Aces and Eights

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  Why hadn’t it been?

  Corner Pocket and the hospital and Maxey and all the rest of the distractions had kept me busy, and it would be easy enough to plead force majeure. A case could be made. But both of us would know it was nonsense, and suddenly I was as eager to talk to the testy little pirate as he seemed to be to talk to me. Maybe together we could make sense out of what was happening.

  The corridor leading to my floor in the VIP garage was empty and silent, but I had been surprised more than once on this trip to southern Nevada, and I opened the door to the garage with more than the usual amount of caution.

  Which was immediately justified.

  My rented car was sitting where I had left it, nosed into its assigned stall on the opposite wall, and the only other automobile in sight was a black BMW backed into the space beside it, with the driver’s door ajar.

  Like Francis Carrington Shaw’s limousine, the windows of the BMW seemed to have been fitted with concealing shadow glass, and I waited with the corridor door still open beside me to see just who was behind the wheel while the watchdogs of my peripheral senses came suddenly to full alert.

  The picture before me was wrong.

  Judge Happy Apodaca’s head and shoulders emerged from the BMW, and he nodded toward the passenger side of the car. But we weren’t alone in the garage...and the third person wasn’t in his car.

  Someone—a sentient and malevolent presence—was on the other side of the wall that made a right-angle curve around the angular side of the hotel, about fifteen feet to my right.

  “Down!”

  I shouted a warning to the judge and took two steps in his direction before ducking into a running forward roll that would take me to cover behind his car’s engine compartment. But the words and the action were both too late.

  Happy Apodaca’s move, ducking back toward the safety of the driver’s seat was all too predictable. And fatal.

  Coming out of the roll, I had a single flash-vision of a knife—medium weight, balanced, double-honed—in the air less than a foot from the old man’s unprotected chest. Something extraneous centered on the hilt guard.

  I heard the dull solidity of impact.

  And a single grunt from the judge.

  I moved, wriggling under my car and out on the other side in an effort to be in the wrong place for the next attack. But a moment later another car’s engine roared to life near the spot where the knife thrower had been hidden and a customized Trans Am burned rubber, taking the corner at full bore and continuing on course for the downstairs exit without pause or further aggression. Mission accomplished.

  Swearing at myself and the world, I heaved erect and covered the distance to where the judge had collapsed.

  He was dead.

  The blade had taken him high on the left side of the chest, near the breastbone, making full entry and covering the wound with the foreign object I’d seen on the guard. Playing cards.

  Five of them.

  I didn’t need a closer look to know which ones.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Mirrors show the world in reverse...and this is the way we perceive the image of ourselves. We recognize it. But no one else would. Evil? Wicked? These are terms we apply to others...never to ourselves.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Hope springs eternal. Blood was welling, not spurting, from the wound in Happy Apodaca’s chest, and I spent nearly a minute checking for vital signs—pulse, breathing, heartbeat.

  Nothing.

  More to the point, when I opened my mind to try to find his aura, feel for the wa that could tell me his true state of being, there was nothing to find. Nothing at all. I was alone in the concrete confines of the VIP garage.

  All right, then, Goddamn you...

  I left him staring wide-eyed and sightless at the ceiling and flung myself into the driver’s seat of his car. Keys in the ignition. Good. The engine caught on the first grind and the fuel gauge climbed swiftly toward full while other needles showed me a car ready for work.

  Better and better.

  I slammed the door and said a mental good-bye and god-speed to whatever was left of the little man who had been so tough and shrewd and corruptible. Death is a part of life—a necessary part—and its timing and cause are always less important than they seem. But there is also a fitness to such things. And an unfitness.

  Men like the judge, if they die by violence, should not be denied an honor guard.

  I gunned the overpriced little sedan out of its stall and down the first ramp toward street level.

  National hubris and personal reservation notwithstanding, the Bavarians turn out an almost first–rate automobile, and the one the judge had been driving seemed typical of the breed: overpowered and, at least in its custom sedan version, more than a little mushy around the suspension.

  But you can’t have everything. The car I had rented on arrival at McCarran was a brightly painted little dog stamped out with a Detroit cookie cutter, and with any luck I hoped shortly to find myself in a race with a carefully remachined item intended for long-range road competition. Given my druthers and a week or two for test-drive evaluation, I might have made some other selection. But as it was, the judge’s taste in motor transport was probably the best luck I’d had all week.

  Not that that was much of an endorsement.

  Downshifting and controlling the oversprung four-door without reference to the brake, I learned a little about its likes and dislikes as we negotiated the dozen or so ninety-degree corners between my parking level and the main exit. I have survived a couple of well-considered courses in competition and pursuit driving, and BMWs are not entirely strange to me. But I had never driven the late-1980s sedan before and found that it has a personality all its own. Powerful, and not entirely tame. Like a grizzly bear trained to perform circus stunts.

  The Trans Am was out of sight by the time I reached ground level, but the back end of my mind had been at work on the way down and now it was time to bet the bankroll. Everything depended on whether the fleeing driver was brilliant or merely smart.

