Aces and Eights

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  Doctrine and standard procedure both dictated that I follow with a kite to the back of the head, overloading the tanden reflex center, to ensure sweet dreams for at least half an hour.

  But the exercise had been a tonic for the spirits, and I had no real desire to sit around waiting for him to wake up.

  So I switched instead to basic judo, clamping both thumbs on the back of his right hand and turning it quickly while my foot came down on the back of his armpit. I waited for the first struggle of returning awareness and then applied the extra pressure that would turn the restraining grip into momentary white pain.

  “Let us reason together,” I said.

  The words may have meant nothing, but the tone and the pain did and he relaxed, drawing a deep breath and checking the action to me.

  Good.

  This one had sense.

  “The way it is,” I said, keeping the voice low-key and neutral, “I say that one kick will put your head outside in the parking lot. Do we agree on that?”

  He nodded almost at once.

  Better and better...

  “You carrying?” I asked.

  More hesitation this time, but his answer was the right one: He nodded.

  “I’m going to let you go,” I said. “When I do, I want you to move very slowly. With me so far?”

  Another nod.

  “I want you to take the piece and hold it by the barrel so I can see...”

  I let go of the hand and stepped back just out of range of his arm, but not too far for an effective kick. He rolled over and sat up, facing me, and nursed the shoulder for a moment of silent agony and then moved—with a slowness that was almost exaggerated—to retrieve the little Airweight from its ankle holster.

  Holding its barrel carefully between thumb and forefinger, he pulled it free and then looked back at me for further instructions.

  “The ammunition,” I said.

  No nod this time. But the cartridges fell, one by one, on the carpet.

  “Put the piece back in the holster,” I said.

  He did it.

  “And now do the same for your friend.”

  The look he turned to me was surprised and almost reproachful.

  “Lancelot don’t carry a gun,” he said. “We wouldn’t give him anything dangerous like that. Manny’d never stand for it.”

  I sighed and looked at the sleeping Lancelot.

  Now, wouldn’t you know the poor bastard would have to have a name like that?

  Manny Temple’s suite at the Scheherazade occupied an entire floor of the Sultan’s Turret, and he needed the space.

  Manny liked company.

  We went there as soon as Lancelot’s head stopped bleeding and he was as conscious as he was ever going to get. He still needed a little help with things like remembering where he was and how to get through doors. But his companion, whose name turned out to be Chick, said not to worry. Lancelot had always been like that after a bout.

  I thought that might explain a lot, and might have said so. But by the time it occurred to me, there were other things to think about. We had arrived.

  The front door of Manny’s suite was unlocked—step right in and make yourself at home—but the invitation was qualified as soon as we were inside. A lock clicked behind us, and we were momentarily trapped in a vestibule innocent of all decoration and furnished only with a carefully positioned television camera. Smile!

  The idea, I decided, was to hold unexpected and/or hostile visitors at arm’s length while considering ways and means.

  Well thought out.

  But not especially hospitable, and so there was a moment of shock when the inner door opened on what seemed at first to be a party in full swing. The living room of the suite, or what I took to be the living room—I later discovered that it was merely one of several—was full of men and women standing and sitting in various attitudes of bored relaxation. The bar appeared to be open, and there was the ghost of a scent that told of organic substances in use. Background music, pouring from some unguessable source, was set at a volume too low to be obtrusive but too high to allow eavesdropping.

  The beginning of a pleasant evening in Las Vegas.

  But it rang false.

  Counting the house a second time, I found what had seemed a random assortment of guests developed several noticeable similarities. All of the men, for instance, seemed to be in the twenty-five-to-forty age group, somewhat above average in height and weight, and wearing sport coat-polo shirt-blazer combinations from the same store that provided wardrobe for Chick and Lancelot. The women were younger—late teens to late twenties—but all seemed fresh from the attentions of the same professional makeup artist, and all had been dressed by the same showbiz-opulent couturier.

  “Atmosphere,” Chick said, noticing my interest. “We all work for Manny. But he don’t like for it to look that way, you know?”

  Manny himself was three doors down the hall and access was through another security trap, but we were passed through swiftly and without any words that I could hear.

  Inside, a table was laid for breakfast—Manny’s hours were unusual, even for Las Vegas—but the fresh orange juice and coffee had to wait while he listened to an explanation of the fresh lump and cut on Lancelot’s head, and when Chick was done, Manny’s only comment was to tell them to call the house doctor for a full checkup. At once.

  They left to do it, and he shook his head sadly as the door closed on their retreating forms.

  “Sometime later on today,” he said, “I am gonna kick ol’ Chick’s fat fanny three times around this room.”

  He poured coffee, leaving mine plain but dosing his own with three lumps of sugar from a bowl in the center of the table. I noticed that he was choosy about which lumps he took and filed the information for possible cross-reference.

  “Or on second thought,” he said after the first sip, “maybe not. I guess it was my fault, right?”

  I grinned at him, and he returned it. Almost sheepishly.

  “Yeah, I guess it was at that. All I told the assholes was ‘I wanna see the Preacher.’ I should’ve said be polite. Or, anyhow, warned them about you.”

