I lift the tablecloth and see that Eddie has his left foot under Surrey’s leg and is lifting and moving her foot against me. He sees me watching this take place, and suddenly jumps to his feet and yells, “What the fuck are you doing?”
He’s yelling at Surrey, not me.
Gwen and Lucky look at me, as if I’ve done something wrong.
I shrug.
“You tramp!” Eddie yells. “You fucking whore!”
He slaps her hard across the face.
“Please,” Lucky says. “I’m sure it was just a misunderstanding. It was just a misunderstanding, right Surrey?”
Gwen looks at her husband and says, “Are you really this desperate?”
“That’s it!” Eddie says. “I’m outta here!” He looks at Surrey. “Find your own way home, bitch!”
He stomps off, leaving Surrey with us at the table.
We’re speechless.
As if proving Lucky right about the shitty service, a waiter appears for the first time since we were seated.
“Go fuck yourself!” Lucky says.
“Yes sir!” the waiter says with enthusiasm. He spins around and fairly sprints to the kitchen.
“You think he’s going to?” Gwen says.
Lucky looks at me and says, “Well, I hope you’re happy. Ten million dollars just walked out the door.”
“You don’t want to do business with that guy.”
“Why not?
“Guys and Dolls? The media would have a field day.”
Gwen laughs. “Pickles and Peters in business together. You get it? Pickled Peters?”
“Shut up, Gwen,” Lucky says.
We all shut up. But our heads turn toward Surrey, as if caught in the pull of a tractor beam.
Moments later, Tom scurries over to the table. He appears to have tears in his eyes.
“I’m so sorry!” he says, with great sincerity.
“Quite all right,” Lucky says.
“I was talking to Surrey.”
Gwen arches her eyebrow and says, “This gets weirder and weirder.”
“I’ll just escort her out of here,” Tom says.
Gwen says, “He struck her!”
“He’s upset,” Tom says.
“I don’t care! He can’t just go around hitting her like that. It’s still abuse.”
Tom lowers his head and sighs.
“He’s done worse.”
He bites his bottom lip a moment, then positions himself behind Surrey, places his palms below her elbows, and carefully begins hoisting her to a standing position.
“This is the worst part,” he says.
“Lifting her?” I say.
Tom shakes his head. “The constant fighting,” he says. “They’re always at each other’s throats.”
“Tom,” I say.
“Sir?”
“What does he pay you?”
“Sir?”
“Eddie. How much does he pay you for this bullshit?”
“He doesn’t pay me anything.”
“Excuse me?”
“Surrey pays me.”
Gwen laughs.
I say, “Of course she does.”
20.
“It’s not going to work, you know,” I say to Lucky.
“What’s not?”
“Your Vegas Moon scam.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This isn’t a real deal. And if it was, it wouldn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
“You’re the draw. The rest is just another sports book.”
“What do you mean?”
“When you set the line at Vegas Moon, the casinos would simply adjust theirs. You’d be betting against yourself.”
“You know anything about Vegas?”
“I know there’s plenty of bank financing for legitimate deals.”
We’re in Phyllis’s actual office. Gwen’s walking through the other rooms with a penlight, keeping it below the windows the way I instructed her.
“You know much about sports betting?” Lucky says.
“Nope. But I understand people.”
Gwen’s light appears before she does.
“Where you been?” Lucky says.
“I wanted to see the lipstick message Phyllis left under the toilet seat.”
“And?”
“It’s not there.”
“Cops must’ve took it as evidence.”
She watches us work. Lucky’s going through drawers. I’m pulling up part of the rubber baseboard.
“What were you boys talking about? I could hear you halfway across the office.”
“Creed was telling me why he thinks Vegas Moon isn’t going to work.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Says he understands people. Doesn’t know anything about Vegas or gambling, but he knows people.”
“You probably get to know a lot about people when you watch them die,” she says.
“You think I don’t know people?” Lucky says. “I’m a professional gambler, for Chrissakes! Did you happen to hear the way I talked to Eddie a few minutes ago? How I changed my style and pattern of speech? I sell people what they want to buy, the way they want to buy it. Do you understand?”
“Yeah,” she says. “You’re a bullshit artist.”
I’m smiling. Lucky can’t see it, because the lights are aimed at our feet, but it’s all over my face.
“I’m a pro, is what I am,” Lucky says.
“You’re a con artist,” I say. “And desperation is coming off you like stink off a floater.”
A half hour passes as we continue looking for the device. Gwen’s getting antsy, and I wonder if it’s because she knows the device isn’t here. I’ve studied her face since the moment we met, and I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion Phyllis lied about giving her the device. What would be her motive? Lucky’s wife was her rival. Maybe she wanted me to torture, maim, or kill Gwen.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she says.
Lucky says, “Creed. You think the police found it?”
“No.”
“Me either. Let’s see if we can break into her house.”
“You got an address?”
“I can show you how to get there.”
“You’ve been to her house?” Gwen says.
“I had to take papers there once,” Lucky says.
