Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt (6 page)

Out of habit he paused to check the main floor. The four stages were occupied, most of the wall booths, no girls were lounging around the bar playing video poker. Satisfied, he pushed open the door marked
NO ADMITTANCE
.

One of the newer girls, Gina, came walking down the hallway toward him. Already dressed out, a gym bag slung over her shoulder. She gave him a calm, indifferent glance.

Dick Moby grabbed her arm as she passed and stopped her.

“What?” she said, annoyed.

He studied her, eyes slitted. Something was off, he could feel it—the nerve ends at the base of his skull tingled—but he wasn’t sure what. A mob guy he once worked for back in Dallas used to tell him he had reptile radar. Dick Moby had taken that as a compliment.

“Thought you were on till four,” he said. She was one of his top earners, though he himself didn’t pretend to understand it. Fix that nose, stick a couple of real tits on her, teach her how to smile more like a whore and less like she could be teaching Sunday school—then she’d bring in even more dough.

“Was.” She shrugged. “But I started my period about an hour ago, so unless you want it to look like a slasher flick out there every time I give a lap dance, get your paws off me.”

Dick Moby had to smile, a little, at the girl’s balls. Maybe that’s why she made so much money; maybe that’s why some guys liked her. He dropped her arm.

“I don’t trust you,” he told her. “I got my fucking eye on you.”

She shrugged again. “Yeah, whatever.”

He watched her saunter calmly down the hall and out the door behind him.

“I got my fucking eye on you,” he growled again, then turned and rumbled down to his office. He swiped the pack of Kools off the desk, then paused. That weird reptile radar of his again. He walked his eyeballs slowly around the office once, then twice: the desk, the desk chair, the cabinet behind the desk, the TV on the cabinet, the door, the chair, the cardboard file boxes filled with the dancers’ sheriff cards, the meat-colored carpet, the liquor license in the frame with the cracked glass, the desk, the desk chair, the—

The cabinet behind the desk.

He squatted, with effort, and peered at the dented metal door of the cabinet. Closed tightly and carefully.

Too tightly, too carefully.

Dick Moby suddenly felt half a century of undigested animal fat in his body, the weight of it, porterhouses and prime ribs, dialing down the aperture of his arteries until they were just pinpricks, squeezing off the blood to his heart and making him dizzy. A faint concentric throb spread out from the center of his chest, like ripples on a pond.

He slid open the door to the cabinet. Inside, the briefcase was still there, but the shelves were empty and all the cash was gone.

“Bitch,” he hissed.

Dick Moby gripped the cabinet door with both hands and wrenched it off the rails, flung it pinwheeling so violently across the office that it stabbed through a cardboard file box and stuck there. He stormed back through the club, shoving aside convention geeks and dancers, into the parking lot. But the cab stand was empty, and the bitch—Gina—was gone.

LUCY SAT ON A BENCH
beneath the volcano and watched it erupt—smoke boiling, red lights flashing, a few tourists gaping—for maybe the fifth time since she’d arrived. She looked at her watch. Four
A.M.
Gina was an hour late. A cab pulled up, but it was two men in business suits who climbed out.

Maybe Gina was just running late?

Maybe Gina had gotten caught in traffic?

Maybe Gina had stopped off to buy a bottle of champagne so she and Lucy could celebrate?

Maybe Gina had meant to say four o’clock instead of three?

Maybe Gina . . . ?

The businessmen from the cab went into the casino. The tourists watching the volcano erupt moved on. The Strip outside the Mirage was almost deserted. Lucy told herself not to look at her watch again. She told herself not to cry.

Four-oh-nine
A.M.

The volcano was quiet now, just the scent of sulfur and chlorine drifting slowly over Lucy, choking her.

GINA TOOK A CAB STRAIGHT
to the airport. That’s where the Whale would expect her to go, and she wanted a few eyewitness accounts to throw him off track when his goons sniffed around.

She instructed her cabdriver to pull up outside the international terminal, then asked him was this where you caught Air France? He said yes. Air France, you’re sure, to Paris? Yes. She tipped the cabdriver a C-note so he’d be sure to remember the conversation.

