The Best of Lucius Shepard

by The Best of Lucius Shepard (v5. 5) (epub)

  She held my eyes for a second, then sat up, rehooked her bra and tugged down her T-shirt.

  “Maybe I do,” she said. “Maybe I find them a vast improvement.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that. I was just…”

  “What did you mean?”

  “It was frustration talking.”

  “Don’t you think I’m frustrated, too? I could probably find an insult to toss at you if I wanted.”

  I could have pointed out that she was the cause of her own frustration, but I’d already dug myself a hole and saw no good reason to pull the dirt down on top of me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I truly am.”

  “It’s not important,” she said icily. “I’ve heard it before.”

  She flung herself off the bed.

  “Jo,” I said despairingly.

  “Oh,” she said, stopping in the doorway. “I nearly forgot. Your employer has a message for you. He’ll be arriving in three days. Maybe you’ll find his company less perverse than mine.”

  I wasn’t accustomed to viewing myself as an employee, and it took me a hiccup to translate the term “your employer” into the name Billy Pitch. I’d been anticipating his arrival, but the news was a shock nonetheless. My dalliance with Jo, brief and unsatisfying as it was, had placed our time on the island in the context of a courtship, and I needed to reorder my priorities. I knew I had to tell Billy everything—he had likely already heard it and our first conversation would be a test of my loyalty—and I would have to put some distance between Jo and me. You might have thought this would be an easy chore, given the state of the relationship, yet I was down the rabbit hole with her, past the point where longing and desire could be disciplined. Even my most self-involved thoughts were tinged with her colors.

  Like advance men for pharaoh, Billy Pitch’s retinue arrived before him. Security people, chef, barber, bed fluffer, and various other functionaries filtered into the compound over the next day and a half. A seaplane brought in Billy the following morning and, after freshening up, accompanied by an enormous bodyguard with the coarse features of an acromegalic giant, he swept into the foyer of the main wing, the most grotesquely decorated room of all, dominated by a fountain transplanted from nineteenth-century Italy, with floors covered by pink and purple linoleum and vinyl furniture to match. It had been over a year since I had seen Billy in the flesh, but I had known him for almost a decade and he had always seemed ageless in a measly, unprepossessing way—I was thus pleased to note a pair of bifocals hanging about his neck and that his fringe of hair was turning gray. He wore a garish cabana set that left his bony knees and skinny forearms bare. The outfit looked ridiculous, but amplified his air of insectile menace. He directed a cursory glance toward Pellerin, sitting on a plum-colored sofa, but his gaze lingered on Jo, who stood behind him.

  “My, my! Aren’t you the sweet thing?” Billy wagged a forefinger at her. “Who’s she remind me of, Clayton?”

  The bodyguard, a mighty android in a blue silk T-shirt and white linen jacket, rumbled that he couldn’t say, but she did look familiar.

  “It’ll come to me.” He tipped his head pertly to one side and said to me, “Let’s talk.”

  He led me into a room containing a functional modern desk and chairs and one of the ubiquitous flat screens, where I delivered my report. When I had done, he said, “Good job. Very good job.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Do you believe her? You think that boy is a miracle worker? Or you think maybe that girl in there’s gone crazy.”

  “It sounds crazy,” I said. “But everything I’ve seen so far backs her up.”

  He nodded like he wasn’t so much agreeing with me, but rather was mulling something over. “Let me show you a piece of tape I landed. Part of the Ezawa project at Tulane. The sound’s no good, but the picture speaks volumes.”

  He switched on the TV and the tape began to play. The original of the tape had been a piece of film. It had an old-fashioned countdown—10, 9, 8, etc.—and then the tape went white, flickered, and settled into a grainy color shot of an orderly removing electrodes from the chest of a man wearing a hospital gown. He appeared to be semi-conscious and was sitting in a wheelchair. Rail-thin, with scraggly dark hair and rawboned hillbilly face. A woman in a nurse’s uniform came into view, her back to the camera, and there was a blurt of sound. The legend “Tucker Mayhew” was briefly superimposed over the picture. Another blurt of sound, the woman speaking to the orderly, who left the room. Then the woman moved behind the wheelchair and I saw it was a younger, less buxom Jo, her make-up so liberally applied as to seem almost grotesque.

