“Excuse me, are you a cop?”

He turned to find a woman who resembled Heather Locklear standing beside him. She wore jeans that fit like baloney skins and a sweater molded to her ample bosom.

“No, are you?”

She let out a little-girl giggle. “I was just wondering if you’d walk me to my car.”

Gerry obliged her, and they walked across the visitor parking lot. He was able to pick out her car before they reached it, a bloodred Mustang convertible. She opened it by pressing a button on her key chain, then thanked him with a smile.

He walked back to find Vinny, Nunzie, and Frank waiting by the front doors.

“Where you been?” Nunzie wanted to know.

“Being a good Boy Scout. Ready to go?”

The three men nodded. The apprehension of being inside a police station was slow to leave their faces, and Vinny took out a pack of cigarettes and offered it around. They all accepted, and shared a silence while allowing themselves to relax.

“How we ever going to pay your father back for this?” Vinny asked.

Gerry stared at the cigarette he’d just lit up. Yolanda was bugging him to quit, and he guessed now was as good a time as any. He dropped the cigarette and ground it out with his shoe, then said, “You’re not.”

“Your father isn’t going to demand something in return?”

Gerry shook his head. He took a deep breath, sucking in the secondhand smoke all around him. Vinny had survived as a hoodlum because he’d learned that favors must always be paid back. Except it was different with his old man. You couldn’t pay him back because there wasn’t anything his old man wanted.

“I’d still like to do something for him,” Vinny said. “You know, show my respect.”

“Maybe you could send him a turkey at Thanksgiving,” Nunzie suggested.

“Or a ham,” Frank said, speaking for the first time. “They’ve got these places that precook them, and deliver.”

“You think he’d like a ham?” Vinny asked.

Gerry realized they were being serious, and tried to imagine what his father would do with a baked ham sent to him by a bunch of hoodlums. He’d either take it to a local homeless shelter, or to the neighbors, but he wouldn’t eat it himself.

“Sure,” Gerry said.

“Bah-zoom,”Nunzie said under his breath. “What do we have here?”

The four men’s attention shifted to the attractive member of the opposite sex coming across the visitor parking lot toward them. It was the young woman Gerry had escorted to her car, only now she had a pissed-off look on her face, and her car keys dangling from her fingertips.

“I’m sorry to bother you again, but my car’s engine is as dead as a doornail,” she said. “Is there any way you could give me a ride home? I don’t live that far.”

Gerry looked at his friends, and not seeing any objections, said, “Sure, but I’ve got to warn you, it’s not that big a car.”

“I’ll squeeze in,” she said.

Her name was Cindy Dupree, and she sat sandwiched between Vinny and Gerry in the front seat, and told them how she’d come to Las Vegas expecting to get a job as a blackjack dealer in a casino—“I heard you could live pretty decently on tips”—but had ended up working the graveyard shift as a bartender—“The tips suck”—and was hoping to scrounge up enough money to move to Los Angeles and enroll in a beautician’s school. She called Las Vegas a whorehouse sitting on a hot plate, and hoped never to return for as long as she lived.

While she talked, Cindy directed Vinny to a nameless subdivision on the northern outskirts of town. There were no streetlights, and Gerry squinted to see the street names, trying to remember them so they could get back to town. They passed a billboard for a smiling attorney named Ed Bernstein, then turned down a dead-end street named Cortez, and Cindy said, “This is it,” and pointed at a single-story ranch house in the middle of the block. Vinny pulled up to the curb, and threw the rental in park.

“Well, I guess this is where we part ways, gents,” Cindy said. “Thanks for helping a girl out of a tight spot. I really appreciate it.”

Gerry slid out of the car and offered his hand to her. She took it, gave him a friendly kiss on the cheek when she was out of the car, then brushed past him on her way up the front path. She had her key ring out, and he saw her press a button that made her garage door automatically open. His father was always telling him that where there was smoke, there was usually fire, and he found himself questioning why she’d come to the police station by herself. She hadn’t felt safe walking across the parking lot, yet had been willing to let four strange guys give her a ride home. It didn’t make sense, and he jumped into the car while looking back at Cindy’s garage. The door had come up, and as she went inside, two men hiding in the garage swept out past her.

“Cute broad,” Vinny said.

“Get out of here!”

“What’s wrong—”

“I said go!”

A Pontiac Firebird was parked in front of them, twenty yards down the street. Its headlights came on, bathing their rental in light. The car’s engine roared, and it came forward as if to hit them, then suddenly stopped. Two men wearing jeans and sweatshirts jumped out. Together with the two men from Cindy’s garage, they surrounded the rental. In their hands were automatic pistols with silencers, and Gerry heard the quiet pop, pop, popas they shot out their tires, the rental slowly sinking several inches. He glanced at the house, and saw Cindy standing in the garage. She’d turned the light on, and was watching the action. Their eyes briefly met, and she shrugged and killed the light.

One of the armed men tapped Vinny’s window with the tip of his silencer. Vinny rolled down his window while keeping his other hand visible on the wheel.

“Which one of you is Gerry Valentine?” the man asked.

Gerry said that he was. He’d put his hands on the dashboard and was trying to stop his bowels from exploding. The only thing worse than getting whacked was soiling yourself before it happened, and he struggled to retain his dignity.

“You and the driver get out of the car,” the man said.

Gerry got out of the rental and faced the man doing the talking. He’d inherited a lot of things from his father, one of which was his phenomenal memory. He’d seen this guy before, then it clicked where: the guy was a valet at the Sugar Shack. The fact that he wasn’t wearing a mask did not bode well for what was about to happen to them.

The valet made them empty their pockets, frisked them, led them to the back of the Firebird, and made Gerry and Vinny climb into the open trunk. He slammed the trunk down hard, and they were instantly enveloped in suffocating darkness.

They listened to Nunzie and Frank being put through the same drill, and put in the trunk of another vehicle. This was how hoodlums executed people, and they both knew it.

“It’s been nice knowing you,” Vinny said.

37

Valentine had never used an alarm clock in his entire life. When the sun rose, so did he.

His hotel bedroom wasn’t big enough for him to get on the floor and do his exercises, so he went into the living room, and did his push-ups and sit-ups to the accompaniment of Rufus Steele’s apocalyptic snoring. He’d told Rufus off before going to bed, and sensed the old cowboy was faking sleep, his Stetson conveniently hiding his face. Valentine stole glances at him while he worked up a sweat.

He’d always thought of Rufus as a man born a hundred years too late. He had uncanny street smarts, and a century ago might have become a prominent businessman or politician. But those days were long past, and his lot in life was playing cards.