Sin City (29 page)

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Authors: Harold Robbins

BOOK: Sin City
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“Even with the club and your company,” she said, “you're not going to have enough money to build a Strip club. You'd have to raise two or three times more money.”
“Try ten times more.”
“Excuse me?”
“I'm not going to build just an ordinary casino. There's already enough competition out there for the weekend crowd and people from back East. I'm going to build a casino that draws people from all over the country, like Disneyland and the Universal Studio tour.”
“Are you serious? Zack, those are family places, for mom and dad and the kids. Vegas is for adult gamblers. The only place that even comes close to being user friendly to families are the circus acts at Circus-Circus.”
“Why can't mom and dad come here and gamble while the kids are enjoying a theme park with rides and games? Don't you see, by not opening the door to families, we're turning away most people. There's no reason Vegas can't be a family vacation spot. I'm going to build a theme casino that the whole family can enjoy. You don't remember, but Circus-Circus was not designed for family entertainment. When it first opened, kids weren't allowed. You played slots with an elephant walking around but it was all for adults. It was the right idea to open the doors to children but the circus acts are not enough. Kids need something to do while their parents are making their contribution at the slots and tables. I'm going to build a super casino that has something for everyone.”
“Zack, you're asking me to risk everything we have—and Bic has—to give you a shot at the Strip.”
“I'm going to make you and that jerk richer than you've ever dreamed.”
“I don't care about the money. What I care about is that I just told you I'm taking our kids three thousand miles away and you don't give a damn.” She got up and started for the door. “All right, I'll sign for your dream. If you'll do one thing.”
“Which is?”
“Give away all parental rights to the children. I'm going to marry Todd after we get settled back East. He'll adopt the children and
they'll bear his last name. You'll never see the children again.”
I didn't hesitate for even a moment.
She shook her head. “I should hate you, but I don't. I feel sorry for you. You never had a mother, father, brother, sister. You're worse than an only child who doesn't know how to share—you don't know how a family functions. You don't know what you're supposed to do with a home and kids.” She stared at me for a moment, hoping for some answer from me. “You're going to end up like the father you never knew. I'm taking our children out of this town so they won't have to see a sick stranger carried out of the back of a hotel someday and realize that it was their father.”
LAS VEGAS, 1967
Bic Halliday was fifteen years old when Con took him out to a chicken ranch to get “the velvet rubbed off his cock,” Con said. The night Con decreed the boy was to lose his virginity, two of Con's old friends from Texas had shown up in Vegas for “a little shit kicking and pussy poking.”
After several hours of hard drinking and carousing, Con loaded his buddies and his son into his 1942 Packard and headed down the road for Sally's Ranch across the county line. Clarke County, where Vegas was located, didn't have legalized prostitution, but the county next door did.
Bic sat in the front seat dreading the ordeal ahead of him. He had done heavy petting with girls and heavy “petting” on himself in his own bed at night, but he had never gone all the way with a girl. His fear was that he would fail and be humiliated.
“You're not going to be in there with me?” he anxiously asked Con when his old man told him he was taking him and his pals out to a chicken ranch.
“Hell, no, I'm not gonna be watching your little prick. I'm going to be sticking my own in Wanda.”
Wanda, Bic had been told, was a big redhead from Tallahassee who Con claimed wrestled him to the floor and mounted him the last time he went out to Sally's.
“Stomp that goddamn pedal to the floor, Con, my dick's yelling that it needs to be milked!” one of the Texas friends yelled from the backseat. The other one leaned out the window and threw a bottle at a parked car. It missed the car and shattered in front of it.
Con took a swig of whiskey and nudged Bic. “Take a shot, boy, it'll calm your nerves. You look like you're going to be the guest of honor at a cannibal's feast rather than finally knocking off a piece. By the time I was your age, I had every woman in the county lining up to get
theirs, like a goddamn bull in a corral full of milk cows.”
The big Packard came across the dividing line at a curve in the road and almost rocketed into a big truck coming from the opposite direction. Bic gripped the dashboard as Con whipped the car back across the line before a head on.
