The Ten-Ounce Siesta

“Harold Ticks.”

“This Harold Ticks,” Jack went on. “In the jailhouse, he was Tony Katt’s sugar daddy or something?”

“Harold didn’t swing that way,” Maria said. “Or if he did, I didn’t know about it. But he used to say Tony Katt was hung like a mosquito. He said Katt couldn’t find his pecker with a pair of tweezers.”

The donut shop rang with laughter. There was nothing better than a perpetrator dick joke to get a roomful of cops howling. For her part, Maria practically burst. She helped herself to one of the lieutenant’s devil’s food donuts, and that finally got her calmed down.

Jack pushed the plate of donut holes across the counter and sidled off his stool. “I guess I’d better leave these alone. Maybe I should make a comeback.”

“You do that, champ.” The lieutenant grunted as he rose and shook Jack’s hand. “Then maybe Maria and me can make back the money we lost betting against Mr. Mosquito Dick.”

The waitress blew the lieutenant a kiss. “See you later, honeybunch.”

“Sure, angel cake.” The cop leaned across the counter and gave the tattooed waitress a peck on the cheek.

Playfully, she shook a plump finger at him.

“Kiss Mama’s snake, you bad boy.”

He did.

Freddy said, “How’s it goin’, Jack?”

“Taking your advice, boss. Taking it easy.”

“Great. Hey, I’m kind of busy now. What do you need?”

“Wondered if you had any news on our problem.”

“Nothing yet. My guy’s still working on it. He couldn’t find a trail in LA. Checked the limo company and got nothing. Anything new on your end? Anyone show up on your doorstep with another ransom note?”

“Nope. Nothing much here. I went out for breakfast, is all.”

“Okay, Jack. Let us know if you hear anything. You gonna be around?”

“Well, I kinda got cabin fever. Thought I might try something different.”

“Like what?”

“Like golf.”

SEVEN

A year ago, in the summer, Eden left Hell's half acre for the bright lights of Las Vegas.

That summer Daddy realized the Russians weren’t going to drop an atomic bomb on Nevada after all. The world had changed quite a bit since he first came to Hell’s Half Acre in 1966. What with the Berlin Wall falling and that glasnost stuff and all. Daddy had to face reality. Still, it was hard to let go of a dream.

He had watched the signs for years. They seemed so clear. Like Gorbachev, the Russian leader with that birthmark on his head. Daddy took one look at that big purple smudge and figured it for the mark of the beast. When Gorbachev took power, Daddy battened down the hatches and kept the family inside the bunker for a full month.

But Gorbachev didn’t last long. Once his butt met Boris Yeltsin’s boot, the prospect of an all-out nuclear holocaust seemed pretty bleak.

Not entirely bleak, of course. Yeltsin was a loose cannon. It was rumored that the Russian president was a drunk who pissed on airport runways. There was no denying that the New Russia was a mess-a crazy-quilt of separate states, each one with a vodka-swilling strongman whose finger was poised on his own private nuclear trigger. Imagine Alabama and Idaho armed with fat ICBMs.

It was a volatile situation. Daddy was sure that Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” had arrived at last. The pot was boiling. The end was near. And in a bomb-proof cement and lead sanctuary on a small scab of Mojave Desert called Hell’s Half Acre, a new beginning was at hand.

But nothing seemed to happen for the longest time, no matter what George Will said on This Week with David Brinkley. Still, the conservative commentator kept Daddy’s hope alive.

Daddy was nothing if not a patient man. “Sometimes the wheels of progress turn mighty slow,” he’d say. He lay awake many a night imagining some cash-hungry Soviet general selling an atom bomb to a bunch of rug-headed Middle Eastern terrorists or a swarthy Panamanian drug lord, but that kind of stuff only seemed to happen in Tom Clancy novels. In real life the bombs never seemed to make it out of Russia. All they did was rust.

Daddy’s faith kind of rusted right along with those bombs. He had always been a man of strong conviction, but that summer he was troubled. Because if there wasn’t going to be a nuclear war, then the new beginning he’d prophetized so many years ago wasn’t going to happen, either.

And Daddy had seen that prophecy so clearly.

He’d told Eden the story many times. The story about the night he’d met Mama on the Las Vegas Strip back in 1966. A go-go dancer and a preacher sharing a mescaline and neon high. Both of them walking the streets in 1966, but one of them seeing the future.

In his vision, the preacher saw himself as an old man. His go-go girl bride became an old woman. They stood together, in the desert, with their children.

A blinding blast in the distance. A rushing tsunami of nuclear destruction. Atomic thunder and sharp slivers of neon rain. The Las Vegas Strip, cracked and scalded, a fused mosaic of broken glass. Gamblers bursting into flame as they yanked slot machine handles for the last time, keno girls exploding like ripe sausages in the wild apocalyptic heat, lounge singers radiated to a crisp as they wailed the closing notes of “Volare.”

The true believers would be spared. Daddy and Mama and their children, the lone survivors of nuclear Armageddon. They would stand together and listen for the sound of hoofbeats on that fused glass highway.

They would watch Him claim the earth for His children.

The Lord from below. His Satanic Majesty, Lucifer.

Daddy had served the dark one for many years, preaching His unholy gospel, converting those who had walked too long in the light. And though his faith had been shaken many times, he still believed in Satan, even if he could no longer believe in the prophecy.

The prophecy had come a cropper. Daddy could see that. All that glasnost and perestroika, and then Reagan with his Star Wars, and before you knew it Ronald McDonald was hawking Big Macs on Red Square.

Daddy had to rethink things. Night after night he meditated in the little chapel he had built to honor Satan. Night after night he stared down the old mine shaft behind the altar, the shaft that ran straight to hell.

Night after night he waited for a sign.

Some nights he’d make a sacrifice-a jackrabbit, a prairie dog, a hitchhiker, a coyote. . something like that. Other nights he’d channel demons through his rattlesnakes. And every now and then he’d get his mind right with a shot of strychnine. Daddy believed in taking a good shot of strychnine now and then. Do that, he said, and you could almost feel Satan nipping at your behind.

Of course. Daddy’s people back in Appalachia had been handling snakes and drinking poison since forever, only they were Christians. They claimed to channel the Holy Spirit, but Daddy always said his people were a little mixed up on that point.

Satan, after all, was a serpent. And a serpent in the house of God was still a serpent. Once you turned one loose, there was no looking back. It was like trying to close Pandora’s fabled box or trap the snake that tempted Eve in Eden.

Eden. That was the name her father had given her. And it was Eden who provided her father with a new vision of the future.

On a hot August night he stepped forth from his little chapel and told Eden that Satan wanted her to find a serpent, because an Eden without a serpent was an Eden unspoiled.

The time had come for his daughters to leave home and honor the dark provider through their carnal appetites. Daddy sent them into the desert with only the clothes on their backs. He told them not to return until they had become as worldly as the whore who gave them birth.