Lone Wolf #4: Desert Stalker

by Barry, Mike

  Never carry all the chips in front of you; always keep a reserve. In his left pocket he had at least five hundred left, maybe nearer a thousand, he hadn’t counted, but it was his reserve, all of it and he would rather go broke now playing against this bastard then hold onto it. It all went back to the house anyway. Didn’t it? Didn’t everything go back to the house, sooner or later? He put two hundred dollar chips, two fifties on the don’t come line, then impulsively went back into his pocket and went for all the rest of it, five hundreds as he counted them and a few miscellaneous chips, seven hundred and eighty-five dollars altogether on the don’t come line. Bastards like this, in or out of the world, never made their point. The houseman gave him an encouraging look, winked at him. There were other people on the course, at least ten on the line right now but the communion between him and the houseman Stone thought, the tendrils of connection which seemed to link them were real and special. There were really only three of them at this table: the little man, Stone and the houseman. The heavy woman to his right, the businessmen, glasses gleaming beneath their foreheads on the pass line, the hard little girl with mad eyes who was betting on the field again and again, none of them existed. Mano a mano on the houseman. Stone wondered if he knew that he was playing with Vinelli’s money, if there was some communications network floating down from the big room up there to all of the croupiers, dealers, security men, housemen so that they knew everything about the players before the players even came up to the tables. Probably. Probably it would have to be something like that.

  The little man was back with the dice now. He waved them above his head like a defensive end plunging over the line, brought the dice against his waist, then, with a curious tentative gesture, holding himself back, he threw them on the table, the cannister following. The dice floated, struck, floated again—Stone found himself thinking how such an essentially boring act as the turning of dice became fascinating once you had a stake in it, well say that about most of life—and then staggered to position the table, two fours again, everything falling away from him quickly.

  “Point,” the houseman said and reached out his rake, caressed Stone’s chips and drew them in. The little man, as if he had been some creation of the house rather than a self-propelled human being told the houseman that he wanted to cash in. His movements seemed awkward, like those of a junkie under stress as a matter of fact: why, Stone thought, the little son of a bitch was probably deep into speed or even stronger stuff and here he was now a thousand dollars of Vinelli’s money gone and some of his own funds too. He felt the rage within him but it was almost beside the point: what was anger going to do? The houseman gave him a quick glance and then looked away, behind him, denying all contact. “I always try to get out when I’m ahead,” the little man said and picking up his chips into uneven handfuls staggered away from the table.

  Stone followed him. There was no purpose to it; it was just something to do. Nothing else was in his mind. He had been locked up inside this complicated whorehouse for three days now, three and a half, and was going stir-crazy even though he supposed that his position was enviable, now he had lost not only all of the play money that Vinelli had given him but had gone into his own funds as well and Stone could feel the first edges of panic beyond the age. The situation was getting out of control. It was more and more out of his hands now; when he looked at it objectively he was not a guest in this hotel but a prisoner, Vinelli was not helping him to pass time, sheltering him, protecting him during a bad time but in fact was keeping him prisoner. And it was then that all of the feelings which had been swirling within him for the last few hours suddenly coalesced into a shriek: I’ve got to get out of here, Stone mumbled, passing a crazed old lady who was trying to loosen the handle on a slot machine, I’ve got to get the fuck out of here, passing two bright whores on the day shift who looked at and then right through him, probably knowing as everyone in the hotel seemed to know exactly who he was and what he was doing here. He walked up a winding ramp traced in brilliant orange and green, into a massive hallway where the one-armed bandits and their customers were lined up like urinals and into an elevator with an operator lounging on its seat, sullenly reading a form sheet. “Five,” he said.

  “Five?” the operator said. “What are you going to five for? Your room is on eleven.”

  “Are you a fucking social director,” Stone said. “Take me to five.” He felt his fists clenching. It would be so easy to ram this bastard through the wall, ram all of them for that matter, take them on one by one until the sneers had changed into whimpers, but he could not think that way now. He was in trouble. He was a man in deep trouble, and really Vinelli was trying to help him and if he could not adjust to this it would only be worse. “Fifth floor,” he said more quietly.

  The operator slammed the paper against the wall, stood, kicking dust off a shoe and slammed the gate closed, yanking on the handle. “I don’t think you should go to five,” he said. “The man is busy now.”

  “I don’t care what you think. How do you know who I’m going to see?”

  “I don’t know anything,” the operator said. The car swayed in the shaft, moved above the number six. Cursing he dropped it into position. “I just work here.”

  “Then shut the fuck up,” Stone said as the door came open, “and mind your own business.” He walked out, kicking the horsesheet into the hall. The operator scrambled after it, picked it up and put a hand on Stone’s elbow. He could not have been more than nineteen years old but his eyes were as crazy as the eyes of the women against the bandits.

  “You watch it,” he said. “You don’t mean anything to anyone here; you’re going to get your ass handed to you.”