  One of the reasons Las Vegas has fewer robberies than you’d expect with all that free cash floating around is the problem of getting the loot out of town. Unless you fancy your chances of getting past security at McCarran International, the only exit routes are the main highways. And there are only two of those: one north, one south.

  The southern route used to sprout from the nether end of the Strip. No more. The Interstate supplanted it and now leads directly into the heart of the city (let’s hear it for the Casino Center Political Action Committee!) and joins the old federal highway a mile or so after the very last hotel-casino appears in your rearview.

  No matter.

  Access is access, and the highway patrol has no more trouble pinching shut the escape routes now than in the old days. North or south, it’s still a dead end.

  In the case to hand, however, I had decided that a brilliant driver would turn left from the parking lot and try to lose his overpriced hot rod among the others of its ilk that would be crowding and elbowing along the Strip at this time of night. The dinner show crowd would be arriving now—dedicated losers prowling for a casino where the tables look hot, plus a small army of local kids cruising just to get a close look at the weirdos.

  If he had gone there, he was home free.

  I would never find him.

  But there seemed a good chance that he was merely smart—in which case he would have turned right, toward Paradise Road, with the idea of getting the Trans Am into the network of back routes skirting the residential side of Las Vegas and then into the desert where the car could develop its full horsepower rating without let or hindrance from other traffic.

  Roll the dice!

  I swung the wheel hard right, kicked the little sedan square on the pavement, and let it have some gasoline.

  Ahead, the way was blocked by someone in a primer-coated rust bucket moving at about thirty miles per hour in a cloud o
f smoke. I jinked left to go around, emerged from the smoke screen just in time to avoid an oncoming truck, and got back into my own lane in the middle of a self-administered lecture about smartass Bible-thumpers who get to thinking they are immortal.

  The intersection with Paradise Road required another decision. Assuming the driver of the Trans Am was only smart instead of brilliant, was he really smart or only half–smart?

  A man with good sense and a moment or two to think would turn left, toward heavier traffic and the anonymity that two or three quick turns into the residential district could give. His car was distinctive, yes, but not unique, even with that custom blower-snout on the hood. Wheels are a hobby item in Las Vegas; something to do in the desert if you don’t want to gamble. He would be among friends.

  But again, I had to bet against the odds. I turned right, following Paradise and then turning east at a likely-looking route into the desert.

  Southwestern access roads around Las Vegas are not many and are not marked at all. The Chamber of Commerce doesn’t really want you to go into the desert if you’re from out of town. It’s for locals only.

  I gunned the little sedan, touched its brakes, gunned again, downshifted, double-shifted, and generally did my best to get acquainted on short notice while following a paved track that an occasional reference to the stars told me was curving gradually away to the south. Booting the BMW into the 90–100 mile range with the engine indicating a steady 4,500 rpm, I did my best to bring a road map of the vicinity up on my memory screen, but was only partially successful. I hadn’t really looked at one for years. There were holes, and I was in one now.

  The last time I’d seen a map, the road I was on had been indicated as an unpaved track wandering off to a dead end at what I assumed—knowing Nevada politics—was the ranch of a big-bucks party contributor.

  Now it was paved. And there were occasional side roads, any one of which could have been a perfect cutoff for the car I was hoping to follow. Land in the immediate vicinity of Las Vegas is flat, but there are enough wadis and other indentations to keep the scenery moderately interesting, and any one of these would have made an excellent hiding place in the stygian velvet that is moonless desert night.

  I was driving on faith, chasing the remote possibility that I had guessed right several times in succession, like a crapshooter riding a roll.

  And that worried me.

  Poker has always been my game, the only one where the individual is not bucking the house but only the other individuals around the table. Blackjack, shimmy-baccarat, and the rest of the casino games all suffer from that drawback, emphasized by the legitimate house percentage that makes long-run triumph impossible. But craps, perhaps because the house edge can be whittled to less than half a percentage point, has always left me especially cold. Chance is a factor in any form of gambling; it must always be taken into account. But the crapshooter—even when he plays the back line and rides the free odds and knows the breakage and manages his money adroitly and comes away from the table a winner—is still just an accident looking for somewhere to happen. He will give the money back soon enough. The excitement of the action, with chip mountains building or melting in seconds, guarantees that he won’t stay away for long. It is an addiction stronger than liquor or heroin or even cigarettes.

  So here I was, coming out on a point. And an eight at that.

  Okay, then: Shoot the whole roll!

  I was already going far too fast, outdriving the little krautwagen’s headlights, but it was no time to drag the bet. I floored the accelerator, and the tachometer needle climbed toward the red zone and the bucket seat pressed into my back. Guts. The car had plenty, and if mine were about to be spread over the near countryside it would at least be a quick end. Watching the speed climb through 110, I found myself entertaining the semi-consoling thought that at this speed a man might easily be killed. But he was not likely to be hurt.

  Where the hell was that Trans Am...?

  Miles passed in a blur, and I forced the considering part of my mind to slow. To walk. Halt and wait. Nariyuki no matsu. Have patience. Await the turn of events.

  Where was he?

