The Butcher's Boy (19 page)

"I came to tell you something," said Little Norman.

"What's that?"

"I just heard Harry Orloff died." His dark eyes didn't flicker; they seemed to sharpen and hold him for impaling.

"So?" he said. "Sorry to hear it. He should have lost some weight."

"Don't play that on me, kid," hissed Little Norman, leaning forward on his elbows so his big face loomed only a foot away over the table. "I was the best before you were born. You were with him two days ago."

"Sorry, Norman," he said. "What now?"

Little Norman leaned back again to give the waitress room to set the plates on the table between them. Finally he smiled. "That's better."

"I didn't do it, you know," he said. "I don't work in Vegas."

"I know you didn't," said Little Norman. "I heard he owed you money."

He picked up his knife and fork and started to saw at the slice of ham.

"Easy come, easy go," he said.

"Not this time, kid," said Little Norman. He leaned forward again and his voice dropped. "You're gonna get paid, and then you're gonna leave. Tonight at nine you play blackjack at the Silver Slipper." He didn't wait for an answer. He was already standing by that time, and then he was moving off toward the door, the broad tan back of his perfectly tailored coat swaying slightly as he leaned to the left to avoid a scurrying keno girl whose stacked wig barely reached his shoulder.

"What the hell does that mean?" said Padgett. The computer clicked and the lines of green print swept into view across the screen. "A car stopped at a red light, was blocked in by two others, and three men walked up and shot a whole family inside it."

"That supposed to mean something?" asked Brayer.

"That's the fourth, fifth, and sixth," said Padgett. "It has to mean something. How can it not?"

Elizabeth pressed the hard-copy button and waited for the machine to roll out the warm, damp sheet. She scanned the report of the Las Vegas police, and it suggested nothing at all. A husband, a wife, and a boy of ten. Stopped at a corner waiting for the light to change. "If we had a little more it might tell us something," she said.

"What do you want?" asked Brayer.

"Anything. What he did for a living, where they lived. What they had with them, I guess. And maybe which direction they were going." She looked out the window into the second heavy snowstorm of the month, and tried to picture it: a bright, sunny morning in Las Vegas and the car stopped in traffic. Maybe the man and woman in the front seat, and the little boy in the back. And then screeching tires, cars lurching to a stop at odd angles, and the sound of guns blasting in the windows, the impact of the slugs at first punching circular spiderweb shapes into the glass, then spattering the glass into tiny crystals like diamonds spread all over the bodies. "I guess that would be first," she said.

"Which way was the car going?"

He was afraid. It was as if fear were a thick, oily liquid that had somehow seeped into his entrails and stuck there, holding him in a kind of paralysis.

Somehow his body had stopped digesting; his food had turned into a greasy, immovable mass. He could feel it—his body wanted to do something, fight, run, turn light and fly—but the thing was in there, holding him down.

No. He'd seen it too many times. They'd sit there staring at him, maybe their fingers fluttering involuntarily like birds while their eyes went stupid. After it was too late they'd do something—the hands would reach for whatever was nearest, or the leg muscles would tense for a spring, but by then they'd be dead.

It wasn't going to be that way with him. He sat on the bed and thought about it.

Little Norman had said they were going to pay him. That was something to think about.

He felt a little better. They were going to pay him. That meant that they acknowledged the debt and that Orloff had done something else. No, that didn't work unless they thought Orloff had told him where the money was going to come from. And that he had some way to make it worth paying him. He looked at his watch—almost noon . Nine hours left, so he might as well reassure them now.

He reached for the telephone and asked for the United Airlines number.

Even as he made his reservation he wondered who would take an eight-o'clock flight from Las Vegas on a Saturday morning. Probably the other passengers would all be people passing through—or maybe it was just that so many people arrived here on Saturday mornings that the only other choice was to fly the planes out empty. He'd probably never know, he thought.

It was going to be tough to give himself an edge in nine hours, most of it daylight. They'd be watching him too closely. He knew he'd have to get started if he was going to make it.

