One-Eyed Jack (7 page)

While I watched, he fumbled a twist of waxed paper from his waistcoat pocket and transferred a sticky-looking, dark-brown glossy candy to his mouth. The bitter ghost-scent of horehound followed when I paused in front of the dead men. They looked startled to be seen; as I hesitated in the gutter, a brunette in fuchsia short-shorts and not much else walked through the right-hand John Henry, head rocking in time to the beat of her portable CD player. The left-hand John Henry coughed into a silk handkerchief, leaving a spot like the dark heart of a snowy blossom of Queen Anne’s lace, and turned to watch the girl wiggle away. I was scared enough of him that my guts turned to water in my belly, but I thought of Stewart and I made myself walk forward
. Ghosts. I called up ghosts.

The right-hand John Henry puffed up his enormous chest and looked away, free thumb hooked through the loops of his pants. His thighs strained threadbare dun cloth, much mended, as he shifted the hammer on his shoulder. The left-hand John Henry folded the cloth to hide the thumbprint of blood and tucked it into his pocket—the one without the flask. He sighed.

“She’s a lady of ill repute, Doc,” drawled the right-hand one. I stopped in front of them.

“She’s a woman who knows her own mind,” the left-hand John Henry—Doc—replied in a rich slow voice like seasoned honey, and drew himself up to face me. “And as for ill repute, I have a little of my own. Some easy virtue, too. Do I know you, sir?”

“No,” I said, holding out my hand. I felt them taking in my cargo pants, Doc Martens and earrings, my tattooed biceps, and the ring through my nose. The eyepatch didn’t look so out of place in all that. A Cadillac crept behind me, wary of the construction dust. Pale eyes and dark tracked its purring glide. “But my name’s Jack. One-eyed Jack, they call me.” Neither moved to shake, and I let my hand fall to my side.

It got the smile from the left-hand John Henry I’d half-hoped for. A gambler. And a quick wit, too. “My given name’s John, as well.”

“It’s why I called you back. You, Dr. Holliday. And Mr. Henry, here. You know—”

“I know I’m dead,” John Henry said. He looked at the sledgehammer in his hand and set it down, leaned it back against the dust-colored wall. “Where are we?”

“Las Vegas.”

“New Mexico? It’s changed some.” Doc Holliday leaned back on the heels of his shoes and looked up at the pale sky overhead, squinting after a jet contrail.

“Nevada.” I shouldn’t help but smile. “Around the corner from Fremont Street. And that’s not the one you’re thinking of either.”

“Huh.” He turned his head and coughed into his handkerchief again. “Named for the same John Fremont, though?”

I nodded.

“Then that’s changed some too, I imagine. What did you bring us back from the grave for, son?”

He died at thirty-six, and I’m over a hundred. But I wasn’t about to argue age and life experience with Doc Holliday. Even if I was something more than mortal myself.

“I need help,” I said. I had a pretty speech prepared, but looking up—way up—into the frowning brown eyes of John Henry I was left with no room for anything but honesty. Might be because the man was a
symbol
for honesty. I swallowed and tried to turn my attention to Holliday, but it wasn’t any easier to meet his eyes. “I’m the One-eyed Jack. The spirit of Las Vegas, its anima. Somebody shot my buddy, and I want to get them back. So I called you up. Namesake rite, tequila, and promises. But since there were two John Henrys who fit the bill, I got the both of you.”

A pedestrian edged around me, seeing a ratty one-eyed homeless boy with a lightless dyed-black snarl of hair, standing on a downtown street corner talking to himself. We get that a lot around here: the straights are used to madmen out of doors in Vegas.

“What makes you think we can help with that?”

“You’re—”
Who you are. New World demigods in the making, the Chuchulainns and Beowulfs and Yellow Emperors of the Americas. Folklore creatures.

Like me.
“You’re Doc Holliday, sir. That there is John Henry the drillman. You’re American legends, sir.”

Holliday opened his mouth, but a coughing jag took him and he fumbled in his pocket for his flask and drank quickly, neatly, even when I thought he’d choke. The whiskey calmed his cough and he shook his head as he screwed the silver cap back on. “Jack, I never killed but three, four men in my lifetime. And every one of those bastards deserved to die.”

John Henry shifted balance beside him, a mountain changing its stance. “I heard it was fifty, Doc.”

“Stories grow in the telling, son.”

