by Jason Ridler
During the pause, Lacey was silent while my heart clenched like a baby clutching its rattle.
“I thought you should know. I . . . I also, well, wanted you to know that you’ve been on my mind. I treated you so poorly, as if you were a common—it doesn’t matter; what matters is that I judged you harshly and I owe you my life. And . . . I can’t stop thinking about you.”
Lace huffed.
“I understand you are working in Venice trying to find who committed this awful crime. As it happens, I’ll be in Venice, too, at the Hilton. My family has a suite that we rarely use, but if you should need a place to work . . . well, I’ll be there. And thank you again, James, for saving my life.”
CLICK.
“‘As it happens?’”
“She almost died today, Lace.”
“So, you going to see her tonight instead of me?”
“As much as I’d like to see you tonight, babe, I’m not seeing you or her or anyone else tonight unless they can lead me to the coward who shoved a grenade into a room full of old men and ladies.”
“Okay, James,” she said, a tad softer than usual. “But one of these nights—right?”
“You bet. Thanks, Lace.”
“You’re welcome. Sorry about your friend.”
She hung up first. She always did.
Now there was a ticking clock in the sky. Connected to magic or not, Cactus was dead in the morning. I wanted my promise to him done before he passed into the nethers.
I pulled myself out of the booth as sirens tore up the main drag. I looked up the beach to where they were headed.
Damn.
I chased the ambulances. They were headed straight for the outdoor gym.
A ring of spectators surrounded the fenced-in gym filled with bronze giants and bleached hair. A collapsed man lay in its center. Most stood stock still while a brunette in a bikini kept hammering his chest. “Come on! Come on, Jack!” She pulled his mouth open and breathed in as if he’d been drowning, as if mouth-to-mouth could replace the breath of life that was escaping.
Two men leapt out of the ambulance, the driver with short salt-and-pepper hair, the other a redhead . . . Arrows! The redheaded guy who’d helped me drag Cactus, kicking and screaming, from death’s door, whom I’d just chatted with.
They reached the body and pulled the woman away. “Let go of me! He’s my husband!”
“Then let us save him!” said Salt and Pepper, shoving her away, and I had half a mind to release the Joker from my front pocket and slice off his eyebrows, but his hands might be needed to save the poor sap on the ground.
Red was already injecting something, maybe adrenaline, into Jack’s veins. We watched the rushed attempts to bring him back, but all of it failed.
When Arrows checked the pulse again, I knew the answer.
There, like a frozen slab of inflated meat, lay the body of Jack Lumber.
“Is he dead?” a kid asked at my side. He and his gang all gawked.
“Of course he’s dead. He’s not moving.”
“But he’s bigger than the Hulk.”
“If the Hulk was five-eight.”
“Easy,” I said to the scraggly kids.
I wiggled my way through the gawkers. “Hey! Arrows! Arrows!”
Red looked up as the ghoulish sightseers shoved him in the back. “You?”
“Yeah. Me. Do you have a sec? Please?”
“Call it in,” Arrows said to his buddy. “This guy might know him.”
“Sure,” said Salt and Pepper, yanking a cigarette from his pocket. “This dude’s not going anywhere.” He opened the ambulance door, got in, shoved the smoke between his lips, and slammed the door.
A muscled behemoth was holding the brunette. She was hysterical. “No! He can’t die! He’s in perfect shape! Perfect!”
I pulled Arrows away from the crowd, but he tore away from me and went toward the woman. “That lady was the last person to have seen Jack alive,” he mumbled as I followed.
“Ma’am,” the redhead asked, “are you his next of kin?”
“Don’t talk like he’s dead!” she said, scarlet fingernail jabbing an inch from Arrow’s eyeball. “Don’t you dare! He’s a machine of health.” The behemoth who held her wore Easy Rider Ray-Bans and a T-shirt on his head like a Boardwalk sheik with a bald spot. “Let go of me, Achilles.”
The name suited him, if the ancient Greeks cared more about bench presses than hacking guys with short swords. “Calm down, Sam. They’re trying to help.”
