He touched her with a sideways glance. She returned it companionably. “He’s a spy.”
And so are we.
“Yes,” she said. “But you don’t like it when the set of your life doesn’t encompass the set of his life. You’re greedy.”
He opened his mouth to rebut, and nodded. “It’s true. Greedy and jealous. And”—his number-one smile, medium wattage—“it appears I have reasons to be envious, too.”
“Oh, do you?” Such patently false ingenuousness. Her lips looked amused, but when it reached her eyes it wasn’t a smile. She turned to face him. “Someday you shall explain them to me.”
“Someday perhaps I will.”
The city breathed around them, the slow scroll of red and white lights along the Strip like the glow of countless flashlights revealing countless invaded spaces. That amusement flickered closer to a smile. “You are disingenuous,” she said. “You knew what Jackie was talking about at the California. But you left it to me to explain it.”
“I like being underestimated.”
“And here I thought you were playing at chivalry.”
“Never touch the stuff—”
“Ah-ah.” Her finger rose like a schoolteacher’s, and waggled precisely back and forth. “Shining armor,” she said, and brushed the back of a fingernail against his lapel. That same fingernail slid under his coat and tapped the holster with a soft, foreign sound. “Magic sword. You wouldn’t lie to a lady, sir knight?”
“Touché.” He bowed, and she laughed and met his gaze directly, chin tilted up. He leaned forward, holding her gaze through his lashes. She did not look the sort to startle and back away, or slap.
“Where’s the fiery steed, I wonder?”
“In the shop.”
“There’s a bit of good news in my having to come to your rescue,” she said, so close he felt her breath on his lips.
“We’ve lost the advantage of secrecy,” he murmured.
“And the requirement. So now we are six.”
“Mmmm.” She hadn’t looked down. He leaned in and went for the kiss—and stepped back, startled for real this time at the flick of her finger against his nose, a gesture you’d use to chastise an impertinent cat.
“You wound me,” he said, and she laughed and folded her arms.
“I’m going to fetch another brandy,” she said. “And if you want to know more about your partner, the man of mystery—”
“Yes?”
“Ask him about Stalingrad.”
Shocking. Not what he’d expected at all, although what he had expected, he couldn’t have said. “Stalingrad?” he said to her back.
“Yes,” she answered over her shoulder. “After all, it’s where he learned to shoot.”
One-Eyed Jack and the Knights of Ghosts and Shadows.
Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
Tribute leaned in the window of the borrowed hotel room, slowly shaking his head. I stood against the wall by the door, watching him, listening to the water run in the bathroom. Stewart in the shower, and I couldn’t say I blamed him, although I probably would have let Tribute have it first. The vampire smelled of old blood, and he was leaving rust-colored smudges on the carpeting. And still he stood there, staring out the window as if he could possibly watch the spies out of sight.
Even the Russian’s hair didn’t stand out that much in a crowd.
“Doc,” I said, as Stewart wandered out of the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist. Holliday looked up from his cross-armed, bent-necked repose. He was slouched against the wall, half inside the nightstand-and-lamp between the room’s two full-sized beds.
“What can I do you for, son?” His smile ruffled his moustache. He dug in his pocket for a candy and unwrapped it one-handed. The bitter, syrupy scent made me want to sneeze.
“Can you and John Henry go out again and see if you can locate Angel and the assassin?”
Doc sucked his teeth and glanced over at the drillman.
John Henry shrugged. “I ain’t got no plans for the evening.”
The twitch in Doc’s lip turned into a smirk. “Don’t suppose you’d care to make it worth my while, Jackie?”
“Sure,” I said, and scooped the two-thirds-full bottle of Canadian Club off the table. Stewart ducked out of reflex when I hefted it, but I only threw it against the headboard of the right-hand bed. It showered glass and whiskey over the bedclothes and the floor. Doc closed his eyes and smiled, and the reek of liquor vanished from the air. I thought maybe John Henry had a nip as well; he leaned both hands on his hammer and shifted his weight forward. His shoulders rolled under his hand-sewn shirt, straining the fibers.
“It’s a deal,” Doc said.
“Be careful you don’t let her get ahold of you.”
Doc tipped his hat onto his head before he walked out through the wall. I thought John Henry winked. Tribute turned away from the window. He hadn’t reacted to the crash of glass; not even a flinch.