I’d done some reading since Stewart got killed. “Wyatt Earp said you were the most dangerous man he ever knew, and the fastest gun.”

Holliday laughed and stroked his moustache, straightened his cravat. “Wyatt never minded stretching a tale till it squeaked protest, and you know what the papers are like.” He couldn’t hide a pleased smile. “He was right about one thing.”

“Doc?”

I was maybe three feet from Holliday. Before I could have moved, even shouted, his revolver was out of the hip holster and leveled at my chest. He cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger so quickly I didn’t have time to close my eyes before the report boxed my ears.

So I
saw
the bullet hit my chest, go through, and pass without a whisper of sensation. Holliday laughed and spun his pistol back into his holster. “Ghosts,” he said, and took another swig from his flask, squinting in pain. I wondered how the whisky tasted around the cough drop.

“Well,” I answered. “I called you up with a task in mind, gentlemen. And you can’t go back to rest until we figure out how to do it. So—immaterial or not—I suggest we go get a drink and talk it over.”

“I can’t drink your liquor,” Doc Holliday said, as John Henry fell silently into step on my other side.

“I’ll pour it on the ground.”

I led them toward the Strip. Dead men don’t mind the heat of the sun.

The American and the Russian.

Somewhere in the Desert Inn Hotel & Casino, 1964.

Bram Stoker—
that
Bram Stoker—said of Teddy Roosevelt that he was a man you couldn’t cajole, couldn’t frighten, couldn’t awe. Some mornings, I wake up certain that the ex-president has somehow managed to get himself reincarnated as my partner. He won’t be cajoled. Neither will he be beguiled.

Someone must have lied to him once. Someone I would like very much to find, someday, and talk to.

Because if he weren’t so darned frictionless, I might be able to get him to talk to me a little more about what he said about Oswald—

“What are you writing?” the Russian said, toweling his hair as he walked out of the bathroom. The American crumpled the sheet hastily and dropped it into the wastebasket by his knee.

“A letter to my aunt, but it’s not coming out well. Ready to go down and see if the café is still serving?”

“What’s the expression? No locks, no clocks?” The Russian looked about for his shoes and sat on the bed to tug them on. “And then we need to try to figure out why the assassin’s here.”

“Because if we know what he’s doing—”

“—we know where he is.” Their eyes met, and a brief smile passed between them. “What do you plan to do with him if we
do
track him down?”

The American grinned, knowing he looked like a shark.
What do you mean if?
“Kill him. In cold blood. Preferably from a distance and from hiding. We’ll work out a justification later.”

“Excellent,” the Russian said, stamping his feet into his black loafers. “Get your coat. And don’t forget your concealed carry card. This is Vegas.”

“Yes. They don’t care if you have a pistol on your hip, but God forbid there’s one under your coat.” The American stood and followed his partner out, pausing for a second to hang the Do Not Disturb card and trap a strand of his own dark hair between the lockplate and the tongue. “Breakfast or drinks?”

“Both?” The Russian glanced over his shoulder hopefully, and the American nodded.

Halfway down the fire stairs, the Russian reached back and laid a hand on the American’s sleeve, and the American glanced down to meet his partner’s sidelong glance. His hand slipped under his coat, but he didn’t draw the weapon, though his thumb rested against the safety lever. “Did you hear?”

“—footsteps?” The Russian flattened himself against the wall, one hand raised unnecessarily for silence. The American held his breath.

Always better to get trapped in a stairway than an elevator, if you have to get trapped.
Of course, it could be a hotel guest, climbing for exercise.

Two hotel guests. Climbing quickly.

In complete silence, the American skipped four steps backward and crouched with his gun in his hands, covering his partner and the landing below them.

The footsteps came closer, hesitated before the turn. The American heard a noisily indrawn breath. “Gentlemen. If we promise not to draw our guns, will you put yours away?” A familiar voice, pitched in a light, ironical range.

“You tennis-playing son of a bitch,” the American called back, delightedly. The Russian had already stepped away from the cinderblock wall and holstered his piece, and was moving forward as two tall, muscular men—one white, one black—gained the landing, shoulder to shoulder, and paused. The American looked from one to the other, at their polo shirts and skin-tight white jeans, a contrast to his own and his partner’s sober suit jackets and monochrome ties. He burst out laughing, and was rewarded by a sideways, fleeting smile from the Russian. “What brings you two to Las Vegas?” He extended his hand to the tennis player, who clasped it heartily.

