Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  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 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 Pellerin, 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 has 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 chum 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 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 eye liner.

  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-plastic 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.

  “Damn!” he would say, and give an admiring shake of the head. “I didn’t see that coming.”

  Pellerin, in heads-up play, let Ruddle win the lion’s share of the pots and took his losses with poor grace. Watching him hustle Ruddle was like watching a wolf toy with a house pet, and I might have felt sorry for the man if I had been in a position to be sympathetic.

  We had been at Seminole Paradise ten days before Ruddle baited his hook. As Pellerin and I were entering the casino in the early afternoon, he intercepted us and invited us for lunch at the hotel’s fake Irish pub, McSorely’s, a place with sawdust on the floor, something of an anomaly, as I understood it, among fake Irish pubs. Pellerin was in a foul mood, but when he saw the waiter approaching, a freckly, red-headed college-age kid costumed as a leprechaun, he busted out laughing and thereafter made sport of him throughout the meal. The delight he took from baiting the kid perplexed Ruddle, but he didn’t let it stand in the way of his agenda. He buttered Pellerin up and down both sides, telling him what a marvelous player he was, revisiting a hand he had won the night before, remarking on its brilliant disposition. Then he said, “You know, I’m having some people over this weekend for a game. I’d be proud if you could join us.”

  Pellerin knocked back the dregs of his third margarita. “We’re going to head on to Miami, I think. See what I can shake loose from the casinos down there.”

  Ruddle looked annoyed by this rebuff, but he pressed on. “I sure wish you’d change your mind. There’ll be a ton of dead money in the game.”

  “Yeah?” Pellerin winked at me. “Some of it yours, no doubt.”

  Ruddle laughed politely. “I’ll try not to disappoint you,” he said.

  “How much money we talking here?”

  “There’s a five hundred thousand dollar buy-in.”

  Pellerin sucked on a tooth. “You trying to hustle me, Frank? I mean, you seen me play. You know I’m good, but you must think you’re better.”

  “I’m confident I can play with you,” Ruddle said.

  Pellerin guffawed.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Ruddle.

  “I once knew a rooster thought it could run for president ’til it met up with a hatchet.”

  Ruddle’s smile quivered at the corners.

  “Shit, Frank! I’m just joshing you.” Pellerin lifted his empty glass to summon the leprechaun. “This is a cash game, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “What sort of security you got? I’m not about to bring a wad of cash to a game doesn’t have adequate security.”

  “I can assure you my security’s more than adequate,” said Ruddle tensely.

  “Yeah, well. Going by how security’s run at the Seminole, your idea of adequate might be a piggybank with a busted lock. I’ll send Jack over to check things out. If he says it’s cool, we’ll gamble.”

  I sent Ruddle a silent message that said, See what I have to put up with, but he didn’t respond and dug into his steak viciously, as if it were the liver of his ancient enemy.

  Somehow we made it through lunch. I pushed the small talk. Movies, the weather…Ruddle offered curt responses and Pellerin sucked down margaritas, stared out the window and doodled on a napkin. After Ruddle had paid the check, I steered Pellerin outside and, to punish him, dragged him on a brisk walk about the pool. He complained that his legs were hurting and I said, “We need to get you in shape. That game could go all night.”

  I walked him until he had sweated out his liquid lunch, then allowed him to collapse at a poolside table not far from the lifeguard’s chair. They must have treated the water earlier that day, because the chlorine reek was strong. In the pool, a huge sun-dazzled aquamarine with a waterfall slide at its nether end, packs of kids cavorted under their parents’ less-than-watchful eyes, bikini girls and speedo
boys preened for one another. Close at hand, an elderly woman in a one-piece glumly paddled along the edge, her upper body supported by a flotation device in the form of a polka-dotted snail. The atmosphere was of amiable chatter, shrieks, and splashings. A honey-blond waitress in shorts and an overstrained tank top ambled over from the service bar, but I brushed her off.

  “You got a plan?” Pellerin asked out of the blue.

  “A plan? Sure,” I said. “First Poland, then the world.”

  “If you don’t, we need to start thinking about one.”

  I cocked an eye toward him, then looked away.

  “That’s why I played Ruddle like I did,” Pellerin said. “So you could get a line on his security.”

  “We do what Billy tells us,” I said. “That’s our safest bet.”

  Three boys ran past, one trying to snap the others with a towel; the lifeguard whistled them down.

  “I did have a thought,” I said. “I thought we could tell Ruddle what Billy’s up to and hope he can protect us. But that’s a short-term solution at best. Billy’s still going to be a problem.”

  “I like it. It buys us time.”

  “If Ruddle goes for it. He might not. I’m not sure how well he knows Billy. He might be tight with him, and he might decide to give him a call.”

  A plump, pale, middle-aged man wearing a fishing hat and bathing trunks, holding a parasol drink, negotiated the stairs at the shallow end of the pool, stood and sipped in thigh-deep water.

  “I’ll check out Ruddle’s security. It may give me an idea.” I put my hands flat on the table and prepared to stand. “We should look in on Jo before you start playing.”

  Pellerin’s lips thinned. “To hell with her.”

  “You two got a problem?”

  “She lied to me.”

  “Everyone fibs now and again.”

  “She lied about something pretty crucial.”

  I suspected that Jo had told him he hadn’t always been Josey Pellerin. “Mind if I ask what?”