Jimmy, a weak man scared, kicked over a chair. “No, goddammit, no!”
Vangie sighed, got to her feet, went to him. She put her arms around his neck, her face close to his. “Jimmy-honey, listen to me! You know we have to—”
He shook her off angrily.
“All I know is that I lose the bonds, I lose you!”
“Maybe, maybe not — but you won’t lose your life.”
“According to Dain.”
Vangie controlled her anger. “Not just according to Dain. You know what Maxton is capable of—”
“I never knew Maxton as intimately as you did.” He had worked himself up into a fine, nasty, self-justifying anger. “You’ll end right side up, though — or should I say backside up? I bet you slept with Dain this afternoon and made plans to—”
“Jimmy, I have to go to work. I get paid tonight, we need the money. We’ll talk about it when I get home, okay?” Zimmer was petulantly silent, refusing to meet her eyes.
“At least think about giving them back. And please let’s get another room like he suggested.”
Zimmer replied in his childishly defiant way, “I’ll do whatever the fuck I please.”
At Carnal Knowledge, the musicians were just arriving, having a drink, looking to their instruments. A few local guys on their way home after work were having a quiet beer before the entertainment drove the prices out of reach. Two bulky men, Nicky and Trask, entered like matched, mobile, very heavy bookends. They moved in on the bartender in unison.
“Harry?”
The bartender jerked an indifferent thumb toward a dark corner by the end of the bar. Bulky guys asking questions were no novelty to him, and Harry was a pain in the ass.
“Him.”
In the dark corner, Harry had Noreen crowded up against the wall, trying to caress her breast while talking earnestly about sexual matters. Noreen looked bored. The bookends closed in on Harry as if he were an encyclopedia of slime molds. Seeing them over Harry’s shoulder, Noreen did a quick and grateful fade, then found something to talk about with the bartender, out of earshot but able to watch obliquely in the backbar mirror.
The one named Nicky, who had a whole lot of blond hair, said to Harry, “You phoned about a girl named Vangie.” He tossed a photo of her on the bar. “Yes or no?”
Harry picked up the picture, studied it with a show of concentration. He had gotten a sly, money look on his face.
“Well-l-l... I can’t be certain.”
Trask, the one with short black hair, said, “Get certain.”
“I ain’t gonna get in trouble over this, am I?” asked Harry with belated caution. “I mean... how heavy is it? I mean... what’d she do?”
“Asked questions,” said Trask.
Harry said hurriedly, “Ah, yeah, yeah, she’s the one, all right, fellas, she dances here.” He added in a smaller voice, “Stuck-up fuckin’ bitch.”
Nicky rolled two $100 bills into a cigarette-like cylinder and stuck the cylinder into Harry’s shirt pocket.
“See, pal?” he said. “Easy money. Now just tell us where she parks her pasties and we’ll be on our way.”
Harry told them. As they started out of the place, Trask paused to finger Harry’s shirt collar regretfully.
“Ring around the collar, Harry,” he said. “Mention us around town, you got no collar. Maybe even you got no neck to go into the collar you ain’t got. Capisce?“
He guffawed loudly and swaggered out after Nicky. He had really liked that TV series, Crime Story, about the old days in Vegas, and had patterned himself after the show’s mob characters.
18
Noreen, in pasties and spangles, was doing an exaggerated and prolonged grind in front of the dressing room mirror. She added an exaggerated bump! to the grind that made everything jiggle, and winked at her own overmascaraed eyes in the mirror.
“So why ain’t you rich, kiddo?”
A mile away in the porn palace next to the Delta Hotel, a couple of dozen male patrons of three races — white, black, Asian — sparsely studded the theater like chocolate chips on a store-bought cookie. Management didn’t mind the nearly empty theater; it was only a money-washing operation anyway.
Zimmer, absorbing the raw sex and grunts and four-letter exhortations from the screen, fondling his own half-hard-on furtively like everyone else, jerked his hand away abruptly. Why was he here with these freaks and weirdos who couldn’t afford a VCR, when he had something like Vangie waiting in his bed?
She wasn’t waiting in his bed, that was the answer. She was out shaking it in a Vieux Carré sleaze joint, or maybe right now fucking the guy who was after them to rob Jimmy Zimmer of the bonds. For her own good, he’d force Vangie to give him the locker key, he’d control their destiny...
Zimmer emerged into the polyglot, swarming street crowd, no tourists, all local. When he turned in at the Delta Hotel, a bulky man sauntered in ahead of him. A bodybuilder, mirror athlete, all muscle and no guts, deep tan and a great shock of almost straw-yellow hair.
Another bulky man, equally large but with black hair cut Marine Corps short, turned away from the check-in desk to meet the blond man in front of the elevator. They shook hands noisily as Zimmer reached around them to punch the button. Cream puffs — these hulking overinflated guys were all fag for each other.
“Hey, man, what about this nightlife, huh?” black-hair asked blond as the elevator door opened.
“Yeah! Thompson’s got the broads up at the room already!”
The three men got on. Zimmer, closest to the panel of floor buttons, pushed 6 just as the blond man said, “Hey, punch six for us, will you, buddy? Thanks.”
Zimmer turned right, toward his room. The two big guys paused, debating which way their room was. They ended up following Zimmer down the corridor.
Heavy applause, rebel yells followed the distant music. Down the corridor from the backstage area came the approaching click of high heels; Vangie came in wearing only an exhausted expression, spangles, and sweat. She sprawled in one of the straight-backed chairs with her arms hanging limply at her sides. Through the half-open door came Harry’s voice from backstage.
“Noreen, get out here! You’re on next!”
“Her master’s voice,” said Noreen, but she made no move whatsoever to get out of her chair in front of the makeup mirror.
Nicky and Trask were coming up the hall behind him with their loose drunken conventioneer laughs when Zimmer opened his door. Trask shoved him hard between the shoulder blades. Jimmy ran across the room, arms flailing, to smash into the dresser. Nicky shut the door as Trask pulled a blackjack from his pocket. Zimmer turned to protest, but Trask waved the sap in front of his startled eyes.
“Make a sound I splinter your nose.”
Zimmer pressed himself back against the dresser, terribly pale, his terror-filled eyes darting from one hulk to the other. Nicky was at the phone, dialing 9 for an outside line. When he had it, he dialed a local seven-digit number.
“Six forty-seven,” he said into the phone, and hung up.
“Noreen! Get your fucking ass out here!“
Noreen went languidly to the door. She caught the frames on either side of it to do a high kick out into the hall. She stuck her head back in.
“I almost forgot, kid,” she said over her shoulder, “couple creeps laid two C-notes on shithead earlier — both looked like that Arny Schwartzynigger guy, y’know? Had a picture that from fifteen feet away in bad light looked like you.”