He looked about the room to see what there was to work with—the bed, the shower, the telephone, the air conditioner —all standard. It would have to be the Magic Fingers machine on the bed. He studied it carefully. The metal box had an electric alarm clock besides the mechanical massager. The coin box was impregnable, but the wiring was easy enough to get to. Once he had the back open it was fairly simple. The wires that went to the alarm buzzer fit through the crack in the back once they were stripped of insulation. He set the alarm for noon and tested the wires. The spark wasn't much, but it would do. He put the Magic Fingers machine back together and trailed the wires beside his pillow.

Then he went to the dresser and brought back his bottle of after-shave lotion and read the label: 98 percent alcohol. He set the alarm, poured the lotion into a paper cup, set it on the bed, and arranged the wires. It wasn't much, but it might help. If he wasn't back by two a.m. there would be a fire in Room 413.

That was one of the things Eddie had been able to give him. "Know everything. If there's nothing you can know that the mark doesn't know you better make something happen." The main thing would be getting out. He had the car, and there was the off chance that he might use his plane reservation.

Then there were trains and buses. He'd have to get those set up during the afternoon. But that late at night there wouldn't be many of them, and he might not be able to get where he had to be to get on one.

It was probably just nerves, he thought. They weren't going to kill him in the Silver Slipper, and they weren't likely to pay him two hundred thousand and then kill him. But nothing else about this seemed right either. There was no question that something big had gone very wrong, and now they were trying to clean it up. Whatever it was made it worth what they'd done to Orloff, and they'd never have done that in Las Vegas unless it was necessary.

Whatever it was, he'd have to stay out of sight until it was time for the payoff. If they were going to kill him it would probably be before rather than after. He checked the lock on the door, chained it, then moved the dresser in 93

front of it. Then he went to the closet and pulled the pistol off the wall and checked the clip. Then he turned on the television.

The air was cold now that the sun had been down for a couple of hours. The hot, steady current of the desert breeze had changed into something harsher and more petulant that whirled down the Strip in icy eddies, then pawed at him and buffeted him from above as he waited to cross the street. He hunched his shoulders and moved closer to the center of the crowd of people. It was as though the frigid emptiness of the mountains was rushing in to correct some imbalance that had been precariously asserted by all this light and noise and motion and color—as though some fragile barrier had been swept away. He pulled his coat tighter around him and felt the pull of the tape on his belly. The hard, sharp edge of the safety catch on the pistol irritated his skin a little, but there wasn't anything to be done about it now. There would be watchers around him already. It was the only place for it anyway. It had to be near his center of gravity, where he could forget about it. There was no way to carry an extra pound of steel attached to your side or your leg without involuntarily carrying yourself differently. One of the first things he'd learned was to watch for the man who held one arm an inch farther out than the other, or the man who stepped a little stiff-legged.

Before the light changed the first two lurched forward into the street, and the rest of the people scurried after them. He stayed among them, measuring his steps to keep himself surrounded by their bodies. He looked at his watch again.

He was still on time. It was just the cold that had made the walk seem endless.

Above him in the dark night sky the gargantuan lady's high-heeled shoe beaded with white light bulbs spun absurdly.

In a moment the pneumatic doors huffed closed behind him like an air lock, and he stepped forward into the warm brightness of the casino. He kept moving deeper into the place. There was no question they had picked him up by now. Somewhere out of sight a telephone would have lit up and a voice would be saying "He's here," and that would be all.

He strolled along the line of blackjack tables, his eyes sweeping the green felt surfaces for a sign, then straying upward to the private, emotionless eyes of the white-shirted dealers. He spotted it without difficulty. A new brigade of dealers filed down the aisle from wherever their break room was, but this time one of them stationed himself behind an empty table, fanned the deck of cards across the felt, and stood with his arms folded on his chest in the customary pantomime of ostentatious idleness that announced the opening of another table. The placard at the dealer's elbow said ten-dollar minimum bet. So it was 94

not to be private—it would be duly witnessed and recorded. The minimum was low enough to ensure that the table would fill up quickly. He waited to take a seat until two other players had rushed in front of him. The dealer swept his hand across the felt and the fan of cards closed into a thick deck. While the hands expertly performed the ritual of shuffling, the rest of the seats at the table were claimed.

