Anshutes didn’t answer.
Not with words, anyway.
He raised the sawed-off shotgun he’d stolen from the ice cream man, and he cocked both barrels.
Coker said, “You think you’re pretty cool, don’t you?”
“Cooler than Santa’s ass,” Anshutes said.
“And you’ll shoot me if I give the lady an ice cream?”
“Only way she gets any ice cream is if she pay for it.”
Coker turned around. “How about if I pay for it?”
“I don’t care who pays. You, the little whore, Lady Luck or Jesus Christ. As long as I get the money.”
“That’s fine.” Coker smiled. “You’ll find your money on the road, asshole.”
“What?”
“The jackpot. The money I shot out of the slot machine. It’s all yours.”
‘You’re crazy.”
“Maybe. But I’m gonna buy me a shitload of ice cream, and this little lady’s gonna eat it.”
Coker set the girl down at the side of the road, peeling off his shirt and rolling it into a pillow for her head. Then he walked over to the truck and opened the refrigerated compartment.
“No Eskimo Pies,” Anshutes said. “Let’s get that straight.”
“I’m getting what I paid for,” Coker said.
Anshutes shook his head. What a moron. Ponying up fistfuls of silver dollars, just so some little Vegas whore could lick a Push Up. If that was the way Coker wanted it, that was fine. In the meantime, Anshutes would make himself some money, and Lady Luck wouldn’t have jack to do with it. Hell, for once hard work wouldn’t have jack to do with it either. For once, all Anshutes had to do to make some money was bend over and pick it up.
Silver dollars gleamed in the moonlight. Anshutes put down the shotgun. Not that he was taking any chances — he made sure that the weapon was within reach as he got down to work, filling his pockets with coins.
Behind him, he heard the sound of the refrigerator compartment door slamming closed. Coker. Jesus, what an idiot. Believing that some Vegas slut was Lady Luck. Personified.
Anshutes had told the kid a thousand times that luck was an illusion. Now he realized that he could have explained it a million times, and he still wouldn’t have made a dent. The kid might as well be deaf. He just wouldn’t listen —
Anshutes listened. He heard everything.
The sound of silver dollars jingling in his pocket, like the sound of happiness.
But wait… there was another sound, too.
A quiet hum, hardly audible.
The sound of an electric engine accelerating.
Anshutes turned around fast, dropping coins on the roadway. The ice cream truck was coming fast. The shotgun was right there on the double yellow line. He made a grab for it.
Before he touched the gun, the ice cream truck’s bumper cracked his skull like a hard-boiled egg.
Kim felt better now.
A couple Eskimo Pies could do that for a girl.
“Want another?” the guy asked.
“Sure,” Kim said. “I could probably eat a whole box.”
“I guess it’s like they say: a walk in the desert does wonders for the appetite.”
The guy smiled and walked over to the ice cream truck. She watched him. He was kind of cute. Not as cute as Johnny Ringo, of course, but Johnny definitely had his downside.
She sat in the dirt and finished her third pie. You had to eat the suckers fast or else they’d melt right in your hand. It was funny — she’d left Vegas worse than flat broke, owing Johnny twenty grand, and now she had three hundred bucks worth of ice cream in her belly. Things were looking up. She kind of felt like a safe-deposit box on legs. Kind of a funny feeling. Kind of like she didn’t know whether she should laugh or cry.
The guy handed her another Eskimo Pie. “Thanks — ” she said, and she said it with a blank that he was sure to fill in.
“Coker,” he said. “My first name’s Dennis, but I don’t like it much.”
“It’s a nice name,” Kim said. Which was a lie, but there was no sense hurting the poor guy’s feelings. “Thanks, Dennis.”
“My pleasure. You’ve had a hell of a hard time.”
She smiled. Yeah. That was one way of putting it.
“So you’re heading for Vegas,” she said.
Coker nodded. “Me and my buddy… well, we ended up with this truckload of ice cream. We wanted a place where we could sell it without much trouble from the law.”
“Vegas is definitely the place.”
“You lived there awhile?”
She smiled. She guess you could call what she’d done in Vegas living. If you were imaginative enough.
“Kim?” he prodded. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. Man, it was tough. She should have been happy… because the guy had saved her life. She should have been sad… because Johnny Ringo had tried to kill her. But she couldn’t seem to hold onto any one emotion.
She had to get a grip.
“You ever been to Vegas?” she asked.
“No,” the guy said. “Going there was my partner’s idea.”
“It’s a tough place.”
“I don’t care how tough it is.” He laughed. “As long as it’s the kind of place you can sell an ice cream bar for a hundred bucks, I’m there.”
She nodded. Ice Cream was worth a lot in Vegas.
But other things came pretty cheap.
“It’s a rich town,” she said, because saying that was really like saying nothing. “It’s full of rich men and women. I read somewhere that the entire budget for law enforcement in the United States is about a third of what it costs to power Vegas’ air-conditioners for a month.”
“Wow. That’s amazing.”
“Not really. Vegas is a desert. It’s an empty place. Everything that’s there, someone put it there. Only the rich can afford a place like that. They come and go as they please, jetting in and out in their fancy planes. Everybody else — they’re pretty much stuck there. That’s what happened to me. I was a dancer. I made pretty good money that way. But every dime I made was already spent on my apartment, or A/C, or water or food. I kept waiting for my lucky break, but it never came. I just couldn’t get ahead. Before I knew it, I got behind. And then I got in trouble with my boss — ”
“Johnny Ringo?”
“You know about him?”
Coker nodded at the one-armed bandit. “I’ve heard of the Mojave Two-Step.”
Kim swallowed hard. ‘You never want to dance that one,” she said. “I’m here to tell you.”
The guy looked down at the road, kind of embarrassed. Like he wanted to know her story, but was too shy to ask for the details.
“Well, maybe your luck’s due to change,” he said. “It happened to me. Or it’s going to happen. It’s like I can see it coming.”
“Like a dream?”
“Or an omen.”
Kim smiled. “I like that word.”
“Me too. It’s kind of like a dream, only stronger.”
“I used to have this dream,” Kim said. “When I first came to Vegas. That I was going to hit it big. That I’d live in a penthouse suite with the A/C set at sixty-eight degrees. That the sun would never touch my skin and I’d be white as a pearl.”
The guy didn’t say anything. Still shy. Kim had forgotten about that particular emotion. She hadn’t run across it much in the last few years. Not with Johnny Ringo, and not with any of his friends. Not even with the two-legged slots that followed her around the casino night after night until she fed them dollars just so they’d leave her alone.
In Vegas, everyone wanted something. At least the walking slots came a lot cheaper than their flesh-and-blood counterparts.
Funny. She didn’t feel good about it, but she didn’t exactly feel bad, either.