Gheist

by Richard Mosses

  Clint focussed on his throat, on being heard. “Try somethin’ bigger,” he whispered.

  The woman frowned. She looked over her shoulder even though she could clearly see no one behind her in the mirror. She sighed and picked up a larger one made from black shiny rubber.

  Pleased with his success, Clint wanted to push himself. He imagined what he looked like, drew the strands together and stepped into the image. The fringes of his vision started to blur, but less than before.

  Was that what he really looked like? He could see himself, in the mirror. It was perhaps more idealised and handsome than he ever really was.

  The woman hadn’t noticed him, she needed both her hands to hold the girth of the sex device. “Evenin’, Ma’am,” Clint said and lifted his hat. She looked in the mirror, screamed, and ran out of the store, strap on still clutched in her hands. Catching the feeling of dread two other customers ran out behind her.

  Clint decided not to chase them down the street. That might draw too much attention. He went back to Melchior who was speaking to the guy behind the counter.

  “Not bad,” Melchior said. “You’ve got to try one more thing though. So remember how that girl cheated on you.”

  Clint steeled himself. He was feeling rather tired in general. But he cast his mind back, glad in a way that this was one memory he still had, and felt the rage rise up his neck to the top of his head. He leaped into the only customer left in the store, idly browsing the DVDs. He felt the flush of heat as he wrapped the body around himself. It felt good. Like sex. That intimate warmth inside.

  The customer didn’t seem to notice though. He carried on taking the plastic cases from the shelf, studying the covers, flipping to the words on the back, although he didn’t seem to be reading them. Busty Asian Beauties 14. All Anal, All Anita. High School Hardcore 8. Clint tried to move backwards, but his legs were stuck in warm hard mud. He went for something simple. Could he get the guy to open his hand and drop the DVD? There was a flexing of fingers, but it was as far as he could go. With the darkness closing in around him, Clint slid out of the body.

  Melchior applauded softly. The shop assistant barely seemed to notice this behaviour. “I think you’ve done great for such a short time. You need to keep working on it. Especially moving someone from inside. Once you’ve got that working for you, you can do anything.” Melchior smiled.

  “It’s been a privilege to work with you, Slim,” said Clint.

  29

  “So let me get this straight. You don’t know anythin’ about Marconi’s money. You didn’t see nothing and no one paid you to see nothing.” Clint walked round the man handcuffed to the chair. The man’s face was bruised and fresh blood darkened his shirt. “And yet Marconi’s money is still missing. We’ve established what you don’t know. Now we’re going to figure out what you do know. Larry, I don’t think he needs his little finger, do you?”

  “No. Wait. Ya gotta believe me. I didn’t see nothing, like I told ya. Really.” Larry meanwhile picked up the garden cutters. He turned them in the light from the bare bulb overhead so the guy in the chair could see how shiny they were. The blades in particular. He took the little finger of the left hand where there was a gold ring and placed the snips around it. “OK, OK, OK. Look I might know something. I heard that Lester Vanetti was looking to move some boxes and needed a few hands to help with the job.”

  “You’re telling me that Lester needed help moving house?” said Clint, who nodded at Larry.

  Larry applied some pressure, the edges cut into the finger’s skin.

  The man cried out, even though there was nothing hurting him. “No no no. Stop. I’m telling ya what I know, man.” Clint nodded again and Larry eased off.

  “OK, Oliver, tell us who has Marconi’s money?”

  “Vanetti has it. Lester Vanetti. He hired some guys from outside the families to move it,” said Oliver. “That’s what I was trying to tell ya, before you decided to mangle my hand, man.”

  “Where does Vanetti have the money?” said Clint.

  “How should I know? I just saw the guys moving it, OK?”

  “Oh we’re pretty fucking far from OK,” said Clint. “You helped someone steal from your employer.” Clint took out his gun, the same one he’d been using since being demobbed.

