Saguaro Riptide

above average, his grasp of logic still Visegrip-tight. And, under more agreeable circumstances, Vince might have been right. Though he was certainly capable of self-delusion, truth be told he wasn’t a stupid guy.

But right now he was pretty tired. And whether he wanted to admit it or not his game was teetering on the edge, ready to take a one-way plunge into that biggest of all tanks. It turned out that walking into a set-up actually made him kind of nervous, and even a player of Vince’s limited experience knew that anxiety could drain the baddest bunny’s Duracells. Besides that, the windstorm had pretty much whipped him like a Jolly Roger’s mainsail. His skin was raw, as if he’d shaved every exposed inch with the dullest of razors. Ditto his lips, and he didn’t have a Chapstick in his pocket. And his eyes. . Jesus, every time he blinked, it was pure murder. Overall he felt like a peeled banana that had been rolled in ground glass.

But the deputy wasn’t moving and the sheriff wasn’t telling her to move, and Vince figured that he still had some time. Not a lot, but some. Under other circumstances it might have been enough time to reach a solution he might find amenable. But under the prevailing circumstances it was simply enough time for regret to take a hand.

So it didn’t really matter if the cause of Vince’s fatigue was job-related anxiety or minor dermatological distress or the mental impact of the deputy’s martial arts demonstration. What mattered was that his shields were definitely down.

Tonight Vincent Komoko had nowhere to hide.

In a matter of seconds he found himself belly to belly with the awful truth of it, the part that really ate at him but good-here he was, more alone than any man should ever be, in a big empty house in the desert with two women who saw him as nothing more than a means to an end. The only person on God’s green who might still care enough to help him was a thousand miles away, and she wasn’t even home. Or if she was home, she was hiding behind her answering machine again. And if that were the case, Vince knew that she was doing the right thing, because he’d cut out on her as quick and cold as plaster Elvis, leaving her all alone without so much as a chorus of “Suspicious Minds.”

For the first time, Vince realized what a shitty thing that was to do. Because for the first time he knew how it felt to be truly alone. . and to be the last one to know about it.

And that was when Vincent Komoko realized-also for the very first time-that while he was more than familiar with all the right questions, he really didn’t have any answers at all.

But he still had a gun-he’d lied about losing it in the sandstorm. A.45 automatic lay flat against his backbone, jammed under his belt.

He went for it.

The sheriff was faster. She spun around, her right shoulder suddenly occupying the space that had been filled by her left only a split second before. Her long blond braid whipped out as she whirled, making Vince blink at just the wrong moment, and that eye blink slowed him down just enough so that the heel of her right cowboy boot cracked against his right temple before he had a firm hold on the pistol, and it slipped out of his hand just the way the cellular phone did, but that didn’t really matter because her foot was coming back from the other direction and she was smiling now, really getting her hip into it this time, and as the heel of her Nocona boot struck his jaw the room was filled with a sound that was as brittle and awful as the long misplaced echo of tonfa cracking the plaster skull of the king of rock ’n’ roll.

PART TWO

The Breakers Roll

ONE

High noon on the Las Vegas strip.

Cannonade rattled a hundred-plus plateglass windows.

Freddy Gemignani stood before one of those rattling windows, staring out at Las Vegas from his penthouse suite on the twenty-sixth floor of the Casbah Hotel amp; Casino. On the other side of the Strip a British frigate was battling a pirate ship in the gigantic moat which fronted the immediate competition, an animatronically enhanced casino that was currently putting a world-class financial hurt on the operation Freddy had established back in ’59 with a little help from the Teamster’s Union pension fund.

'Thar she fuckin’ blows,” Freddy G said, turning toward a man who was sitting alone on the expansive sofa which ran the length of the window.

The man was on the wrong side of thirty but the right side of thirty-five. Not that he was the kind of guy who was bothered by age. He didn’t think that way. His belly was flat, and his sandy brown hair was his own, and most days he rolled out of bed without making any of the horrible hacking sounds his old man had made after he hit thrty. That wasn’t so surprising-after all, the man had never developed his father’s three-pack-a-day habit-but the fact that he could still wear jeans and a T-shirt and cowboy boots without looking like a Hollywood poseur or a redneck or a guy who should be parking cars somewhere was.

His name was Jack Baddalach. And he didn’t bother to acknowledge Freddy G’s comment, because he knew that the casino boss wasn’t even warmed up yet.

“Christ on a cross. Jack,” Freddy said. “This salty-dog shit is driving me nuts. I mean, you’ve heard the old stories about me-even the government boys say I’ve mellowed since the fifties. Most things I can take with a modicum of good grace. But losing money to a Mickey-fucking-Mouse abortion of a casino with a couple of dolled-up rowboats out front isn’t one of them.”

Jack nodded. Perhaps he was agreeing that losing money was a bad thing, or that Freddy G had in fact mellowed since the glory days of the pink Cadillac and the platinum-blond starlet, or that protracted exposure to salty-dog shit would undoubtedly drive one nuts. Or it might have been that his unspoken affirmation simply conceded the point that Jesus Christ, indeed, had died on a cross.

Not that any of it mattered. Not really. What mattered was that (1) Jack Baddalach had heard slight variations on this particular theme a dozen times or more, and (2) he thought enough of Freddy G to suffer another rerun without complaint.

So Freddy G continued. “In the old days a guy would decide where he’d drop his load based on the essentials-which joint had the cocktail waitresses with the best tits, and which joint dressed those gals in outfits that would show off those tits to the best advantage, and which joint had one of those gals waiting for you up in your room sans outfit once you’d dropped your greenbacks. Sure, that wasn’t the whole deal-it’d be okay if you could get a decent meal cheap, or hear Frankie Laine in the big room if you felt like tearing yourself away from the tables. Maybe even shake hands with Joe Louis in the lobby or something, get in a round of golf with him if you were a high roller.”

Freddy shrugged. “Oh, maybe you had to gild up the lily just a little bit, even then. Maybe you built a sixty- foot concrete sheik straddling the parking lot or something. That I could live with. But now. Jesus. Vegas is a different place. Pirate ships lobbing invisible cannonballs at Her Majesty’s Navy, right on the Strip.

“They call ’em megaresorts. Guys running around town, talking about their visions. Pirate ships, giant guitars, pyramids and castles-I could give a shit. These guys wouldn’t know vision if it bit them in the ass.”

Freddie shook his head. “But that’s what we’ve come to these days. Guys bringing the wife and kids to town in the family wagon, like they were going to goddamn Disneyland or something.” He sighed. “And you want to know the worst of it, Jack? The most disgusting part of the whole deal?”

Jack didn’t say anything, but he tilted his head slightly. His eyebrows did a little peekaboo act above the rims of his very dark sunglasses.