As Little Norman stepped out of the bar and across the casino toward the door, the throngs of gamblers looked only at the clicking, buzzing, jingling displays on slot machines, or the brightly colored playthings on green felt tables. The only people who really watched Little Norman were some men on the walkways above the mirrors in the ceiling because they were paid to see everything, and a couple of women in the cashier’s window because they were bored. Their eyes settled on him for only a second and moved on. Little Norman was a regular, part of the garish sameness that they looked at every day.
There are places in the world where a man nearly seven feet tall, blacker than the king of the Zulus and weighing two hundred eighty pounds might well cause eyes to linger, but Las Vegas isn’t one of them. Little Norman was a familiar sight, and he never caused any trouble. If he had, it would have been very quiet and ended very quickly, because there were not many people who could have offered more than negligible resistance.
Little Norman had discovered Las Vegas in 1958, when he arrived there as the bodyguard of a boxer named Walt “The Animal” Homer. A convincing bodyguard for a celebrity who made his living beating other celebrities senseless had to be big, ugly and mean. Anyone could see that Little Norman was big and ugly enough, and the rest of his credentials came to the Las Vegas Police Department by way of his parole officer in Kansas City. Walt Homer turned out to be a bad ticket. He had his nose moved half an inch to the right in a match in Florida later that year, and the promoters decided not to invest any more in his doubtful future, so it was left in doubt no longer.
But in those days Little Norman was a warm, comforting presence for people in certain professions to have around. He met some friends of the promoters, made himself agreeable, did some favors and eventually built a place for himself in the world. By the time he returned to Las Vegas fifteen years later, it was in the position of responsibility and trust he now held.
After breakfast Little Norman always promenaded along the Strip, stopping in each of the casino lounges he passed. He would spend a few minutes in each bar, conferring with various consultants he kept on retainer—waitresses and dealers who worked in the casinos, chambermaids who worked above them and people who simply made it their business to be there because Little Norman had told them to. Whenever he had heard enough, he would reach into the pocket of the tailored suit, pull out a wad of twenty-dollar bills and strip off one note or several, depending upon the freshness and weight of what he had been told.
What Little Norman was doing was checking the weather in Las Vegas. For a number of years now—ten, to be precise—the weather had been fine. The money he paid for the recitations he heard each day came to him indirectly from fourteen old men, none of whom lived within five hundred miles of the city, who had gotten into the habit of depending on Little Norman. His job was to ensure that nothing ever happened to disturb the tranquility that had prevailed with few interruptions since their predecessors had formally agreed to it forty years ago.
Today, as Little Norman sampled the weather, he stared particularly intently at his observers and listened for mistakes. It wasn’t that any of them would be so foolish as to tell him a lie, but after so many days of clear weather, they might have missed something. As usual, he asked them who had checked in that they recognized, and who had played with a lot more money than his clothes indicated he should have. But today he also asked if there was a man of average height and build, with sand-brown hair, who seemed to be looking for someone. He would have sat watching at a remote table in the bar, or passed through the casino slowly, never gambling or talking to anybody. None of Little Norman’s people had seen such a man, so by the time he had finished his rounds at eight, he was satisfied that the weather was still fine.
At nine P.M. Little Norman’s long strides took him into Caesars Palace, where he had a light lunch with a girl named Yolanda. She claimed to be nineteen but provided him with evidence that was ambiguous. When he went to the men’s room, she tried to steal some of the money he had left under the check for the waiter. This meant that she was old enough to be squeezing each opportunity to put something away for the future, so she might have seen a sag or a wrinkle already, which argued twenty-five. But doing this also meant that she was young enough not to realize how bad that sort of behavior was for her future, because until the waiter picked it up, that money still belonged to Little Norman. He explained the distinction to her patiently, with a reassuring smile on his face, and she listened with the alertness of a rabbit. For her benefit he added that Las Vegas was going to be a cold, hard place for her if she didn’t value the goodwill of people like waiters and doormen. She demonstrated her native intelligence by openly taking the money out of her sleeve and putting it back on the table—not on the check, but under her own plate. Little Norman liked her for that.
By eleven P.M. Little Norman was making his second circuit of the casinos. He couldn’t be everywhere, but he could seem to be. He made eye contact with everybody he saw whom he knew, so that if they had seen anything he might like to hear, they wouldn’t need to wonder where to find him.
Little Norman returned to his car in the lot at the Sands at six in the morning. It was a bright red Corvette with an engine that could do a hundred fifty if he had been reckless enough to try it. He had bought the first one he could afford in 1960, and kept trading them in ever since, always bright red, because that was the color of the first one he had seen in Kansas City; it was the color Corvettes were. He always had experienced a comfort in having more car than anybody he was likely to have to chase down.
Little Norman had lived in some of the big hotels downtown when he had first come to preserve the good weather. The fact that he could afford this luxury had appealed to him then. Now he lived in a three-bedroom house on the edge of town near an entrance to the Interstate. The fourteen old men were deeply conservative in their souls, and they didn’t trust a man who lived as though he didn’t intend to stay.
The traffic was sparse, and Little Norman drove home with only a couple of almost-stops at corners where he had mistimed the lights. He unlocked the door of his house and entered, punched the buttons on the panel in the wall to let his security system know who he was. Then he locked the door and walked into his bedroom.
Outside the window at the back of the living room that looked out on the empty swimming pool and the cactus plants, Wolf ducked into the darkness. “One-five-two-four: fifteen twenty-four.” He waited, then moved to the bedroom window, stooping to look through the crack in the blinds at Little Norman’s bedtime ritual. The big man carefully took off his clothes and boots and put them in the closet, then opened the drawer on the nightstand, pulled out a .45 ACP pistol that Wolf judged was a Beretta and slipped it under the pillow beside him. He disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes, then returned, climbed into bed and turned off the light with a remote control on the nightstand.
Wolf waited for a half hour, lying on the still-warm weeds beside the house, then stood up and began the walk to his motel. It was a couple of miles away, and he was tired.
The next day, Little Norman was pleased to learn that the weather in Las Vegas was still fine. He made his rounds wearing boots of crocodile and ostrich hide, and celebrated with an evening meeting with Yolanda in a room he had rented for her at the Frontier. It was after five A.M. when he compressed himself into his Corvette and drove back to his house. It wasn’t until he reached his bedroom that he learned the weather had changed. “Hello, Norman.” He didn’t have to turn his head to know who it was, but he did it anyway. He wasn’t going to go into the darkness without being man enough to look.