Nikita was trying to find every edge he possibly could.
“Time to go,” Luray said.
“Locked up and ready to roll,” Bugsy answered. Nikita found it strange to hear his own voice speaking English with that harsh Brooklyn accent. Bugsy seemed to like it, though, because he said, “We’ll be home in time for supper,” and gave Luray a big, broad grin.
It was a grin that worried Nikita intensely, because it made him think that somehow, as far as Bugsy and Luray were concerned, everything was going exactly according to plan.
“We’d better be,” Luray said, quickly checking his watch. “I’m missing the assassin right about now, Ben.”
“We’ll be fine without him,” Bugsy said. “We don’t need him and we don’t need the syndicate either. Stick with me, kid.” He turned to Luray, slipping the freshly reassembled Sig into an improvised hip holster, and grinned even wider. Bugsy’s expressions felt strange on Nikita’s face; they were broad, but not very deep, and they made his cheek muscles ache.
“I’m stuck,” Luray answered, and followed Bugsy and Nikita down the hill.
It looked different in daylight. The earth was washed-out, powder-colored, and it crumbled like too-dry cake under Nikita’s boots. Small stones skittered, but the descent looked shallower; it wasn’t long before they were off the bluff and walking over tumbled rock.
The dead gangster must have been nimble and quick, an athlete in life. He wore the Russian’s form like a tailored suit, springing from rock to rock as gracefully as Nikita could have, while Felix stumped down after, skidding a little.
If they had any sense
, Nikita thought,
they’d pick us off as we came through the tamarisk.
They wouldn’t, of course; it would invalidate the bet, and Sebastian would want to stall to the last second anyway, on the long odds that somebody would find a way to pull Nikita out of it alive.
The hike down to the church was a little over a mile, over mostly flat terrain. Nikita could feel the heat on the top layers of his hair when the breeze ruffled them against his skin; it felt like a silk shirt out of the dryer. And apparently Nikita’s companions at arms had been busy; somebody had haggled the tamarisk down along a fifteen-meter stretch of what must have been Main Street, not far from the foundation of the church. A cluster of men stood at the far end. James’s hand was in a sling across his chest. The air smelled thick and herb-sap-bittersweet. Stewart was fussing over Jackie, lashing the holster of a six-shooter to his right thigh with a bit of rawhide while Jackie coughed against his hand.
Bugsy drew Nikita’s body to a halt just as Sebastian stepped forward, away from James, and offered Jackie a clean white handkerchief. Jackie started to wave it away, but coughed again, and grabbed the cloth.
He got himself under control as Luray stopped beside Nikita. “Ready, Ben?”
Bugsy rearranged Nikita’s face into a smile. “Ready as I ever was, Felix. Time for us to take over the world.”
“You and me, kid,” Felix answered, looking like he was quoting something, and Bugsy punched his arm.
“You need a haircut, son,” Bugsy said to Nikita as he walked the length of the trimmed strip, pushing Nikita’s hair out of his eyes again. “We’ll see about that when we’ve got this dealt with, shall we?”
Over my dead body
, Nikita thought, and heard Bugsy laugh.
“Not while I’m using it, son.”
Jackie stuffed the handkerchief into his pocket hastily as Bugsy walked up, and moved away from his entourage. He met Bugsy in the middle of the mown strip and paused there, color high in his pale cheeks, his eyes burning with a feverish light. One handed rested on the grip of the six-shooter, with an elegance Nikita hadn’t realized Jackie knew.
“You heeled, Mr. Siegel? Ten paces, turn and shoot?” Jackie asked.
Bugsy’s lips twitched, but he didn’t betray any surprise that Jackie knew who it was in Nikita’s body. “You were expecting a fair fight?”
“If your friend wants to collect his wager,” Jackie said, coolly, “I suggest you keep it clean.” He showed his teeth. Nikita could picture him in cowboy boots, a scuffed vest hanging loose over a worn shirt, collar cinched with a string tie. He would have shaken his head to clear the image, but he couldn’t, of course; Bugsy was still staring in Jackie’s glittering eyes while Jackie stroked the butt of his gun.
And then Sebastian winked—not so much a wink as a flicker of his eyelid, and although Nikita couldn’t lift an eyebrow in acknowledgement, he felt the energy jolt between them, the moment of communication and trust, and he relaxed.
Sebastian would make sure he didn’t hurt anybody he wouldn’t have wanted to hurt. No matter what else happened.