  “Fuck you,” Stone said, yanking off the arm. “Fuck you again,” and in panorama in his mind could see what might happen next, he could knock down the boy with a heavy right, use his left to yank him again to his feet and then he would give him an old-fashioned PD going-over, the kind that had gone out in the last ten years because of the courts and the press and the fucking pressures in the department but which never, like love, went out of style. That was what he needed but he could not do it. A door was opening way down the hall, little shafts of light spitting out of it, a man who looked like Vinelli peering through that door, apparently having heard something, and Stone backed away. It had been close. Looking at the face of the kid, the way his hand shook as he gathered the sheet against his arm and walked back to the elevator, Stone knew that it had been close. Much closer than he had thought. His control was lapsing, he was not really sure of himself at all, and if he was actually going to go around beating the shit out of the hotel staff how long would he last? The figure down at the end of the hall was gesturing toward him. It was Vinelli. The elevator dropped behind him like the sound of money falling down the shaft.

  It was Vinelli all right and following the curve of the arm, moving toward him now, Stone realized that it was a damned peculiar thing all right. He had come here to see Vinelli, to lay it on the line to the man, to tell him that he could not go with this anymore … but now that his man was there, open in the hall, his arm moving in that florid, commanding gesture as if Stone was another of his lackeys, Stone felt a reluctance tugging at him, a reluctance which was telling him to go the other way or at least to stay rooted at the spot, let Vinelli come to him. The terms of this were all wrong; he had come up here to demand a plan, a set of alternatives, a change … hell, he had Vinelli by the balls, not the other way … and yet now it did not seem so easy. He moved grudgingly, conscious of his footfalls like an old man, seeing Vinelli waver in his vision, becoming larger, a sense of consequence overtaking him then, like a man who was willingly taking his doom … what the hell was happening to him? Three days in Las Vegas, he guessed, could get anyone crazy, particularly someone like Stone who had never understood gambling. Not even now. “I was looking for you,” Vinelli said, gesturing him into the room. “How convenient of you to come right up and save me the trouble of paging. Get
inside.”

  Stone went inside. He was a big man, six feet, two hundred and forty pounds, still in good shape for a man just forty but Vinelli had always given him a sense of reduction even though physically Vinelli was much shorter than he. He guessed—all right, admit it, face up to it now—that he was afraid of the man. There was no disgrace in it, a lot of people were. But somehow he had never imagined himself being at Vinelli’s mercy. It had always been supposed to work the other way. Until last week …

  He walked into the small, bare hotel suite, unmarked, in which Vinelli did his work. No offices, he had explained, nothing elaborate, the stuff upstairs was only for show. He worked on the fifth floor where no one could find him and he travelled light. Stone looked at the bare walls, the spare furniture of the room, such a contrast to the decor of the rest of the hotel and he felt the fear beginning again. Vinelli closed the door quietly and went over to the desk, hovered there rather than moving into the chair. “Been having fun?” he said.

  “No. I don’t like craps or roulette and I don’t understand blackjack.”

  Vinelli shrugged. “Your fucking problem,” he said. He reached into a desk drawer, took out a New York Daily News and tossed it into Stone’s lamp. “Very quiet, huh?” he said. “The whole thing under wraps, right?”

  Stone unfolded the paper and stared at it. He didn’t have far to look; he was a liner on page three: COP TIED TO DRUG THEFTS DISAPPEARS BEFORE GRAND JURY APPEARANCE. His picture was there, a bad one, about twelve years old, from the files, probably when he had been promoted. The story was set in four columns of dense type for the News and broke over to page forty-eight. Stone found that he couldn’t read it. He folded the paper over, feeling nauseous and carefully passed it back to Vinelli. Vinelli raised his hands.

  “I don’t fucking want it,” he said. “You think I fucking want this shit? It was all supposed to be quiet, right? You know what? They got informants tying you to Vegas.”

  “I can’t understand what happened,” Stone said. He tried to keep his voice level, keep his palms flat on the arms of the chair. “There’s no way …”

  “I know what fucking happened,” Vinelli said. He slid into the chair now and somehow this gesture was more ominous than the standing; it brought the man who had an abnormally large torso in relation to his height above Stone’s level, forced Stone to look upwards like a schoolboy being reamed out. “What happened is that you sold me a bill of goods. They knew all along that you probably were heading this way and you dropped the word all over town. So now I got you here and all of a sudden it isn’t a quiet job at all, it’s a big problem.”

  “They won’t find me,” Stone said. “How can they find me?”

  “They’re bloody fucking well not going to look here,” Vinelli said quietly. “You think I’m going to give you room and board while the FBI comes crawling all over my hotel? You’re out of your fucking mind, that’s what you are.”

  “It’s not an FBI matter. It’s just the News. They …”

  “Don’t tell me about the fucking News.” Vinelli put his hands together with odd precision, leaned across the desk, looked at Stone flatly. “We’re not going to play it your way anymore,” he said, “I seen how it goes playing it your way. It’s going to be mine. I want the fucking stuff.”