“You ain’t helping shit!” she said. “Unless you let go, I’ll get a cop!”
Achilles released his grip and held his cultivated arms up in surrender. God, his biceps had to be twenty inches all the way around, as if his thighs had gotten misplaced.
It was only when Achilles backed off that I understood why he was holding on. Sam was beautiful, and that distracted from the power of her build: round shoulders, strong arms, hard legs; this woman was a career athlete and gym rat, not some bunny doting on the boys doing curls. She walked with the force of a hurricane and grabbed Arrows by the shirt with two tanned mallets. “What happened to him? He was fine this afternoon.”
“Ma’am, I can’t say. But his heart stopped, and we can’t resuscitate him.”
Then Arrows’s feet were dangling above the ground. “No way. Not Jack. He was in perfect health. He was a perfect specimen.” I admit I heard the Bard whisper in my ear, the lady doth protest too much. She needed to believe her husband was a paragon of virtue and good living, but something told me the Black Lotus he chewed on the Boardwalk had not been his first taste.
“No need to strangle the nice fella,” I said. “He’s trying to help.”
“He failed!” she said, shaking Arrows, whose face was now cherry-red below his carrot top. “He was too weak to save my man.”
“Especially after he lost to this guy.” Goddamn it. Austen, that miserable toad, was smiling from the Boardwalk, his skateboard hugged to his chest. “He damn near ran him over.”
Arrows hit the ground and I found myself a foot taller as Sam the Bereaved Amazon lifted me closer to heaven than I would ever get on my own. “You were in that race?”
I nodded.
She sized me up. “You . . . beat my husband?”
“More . . . like a tie. Draw at best.” Her hands shook as the crowd waited for her next move. “Didn’t mean harm,” I said. “Especially to such . . . a great wrestler.”
Her eyes softened.
My ass landed next to Arrows with a thud that lanced pain up my spine.
Sam dropped to her knees, chest shaking, tears streaming from her blue eyes. “This was supposed to be his big match. He was getting over with the fans. He was main eventing at the Olympic. Sasha would get her medicine.” She crushed her hands to her eyes. “The child is so sick she can barely walk!”
Pain turned to guilt and it was getting hard to swallow air I didn’t think I was entitled to. Arrows got up, offered his hand. “Please, come with us to the hospital.”
“I can’t! Our babysitter—”
“We’ll drive you to your home,” Arrows said. “You can get your daughter.”
She reached out and clasped his pale and freckled hand. Arrows steadied her and helped her to her feet, then looked at me. “No news on your friend.”
I nodded and knew pressing for details on Jack was not going to gain me any favors. I might even end up in a headlock. As Sam was taken away, the crowd dispersed, including Austen, smug as the cat who got the cream.
“Hey, you!”
I sighed, turned, and stared at the boulder of a human being who went by Achilles. “You knew Jack?”
I nodded, and an idea bloomed in the form of a lie. “From the Northwest wrestling territories. For a big guy, he could wrestle.”
“You heard what Sam said about this being his big night?”
“Sure, brother.”
“Then I’d suggest you do the right thing.”
“You need
to help me out, Achilles, I don’t speak Californian.”
My stunning sense of humor was deflected with a smug look that made it clear I was yet another rube until proven otherwise. Achilles bent and picked up a green gym bag. He handed it to me. “Jack’s trunks. Costume. And mask.”
Uh-oh.
“Before you start making excuses, Jack was doing two shows tonight. But in the main event, he was wrestling as the Assassinator.” He looked me up and down. “Scrawny, but you could make Sam her payday and make sure Sasha gets her medicine.” Around me all the lifters, pullers, and curlers were vanishing to the beach, abandoning what was now a death marker for a “healthy” man whose heart must have exploded thanks to Black Lotus.
I wanted to run in the other direction. Sure, wrestlers had carny roots, but the modern variety was a brotherhood unto themselves. They kept their lives in shadow, secret, and bullshit. If they found me out, they’d chew me up. But that show was the only connection I had to Black Lotus. Maybe Mick Butler would be drumming up business before the big match.
I reached out and took the bag, heavy with gear. “What time?”
