“Las Vegas
is
my house. And don’t you forget it, King—”
“—it’s more like walking into somebody’s hotel room.” As dryly as I could pull off, and to his credit, he tipped his head to the left, acknowledging the hit. Hah. I wondered if I would have been that clever in the old days, if I’d given myself half a chance.
Probably not. As Ted Williams once said, if you don’t think too good, it’s best if you don’t think too much.
“Touché,” Jackie said. “We still have a problem, King. What are we going to do about you?”
“I’ve got no interest in hunting your city out, kid.”
“I’ve got no intention of letting you hunt my city, King. And I’m older than you. I just aged better, is all.”
What was his word? Touché. “Most people did. But that’s all behind us now, isn’t it? Tell me something, Jackie—”
I let it hang but he didn’t jump in again, and he didn’t uncross his arms. I wondered if he had a stake up his sleeve. Rowan and garlic, and a cross of silver threaded on a chain around his neck.
There was no shortage of crossroads near here to bury the body under. My lip twitched up; I wondered if I could go on down to one and sell my soul for the power to sing the blues, the way old Robert Johnson was supposed to have done.
He was smiling at me smiling, and so I smiled right back. “—what can you think of that belongs in Vegas more than me?”
He didn’t blink. “Sunrise, King. I’ll give you tonight to set your affairs in order and to get out of town. For old time’s sake, I’ll give you tonight. I’d head for Salt Lake. Not a lot of myth brewing up there, and those boys don’t keep a very good eye on their town.”
“Mormons taste like shit,” I said when he hesitated. “All that clean living.” His lip curled, but I didn’t manage to crack him up.
“You can’t stay here. I’ve got too much on my plate right now to even think about having a vampire in town.”
I’m embarrassed to admit it took that long for the penny to drop. I should have listened a little better to old Ted. “Your full plate, Jackie . . . ”
He nodded, his one eye gleaming in the shadows, his gaze locked on mine.
“Has that got anything to do with why your other half is running around Las Vegas with a genius from LA?”
Touché, indeed.
Now
his heart thumped, and I smelled the cold sweat on his skin as he came toward me. Too smart to walk out into the room, but he was just out of arm’s reach when he stopped.
“What do you know about Stewart, King?”
“Call me Tribute,” I said for the second time. “Give me your parole, Jackie, and I’ll give you mine, and come sit down and we’ll crack open the minibar, and I’ll tell you.”
“Your parole?” Incredulous: his rising eyebrows shifted the eyepatch enough to show a pale thread of untanned skin on his cheek. “You’re going to promise me you won’t hunt in Vegas? I don’t really think—”
“Don’t be dense. Of course I can’t promise that.” I stepped back, away. Closer to the window, but careful of the white-hot glow that still limned the edge of the curtain. “But I won’t take any of yours, and I won’t take anybody you’ll miss.”
He was watching, measuring, but I had the advantage. I could smell the eagerness on him, the need to know trembling on his skin. It smelled like a win.
I held my peace, humming a few bars of a Big Mama Thornton standard as I swung an armchair around, where it wouldn’t be too close to the light.
He stepped into the room. “What do you know about Stewart?”
“It’s not much, baby.”
“I’ll take it.”
“I can stay?”
He stopped. His lips twisted, and he turned away to inspect the rack of bottles on top of the minibar. “Bit early for the hard stuff.”
“Did you get any sleep last night?”
“This is Vegas. Baby. Nobody sleeps.”
He waited for me to look. His decision hung on the air around him like the smell of blood, delicious and thick. He’d have liked to have hit me; his frustration was metallic, harsh.
“How do I know you’re not jerking my chain?”
“If you don’t like my peaches, Jackie—”
“It’s not shaking your tree that concerns me.”
He picked a mini and cracked the seal, a sharp, limited sound. The scent of bourbon filled the hotel room and I sneezed.
“All right,” he said, and knocked the whole bottle back without bothering to dump it in a glass. He put it down and stepped away; I tidied it against the others. “Screw it. Tell me what you know, King, and I’ll tell you if you can stay.”
The Assassin and the Ghosts of Gods.
Los Angeles. Summer, 2002.
It had been a long time indeed since blood—with or without the trappings of authority—had bothered the assassin. He wouldn’t flinch from the blood of a cop.