  Billy asked why the heavy make-up and I replied, “She said they don’t see very well at first. Must be to help with that.”

  Jo began to touch the man’s shoulders and neck. Initially he was unresponsive, but soon the touches came to act like shocks on him, though he was still out of it. He twitched and stiffened as if being jabbed with needles. His eyelids fluttered open and his eyes showed green flashes, already brighter than Pellerin’s.

  “The part where she’s touching him went on longer,” Billy said. “I had it edited down.”

  The man’s eyes opened. Jo left off touching him and moved away. He gaped, glanced around, his face a parody of loss. Jo spoke to him and he located her again. The change in his expression, from woebegone to gratified, was so abrupt as to be laughable. The sound came and went in spurts, and what I could hear was garbled, but I caught enough to know she was teasing out his life story, one he was inventing in order to please her, one that fit the absence in his mind. His eyes tracked her as she performed movements that in their grace and ritual elegance reminded me of Balinese dancers, yet had something as well of the blatant sexuality of bartop strippers you see in clubs on the edge of the Quarter. She passed behind the wheelchair and again touched him on the back of the neck.

  Billy paused the tape. “There. Look at that.”

  The man had his head back and mouth open, searching for Jo, and she was about to touch him again, her long fingers extended toward the nape of his neck. Her smile was, I thought, unreadable, yet the longer I stared at it, the more self-satisfied it seemed. The image trembled slightly.

  “Anybody doing that job is going to look bad from time to time,” I said.

  “But that’s the job she does, honey,” Billy said. “You can’t get around that.” He unpaused the tape and muted the sound. “Know what it puts me in mind of? Those women who marry men on death row. It’s all about being in control for them. They control the visits, letters…everything. They don’t have to have sex, yet they have all the emotional content of a real relationship and none of the fuss. And it’s got a built-in expiration date. It’s a hell of a deal, really. Of course our Miz Verret, she took it farther than most.”

  A jump in the film, another edit. The man’s eyes blazed a fiery green that appeared to overflow his sockets. His coordination had improved, he made coherent gestures and talked non-stop. He struggled to stand and nearly succeeded, and then, after making an obviously impassioned statement, he fell back, dead for the second time. Jo stood beside the body for almost a minute before closing his eyes. A faint radiance shone through the lids. An orderly removed the body as Jo made notes on a clipboard. The screen whited out and another countdown started. Billy switched off the TV.

  “Forty-seven minutes,” he said. “Scratch one zombie. You got to be careful around that girl.”

  “Billy, I was—”

  “I know. You were trying to get a little. But I’d hate to see you screw this up over a piece of ass.” His voice acquired a pinched nastiness. “Especially since the bitch is such a freak!” He peered at me over the top of his glasses, as if assessing the impact of his words. He sighed. “Let’s go have a chat with them, shall we?”

  We went back into the living room. Clayton and the other bodyguard stood at ease. Billy took a chair opposite the sofa where Pellerin was sitting and I hovered at his shoulder. Behind Pelle
rin, Jo tried to make eye contact with me, but I pretended not to notice.

  “Mister Pellerin,” said Billy. “I have a question for you.”

  Pellerin looked at me and said, “This dab of cream cheese is the badass you warned us about?”

  “Clayton?” said Billy. “Would you mind?”

  Two strides carried Clayton to the sofa. He backhanded Pellerin viciously, knocking his sunglasses off. Jo shrieked and Clayton stood poised to deliver another blow.

  “In the stomach,” Billy said.

  Clayton drove his fist into Pellerin’s belly, and Billy signaled him to step back. Jo hurried around the couch to minister to Pellerin, who was trying to breathe, bleeding from a cut on his cheek.

  “I’m not a very good businessman,” said Billy sadly. “I let things get personal. I miss out on a lot of opportunities that way, but I’ve learned if you can’t have fun with an enterprise, it’s best to cut your losses. Do you need a moment, Mister Pellerin?”

  “You could have killed him!” Jo said, glancing up from Pellerin.

  “Precisely.” Billy church-and-steepled his fingers. “Your boy there’s a valuable commodity, yet because of my intemperate nature I might have done the unthinkable. Do we understand each other? Mister Pellerin?”

