Morning dawned, literally and metaphorically. Jack didn’t know where he stood on the piranha-pig scale, but he did know that he was hungry.
He wanted donuts.
FIVE
The little bastard wouldn’t eat.
Harold Ticks ran one hand over his bald pate and swore under his breath. What he really wanted to do was yank his.357 and plug the Chihuahua, but he wasn’t going to do that.
No. The furry little bastard had to stay alive for one more day. After that Harold knew that little ol’ Spike was a goner.
Tough luck, muchachito. Tomorrow night Harold would have a half a million bucks in cold hard cash. Man, what a trip. Harold Ticks rolling in the long green.
But that was tomorrow. Right now Harold had to take care of business. And that meant getting the fucking can opener and opening another can of dog food.
This Harold did. He flipped the top of the can into the garbage and emptied a gelatin-spackled lump of turd- colored food into the Chihuahua’s bowl.
The dog sniffed the food and looked at Harold with its big brown saucer-eyes. Harold gave the little bastard a big smile and sniffed the empty can encouragingly.
“It’s good fucking stuff, Spike,” Harold said. “It’ll make you a fucking world beater. A couple bites of this and you’ll fuck like a German Shepherd. Turn your little
The dog licked its muzzle and coughed feebly. Its spindly legs quivered and shook like pencils at a senior citizens’ art class.
The little bastard gave in and settled down on all fours, whining. Swearing under his breath, Harold tossed the empty dog food can into the garbage with all the others. Damn. Ten bucks’ worth of dog food wasted.
Harold’s ten bucks, too. Every penny. None of the others had chipped in on it. Just like with the tuxedo-the limo driver’s outfit he’d used to fool that asshole Baddalach. Harold had spent nearly a hundred bucks on that, every dime straight out of his own pocket. Plus a deposit he was going to lose because things were much too toasty to show his face in Vegas.
Harold wasn’t going into town. Not with Freddy Gemignani’s greaseballs sniffing around. The odds of getting caught like that were probably pretty fucking infinitesimal, because Vegas was a big place. But Harold Ticks wasn’t going to buck those odds. He was going to play this cooler than an Eskimo.
So ten bucks on the pup chow and a hundred-plus on the tux. Plus he’d gassed up the limo on the return trip to Hell’s Half Acre. There went another twenty-plus. And this shit wasn’t exactly tax-deductible. Not that Harold had seen many IRS forms, but he was stone fucking sure that there wasn’t one for expenses-dognapping.
But that was okay, really, because if things went the way Harold wanted them to, he was going to come up kickin’ it in the end. Half a million bucks. Hey, we’re talkin’ thick pockets. Plush. Fresh. Completely frosty.
Harold liked the idea of that. Come drop day his skinflint compadres would learn what was exactly what. They’d find out how a badass alumnus of Corcoran State Prison’s gladiator wars cuts up the swag with a bunch of clueless taters who didn’t ante up.
Clueless taters. Yeah. That’s what they were. Daddy Deke and his big bad Mama, daughters Lorelei and Tura, too. All of them. One big bucket of white trash, their skulls filled with crazy ideas fried up in the Mojave Desert sunshine.
They were expendable, as far as Harold was concerned. Especially the bitches, who grated on him something fierce.
Except for Eden. Eden was different. She was special. She had everything her sisters had and then some, but she wasn’t a desert rat. Eden could think. And so maybe the wiring in her head was a little twisted from growing up with a bunch of nuts in the nuke-proof concrete bunker Daddy Deke had built in the middle of nowhere. So what? Get tight with a body like Eden’s and a man had to expect to make a few concessions.
But Eden didn’t matter. Not now. Not with the damn mutt coughing. Huddled on linoleum the color of a mud puddle, shivering, looking all sick.
“C’mon, Spike.” Harold nudged the bowl under the dog’s nose. “Those pitbull bitches are waiting. Eat up.”
The dog coughed. Harold sweated. Maybe the pug was right. Maybe the dog really was sick. Man, Baddalach had warned them. Maybe Spike really did have lung cancer.
But maybe the dog was really okay, too. Maybe it just had a cold or something. And shit, everybody knew that Chihuahuas were nervous little fucks, almost as bad as French poodles. Maybe Spike was just freaked out about being dognapped.
Well, it wouldn’t matter after tomorrow. As long as the dog stayed alive until drop time, everything would be fine and dandy.
Shit. It was pretty fucking crazy. Kidnapping a Chihuahua, holding it for ransom. But Harold was sure that Gemignani would pay up. Maybe not at first. But once phase two of the plan kicked in and Harold ran a shuffle on the old Guinea. .
The Harold Ticks shuffle. It was a good one. Harold was going to do an end run around the casino boss. He had set up Gemignani with the first ransom note, but all further communications would go directly to Angel Gemignani’s suite at the Casbah.
And Angel would bite. Harold was sure of that, just as he was sure that Angel could get her hands on a half a million bucks in a hot minute. He had the Gemignani tramp cased good. She loved that Chihuahua more than anything. She never went anywhere without her little Spikester. He was always right there in the mix. Even when she visited a man behind closed doors.
Harold almost laughed. Man, that was a good story. The one about Angel and Spike behind closed doors. According to the coconut telegraph, the Spikester was quite the little Hercules. When he wasn’t sick, anyway.
Spike whined. Harold knelt, knees cracking under his weight, and patted the little bastard’s bony head. Those big brown eyes looked up at him again. Man. Harold couldn’t take them right now. He rose and looked out the little pillbox window.
Dirty fucking window, but that didn’t matter. This was a dirty fucking land. Nothing but desert and scrub, a useless patch of Joshua trees and tumbleweeds separated from the highway by forty miles of literally bad road. Useless. Hell, the government couldn’t even give this shit to the Indians. Hadn’t even tried. At the dawn of the nuclear age, they wouldn’t even test the fucking atom bomb here, and it was damn sure that the Russians weren’t going to waste one on a big hunk of nothing during the cold war. Try convincing Daddy Deke of that one, though. He’d come along in 1966 with a brand new bride and plans for a concrete homestead. What a tater, a big ol’ spud who looked at this scab of dirt and saw a grade AAA nuclear-proof Promised Land.
Some fucking promise. Harold called the place the Radiation Ranch. To him, the whole set-up was as useless as tits on a-
Gunfire stitched the silence. Lorelei and Tura were out there somewhere, off behind the rise. Dressed in their leather bikinis, early morning Mojave sunshine baking their finely boned skulls, brains shriveling like apricots in a food dehydrator, machine guns kicking in their hands.
Yeah. Harold had them nailed. Guns but no brains. Sure, they had bodies that wouldn’t quit. But grow tits on a tater, and you’ve still got a spud.
Harold knew how to handle spuds. That’s why he carried the.357, a twin to the gun he’d used on Jesus all those years ago. He’d blown the postman’s fucking tater head clean off. Just like Dirty Harry. Huge gun kicking up a huge fucking slug, only Harold didn’t waste his breath with all that do-you-feel-lucky-well-do-you-punk shit. Hell, no. He was a cowboy, Harold was. A stone fucking killer. A cowboy robot. Forget Yul Brynner in
