Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life (2 page)

I wanted to ask what month it was and how close to the end we were but decided to hold off on that. All I had to do was look at a newspaper or tune in a radio program.

I had once been a disc jockey for a country station in Wyoming … no … no … Colorado. But I had lived in Wyoming. I used to ride horses for days at a time.

A chubby, young Latino man brought my car, a bright red, restored 1967 Mustang, to the front of the hotel. I gave him two dollars, which he accepted without scowl or smile.

Fifteen minutes later, I was pulling up in front of the Steadman Casino. I knew the direction without thinking about it; I knew many things.

A valet in a blue uniform ran out to take my keys. I handed them to him expecting to receive a ticket, but instead he was transfixed, staring at me. I looked past his head at a black van with tinted windows that was pulling up to the curb across the street. In my time, I had spied on people from vehicles like that, been spied upon, too.

“You,” the valet said. “What the fuck are you doin’ here, Lance?”

“You got me wrong, man. My name is Jack, Jack Strong.”

The valet’s face carried a lot of extra skin and was the color of an uncooked piecrust.

“Your hair is different and your voice sounds funny,” the valet, who was a head shorter than I, said. “But it’s you. I can tell by the scar under your lip. I remember when Arnie Vane give you that.”

“Keep the car where I can get it quickly,” I said. “I might not be here long.”

I turned my back on the thuggish doorman and walked into the plush Steadman Casino.

A wide scarlet ramp led down to the floor of slot machines, roulette, and blackjack tables. The Steadman was classy. The girls offering drinks were all beautiful and well looked after. Even the clientele was a cut above the run-of-the-mill tourists and gambling addicts.

After a few steps, my mind settled on the personality that had inhabited this casino. His name was Lance Richards, and he didn’t have a very compelling moral compass. He looked for opportunities and took advantage whenever he could. He was the kind of guy who would have stolen insulin from a type 2 diabetic, but I didn’t mind. It felt good to be ruthless, maybe even amoral. I could move through the world without all the guilt and neuroses that worried my waking and sleeping mind.

Here and there at the edges of the gambling aisles men with intent eyes were watching me. Tall and short, obese and gaunt they were dogging me, but I didn’t mind. I had been away, obviously sick, and now I had returned—of course, they were suspicious.

I came to a set of emerald double doors. The guardian of this portal was a broad, and quite powerful looking, Samoan. His name, I remembered, was Sammy. I wondered, not for the first time, if that was his real name.

“Sammy.”

“Mr. Richards.”

“I think I’d like to go on in and play a few hands of blackjack,” I said easily.

“You crazy, man?”

“That ain’t even the half of it, brother,” someone from deep inside me intoned.

The six-foot Samoan shrugged his bowling-ball shoulders and stepped to the side. The doors were opened by unseen hands, and I walked through ecstatic that I was, for the most part, just one man instead of the many.

The doorwomen were naked, one white and the other black, very beautiful, and somewhat worried to see me. I kept walking down a green hall toward a large room maybe a hundred feet away.

With each step, I experienced a growing trepidation. There was a reason that I shouldn’t have been there. There had been a break between the Steadman and Lance Richards.

I kept on walking, but never made it to the end of that green hall.

When I’d gotten halfway to my destination, invisible doors on either side slid open and two brutal-looking men lurched out.

Seeing their awkward movements, I realized that I had been walking just fine once I’d donned the identity of Lance Richards. This thought was cut short when a pair of powerful arms embraced me from behind. That was Sammy; I was sure.

The other two men were white and ugly. Their faces had enlarged over the years to contain all the evil they exuded. One had ruddy skin and a big nose that had been broken quite a few times. The other was pale with tiny ears that stood out like clamshells.

“Hello, Trapas,” I said to the man with the tiny ears.

Trapas jerked his head to the right, and I allowed Sammy to muscle me through one of the secret doors. The other two followed.

It was a small room with dirty yellow walls and no furniture. There were a few rolls of green wallpaper piled in a corner.

Kraut, the reddish white man with the broken nose, produced a jagged-looking knife.

“Mr. P says you got one chance,” the ex-boxer proclaimed. “Either you tell us where the cash is, or you die right here in this room.”

