Texas Hold'em

by Wild Cards Trust

  This I tossed in Blood’s nose, open mouth, and hound-dog eyes. My power doesn’t work just on literal dust; all it has to be is what you call your fine particulate matter. I reckon this was mostly human dander and dust mites, which sounds disgusting, but that might not matter much to some poor son of a one cursed by the wild card to be as much dumb animal as man. What did matter to him was that he started sneezing and choking violently, and left off trying to bite Candace to dab at his own eyes and whimper.

  She got her feet up against his chest and heaved him right off her. She got up smart quick, then, but swayed.

  “Dumb cunt don’t know when you’re beat,” Buck said, and pulled out a gun. A snub-nosed .38 of some kind. Not my first choice, or second, and he held it down by his hip, which is second worse only to holding it sidewise for hitting what you think you’re shooting at. That didn’t make him any less deadly. Especially since he struck me as none too tightly wrapped.

  So here we were: Candace too woozy to Dark him. Me needing a minute or so to recharge the mental batteries to go foraging for more dust. Billy apparently still losing whatever mind he had in buckets over the admittedly unsettling and unhappifying appearance of Blood.

  And Mindy-Lou, all six feet of her in her little short Catholic schoolgirl–looking skirt and blouse, brown pigtails flying, said, “Fuck this,” rared up, and fetched Buck a mighty clout over the ear with a wooden chair.

  Somehow Buck managed not to trigger off a shot as he went down in a heap of busted-up chair parts, a lucky man it was too cheap-ass to cave in his skull. He also managed to keep a hold of his snubby. He was moaning and stirring his limbs vaguely, like a drunk penguin, even before he finished sitting down hard on his skinny butt.

  “Good job,” I said, grabbing Mindy-Lou by the wrist and towing her in the direction of the still-open door. Fortunately, the Valkyrie fury, if that’s a thing Latinas can catch, had drained right out of her. She came along docile as a puppy.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “That was supposed to knock him out.”

  “That’s just movies,” I said, as we emerged from the hot and dim of the motel room to the hot and bright of late afternoon. “Reckon you gave him a concussion, though, that makes you feel better.”

  The RAV4 was unlocked and running, which of course meant the keys were in. Candace seemed to have wanted a quick getaway more than she worried about getting her car stolen. My car. Which she had stolen. Easy come, easy go, I guess.

  I bundled Mindy-Lou any which way into the passenger seat, trying not to pay an unseemly amount of attention to bare brown legs that looked as long as all of me. I vaulted the hood, which made my durned back twing but looked boss, I’m just sure, and ducked behind the wheel. Which was blistering hot, of course. Apparently Candace’s limited driving experience had not clued her in to things like sunshades.

  “Ow, ow, ow,” I whined as Candace yanked the right-side rear door open and literally dove across the seats. She got herself righted just as a second, longer person folded himself into the other side.

  “Shut the door!” I yelled at Billy Rainbow as I screamed Baby in a backward arc, shifted, and sent her squealing and bouncing across the cracked and weed-sprung asphalt parking lot toward the street. “And what is he doing here?”

  “The exit’s that way,” Mindy-Lou said, pointing off to my left and waving her hand in front of my face in the process.

  “Irrelevant.” We bounced over the curb, I screeched us more or less parallel with the road, and off we went.

  “Why are you turning here?” Candace demanded as I hung the second left on two wheels, between a warehouse with a forklift parked outside and a strip club that looked as if it had been closed for years.

  “Getting out of line of sight of those clowns who walked in on our cozy little soiree. I don’t want ’em dropping through the roofs in our laps.”

  “Helps if he shoots at us, too,” offered Billy, who had recovered his composure smart quick out of Blood’s presence. Though Buck had about as much chance to hit us if he threw that snubby.

  “So what was all that back there about?” I gobbled. “Who were those guys? Is everybody an ace these days?”

  “Was that a Dr. Strangelove reference?” Billy asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Well,” Candace said, tentative for once, “perhaps I didn’t tell you the whole story of who I’m working for.”

