Strangers (26 page)

The cop did not seem to recognize Brendan—or even to know where he was. He coughed again and choked more violently than before.

Brendan quickly lifted Tolk’s head a few inches and turned it to one side, to let the blood and mucus drain more freely from his mouth. Immediately the wounded man’s respiration improved, though it remained noisy, each inhalation hard-won. He was still in critical condition, in desperate need of medical attention, but he was alive.

Alive.

Incredible. All this blood, and he was still alive, hanging on.

Outside, three sirens died one after the other. Brendan shouted for Paul Armes. Excited by the hope that Winton could be saved, but also panicked by the possibility that medical attention would arrive seconds too late, he glanced at the sandwich-shop employees and shouted, “Go! Get them in here. Let them know it’s safe. Paramedics, damn it!”

The man in the apron hesitated, then moved toward the door.

Winton Tolk expelled bloody mucus and finally drew an unobstructed breath. Brendan carefully lowered Winton’s head to the floor again. The cop continued to breathe shallowly, with difficulty, but steadily.

Outside there were shouts and doors slamming and running feet coming toward the sandwich shop.

Brendan’s hands were wet with Winton Tolk’s blood. Unthinking, he blotted them on his coat—and it was then that he realized the rings had reappeared on his hands for the first time in nearly two weeks. One on each palm. Twin bands of raised and inflamed tissue.

Cops and paramedics burst through the front door, stepping over the dead man in the navy peacoat, and Brendan quickly moved out of their way. He backed up until he bumped against the service counter, where he leaned in sudden exhaustion, staring at his hands.

For a few days following the first appearance of the rings, he had used the cortisone prescribed by Dr. Heeton at St. Joseph’s, but when the rings had not reappeared, he had soon stopped applying the lotion. He had almost forgotten about the marks. They had been a curiosity—baffling, but of little concern. Now, as he looked at the strange marks, he heard the voices of those around him, fuzzy and strange:

“Jesus, the blood!”

“Can’t be alive…twice in the chest.”

“Get the fuck out of my way!”

“Plasma!”

“Type his blood. No! Wait…do it in the ambulance.”

Brendan finally looked at the crowd around Winton Tolk. He watched the paramedics as they worked to keep the wounded man alive, get him on a stretcher, and move him out of the sandwich shop.

He saw a cursing policeman dragging the dead man out of the doorway to make it easier for the paramedics to exit with Tolk.

He saw Paul Armes moving along beside the stretcher.

He saw that the blood in which Tolk had been lying was not merely a pool but a
lake.

He looked at his hands again. The rings were gone.

4

Las Vegas, Nevada

The Texan in the yellow Day-Glo polyester pants would not have tried to get Jorja Monatella into bed if he had known she was in the mood to castrate someone.

Although it was the afternoon of December 24, Jorja was not yet in the Christmas spirit. Usually even-tempered and easygoing, she was in an exceedingly sour state of mind as she strode back and forth through the casino, from the bar to the blackjack tables and back to the bar again, delivering drinks to the gamblers.

For one thing, she hated her job. Being a cocktail waitress was bad enough in a regular bar or lounge, but in a hotel casino bigger than a football field, it was a killer. At the end of a shift, her feet ached, and often her ankles were swollen. The hours were irregular, too. How were you supposed to provide a stable home for a seven-year-old daughter when you did not have a job with normal hours?

She also hated the costume: a little red nothing, cut high in the crotch and hips, very low at the bustline, smaller than a bathing suit. An elastic corset was built in to minimize the waistline and emphasize the breasts. If you were already small-waisted, with generous breasts—as Jorja was—the getup made you look almost freakishly erotic.

And she hated the way the pit bosses and casino floormen were always hitting on her. Maybe they figured any girl who would strut her stuff in an outfit like that was an easy lay.

She was sure that her name had something to do with their attitude as well: Jorja. It was cute. Too cute. Her mother must have been drunk when she got creative with the spelling of Georgia. It was all right when people heard it, because they had no way of knowing she spelled it cute, but she had to wear a name tag on her costume—
JORJA
—and at least a dozen people a day commented on it. It was a frivolous name, misspelled like that, so it gave them the idea she was a frivolous person. She had considered going to court to have the proper spelling made legal, but that would hurt her mother. However, if guys at work kept hitting on her, she might even have it changed to Mother Teresa, which ought to cool off some of the horny bastards.

