Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (18 page)

Leo took a quick inventory and found he didn’t regret much about dying, aside from doing it with his daughter in the room.

In the moment before Dr. Kwak pulled the trigger, Leo closed his eyes and instead of his life, he saw that little runt-dog from the calendar.

How his eyes screwed up in his little head with a seizure of emotion the uninitiated could easily mistake for surprise and joy. Only Leo could know the terror that little dog must have felt, the sick sense of falling out of his own body as he tried to calculate the price of those aces. Whether or not he collected the pot and made it off the train, he was never going home. Such was the fallout of the lousy hand he’d been dealt before his birth. Ages before any of this shit existed, the game was rigged.

“I love you, Eliza.”

“I love you too, Daddy—”

“Cover your ears, baby.”

He heard a click. A curse.

He opened his eyes and saw with preternatural clarity the cylinders in the drum rotating as Kwak pulled the trigger past the empty chamber under the hammer.
Nothing but bullets, now
, his smile said. Leo forced himself to smile back and blow Kwak a kiss, trying to put all his bad luck into it.

Then he looked down the barrel, and started laughing so hard he didn’t even duck when Dr. Kwak pulled the trigger.

So that’s how you get chewing gum out of hair!

The gun went off. Leo fell back across the pai gow table untouched.

The revolver exploded in Kwak’s hand. The plug of brittle pink chewing gum from Eliza’s hair fouled the barrel, and the gun backfired in his face.

Eliza cried. Wanda barged into the room and took her in her arms, cooing, but Eliza didn’t seem to recognize her. In shock, she screamed, “Daddy!”

“We’ll go,” Leo said. “You take the tickets.”

Tony Sherpa dabbed at his eye. “If you ever come back—”

“We won’t.” Leo went to Eliza and pried Wanda’s hands away. Without removing the girl’s blindfold, he led her out of the room.

When they were back in the VIP room, he peeled off the white scarf and tossed it. Eliza blinked and hugged her father. She looked around, but her eyes passed over Wanda without recognition. She hadn’t seen her mother in almost five years, and Wanda had changed.

“Where will you—”

“I don’t know. Don’t look.”

“I just want you to—” Wanda handed Leo his hat, with the toupee in it.

“No way. He took it for debts, and we’re settled.”

“Tony is my partner.”

“You bought into this dump? I thought you were—”

“I saved it. He’s not anything to me. But I’m the house. If you want to play for it—”

“I could never beat you,” Leo said, starting to turn away.
And you know what could happen if I beat you
, he didn’t add.

Wanda sat down at the dealer’s chair on a blackjack table. “Lo-Ball,” she said.

“Honey,” Leo said, “Why don’t you get something to eat at the buffet? Daddy’s going to play a couple hands with the nice lady.”

When they needed to score and all their old marks were played out, Roshawn and Aida went shoulder-fishing at the County Clerk’s. Aida was too tweaked to keep the numbers straight and stop picking at her face, today, so Roshawn fished alone. Aida was better with people, better at stealing, better at all of it, until she got like this.

An old man caught Roshawn looking on with her lips still moving as she read his social off his form request. She ducked out before he could alert the security guard, streaked across the lot and into the dent-resistant side of a brand-new Volvo wagon with kids and groceries in the back and a mom in a soccer coach outfit, and a fancy white leather purse, more expensive than all the things anyone had ever bought for her in her life, put together.

It was the purse that Roshawn studied as she jumped back from the coasting Swedish shuttle, not the screaming kids or the oblivious mom. It was the purse, which was sitting on the roof. She jogged after the car as it sped up and, to her delight, turned down the side street where she’d left Aida in her shitbox Fiero. She saw the driver’s head turn and notice Roshawn in her mirror, dropped back so she wouldn’t stop.
Go on, bitch, don’t worry about me
,
go back to La Mesa
.

She broke into a run, rounded the corner and skidded to a stop as twenties blew by her on the dank afternoon breeze.

Aida danced down the middle of the street, snatching bills out of the air and laughing. “D’you believe this? You say praying don’t work, then what’s this shit?” Swinging from one skinny claw, the purse.

Aida smoked cigarettes like she was sucking venom out of a snakebite as she counted bills, “Three C’s and change,” but she counted again. “Let’s go see Hector.”

Roshawn’s nerves danced, sparks of autonomic joy sending the Fiero bouncing across the lanes on the eastbound 8. “The cards be trash by the time we get Hector out of bed,” Roshawn said. “Use your head, that shit makes you so stupid. We max ‘em out with a quickness and blow town. That was the plan if we got a fat one…”

“This bitch on the vapors. She lose her head, if it ain’t tied on. We fry her now, she lock up the castle and call out the feds. She too hot now, but she on the vapors, like I said. She cancel these, get new ones in the mail. We don’t need her cards. We’ve got
her
. We ghost her, and ride her to the next level.”