  “Which is to say?”

  “The record label that’s so hot to sign Mindy-Lou is owned by the Syndicate. So am I, you might say. And those two connards back there.”

  “What?” Mindy-Lou and I said at once. I was still driving around at random. If I got lost, Google Maps remembered where I-10 was. I had faith.

  “Fuck,” said Billy. He seemed pretty quick on the uptake for such a dedicated screwup. “We are so fucked.”

  “I am fucked,” Candace said.

  Beside me, Mindy-Lou burst into tears.

  Little as I could blame the child, current events considered, it did nothing to help my considerably frazzled composure. “Listen,” I said over her wailing. She had a good voice even doing that. “I think we all need to sit down together, calm right the heck down, and talk about all this in a rational matter.”

  “So says the big, strong cowboy,” Candace sneered. Which was unfair, since I am by no means big. I like to think of myself as average height for an American. Plus I’m a wiry little lagarto, as my grandma likes to say. “Why didn’t you shoot him? You’re an American. This is Texas. Where is your gun?”

  Why, it’s right there in the glove compartment in front of our Ms. Gutiérrez, I thought. Where you never bothered checking. I had, though, right quick before walking into that motel room.

  “We still need to deliver Mindy-Lou back to the contest without raising a public ruckus,” I said. “If I shot him, no matter how justified, a mighty ruckus would ensue. So far the police still don’t care enough to connect the dots on our little petty crime spree. Somebody dead on the floor around a bullet wound would change that pronto. So we need to think in terms of less drastic solutions. Or at least less noisy ones.”

  “Take her back?” Billy chirped up from the back seat. “So you’re kidnapping her? Cool!”

  That brought us a moment of blessed silence. Mindy-Lou gave off sniffling and sobbing to stare at Candace and me with big, brown, deer-in-headlight eyes.

  “That … depends,” I said. “Now everybody please pipe down while I figure out a place we can light without attracting any more unwanted attention.”

  “First things first,” I said, as we all tucked into the bags of McDonald’s we had set before us on the weathered wood picnic table tucked away in a corner of Pat Taylor Athletic Field on the southwest side of Fort Stockton. Where fortunately no athletic events were taking place, nor seemed in the offing. “How did those slasher-movie nutjobs find you?”

  Candace sat across from me, chowing down on a Filet-O-Fish. She looked thoughtful, chewed, and swallowed. Raised up proper, whatever else she was. “I told you the cops could track Mindy-Lou’s phone by cell-tower hits, non?”

  “Sí. And I told you they had no reason I could see to do so, since the crimes involved were minor.”

  “Just because they do not do so officially, does not mean they cannot do so as individuals, on the side.”

  “You’re saying the Syndicate bought a cop?”

  She laughed. “No need. I’m saying they have any number on the inside of any law enforcement agency you know about, and very, very many you do not. Or perhaps they rented somebody else’s mole. They do that a lot too. Somebody made an official-sounding request for the data, and the cell company obediently handed it over without raising any fuss about due process. One thing I learned since joining your underworld is what a very great favor all your antiterrorism laws do for criminal organizations. Your law enforcement groups all share information so freely these days, there is hardly any infosec at all.”

  “They’re not min
e,” I said. I wished I could’ve said I was surprised. “So now we get to our big question: Mindy-Lou, do you want to go back to San Antonio now?”

  She nodded vigorously. Her mouth was occupied by being stuffed with a big old bite of Triple Cheeseburger. I already knew the kids hadn’t gone hungry on their little jaunt. That was the source of one of the biggest problems I could see in our road that wasn’t a pair of murderous sideshow freaks. “Yes, please,” Mindy-Lou said, wiping her mouth with a napkin. “I wish I’d never laid eyes on this asshole.”

  Billy looked as hangdog as a body can who’s stuffing his face with Chicken McNuggets and sucking on a strawberry milkshake like a five-year-old. “I’m sorry, hon.”