The black man leaned against the wall and crossed his arms, biceps bulging under the tight sleeves of his shirt. “The same thing as you two, I presume,” he said, middle Atlantic accent and a light bass range. “Only a little more officially, if the rumors are true.”

“We’re here to see a man about a horse,” the American answered, still grinning. The rational corner of his mind recognized the giddy relief as honorably discharged adrenaline, and his partner’s second sideways glance told him the Russian knew it too.
I’m more worried about the assassin than I thought.

“We’re on vacation,” the Russian elaborated, extending his right hand to the scholar. They clasped briefly, the scholar muttering something in a language the American didn’t recognize, but which his partner apparently knew well enough to answer in. “We were just about to get something to eat. Would you care to join us?”

“Delighted,” the athlete said, reversing course lithely. He grinned over his shoulder, and the American spread his hands in bemused acquiescence. Obviously the Russian thought it would serve some purpose for the four of them to be seen in public together, and the other agents were willing to play along.

“Do you, ah, need to head back to your hotel and get ties?”

The athlete shrugged, as if letting the suggestion slide off his back. “At seven o’clock in the morning, in Las Vegas? You don’t suppose the Brown Derby’s still open this late? Or open again this early?”

“There’s a Brown Derby in Las Vegas now? I only knew about the one in Hollywood.”

“Age of globalization, man,” the scholar said, falling into step beside them. “Age of globalization.”

One-Eyed Jack and the King of Rock and Roll.

Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

I paused on the east side of Las Vegas Boulevard, near the flat rubble-graveled lot where the old El Rancho had stood vacant for so many years, and watched the ghost of Bugsy Siegel smoke a cigar while brains dripped down the back of his collar. Bugsy didn’t seem to notice me, or my entourage, but I had the weirdest prickle as if he’d just been staring at me. Anyway, he wasn’t the sort of thing I was used to seeing in broad daylight; I preferred the John Henrys, frankly, who followed along single file, barely wincing when the tourists walked through them.

Little ghosts don’t interact much, but they can be a damned pain in the ass if they’re mad enough, and powerful enough.

Doc Holliday cleared his throat twice before I realized he wasn’t coughing. He just wanted my attention. “Speaking of ghosts and shadows, Jack—” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, and I followed the gesture.

I’ve seen a lot of strange things. The ghost of an imploded hotel sitting healed and shimmering like a mirage in the evening sunshine wouldn’t take a prize by any means, but it was enough to make me blink and rub my eye.
That
was what Bugsy’d been looking at; a parking lot filled with tailfinned Cadillacs and Buicks with five-body trunks, with Nash Ramblers and a ’63 Corvette, candy-apple red, a pedestrian in a close-tailored gray gabardine suit coat and a skinny black tie slowing down to take a lingering look. I could see the rubble through his shoes.

“That’s unusual,” I said. John Henry grunted on my left side, and I chuckled a little nervously. “I hope I didn’t call up every ghost in the city.”

“If you did, you don’t know your own power, Jack.” Holliday ducked his head to light a cigarillo, in a logical move for a consumptive, shielding the flame of his Lucifer match with his hands. “That looks to my practiced eye like some sort of a
natural
supernatural manifestation, if you know what I mean. Where did you want to go to go drinking?”

“The Brown Derby,” I said, checking the angle of the sun. It would be dark soon enough, and if we hurried we could hit the lull between the dinner rush and the post-show crowd.

If we hurried.

I beckoned the John Henrys along. We had a while to walk still, and I’d need better clothes for the Derby. Lucky for me there are shopping malls the length of the Strip these days. I hung on to my Doc Martens; they’d be fine if a little self-consciously trendy under a suit pant, but the damned things take a year and a half to break in right. I changed in a washroom and stuffed my old clothes in a wastepaper basket. I never liked that T-shirt anyway, and the cargo pants were torn.

We walked into the Brown Derby at 8:15 p.m. and were seated right away. Or, I should say, I was seated. The John Henrys followed, drifting through the table to take their chairs. It wasn’t a bad table, in the smoking section with a view of the bar. I had just ordered a vodka martini and was hiding my small talk with the ghosts behind the menu when an Elvis walked past. Which is not unusual in Vegas, by any means.