“Lucky’s quite the ladies’ man,” Gwen says.
“Used to be,” he says. “Now I got you.”
We sneak out the back of the office. As we make our way around the building, Lucky takes the lead. Gwen reaches behind her without looking and grabs my crotch. I reach around and grab her boob. Neither of us acknowledges the other, but she can tell I’m awake. As absurd as it is, we walk this way, hand-to-boob, hand-to-crotch, for a good twenty feet. Finally, I let go of her. She’s still holding me tight, so I reach under her dress and slip my hand between her legs as she walks. She’s surprised, and her voice catches in her throat. Comes out as a little squeal. We both remove our hands as Lucky says, “You okay?”
“Just caught my heel for a second,” she says.
“Are you okay Mr. Creed?” she says, without turning around.
“Wait here,” I say. “I’ll get the car.”
I’m in high school again. But having more fun this time around.
21.
“What are you doing?” Lucky says.
“Pulling over.”
“Something wrong?”
“You tell me.”
I’d been heading toward Phyllis’s house, but now I slow down to turn into the entrance of a Wendy’s. I find an empty space and claim it. The sign light casts a yellow glow across part of the back seat where Gwen is sitting, and crosses her diagonally, illuminating her face, right arm and shoulder, leaving the rest of her in shadow. Lucky, in the front passenger seat, is directly in front of her. When he stares straight ahead like he’s doing now, his face is backlit, and has an aura around it, that reminds
me of a lunar eclipse. If the moon was wearing a cowboy hat.
Lucky’s nervous, but acting cool. Gwen hasn’t spoken since we entered the car. I see her giving me a quizzical look in the mirror. No one speaks for a minute.
Finally Gwen says, “Would you like to try a combo?”
“Shut up, Gwen,” Lucky says. To me he says, “You know how late it is? I’ve been up twenty hours, nonstop. Not to mention my ass feels like the doctor left his scalpel in my upper intestine.”
I say, “Lucky, look at me.”
“Fine. I’m looking. What do you want?”
“I know what we’re looking for. But I want to know what you plan to do with it.”
He shrugs. “Phyllis had a device. A work product. I need it.”
“Start at the beginning. But before you say anything, I’m going to allow you one lie.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re going to tell me everything you know about the device, and how you first learned about it, and I’ll let you lie up to one time. If I believe you’re lying twice, I’ll kill you without giving it a second thought. Do you believe me?”
“I don’t know. You could be bluffing.”
“Spoken like a gambler.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s not a compliment.”
I glance in the mirror and see the sudden flash of Gwen’s smile as she realizes I just made a reference to what she said earlier in the day: that I was great looking, but it wasn’t a compliment. I give her a wink.
“Spill it,” I say to Lucky. “I won’t use this information against you. You have my word.”
He pauses a few seconds, then says, “How much do you know?”
“I know a lot about the device. Things I haven’t told you. But I need to know what you know, or we could be at a disadvantage with Connor Payne.”
“What do you know about Ropic Industries?”
“I know you put twenty million bucks into a technology company that had a surplus of sixty million at the time. You bought your way onto the board, and worked a deal with your accountant to get your hands on twelve million of their investment capital. I think you took that money and bet it on college hoops, or pro football, or whatever the hell you like to bet on. And I think you lost your ass. So you went back to the trough for more money, and you lost that, too. I think you maxed out what you could get from the accountant, so you came up with this whole Vegas Moon bullshit. You can’t get bank financing, so you’re scamming your degenerate gambling friends, a million here, a half-million there. You’re supposed to be using it to replace the money you stole from Ropic Industries, but you figure if you put it on the Lakers to beat Boston, you’ll be able to repay twice as much. Only you’re in a slump, and nothing’s going your way. You know you’ll dig out eventually, but you need some cash to get you through this slump. Meanwhile, you’ve got this device that Ropic manufactured, and somehow you’re planning to cash in on it. Stop me if I’m wrong.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Which part?”
“I don’t want to do this in front of Gwen.”
“She deserves to know what you’ve been up to.”
“It’s okay, Lucky,” Gwen says. “You can tell the truth. I’ll love you no matter what.”
“You think?”
“I know. ’Cause you’re a winner, Lucky. Everyone knows that.”
He nods.
“Everything you said is true,” Lucky says, “except the part about Vegas Moon, and the device.”
“You’ve just told the first lie,” I said. “Next lie kills you.”
“It’s not a lie! Not exactly.”
Something in his voice makes me believe him. A little.
“Go on.”
“Vegas Moon was my dream,” he says. “I always planned to build it. I put two million of my own money into it, and bought an option on the land. Then the bank crisis hit, and the regulators went ape shit and forced the banks and insurance companies out of the project. So I tried to raise the money myself. But the economy is so fucked up, only a few people invested. It wasn’t enough to start the project. So I used Ropic’s money as a nest egg for my bets. I figured if I could win enough, I could pay Ropic back, with interest, and break ground on Vegas Moon. Here in Vegas, once you break ground, the money starts pouring in.”
