Also, I’d been left my wristwatch, which was nothing expensive, just a Timex, and yes the sucker was still ticking-it was ten after midnight. Tonight’s poker game at the Lucky Devil hadn’t even started yet.
I’d given thought to pulling the jon boat in at the Paddlewheel’s little dock, but my Sunbird was in the Lucky Devil lot, and I decided to see if I could risk docking at Jerry G’s landing. That pier was more elaborate than the Paddlewheel’s, with a few other jon boats tied up, plus a brick boathouse for the cabin cruisers that were part of the “recreational boating” fleet that was actually used for drug-, gun-, and who-the-fuck-knew-running.
Fairly adept with the Evinrude by now-my little outing with the two bouncers had taken me maybe twenty miles downriver-I slowed and had a look at the dock, where the only lighting was one yellow security lamp on the boathouse itself. I could see nobody standing watch, the jon boats bobbing at an empty expanse of pier. I glided in and tied up there, and crawled up on the spongy dock.
I had no weapon other than the sawed-off, and I’d used one of its two shells-any reloads had gone down with its previous owner. But it was a formidable-looking weapon and I could still do one blast’s worth of damage, so it was worth hauling along.
A gravel path wider than a sidewalk and narrower than a one-lane road made its way up the slope through trees to the edge of the Lucky Devil parking lot, which was full now. Post-midnight Friday was prime time for the Lucky. The security lighting was subdued, with the handful of lamp poles outshone by the occasionally opening doors of the hooker trailers lining the lot at right and left.
I moved toward where I’d left the Sunbird, with the sawed-off at my side, staying close to cars so that the weapon couldn’t be easily seen. Parking places were rare enough that arriving vehicles were trolling for them, and when a car found a space, it swung in to disgorge drivers and passengers who had already long since passed any legal drinking limit. Dumb loud remarks and drunken louder laughter made dissonant music in the open air.
When I got to where I’d left the Sunbird, I at first thought I’d miscalculated, and was off a row, because the Pontiac wasn’t there. Then I leaned against the Dodge in its space and thought it through: my car keys hadn’t been on me, so that meant Jerry G’s minions had located the Sunbird and moved it, dumped it some-where.
You’re a dead man, I reminded myself. They couldn’t have left your wheels just hanging around their parking lot…
Up a row, however, another Pontiac caught my attention-a familiar cherry-red vehicle that was still in its place: Chrissy’s Firebird convertible, with the top down.
I was maybe twenty feet from the building now, so I lowered my head as I made my way to the Firebird, then knelt beside it, and got the lay of the land. A single bouncer, situated near the casino, was walking the line, keeping an eye on the lot. He didn’t seem to have spotted me, and his only brothers were walking the perimeters where the hooker trailers perched.
Three bodyguards, then…with the ones babysitting the hookers way too busy to be overly bothered with the parking lot.
I hadn’t expected to see any increased security-after all, had everything gone peachy for the boys dumping me downriver, they would just be getting back. They might not even be expected to check in with the boss, who soon would be playing his precious poker game, and disliked being interrupted.
Speaking of which, after I’d kept watch for possibly fifteen minutes, the door to the private poker room abruptly opened, and a familiar yellow-permed figure exited, with Jerry G following her a step or two. They exchanged a few words, he patted the behind of her tight jeans, then slipped back inside as she started toward the lot.
I hopped in the back of the convertible, and positioned myself on the floor behind the front seats. The Firebird was parked about mid-lot, which was its most under-lit section, and I figured I could get away with it. Anyway, I didn’t suppose Chrissy felt she needed any weapon that God hadn’t already granted her, but if she’d upgraded to a revolver or something, and had it handy in her pink purse, I had a shotgun shell available to rearrange her perm.
She got in the car and behind the wheel, started it up, and pulled out, wheels crunching gravel and then I felt the shift onto the smooth blacktop of Main Street. That was when I slipped the double-nose of the shotgun between the seats and into her bare side-I was still tucked below sight of anybody but birds and truckers.
“ Jesus! ” she said, and hit the brakes.
“Keep driving,” I said.
She tried to see me in her rearview mirror, but the angle was wrong. “What?”
“It’s your Coke buddy. I’m not dead. But you will be, if you fuck around.”
“I’m not afraid of you!” she said, terrified. “What if I go one hundred miles an hour and crash us?”
“Then we’d both be dead, only I won’t let you take this baby past forty-five, without reducing your waistline first.”
I poked her flesh with the shotgun’s cold snout.
“You…you wouldn’t shoot me…”
“I think I would. Drive us to the Wheelhouse Motel. Pull in the space at room twenty-eight.”
A maybe three-minute drive followed, proving as uneventful as it was silent. I felt the car slide into the stall, and she shut the car off.
“Now what?” Her voice sounded entirely different, sort of medium-range, that middle ground between alto and soprano, and grown-up. Before, all she’d emitted was a sullen, childish mumble. I realized these last few minutes were the first time I’d heard her speak when she wasn’t bored, or pretending to be, anyway.
I hopped out of the back, facing the room, the shotgun in front me, out of sight from any motel guests who might have been loitering, although there really weren’t any-they were all around the bend down at the Paddlewheel.
“Get out,” I told her.
She gazed up at me in fear and loathing-she looked a little like Tuesday Weld, Dobie Gillis — era, though her cheeks were more sunken; still, it was Tuesday’s smirky kiss of a mouth. Her eyes, dark blue and large, showed no sign she’d been tooting recently, neither dilated nor red. She’d apparently spent her time with Jerry G in the private poker room either filling him in or getting filled by him. Or both.
I unlocked the room and she went in first, and sat on the edge of the bed, still in the pink shirt tied under her nice little titties, her jeans so tight they would have given Brooke Shields pause. The pink purse was beside her, and I reached over and flipped it out of her reach.
She was studying me. Looking to see how much trouble she was in. Looking to see how she could get out of it.
I went to my suitcase on its stand and got out my spare nine millimeter, and left the sawed-off on top of some clothes.
“Let me tell you all about you,” I said, pulling up a chair opposite where she sat, but angling it so my back wouldn’t be entirely to the door.
“You don’t know me,” she said.
“You were a cheerleader in high school, but you had a bad reputation, well-deserved. Your grades and activities were just good enough to get you into college, but you either flunked out or got in trouble over drugs, and so you started dancing. Maybe in Chicago. You caught somebody’s eye in family circles, maybe Jerry G himself, on a visit…but anyway, when Jerry G did see you, he knew you were something special, way too cute to waste on dancing or whoring, and anyway you didn’t like to think of yourself as a whore, so you became Jerry G’s favorite little squeeze. He lavished you with credit cards and cocaine, with never a notion of wasting you in any capacity at the Lucky, and then he got an idea. He knew all about Dickie Cornell’s weaknesses, and he needed somebody to keep an eye on the Brit prick’s activities and ambitions. So you enrolled in community college in River Bluff…probably just a class or two…and you applied as a waitress at the Paddle-wheel. I’ve seen the female help there, it’s like walking around inside a men’s magazine. But you are exceptionally cute, Chrissy, even by Paddlewheel standards, and when Dickie interviewed you, you two hit it off. Were you ever a waitress there, I wonder, or maybe a bartender? Or was it straight up to the Playboy penthouse on the third floor, with hot-and-cold running tootski and all the decadence a nice Midwestern girl could ever dream of?”