  “Don’t ‘hon’ me, you—you loser. I trusted you. I believed in you. And then your car broke down before we even got out of San Antonio, and you’ve been getting me deeper and deeper into this—this shit since!”

  He looked at us as if expecting sympathy. Yeah, lemme point that out in the dictionary for you, pal. “Man, I feel so bad about everything,” he said. “I never thought it’d all go south like this.”

  Well, for that I could sympathize with him. Almost. The plain fact was, he and Little Miss Muffet here had made a truly wondrous mess of things in a really short period of time. It was an impressive achievement, looked at from the perspective of someone who wasn’t me and staring down the three horns of a joker dilemma: Who was least terrible to wind up on the wrong side of, the cops, the Mob, or mi abuela?

  Okay, maybe just a nat dilemma. Disappointing Grandma was not an option.

  “I mean, I woke up this morning and suddenly it hit me: I probably shouldn’t have boosted that poor peckerwood’s truck and his bank card, even if it was only just the one. I mean, he probably misses ’em mighty bad ’long about now. That was just mean. And ‘mean’ just isn’t me.”

  “You know,” Candace said, swigging a bottled water, “I make a habit of trying extremely hard not to kill anybody. But I am much more tempted to make an exception for this one than even for Buck and Blood.”

  Leaving aside the odd little tint to her voice that suggested this no-murder policy was a relatively new development on her part, I was gut-inclined to believe Billy. He was coming across to me not so much malicious, or even stone cold like a real con man, as somebody who had never learned the habit of thinking things through.

  Billy had lost what color he had in his face and, at least for the moment, his appetite. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I—I just want to make everything right. Like all of this never happened.”

  “Well, one of those things is actually going to happen,” I said. “You are most certainly going to help us make things right, my friend. And you best pray it’s possible.”

  “I’m an atheist,” he said.

  “Well, thank God you’re not a Protestant, as my mom would say. But right now, Candace, I think we all need to hear a little more detail of what kind of people you’ve been bent on delivering Mindy-Lou to.”

  She sighed. “Bad ones.”

  “What’s all this about Titan Records and the Syndicate, anyway?” Mindy-Lou asked.

  “They are the same. They want you back very badly, child.”

  “But they were gonna make me a star!”

  “Why’d you run off with Billy Sunshine, then?” Candace asked.

  “Rainbow,” Billy said.

  “Shut up,” we all three said.

  “He was gonna make me a Hollywood star! The first marquee actress and movie scorer, like, ever!”

  I had to admit she had the looks for it. And apparently the talent. The “Mozart of Modesto,” remember?

  The abuela and I had had another conversation about Mindy-Lou’s family applying healing transfusions to my own fast-fading bank card. “You want more money, pendejo? They’re already making unhappy noises about how much all this is going to cost them.”

  “They ain’t seen nothin’ yet. And tell them even that is going to mightily pale beside how much it would cost to defend their little songbird from all these criminal charges she’s been ringing up. Anyway, they agreed to cover expenses.”

  “That they did,” Granny said, and I could hear the twinkle in her eye. “And they better not try to weasel out!”

  Guess who paid for dinner? Yeah, I was hungry, too.

  “I am worried,” Candace said. “Not just that they sent out Buck and Blood after they’d promised me the job. But what the job really is. They may not be intending to groom the girl as America’s next pop star. Someone like her could fetch quite a price in certain corners of the world. Especially if she is a virgin.”

  “Hey, man,” Billy said, “don’t look at me. I didn’t touch her.”

  “He most certainly did not!” Mindy-Lou said indignantly. “I told him I was saving myself for marriage, and he was a perfect gentleman. Well, that way, anyway.”

  “Then may God have mercy on your soul,” Candace said.

  I was looking at her pretty hard. “So that’s what you were going to give her up to? To be sold for a sex slave?”

  She dropped her eyes to her grease-stained yellow sandwich wrapper. “I hoped not. They can make a great deal of money if she hits big as a performer in the U.S., or even in Europe. The Syndicate owns a lot of the pop music business, you know.”