  I went on grinning.

  “Gentle as a lamb,” I said. “Hope of peace in my heart, brother; the meek shall inherit the earth.”

  He snorted. “Oh, hell yes,” he said. “Six feet of it—with luck, and nobody decides to blow you up like that poor bitch out there at Holy Joe’s Heaven. I saw it on the television, what little they let them show. Shit, Preacher, I met that broad a couple times before she got married and she was okay. Regular, you know? Blowing someone up’s bad enough. But getting the wrong person...Jesus!”

  Manny sighed, slurping another mouthful of coffee and considering the unfairness of the world and its works. But he had raised a point that interested me.

  “What makes you think she was the wrong one?” I said.

  That seemed to surprise him.

  “Chrissake, Preacher,” he said. “Straight broad like that, who’d have anything against her? Enough to want to kill her, I mean. No way, you know? They were after him—the goddam jerked-to-Jesus Bible-pounder. No offense, Preacher. I keep forgetting you’re in that line of work yourself. Or used to be.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve heard worse,” I said, “and said some of it myself. But all the same, why Joe Gillespie? Who’d want him dead?”

  More surprise.

  “Shaw, of course,” he said. “Who the hell else? Francis Carrington Shaw. He made Holy Joe Gillespie and now he’s out to unmake him. Have him killed, just like he wants to kill me...”

  That called for an explanation, but Manny didn’t seem to feel like offering one. He changed the subject. “New game,” he said. “You ready for this?”

  I wasn’t. I wanted to talk some more about murder and Francis Carrington Shaw and Joe Gillespie and related matters. But it was his room and his play, and besides this was something that had been going on between us for a long time.

>   Manny was crazy about proposition bets.

  But only if they were gaffed.

  “This game,” he said, selecting two more sugar cubes from the bowl, “is called Mosca, and it’s an old one, from Italy, the goombahs tell me. To play it, you got to have a fly.”

  With the flourish of a stage musician uncovering a hatful of rabbits, he swept away the napkin that had been covering an inverted waterglass centered on the breakfast table. It contained a single housefly. I put down the coffee I had been about to sip and looked at it.

  Flies are one of the few pests that Las Vegas doesn’t seem to attract in great numbers. I wondered if he’d had to import this one. And if so, how he had phrased the request.

  “Get the balcony door, hey,” he said.

  It seemed a logical enough request if he wanted to keep the fly in the room and I moved to comply, but the door was already closing. A hairy arm belonging to someone standing, not seated, on the balcony was doing the necessary. Security around Manny Temple was even tighter than I’d supposed.

  “What we do is,” he said, putting one of the sugar cubes on my side of the table and the other on his own, “we let the fly go and bet on whether he’ll light on my cube first or yours. Okay? For a honeybee?”

  With Manny, that was always the amount of the first bet. A honeybee. One hundred dollars. Then bump the action when the chump wants to get even.

  Okay.

  I nodded, and he lifted the glass.

  For a moment, nothing happened. The fly didn’t seem to know it was free, and I wondered if it might have been inside there for too long. But Manny waved a hand toward it, and the motion or the air current seemed to wake the insect up. The fly took off and began to move around in search circles.

  “Takes a minute or two,” Manny said, his eyes on the living game piece. “He’s gotta spot the sugar and think it over. Don’t make no sudden moves, okay?”

  I sat still and wondered what a neutral observer would have said about us. Two grown men sitting in a high-tech room in a high-tech building fitted with several million dollars’ worth of high-tech gaming equipment...betting on a fly.

  Only in Las Vegas.

  “Hah!”

  The fly had found the sugar cubes, circled mine twice, but then landed on Manny’s.

  “Way to go, ya little bastard!”

  Manny grinned widely and shooed the fly away. “Go again for double?” he said. “Nobody could gaff a fly, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “But this time, how about we change cubes—I get yours, you get mine. Just to keep us honest, like the fly.”

  Manny tried to register injured innocence, but he was enjoying himself too much. The grin stayed put as he reached out to switch the cubes.

  “Aw, hell, Preacher,” he said, doing his best to sound wounded. “Would I cheat an old friend?”

  “Not if he’s careful,” I said.

  I spotted the gimmick when he switched position of the cubes. He hadn’t practiced enough, and the move turning both of them upside down was still a bit awkward.

  “Double?” he said, hands still on the cubes.

  I shrugged. “Why be cheap?” I said. “Make it five—or a thousand, if you’re game.”

  The grin widened, but then dimmed for a moment. This was too easy. And I had stolen his line. Nothing could go wrong, of course, but still...

  “The guy on the balcony,” I said, derailing his thought train. “You can trust him?”

  The grin evaporated, and the eyes turned sharp. Questions like that are not casual in Manny’s world. They are life and death, and mine had exactly the effect I had intended. Manny couldn’t resist turning away for a long, hard look at the closed door.

  Which gave me plenty of time.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, looking back at me. “Of course I can. Why?”

  “Just wondering,” I lied. “Still touchy, I guess, after all that’s been happening. Forget it. Okay, then—for a dime?”