What happened next was not normal. A gray patch appeared inside of my mind. It was like a psychic workspace designed for clarity, integration, and survival. I was not a man but an agglomeration of potentials on one side and personalities on the other. From outside this space came a presence that was single-minded and confident in the task at hand. Reluctantly, Lance Richards submitted to this presence and the gray space abruptly ceased.

I was still standing there, Jack Strong, the frame of the many, but the person in control was Sergeant William Tamashanter Mortman. He/I jerked our shoulders to the left, and Sammy the Samoan tumbled to the floor. He grunted in surprise, but Tamashanter didn’t stop to gloat. He grabbed Kraut’s knife hand at the wrist, breaking the bone while crushing the ex-boxer’s throat with his other hand. Executing a perfect Shotokan sidekick, he broke Trapas’s neck at the side. Then, with balletic grace, he swooped down, picked up the knife that Kraut had dropped, made a fast and deadly arc that ended with the blade sunk deep in Sammy’s left eye socket as he was rising up from the floor.

We froze there for a moment—Tamashanter, Lance, and I—struggling over not only what to do but also who to be.

Finally, Lance took ascendance because he knew the place and we did not.

I struck a depression in the wall with my black-fingered hand, the sliding door came open again. I stopped, took a .38 automatic from a holster at the back of dead Trapas’s belt, and strode out into the green hall.

The doorwomen were gone. There was no guard outside the emerald doors.

The men who had been stalking me were still there, but they seemed confused. I wasn’t supposed to be coming out that way.

I wasn’t supposed to be coming out at all.

There was a red-and-white Checker cab in front of the hotel. The thuggish valet was standing maybe fifteen feet away, but I didn’t trust him to get my car so I dove into the backseat of the cab and said, “Take me to the Bellagio.”

Looking out the back window, I saw the black van pull away from the curb.

I got out at the main entrance of the hotel and went directly to a side exit, where I knew taxis waited to be called up for clients. I got into an aqua-colored cab driven by a man named Manuel Lupa, at least that’s what his limousine identity plate said. I gave Lupa the address of my extended-stay hotel and sat back wondering what I had done to make my friends at the Steadman so angry.

The killings didn’t seem to bother me or, at least, they didn’t affect Lance, who was in the driver’s seat—so to speak.

Manuel let me out in front of the glass doors to my hotel.

The black van was already there, parked across the street. They hadn’t tried to kill me yet so I ignored them as I went in and up to my fourth-floor room.

Lying down on the hard mattress on top of the rough blue-and-tan bedspread, I gave in to the voices.

It was a juridical gathering, a meeting of the many after the trauma of such violence. Under the roof of my awareness, they argued for a very long time.

Some had never killed before. Others were ecstatic at the bloodshed and battle. There were calls for suicide and for going to the police. One powerful voice, that of a Spanish priest, said, “God will not forgive an unrepentant sinner.”

“God?” I said from the rafters of my mind. “How can you talk about God when you are where you are?”

“All deeds are divine,” Father Clemente replied in the same mental idiom. “He has placed me here to succor those lost and sundered souls.”

For a moment, I saw and felt what that Catholic minion believed. His sense of the Deity was so intense that I could not help but defer. I felt myself fading inside my own mind. Other voices gained ascendance calling out for confession and absolution. These voices were of all religions, and some were simply devout believers. They wanted to be freed from the prison they found themselves in. The husk of my mind was for them, at that moment, an unbearable limbo.

“No!” It was a man’s voice that cut through the moaning and wailing of religious piety and confusion.

This pronouncement was so loud that I was forced to sit up and then get to my feet. I went to the terrace and breathed in the chill night desert air. It was late in the evening. We had been at it for hours.

“They were going to kill us,” the new voice said above the waning din of pious complaints. “There was no choice, no crime. And we need more information before we can go to either God or the law.”

What should we do?
I thought.

“Let’s make a call,” the as-yet-unidentified voice said.

On the walk from my bed to the terrace, I wondered if I was schizophrenic with side orders of multiple personalities and delusions. Had I been to a place called the Steadman and killed those men? Maybe I had stayed in this room the whole time imagining deeds, actions, and crimes.