And fending off the bosses was not the worst of it. Every week, some high-roller—a bigshot from Detroit or L.A. or Dallas, dropping a bundle at the tables—would take a shine to Jorja and ask the pit boss to fix him up with her. A few cocktail waitresses
were
available—not many, but a few. But when the pit bosses approached Jorja, her answer was always the same: “To hell with him. I’m a waitress, not a hooker.”

Her routine, cold refusal did not stop them from pressuring her to relent, which they had done an hour ago. A wart-faced, bug-eyed oilman from Houston—in phosphorescent yellow pants, a blue shirt, and a red string tie—one of the hotel’s favored clients, had gotten the hots for her and had made inquiries. His breath stank of the burritos he had eaten for lunch.

Now the bosses were angry with her for refusing a highly valued customer, for being “too stuffy.” Rainy Tarnell, the blackjack pit boss on the day shift, had the gall to put it just like that—“Honey, don’t be so stuffy!”—as if falling on her back and spreading her legs for a stranger from Houston was merely the equivalent of a fashion gaucherie like wearing white shoes either before Memorial Day or after Labor Day.

Though she hated being a casino cocktail waitress, she could not afford to quit. No other job would pay her as well. She was a divorced mother raising a daughter without benefit of child-support payments, and in order to protect her credit rating, she was still paying off bills that Alan had run up in her name before walking out on her, so she was acutely aware of the value of a dollar. Her wages were low, but the tips were exceedingly good, especially on those occasions when one of her customers started winning big at cards or dice.

On this day before Christmas, the casino was two-thirds empty, and tips were bad. Vegas was always slow Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the crowds did not return until December 26. The whizzing-rattling-ringing of slot machines was muted. Many of the blackjack dealers stood idle and bored in front of empty tables.

No wonder I’m in a sour mood, Jorja thought. Sore feet, back pain, a horny creep who figures I ought to be as available as the drinks I serve, an argument with Rainy Tarnell, and no tips to show for it.

When her shift ended at four o’clock, she hurried to the changing room downstairs, punched the time clock, slipped out of her costume and into street clothes, and was out the door into the employee parking lot with a speed that would have drawn praise from an Olympic runner.

The unpredictable desert weather did nothing to instill the Christmas spirit in her. A Las Vegas winter day could be cold, with bone-numbing wind, or it could be warm enough for shorts and halters. This year, the holiday was warm.

Her dusty, battered Chevette started on only the third try, which should have improved her mood. But listening to the starter grind and the engine cough, she was reminded of the shiny new Buick that Alan had taken with him fifteen months ago, when he had abandoned her and Marcie.

Alan Rykoff. More than her job, more than any of the other things that irritated her, Alan was the cause of Jorja’s foul mood. She had shed his name when the marriage had been dissolved, reverting to her maiden name, Monatella, but she could not as easily shed the memories of the pain he had inflicted on her and Marcie.

As she drove out of the parking lot into the street behind the hotel, Jorja tried to banish Alan from her thoughts, but he remained at center
stage. The bastard. With his current bedmate, an airhead blonde bearing the unlikely name “Pepper,” he had flown off to Acapulco for a week, not even bothering to leave a Christmas gift for Marcie. What did you tell a seven-year-old girl when she asked why her daddy didn’t buy her anything for Christmas—or even come to see her?

Although Alan left Jorja saddled with bills, she had willingly forgone alimony because, by then, she loathed him so much that she had not wanted to be dependent on him. However, she had gone after child support and had been shocked when he countered by insisting Marcie was not his child and, therefore, not his responsibility. Damn him. Jorja had married him when she was nineteen and he was twenty-four, and she’d never been unfaithful. Alan knew she hadn’t cheated, but protecting his jazzy lifestyle—he needed every dollar for clothes, fast cars, and women—was more important to him than his wife’s reputation or his daughter’s happiness. To spare little Marcie humiliation and pain, Jorja had released Alan from responsibility before he could voice his sleazy accusations in the courtroom.

So she was finished with him. She could put him out of her mind.

