by Ted Thackrey
“The guys they got playing for the house,” he said, “are all like Tank. Not really dumb, y’know. But just not too swift about the cards.”
“So why not use pros?”
Willie shrugged. “Beats hell outa me,” he admitted. “Maybe they just ain’t got enough card pros seen the light and joined the Temple yet—or maybe they figure they giving the guys enough of a edge with not telling the customers the guys are playing for the house, and by letting them raise as often as they need to.”
I thought it over and saw how it might have seemed that way, at least to someone who didn’t have too much experience in casino operations. But I couldn’t imagine anyone with real knowledge of the business letting it happen.
“The people actually in charge of running the casino,” I said. “They must know better.”
Willie’s hands flapped in a gesture of futility.
“Sure,” he said. “They know. And what I hear, they put in their two cents’ worth every chance they get. But that don’t cut no ice with the Master. Nor the angels. Nor with Jackhandle Jack, neither.”
“Jackhandle Jack?”
“Shit, Preacher—they really did send you in blind, didn’t they?” No suspicion in Willie’s eyes now, but his tone said he was sorry for me. “They must really be scared of a leak if they didn’t give you a knockdown to ole Jackhandle. He’s the reason poor old Tank was so scared when he lost. Jackhandle Jack Soames. Some kind of hood from Frisco—heard about him myself when I was up there. Story is he got that name by beating some guy to death with a jack handle just over a business deal, y’know? Anyway, he’s the Master’s enforcer down here now. Head honcho of the angels. See, the way they got it set up everybody in the temple pays his way, right? That means you bring in a hundred bucks a day—one fuckin’ honeybee, no excuses—any way you can get it. Change-hustling tourists at the airport or snatching purses or clouting cars or pimping. Or shilling there at the casino, like ole dumb Tank was trying to do. Whatever. The angels are the ones who lock you out for the night if you come home without at least that hundred. And it’s Jackhandle who breaks your face for you if it happens two days in a row!”
It was enough.
Too much, in fact. An input overload at the end of a long, long day. I needed time to play catch-up with my thinking, and I wasn’t going to get it sitting there with Willie the Ear.
It was still anybody’s guess whether the little snitch would be able to resist the urge to tell someone at the temple about who he’d met poking around the casino, but short of kidnapping him or cutting his throat, I’d given it my best shot. Call the bet and show openers.
Master Masuda would have laughed and called it joss.
But I wasn’t Yoichi Masuda, or even his brightest pupil, and I never saw the joss yet that couldn’t use a little help. So, the best I could do was make a date to see Willie again the following night and go along with his suggestion that we leave the café separately—just to see if anyone followed anyone out the door.
Which was pretty fair joss, at that . . . all things considered.
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
But how are we to recognize the false prophet when he appears—especially if he’s not going to wear a sign?
NINETEEN
Willie left first, and he was alone as far as I could see. But I had company when I paid our check and strolled out into the fog a few minutes later, and it gave me a queasy little sense of déjà vu.
Fun is fun and I like games better than most. But follow-the-leader has always impressed me as a limited pastime, and the earlier session in San Francisco had exhausted its sporting possibilities as far as I was concerned.
This was getting to be a bore. And besides, I was tired . . .
The casino and the café where Willie and I had done our talking were up on the sand berm above the beach, so I took it easy going down the hill, not looking behind me and not bothering to stop for a gawk into store windows along the way. I had spotted a likely looking storefront earlier in the day, and this seemed as good a time as any to use it.
Sound travels well in fog, especially at night when interference from street noise is at a minimum, and I didn’t need the usual device of speeding up and slowing down to be sure I was still being followed when I finally reached the end of Pier Avenue and turned south along the Strand. South Bay City is a late town, but all the bars were closed for the night and we were alone on the beach walk when I finally arrived at the abandoned storefront and used the beam that had supported its neon sign to swing myself suddenly upward and out of sight.
The following footsteps halted at once.
Fog had thickened as we neared the beach, and there was no way the man behind me could have seen where I went. I stopped breathing for a long sixty-count to avoid giving him a clue.
But he was good. Far better than the one in San Francisco. Someone, somewhere, had taken the time and trouble to teach him the art of blind tracking, and the sudden cessation of sound in front of him had set all the alarm bells ringing. He advanced warily on the balls of his feet, balanced for a move in any direction.
The Good Old George padding around my middle left me uncomfortable and off balance, and the fog dampness of early morning made my grip on the beam less secure than I might have hoped. Yet I could comfort myself with the thought that streetlights along the Strand were too widely spaced to give my position away, and I waited with the patience of a man who knows he can see without being seen as my tail tiptoed silently into focus below.
He was of middle height, young and blond in the southern California mold, and I recognized him from the café—which should have put me on guard, because he’d arrived well after Willie and I began our conversation. But it didn’t, and the move when I dropped on him, reaching out with the left foot to tap him smartly just below the shoulder in order to set up the kite aimed at the exposed nerves between right ear and eye was almost leisurely.
All the time in the world.