A phone number worked its way into my thoughts.

After pressing a nine and a one, I entered the number on a tan phone that sat on the blue desk.

Six rings and she answered, “Yes?”

“Anna?” the man who stopped the religious convocation said.

“Yes?”

“This is Ron.”

“Ron?”

“Tremont.”

There was silence for a moment … two.

“Anna.”

“Who is this?”

“I don’t have time to explain, A. But I can tell you that on June 24, 1999, you did something to a man named Charles Willis that I cannot repeat on any phone line.”

“Ron?”

“You always called me Tremolo.”

“Ron Tremont is dead.”

“I thought that might be the case. But here I am … sorta.”

“Where are you?”

“Vegas. I’m … I’m not quite myself and I need help. You can get in touch with a guy named Jack Strong at the Motorcoach Extended-Stay Motel.”

“Your voice … it doesn’t sound like you.”

“On Tuesdays I always brought lemon-filled doughnuts to work wherever we were, and on Fridays you bought chocolate éclairs.”

Anna—Wolf was her last name, I knew—went quiet again.

“Anna.”

“How can you expect me to believe this?”

“Your husband came out to you four years before the divorce, but you remained faithful to him and never told his secret to anyone but me.”

“I was with you when you died,” she said.

I suddenly remembered driving down a two-lane highway outside Cincinnati. One moment I was fine, and the next my heart felt like an expanding balloon causing a pain I’d never experienced before. I pulled to the shoulder and threw open the car door. I heaved up and out of the driver’s seat while Anna was shouting my name. Three steps into my attempted escape from the heart attack, I fell to the ground. Anna rolled me over with some difficulty because I was a fat man. The last thing I remember seeing was her face. Her coloring was dark ocher. Her race was what is called African American.

“I was a coward at the end,” I/Ron said into the phone. “I begged you not to let me die.”

“Ron,” she said with a kind of semi-certainty.

“I gotta go soon, A. You still with the bureau?”

“Y-yes.”

“I’m in big trouble and I don’t understand it. Can you come out to Vegas?”

“I’ll be there by tomorrow afternoon.”

When I hung up, Ron Tremont stepped back from the forefront of consciousness. That’s how it felt. My awareness was like a pulpit or a podium that varied personalities approached in order to use their knowledge and abilities. I was always there but not necessarily in control.

There came a knock.

“Yes?” I said, standing to the side of the door, squatting low.

“Mr. Strong? It’s Alberto. Tony send me up to tell you somethin’.”

I opened the door on the red-skinned, fleshy-featured young man.

“These bad dudes come up to Tony and said where was you at? Somebody called before then asking for Jack Strong, but they hung up. Tony figured it was the bad men that called, but he didn’t know.”

“Who was calling?”

“The bad dudes,” Alberto said, upset that I wasn’t getting his meaning. “Tony sent ’em to a empty suite on the eighth floor, but you got to get outta here before they find out you’re not there. Tony already split ’cause he don’t want ’em comin’ after him. He called me on his cell phone an’ told me to warn you.”

“Is there a back way, Alberto?”

“I’ll show you.”

Before sneaking out the service entrance of the hotel, I told Alberto that if a woman named Anna Wolf called for me to have her call and ask for Carl Rothman at the Beamer Motel after six the next day. I repeated the message twice and gave him a hundred-dollar bill.

“My cousins Esther and Shoni work the switchboard,” he said with a smile. I noticed that an upper tooth was edged in silver. “They’ll do it.”

Two twenty-three in the morning found me at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop on the dowdy end of the Strip. I was sitting hunched over a table in a booth at the back eating a chili size and searching my mind.

Richards. Lance Richards. He’d been dead for a while. It was 2008 when Mr. Petron’s bookkeeper figured out that Lance had been skimming off the money Petron had been skimming from the big boss Ira Toneman. Lana Santini, the daytime bartender, and Richards had worked together to get a nightly bundle of twenty-dollar bills from the vig chest into their joint safe-deposit box. They’d been doing it for almost two years and had more than six hundred thousand stowed away.