“What’s she going to do to a ghost?”
Stewart picked his way around the broken shards toward the closet. “King, you don’t want to know. Whose room was this?”
“Somebody who won’t be using it again,” Tribute said. He crouched down to unlace his boots, more spider than man, all angles and flapping coat. Flaked blood sifted around him like pollen drifting off a branch.
“Good,” Stewart replied, sliding open the closet door. “Then he won’t mind if I borrow his clothes.” Sometimes I forget what Stewart comes from. He hides it under layer after layer of artifice—but the camp persona he’s inhabited since 1970 or so is built around the core of a young man who survived feud and range war, when Vegas was still the Wild, Wild West. It can be a little shocking when the gunslinger shines through.
A moment later, a faked gagging sound floated from the back of the wardrobe. “The murder victim was not a fashion plate.”
Tribute stood and toed out of his boots. He tossed the trench coat on the bed, ignoring the shattered glass with strange determination, and stripped the bloody shirt over his head. His chest was heroin-thin, his skin translucent, blue as skim milk between smeared streaks of flaking blood. There wasn’t a sign he’d ever been hurt in this life—or unlife, for that matter.
The sound of tearing fabric floated from the closet. “I’ll try to kill someone better dressed next time,” Tribute said, unbuckling his belt as he padded away in bloody socks.
Stewart laughed and came back out of the closet as the bathroom door closed behind the King of Rock and Roll, twelve-year-old-boy-adorable in rolled up, oversized blue jeans and a T-shirt with a Confederate flag on the front and the sleeves ripped off. He glanced sidelong at the bathroom door, and grinned. “You think it’s safe to let him go in there alone?”
“
Stewart!
”
“What? Just asking—” He gave me the eyebrow, and I shook my head. It was so good to have him back that it hurt, even when I was worried—scared shaking—by Angel and the assassin and what they’d almost done to him . . . and even more scared of the temporary ally who was standing in the shower, washing blood off his cold, white skin.
Stewart came to me, real and alive and breathing, and leaned his forehead on my shoulder. His eyes slid toward the bathroom, and he shivered, then glanced back at me, too smart to say it out loud. The water wouldn’t cover our voices where something like that was concerned.
Jackie, you grabbed a tiger by the tail this time, love.
Stewart, believe you me, I know.
“Those spies of yours are good guys.”
“They’re
the
good guys,” I answered, and kissed him on the mouth. “We got lucky with our allies there.”
He kissed back, a dreamy little peck and then something deeper. For the first time in days, my heart beat the way it should. “We’ll be fine.” He smiled against my mouth as the water cut off. “We got through Bugsy, and we’ll get through this.”
John Henry Holliday and a Hot Night in the Old Town.
Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
“Mister Holliday,” John said, “can you feel him?”
Doc could. Not Angel, but the media ghosts had a kind of gravity: turning toward the assassin was like sliding down a greased slope to the low point. Once you started, you wanted to keep going as you’d begun.
“Maybe he’ll lead us to the chippie,” Doc said, digging in his pocket for a horehound drop. He tucked it between his cheek and gum, ignoring the dull ache of his ghost-teeth as the ghost-sugar saturated them. “Cherchez la femme.”
They stepped out into a night full to saturation with heat. Heat soaked the air until the air felt like a strange dry fluid. Heat radiated from the pavement, wicked up into Doc’s immaterial feet with each footstep. It took more, these days, before he felt it, but this was a desert heat, the
idea
of heat, and of course it could warm the idea of a man.
He chafed his hands together and glanced over his shoulder for John. John was there, a step back on the left. When Doc caught his eye, he nodded.
“Then let’s wear some leather,” Doc said, and moved himself.
The dead had their own ways of traveling, and they didn’t need to go on foot. Las Vegas might be a big city, but it was an eyeblink across as far as Doc was concerned. He felt John alongside him. Within moments, they were amid the color and light of downtown, the press of people who shivered without reason in the heat and drew their shoulders around their ears when Doc and John passed.
The ghosts arrived just as the lighted canopy over Fremont Street was kicking into a sound-and-light display that stopped milling tourists in their tracks. Branching support columns like weird architectural trees reached up between ring-shaped white-painted dangles decked with black boxes, from which the music boomed. Doc would have covered his ears, but immaterial hands didn’t do much to stop the thumping.
