The Devil's Graveyard (10 page)

Clementine reared up. His blonde girlfriend rubbed his back to help spur him on. He and the Kid were no more than a yard apart and the bimbo looked like the confrontation was turning her on.

‘Oh you’re a fucking comedian, aren’t you? Ha-ha-fucking-ha,’ Clementine sneered. Lowering his voice menacingly, he hissed, ‘You light that while I’m here, I’ll have you taken out to the desert and shot like a dog.’

The Kid took a long look at Clementine through his sunglasses. For a few seconds the two of them stared at each other, motionless. Then Clementine lunged out to snatch the cigarette from the other’s mouth. The Kid grabbed his arm with his left hand, stopping its forward motion stone dead. Then, with his clenched right fist, he punched Clementine in the face. Hard. All without even getting off his stool.

The businessman swayed gently on the spot, a look of complete bewilderment on his face. Blood began to seep out of both his nostrils, pouring down to his mouth. After a painfully long couple of seconds, he fell backwards in a heap on the floor. There was an unpleasant noise as his skull connected with the hardwood boards.

The blonde in the gold hot pants threw her arms in the air and squealed.

‘
Oh my God, Jonah!
Are you okay?’ She bent down and leaned over him to see if he was all right. Her six-inch stilettos and the weight of her enhanced breasts made it difficult for her to keep her balance, so she pressed a hand down hard into Clementine’s chest to balance herself. He didn’t react. After a few attempts at patting him on the cheek to try to rouse him she looked back up at the Kid. ‘He’s unconscious,’ she said accusingly. ‘You’ve knocked him out.’

‘He ain’t unconscious.’

‘He is. I’m telling you. He’s out cold!’

The Kid sucked on the end of his unlit cigarette and it lit up brightly before he responded. ‘If he was unconscious,’ he growled, ‘he’d still have a pulse.’

The bimbo stared open-mouthed at Clementine’s body for a moment. It took her a while, but she eventually realized that he wasn’t breathing. Again, she looked up at the Kid, who had now turned back to his half-filled glass of Sam Cougar.

‘Oh my God!’ she said. ‘How d’ya light up like that? That’s, like,
so-o-o cool
.’

She stood up and walked over to him. She placed a hand on his shoulder and whispered in his ear. ‘So, d’you wanna buy me a drink?’

‘Beat it, skank,’ he snarled in a voice like wave-washed gravel. Then he looked over at Valerie the barmaid and nodded at his drink. ‘Miss?’

‘Yes, sir?’ The girl’s heart was racing so fast that she was surprised she could speak at all.

‘Fill the glass.’

Sanchez was a man with many flaws. One of the worst was a weakness for gambling. It was a pastime that had cost him a fair amount of his wealth over the years, but the lure of a bet and the opportunity to make money without breaking sweat was, for him, powerful and seductive to resist.

From the second he had laid eyes on the money in the envelope he had found in his hotel room, he had been concocting all kinds of plans about how he would speculate with it. And in spite of Elvis’s warning that the envelope had been intended for a contract killer, name and identity unknown, Sanchez couldn’t pass up the opportunity. So he headed straight for the hotel’s casino. He had the envelope containing the photos and the twenty thousand dollars tucked away down the front of his shorts, cleverly concealed by his red Hawaiian shirt, which hung over them. When he’d bought the shirt, the shop assistant had informed him that, wearing it, he’d never be able to hide anything. Well, she’d been wrong.

Being a tolerably honest sort – by his estimation, at least – Sanchez was fully intending to hand the envelope in to the reception desk. After all, it didn’t belong to him. And when he handed it in, it would still have the money in it: right amount, right number of bills in the right denomination. But before he did that, he was just going to use twenty thousand as stake money in the casino. As soon as he’d made a decent profit, he would slip twenty thousand in hundred-dollar bills into the envelope, seal it and drop it off at reception. No one would be any the wiser.

When he had first decided on this plan, his intention had been to play it safe and make only a small profit. But by the time he actually made it down to the casino on the lower ground floor, he had decided that he would only quit once he’d doubled the stake money. Twenty thousand for Sanchez and twenty thousand for the hitman, whoever he was. It seemed only fair. His palms were sweating as he stepped out of the elevator and into the casino area. One good bet, and his vacation would be off to the best possible start.

The casino was straight out of one of Sanchez’s dreams (well, leaving aside that the croupiers weren’t monkeys in red suits and hats; Sanchez’s dreams had their odder moments). It was vast and opulent and the lighting made the whole area glow a bright golden colour. The carpet was deep crimson in colour, not dissimilar to the red of the waistcoats worn by croupiers and waitresses. And there were customers everywhere. The sound of rolling dice, cards being slapped down on baize-topped tables, roulette wheels spinning, cheers from winning gamblers, sighs from losers, coins rattling into trays, it was all there.

Sanchez was in heaven.