  “Wait, no, c’mon, I told ya what I know,” said Oliver.

  “You’re fired,” said Clint and killed him.

  There hadn’t been much to do after the war. Somehow hauling lumber and yelling at guys to do the same had lost its satisfaction. It was honest work, but it meant he was always at the bottom of the heap. He’d got back into organising work teams and this led to running sites. The Strip was going up at a fast rate and not always the way it was planned. At first he’d been asked to change a few things, receiving materials that weren’t quite what had been ordered. The war, the dust, they’d blurred Clint’s sense of black and white. There was live or die, so far as he was concerned. Soon he was being asked to alter the work schedules, say someone was on shift when they weren’t, typically some guy out on parole. He didn’t like that they had shirked their duty or were skipping work, but he knew how things were, and this might be his chance to move up.

  Once he was noticed as a reliable guy Clint was invited to help out in more direct ways. At first he was just muscle, then it was clear he had good aim too and could be trusted when things got heated. He survived where some of his more rash colleagues ended up injured or worse. Nature weeded out the weak and the strong reaped their rewards.

  This business with Vanetti was only going to end one way. In all likelihood Vanetti knew this and was trying to provoke something bigger and grander. It was the first move.

  “Just get me my money back,” Marconi had said. “I don’t care who you have to take down to get there. I’ve tried being reasonable and I’ve tried talking to Vanetti. He just plays dumb with a big fuck-you smile on his face the whole time.”

  “If this gets too hot, things will escalate,” Clint had said.

  They had met in Marconi’s garage. Which sounded like he didn’t want the help tracking mud through his home. But Marconi’s garage held six cars and a couple of bikes. Even had its own gas pump. Marconi wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. Right then he had been deep in the engine of a big German car he’d had shipped over. Probably some officer’s staff car.

  Marconi stopped tinkering. “So be it,” he had said, fixing Clint with a steady look.

  Clint finished cleaning his gun. The M1911 pistol had seen him through the war and he knew how it would behave in almost every circumstance. He almost trusted it more than himself. Certainly more than his colleagues. He reassembled it, checked it was empty, and tested the mechanism was working. Sure and straight every time. He checked the magazine and his spares were fully loaded. Then Clint went to work.

  The sound of gunfire was muffled by the crates and other packages in the loading bay. Larry had called up a few of the guys to help with the diversion, and if things went south thin out the opposition.

  Clint didn’t have long before someone called the cops. An all-out assault like this couldn’t be allowed to go down without the law looking like it had done something, however much the force was all in the pockets of the Families.

  He walked into the service elevator and pulled down on the thick textile belt that drew the top and bottom gates together. Punching the button caused it to shudder into life and grind its way up several floors past all of Vanetti’s main security. It was better this way. Marconi might want to engage Vanetti in a war, but Clint knew it did no one any favours. Good men would die for no reason on all sides. The Strip could end up tarnished and the either the gamblers would go elsewhere or the Feds would send in some kind of taskforce. No one would thank him for it, but he was saving everyone’s ass.

  The elevator came to a halt. No guards here either. Fuck’s sake. With this kind of operation Vanetti deserved to be weeded out. There was no way this was a trap. Was there?
<
br />   Clint moved through the main floor of the new Del Mar casino and hotel. Stupid name. Didn’t sound that exotic so close to California. Should’ve gone with something more Eastern like Zanzibar, somewhere from one of the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movies.

  He got into another elevator, almost unnoticed between two potted ferns. It wasn’t too difficult to pick the lock that activated the penthouse button. Again he felt that light stomach lurch as the wheel engaged, pulling the car up to the top of the building.

  As the doors opened he sprang into action, darting out from behind the cover of the elevator he was pleased to see that Vanetti wasn’t completely without protection. The two guys seemed so surprised to see him that they were a heap on the luxury woollen carpet before they’d even drawn their guns. They’d live to be embarrassed though.