Sebastian would make sure it came out right.
“Oh, don’t worry about me,” Bugsy said, and pulled the Sig out of his holster to cock it before slipping it back, making sure it sat loosely in the leather. “I’m as clean as can be. And ready when you are.”
Jackie stifled a cough against his wrist, and glanced at his watch, and then at the sun. “Well,” he said, “it ought to be about time, son. You count. Bugs.”
Calm and collected, he smiled, and turned his back, stealing the march on Bugsy. Nikita felt the gangster’s surge of loathing at the hated nickname, and fought back his own interior grin. Jackie wasn’t so bad, for a capitalist.
Simmering, Bugsy turned his back, squared his shoulders against Jackie’s—Jackie was taller—and said, with sharp precision, “
One
.”
Bugsy paced forward, and judging by the crunch of weeds under his boots, Jackie did too. “
Two
.”
Nikita couldn’t close his eyes, but he could focus himself. Focus his will and strength, visualize the sequence of desired events clearly—
three
—and without telegraphing his intent to Bugsy—
four
—imagine each step, each pace—
five
—imagine his own body ready for action—
six
—as his fingers arched, itching, around the butt of the gun—
seven
—and the cut tamarisk crunched under his feet.
Focus.
Eight.
Focus—
Nine.
Step.
Ten—
Bugsy planted Nikita’s heel and spun, slapping leather like the professional he was, and Nikita, with every ounce of will he could muster, imagined his own hands grabbing Bugsy’s wrist, wrapping tight, straining, slowing the draw. He almost felt Bugsy’s wrist slipping through his fingers, fingers with no more substance than smoke. He
actually
felt the warm black plastic of the Sig slide into his hand, felt the jerk of trained muscles clear the gun and spin it up, as if Bugsy meant to shoot from the hip, and Nikita’s trick must have worked because Jackie had his gun up and aimed and there was a lick of flame—
A pistol spoke, and it wasn’t the Sig. Nikita knew the sound of a revolver, and he knew the Sig hadn’t kicked—and suddenly, Bugsy wasn’t holding him up any more.
Just like him to let me die alone
, Nikita thought, and looked down at his chest.
He’d been shot before, and he expected to feel something. Not pain; the pain happened afterwards. But the hard slam of bullet against flesh, the shock of impact.
Nothing, as the Sig fell out of his fingers and discharged as it hit the ground, and no dark stain spreading over his chest, almost invisible against his blacks, and no suck of air through the hole in a punctured chest. He blinked, and raised his hand to touch his chest, and looked curiously at his muddy but unbloodied fingers. And then he blinked again, and looked up at Jackie, and the broad matching grins on James’s and Sebastian’s mouths.
And Jackie pointed at the ground behind him.
Nikita turned, and grimaced. The once-handsome, dark-haired body of Bugsy Siegel lay at his feet, shimmering, transparent in the white noonday sun, brains and gore and bits of bone oozing from the wounds where bullets had exited his eye socket and his cheek. Those were no surprise; they were the wounds that had killed him.
The dark patch over his heart was new, and still leaked transparent red.
“If the ghost of a river can kill a ghost,” Doc said, stepping out of Jackie’s body and blowing the smoke off the muzzle of his gun, “then do you reckon the ghost of a bullet can kill a ghost as well?”
“Yes,” Nikita said, glancing up with a smile. “I ‘reckon’ it can.” And then he turned and looked at Felix Luray, and crouched down, and picked up his accidentally discharged gun. “You’re going to adhere to your bargain, aren’t you. Mr. Luray?”
Luray glanced aside, but Nikita imagined he didn’t find a lot of sympathy in Jackie’s eyes. “Of course,” he said.
Jackie covered the twenty paces between them in a few quick strides, and draped one arm around Nikita’s shoulders. Nikita didn’t complain, although, technically speaking, Jackie was fouling his aim. “That’s good,” he said. “Because if you weren’t going to behave, I’d have to take steps.”
“Steps?”
Jackie smiled. “Yes. I’ll do what Jesse suggested, and call up the ghost of the whole damned Colorado River, and flood the Imperial Valley from one end to the other. You think the ghost of a flood would have any effect on a lettuce crop, Luray?”
