Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (17 page)

“Aw honey, relax,” Leo said as he came in and slouched into a seat opposite Tony Sherpa. “This must be very exhausting for you.”

Her mouth opened to let killer bees and Ginsu knives fly out of it, but Tony cut her off. “You have both put me in an extremely awkward situation, which I do not wish to enjoy any longer than necessary. Your parasitism is at an end. You owe me three thousand dollars.”

“The hell I do! It’s eighteen hundred, and I was getting it for you, when you cut off my livelihood and kidnapped my daughter.”

She snarled, but let a lot of her venom boil off before she finally opened her mouth. “If you want to see
your
daughter again, you will settle your account with us, and the both of you will leave Los Angeles on the next train.”

“I don’t have that kind of money. Ask her.”

A little of Wanda’s hair color drained into her face. “Just give him the hat, Leo.”

Leo took his lucky hat off and spun it on his splinted fingers. “Well, I don’t have much, but there’s only two things in the world with my name on them. You already took one, and you can have the other, if your name’s also Leo. The wig, I’ll play you a hand of Low-Ball for. If I win, I get my daughter back, and I can come back and play the tables… and free buffet for a year.”

It was a joke, but only Dr. Kwak laughed. Nobody got lucky at the Industry Casino Buffet.

Wanda said, “We just want the tickets, Leo.”

“Aw, shit. Is that what this is about? You sure know how to spoil a birthday, Wanda.”

“Don’t twist my tits here, Leo. You don’t even redeem the goddamned things.”

“You know why.” She looked away. He almost asked her if she was familiar with the art of Cassius Coolidge. “Fine, you can have them. But I want to see Eliza, right now.”

Dr. Kwak left the room through an unseen door. Tony reached for the hat, but Leo offered it to Wanda. “Close your eyes,” he told her.

Smirking at him, she indulged him and dipped her hand into his lucky hat.

Tony looked like he expected a mousetrap to go off. He sighed when she produced his Quik Pix card from today.

Tony snatched the hat and turned it over. Stuck to the hat’s liner by years of flop sweat and glacial accretions of dandruff, the layers of past lottery tickets gradually made a pretty pot in the table’s center.

A little guy who looked twelve-going-on-fifty checked them against the US Lottery Almanac. Of the twelve tickets on the table, seven were instant winners, while three were matching numbers in the Pick 6 in the California, New Jersey and Nevada lotteries, and the oldest one sent the winner to appear on the Big Spin, a lottery game show cancelled a decade ago.

The old unredeemed tickets were trash, but today’s ticket alone was worth $200,000.

“Where is my daughter?”

Wanda got in front of Leo. “Tony, can we have a minute?”

Tony glowered at her, but took the ticket from Wanda and left the room.

“A message would’ve been nice,” Leo said. “For old times’ sake. I would’ve played ball.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You wear that bad luck bullshit like a hair shirt. You’re a coward, and everyone knows it. They don’t pay out of respect, they pay to keep the stink of you away.”

He bit his tongue on a kneejerk thought.
You used to like my stink, well enough.
“I could change my luck, like you. Really nice setup, here. You and Tony. He’s a lucky guy.”

“It’s real work. I finally got a place. He’s not a cheapskate. The buffet hardly makes anybody sick, now.”

“That’s great. And all Eliza and I gotta do is drop dead, to make all your dreams come true.”

“That’s not fair. I tried to talk some sense into you ages ago.”

“You told me that since your lucky charm act involved playing a virgin, that it would cramp your style for anyone to know you had a daughter.”

“You sure know how to twist a story, Leo.”

“Sure, babe. Hey, waiter!” Leo shouted at Silent Lee. “CR&RC for the lady, and a tall glass of warm coconut milk for myself.”

Silent Lee tried to ignore him, but Leo dipped his fingers in Tony’s drink and tossed ice cubes at him. “Crown Royal and Royal Crown Cola, separately, with crushed ice. Try to slip Pepsi by her, and I wouldn’t want to be you. And the milk. Pretty please.”

Lee looked at Dr. Kwak, then slouched off to get the drinks.

“Liza can stay with me. I can keep a secret.”

“Tony’s not an idiot, Leo. He’s willing to stick his neck out for me, but he’s not Blue Cross.”

“Time was, Tony Sherpa would carry a guy right up until he stopped breathing. Somebody’s been riding him about making his own luck, I guess. I’ve never talked dirt to her about you.”

“I know that, Leo. She hates me all on her own.”

He wasn’t taking that bait.

Silent Lee came back. He slipped on Leo’s ice cubes and broke his nose on the edge of the craps table, flipped the tray onto the green, warm coconut milk and flammable liquid sloshing all over hand-painted baize and the ashtray where Tony’s last two cigarettes still smoldered.

“Oh shit, that’s gonna stain. Here,” Leo got up to blot up the mess and put out the fire that leapt out of the tray and hungrily bit into the gaming table’s unbelievably expensive surface. Dr. Kwak gently kicked the back of Leo’s leg and reduced him to spaghetti.

Wanda caught him before he fell over. “He doesn’t want to hurt you. He just wants you out of his casino, out of his town. It’s his now. It was never yours. A barnacle doesn’t own a boat, Leo.”

“I can’t fucking believe this. You’re really kicking us out of LA.
Banishing
us. How far do we have to go? How am I supposed to make a living?”

“Get out of the life, Leo. Take care of Eliza. She loves you, and she’s smart enough to turn out better than you.”

