Authors: Subterranean Press
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.
He 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 grey 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,
blood and brains and bits of white like a dropped china bowl all over the
place. 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.
He 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. “He was on the take,” she said, and stood on tiptoe to
kiss the assassin’s cheek.
*
Part IV
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 teal and black and silver
Thunderbirds and Buicks and a single candy-apple 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 blonde 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.
“Ghosts,” the American said. “But we know what we’re
here for, and we know why we came.”
“Yeah, MI-6 leaving us to clean up their mess.”
The Russian snorted at the athlete. “In my homeland,
they have a more efficient manner of dealing with disgraced former employees.
One finds a pistol loaded with a single bullet on one’s desk. One is intended
to know how to address the matter from that point.”
“I’ve wondered about that. Why only one bullet?”
“It is
not
expected that one Russian will make
two mistakes.” Delightful, when they walked into it. It almost made up for the
blistering heat on the nape of his neck and the packed earth under his soles
cooking his feet in his shoes. One-handed, he loosened his tie. “In any case,
my partner is correct. Our friend Jackie may be a poker player, but he’s no
spy. And if he means to use us to get his vengeance on the…genius…who killed
his partner, it would take little in the way of moral suasion for me to use him
in return.”
The Russian glanced up from his shoes as they touched
the melted, sticking tarmac of the Strip. The Hacienda was appreciably closer,
and if he turned left, he could see the “drive carefully” side of the “Welcome
to Las Vegas” sign. He blew his hair out of his eyes, checked for oncoming
traffic, and walked faster. The athlete and the scholar paced him easily, the
American nearly trotting to keep up.
The athlete was nodding. He leaned forward one more time
as they gained the western side of the highway. “So you think there’s a way to
use him to get to the assassin?”
“I think it can’t hurt to give it a whirl,” the American
said, leading them up the driveway to the casino. “We’re catching a cab back,
gents–”
The scholar held the door for the rest of them, but the
American balked a moment, glancing up. “No air curtain.”
“You mostly get those downtown, where people walk in and
out a lot. Come on; Uncle Sam doesn’t pay you to air condition the Mojave.”
“Uncle
Sam
doesn’t pay me at all,” the American
retorted, but he stepped inside, and the Russian followed tight on his heels,
breathing a sigh of relief as cool darkness closed around them. A moment later,
and they were ensconced at the bar, the only four customers this early in the
morning.
The scholar contented himself with orange juice. The
American and the athlete ordered mimosas, and the Russian a bloody Mary. “So,
what’s your plan?” he asked his partner, when they’d each had a chance to get
in a few pulls of their drinks, and suck on a couple of ice cubes.
“I’ll let you know when I figure that out,” the American
answered. His eye lit on something over the Russian’s shoulder, and he finished
his drink in one long swallow and clinked the glass on the bar. “I’m
improvising. Excuse me for a moment–” He stood, straightened his tie in
the bar mirror, winked to his partner, and took off in pursuit.
The Russian checked his watch. “He’ll either be back in
fifteen minutes, or four hours,” he predicted confidently, watching in the
bartender’s looking glass as the American strolled up to a pretty brunette near
the one-armed bandits, exuding gallantry.
“What’s his batting average like?” The athlete watched
more openly, with a professional interest.
The Russian pursed his lips, working through the sports
metaphor. “He swings at every ball,” he answered at last. “He has to knock a
few out of the park, yes?”
“What if we have to get in touch with him?” The scholar,
looking less amused and more annoyed.
“He has his cigarette pack. I can call him if I must.” A
long sigh, and another sip of his bloody Mary. “So,” he said, turning on his
stool and glancing up at the athlete with calm interest. “About that tennis
match–”
#
One-Eyed Jack and the house of the rising sun. Las Vegas.
Summer, 2002.
Vampires sneeze like cats. Who knew?
I concentrated on amusement to keep another image the
hell out of my head–Stewart, alive, and bound to Angel somehow, drugs or
magic or something else. It took a lot of willpower to walk down the stairs
rather than stomp, but I thought I had my heart rate back to normal by the time
I walked out into the parking lot. Both John Henrys waited by the front door of
Jeremiah’s Steak House. I paused in the shade as they crossed the asphalt and
glanced over my shoulder, drawn by a whisper of breeze and the tang of ozone.
Storm clouds piled up behind the Spring Mountains, not quite pushing over;
another alleged monsoon season that was going to pan out mostly dry.