The Ten-Ounce Siesta

She opened her purse. Took out a tube of lipstick. Opened it. Held it against her arm.

“What’s your number?”

Jack gave it to her. Surprised, even as he opened his mouth.

She wrote it in red, on the neon scales of a tattooed rattlesnake.

The limo driver said, “Had me a woman with a snake tattoo once.”

Jack stared at the back of the guy’s head. Bald as a cue ball. Bright pink skin. Heavy folds of flesh on the back of his neck that reminded Jack of a pack of Oscar Meyer wieners.

As the big Caddy pulled away from the house. Pack O’ Weenies started talking about the woman with the snake tattoo. “Big old anaconda started at her pussy and wound its way up to her neck, sinking its fangs into her carotid and man, did she have a body in between. Skinny little Mexican thing with little bitty brown sugar titties that stood up and said Buenos dias. Man, was she something.”

Jack didn’t say a word. Neither did Spike, who sat shivering on Baddalach’s lap.

Pack O’ Weenies went on: “This chick ran a credit card scam. Bigtime. Her and her brother Jesus. Jesus worked at the post office. He stole the cards and she ran ’em up. Bought TVs and stereos, stuff she could sell or return to the stores for cash. Got me into it. We’d go out on the weekends like Ma and Pa Suburbs, buy stuff till we maxed out a card, then switch to another. See, doing it on weekends was the way to go, because then the credit card companies don’t pick up on it. That’s when they expect people to do their big spending. Go out and trot up those charges on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and alarm bells go off in the credit card company’s computers. But stick to the weekends and you can charge till the wheels come off. Unless it’s Christmastime, of course. Christmastime-that’s heaven for credit card scammers. Every day is what you might call Santa- intensive.

“Anyway, it seemed like an okay deal at first. We made pretty good money. She put me in the driver’s seat of a brand new Cadillac. I put a ring on her finger. Then we got caught. Or Jesus got caught, I should say. See, one day the stupid motherfucker has a bunch of cards jammed down his shorts on the way out of work, and the postmaster stops him for a chat, and his ass starts to sweat, and pretty soon those little chunks of plastic start sliding down Jesus’s perky little ass cheeks and before you know it he’s shitting Visas and Mastercards on the post office floor.

“It was summertime, see, and Jesus wore shorts. The son of a bitch wanted to show off his legs like he was a fucking UPS driver or something. He was always after the chicks on his route. And the fool wore boxers, too. If he would have stuck to long woolies and briefs, he would have been as safe as sunshine. But he just had to play the stud, this boy.

“And Jesus was a tater, too. One hundred percent spud. Me and my wife, we just knew he’d give us up the first time the cops offered him a deal. And these were federal cops, y’know? The post office is a federal institution, and federal cops, hell, you don’t even want to take a chance with those motherfuckers.

“So I shot Jesus before the cops could sweat him. Did his tater ass out in the woods, a little meadow in the middle of nowhere-this was up north, you understand. Marin County. Hell. I couldn’t see nothing that wasn’t green for miles. And the only sound I heard were the birdies singing. I didn’t think anyone was around. Not even Bigfoot.

“Turns out there was a group of bird watchers back in the trees. Card-carrying members of the Audubon Society, all done up in their best L.L. Bean camouflage wear so they wouldn’t scare their fine feathered friends. They were awaiting the arrival of the palm warbler or some such shit. Some rare fucking bird. Instead, they got me and my.357 Magnum.

“Ten pairs of binoculars were aimed right at me when I pulled the trigger. A half dozen cameras, too. And that magnum made a hell of a lot of noise. I never even heard those camera shutters click when I pulled the trigger.

“The pictures came out pretty good, too. You should have seen me. All dressed in black, my bald head gleaming in the sunshine. I looked like Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven. After the trial was over, I asked the judge if I could get copies of some of those pictures. They were evidence; it shouldn’t have been a big deal. But the son of a bitch made some Fruit Loop ruling so I couldn’t have any of ’em. What a tater. He had no sense of humor at all.