Leo just stared at the wisps of smoke rolling up out of the hole in the table. Nobody moved to get him another glass of milk.

“You won’t have to work, if you don’t want to. You’ll get a cut of the ticket, and I’ll send—”

“You pretending you don’t understand? Maybe you don’t really believe in the system, but you know what I believe. I can’t touch that money.”

“No, I don’t understand. It’s the screwiest bunch of bullshit I ever heard.”

He didn’t want to waste his breath telling her again. He could just blow her off and see Eliza again, and she would have to leave, and then whatever happened next would happen. But it would happen fast and they would take no chances, because he was toxic. To touch the same cards and chips, to breath the same air, could rub off his luck on them. To lose to such a cursed man could permanently swap their fates. Tony would never face him over cards or dice, but Dr. Kwak was not a superstitious man.

He tried, anyway. “You remember the first time I bought a ticket.”

She started to get up. “Don’t.”

“I bought it for you, on our first date. You were lucky, even then.” It was a hundred dollar ticket. His car got towed. The yard fee was ninety-six. He used the change to buy a pack of cheap rubbers for their second date.

“I bought another one when you said you were pregnant. It paid ten thousand dollars, remember? You left with my car, so I thought that balanced it out… but funny thing, I had this pain in my arm, like a hot copper wire inside my bones, and I wondered how much a heart attack and a triple bypass cost.

“That’s nobody’s money, Wanda. It’s not just a sacrifice to keep my bad luck at bay. It’s a trap someone set up. If I tried to claim that $200,000… I don’t have anything in my life worth that, except Eliza.

“It’s my job to pick that ticket every year on my birthday, so nobody else will win it, because it’s nobody’s lucky day. If Tony can claim it, more power to him, but—”

Tony blew into the room, holding a napkin over one eye. Red-faced and hoarse from screaming at phones, he barked something in slurred Korean to Dr. Kwak, who gave him a lot of static.

“Oh God, Leo, what did you do, now?”

“I’m ready to leave. Where’s my daughter? And I distinctly recall coming in here with a hat…”

Dr. Kwak shuffled out the door Tony just came in.

Leo tried to be helpful. “Whatever just happened to you, Tony, I bet it was really expensive. You want me to go call you an ambulance?”

Tony pointed a gun at Leo and screamed, “In the back, now!” He grabbed another lottery ticket out of the hat and flicked it at Vicious Lee. “Run this one!”

The winning Pick 6 ticket was only a year old, but stiffened by sweat and oil, it sailed like a ninja’s shuriken, and steered by Tony’s anger and pure, cussed bad luck, it nicked Vicious Lee in the throat.

Lee fell back against the wall and said something in Cantonese, but no one understood the words, since they came out of the gushing hole in his neck.

Tony bit back a high, throat-shredding scream and tried to throw his own hand away. His men backed away from him and the fountain of blood from Vicious Lee’s cut throat.

“So Wanda,” Leo said, “don’t suppose you’ve talked to your daughter since you kidnapped her?”

“Just go, Leo.” She pushed him towards the door. No chance Tony was going to let him ruin any more of his high-toned casino with his unlucky blood.
Oh, yeah
—

He stopped and leaned in close. “They tested each other’s blood in school, you know, for biology class? And it got me to thinking, so I got a blood test, too. That’s how I found out Eliza’s not my biological daughter.”

He amiably waddled out the back door and down a hall to a counting room, where the floor was lined with dropcloths and all the cash machines were covered in plastic shrouds. One of them called him Daddy.

Leo ripped off the shroud. Eliza sat in a padded leather pit boss’s chair, wearing the same mismatched shirt and skirt combo he’d picked out for her this morning, and a white blindfold. White is the color of death in Asia. Were they afraid of her, too?

Dr. Kwak stood behind the chair with his gun pressed against her red curly hair. Tony Sherpa came in behind him and shoved him towards his daughter.

“Hi honey,” Leo said. “You about ready to go?”

“Daddy, please just do what they say. They said if you don’t, they’re going to kill Mom.”

Staring mind bullets at Kwak, Leo kissed his daughter on the forehead and stroked her hair. “I wouldn’t worry too much about Mom, sweetheart.”

“It doesn’t matter where you go,” Tony growled, dropping the napkin. His eye was drooping and filled with blood. The whole right side of his face sagged oddly, muffling his words. “A curse can’t be banished… only broken, burned and cut away.”

Leo knew Tony would never do it, himself. “Deal her out. I’ll do anything. What’re the new rules?”

“You end yourself now, or you watch the girl die, before we end you.”

“Wow, Tony, you are way out of your league, here. You know, this is probably just the blood hemorrhaging into your frontal lobe talking, right now.”

Tony looked down at his patent leather wingtips, which had tracked Vicious Lee’s blood all the way in here from the high roller’s room. “This is survival, now.” Dr. Kwak stroked Eliza’s hair with his gun.

“How am I supposed to do it, swallow my tongue? C’mon, Kwak, give me a gun. We can settle this with a few rounds of Russian roulette.”

Kwak sneered, “I do not gamble,
liao
.”

“Oh, you’re gambling right now. Go ahead.”

Kwak laughed and pointed the gun at Leo.

He knew Dr. Kwak wouldn’t shoot Eliza. The man was a stone douchebag, but whatever he was a doctor of in Korea, it probably wasn’t executing little girls.