And the hell of it was, I was still thinking that way even when I sensed the sudden rush of motion behind me and realized we were not alone. Some ideas die harder than others; I was still feeling tough and invulnerable when the lights went out.
It was a long, weary sleep, and the next day started far too early.
And too roughly.
A foot—shod, I noted, in a thick-soled black brogan of double-digit size—prodded my ribs and then tapped tentatively at the side of my face as though checking out the cheekbone for a possible placekick.
“Dumb place to sleep it off, buddy,” a friendly young voice declared. “A guy could get hurt.”
The shoe tapped my face a second time, more smartly than before, as if to emphasize the oral point, and it seemed as good a time as any to sit up. I tried. And failed.
“Oopsy-daisy!”
The cheerful voice apparently came equipped with hands as well as feet; they seized my shoulders and set me upright with an ease that did absolutely nothing for my sense of dignity and personal confidence.
But I let myself be helped, and even then, I couldn’t seem to sit up straight. The world kept trying to lie on its side, and major parts of me wanted to go along with the gag.
“Ambushed,” someone said. “And dumped on the beach like any rube. Nice work, Preacher! Congratulations.”
The voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it, and an effort to locate the speaker ended with my face inspecting the sand at close range again. What’s more, something seemed to be wrong with my right eye. I couldn’t see out of it.
“Crazy,” the unidentified voice spoke up again. “And forgetful. You haven’t had any right eye to speak of since Khe Sanh—unless you count that glass thing. And you don’t count that.”
This time I made a supreme effort and finally managed to place the voice.
It was my own.
“Brain washing around in the jelly,” it said. “Knocked loose from the rest of you and just sloshing around there in the dura ma
ter. No thalamic response, no censoring, no superego. Just the id, running around screaming every damn thing that comes to mind. Wonderful! Remind me to cancel your security clearance.”
That struck me funny and I heard hysterical laughter, which stopped abruptly when I sank my teeth into my tongue.
“Sit up, asshole,” said the voice that went with the black brogans. “Sit up and stick your arm back here. Behind your head.”
I considered the request and decided it was a reasonable one, but the arms still weren’t working right, and what I saw when I tried to look at them distracted me from the task entirely.
The arms were in my lap—and that was a good place for them to be.
Strategic.
Because in that position they constituted a kind of fig-leaf covering for what was otherwise an altogether remarkable expanse of bare skin.
I blinked the good eye a couple of times in what was probably a forlorn effort to change the video channel, but the only real effect was to bring the rest of the scene into sharp focus. And that was not necessarily a plus because it only confirmed my original impressions.
I was seated on a beach, about twenty yards inland from the high tide line, cozied up to the leg of a police officer and just beginning to understand why he was so anxious to put manacles on my wrists.
I was naked.
And I smelled like last week’s explosion in a rotgut distillery.
One way and another, it was starting out to be the kind of day when every small thing seems to go wrong . . .
En route to police headquarters in the steel-screened back seat of a patrol car I discovered, however, that my nudity was not total.
A portion of my chest had been used as a bulletin board.
Handcuffs and my continued problems with equilibrium, added to the unfamiliar angle of sight, made reading difficult, but I finally managed to decipher the tidings that had been inscribed there in grease pencil: “Romans, 12:19.”
The citation seemed familiar, but some essential parts of me were still on a magical mystery tour and we had reached our destination and were out of the car before I got it.
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”
Well, anyhow, this way I wouldn’t have to wonder about why and how. The message was loud and clear.
I had met another angel. And come off second best.
The total want of clothing seemed to make me a kind of curiosity around the police station, and instead of being ushered into the drunk tank after booking I was taken to a room furnished with a chair, a table, an electric wall clock, and a door that could be opened only from the outside, where a denim shirt (too small) and trousers (too large) were handed to me without comment.
And then I was left alone.
The floor of the room was concrete, but the walls and ceiling were covered with sound-absorbent material except for a wire-caged bulb in the ceiling and a jumbo-size mirror on the wall. There was no window. I decided the bugs were probably in the wall covering, and briefly considered making an obscene gesture for whoever was on the other side of the mirror but changed my mind before any of the larger muscle groups could become involved.
Instead, I began taking inventory.
Toes, feet, and ankles responded readily to the usual commands, and the legs had worked well enough on arrival at the station. But the vertigo that had been a problem on the beach was still with me, and I couldn’t shake a somewhat paranoid suspicion that the world had been canceled just an inch or two behind my heels. No worse than a really monumental hangover. Only I hadn’t been drinking.
“Concussion,” I said aloud, “and maybe a little pinching of the cervical disks. But probably no fracture . . . ”
My voice was still living a life of its own.
I suppressed it consciously—an effort that partially confirmed the audible self-diagnosis—and set myself on the path of patience, nariyuki no matsu, to await the turn of events. Extremities relaxed. Major muscle groups relaxed. Body on balance.