  “That’s impossible,” Stone said although with an odd thrill, clamping the gut he knew that it was not impossible, it was what he had expected all along. How could it have not come to this? Vinelli was no clown, he was no fool: it was only a matter of time until they had this confrontation and for these three days in the hotel and all the frantic days just before his flight Stone had tried to avoid thinking about it, concentrating only on moving inch-by-inch along some path of survival. But now it had happened and somehow the fact that it had gave him strength. It could not have been avoided and it could not now get any worse. From here on, it would have to be downhill. He had to believe that. “I told you,” he said, “at the beginning, now this is nothing new, Vinelli, you knew from the start, there’s no way I can lay my hands on the stuff until the heat goes down. It shouldn’t take long, a week, a couple of weeks tops before they go onto something else, you’ll see. They have no real lead on me, they wouldn’t know where the hell I am, it’s all newspaper stuff.” He was babbling. This was not coming off as it should. “Just wait a little while,” he said, “until they get onto something else and I can move in on it.”

  “You know what I fucking think?” Vinelli said as if Stone had not spoken at all, “I think that you don’t have the stuff at all. It was all bluff and bullshit so you could talk me into putting you on ice for a while.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Stone said. He concentrated on leveling out his voice, keeping his face expressionless. “I know exactly where it is and how to get hold of it but can’t you see, this isn’t the time …”

  “I’m dumb,” Vinelli said and put his elbows on the desk, tearing little pieces from a blank sheet of paper which had been under the blotter. “A dumb, greedy, uneducated, fucking wop, that’s how you had me figured, wasn’t it? I’d sucker into anything; you said that you could get me a half a million dollars worth of materials you’d figure that I’d trip myself up, fall over my hardon running but even the stupid ones learn eventually.” Vinelli opened his desk drawer again, took out a deadly silver letter opener and ran it casually over his nails in the single most threatening gesture that Stone had ever seen. “The next thing,” he said, “they’ll be crawling all over the fucking hotel. They’ll wind up closing the joint on me for aiding and abetting, Lieutenant, and there are some people above me who are going to be made very unhappy by that.”

  “You’ve got me wrong,” Stone said. He concentrated now on modulated voice, slow gestures, reasonable, easy talk: the same kind of talk you might try with a suspect if you were playing the soft guy on the team and were going in for something final. Once, as a rookie, he had been backed up in an alley by a mob at a public school who thought that he had shot a kid lying on the steps who turned out to have been having an epileptic fit and he had gotten out of that one with this tone of voice. “I can lay my hands on the stuff. I’m not bullshitting you, I’ve never bullshitted you, I can key in on it and I promised and I’ll deliver. But not now, Vinelli, don’t you see? There’s too much pressure on us now. Wait a couple of weeks and they’ll let it die, go onto something else and then I’ll be able …”

  “And give you room and board and fucking partners and two hundred dollars a day gambling money, right? Set you up here in style. You’ll never move.”

  “I don’t want the gambling money. I never wanted to gamble. You told me to go out, have a good time, mingle, get around.”

  “Well that was a fucking, crazy, stupid idea,” Vinelli said. “That was one of the stupidest wop ideas I’ve ever had in my life, letting you move around in the casino. I thought you were clean, Stone. I thought that you were on a leave of absence, that everything here had been managed right, that half of the fucking law-enforcement personnel in the state weren’t looking for you.” His face became clotted, his cheeks pulsing. “They’ve probably got your picture from fifty fucking angles,” he said. “They’re probably tacking them up in a gallery somewhere.” He stood again and his hands were white against the flat, dead surface of the desk. “You’re through Stone,” he said.

  Stone saw it. He saw it in the man’s eyes twice: first in the conviction, the terrible concentration of light coming from them and then, an instant later he saw it another way: as a flash of recognition as something came into Vinelli’s line of sight that he had waited to see. Stone knew with his old instincts that the situation was developing too fast for him to do anything but witness, nevertheless he turned in the chair, saw the two men at the doorway looking at him impassively, the taller of them holding a small revolver pointed at Stone’s temple: the other one, much smaller, smiling, smiling, he had never seen anyone smile like that. Jesus Christ, was that what the man was on the payroll for? To circula
te among the guests and smile. … no, he guessed not, he dodged as he saw the gun being lifted, hit the floor, then turned to Vinelli on his knees, arm outstretched. “For Christ’s sake,” he said, “give me a chance, at least let me tell you where the stuff is. Don’t you want to know?”

  Vinelli shook his head slowly, softly. “No,” he said, “you don’t know where the stuff is.”

  “Yes I do …”

  “You don’t know anything, Stone, you’re full of fucking shit, you’ve always been full of shit,” and then Vinelli smiled too, this just an echo of the terrible smile behind and almost imperceptibly nodded … but Stone caught all of it, knew what was going to happen then. He rose to his feet, tried to get balance, slammed to his knees again and then he felt something like a needle penetrate his temple, opening up inside there like a flower, the flowering needle, the swing of his blood pouring around it and he fell heavily under Vinelli’s gaze, drawing up his knees like an obstetric patient, palpitating, looking at the ceiling through sight that was already failing. Half a million dollars, son of a bitch, half a million dollars there for the taking and now no one would ever take it.