  There was a moment of blankness while he shifted gears; Manny never liked to mix business with pleasure. But the fly gimmick was too good to forget for long, and a remnant of the grin returned when he settled back into scamming an old friend.

  “For a dime.” He nodded. “A thousand.”

  The fly was already in the air again, and this time it took nearly a minute for the little dipteron to get interested in the sugar cubes. Manny’s concentration was total as it went through the routine inspection runs, and the grin was showing teeth again as the fly finally returned for a close pass at the cube on his side of the table.

  But I had a hard time keeping my own face in neutral when the fly turned away and landed on the cube in front of me.

  Manny was snakebit.

  Words failed, and his mouth opened three times soundlessly before he was able to put his emotions into words.

  “Why, that little motherfucker!” he roared.

  I shook my head.

  “Perfectly good fly,” I said. “Just doing his own thing. Trying to stay alive. The insecticide’s on the top of your cube this time; I turned them both over again while you were looking at the door. What’d you use, DDT?”

  More speech failure.

  And then a huge laugh—which is, I suppose, why we had been able to stay friends for so long. This was the only hood I’d ever met with a real sense of humor, even when the joke was on him.

  “Nah,” he said, waving the fly away and sweeping up the sugar cubes to drop them into the wastebasket. “Something new; not a poison, it just works kinda like insect repellent.”

  “And you put one drop on each of the cubes,” I said, “and then made sure that the smelly side was up on my cube and down on yours.”

  “And switched sides when you wanted to trade cubes. Yeah...”

  The telephone on the breakfast table rang, and Manny stopped talking but didn’t answer it at once. I had a feeling it wasn’t supposed to do that. Manny had people around to answer phones for him.

  But it rang again, and on the third ring he picked it up and listened for a long moment without apparent reaction. Or reply.

  And then he handed the receiver to me, covering the mouth piece with his palm.

  “Francis Carrington Shaw,” he said in a voice made out of high-altitude ice crystals. “For you...”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Identification of the heroes and the villains had become more complicated. Or at least people thought it had. Sometimes you had to deal with a complicated, almost human, character—a good bad guy or a bad good guy. Movies like that were called “adult westerns.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  At first I thought it might be a joke.

  Manny doesn’t always have a glass head, and it occurred to me that the Mosca game with the gaffed sugar cubes might be just a cover for something more subtle. Something involving somebody who could imitate Francis Carrington Shaw’s voice.

  But the first few words—and the temperature of Manny’s eyes—told me I was wrong.

  “You are the one they call Preacher?”

  The sentence was inflected as a question, but it wasn’t one and the paper-thin voice on the line didn’t wait for an answer.

  “I believe that we should meet,” it said. “And I believe that it should be as soon as possible. Do you agree?”

  This time an answer was required, but I wasn’t sure what it should be. Especially in present company.

  “I understand that’s not so easy,” I said. “Something about big healthy-looking guys in white T-shirts who don’t talk much or open doors.”

  The voice made a whispery sound, like moths wrestling, and I decided it was intended as a polite laugh.

  “They talk,” it said, “and open doors when they are told to do so. You will oblige me, sir?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “When?”

  I looked at Manny and tried to guess how long it would take to calm him down and then find my way to the Shaw suite.

  “Ha
lf an hour,” I said. “If you clear the way. I understand you’re here in the Scheherazade...”

  The dry laugh repeated.

  “Another misconception,” it said. “But one that I have encouraged. For good reason. There is, to be sure, a suite reserved in my name at the Scheherazade, but I am not in it. Never mind. I will send a car.”

  Immediate suspicion. We live in interesting times.

  “To meet me where?” I said.

  No laugh this time, but a pause for thought.

  “You are asking more than a location,” the whisper-like voice said after a moment. “And I hardly blame you. Would it be of any help for me to say that the car will pick you up beside the spot where your own rented vehicle is parked in the VIP garage...and that I, too, feel both regret and responsibility for the death of Little Trouble?”

  Well, yes. Knowing where I parked my car and the nickname of the gunman who had died in the attack on the penthouse didn’t necessarily identify my caller as Francis Carrington Shaw. But it certainly made him worth meeting, whoever he was.

  “Thirty minutes,” I said. “In the garage.”

  “Thirty minutes. Beginning now.”

  The connection was broken, and I glanced at my watch.

  “Good idea,” Manny said. “Shaw, he likes things to run on time.”

  The voice was emotionless, but the eyes were still subarctic.

  I relaxed in the chair and tried to get a sense of what was bothering him. The wa was running up and down the scale from hot to cold to hot again, and I couldn’t see why. A telephone call, even from a man you think is trying to kill you, shouldn’t be that important. But the next words gave me a clue.

  “You’re going to meet him—Shaw? In person?”

  Oh.

  “He seemed to think it was a good idea,” I said. “Come along if you like. He’s sending a car.”

  And that got a laugh.

  Manny’s central aura was still confused, alternative between fury and anxiety. But my suggestion seemed to have answered some kind of question for him, and the anger no longer seemed to be aimed at me.