  The road curved right and then left, and my hands moved quickly in aid of staying alive, holding the car on the pavement by a combination of luck and good Bavarian engineering. Many more of those and the road crews would be scraping the preacher up with a stick and a spoon. The hand was getting to be a long one; I was rolling numbers, but not my point.

  Monocular vision is no big help for driving of any kind, much less for high-speed night pursuit. Two-eyed people judge distance by a largely unconscious ranging system known as strains of convergence. Those who become single-eyed have to learn that part of living all over again, attacking the problem with a combination of perspective judgment and the minor strains involved in focus. Should the single remaining eye chance to be near- or farsighted, compensation can come slowly, if at all. And even the best-adjusted monoculars find night driving a chore.

  I stilled my center and concentrated on processing what little information came in from the single visual sensor, now locked firmly on the obscurity of the road ahead.

  And suddenly there it was...

  Dim and far. Disappearing from time to time with the vagaries of the desert road. But unmistakably a pair of taillights. Moving fast.

  Eight, the point!

  Coming out again...

  No way to be sure that the lights ahead were those of the Trans Am, of course. Kids trying to scare themselves, maybe. Or a drunk pushing his luck. But I had that come-seven feeling and found myself inching forward in the seat. Trying to give the car an extra boot.

  Gaining swiftly, I thought for a moment of dimming my headlights or shutting them off altogether, but decided against it. The position of the lights ahead did seem to indicate a straight stretch of pavement, but even though he still seemed to be in a hurry he would be back to half or three-quarter throttle by now, not expecting pursuit. Headlights on the road behind would not necessarily seem a threat, unless they did something to indicate a desire for concealment.

  No. I tried to concentrate on keeping the car steady and left the headlights alone.

  Closer now and closing fast. I eased off a little, dropping the speedometer needle back below 100 while maintaining just enough pressure to keep the red twins ahead growing a little. And I tried to get inside the other driver’s mind.

  He thought he had just gotten away with murder. Was he exultant, savoring the sense of omnipotence and power that such an act can produce? Repentant—a killer with a conscience? Or was there no feeling at all? Men who deal death because the fire at their core needs fuel have been a fact of existence since the beginning of time. Familiar, though on no account to be trusted or tolerated. But if the car ahead was indeed a custom Trans Am with a knife-throwing murderer at the wheel, was its driver one of the breed—once rare, but increasingly common in these final years of the twentieth century—who kill because no fire burns?

  Pointless speculation. And it almost got me killed.

  The driver of the other car had spotted me and decided to have a look. My foot hit the brake only a second later than his did, but by that time the distance between us had closed to a matter of feet.

  I had rolled another point. But the hand was still in doubt.

  The car ahead was a Trans Am, and I was close enough to see that there were two heads in the front seat instead of one. The head on the passenger side was turned toward me and my headlights picked out the whiteness of a face that moved quickly toward its window and leaned out to open fire with what looked like the job-lot brother of the mini-Uzis that had been such a problem in the penthouse at the Scheherazade.

  He got off two bursts of three before I could edge the BMW out of the way.

  My luck seemed to be in.

  The dice were still rolling, but it had been a near thing, and I hit the accelerator in an effort to turn necessity into advantage. The sedan was game; revolutions c
limbed toward the red line again and speed came up in a rush. I had pulled to the left and my front fender was opposite the Trans Am’s back wheels. Before the other driver could respond, I yanked my steering wheel to the right and had the satisfaction of feeling hard and effective contact. The Trans Am yawed wildly, skittering on the edge of disaster, and I nosed toward it in an effort to help things along.

  But it was no go.

  This was a desert road; not much shoulder and no drainage ditch at all. The Trans Am pulled wide to the right as the driver regained control and shot back onto the blacktop in a spurt of gravel and exhaust gases. I could hear his blower cut in, and knew it was time to run.

  Skew turns are not a good maneuver for passenger sedans, even when they are made for autobahn speed freaks in Germany. The BMW protested, swayed, and spooked the very edge of the envelope coming through the last few degrees of arc, but I kept my mind on the downshifting and then the racing changes bringing it back to speed, and by the time the world had steadied we were climbing past 100 again, headed back toward town.

  But it was a forlorn hope and I knew it.

  Some people think well and clearly when they are angry, and sometimes I am one of them, but here was an example of just how far a really potent shot of adrenaline can distort the thought processes. Coming out of the garage and speeding across the desert, I had managed to concentrate on pursuit to the exclusion of all else. Two obvious considerations—the off chance that the killer of Happy Apodaca might not be alone in the car, and the question of what I was going to do with or about him even if he was—simply had not crossed my mind. And this was the payoff.

  Craps.

  Pass the dice...

  The Trans Am’s headlights appeared in my rearview. The driver had completed his own turn and would be gaining on me... with his passenger primed to put a well-aimed burst through the rear window.

  Suddenly the loom of the city seemed impossibly distant.

  I put the hammer down and let the little sedan have its head. Nothing could forestall what was coming, but there was a chance I could make it happen in an inhabited area—someplace where there would be people to see and know and remember. Not much consolation. But all I could reasonably ask for now.