  Pellerin made a stressed yet affirmative noise.

  “Good. Now…my question. Is your ability such that you can control the play of seven or eight good card players so as to achieve a specific result?”

  With considerable effort, holding his belly, Pellerin sat up. “How specific?”

  “I’d like you to arrange it so that you and a certain gentleman outlast all the rest, and that he have a distinct advantage in chips at that point. Let’s say a four to one advantage. Then I’d like you to beat him silly. Take all his chips as quickly as you can.”

  “That’s risky,” said Pellerin. “The guy could get a run of great cards. It’s hard playing heads-up from that far down. You can’t bluff effectively. Why do you want me to do it that way? If you let me play my game, I can guarantee a win.”

  “Because he’ll want the game to continue if he thinks you lucked out. He’ll offer you a check, but you tell him it’s cash or nothing.”

  “What if he—” Pellerin began, and Billy cut him off: “No what-ifs. Yours not to wonder why, yours but to do or die.” He looked to Clayton. “Is that Byron?”

  “Tennyson,” said Clayton. “‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’”

  “Yes, of course!” He gave himself a pretend-slap for having forgotten. “Well. Can you do the job, Mister Pellerin?”

  “I’ll need a little luck, but…yeah. I guess I can do it.”

  “We all need a little luck.” Billy popped out of the chair. “You’ll be leaving for Fort Lauderdale day after tomorrow. The Seminole Paradise Casino. I’ll have my people watching, so don’t worry about anything untoward. You will be closely watched. I’ll give Jack the details. He can tell you all about it.”

  He walked away briskly, but then he turned and pointed at Jo. “I got it! Big Brother All-Stars. The seventh season. You remember, Clayton?”

  Clayton said, maybe, he wasn’t sure.

  “Come on, man! Erica. The tall bitch with the big rack. She played the game real sneaky.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Clayton. “Yeah, I can see it.”

  The Seminole Paradise Hard Rock Hotel and Casino was a hell of a mouthful for what amounted to your basic two-hundred-dollar-per-room Florida hotel complete with fountain display and an assortment of clubs and bars notable for the indifferent quality of their cuisine and the bad taste evident in their decor. Particularly annoying was Pangaea, a club decorated with “authentic tribal artifacts” that likely had been purchased from a prop supply company. The entire complex was a surfeit of fakes. Fake breasts, fake smiles, fake youth, fake people. Why anyone would choose such a place to put a dent in their credit cards, I’ll never know—maybe it offered them the illusion that they were losing fake money.

  We went down to the casino early the same afternoon we checked in, and Pellerin nabbed a chair at one of the poker tables. I watched for a while to ascertain whether he was winning—he was—and went for a stroll. I wanted to see how far my leash would stretch. There were several men hanging about who might be Billy’s people and I was interested to learn if any of them would follow me. I also wanted to get clear of the situation and gain some perspective on things. Once I reached the entrance to the grounds, I turned right and walked along the edge of the highway, working up a sweat in the hot sun, until I came to a strip mall with about twenty-five or thirty shops, the majority of them closed. It was Sunday in the real world.

  A Baskin-Robbins caught my eye. The featured flavors were banana daiquiri and sangria. Sangria, for fuck’s sake! I bought two scoops of vanilla by way of protesting the lapsed integrity of ice cream flavors and ate it sitting on the curb. I tried to problem-solve, but all I did was churn up mud from the bottom of my brain. The assignment that had been forced upon us—upon Pellerin—was to attract the interest of a wealthy developer named Frank Ruddle, an excellent poker player who frequented the Seminole Paradise. Pellerin’s job was to play sloppy over the course of a couple of weeks. That way he would set himself up as a mark and Ruddle would invite him to the big cash game held each month at his Lauderdale home. According to Billy’s scenario, once Ruddle went bust, he would feel compelled to open his vault in order to obtain more cash. At this point Billy’s people would move in on the game. He wanted something from that vault. I thought it might be more of a trophy than anything of actual value, and that his real goal was purely personal. The plan was paper-thin and smacked of Billy at his most profligate. There were a dozen holes in it, a hundred ways it could go wrong, but Billy was willing to spend our lives for the chance to gain a petty victory. Had the aim of the exercise been to secure the item at any cost, it could have been far more easily achieved. That he was willing to squander an asset with (if Jo were to be believed) unlimited potential was classic late-period Billy Pitch. If we failed, it was no skin off his butt. He’d wait for his next opportunity and while away the hours throwing Tanqueray parties for his fellow reality-show addicts. And if we succeeded, he might decide that his victory would not be secure so long as we were alive. I saw a couple of outs, but the odds of them working were not good.

