Designated Targets

Davidson, naked or not.

He’d tried feeling her up once, and she’d nearly broken his arm for it. She’d snapped an excruciating wristlock on him without even breaking a sweat, no doubt a party trick she’d picked up back when she was a captain in the Eighty-second MEU. And she’d kept him locked up, gasping for breath and nearly fainting away, while she explained to him the facts of life:

One, she was his employee, not his girlfriend.

Two, she would be his employee only for as long as she needed to be, and she would never be his girlfriend.

Three, she could kick his scrawny ass black and blue without bothering to lace up her boots.

And four, she . . .

“Mr. Davidson?”

Slim Jim jumped, feeling guilty and worried that she might have figured out what he was thinking. But no, luckily she was just dragging him out of his slightly bored daze.

“Elvis has left the cemetery,” she announced. She said it in a singsong way, and it seemed to amuse her more than it should have. But Slim Jim had given up trying to figure her out.

“Let’s go over it one last time, just to be sure,” she said, pulling out a flexipad.

“Oh, please,” he begged. “Let’s not.”

O’Brien ignored him, and his shades suddenly flickered into life. Windows opened up on the lenses and seemed to float in the air in front of him. Some carried photographs of the boy they’d just seen. Others were full of words. Small words in large type. She’d learned not to burden him with too much text.

Bitch thinks she’s so goddamned smart . . .

Slim Jim sighed, and read through the briefing notes again. Some of his reluctance was for show, though. He never really got tired of the amazing gadgets these guys had brought with them.

“Elvis Aaron Presley, age eight and a half. Mother’s name, Gladys. Father’s name, Vernon,” he recited. “Dead brother, Jesse. Attends school at East Tupelo Consolidated. Father jailed for fraud. Asshole tried to ink a four-dollar check into forty . . .”

O’Brien shot him a warning look, but he hid behind the shades, pretending he couldn’t see her.

“Daddy’s out now, away in Como, Mississippi, building a POW camp for the government. Mama takes in sewing when she can get it. Local yokels call ’em white trash behind their backs . . .”

Slim Jim laughed out loud, glancing out across the ragged fields of corn and soybean that stretched between the cemetery and the edge of the town. “Ha! There’s a fucking pot calling a kettle black if I ever—”

“The notes, Mr. Davidson. Just review the notes,” said O’Brien.

Slim Jim returned to the readout for what felt like the hundredth time. He’d heard about some big-time grifters who worked like this. Getting so far inside the heads of their marks that they knew what was going on in there before the chumps realized it themselves. He could sort of see the point.

O’Brien had helped him close some amazing deals these last few months. But damn, it was hard work. Nevertheless, he plowed on, reciting most of the notes from memory even though the words still hung there in front of him.

“Gladys drinks in private. She finds her comfort in the church. Her first love was dance, her second music. But she’s kind of a fat bitch now so . . . Sorry! Sorry . . . She gets around in bare feet and old socks so her kid can have shoes. Elvis, he’s aware of his family’s low standing. It eats him up and he wants to rescue them. It always tickles him when his mama says she’s proud of him.”

In spite of himself, Slim Jim couldn’t help but warm to the little prick. They’d listened to his music all the way down here, and you had to admit, the kid had a gift. Or would have.

Then again, maybe he wouldn’t. If Slim Jim bought him a ticket out of Tupelo now, gave him enough money for a comfortable life, maybe the kid would never sing a song worth a tinker’s crap. Not that the thought really bothered him. Those songs were recorded by an Elvis from another time. No, this was all about who was gonna get paid for them.

Not some asshole called Colonel Tom Parker, you could bet on that.

Nope. “Slim Jim Enterprises” would be latching itself on to this particular money tit. And if the kid never became an actual recording star, just because he grew up rich instead of poor, well, who gave a damn? Slim Jim had grown up in a town a lot like this, with a daddy a lot like Vernon. And if some asshole had turned up on their doorstep, offering to buy them out of poverty, Daddy would have been trampled to death by the entire Davidson clan rushing to sign on the dotted line. And to hell with the consequences.

Slim Jim was only vaguely aware of the deepening dusk as he sat in the Caddy, chanting his way through O’Brien’s notes like some kind of mad priest. Yeah, Tupelo is a lot like home. Besides the two main roads in the center of town, every street was a strip of dirt or gravel. Clouds of dust would rise from them in summer. They’d turn into rivers of mud during the spring rains. Most folks would have worked the Roosevelt program during the Depression, cutting brush, fixing roads. Most, like Gladys Presley, wouldn’t ask for handouts, but would accept what was offered. The men would all be factory workers and sharecroppers.

Now most of them would be in the army or working in the war industries. Poor but honest, they’d think of themselves. Screwed and stupid was how Slim Jim would have put it.

A guy like Vernon Presley he could understand. He knew the type. He’d have had good intentions, but not enough character to see them through. Slim Jim wished they could deal with Vernon rather than Gladys. It was a laydown that they could sneak a signature out of old Vern, just for a crate of beer and a hundred bucks.

But O’Brien had been a real ballbreaker on that particular subject, even more so than usual. There’d be no grifting the Presley family. They’d get the industry standard percentage, and Slim Jim would take the industry standard cut. It was a shitload of money to be tossing away to a bunch of dumbass crackers, at least to his way of thinking. But she’d given him that stone face of hers again, and he’d buckled. She was a scary bitch—and bottom line, he was rich because of it.

“And then Vernon told Elvis he was responsible for his mama’s ill health because of the bad birth . . . ,” he continued, only half his mind on the task.

“No,” O’Brien said. “We don’t know for sure that that’s happened yet, so it’s better not to bring it up. But it’s supposed to happen around about now, so just keep it in mind.”

“Right.” He nodded. “So are we gonna fuck this puppy or what?”

His lawyer rolled her eyes, but she leaned forward to tap on the glass partition that separated them from the driver.

“Okay,” she said, raising her voice. “Let’s roll.”

It was a short drive from Priceville Cemetery to East Tupelo, a pissant little rats’ nest of meandering unpaved streets running down off the Old Saltillo Road. A couple of creeks, two sets of railroad tracks, some open fields, and a whole world of dreams separated the hamlet’s beaten-down inhabitants from the good people of Tupelo proper. Slim Jim wasn’t bothered none driving into such a place.

Nor, he noticed, was Ms. O’Brien. He figured it was just another one of those things about your dames from the future. Not much seemed to rattle them, unless you tried to cop a feel without being invited.

“That’s it,” she announced.

She indicated a small wooden frame house, a “shotgun shack,” they called them. This one stood about a hundred yards up the street they’d just entered. Dusk was full upon them now, and the car’s headlights lanced through the gloom and the dust and pollen that always seemed to hang in the air, even at this time of year.

“You sure you don’t want to do the talking?” he asked, suddenly nervous for no good reason. That wasn’t like him at all.

“You’ll be fine,” O’Brien assured him. “It’s just business. Be sure and treat them with respect.”

“But . . .”

“No buts. You’ll nail it. I’ve never known such a rolled gold bullshit artist. If you’d been born any luckier, you could have been a senator or a televangelist.”

Slim Jim wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but she didn’t seem to mean it as a compliment.

His driver pulled over into the gutter. As soon as he stepped out, the smell took him by the throat. Sour sweat. Outdoor toilets. Woodsmoke. Corn bread, grits, and boiled spuds. The smell of his childhood.

He could tell, without needing to check, that dozens of pairs of eyes had settled on the back of his newly cut, lightweight suit. Some of the bolder folks would have wandered right out onto their verandas—an awful fancy name