Gambol closed his eyes. He felt his head nodding forward and rode a Ferris wheel down into violent cartoons.
He shivered, but he didn’t feel cold. When he shivered the pain filled his right leg.
“I want another shot.”
“Not for two more hours,” the woman said. “This isn’t an opium den.”
He opened his eyes. He wore a frilly blue nylon robe. Probably the woman’s.
“Where’s my clothes?”
“How many times are you going to ask me that?”
“Fuck you.”
“Your stuff went out with the rest of the bloody trash.”
Gambol’s head drooped, and he looked down into Jimmy Luntz’s face.
The landscape had that blond, Central Valley look. Some pine trees. Oaks. Orchards. Farmland. Sunny and still. They drove south past Oroville, looking for a shopping mall. The speed signs said 65. Luntz stayed legal. He kept his window cracked to suck his cigarette smoke away from Anita’s face.
Luntz said, “Dude who worked in a casino in Vegas told me about this hippie. This hippie comes in out of the desert night, creeps into the casino all scraggly in his huarache sandals and tie-dye shirt and Hindu balloon pants, and he goes to the roulette table and reaches into this little pouch tied to his belt and comes up with one U.S. quarter. Lays the quarter on black. Little ball comes down on twenty-two
black. He lets it ride, doubles again, switches to red, doubles his dollar, takes his two dollars to the blackjack and wins ten in a row, doubling every time. Ten in a row. True story. Two thousand and forty-eight dollars. He pulls his chips and heads for the craps and starts betting with the shooter, double whatever the shooter bets. Inside of two hours the house is clocking his action and he’s comped with free meals and he’s drunk on free booze, and he’s still at the craps, with a crowd around him, betting a couple hundred a throw. By three a.m. he’s stacked up over six grand off an initial investment of twenty-five cents. And suddenly, in four or five big bets, all gone — he busts out. Stands there thinking a minute. . folks around him watching. . He stands there. . Everybody’s shouting, “One more quarter! One more quarter!” Old hippie shakes his head. Staggers back out into the desert after one hell of a night in a Vegas casino. A night they’re still talking about. Total cost was twenty-five cents. A night he’ll never forget.”
“For a person who doesn’t drink coffee,” Anita said, “you sure run your mouth.”
“It keeps me from thinking about things.”
“Like what?”
“Like who you are and what the fuck you want.”
Cigarette smoke in his nostrils woke Gambol, and he coughed, and the woman said, “Sorry,” waving it away.
“Lots of folks are quitting these days.”
“What century are you in, guy? I’m the last smoker on earth.”
“How long have I been here?”
“You don’t remember yesterday?”
“When was yesterday?”
“You were walking and talking.”
“Walking?”
“And swearing. In a real creative style. I poked my head into that culvert, and you hopped right up and walked right to my car. Then,” she said, “I couldn’t get you out of the car. I had to do the whole thing in the back seat. Debrided the wound and all the rest. The back seat of a Chevy Lumina is not the place for that.”
Gambol closed his eyes. “I feel like I weigh ten tons.”
“You lost a lot of blood. A lot. I scored one liter of plasma. Nothing else but glucose and water.”
“Feels like he shot me through the bone.”
“He missed the bone. Or you’d be in the ER right now getting your leg saved and probably talking to a detective.”
“I don’t talk to detectives.”
“And he missed the big artery, or you’d be dead.”
At the Time Out Lounge in the Oroville Mall they sat in the rearmost booth, and Jimmy who called himself Franklin only stared at her, never sipping once from his Coke. She
took a long swallow of vodka-and-Seven and said, “Oh, well. . was I on TV again?”
“How did you steal two-point-three million bucks?”
“Didn’t the TV tell you? You run a bond election for a new high school, you float the loan, turn on the computers, transfer it here and there — zip, all yours.”
“That’s greedy.”
“Then the money gets missed right away, and the list of suspects is extremely short. Then somebody gets arrested.”
“Well,” he said.
“Well, what?”
“I guess you were greedy enough to take it, but not mean enough to frame an asshole. Excuse my language,” he added, “but where I come from that’s what they call the guy who gets sacrificed — the asshole.”
She laughed without feeling amused. “There was definitely an asshole,” she said.
“If you’ve got it stashed, you’re doing it right, wandering around acting broke. That’s doing it right. But if you’ve got it, why don’t you just disappear?”
“For one thing, I’m due in court to enter a plea and take a deal. Probation and lifelong restitution. If I miss that date, the judge’ll void the deal and max me out. That’s six years at least.”
“Kind of a long time to wait to spend your two million.”
“Have you lost count already? Two-point-three.”
“What’s a point or three among friends?”
“I haven’t got any friends. And I’m flat broke.”
“Not according to the Federal Bureau of Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“I haven’t got the money. I just know who has it and how to get it.”
No more flip commentary from Mr. Jimmy.
“Doesn’t that interest you?”
“You’re interesting every way there is.”
This Jimmy was your basic bus-station javelina, but a nice enough guy. He insisted on handing her two Ben Franklin hundreds before they left the lounge. “You’re with me now.”
“That’s not established.”
“By ‘now’ I just mean now — right this second. That gets you at least a couple hundred.”
He led her into JCPenney’s, where he stacked generic-looking items on one of his arms and went into the dressing room wearing his shiny black pants and white tuxedo and came out in khaki chinos and a flannel Pendleton.
“Where’s your fancy threads?”
“On the floor in there. I shed those babies like a sunburn.”
“You’re fast.”
“These days, life is fast.”
She picked out a JCPenney pantsuit, a JCPenney blouse, a JCPenney skirt, and the best underwear they had, which wasn’t much. While Jimmy stood around waiting for her she
sat in the dressing room momentarily naked with these latest humiliations at her feet and rage in her heart. JCPenney.
She changed into the pantsuit, gray pinstripe, and made sure she had her shoulders back and her smile on before she swept aside the curtain. “Does it fit?”
He stared, and then he went for his Camels and put one between his lips, realized where he was, dropped the cigarette into his shopping bag. “It fits.”
“You’re sweet,” she said, and she sort of meant it. But not as a compliment. “You’re homeless, right?”
“I have a home. I’m just not going back there, is all.”
“So right in that shopping bag is everything you own.”
“Everything I need.”
“And your white canvas bag — what’s in that one?”
“Everything else I need.”
“I know what’s in it. A sawed-off shotgun.”
He seemed completely unsurprised. “It’s not a sawed-off. It’s a pistol-grip. And it isn’t mine.”
“I peeked in the bag while you were in the shower.”