The Ten-Ounce Siesta

big dead letter office in the sky. Anyone who listened to Pack tell his story could figure that one out. The guy wanted copies of the photos that showed him plugging the postman, for Christsakes. He probably wanted to hang them over the wet bar in his rumpus room, like a fisherman does with snaps of marlin and trout.

Jack figured there was no reforming a guy like Pack O’ Weenies. In Baddalach’s opinion, anyone who’d murder a postal employee in full view of the Marin County Audubon Society had to be full-tilt Looney tunes, anyway.

It wasn’t a long drive from Palm Springs to Vegas, but it was long enough. Jack didn’t want to spend the trip doing the nice-weather-we’re-having-today mambo. Fortunately, he knew how to cut a conversation short, even with a cold-blooded killer.

He set Spike on the seat next to him and reached for his jacket, a worn leather thrift shop special with a faded red lining.

His fingers found the inside pocket. In the rearview, Pack O’ Weenies eyed him suspiciously. The guy was already sweating. Jack grinned, and that made Pack sweat all the more.

The driver was going to be easy. Jack let the grin grow into a smile. Kind of a frosty smile, lots of incisor showing. Just the way he’d done it in the old days, standing in the ring and staring down an opponent when he was the undisputed light-heavyweight champion of the whole fucking planet.

“Sorry,” Pack O’ Weenies said. “I didn’t mean to go on like that, champ. I’m probably boring the shit out of you. Maybe I better just pay attention to the road. Maybe-”

Jack’s hand came away from the coat.

“Hey,” Pack O’ Weenies said. “What you got there, champ?”

Jack held it up.

The conversation ender to end all conversation enders.

“Don’t sweat it,” Jack said. “It’s only a book.”

Outside the limo, the Mojave Desert whipped by. Jack ignored it. Not much of a stretch, actually. He found it inordinately easy to ignore acre upon acre of absolutely nothing.

He didn’t have as much luck ignoring the Chihuahua, which had curled up on his lap and fallen asleep. The damn thing was pretty pathetic, taking little rasping breaths, fidgeting now and then as if it were having a doggy nightmare. Jack hoped the dog didn’t have lung cancer. Jesus. Just thinking about that gave him a shiver. He didn’t want to hear those words from the vet in Vegas. He didn’t want to live Old Yeller. Not with a Chihuahua named Spike, and not with his boss’s punker granddaughter. Complications like that. . well. Jack Baddalach didn’t need them in his life. That was for sure.

Jack tried to concentrate on the book. It was an old Dan J. Marlowe paperback from the fifties. One Endless Hour. He’d found it at the same thrift shop where he bought the leather jacket. It was a first edition, a primo score at fifty cents. Not that Jack Baddalach was the type of guy to get his shorts in a bunch over a first edition. No way, Jose. But Jack thought that Dan J. Marlowe was one hell of a writer. That was the thing.

The book was a good one. It pumped right along. But Jack found that his mind kept drifting back to the little scene which had highlighted his morning.

Palm Springs sunshine warm on his back. In front of him, a girl who had to be ten (let’s face it. Jack, more like fifteen) years his junior. A girl in a T-shirt that said Sweet Cherry Love.

A girl with her tongue in his mouth.

There was a little fridge in the back of the limo. Jack took a cold Kirin from the compartment and rolled the bottle back and forth across his knuckles. A year and a half since he’d quit the ring, but still his knuckles ached.

He tried to think about nothing at all.

He thought about Sweet Cherry Love.

Suddenly, the cellular phone on his hip felt as heavy as a wedding ring.

Jack swallowed uncomfortably.

Jesus, Baddalach. Get a grip.

He did. He got a grip on a bottle opener, popped the Kirin, and let that golden Japanese beer wash the taste of tarnished virtue from his mouth.

Jack had intended that only one woman have the number for his cellular phone. One woman, and one woman only. Her name was Kate Benteen, and to make a long story short she had saved Jack Baddalach’s bacon during the first job he’d ever done for Freddy G. Jack had been waiting for Kate to call him for the better part of a year. Jack thought that the better part of a year was a long time to wait for anything, but he had stuck it out because Kate Benteen had told Jack to stick close to the phone. Jack, a man who tended to take thinks way too literally, had done his damnedest to comply, because if there was ever a woman who was worth a long wait it was Kate Benteen. But in all that time, his cellular phone hadn’t rung. Not once. And now he’d given his phone number to another woman. A woman named Angel, who had written his number on her arm with bright red lipstick.

Jack thought about Pack O’ Weenies, a guy who knew exactly when things were over. A guy who could close a hotel room door, and leave a woman behind without a word, and never give any of it another thought.

And then he thought about Kate Benteen and Angel Gemignani, and he wondered which woman would call him first.

Spike squirmed on his lap. An anguished little whine escaped the Chihuahua’s muzzle. Jack knew exactly how the little bastard felt. Absently, he started petting the dog. Spike stopped squirming almost instantly.

Outside the window, the town of Amboy drifted by. Then Essex. Needles coming up. But the Mojave Desert didn’t change a bit. The limo rocketed over a midnight stripe of pavement that split a whole lot of very white nothing. Jack stared at the desert but couldn’t see it at all. He found himself staring instead at his reflection in the limo window.

And then, through his reflection, he saw something else. An exit off the highway. And beyond that a gas station. Or what used to be a gas station, because now the broken windows were scabbed over with large slabs of plywood.

Pack O’ Weenies took the off-ramp. The limo kicked up a cloud of dust as they crossed the dirt lot and pulled to a stop on one side of the gas station. Pack ratcheted the gear shift into the park position. The ash-colored cloud caught up in a second, and the big Caddy was enveloped in a shroud of swirling dust.

“What’s up?” Jack asked.

At first Pack O’ Weenies didn’t answer him. He stepped out of the car, and into the cloud, without looking back.

“Gotta see a man about a snake,” he said.

And then he slammed the limo door.

The door had only been open a second, but in that second Jack caught a mouthful of Mojave dust.

He almost took another sip of beer, but he decided against it. He just didn’t want it anymore. He set the bottle on top of the limo fridge, watching Pack O’ Weenies disappear around the back corner of the old gas station.

Jack waited, his left hand drifting over Spike’s fur as the dog slept easy. Outside, the cloud began to settle around the limo. Lazy dust devils danced in the sunlight. Jack watched them, listening to the limo’s big engine ping hotly in the dry desert silence.

A moment later, someone came around the comer of the gas station.

Someone who wasn’t Pack O’ Weenies.

The woman was dressed in black leather. Black pants, black go-go boots, black bikini top. She was definitely something to see. The cows that had given up their hides for her wardrobe could rest easy in the knowledge that they’d made a much more significant contribution to human society than their brothers who’d given it up for hamburger meat.

The woman came through the dust, ash-colored particles swirling around her, moving forward through it step by step as it settled lower, coming finally into sharp focus as if spied through a camera viewfinder. Everything tight on her long lean body. Everything black save her very white skin. Hair as black as night, and sunglasses that