the mindtouch glimpses of its hundreds of solitary men and women alone in their hotel rooms, emotionally viscerated by the day or night’s gambling, masturbating in solitude to the “adult” videos piped to their rooms.
But the five-card-stud poker tables were places of forgetting, temporary nirvanas reached through concentration rather than meditation, and Bremen spent his waking hours there, accumulating money in small but never-faltering increments. By the time he had worked his way through the larger casinos on the Strip, his steel carrying case held almost three hundred thousand dollars in cash. Bremen went to the Mirage Hotel, admired its working volcano outside and its tank of live sharks inside, and almost doubled his money in four nights of ten- thousand-dollar-entry-fee tournament play.
He decided that one more casino would be the icing on the cake and decided to finish up in a huge, castlelike structure near the airport. The card room was busy. Bremen waited like the other pigeons, bought his hundred- dollar chips, nodded hellos to the other six players—four men and two women, only one of them a pro—and settled into the night’s haze of mathematics.
He was four hours and several thousand dollars up when the dealer called a halt and a short, powerfully built man in the blue-blazered uniform of the casino whispered in Bremen’s ear, “Excuse me, sir, but could you come with me, please?”
Bremen saw only the command to bring this lucky player to the manager’s office in the flunky’s mind, but he also saw that the command would be obeyed under any circumstances. The flunky carried a .45 automatic in a holster on his left hip. Bremen went with him to the office.
The neurobabble distracted him, all those surges of lust and greed and disappointment and renewed lust adding to the background mindnoise, so that Bremen was not warned until he was waved into the inner office.
The five men were watching the video monitors when Bremen entered and they looked up with an almost quizzical humor, as if surprised to see the image on the television standing live and three-dimensional among them. Sal Empori was sitting on the long leather couch with the thugs named Bert and Ernie on either side of him. Vanni Fucci was seated behind the manager’s desk, his hands clasped behind his head and a huge Cuban cigar clenched between his teeth.
“Come on in, civilian,” said Vanni Fucci around the cigar. He nodded for the flunky to close the door and wait outside. Vanni Fucci gestured toward an empty chair. “Siddown.”
Bremen remained standing. He saw it all in their minds. The steel case by Bert Cappi’s leg was Bremen’s; they had searched his room and found the cash. It was their hotel, their casino. Or, rather, it was the absent Don Leoni’s casino. And it had been the thief Vanni Fucci, here on another deal entirely, who had seen Bremen’s image on the video monitor in the manager’s office. Vanni Fucci had ordered the manager to take a two-day vacation, and then the thief had called Don Leoni and settled back to wait for Sal and the boys to arrive.
Bremen saw all this clearly. And he saw, even more clearly, precisely what the aging Don Leoni was going to have done to the upstart civilian who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. First, Mr. Leoni was going to talk to Bremen back in New Jersey, where they would find out whether this civilian was really a civilian, or whether he worked for one of the Miami Families. It did not matter too much, because Bremen would then be loaded aboard a garbage truck and taken out to their favorite place in the Pine Barrens, where they would blow Bremen’s brains out, put his body in the truck’s compactor, and dump the parcel in the usual place.
Vanni Fucci smiled broadly and removed the cigar. “Okay, stay standing. You been real lucky, kid. Real lucky. At least up to now.”
Bremen blinked.
Vanni Fucci nodded, Bert and Ernie moved more quickly than Bremen could react, he felt his arms pinned, and Sal Empori raised a hypodermic needle to the light and injected him in the arm through his seven-hundred-dollar Armani jacket.
EYES
Robby Bustamante is dying. The deaf, blind, retarded child slides in and out of coma like some sightless amphibian moving from water to air without finding sustenance in either element.
The child is so terribly and obviously damaged that some nurses find reasons to avoid his room, while others spend extra time there, tending to the dying child while trying to ease his pain through the sheer unsensed fact of their presence. On the rare occasions when Robby rises close to consciousness and the monitors above his bed register something other than REM-state dream sleep, the boy moans fitfully and paws at the bed covers, splayed fingers and stiff splints scratching at the sheets.
Sometimes the nurses gather round then, rubbing the child’s brow or increasing the dosage of painkiller in his IV drip, but no amount of touching or medicine stops Robby’s mewling and fevered scrabbling. It is as if he is searching for something.
He is searching for something. Robby is desperately trying to find his teddy bear, the one companion he has had through the years. His tactile friend. His solace in the endless night punctuated only with pain.
When Robby is semiconscious, he rolls and scrabbles, searching the bedclothes and wet sheets for his teddy bear. He cries out in his sleep, the falsetto croon moaning down dark hospital corridors like the cry of the damned.
There is no teddy bear. His mother and “Uncle” had tossed it and the rest of the child’s possessions in the back of the car on the night they left, planning to get rid of them at the first Dumpster they passed.
Robby turns and moans and claws at the sheets during those rare times he rises toward consciousness, searching for his teddy, but those times become fewer and fewer and finally cease.
Geryon
They took Bremen to the Las Vegas airport in the middle of the night. A twin-engine turboprop Piper Cheyenne was idling outside a darkened hangar, and it was taxiing for takeoff thirty seconds after the five men boarded. Bremen couldn’t tell a twin-engine turboprop Piper Cheyenne from the space shuttle, but the pilot could, and Bremen was disappointed to find that the pilot also knew exactly who his five passengers were and why they were flying back to New Jersey.
All four of the hoodlums had weapons, and Bert Cappi had carried his .45 automatic under a jacket over his arm, the muzzle of the silencer sticking out far enough to touch Bremen’s right ribs. Bremen had watched enough television to know a silencer when he saw one.
They took off to the west and climbed steeply, banking around to leave the mountains behind them as they headed east. The small aircraft had two seats on each side behind the pilot’s and empty copilot’s seats and a bench against a rear bulkhead. Sal Empori and Vanni Fucci sat across the narrow aisle from each other in the first two seats, nearest the door; the thug named Ernie sat across from Bremen in the second row; Bert Cappi sat buckled into the rear bench directly behind Bremen, his pistol out and on his lap.
The aircraft droned eastward and Bremen set his face against the cool Plexiglas of the window and shut his eyes. The thoughts of the pilot were cool, crisp, and technical, but the four thugs offered a cauldron of dim-witted malevolence to Bremen’s mindtouch. Bert, the twenty-six-year-old killer and son-in-law to Don Leoni, was looking forward to whacking Bremen. Bert hoped that the civilian would try something before they got there so he could do the asshole en route.
Wind gusts buffeted the small aircraft and Bremen felt the emptiness rise inside himself. The situation was ridiculous—cartoonish, TV stuff—but the inevitability of violence was as real as an imminent automobile crash. Until his moments of madness in Denver with the child abuser, Bremen had never hit anyone in anger. He had never bloodied anyone’s nose. To Bremen violence had always represented the last refuge of the intellectually and emotionally incompetent. And now he sat in this sealed machine, the seats and doors less substantial feeling than those of an American automobile, remembering Miz Morgan’s ice-filmed face while flying eastward to his fate, the violent thoughts of these violent men rubbing like sandpaper against his mind. Ironically, there was nothing personal in their eagerness to kill Bremen; it was their way of solving a problem, easing a minor potential threat. They would