They went by a sheriffs patrol car parked on the other side of the road and Con stuck his head out the window and
yippeed!
He waved with the whiskey bottle. Bic tensed with hope that the deputies would pull them over, but they only waved back. He knew they'd drop around Halliday's tomorrow and pick up drink, meal, and slot comps.
Out on the highway, one of the cowboys in the back leaned way out the left passenger side and threw a bottle high over the car. His buddy on the right side fired out the window at the bottle but missed. He cursed, then emptied his six-shooter at a road sign.
Con nudged Bic with the whiskey bottle and Bic took it reluctantly. He didn't like hard liquor, but he took a swig to please his father. It exploded in his mouth and went down his throat like burning aviation fuel. He started coughing and Con leaned over and hit him in the back so hard he went forward and hit his head on the window.
“Goddamnit, boy, I've told you a man swallows whiskey without tasting it. Just shoot it down. You just can't get it right, can you?”
Bic couldn't get it right. And drinking whiskey “like a man” was just one of a long list of things he couldn't get right. He was big, like his father, but where Con had the backbone of a grizzly, Bic had the spine of a rabbit. He grew up without the tough-skinned, barroom-brawler, ride-the-river cowboy tenacity of his father. The truth was Bic was scared of a lot of things. In school smaller kids beat him up. “It's not the dog in the fight,” Con told him when he came home with his tail between his legs after a fight with a kid physically smaller than him, “but the fight in the dog. Get some fight in you, boy, and go back there and kick ass.” He spun Bic around and gave him a kick in the butt in front of people. “Don't come back without the scalp of that kid who hit you.”
He came home from school with a red nose and a cut on his forehead after being whipped again by a smaller boy in his high school class. He went into the casino and to the corner table of Halliday's restaurant where Con held court. Con looked up from a discussion with two of his pit bosses and stared coldly at Bic as the boy stood next to the
table. Defeat was written all over the boy's face. “You cunt,” Con said, and turned his back on him.
His reaction to his father's disapproval was always the same—he screwed up worse. When he was little, if he got slapped for dripping mustard on his shirt while eating a hot dog, he ended up with mustard all over him.
“You're like a goddamn steer that keeps butting a fence post because he ain't got the brains to move to the side,” Con had told him over and over. “You fuck up and fuck up and fuck up.”
Con made the turn onto the side road to Sally's Ranch, running into a ditch before getting the car centered on the road. The “ranch” was half a mile ahead, several “modular home” units linked together. Bic began trembling. His friends at school who had lost their virginity had almost always got their first piece at a drive-in theater. None of them had been taken to a chicken ranch by their father. He had seen the whores who hung around Halliday's bar. Hard women with coarse voices and clothes that struck him as trashy rather than sexy. He didn't want to have sex with any of them. There were plenty of girls at school he could've had sex with. One time he boasted to his dad that he had made love to a girl he had dated, Janey Wayne, and when Con had picked up the phone to call and ask her if it was true, Bic panicked and confessed his lie. That got him hit across the side of the head.
“That's for letting me call your bluff—with a bluff. Don't play cards you can't handle.”
Sally was a surprise. Bic had expected a “madam” but Sally was a barrel-shaped man with big ears and a round face.
“Get the crew out here,” Con told Sally. “My boy's gonna pick the filly he'll ride.”
The four “girls” lined up next to each other. Bic was shocked when he recognized one of them. She was the mother of a boy he knew. He avoided looking at her.
“Go ahead, boy, pick one.” Con slapped Bic on the back. “Hell, pick two or three if you think you can ride 'em all.”
“I—I don't know—”
Con grabbed his arm and steered him to a Latino woman. She was a little younger than most of the other women. Bic guessed she was in her early twenties.
“What's your name, honey?” Con asked.
“They call me Tijuana Rose.”
“Well, T-Rose, you think you can fix up my boy here? He's been pumping his Long Tom by hand so often, you'd think he was milking it to fill baby bottles.”