“Eight-thirty. Tell Hector that Achilles said you were cool with kayfabe and doing a double for Jack.”
Kayfabe . . . that took me back. It was carny slang for maintaining the illusion that a con—like wrestling—is real. “You going to be there?”
Achilles scoffed. “I’m just security, rube. Now go and make it right.”
Something told me that Achilles’s interest in Sam and Sasha wasn’t strictly humanitarian, and that Sasha likely had the eyes of Achilles. But who was I to judge?
I had two hours before the bout to try and gather more info on Black Lotus. I needed to know what it did. Where it came from. How in hell it had crept out of the Cimmerian age and what in hell it foretold.
Standing on the blistering Boardwalk, a cool breeze shook me. I wasn’t close to any esoterica shops worth a damn. Venice was never a hotbed of magic like the heart of L.A., and what occult roots were buried here were, to the best of my knowledge, dead and gone. And, frankly, herb lore was never my scene. Edgar’s greenhouse was filled with enough poisonous roots and psychedelic worms to make Timothy Leary run home to his mother’s tit before he “dropped out.” I hated when Edgar had me steal flowers from the graves of his former enemies from the worlds of real or stage magic—filching freshly planted marigolds or impatiens under a waxing moon—just to make sure Herb “The Magnificent Moroccan” Harrak had a harder time ascending to whatever afterlife he’d be performing in for all eternity. As for the lore of plants—from witch hazel to woad to Black Lotus—well, that was as enjoyable as reading a terrible pulp novel: both were packed with ancient rites and warrior traditions filled with blood, guts, and glory.
But what this stuff did? How Jack could chew on it like an acid tab and become a berserker of the Boardwalk? What it did to your heart, your glands, your turds? Pretty sure I cheated on that exam. And Edgar didn’t mind. Which meant he knew, he knew I didn’t know shit about Black Lotus and its properties, but he did. And would have shared. And helped me find the bastards who put Cactus in a coma . . .
I spun and ran down the Boardwalk to cat calls of “fruit” and “fairy,” which bounced off me like rubber hail on a rhino’s hide.
In the sea of lobster-red faces and tanned bodies with ass cheeks swinging away on roller skates, Edgar’s sour puss was nowhere in sight and there wasn’t a flicker of his magic in the air.
Until I heard a familiar giggle lofted on a cryptic wind.
“You’re doomed, James. Without me? You and everyone you love are doomed.”
It wasn’t the veneer of malice that coated Edgar’s voice like tar on a jazz singer’s lungs that pushed my button. It was a word that Edgar used, a word that had no meaning to him personally but that he could wield like a hammer against others.
Love. Everyone you love.
I fished through my pockets because I needed another dime for another dame, and without anyone as the middleman. All I had was two hundred from the Rocketeers Sex Club, all in twenties.
Breaking a twenty was as easy as buying a Coke, but—hoping to banish the taint of an odious brush with Edgar with a good deed—I chose a harder way.
In the shadow of a shack selling shaved ice stood a small card table and the world’s oldest waste of money.
“Another winner!” said the dealer, a career beach nut in bronze skin and a tie-dyed tank top that hung off his skinny body like rags on a skeleton. “Michelangelo, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were scamming me!”
The man in front of him was an innocent. A creature born simple and sweet, a child destined to never grow up but, unlike that little shit Peter Pan, not granted magic powers. The air around him tasted of cotton candy, not conjuring.
The asshole with the cards was using this big kid’s good nature as a means to fleece him.
I walked up, face all “gosh-wow” as if this cat in the lounge-lizard suit had never seen such entertainment. “Wow, you must be doing great!” Big Kid looked up at me and smiled, eyes huge, face burned, a badge around his neck telling the world he was “Michael G,” from St. Christopher’s Center for the Mentally Retarded. “I’m lucky!” Michael said, but his eyes kept being pulled to the shack where stuffed animals were displayed. The apple of his eye? A dingy version of Underdog—his red shirt bleached pink—tied with other tacky prizes to a board behind the table.