The dealer's empty eyes seemed to stare out over the heads of the gamblers at some distant focal point as his fingertips tapped the fat deck into the shoe. The dealer looked young, his carefully sculpted hair blond from the sun, but already he had the ageless look of detached competence they all seemed to have worn into them. He clapped his hands once, held the perfect fingers up, turned them to show his palms, and said, "Good luck, ladies and gentlemen."

The cards seemed to fly from the shoe and appear in perfect order before the gamblers. The gamblers paid little attention to each other as each played his hand in turn, assessing the threat implicit in the dealer's up-card. He watched the dealer's hands float above the felt, collecting cards and moving chips with relentless, unhesitating efficiency. He looked at the cards in front of him, a queen and a ten. The dealer's nineteen won the chips on four of the betting circles, and paid off one other bettor. The cards appeared on the felt again and the dealer busted; the hands moved in an arc along the semicircle, duplicating five of the stacks of chips. The cards appeared again and the dealer's seventeen had to pay four of the gamblers. As the game went on, the trend became clear.

He was winning three hands out of four at minimum bets. Three of the others were getting random pairs of cards, sometimes good, sometimes bad. The dealer was using the other two.

One was a fat man in a blue plaid sport coat who was dealt an ace and a ten-point card every few hands. The other was a small, pinched-looking woman about forty-five years old who was playing a mysterious intuited system that seemed to be paying off. He wondered which one the dealer was going to bust first. He collected his steady income, letting the dealer deftly pay his winnings in larger denomination chips to keep the stack in front of him from looking too big, and watched the other two winners to see if he could sense it coming.

When the fat man began to double his bets, he knew. Slowly the trend changed. When the man lost, he doubled again. In a few minutes the chubby pink fingers extracted another pair of hundred dollar bills from the plaid sport coat and bought more chips. The cards kept coming, each pair the fat man got costing him more. Then he got up and left. When he pushed his chair back another man left too. By now the little woman was winning so steadily that the others took an interest. Nobody noticed that the nondescript man beside her was winning almost as steadily, or that he was now betting twenty-five-dollar chips.

Two of them shrugged in sympathy when her luck ran out. One of them said,

"Good move," when she climbed down from the stool while she was still ahead.

One by one the rest of the players dropped out and were replaced by new faces, until he was the only one of the original players who remained. The new people 95

won or lost and moved on, none of them allowed to remain long enough to notice that the quiet man in the gray tweed was on a big winning streak. And then the dealer paid him off for a hand just as a new dealer arrived to relieve him. The dealer clapped his hands once, held his fingers up and said, "Good luck, ladies and gentlemen," and walked away.

Instead of watching while the new dealer began to shuffle, he looked at the last stack of chips. The third one down was slightly smaller. He pretended to restack them and palmed the chip so he could look at it. In the center, where the others had the legend Silver Slipper, this one said Flamingo. He put it in his pocket, collected the rest of the chips, and moved away from the table. At the cashier's window the teller gave him almost ten thousand dollars.

It seemed even colder outside now. The Flamingo was several long blocks out on the Strip, but he didn't take a taxi. As soon as he had made his way to the blackjack tables he spotted the invitation. This time it was a middle-aged woman who looked a little mannish in the dealer's white shirt. The evening was approaching its peak now, and seats were scarce at the tables. The twenty-five-dollar minimum bet at her table didn't discourage anyone when she laid out the fan of cards. The game proceeded as it had in the Silver Slipper. Time after time he got nineteen or twenty. The dealer's seventeen or eighteen took most of the chips on the table; about a quarter of the time she went over twenty-one. He won steadily while the faces around him changed. After about an hour the dealer paid him with a chip from the Dunes. This time when he cashed in the teller gave him forty thousand dollars. As he walked to the Dunes he was beginning to wonder where he would carry the rest of it. But by the time he left the Dunes it was almost midnight, and the Friday evening gamblers were too busy to notice that the teller had counted out sixty thousand-dollar bills to the man in the gray tweed. At the Aladdin it was the same. By the time the dealer at the Tropicana gave him the chip from Caesar's Palace he calculated that he must have the whole two hundred thousand. His pockets were full of money and they were sending him home. He had to admit it was sort of funny: they'd actually found a way to ring in their own dealers without the solid-citizen management types of all those big hotels even suspecting it. Anything happens, the hotels get the heat.