Once inside, she made her way across to the domestic terminal and down to baggage claim. All the rental-car places at McCarran were open twenty-four hours. Gina ignored the booths staffed by twenty-something boys and picked the one occupied by a hard-eyed gal in her forties, ex-hooker or ex-dancer or both. Bleached-blond hair, sun-cured skin, perfect manicure. Either the woman would hate Gina on sight or else she’d recognize the ghost of her young self materialized right before her and feel a pang of motherly tenderness. Gina was counting on that second one.

“Hi,” Gina said, “I need to rent a car, but I don’t have a credit card? Just cash?”

“You have to be qualified for a cash rental.”

“Okay,” Gina said. “Great. I’ll do that.”

The woman looked her over. Gina thought she saw the woman’s expression soften a little.

“Takes three to four weeks, sugar.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry.”

Gina leaned forward. She made her voice tremble, but not too much. “Please, it’s really important. If I don’t—I have to—Is there any way at all you can, you know . . .”

A long moment of silence passed. Gina felt the woman wavering, sensed her filling in the blanks from her own experience. Maybe a drugged-up boyfriend years ago, who used to beat her. Maybe a drugged-up boyfriend years ago, she shot in a fit of rage because he used to beat her, then had to get out of town pronto.

“Sugar.” The woman finally sighed. “I—”

Gina slid a packet of hundred-dollar bills across the counter. Ten grand.

“And you never saw me,” Gina said. “You don’t remember a thing about me.”

The woman eyed her for a second, then turned away and started punching numbers into the computer. Gina looked down and saw that the ten grand had already disappeared off the counter, just like magic. She smiled.

“Full-size all right with you, miss?” the woman asked.

THE CAR WAS A BUTTER-COLORED
Ford Crown Victoria, big and luxurious, with butter-colored leather seats and a primo sound system. Gina set the cruise control to eighty-five—why dawdle, right?—and blew through the deserted desert night. She stopped briefly in Barstow for coffee, then hit the outskirts of L.A. just as the sky behind her turned pink and pearly.

She swung off the 10 and wound through Beverly Flats to Wilshire. The valet at the Peninsula took her keys with a polite smile and didn’t give her a second glance. In her jeans and sweatshirt, sunglasses and baseball cap, she was just another movie star on the down low, for all he knew.

She crashed out and slept till early afternoon, then ordered room-service pancakes and champagne. After that she strolled over to Rodeo Drive and hit the shops. She bought a black cocktail dress with a hint of flapper sass at Gianfranco Ferré, heels to match at René Caovilla, some panties so expensive she had to laugh, a pair of teardrop pearl earrings. She had a latte at an outdoor café, then bought some more shoes, a bag, a necklace. She bought five hundred dollars worth of makeup. Another dress, another bag, a couple of cute James Perse tops, some high-end denim.

“I could get used to this,” she confided to an Arab woman in a burka who was standing next to her at the corner, waiting for the light to change. The woman’s eyes darted over to Gina, then darted quickly away. Gina thought she saw a smile crease the dark cloth.

Gina did get used to it. For the next couple of days, she lived like a fairy-tale princess, or at least the kind of princess in the kind of fairy tale
she’d
write. She hit Melrose for funky casual, a handmade leather bag from Argentina and more bling, Montana Avenue for beachwear and high-end lotions, oils, and exotic ungents (and more bling), the Grove for an iPod and a supply of trashy magazines. In between the heavy shopping, she went total spa jihad—Thai massage, seaweed wrap, facial, hot stone something or other. Back at the hotel the afternoon of her third day in L.A., she spread out all her purchases on the bed. Not bad for fifty-some grand and a few days’ work. At some point she’d want to figure out how to retrieve her stuff from Vegas, where it was safe for the time being. If doing that proved impossible, though, no big wiggie. There was nothing she owned, Gina knew, that money couldn’t replace—more of and even better.

She soaked for an hour in the tub, then put on the black Gianfranco Ferré and the pearl earrings. She went downstairs to the hotel bar. She ordered a martini and checked the crowd for movie stars. The only guy she recognized was a guy from TV, one of the lesser networks, a roly-poly sitcom dad who also did fried-chicken commercials. He gave her the eye from across the bar, but Gina could see neither the fun nor the profit in it, so she picked up her martini and carried it out into the lobby.

