Rosetta came on that journey with me, so to speak. She was saying things, but my ears could not hear. She was pounding my thighs with the heels of her hands, but it didn’t hurt until hours later. When the climax had crested and fallen, Rosetta stumbled from the bed and into the hall.
I crumpled on my side, half on and half off the bed. The power of the two sexes coming together inside me, and with Rosetta, too, was something I had never even suspected was possible. I shivered with intensity that was so charged that it couldn’t properly be called pleasure.
A few minutes later, Rosetta came back through the bedroom door taking a deep drag off a cigarette.
“You smoke?” I asked when she sat down next to me on the bed.
“Not for seven years,” she said. “But after that, I don’t care. I need this cigarette.”
She held the butt end toward me, and I took a grateful drag.
“Baby, you don’t need to give me no money at all,” she said. “Just do that once a month, and I will consider myself a rich woman.”
I pulled her down on top of me and kissed her eyes, which fluttered shut with each osculation.
“Did you go to school for all that?” she asked.
“Many.” My erection was returning.
“I know you want it, Jack Strong. I do, too. And you know I can, but I can’t. If I go through that again, I might just die before you can get to tell me where all that money’s comin’ from.”
“I thought you didn’t want the money.”
“I’ll use it to feather your nest.” She kissed my lips and rolled off.
I got up and walked for the door.
“Where you goin’?” she demanded.
“Into the other room until this dick goes down.”
In the dark of the living room, I peered out between shuttered slats of the venetian blinds. The black van was parked out there, silent and still.
I took the envelope Tom Grog had given me and tore it open. It contained six thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills and an address on Park Avenue in Manhattan.
Manhattan. I used to sleep in various grottoes formed by huge boulders in Central Park there in the summer. In the winter, I knew every grate that spewed heated steam. My life had been contained in a Grand Union shopping cart. I had my football award from Perry High and a loaded pistol I’d found and kept.
“Jack?”
She had come to the doorway of the darkened room.
“Why’d you put your robe on?”
“You don’t wanna be lookin’ at no middle-aged woman’s skin.”
“Take it off.”
“How about your dick?”
“He’ll behave as long as you don’t tickle him.”
She let the white silk kimono fall from her shoulders, and I sat on a stuffed chair. She lowered into my lap and I gave her the money, minus ten bills.
“What’s this for?” she asked.
“Down payment on the money I promised.”
Leaning over, peering into my eyes, Rosetta asked, “Where did you learn to make love like that?”
“From a woman.”
She smiled. “Did that woman ever tell you that it’s not a good manners to give a lady a wad of cash when she’s naked on your lap? Might give the wrong message.”
“We struck the deal about something else before the wrestling match.”
“I won,” she said.
“Me too.”
We kissed.
“Okay,” she allowed, moving over to the green sofa placed at a perpendicular angle to my blue chair. “What are we gonna do for this money?”
“A while ago another woman and I stole a great deal of cash from a bad man who stole the money from a worse man. She tried to kill me but failed. Now I need her key to the safe-deposit box that holds the money.”
“How long ago?”
“Four years.”
“Four years? Where’ve you been all this time?”
“Recuperating.”
“Damn. You must’ve been somethin’ else before you got sick.”
“I’m something else now.”
“Is that why your skin is all patchy?” Rosetta asked. “Did she burn you with acid or somethin’?”
“Something. Are we in?”
Rosetta’s visage became very intent. She said, with a sneer, “All the way in.”
After my temporary lover and partner in crime had gone to sleep, I used her phone to call a guy Lance Richards once knew.
“Hello,” he said in the smallest possible span.
“Roaches?”
“Who’s this?”
“Lance.”
Silence.
“Roaches?”
“Lance who?”
“You know damn well who. You still workin’ at the Beamer Motel?”
“Uh-uh, but my cousin Rolly is.”
“Somebody is gonna call there for a Carl Rothman. You take the message and call this number with it.” I gave him the number of a cell phone that I’d found in Rosetta’s purse.
“Okay. Okay. Where you been, Lance?”
“Away.”
“Away like the joint?”
“Just like that. And let me tell you something, Roaches.”
“What’s that?”
“I still know the address of the liquor store got robbed in L.A., the one where that cop was wounded. All I got to do is say your name, and that video will be looked at next to your mug shot.”
“You don’t have to threaten me, man.”
“No threat. I just want you to know that even if I’m dead and cold that information will be delivered to the LAPD.”
I hung up on the petty thief and armed robber. Roaches was a little soap-colored man who was always scratching. Whether the itching came from psoriasis or neuroses, no one knew, but the name Roaches stuck on him because he always seemed a little dirty and disheveled, you expected to see bugs darting out from a pant leg, sleeve, or collar.
A certain glee appeared at the deprecation of the criminal, and my persona, randomly named Jack Strong, mentally shrugged off the unclean Lance Richards. I was, Jack Strong was, the top man in the pyramid of innumerable personalities that made up my mind. This certainty caused a sense of security throughout the fields of thought and feeling that comprised me, were becoming me.
Jack Strong got up from the stuffed chair and went back to the window.
There was another car parked in front of Rosetta’s little matchbox house — a red 1967 Mustang.
Rosetta was sleeping when I left hours before dawn.
It was maybe four in the morning when I arrived at another tiny house in yet another sleepy suburb of Sin City. It looked gray in the darkness, but I knew that Lana Santini’s house was turquoise and white. Lance was so angry that for a moment he almost broke through to the podium intending to go up to her door. But I held him back and called her number from memory. It had been disconnected so I tried information. That got the call put through automatically.
“Hello,” she said, all sleepyhead.
It surprised me that Lance still had feelings for her.
“Lana, it’s Lance.”
“Oh.” Her words were flat and cautious. “I heard you were at the casino today.”
“Yeah, I was there.”
“What do you want?”
“Why’d you do it, baby? Why’d you have to try and kill me?”
“I didn’t.”
“You thought you could get the money, and Mr. Petron would be searching for me not knowing that I was buried out in the desert somewhere.”
“I didn’t do that, Lance. I swear.”