something quite different. He thought.

He didn’t want Jenn to want what he wanted.

It was another one of those uncomfortable moral conundrums, and the fact that his feelings for her were quickly evolving beyond casual interest only made things more difficult.

He needed the Lodge. He needed the sanctuary it would provide, the quiet and unrelenting boredom that would jump-start any imagination. The place was perfect for him. There was nothing to do here, no distractions, no public to impress, no media to court, no
parties
. Nothing but woods and quiet and a huge, empty barn just waiting to be filled.

He had to have it.

11:20 a.m.

Blue Lake Casino

Ed White, the general manager of Blue Lake Casino, stood behind his office’s one-way mirror overlooking the casino’s vast interior and estimated the head count. Beside him his assistant, Paul Rodriguez, did glumly likewise. Tomorrow night the casino would host its first annual All-Amateur Dusk-to-Dawn Tournament, and so far not a quarter of the players they’d anticipated had signed up. It was that damn snow. Piles of it keeping the professional amateurs, tourists, and would-be poker sharks in the cities. And if the weatherman was right, another five to six inches would be dumped on them this evening. Nope, the only hope they had of this thing not becoming a complete bust was if they could somehow draw on the local population and at the same time siphon off some of the fishermen up early for Fawn Creek’s Sesquicentennial Ice Spearing Tournament.

But how? They needed a hook, someone who would draw them up here from down there.

Rodriguez pointed at a woman in a cheap, plastic black wig and cheaper wraparound reflective sunglasses, sitting at the five-dollar blackjack table beneath the banner that read, “DAWN TO DUSK AMATEUR TOURNAMENT—ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS TO THE WINNER!” Ed had noticed her earlier, Ed’s job being to identify odd characters, and this little honey certainly fit that bill.

She was clearly as local as hell, because Ed recognized the short dress as being the same one he’d made his teenage daughter take back to Pamida last month. On his daughter, in the proper size, it had been naughty; two sizes too small, like the one this woman wore, it was plain wrong. It was so hoochie, in fact, that Ed, who had a long-standing familiarity with unsavory types, would have pinned her as a bank robber or con artist just on the basis of that dress alone. It was the sort of in-your-
face dress women wore when they didn’t want people looking at their faces. And it was doing its job. There was quite a little crowd around her.

“Look at that,” Paul mumbled.

“Yeah,” Ed said. “Nice. But we got other things to think about.”

“No.” Paul
tch
‘ed. “I mean, look at how much she’s winning.”

Ed looked. Paul was right. The woman was sweeping quite a nice pile of chips into one of the casino’s plastic buckets and looking around over the heads of a crowd that had gathered around her table. As they watched, she stood up and pushed her way through them, heading for the twenty-five-dollar stakes table.

And the group who had been clustered around her table followed her.

“Who is she?” Ed asked.

“Never seen her before,” Paul answered. “But she’s definitely from around here.

“It’s not what she has, Ed. It’s who she has. And she has a crowd. Locals. They like her.”

She did, Ed allowed, but he had worked at casinos for more than a decade and he knew how fickle fans were. “As long as she’s winning.”

“Right,” Rodriguez allowed. “So let’s keep an eye on her and see if her luck holds.”

Her luck did hold. In fact, it grew, as did the crowd around her table, yet the only emotion discernible on the visible portion of her face was grim satisfaction as the pile of chips beside her increased from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars. She won another hand and the people around her broke into spontaneous applause. She ignored them. Oddly, rather than offending them, they seemed to like her detachment, her impassivity, her inexcitability, her complete indifference not only to them but to her hand and especially her growing piles of poker chips.

But, of course! Ed thought with a mental snap of his fingers. Of course, they loved her. She was the quintessential Minnesotan but decked out like a well-maintained, well-stacked, older hooker. The dichotomy was irresistible. Minnesota Nice meets Nevada Naughty. At which point even Ed realized she might be worth having around. People liked a winner, people loved a local winner, and local people loved a local winner most of all. She
could
be a draw, and God knew with all this snow, they’d need every lure they could get.

He and Rodriguez worked their way through the crowd until they stood flanking their interesting gambler. She angled her head around, the dark lenses obliterating her eyes and brows. Her mouth, a bright slash of carmine, opened without a hint of a smile. “What?”

“I just wanted to congratulate you on a great run,” Ed said, smiling.

“Gee, thanks,” she said and turned back around. Nope, the little lady was no gushing, trembling amateur—that was for sure. And she played smart but she had something else, too, something more important: that ineffable quality called luck.

Twenty minutes later, she suddenly stopped playing, counted out her chips, dumped them into the plastic pail on her lap, got up, and with a muttered, “Excuse me,” started to work her way free of the ring surrounding the table. The people applauded.

“You have to get her back,” Rodriguez whispered urgently. “I can make some calls. Maybe even get a reporter up here from the Poker Channel. Look at her. She’s a bona fide flake. People will drive for miles to see a flake gamble.”

“No shit,” Ed muttered back and fell in behind the woman as she headed across the casino. They caught up with her as she fell into line at a cashier’s window. “Miss, can we have a word with you, please?”

She looked around. “What?”

“You’re one lucky woman,” Rodriguez said by way of preface.

“Ya think?” Her cell phone suddenly rang and she jerked it out of the small pocketbook dangling from her wrist. “Yes? Paul? Paul, I can barely hear you. What? What? Listen, I’m driving by there in about a half hour anyway. Half hour! I’ll stop then and you can tell me whatever the hell it is you’re trying to tell me now!” she shouted into the phone before snapping it shut.

“You have quite a little fan club here, in case you didn’t notice,” Ed said, at his most genial.

With a sharply disgusted sound, she stepped up to the cashier’s window as the lady in front of her finished and hefted her two containers to the ledge and dumped them into the waiting bin. Behind the partition, the cashier emptied this, in turn, into the counting machine.

“We’d like to extend an invitation to you, Miss …” Ed trailed off, inviting her to supply a name. She didn’t. The cashier printed the electronic readout. Ed caught a glimpse of the number. Twenty-five hundred thirty dollars.

“A personal invitation,” Rodriguez elaborated as the cashier counted out the bills and handed them to the woman, “to enter tomorrow’s tournament. The buy-in is only a thousand dollars.”

Their mystery woman turned around, stuffing the folded bills deep into some impressive cleavage. “No, thanks,” she said, pushing between the men and heading for the exit. “I don’t approve of gambling.”

12:30 p.m.

Town hall, Fawn Creek

“I hope those guys did a better job clearing the parking area on the Lake than they did in town here,” Ken Holmberg told Paul.

Paul, who understood the statement to be Ken’s way of holding him accountable, nodded as they drove the short distance to the town hall, where they were to meet the AMS people. The film crew had flown in between stormfronts this morning, arriving at the casino airstrip, which, being privately owned, had its own dependable plowing service. At Bob Reynolds’s request, Paul had gotten hold of Jenny—Bob saying his cell coverage didn’t extend up here—and he
thought
she’d promised to come straight over. The connection had been bad.

“I’m some worried about the fishing contest,” Ken said.

The ice-spearing contest, the kickoff of the sesquicentennial, was slated for tomorrow. Last night’s storm had kept the droves of anticipated entrants from arriving, though a number had made it to town ahead of the storm. Duddie Olson was already raking in a fair amount of cash by delivering pizzas out to little clusters of dark houses that had sprouted overnight across the Lake’s surface, using the roads Paul had ordered Neddie Soderberg and Jimmy Turvold to plow across the ice.

“The turnout might not be what we’d hoped for,” Paul allowed.