Two beefy black guys in suits aroused her attention. They stood motionless across from the concierge desk, flanking a big wooden door. Curious, Gina made her way over. Before she even had a chance to select which of her many smiles to lay on them, the beefier of the two guys stepped aside and opened the door for her. She glimpsed glittering chandeliers inside, heard the plaintive coo of a string quartet.

“Miss,” the beefy guy said.

Gina nodded, not missing a beat, and entered a ballroom almost as vast as the hotel lobby. Even posher, if possible. Marble pillars, walls draped with Asian silk tapestries, a polished parquet dance floor around which men in tuxedos gracefully guided their bejeweled partners.

Now
this
, Gina noted with approval, was a party. She crossed to a bar set up opposite the string quartet and exchanged her empty martini glass for a crystal flute of champagne. She took a sip and looked out over the crowd, tried to gauge the cumulative net worth. Most of the men were in their fifties and sixties, silver-haired and pink-cheeked, while the women averaged a good ten years younger. Clearly a gala for wives, not girlfriends. There were only a few twentyish girls like Gina, who made it a point to ignore her.

“Hello, there,” said a voice behind her. Gina felt a hand on her elbow, gentle but proprietary. She turned to find a rich old coot grinning at her. He’d just come off the dance floor, and there was a faint dew on his pink cheeks and forehead, along the edge of a hairline too perfectly uneven to be real. He smelled musty, but expensively so. “My wife went to call the sitter, so I thought I’d come flirt with the most beguiling girl at the party.”

“How sweet,” Gina said. How creepy, she thought, that an old coot like this had kids young enough to need a sitter.

“Bernard Craig,” he said. He paused, still grinning, as if he expected her to know the name and be impressed. Gina was bored already.

“Caroline Graham,” she said.

“Let me guess,” Bernard Craig said. “You’re a curator at the Getty. Early impressionists.”

Gina smiled and reached for another glass of champagne. She noticed a striking woman standing by herself at the end of the bar. The woman was probably late thirties but looked a decade younger, with glossy black hair cut in bangs and eyes the color of pale gray frost. She wore a
très
tasty silk dress the same shade as her eyes.

“Vice president of acquisitions at Sotheby’s in New York,” Gina said. “My area is Near Eastern antiquities, though I also have an interest in jade.”

“Aha,” Bernard Craig said, pleased with himself. “Not far off, was I?”

“Quite close,” Gina said. By now she’d idly ascertained, by the way the fabric shifted when he moved, that Bernard Craig’s wallet was in the inside pocket of his jacket. “And I do enjoy the early impressionists.”

Bernard Craig started to say something he clearly anticipated to be witty but then glanced over her shoulder and stiffened. Gina figured he’d spotted his wife. She took the opportunity to stand, lean close, and strum her fingers lightly but suggestively across the pleats of his tuxedo shirt.

“Caroline Graham,” she whispered. She let her lips brush against his ear. “Our Beverly Hills office has my number, if you’d like to give me a call.”

Then she was off, without a glance back. She passed the two beefy guards at the door and made her way to the lobby ladies’ room.

In the ladies’ room, she plucked Bernard Craig’s wallet from her bag and held it to her nose, inhaled the rich scent of calfskin. She played the game she always played with herself and guessed, let’s see, eight hundred dollars inside? A black American Express?

Before she could open the wallet and check, though, she heard the outer door to the ladies’ room swing open. Gina had just enough time to drop the wallet back into her bag and turn to the mirror. The striking woman with the black bangs and gray eyes entered. She joined Gina at the mirror. Gina pretended to check her hair, then realized after a second that the woman was gazing at Gina’s reflection, not her own.

“You look familiar to me,” the woman said. Her voice was as silky as the dress, with an accent Gina didn’t recognize—Russian, maybe.

“Do I?” Gina asked.

“Are you a movie star, perhaps?”

Gina smiled and turned to the woman. She’d been in more of a boy mood when the night began, but she always made it a point to keep an open mind.

“Are you hitting on me, perhaps?” Gina asked.

The woman smiled back at her.

“I know now,” she said. “A business acquaintance of mine in Las Vegas. He faxed me photo this morning.”

Gina turned back to the mirror. She took out her lipstick.

“Vegas?” she said. “Never been, but I hear it’s fun.”

“This girl in photo? She could be your twin, I think.”

“They say we all have one somewhere.”

“And here you are!” the woman said, still smiling. “Life is funny, yes?”