Luray held his hands up, showing them empty, and walked toward them out of the tamarisk. “So you’ll be genius of Las Vegas and Los Angeles both now, Mr. Kinkead? You and your partner? I think we have some things to discuss, regarding how I can be of service to you in your new role—”
Something in Luray’s voice—a concealed throb, the restrained anticipation of victory—triggered Nikita’s threat sense, and he was already raising and extending the Sig when Jackie gave him a second little squeeze and stepped away. “Actually . . . ” And Jackie glanced at Stewart and grinned. “I’m not interested in a job as the genius of Los Angeles.”
“The wager?”
“I said
our
,” Jackie said, and with a quick stoop pulled a knife out of his boot to clean his thumbnail on. “I’ve heard a rumor, though, that Tribute’s planning on taking over, so if you wanted to talk to him about the job—”
Nikita wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a face fall out of smooth and into worried as fast as Felix Luray’s did. “Tribute?”
“Yeah,” Jackie answered. “I hope you can see your way clear to work with that.”
Luray’s face fell, and whatever he might have said next Nikita missed it, because Sebastian grabbed him off his feet, and swung him into an airborne bear hug, yelling his name.
Nikita hugged his partner back, hard. And then Sebastian set him down, and Nikita grabbed his shoulder and turned him.
Luray stood among the tamarisk, frowning at his hands. Stewart had Jackie pulled down into a closed-eyed liplock. And James was picking his way through the tamarisk, walking away, twirling the assassin’s pistol around his forefinger slowly, his black bowler hat shiny in the noonday sun.
Nikita turned toward Sebastian, ready to tug his sleeve to catch his eye. He didn’t need to. Sebastian was already looking, and nodding slowly.
“Even if he says yes I still drive,” Nikita said, grinning.
“Go get him,” Sebastian answered. “It isn’t like he’s got a story to go home to any more either.”
One-Eyed Jack and the Boy from Tupelo.
Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
Two days later, I met the new genius of Los Angeles on top of the Rio Hotel, on the rooftop patio of the Voodoo Lounge, just before sunrise. Tribute leaned over the cement wall on folded arms, watching gray and gold silhouette the lumpy outline of Frenchman’s Mountain like a man watching the glow from a nuclear meltdown creep across a dark night sky. The Strip shone green and blue and lavender below and around us, and the piercing white Luxor spot speared upward from the shiny black glass pyramid of the casino, transfixing the heavens.
He wasn’t looking that way.
But I was.
“Hey,” he said, when I came up behind him. “Figure Angel and I are clearing out tonight.”
“Just keep her the hell out of my sight.”
He coughed, disguising laughter. “We’re going to work on her personality, never fear. Luray was awful apologetic and eager to be liked, by the way. What’d you tell him?”
My turn to chuckle. “I told him I’d kill him myself and then drown his ghost in the ghost of the Colorado if he gave you any shit.”
“That’s gentlemanly of you.” He craned over his shoulder as the first sharp rays of light stroked the tip of Mount Charleston. It’d be a while before they reached us, though. “You seen Doc?”
“He’s gone,” I said. “Task completed, summoning over. You know John Henry didn’t really die, don’t you? His legend is still out there.”
“Seems close enough to dying for me,” he said. “Speaking as one dead man to another. Doesn’t matter how many times you go through it. Hell of a thing, when your story says you got no other ending.”
“Hell of a thing,” I agreed, arms folded. “From one dead man to another. Maybe we need to find some better stories.”
That was good for a few seconds’ silence.
“Hey,” I said, and pointed to the bat-shadows flocking through the Luxor light a half-second before it winked off for morning. Brightest light on earth, they say. You can see it from orbit, pick it out from all the other lights in Vegas. “You helped make my mirage come true.”
He laughed, and shook his head a little. “What are you going to do about the spies?”
“I hired ’em,” I said. “They can’t go home—”
“No, Stewart saw to that.”
The bitterness in his voice made me wonder when and how he’d gotten so protective of the media ghosts, but I wasn’t about to ask. “You think going home’s all it’s cracked up to be?”
He shrugged. “How would I know?”
“How would any of us?”
He jerked his thumb at the Strip, rainbow lights glimmering out down in the valley as the sky grayed over it. “Your city, Jack-Jackie.”
And when I followed his gaze, I couldn’t answer. Because he had that right. So I just sighed and shrugged, and scratched my nose. “You’re welcome to come visit, you know. And I’m sure you’ll get used to L.A.”
He snorted and turned back to the sunrise, the steadily brightening east. He took a long, unnecessary breath before he spoke, and paused, but I didn’t let him make me fill the quiet. “Jackie. I never did ask you. Who the hell are you, man?”