  Someone was playing a piano. Was it a blues riff on a large classic instrument? It didn’t sound earthy enough, instead it seemed brittle. But what did he know? He could just about use a mouth harp.

  Clint followed the sound through a warren of plush rooms. Each one had a panoramic view across the Strip, all sparkle and no diamond. It sure had grown up fast.

  A door separated him from the sound. Whoever was playing kept repeating the same riff. It wasn’t much better than Chopsticks. Clint took out his gun and put his ear to the door. There was some soft conversation. No more than three, maybe four people inside. He waited a moment longer until he heard a phone ringing.

  In one fluid move he opened the door, took in the room and raised his gun to aim at the pianist who was just standing up from the stool. It was Vanetti himself. Draped across the closed lid of the grand piano was a young woman wrapped in a long white sheet. Sitting on a sofa, observing all this, another woman, wearing a cocktail dress and a smile, put down her Martini.

  “What are you doing here?” Vanetti said.

  “You shouldn’t have taken Marconi’s money,” said Clint.

  “Really? That’s why you’re here?” said Vanetti. “Marconi should have raised it at the next Family meeting.”

  “He decided it couldn’t wait that long.”

  “Put the gun down and let’s deal with this civil, like.”

  “Ladies, you should go,” said Clint.

  Toga girl on the piano slid off and tried to use more of the sheet to cover herself, but left plenty of lithe legs and skin on show. Clint’s only concern was that she might attack him on her way out. “I think I’ll stay and see how this works out,” said the other, who picked up her drink and took a sip from it, stirring it further with the olive on a stick.

  The phone meanwhile kept on ringing.

  “Please,” said Vanetti, hands outstretched, “put the gun down.”

  “No,” said Clint. “This will save unnecessary deaths in the long run.” He didn’t understand why assassination was looked down upon. Take out the leader and the opposition was lost.

  Vanetti knew what was going to happen. There was no mercy in Clint’s eyes. He ducked low and ran towards the other door. Clint shot once and Vanetti fell. He didn’t need to check the body.

  “Well this is turning into an unusual evening,” said the woman, rising from the couch, the curl of gunsmoke eddying around her. She offered Clint her gloved hand. “Marie-Claire. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  30

  Kat went to work and came back, still no sign of Amy. She slept, not very well. Still no Amy. She was tempted to drive out to the casino, see what she could find there, but if Danton was looking for her she didn’t want to be found. Getting anyone else to Inferno Creek meant she had to go there anyway, so that didn’t seem like an option. She could wait a little longer, but if Amy didn’t come back they needed answers about the vaults and another Phreaker to cover the electrical devices. She could find a flesh and blood person, but frankly she’d trust them a good deal less than the dead, especially for a job where no one got paid and she would be the looney speaking to invisible people. Even Carlos had backed out of being in meetings, thank God, because he couldn’t follow what was happening and kept asking questions. It was worse than visiting your in-laws when they didn’t speak your language – at least you still had visual cues and might pick up on a similar sounding word.

  Someone knocked on the door. Kat froze. It didn’t sound like Carlos this time, and it wasn’t Connie’s knock either. The knock repeated. Confident but not demanding. Kat could hear an engine idling outside too.

  Kat crept over to the peephole. The tiny ring of light went dark before she could look.

  “We know you’re in there,” said a voice she didn’t recognise. Was this who Connie had warned her about? “I can see you moving. Mr Danton would like to talk with you.”

  Shit it was Danton Jr after all. “Tell him to make an appointment with my secretary. I’m busy.”

  “Just open the door, Ms McKay, and you can talk like civilised people.”

  “Last time we had a civilised chat I lost something very dear to me,” Kat said to the door.

  “We’re not here to harm you – but you wouldn’t want what you lost to get even dearer for you to retrieve.”

  “Fuck you,” Kat said, feeling cornered. She didn’t remember the journey to meet Danton before. What would they do this time if she resisted? She unbolted the door and opened it.

