“Please,” he said. “Don’t tcll me those things. Not now.” He signaled the waitress for two more Wild Turkeys.
“This is my last drink,” he said. “How much money can you lend me?”
“Not much,” I said. “Why?”
“I have to go,” he said.
“Go?”
“Yes. Leave the country. Tonight.”
“Calm down,” I said. “You’ll be straight in a few hours.”
“No,” he said. “This is serious.
“George Metesky was serious,” I said. “And you see what they did to him.”
“Don’t fuck around!” he shouted. “One more hour in this town and I’ll kill somebody!”
I could see he was on the edge. That fearful intensity that comes at the peak of a mescaline seizure. “OK,” I said. “I’ll lend you some money. Let’s go outside and see how much we have left.”
“Can we make it?” he said.
“Well ...that depends on how many people we fuck with between here and the door. You want to leave quietly?”
“I want to leave fast,” he said.
“OK. Let’s pay this bill and get up very slowly. We’re both out of our heads. This is going to be a long walk.” I shouted at the waitress for a bill. She came over, looking bored, and my attorney stood up.
“Do they pay you to screw that bear?” he asked her.
“What?”
“He’s just kidding,” I said, stepping between them.
“Come on, Doc—let’s go downstairs and gamble.” I got him as far as the edge of the bar, the rim of the merry-go-round, but he refused to get off until it stopped turning.
“It won’t stop,” I said. “It’s not never going to stop.” I stepped off and turned around to wait for him, but he wouldn’t move ...and before I could reach out and pull him off, he was carried away. “Don’t move,” I shouted.
“You’ll come around!” His eyes were staring blindly ahead, squinting with fear and confusion. But he didn’t move a muscle until he’d made the whole circle.
I waited until he was almost in front of me, then I reached out to grab him—but he jumped back and went around the circle again. This made me very nervous. I felt on the verge of a freakout. The bartender seemed to be watching us.Carson City, I thought. Twenty years.
I stepped on the merry-go-round and hurried around the bar, approaching my attorney on his blind side— and when we came to the right spot I pushed him off. He staggered into the aisle and uttered a hellish scream as he lost his balance and went down, thrashing into the crowd ...rolling like a log, then up again in a flash, fists clenched, looking for somebody to hit.
I approached him with my hands in the air, trying to smile.
“You fell,” I said. “Let’s go.”
By this time people were watching us. But the fool wouldn’t move, and I knew what would happen if I grabbed him. “OK,” I said. “You stay here and go to jail. I’m leaving.” I started walking fast towards the stairs, ignoring him.
This moved him.
“Did you see that?” he said as he caught up with me.
“Some sonofabitch kicked me in the back!”
“Probably the bartender,” I said. “He wanted to stomp you for what you said to the waitress.”
“Good god! Let’s get out of here. Where’s the elevator?”
“Don’t go near that elevator,” I said. “That’s just what they want us to do ...trap us in a steel box and take us down to the basement.” I looked over my shoulder, but nobody was following.
“Don’t run,” I said. “They’d like an excuse to shoot us.” He nodded, seeming to understand. We walked fast along the big indoor midway—shooting galleries, tattoo parlors, money-changers and cotton-candy booths—then out through a bank of glass doors and across the grass downhill to a parking lot where the Red Shark waited.
‘You drive,” he said. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”
7. Paranoid Terror ...and the Aweful Specter of Sodomy ...A Flashing of Knives and Green Water
When we got to the Mint I parked on the street in front of the casino, around a corner from the parking lot. No point risking a scene in the lobby, I thought. Neither one of us could pass for drunk. We were both hyper-tense. Extremely menacing vibrations all around us. We hurried through the casino and up the rear escalator.
We made it to the room without meeting anybody—but the key wouldn’t open the door. My attorney was struggling desperately with it. “Those bastards have changed the lock on us,” he groaned. “They probably searched the room. Jesus, we’re finished.”
Suddenly the door swung open. We hesitated, then hurried inside. No sign of trouble. “Bolt everything,” said my attorney. “Use all chains.” He was staring at two Mint Hotel Room keys in his hand. “Where did this one come from?” he said, holding up a key with number 1221 on it.
“That’s Lacerda’s room,” I said.
He smiled. “Yeah, that’s right. I thought we might need it.”
“What for?”
“Let’s go up there and blast him out of bed with the fire he said.
“No,” I said. “We should leave the poor bastard alone, I get the feeling he’s avoiding us for some reason.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” he said. “That Portuguese son of bitch is dangerous. He’s watching us like a hawk.” He squinted at me. “Have you made a deal with him?”
“I talked with him on the phone,” I said, “while you were out getting the car washed. He said he was turning in early, so he can get out there to the starting line at dawn.”
My attorney was not listening. He utt.ered an anguished cry and smacked the wall with both hands. “That dirty bastard!” he shouted. “I knew it! He got hold of my woman!”
I laughed. “That little blonde groupie with the film crew? You think he sodomized her?”
“That’s right—laugh about it!” he yelled. “You goddamn honkies are all the same.” By this time he’d
opened a new bottle of tequila and was quaffing it down.
Then he grabbed a grapefruit and sliced it in half with a Gerber Mini-Magnum—a stainless-steel hunting knife with a blade like a fresh-honed straight razor.
“Where’d you get that knife?” I asked.
“Room service sent it up,” he said. “I wanted something to cut the limes.
“What limes?”
“They didn’t have any,” he said. “They don’t grow out here in the desert.” He sliced the grapefruit into quarters then into eighths ...then sixteenths ...then he began aimlessly at the residue. “That dirty toad bastard,” he moaned. “I knew I should have taken him out when I had the chance. Now he
I remembered the girl. We’d had a problem with her on the elevator a few hours earlier: my attorney had made a fool of himself.
“You must be a rider,” she’d said. “What class are you in?”
“Class?” he snapped. “What the fuck do you mean?”
“What do you
“We’re filming the race for a TV series—maybe we can use you.”
“Use me?”
Mother of God, I thought. Here it comes. The elevator was crowded with race people: it was taking a long time to get from floor to floor. By the time we’d stopped at Three, he was trembling badly. Five more to go. .