Con's pals howled with laughter and Bic turned redder than he already was.
Rose took Bic's hand and winked at Con. “When I'm finished with him, the girls at school will drop their panties every time he walks down the hallway.”
The dimly lit corridor was lined on both sides with room doors. Bic heard noises coming through the thin walls; a squeal of female laughter, a man grunting like he was lifting heavy weights. His mouth was dry and his stomach knotted. She held his hand as they ventured down the hallway, a wet, sweaty hand full of fear and panic.
They went inside a room that had tacky budget motel furniture, the smell of perfume from Woolworth's, and another odor that couldn't be hidden, a scent more primeval than perfume, his first smell of cheap sex.
Rose closed the door behind them and stood only inches away from him, her breasts jutting against the restraints of the sheer silky blouse. She took his hands and put them flat on the bare skin below her neckline and slowly moved them down, squeezing his hands tight over her breasts.
“These don't feel like the girl's at school, do they?”
“Uh-huh,” came out as a dry mouth mumble.
“Why don't you take off my blouse?”
His hands fumbled with the buttons and she helped him, unable to suppress a grin. “Don't be nervous, I'm not going to bite you—except where it'll feel good.”
She laughed lewdly and it increased his nervousness. When they left the room, Con would cross-examine her about how he performed and he'd be humiliated again. His dread of what would be said later panicked him and he did what he always did in those moments, he tried harder and failed worse. Unable to get a button undone, he jerked at the blouse.
“Take it easy, honey, don't damage the merchandise.”
She undid the last button and slipped off the blouse. Her brown
breasts were barely restrained by the size thirty-eight bra. She unhooked the brassiere and let it fall on the floor. Taking his hands, she put them under her breasts and had him hold them. “Like 'em, honey?”
Not waiting for a reply, she pushed him back to the bed. He sat on the edge and she pulled his shirt off over his head. “Stand up, sweetie.” She undid his pants and dropped them and his underwear, then had him sit back down and pulled them off his legs. She slipped out of her skirt and stood in front of him wearing only bikini panties. “Like me?” She did a little tiptoe dance step in a circle, then moved in closer, putting her large breasts in his face. The breasts had the same cheap perfume scent of the rest of the room. Instead of turning him on, his stomach turned and he felt nauseated. He pushed her back so he could breathe.
Shaking her head, she stepped into the bathroom and came out a moment later with a bowl of warm soapy water and a wash cloth. “Lay back for me.” She spread his legs and gently washed his penis and testicles, massaging them as she did. His organ stayed limp.
“Lay the other way on the bed, honey.”
Rose hit the on switch of an eight-track player next to the bed and a Spanish disco beat started blaring. With Bic lengthwise on the bed, she stood on the bed with his prone body between her legs, her legs spread wide enough so he could see the pink between her legs. She swayed and moved her body seductively to the beat of the music, fondling her own breasts and smiling at him. She slowly came down on him, and spread her soft moist pink zone across his virile part, rubbing against him as she slipped down his body until her head was in his groin area.
He still hadn't gotten hard yet. She ran her hands up his naked abdomen and felt his tension. She teased his virile parts with her tongue, starting below his belly button and moving down and under, tickling his balls and taking his limp shaft in her mouth and sucking. She sucked off and fucked hundreds of men a year, so many that the only sexual response in her was artificial, but she found herself getting a little turned on by the boy's limp cock, her mouth getting hotter and warmer. Most men's cocks were hard red stems. The softness and pliability of his was refreshing. But no erection came.
She shook her head in disbelief as she glanced at a black curtain that covered one wall of the room.
“I'm sorry,” Bic said. “I'm really sorry.” His voice quivered embarrassingly. “Can I pay you just to talk for a while?”
He heard giggling come from the curtained area, not a girlish sound but that of a drunk man. Con Halliday jerked open the curtain. Standing next to him was one of his Texas buddies bending over with mirth.
“You'd fuck up a wet dream, boy.”

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