  “I didn’t, no. Easy to believe, though.”

  “But not even they can control all the outcomes. It is always a gamble. If they are offered a big enough amount up front, that will tempt them strongly. In a way such people are not used to resisting.”

  “You reckon they got an offer?” I asked. Mindy-Lou and Billy, who also sat opposite each other at the table, were following our conversation like onlookers at a tennis match. You could almost hear their eyeballs clicking left and right. At least they weren’t saying anything. Small favors, you know?

  “First I must give you more background.”

  “Make it fast.”

  “Please. This is important. I never meant to work for the Syndicate. I was a freelancer, doing all kinds of jobs where my talents proved useful. Some of them were even legal. Most of them were gray. Then I found out I’d unwittingly contracted with a minor Mob boss, a Ukrainian. And once you sign on with them, they have a way of sinking their claws into you.”

  “Just like a movie!” Billy said, and I swear he perked right up.

  He perked down at the look she gave him. “I spent the last couple of years … not wholly my own woman. Doing things even I find distasteful. At one point in my life, I was a monster. I never want to be one again. I would rather die—and I am a survivor, I assure you. But their tasks made it hard. I worked out an arrangement: one last score, and they’d let me walk. I trusted this was it: they believed enough in Ms. Gutiérrez’s star potential to offer a premium contract to get her back. Enough to buy me out of what they thought of as my obligation to them.

  “Or so I thought. Until the wall opened up and Buck and his brother walked through, back at the motel. That’s Blood’s power: he can make a tunnel from anywhere to anywhere. Otherwise, he is simple—impaired.”

  “I kinda gathered,” I said, starting on my second Triple Cheeseburger with jalapeños. Which were not as good as real green chiles, but the alternative was “chili,” and nobody wants that.

  “The gun is new, though. In the past Buck has been content to let his brother do the violent work. You saw. They’ve mostly played taxi for heavier hitters. It looks as if Buck is aiming for promotion.”

  “So maybe they’re auditioning—like, for your old job?”

  “My place in the hierarchy, perhaps. Their involvement makes very clear to me that the Syndicate has no intention of letting me leave their employ. Alive, anyway.”

  “What does all this mean for me?” Mindy-Lou sounded as sick as anything else. And who could blame her.

  Candace shook her head. “I—I will not take you back. Fuck them.”

  “But I want to go back!” Mindy-Lou said. “I miss my band. Well,
except Jillian. She’s why I left. She’s a total bitch, and I’m sick of her pushing me around. But I’ve worked so hard for this. I want to be in the contest. Let Billy run off to L.A. This is what I’m supposed to do.”

  “My employers do not take happily to disappointment,” Candace said.

  I put down my sandwich—regretfully, because I still felt a powerful hunger upon me—laced my fingers together, and thumped my hands down on the table. “Okay,” I said. “There’s a way to work this out. There’s always a way.”

  “Yeah, what?” Mindy-Lou said, a beat after Candace did.

  “We’ll get to that.” When I pull it out of my narrow fanny. “See, you have a problem, Mindy-Lou. Which is the little crime spree you and Charlie Starkweather Junior here have gone on. Now, it’s too small-time for cops to bother with. But it gets out you ran away from the big-band contest in San Antonio, with the national spotlight awaiting you and all, that’ll change muy pronto. If they put all the petty scams together and douse the heap with possible publicity, prosecutors start pulling out their lighters.”

  Okay, it’s possible I let my metaphor kinda run away with me, here.

  “Best bet is to claim you were flat kidnapped. That Billy used his rainbow power to make you commit crimes. That makes you a victim instead of an accomplice.”

  “He didn’t,” she said. “The only time I saw his rainbows before was when, like, he shone them in other people’s eyes at the contest. Sort of a party trick, like hypnosis. I didn’t see any harm in it. But I wasn’t kidnapped.”

  “Good for you,” I said, and meant it.

  “But you saw through his bullshit pretty quickly,” Candace said.

  “Hey!” Billy burst out. “I’m right here!”