“Anyway, I took the fall. Spent the next ten years in Corcoran, which was one bad jailhouse in those days. Ten years without my little brown baby and her sweet anaconda. I couldn’t get her off my mind, though. Not even. I read every reptile book in the prison library and dreamed of my sugar’s anaconda every fucking night. Snakes, snakes, snakes. Pussy, pussy, pussy. That’s all I thought about.

“Then I got out of prison. Parole. My baby’s waiting for me. She’d moved to Vegas and I hadn’t seen her in three-four years, but we kept in touch with letters. While I was away, she did all right. Went straight. Opened up a donut shop with some of the money she made off the credit cards.

“That was a tough one. Bad enough I’m always thinking about snakes and pussy, now I start thinking about donuts. See my old lady’s always writing me about glazed donuts and chocolate bars and big old gooey bearclaws, and I’m lucky if I get some dried-out turd of a cookie in the slams. And not only that, the donut shop is a really different environment for her. All of a sudden she’s got plenty of cop friends. Las Vegas cops. They all like donuts.

“Anyway, on graduation day my little mamacita sends a limo for me. The driver picks me up at the prison gate. Takes me to a Holiday Inn in Fresno. Man, I’m hard before I even hit the door, thinkin’ of my long tall baby and that snake writhing on her belly. That big ol’ anaconda traveling those sweet little lumps of brown sugar on her chest.

“I open the door, and there she is. Naked on the sheets. You can’t fuckin’ miss her. But all I see is the snake. ’Cause it’s big now. Thick. Jesus. Some of those scales would dwarf the trunk of a Buick. And somehow I get the idea that the damn thing is a lot longer, too. Gotta be, because since the last time I seen her there’s a lot more of my baby to go around. . and around. . and around.

“But the worst part is her chest. Those sweet breasts that used to be so little and firm. The snake is even wider there, sort of swollen, like it swallowed a couple of hamsters that it can’t quite digest.”

Pack O’ Weenies sighed. “Well, sometimes you just flat out know when something is over. That’s the way it was with me and my wife and the snake. I just turned around and closed the door on the both of them, because I knew I couldn’t spend the rest of my life making donuts and watching that snake get bigger. Fact is, I ain’t never dated a woman with tattoos since, and I never will.” The driver glanced at Jack in the rearview. “What do you think of that?”

Jack thought it over. “Tattoos are all right,” he said finally. “But donuts and gravity-they’ll get you every time.”

Jack stared at the back of Pack O’ Weenies’ bald head as they headed toward Vegas. Physiologically speaking, the contents of one human skull was pretty much like another. Psychologically, it was another story entirely. That’s the way Jack Baddalach saw it, anyway.

And Jack met all kinds of people. That was a given when you worked for the mob.

Check that. The fact of the matter was that Jack Baddalach couldn’t possibly work for the mob. Because his boss, Freddy Gemignani, was the owner of the Casbah Hotel amp; Casino, located on the beautiful Las Vegas Strip. As such, Freddy G had passed muster with the Gaming Control Board. And anyone who had done that. . well, anyone who had done that couldn’t possibly be involved with organized crime in any way, shape, or form.

Still, Jack had met some interesting people through his association with Freddy G. Then again, he had also met more than a few people like Pack O’ Weenies. Jack’s experience with cold-blooded killers told him that protracted conversations were generally a minus with same. Verbally speaking, a couple of strangers were bound to step on each other’s toes sooner or later. And with cold-blooded killers. . Well, Jack didn’t care how much time a guy like Pack O’ Weenies had served; he didn’t want to get on the wrong side of a murderer, verbally or otherwise.

If you wanted to understand a guy like Pack O’ Weenies, all you had to do was hire a medium to channel the spirit of a postman named Jesus. And then factor in the not-so-stunning revelation that a protracted stay in the slams obviously hadn’t done much to change the cowboy who’d delivered the postman with the studly legs to the