Visual stimulus was negligible; I was staring at a blank wall. But I retuned the one working eye nonetheless to the frequency of thought, leaving only a monitor circuit on duty to alert me if anything interesting turned up in the bare little room, and found my way—not without difficulty—to a quiet mountain meadow where low clouds wandered in from the sea, speaking in tongues of light and shadow.
I touched the glowing sky and merged with it, motionless, but aware of moving at the speed of light aboard a planet in a solar system and a universe hurtling through the void of space . . . and rejoined a conversation that had been going on for a long, long time.
The Rebbe from Nazareth had told a joke, and the Enlightened One was laughing.
You could feel his amusement in the blades of grass that were his fingers, and the clouds vibrated in bars of pure color that could also be perceived as sound. I joined in the laughter and felt the balm of healing joy.
But the joke was on me.
“You still don’t understand,” the Rebbe said, turning his face to show me eyes that were of a color unrelated to the spectra of earth. “You invented the game and you are playing all the hands. You don’t like the way it’s going? Change the rules. You’re bored? Make up a new game. I’ll help if you like, but you don’t really need me—and besides, I’ve got a game of my own.”
The Enlightened One thought that was funny, too, and I had to agree with him and the day might have gone happily on forever, only there was an interruption from outside the universe.
The monitor bell was ringing. I had to go back.
But I didn’t say good-bye and the joy of the words went with me, soothing and healing. The game could go on, for a while, at least.
I still wasn’t bored.
The clock said I had been in the little room for nearly four hours when an officer I didn’t recognize came to get me.
Something had changed. It wasn’t in the words he used to get me on my feet or in the careful neutrality of his facial expression, but there was a difference in the distance he kept between us—no invasion of the circle of personal space—and he brought along a pair of paper sandals to protect my feet from the chill of the uncarpeted floor.
But there was a carpet in the anteroom of the office where we were going. And a walnut door instead of the steel-and-reinforced-glass models that guarded other rooms in the building.
And the name of the occupant in gold leaf on the polished wood: Thurloe D. Thurmond, Chief of Police.
The receptionist said we could go right in.
The chief was on his feet behind an outside desk when we entered, and he gave me a moment to appreciate the scenery.
It was worth the price of admission.
One glance around the office was enough to assure even the most casual visitor that Thurloe D. Thurmond was a man who enjoyed his position in the world and didn’t mind flaunting it a little. Walnut veneer walls were decorated with a floor-to-ceiling collection of plaques, citations, mementos, and framed certificates, all attesting to the fame, excellence, and general worthiness of South Bay City’s police chief and the fine body of men he commanded.
The Rotarians thought so. Ditto the Kiwanians and Lions. There were testimonials from the American Association of Chiefs of Police and from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not to mention the Drug Enforcement Administration, Secret Service, and U.S. Department of Commerce. Photographs showed Thurloe D. Thurmond—his uniform graced by four stars on each shoulder and one either side of the collar—shaking hands with the incumbent governor, the mayors of Los Angeles and San Diego, and several well-known sports figures, and grinning into the camera as he embraced a onetime movie star of truly incredible mammary proportions.
But sight-seeing time was over as soon as my officer-escort was out of the room.
“We found some clothes,” he said with the air of a man who doesn’t like to waste time on preliminaries. “Shoes, socks, pants, and shirt, tossed in a trash can a block from where they found you. T
here was a wallet in the pants, with money and credit cards and a driver’s license. But the name don’t match the one that goes with your fingerprint card back in Washington.”
The chief’s voice was a surprise.
He was a big man, an inch or two taller than me and solid in proportion with just the barest suggestion of an incipient potbelly compensated by tailoring of the four-star uniform. But the voice was high and piping, the vocal equipment of a boy soprano not yet arrived at puberty. I wondered, not relevantly, about a possible imbalance in the glands. A thing like that can cause all manner of problems.
“The FBI,” he went on when I didn’t reply, “scratched around and came up with a whole passel of information, though. Plus, a picture.”
He picked up a folder and shoved it across the desk toward me.
“Old one,” he said. “But a good likeness.”
I glanced at it and decided he was right about that. Some police photographers are more proficient than others, and this one was a Las Vegas county jail trusty who had been a truly artistic forger before ill fortune had brought him to the notice of federal and Clark County authorities simultaneously. In a world of winners and losers, the casinos’ loss was law enforcement’s gain.
“They also sent along some of your service records,” the chief said. “From the ‘Nam. Seems like you and me been some of the same places, a few years back . . . ”
I hoped that wasn’t true.
“ . . . which is how come you ain’t fending off the faggots in the drunk tank right now.”
He paused again and looked as though he might want to be thanked, and maybe thanks were due. But they would have to wait.
“Thing is,” he said, “I got my duty to do, you understand, no matter how many fancy gongs you won back then. And you’re looking at two, three misdemeanor charges here that could sure take a lot of the shine off a record like that. Especially for a man of the cloth . . . ”
I think that was supposed to make me curl up on the carpet and whimper—the errant country minister caught in flagrante delicto—and he rolled it out with the smiling aplomb of a game show host consoling the losers. A prince.