Roshawn and Aida had burned more people than they could hope to count, but in short, sharp shocks. Card dips, picked pockets, mail shakedowns, small schemes Roshawn learned from Aida. They sold numbers and papers to the Trashman, who prowled the rich condo dumpsters. But Aida wanted to slow-burn this bitch herself, something they’d talked about, but never got the nerve to do.

“We could bleed her so long, we be livin’ her life before she saw we took it.”

Roshawn came from poor Tennessee Navy trash, stranded in San Diego by a dishonorable discharge, and grew up in the ghetto. She had to learn to pass for black, though she was abysmally white, with the close hazel eyes, ash-blond hair and awful dentition of the Scotch-Irish mountainfolk who paid for passage to America as indentured servants before slaves were imported from Africa. Mimicry was survival for as long as she could remember, but Aida showed her how to make a living at it.

As to where Aida came from, Roshawn had learned little that stayed the same from one telling to the next, and she was smart enough to see how Aida’s lessons gave the lie to it all.
Know what your mark knows, let them see you’re part of their world, and nothing more.

When they first met, Aida’s own stories of hardship as a military brat, of abuse at the hands of men, rang true, and bonded Roshawn to her. Overjoyed to find she didn’t have to choose the lesser of masculine evils, thrilled to find someone who understood her, she didn’t notice for a long time how much Aida had changed her.

In her more lucid moments, Roshawn guessed that the essential Aida must be whatever she was slowly changing Roshawn into, but she remained passive, fascinated. Becoming
anything
was better than what she’d been. She learned how to play men and women, straight, solid types who could draw cash on a credit card without getting the stink-eye from the manager. In between, she learned how to be hard and blank, to partake of the empty rituals of addiction without hope of pleasure, to endure the ugliest underside of life without pain or fear. It was a better life than she could have made, on her own.

They picked up three eight-balls of crank from Hector, but Aida swept into the bedroom, stripping off her clothes, and crashed on the waterbed. Roshawn sank in beside her, as close as she dared, wary of Aida’s feverish glow. The arid heat redoubled and cooked the sweat out of her naked body. Roshawn longed to touch her, but feared waking her up. This wasn’t normal, this kind of sleep, and she feared breaking it.

She lowered her head to the hollow between Aida’s tiny breasts and lapped at the rivulets of sweat, tasting the smoke and ammonia and ether of crystal meth, and something else she had always figured was the true essence of Aida, because she could not guess what else it might be. For a minute, she thought she knew the real Aida, and was happy.

Roshawn didn’t know how long Aida had been sleeping with the driver’s license under her pillow. She changed the sheets whenever they stole new ones, because neither of them liked to do laundry.

It was no kind of betrayal that Roshawn could explain, but it derailed her cleaning binge and got her taking things apart, and that was how she found the books.

“What’s all this shit?” she barked, when Aida breezed in from shopping.

Aida, confused, got defensive about the flock of gossamer shopping bags that seemed to float around her like balloons. Before Aida could stroke her, Roshawn charged her with the fattest of the books, something called the
Tibetan Book Of The Dead
. “What’re you
reading
for? Why are you keeping shit from me?”

Aida took the book and pocketed the license. “Haven’t you ever thought about your soul?”

Roshawn went slack. She hadn’t even looked inside them. Books were for learning how to do things, and if the books were a secret, then what was she learning?

“These souls we got now, they pretty beat-up, Ro.”

Roshawn looked into Aida’s eyes, lost in the way the golden mandalas in her irises seemed to burn and turn when she operated. “We could stop…”

“We’d still be us, wouldn’t we? Still damned, just starving, too.”

Why did
she
feel like the one who was hiding something? “We could change…”

Aida smirked, mute shorthand for helpless recognition of how dumb Roshawn was. “Ain’t you heard of predestination? God knows everything, from the beginning to how it’s all gonna turn out. So no matter what you do, if your name’s not in the book, you never get saved. God made you, so He knows you can’t change.”

Roshawn tried the smirk, but only felt dumber. “Where’d you get all this shit?”

“Daddy was a righteous Calvinist. After a good Sunday-go-to-meetin’ beatin’, he used to tell me about the Elect—that’s the saved ones. Since God knew how Daddy’d turn out in the end, he could do what he did to me, and still go to judgment with a clean conscience. This is
their
world, Ro. We just live here.”

Roshawn snorted a line to keep from laughing. “So you’re one of the Elect?”

“Hell no. Nothing in the Lord’s big book about Daddy knocking up a whore in the Philippines who could track him down in the States. Daddy used to say I had no soul, anyhow. They do give you a lift, though, knowing you judged and damned, whatever you do. Everything’s free, you know?”

“No judgment you need to fear but mine, girl.” Roshawn tried to look as brave as the words sounded.

Aida’s long acrylic nails tickled the tender scalp of Roshawn’s cornrow braids. “So
I
belong to
you
, now?”

Later, when Aida showed her the new ID with her picture and the mark’s name, she was too stoned in love to care. Aida had only to look at her that way, that said she knew who and what Roshawn really was, and could bear to keep looking, though she would never, ever tell what she saw.