“Three times,” the asshole said. “Three times he’s doubled his money. That’s a lot of gum drops, Michelangelo! That’s a lot of paint and canvas. One more and you could buy that prize without having to play a single game.” Then the asshole stuck the cash out so the bills fluttered in the ocean breeze. “Or I could give them back—”
“No! Again!” Michael stared at the black cloth on the table as if it was staring back.
This was bad. Conmen rarely let a mark win any hands at three-card monte. But this big kid looked like a payday, so he was playing high risk with a victim in waiting.
The asshole fidgeted with three cards. Each was bent down the center like the roof of a log cabin. He put them down side by side with the care of a master craftsmen laying brick. “You know the rules, Michelangelo. Follow the lady with the nice dark hair—” He lifted one card and revealed the queen of spades. “— and she will grant you your wish!”
“She granted mine,” said a surf dude standing nearby. He flashed a fistful of cash.
“You’ll eat me out of house and home!” the asshole said. The beach bum was surely his shill, building up the idea that this game was legit. Michael glared at the guy with the big wad of cash, as did I, but I focused my peripheral vision on the conman. As we gawked, the dealer made his move.
He palmed the queen of spades and pried one card apart, revealing a second.
“All right!” the dealer said and, with Michael back at full attention, shuffled. “All you gotta do, my friend, is find the lady with the black hair. That’s it. That’s all there is. Which explains why I’m still working the Boardwalk and not in Vegas.”
He was good. Smooth. But I could smell the finger moistener on his tips, the stuff he’d used to stick the cards together and that allowed him to palm them like a magnet on lead.
“Fun game,” I said to the dealer.
“Not for me, I gotta feed my family!” He kept hustling the cards like a juggler.
“Care to make it more interesting?”
His hands never stopped moving. “Always. That’s why it’s fun to be alive!”
“Terrific!” I took out a twenty-dollar bill, creased it like the cards, and placed it on the black canvas with a single finger stabbing it in place. “I bet I can find the queen of spades while you’re still moving your hands. Double or nothing.”
Michael’s ears perked, but all his attention was on cards that weren’t the queen.
The dealer snorted, which had to be a signal. “Wow, never heard that one before!”
&n
bsp; He was using a pattern called the Hindu Diamond, which looked pretty but was meaningless because the queen was now tucked on the back of a shaved card. No matter what Michael picked, he’d be wrong.
But not me.
“Just say when,” the dealer said. I could feel the shill’s shadow on me, in wait, ready to do something stupid in case the dealer had to run.
I smiled. “When.”
As quick as this dealer was, he was low-rent compared to the hustlers who trained me, from Edgar to every talented shill in Oakland working Chinatown to the docks. Plus, Edgar’s isometric training and Dr. Fuji’s muscle-control regimen meant my fingers were spring-loaded triggers for cards, paper, coins, and more. Before our dealer realized he was in a jam, I launched the twenty at his face with a flick.
Even for the most hardened conman, money in the face is impossible to resist. He brought both eyes up to catch the bill as my hand struck out faster than an asp at Cleopatra’s breast, bent the glued cards in half with thumb and index finger, and sliced them back so that the queen of spades was resting on her back in the sun.
When the dealer plucked the Jackson from his eye, the gig was up. He didn’t clench his jaw, but he didn’t laugh about needing a new day job, either. He just held his face, then blinked twice. “Wow. Ain’t that a sight?”
Michael looked confused and sad. I felt like an ass. “Sorry to interrupt your win,” I said to Michael. “Tell you what, since I changed the game, you can get my winnings, minus a dime.” I looked at the dealer, who just realized I’d flushed out his reserves beyond the cash in the shill’s pocket (which might well be counterfeit). The dealer’s eyes were tiny calculators running the odds of escape. I placed my finger on the queen, in the exact same launch position I’d used for the bill. At this distance, I could slit his throat or shave his forehead. “You do have enough to back up the bet, correct?”
The dealer stole one glance at my finger and saw my little green ring. A slice of flash to distract the rubes, and, right now, make it clear that if he screwed with me he’d be in a world of hurt. He smiled and nodded. “Of course. I’m a legitimate businessman.”