I think about what he says, and decide it could have gone down that way.
“Okay, you can have your lie back. Now tell me about the device.”
“I liked Ropic because, like you said, they had a lot of cash, and no one knows this, but the accountant was one of my employees. He’d made money with me before, but never had any real cash to bet. Plus, he was frustrated, tired of counting other people’s money all day. I convinced him I had some locks, some sure-thing bets, and kicked him back fifty grand for every million he got me. He used his share to mirror my bets, meaning, we both lost everything. But there was another reason I liked Ropic: their research team owned patents on super-secret technology the government needed for high tech weapons. For a corporation that size, a government contract would have made the stockholders rich.”
“But that didn’t work out.”
“Right. Because the new administration cut the funding, and the military backed out. Our products had no use beyond weaponry that’s illegal for civilians to own. I thought about selling it to the enemy, but our tech people said no one else has the technology. Our devices were just one piece of a sophisticated weapons system. So I called a board meeting and said, ‘what the fuck do we own that we can make money with?’ And the answer was ‘Nothing.’ Can you believe it? Ropic had all their eggs in one government basket.
“So the board says, ‘Good thing we’ve got that sixty million dollars. We can buy some technology, stamp our name on it, and start a whole new dog and pony show.’ And that’s when me and Stevie went into a panic.”
“Stevie the accountant?”
“Right.”
“I’m falling asleep here, Lucky. Tell me about the device.”
“After the board meeting, Phyllis—Dr. Willis, I mean, brought me a little metal box. It was like something you’d see in the movies. She said, ‘What I’m about to tell you, no one knows.’ She said she went to a secret government facility and watched a doctor implant a heat chip into Connor Payne’s brain. The chip has a four-digit code that can be entered from anywhere in the world by using a remote unit that looks like a large wrist watch. When you punch a code into the wrist unit, the chip will instantly kill Mr. Payne.”
“Jesus!” Gwen says.
“Right. And then Dr. Willis said that the government thought they had the only two wrist devices ever made, but Ropic Industries actually had three more that no one knew about.”
“Three?”
“Three.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“That’s what she said. Five wrist devices were manufactured.”
Darwin had one, Doc Howard had the second, which he sold to me for a hundred million bucks. I took Phyllis’s unit with me after killing her. Which leaves two wrist devices unaccounted for.
“Where are they?” I ask.
“Phyllis had one. I don’t know what happened to it. Probably the cops have it. But this morning—or is it yesterday morning?—Anyway, Connor Payne showed up at Phyllis’s office. She figured he knew about the device and planned to kill her. So she input the code, thinking he’d die in her lobby. But it didn’t work.”
“And why’s that, do you suppose?”
“Someone must’ve reprogrammed the chip.”
“But there’s a small device in a metal box that Phyllis gave you.”
“Right. That little device can override any code. You plug it into one of the wrist units, punch in any four numbers, and the chip will boil Mr. Payne’s brains anywhere in the world.”
“Were you planning to blackmail Mr. Payne?”
“Hell no! You think I’m crazy? The whole thing gave me the creeps. I told Phyllis I didn
’t want any part of it. Told her to hide the device and never tell me where she put it. But Connor Payne has to know about the device.”
“If he doesn’t have it, he might start killing Ropic board members until he finds it?”
“Exactly,” Lucky says.
“So you hope to find the chip, place it with a wrist unit, and kill Conner Payne?”
“Yes. In self-defense.”
“A pre-emptive strike.”
“Exactly.”
“Only now you can’t find the wrist unit or the device.”
“Right. But if I get the chip back, maybe I can find out who has the other wrist units.”
It was giving me a sick feeling too, wondering who might have them.
“You should have a record of the sales,” I say.
“I doubt they were sold. I don’t know what happened to them. Maybe they’re locked away in a storage container somewhere.”
I think about it from Lucky’s point of view. “This whole Connor Payne thing has sidetracked you from raising money to recover your losses.”
“It has.”
“As I see it, you need two things: Connor Payne out of your life, and capital to finance your play till your luck changes.”
“Exactly.”
“Let’s go home, get some rest. I’ll keep Conner Payne at bay while you meet more investors.”
“I still want to search Phyllis’s house. I doubt we’ll find anything, but we need to try.”
“It’s your call,” I say.
He thinks about it a minute. “Let’s look for an hour. If we don’t find it, we’ll just have to live in fear.”
In the back seat, Gwen groans.
“What?” Lucky says.
“I’m starving.”
To me he says, “Can you go through the drive-through, get her some fries or something?”
I give him a look.
“Please, Mr. Creed?” Gwen says. “I love french fries.”
I look at her in the mirror. She licks her lips in a way that indicates far more than her love of french fries.
To Lucky I say, “You want anything?”
“Diet coke.”
“And a shake,” Gwen says. “If you don’t mind.”
“Uh huh.” Long as I’m a waiter, might as well go all in. “Anything else, Mr. Peters?”