  “Will you come with me please?” The guy was as big as Connie described him. Behind him was the blacked out SUV they’d spent so many weeks tailing to the Inferno Creek Casino. The passenger door was open, but it was as inviting as a lion’s mouth.

  Kat snatched up her keys, shut the door and locked it. For a moment she considered making a run for it.

  “Please take a seat,” said the lackey, with impatience.

  She climbed into the SUV right next to Danton himself.

  “Thank you for joining me,” Danton said, in his thick voice.

  “Did I really have much choice?” She flinched as the door was shut. The car drove off. Kat could barely see anything out of the windows and a partition separated the front from the back. The leather seats were soft and the air cool.

  “There’s always a choice,” said Danton. “Red or black, call or fold. From each choice there comes consequences. It’s inevitable.”

  “What do you want? I haven’t got anything.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. It was brought to my attention that you visited one of my establishments,” Danton said.

  Kat knew it. Somehow they’d caught Amy and had dug deeper. It was all over. She ought to feel sick, shocked even.

  “You had an astounding run of luck, and it was unfortunate that it ran out during that last hand – almost like history repeating itself,” Danton continued. “Like I said, choices, and then consequences.”

  Kat realised she was holding her breath. It was okay. This was okay. He was just talking about her visit to the Strip. The movement of the car was making her feel nauseous.

  “While I appreciate the dedication, I wanted to let you know, in person, that your business is no longer welcome. That way we can avoid any ugly scenes if you try to enter one of my casinos, or any other establishment, in town. I think it’s safe to say that many of my colleagues won’t open their arms for you either.”

  The one advantage of her current state was the perfect poker face. “Fucking great. How I’m ever supposed to pay you back now?” The idiot had just made it certain that her current course of action was her only shot at getting her heart back.

  “You have an addiction, a weakness,” said Danton. “I’m doing you a favour. Helping you shake the disease. No harm in hard work.”

  She wanted to slap the smirk from his face. “Well, I don’t know where I’d be without the help and support of the gaming community. I’d be destitute. A lost soul without hope. Anything else I need to know? Have I got a curfew too? A restraining order?”

  Danton shook his head.

  “Then please take me home.”

  Danton pushed a button. L
ike a lift coming to a floor the SUV slowed and stopped and the door opened.

  Kat got out. God knew where she was. It couldn’t be too far from her motel.

  “Be seeing you,” Danton said.

  Kat slammed the door shut. She really needed to move now.

  Another day passed. Connie, bless her, had found Kat a place. Another room in another motel, for now. But it was a little more secure. The people on the desk were related to Connie, second cousins or something. It would be good to be off the ground floor. Felt like anyone could just walk in. Kat had nearly finished packing the few things she had into her trusty roller case. Seemed like whenever Danton came into her life, she ended up trundling around with this case in his wake.

  “Kat?” Amy. Kat spun round. Amy looked…diminished, like some of the spark had been taken from her.

  “I’d love to say I was worried about you.” Kat shrugged. “I was the next best thing.” Amy nodded. “What happened?”

  “I got caught,” Amy said. “I was so stupid. Don’t touch the glowy pattern Ames. But who went right ahead and did it? So I got stuck in a trap or something on the inner vault door. I got out, but I was dead beat. I went into that state, whajacallit? Blue crystal iso-cube. When I came out of it, I was in Mrs D’s office. The penthouse.”

  “Danton caught you? Shit. It’s all over, isn’t it? Fuck. What do I do now?”

  “Hold on. It’s OK. She doesn’t know anything. I persuaded her I was hitching a ride with a guest. That I got bored, got curious. We’re okay. She bought it. Stared at me with her x-ray eyes and I didn’t say a thing. Told me to scram. I mean she actually said scram. Can you believe that?”

  “Really? It’s just a coincidence that Danton Jr dropped by for a friendly visit. Warned me to stay away from his casinos?”