  Across from the mall lay a vacant lot overgrown with weeds, sprinkled with scrub palmetto, and adjoining it was another, larger lot that had been cleared for construction, the future site of LuRay Condominiums—so read a sign picturing a peppy senior citizen couple who seemed as pleased as all get out that they would soon be living next door to a casino where they could blow their retirement in a single evening. Farther along was a cluster of tiny redneck dwellings set among diseased-looking palms. Squatty frame houses with shingle roofs and window-unit air conditioners and front yards littered with sun-bleached Big Wheels and swing sets. They looked deserted, but each of them harbored, I imagined, a vast corpulent entity with dyed hair and swollen ankles, who survived on a diet of game shows and carbohydrates, and went outside once a day to check the sky for signs of the Rapture. Now and then a car zipped past and, less frequently, one pulled into the mall and disgorged a porky Florida Cracker family desirous of some Burger King or a couple of bare-midriffed Britney Spears clones in search of emergency eyeliner.

  This dose of reality caused the mud to settle, the sediment to wash from my thoughts, but clarity did not improve my prospects. I tossed my trash into a bin. Zombie hold ’em players and doe-eyed ladies who were a little damaged…I wanted that crap out of my head, I wanted things back the way they had been. Small Time. That was me. Yet I was content with my small-time life. I was adept at it, I was pleased with my general lack of ambition. Tentatively, I gave the trash bin a kick. It quivered in fear, and that inspired me to unload on it. The bin rolled out into the parking lot and I kept on kicking it. I crushed its plastic ribs, I flattened it and squeezed out its soggy paper-and-crumpled-p
lastic guts. Inside the Baskin-Robbins, people stared but didn’t appear terribly alarmed. They were accustomed to such displays. Heat drove men insane in these parts. The manager took a stand by the door, ready to defend his tubs of flavored goo, but the moment passed when I might have stormed his glassed-in fortress and engendered the headline “Five Dead in Baskin-Robbins Spree Killing—Louisiana Native Charged in Crime.” I strode out to the highway, fueled by a thin, poisonous anger, and was nearly struck by a speeding Corvette that veered onto the shoulder. Dizzy with adrenaline, I gazed off along the road. Despite the vegetation, I felt I was on the edge of a desert. Weeds stirred in a fitful breeze. One day the Great Sky Monkey, sated with banana daiquiri ice cream, would drop down from the Heavenly Banyan Tree to use the place for toilet paper. I tried to calm myself, but everywhere I cast my eye I saw omens and portents and outright promises of doom. I saw a wine bottle shattered into a spray of diamonds on the asphalt, I saw a gray-haired man poking his cane feebly at a dead palm frond, I saw a sweaty twelve-year-old girl with a mean, sexy face pedaling her bicycle full tilt toward me, and I saw a black car with smoked windows idling beside a dumpster under the killing white glare of the sun.

  Frank Ruddle looked like an empty leather gym bag. He had recently lost a great deal of weight, something he proclaimed loudly and often, and his skin had not tightened sufficiently to compensate. Forty-something; with thinning blond hair and a store-bought orange tan and a salesman’s jaunty manner; these attributes—if attributes they were—had been counterbalanced by dewlaps, jowls, and an overall lack of muscle tone. His outfits always included some cranberry article of clothing. A tie, a pair of slacks, a shirt. I assumed this was his lucky color, for it was not a flattering one, serving to accent his unhealthiness. At the tables, prior to making a bold play, he was in the habit of kissing a large diamond signet ring. He appeared to have taken a shine to Pellerin, perhaps in part because Pellerin was an even unhealthier specimen than he, and, when sitting at the same table, he would applaud Pellerin’s victories, including those won at his expense, with enthusiasm.