The assassin stood out in a crowd, in modern Las Vegas. His glossy black head poked up a few inches over most of the bystanders, and where they shuffled in Birkenstocks and T-shirts, he wore evening dress, the shoes shined so bright they shimmered. Doc watched as he emerged from the Golden Nugget’s glittering archway and crossed through the press of pedestrians, not troubling himself to look up at the sweep of an animated fleet of balloons passing by overhead.
John chewed his lower lip, a frown creasing his high forehead. His scalp shone under the lights between cropped curls. “We ain’t gonna lose him.”
“No, we shan’t,” Doc said. “We’ll hang back for now. See where he takes himself.”
Where he went was to a taxi cab, which they followed without trouble, gliding above the traffic it threaded through. “I believe he’s going to Caesar’s Palace,” John said, as the cab turned onto the strip.
“Is that a gaming hall?”
“It’s a hotel. And a big one. Don’t you watch movies, Mister Holliday?”
Doc had to allow as how, no, he really didn’t. More’s the pity.
John Henry turned out to be right. But as they were making the turn into the long circuitous drive, something caught Doc’s eye. He checked, one hand unconsciously hooking the tail of his coat behind his holster, and John stopped beside him.
“Mister Holliday?” John could certainly see the other ghost, too—the one who stood arms folded on the street corner, one hand inside his bosom in the attitude of a man resting a palm on a concealed gun. He wore a gray flannel suit and smoked glasses, but the dark glass couldn’t conceal the fact that he was very, very dead.
“Go on ahead,” Doc said. “I’ll catch up.”
John gave him a doubtful look, but went. And Doc swooped down to land beside the gunman.
“Holliday,” Doc said, extending his hand. “John.”
The other dead man drew his hand from inside his waistcoat and touched Doc’s with it, giving a quick firm shake. “Siegel,” the man said. “Benjamin.” He had hooded eyes under a crease-crowned hat with a broad black satin band.
“You’re a Jew,” Doc said, surprised.
The corner of Siegel’s mouth curved up. From somewhere, he produced a slim brown cigarette and set it on his lower lip. Smoke curled from his nostrils an instant later. “I hope you won’t hold that against me.”
Doc set his handkerchief before his mouth, knowing the acrid weed would make him cough. When he was done, Siegel offered him a machine-rolled cigarette, the duplicate of his own.
Doc took it, and leaned in so Siegel could light the tip from his own. “I guess not,” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“You’re working for the One-Eyed Jack,” Siegel said. “I’m here to offer you a better deal.”
“It’s a damn poor son of a bitch who changes sides in the middle of a range war,” Doc said, thoughtfully. The taste of the nicotine mingled unpleasantly with the horehound still in his mouth. “Why should I come and work for you?”
“You shouldn’t,” Siegel said. “You shouldn’t work for anybody but yourself. Freelance. Nobody else is going to look out for you like you do.”
“It sounds to me like you’re implying that my loyalty’s cheaply sold, Mr. Siegel. I don’t suppose you’d care to explain why I shouldn’t take offense at that?”
“What loyalty have you got in this situation? You were called up, weren’t you? Summoned out of your rest, bossed around by living strangers, given a job with hardly a fare-thee-well. I could do a lot more from you.” He smiled. “One American legend to another. You understand.”
Doc took another drag on the cigarette, then flicked the ember regretfully off the tip and stepped on it. He dropped the butt into his pocket and frowned. The last sliver of horehound cracked between his teeth. “All I want out of you,” he said, deliberately, “is ten paces out in the street.”
Siegel seemed in no hurry to finish his cigarette. “Then I’ll see you get it.”
Doc wasn’t surprised at all when he winked out like an occluded star. He sighed, covered up his gun, and went to find John.
The American Encounters the Single-Bullet Theory.
Somewhere in Las Vegas. 1964.
In the gray light of morning, the American and the Russian climbed downstairs, silently, side by side. The Russian wasn’t quite weaving—it would take far more than a few glasses of brandy to make him stagger—but he was careful about how he placed his feet, and he kept one hand on the stair railing when he would have normally plunged down more or less headlong.