Not even the need to do it eye to eye, and hand to hand.
The assassin climbed the steps two at a time, the carpet sticky beneath his shoes where it wasn’t threadbare. He paused at the landing and looked up. Caught the eye of Angel in a red pleather skirt, descending. Her hips swayed as she danced over worn treads to the industrial strains of Objekt 775. The music, loosely so termed, blasted from a chopped Honda Civic parked under a partially burned-out sign visible through the rain-streaked window on the landing.
The window was stuck halfway open. The sign read
Gilbert Hotel
if you added the shapes of the unlit letters.
Angel nodded, and the assassin nodded back. “He’s in the room?”
She smiled, an expanse of pricey dental work, and held up a hand to show a buck fifty in quarters pinched between her finger and thumb.
“Two twenty-seven. I told him I hadda buy rubbers.” She winked, scraping a platform sole across the edge of the stair to cock her hip, and then made doe eyes. “Fifteen minutes all you need?”
“It won’t take longer,” the assassin said, and turned around to smile at her derrière as he passed her on the flight.
She’d left the door unlocked. The assassin slipped on a pair of white cotton gloves and turned the handle silently. The cop was in the bathroom with the door just cracked; he hadn’t thrown the chain.
If he’d had the opportunity to live more than a day or two, he might also have had the opportunity to learn better. “That was quick, sweetheart,” he called over running water.
The assassin kept his back to the wall, his shoes shining despite the muddy streets outside, and slid his right hand under his immaculately pressed lapel to retrieve the Walther PPK from his shoulder holster. The silencer screwed down oiled threads like a kiss gliding down a woman’s belly.
The assassin thumbed the safety off.
“Don’t call me sweetheart,” he snapped, and shouldered aside the door.
The cop had stripped his shirt and his bullet-proof vest off, and stood before the mirror clad in a white singlet and his uniform pants. A wad of money lay crushed up on the scarred bathroom counter; peeled silvering on the back of the mirror and the sickly overhead light gave the cop’s reflected face the appearance of leprosy. He was half-bald, Caucasian, a small paunch doming his belly. The assassin caught sight of his own chiseled face in the mirror over his target’s thickly muscled shoulder, his black hair drooping over one gray eye, his scar livid white against skin flushed with excitement. He leveled the Walther.
The cop half-turned, eyes wide, reaching with a knuckle-crushed hand for the automatic holstered at his hip. He never touched it.
The assassin grouped two bullets through his target’s heart, then sank the third one in between his eyes while he was still falling, scattering blood and brains and bits of white like a dropped china bowl. The loudest sound was the crack of the bathroom mirror as a tumbling bullet exited the dead man’s body and punched through glass to the wall behind.
The assassin met Angel in the lobby four and a half minutes later. The blood hadn’t spotted his shoes.
“Did you get what we came for?” she asked.
He patted the pocket over his heart. “How did Los Angeles ever produce a
police officer
as her Genius?”
Angel smiled and took his arm so he could squire her down the steps and outside into the rain. The Bentley was around the corner. She squeezed his coat sleeve between long red nails detailed with tiny airbrushed unicorns. She stood on tiptoe to kiss the assassin’s cheek. “He was on the take,” she said.
The Russian Plays Roulette.
Somewhere in Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
Jackie said he’d give them plenty of time to think about it, and the Russian didn’t doubt he meant it. Still, the four spies didn’t sit still long; the American and the athlete rose as one, the Russian and the scholar a half step behind. The American’s hands were balled up in his pants pockets, ruining the line of his suit. The Russian was amused—as the Russian was often amused—to discover that he could now discern nuances in the gesture. This particular manifestation meant that his partner was thinking hard, and more than a little irritated.
“Where are we going?”
“Someplace private,” the American said, shooting the Russian a sideways glance and then staring over his own shoulder at the athlete, a tacit request for permission. The scholar stayed at the athlete’s back like a fetch, a frown carving the lines in his forehead deeper.
“If you’re onto something, man, share the wealth—”
The American flashed the athlete one of his legendary smiles. “In a minute. I’ve got a question for you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. The Vegas my partner and I saw when we walked in here looked a hell of a lot like the nineteen-sixties.” He gestured widely, an arc that took in the roulette wheels, the card tables, the croupiers and the dealers and the jangle and wheeze of slot machines in uniform ranks like light-up tombstones in a military cemetery.