To his left were rows of slot machines, mostly being used by elderly people. Directly ahead was a bar fronted by rows of stools on which a few losers sat drowning their sorrows. Over to his right were the roulette and blackjack tables, about twenty of them in all. Each table had a croupier and two or three gamblers seated at it, so there was plenty of room for Sanchez. He could pick any table he wanted, but what game did he fancy? Blackjack, poker, craps, roulette?

What he needed was a sign. He was not overly superstitious, but he did believe in good luck. Some kind of omen would set him on the right path, he felt. And he spotted one almost at once. There was a roulette table near the centre of the room at which three players sat taking their chances. One of them was the self-styled Mystic Lady, Annabel de Frugyn.

Jackpot!
Despite his personal distaste, right now she was just the person he had hoped to see. If the rumours were true, then this crazy old crone could see into the future. So who better to stand next to?

Sanchez made his way over to the table, heading for Annabel. She was seated on a stool between two tiny middle-aged Chinese women. Each of them had huge stacks of chips in front of her suggesting that they were all winning. Or that they had only just started playing. Sanchez grabbed a free stool from another table and manoeuvred it in between the Mystic Lady and the smaller of the two Chinese women, nudging her to one side so he could squeeze in to the left of Annabel. The sight of him sidling up next to her had the desired effect. She was pleased to see him.

‘I knew you couldn’t stay away, Sanchez,’ she said, winking at him with quite horrible coyness.

‘Ha ha! Yeah, that’s right,’ he replied with a shameful level of forced enthusiasm. ‘So, you havin’ any luck?’

‘Oh my, yes. I’m on a real winning streak, Sanchez. The hotel manager gave me five hundred dollars and I’ve tripled it already.’ Well, she had received five hundred bucks from Powell. Sanchez didn’t need to know how she’d earned it.

Sanchez reached down to the envelope tucked into the front of his shorts. He’d wedged it in good and proper, and he provoked a number of odd glances from the others as he tugged at it three or four times before it came free. The sudden release made his arm shoot back and he accidentally elbowed the small Chinese lady in the face, knocking her off her stool to land on her back on the floor.
Shit!
Thought Sanchez.
Still, no time for an apology. She’d be okay, one way or the other.

Recovering his composure, he opened the envelope, pulled out the thick wad of bills and casually tossed it over the table to the croupier. The latter’s face gave away nothing. He was a bald, olive-skinned young man in his late twenties, and he had an impressive poker face when it came to showing a complete lack of interest or surprise when large amounts of cash were thrown at him.

The tiny Chinese woman climbed back on to her stool muttering angrily and looking about ready to fell Sanchez with a karate chop. But when she saw the wad of cash she seemed to change her mind, and even attempted a wan smile at the bar owner. Everyone liked a guy with money. And for once, Sanchez was that guy. Smiling himself, he called over to the croupier. ‘Chips please, good sir.’

The croupier picked up Sanchez’s money, expertly counted it, and replaced it with a pile of red, yellow and blue chips of corresponding value. Sanchez could sense that his female companions were mildly impressed by his apparent wealth.

Annabel confirmed it. ‘Hey, Sanchez, that bar of yours must be doing really well!’

‘Sure. I’m a pretty astute businessman,’ he bragged.

‘Reckon we should go into business together,’ suggested Annabel. ‘With your business sense and my foresight, we could make a killing.’

‘Sure. Let’s start now. You tell me red or black and I’ll lay down the money.’

‘Oh, this one is definitely gonna be red.’

‘You sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

She did sound incredibly confident. More telling, to Sanchez, she placed a stack of chips down on red.

‘Last bets, please,’ prompted the croupier. Although his request was aimed at everyone at the table he was looking directly at Sanchez, daring him to prove he had the balls to gamble more than just one chip on his first bet.

Sanchez weighed up his options. He had to make a decision quickly.
Oh, what the hell? It’s all found money anyway,
he decided.

And he placed all his chips on red.

In the time that had elapsed since the Bourbon Kid had punched the former bank boss Jonah Clementine in the face, killing him instantly, no new customers had come into the bar for a drink. The leggy blonde glamour model who had, until very recently, been hanging off Mr Clementine’s arm had left almost immediately, most likely heading to the casino in the hopes of finding a wealthy substitute before they all got snagged by other gold-diggers. Slowly and unobtrusively, the other drinkers in the bar had followed her out. None of them had made sudden movements to get up and leave, but they had all discreetly finished up their drinks and conversations and, one by one, made their way out of the bar.

Valerie the barmaid had no one new to serve, but tried to busy herself wiping down parts of the bar as far away from the Kid as possible. All the other staff had been closer to the exit behind the bar and had dashed through it before Valerie got the chance. With the hotel having a policy that one member of staff had to be available behind the bar at all times, she was stuck there until one of them plucked up the guts to return. Which wasn’t likely to happen any time soon.

For the first twenty minutes after the killing the only people to enter the bar were two guys from the security team. Gunther had sent them along after the Kid had warned him that a corpse would need disposing of. Soon. The two men had slipped in quietly and lifted Clementine’s lifeless body from the black hardwood floor, which now had a pool of his blood settling on it. They carried it round behind the bar, at which Valerie threw a fit.