Under the Skin

But I hadn’t played the last shot well. The eight was positioned at one end of the table, near the center of the rail and an inch off the cushion, while the cue ball had ended up at the other end of the table and up against the rail.

“Got too cocky, hotshot,” Brando said. “Left yourself hard.”

“Five-buck side bet, two to one, says I sink it.” I tapped the corner pocket to my left. “Here.”

“Too much green and a bad angle,” Brando said. “You’re on.”

I formed a thumb bridge for the stick and set myself, then laid into the cue ball. It zoomed toward the eight and caught it just right and the black ball jumped off the cushion at an angle and came barreling down the table like it had eyes and vanished into the corner pocket.

“Whooo!” LQ hollered.

“Shit!” Brando said. He dug two fives out of his pocket and tossed them on the table. “That’s it. I aint playing you anymore. I don’t need this kind of humiliation.”

“Kind you usually get’s plenty enough, huh?” LQ said.

“Kiss my ass,” Brando said. “Let’s see you take him.”

I arched my brow at LQ and gestured toward the table.

“No thanks,” he said. “I’m short enough at the moment. I can just about make it to payday tomorrow.”

“Well hell,” I said, “if nobody’s going to play, let’s go park our asses in the bar and have a few.”

“Winners buy,” Brando said.

“It’s how come you always drink for free,” LQ said.

Out in the lounge I got us a pitcher of beer and we took a table in the corner. I filled the three glasses and we touched them in a toast and drank.

“Kinda surprised this morning when Momma Mia said we’d just us two be going to Alvin with a slot man,” LQ said. “I asked where you were and she just shrugs like she always does. Like she don’t know the time of day.”

“Poppa got you on a secret mission?” Brando said.

“Wish he did,” I said. I told them all about Rose’s talk with the Dallas guys and his suspicion that they might try to retaliate.

“You got to hang around all week?” Brando said. “Man, I like the Club, but I’d go crazy if I had to be here all the time for a week.”

“I agree with you and Sam,” LQ said. “Them Dallas peckerwoods aint gonna do a damn thing, not after how we done Willie Rags. They’d have to be the biggest dopes in Texas, and that’s saying plenty. Shit, let ’em try something. I could use the action.”

“Looks like you-all maybe got some action today,” I said, pointing at the bruise on Brando’s face.

“Oh man, the Shoes place,” LQ said. He cut a look at Brando. “Some fun, huh, Ramon?”

Brando shrugged and lit a cigarette.

LQ said that when they got to the Red Shoes Cabaret that morning, along with a slot mechanic named Freddie, the place was closed, of course, but there was an armed security guard at the door. LQ told him what they were there for and the guard said he couldn’t let anyone go in without permission from Mr. Dunlop or Mr. Garr, the partners who owned the place, and neither one of them was there at the moment. He expected them to show up sometime later but didn’t know exactly when.

“Jesus, what’s that?” LQ said, looking over the guard’s shoulder into the club. When the guard turned to look, LQ snatched the guy’s pistol from its holster and shoved him inside.

Brando took a quick look around the premises but there wasn’t anybody else around except a grayhaired Negro janitor. LQ made him and the guard sit down out of the way.

Freddie was almost through with his inspection of the machines when they heard a car drive into the lot. LQ pulled the guard up to the window and drew the blind aside just enough for them to peek out and see a Cadillac stop beside the Dodge. There were two men in the Caddy, and the guard said it was Dunlop and Garr.

The car doors opened and the men got out. They stood there looking at the Dodge a minute and then headed toward the cabaret’s front door. LQ told the guard to sit back down at the table and he and Brando took positions on opposite sides of the door with their guns ready.

The one named Garr came in first and stopped short when he saw Freddie standing at the bar with a toolbox beside a dismantled slot machine and the guard and janitor sitting there with their thumbs up their ass. He said “What the fuck you think—” and then shut up when LQ’s gun pressed against the side of his head.

The Dunlop guy had been a few steps behind Garr and stopped at the door when he saw what was happening. Before he could haul ass, Brando snatched him by the coat and pulled him inside. But the guy was no slouch—he grabbed Brando’s piece and tried to take it away from him.

“Son of a bitch snatched onto it like a damn bulldog on a bone,” Brando said. “We went banging against the tables and the bar, knocking over stools, both of us cussing a blue streak. He’s trying to get the piece and I’m mainly trying to keep it pointed away from me. Bastard was strong.”

“Ray finally jerks the gun away from the guy—but he was pulling straight back and hit hisself in the face with it,” LQ said, demonstrating the move. “About knocked hisself on his own ass. I’ve got the other fella by the collar with my piece to his ear and it’s a damn wonder I didn’t shoot him by accident I was laughing so hard.”

“Real funny,” Brando said.

“I gotta say, the old boy paid for it,” LQ said. “Ray just whaled on him with that gun—whap! whap! I expect the fella swallowed them top teeth he lost. I never did see them come out his mouth. When Ray got done with him the guy looked like he’d tried to stop a train with his face.”

“Son of a bitch,” Brando said softly, fingering his shiner.

But Dunlop’s troubles—and Garr’s too—had only just begun. When Freddie was done checking the machines, he handed LQ a piece of paper with a tally of the money the slots had taken in since they’d been rented by the Red Shoes Cabaret. LQ compared it to the slip of paper Rose had given him that showed the total slot receipts Dunlop and Garr had reported. The Red Shoes tally was way short.

“I told them fellas what the problem was,” LQ said, “and they started talking a mile a minute to try and explain things. The one with the busted mouth sounded like a retard, it was so hard for him to talk. I never did understand how these old boys who get caught with their hand in the jar figure they can say something that’s gonna make any damn difference.”

They made Dunlop hug one of the thick floor-to-ceiling support beams and made Garr hug another and they tied their hands around the posts with their own belts and gagged the men with their own neckties. Then Brando told the janitor to get him a hammer.

“Would’ve settled it for just a hand,” Brando said, “but that Dunlop bastard made me mad, so I did his foot too.”

“What about the Garr guy?” I said.

“Well hell, same thing,” Brando said. “They’re partners, aint they?”

“Share the profit,” LQ said, “share the loss.”

We all got nicely buzzed on another three pitchers while the afternoon dwindled away and the lounge windows turned pink with the sunset. When Brando asked what I’d done to celebrate the night before, I told them about having supper with Rose and then going to a cathouse, but I didn’t feel like talking about the fight, so I left that part out.

Brando said he would’ve been better off going to a cathouse too, considering the way things turned out for him with the French girl. When he’d arrived at Brigitte’s to pick her up for the party, she was already gone. She left a note saying she’d got tired of waiting and that the party was at such and such an address and she’d meet him there. So he went on over to the place, an apartment house by the wharves.

He said you could hear the shindig from three blocks away. The party took up the whole building, all eight apartments, with a different kind of music blasting in each one.

“Sounded like a goddam loony bin,” Brando said.

He searched through five apartments before he found her. She was dancing with two guys at once, one holding her from the front and one from the rear, and all three of them so drunk they weren’t really dancing as much as staggering around together.

Before Brando could make up his mind what to do—grab her away or start punching or what—the guy hugging her from behind suddenly puked a gusher over her shoulder, getting it all over her and the other guy both. That broke up the three-way dance in a hurry, Brando said. The puking guy backpedaled into the end of a sofa and