“It did, didn’t it?”
“Yes, and this—doesn’t.”
The Russian felt his own smile tug his lips wide. He nudged the American with his elbow. “You want to know if it will help us get any privacy to go back there.”
The American didn’t look at him, just the other two. “Would it?”
“Well—” They traded a familiar glance. The scholar shrugged. The athlete smirked. “It won’t keep the assassin off. That’s his time as much as ours.”
“What about that Jackie fellow?”
“I can’t rightly say.” The athlete had a gangling, slouchy habit of motion that the Russian thought would reveal considerable power and grace when he chose. “Worth a try.” He looked around, craning his neck to take in everything from the gaudy carpeting to the jangling machines and the high, light-patterned ceiling in one sweep. “Here? Now?”
“No time like the present,” the Russian said, and laid light fingers on the crook of his partner’s elbow before he closed his eyes and concentrated. He remembered the walk from the Desert Inn to the MGM Grand; the athlete or the scholar must have done
something
to move them from then to now?
Mustn’t they?
He pictured the Strip the way he’d last seen it, the Hacienda and the Desert Inn and the shell of the El Rancho Las Vegas hunkered down, a fire-raddled hulk. Heat struck his face, a wall of it like an oven, a weight of it like a punishing hand on his hair. He opened his eyes, let his hand drop, and turned.
Desert stretched around them, flat, the Las Vegas Strip a black ribbon in the middle distance spangled with turquoise and black and silver Thunderbirds and Buicks and a single gleaming red Pontiac Tempest GTO with the top down, dust curling from under its whitewalls.
“Mmm,” the American said, turning to watch the latter—and the blond hair that streamed out from under a green and rust scarf behind the driver’s wheel.
“The car or the girl?”
“It’s too far away to appreciate the girl properly,” the American said complacently.
The Russian laughed. “Remember, I’m farsighted.” He turned and caught the athlete’s eye, and then the scholar’s. “Voilà, gentlemen.” With an expansive gesture: “I give you—nineteen hundred and sixty-four.”
The scholar slipped a hand under his jacket and came up with a snub-nosed .22 revolver. The Russian eyed it warily, but the scholar just flipped it open and started checking the loads. Five were chambered; the big man dug a sixth from his pocket and thumbed it into the chamber. He snapped the assembly shut with a practiced twist of his wrist and let the hammer down easy.
“That’s a pretty dainty gun for a big guy like you.”
The scholar hitched his thumbs through his belt loops and smiled. “You require a big pistol, son?”
The American’s eyebrows went up. He glanced from the scholar to the Russian and back again in patent disbelief.
The Russian bit down on his grin as the athlete cleared his throat, pointed back and forth between them, and said, “You won that one. I think he won that one. What do you think? Do you think he won that?”
“I think I burn easily,” the Russian said, and marched forward. “The Hacienda is this way.”
“The Hacienda’s a dump!”
“They have a bar, don’t they?” The other three fell in behind him without further argument. “Tell me—who do you expect to meet that you require more than five bullets for?”
“It’s nineteen sixty-four—”
“We have observed that.” Sharply enough that the American snorted and the athlete coughed. The scholar sent the Russian an amused glance; he caught it and sent it back. “Who do you expect to meet out here?”
“Just about nobody,” the scholar admitted, tucking his gun into his belt. “Except the opposition.”
“It’s even too early for Kolchak,” the athlete said.
“Who?”
“My point exactly.” The athlete frowned at the American, leaning across the Russian’s line of sight to do it. “All right, pretty boy. This is as private as it gets. Let’s hear it.”
“Easy,” the American said, smoothing his forelock out of his eyes. “I think our new friend Jackie needs us a heck of a lot more than we need him.”
The scholar smiled. “He thinks he summoned us.”
“By accident. Along with a whole bunch of other . . . ”
“Ghosts.” The Russian gave his partner the word bluntly. It wouldn’t look like empathy to an outsider, but he didn’t care what an outsider thought. He shouldered the American, and the American shouldered him back, packmates communicating.