But as she drove past the mall at the intersection of Maryland Parkway and Desert Inn Road, Jorja thought about how young she had been when she tied herself to Alan, too young for marriage and too naïve to see through his facade. When she was nineteen, she thought he was
très
sophisticated, charming. For more than a year, their union had seemed blissful, but gradually she began to see him for what he was: shallow, vain, lazy, a shockingly promiscuous womanizer.

The summer before last, when their relationship had been rocky, she had tried to salvage the marriage by coercing Alan into a carefully planned three-week vacation. She believed that part of their problem was that they spent too little time together. He was a baccarat dealer in one hotel, and she was employed in another, and they frequently worked different shifts, slept on different schedules. Just the two of them—and Marcie—embarking upon an adventurous three-week car trip seemed a good way to repair their damaged relationship.

Unfortunately but predictably, her scheme had not worked. After the vacation, upon their return to Vegas, Alan had been more promiscuous than before. He seemed determined—
driven
—to take a poke at anything in skirts. In fact, it was almost as if the car trip had somehow pushed him over the edge, for the number and intensity of his one-night stands developed a manic quality, a frightening desperation. Three months later, in October of that year, he walked out on her and Marcie.

The only good thing about the car trip had been the brief encounter with that young woman doctor who had been driving cross-country
from Stanford to Boston on, she’d said, her first vacation ever. Jorja still remembered the woman’s name: Ginger Weiss. Although they had met only once, and then for little more than an hour, Ginger Weiss had quite unwittingly changed Jorja’s life. The doctor had been so very young—so slender, pretty, feminine—it had been difficult to accept that she was really a doctor, yet she’d been uncommonly self-assured and competent. Deeply impressed by Ginger Weiss during that encounter, Jorja was later motivated by the doctor’s example. She’d always thought of herself as a born cocktail waitress, incapable of anything more challenging, but when Alan walked out, she had remembered Dr. Weiss and decided to make more of herself than she had previously thought possible.

During the past eleven months, Jorja had taken business management courses at UNLV, squeezing them into an already hectic schedule. When she finished paying the bills that Alan had left her, she would build a nest egg so she could eventually open her own business, a dress shop. She had worked out a very detailed plan, revising and honing it until it was realistic, and she knew she would stick with it.

It was a shame that she would never have a chance to thank Ginger Weiss. Of course, it was not any favor that Dr. Weiss had performed that so deeply affected Jorja; it was not so much what the doctor had done as what she
was.
Anyway, at twenty-seven Jorja’s prospects were more exciting than they had been previously.

Now, she turned off Desert Inn Road onto Pawnee Drive, a street of comfortable homes behind the Boulevard Mall. She stopped in front of Kara Persaghian’s house and got out of the car. The front door opened before she reached it, and Marcie rushed out, into her arms, shouting happily, “Mommy! Mommy!” And Jorja was at last able to forget about her job, the Texan, the argument with the pit boss, and the dilapidated condition of the Chevette. She squatted down and hugged her daughter. When all else failed to cheer her, she could count on Marcie for a lift.

“Mommy,” the girl said, “did you have a great day?”

“Yes, honey, I did. You smell like peanut butter.”

“Cookies! Aunt Kara made peanut butter cookies! I had a great day, too. Mommy, do you know why elephants came…ummm, why they came all the way from Africa to live in this country?” Marcie giggled. “’Cause we got orchestras here, and elephants just
love
to dance!” She giggled again. “Isn’t that
silly
.”

Even allowing for maternal prejudice, Jorja knew that Marcie was an adorable child. The girl had her mother’s hair, so dark brown that it was virtually black, and her mother’s dusky complexion. Her eyes were a striking contrast to the rest of her, not brown like Jorja’s but blue like her father’s. She had an immensely appealing gamine quality.

Marcie’s huge eyes opened wide. “Hey, know what day it is?”

“I sure do. Almost Christmas Eve.”

“Will be soon as it’s dark. Aunt Kara’s giving us cookies to take home. You know, Santa’s already left the North Pole, and he’s started going down chimleys already, but in other parts of the world, of course, where it’s dark, not chimleys here. Aunt Kara says I been so bad all year I’ll only get a necklace made out of coal, but she’s just teasing. Isn’t she just teasing, Mommy?”