made it their business to be there because Little Norman had told them to. Whenever he had heard enough, he would reach into the pocket of the tailored suit, pull out a wad of twenty-dollar bills and strip off one note or several, depending upon the freshness and weight of what he had been told.
What Little Norman was doing was checking the weather in Las Vegas. For a number of years now—ten, to be precise—the weather had been fine. The money he paid for the recitations he heard each day came to him indirectly from fourteen old men, none of whom lived within five hundred miles of the city, who had gotten into the habit of depending on Little Norman. His job was to ensure that nothing ever happened to disturb the tranquility that had prevailed with few interruptions since their predecessors had formally agreed to it forty years ago.
Today, as Little Norman sampled the weather, he stared particularly intently at his observers and listened for mistakes. It wasn’t that any of them would be so foolish as to tell him a lie, but after so many days of clear weather, they might have missed something. As usual, he asked them who had checked in that they recognized, and who had played with a lot more money than his clothes indicated he should have. But today he also asked if there was a man of average height and build, with sand-brown hair, who seemed to be looking for someone. He would have sat watching at a remote table in the bar, or passed through the casino slowly, never gambling or talking to anybody. None of Little Norman’s people had seen such a man, so by the time he had finished his rounds at eight, he was satisfied that the weather was still fine.
At nine P.M. Little Norman’s long strides took him into Caesars Palace, where he had a light lunch with a girl named Yolanda. She claimed to be nineteen but provided him with evidence that was ambiguous. When he went to the men’s room, she tried to steal some of the money he had left under the check for the waiter. This meant that she was old enough to be squeezing each opportunity to put something away for the future, so she might have seen a sag or a wrinkle already, which argued twenty-five. But doing this also meant that she was young enough not to realize how bad that sort of behavior was for her future, because until the waiter picked it up, that money still belonged to Little Norman. He explained the distinction to her patiently, with a reassuring smile on his face, and she listened with the alertness of a rabbit. For her benefit he added that Las Vegas was going to be a cold, hard place for her if she didn’t value the goodwill of people like waiters and doormen. She demonstrated her native intelligence by openly taking the money out of her sleeve and putting it back on the table—not on the check, but under her own plate. Little Norman liked her for that.
By eleven P.M. Little Norman was making his second circuit of the casinos. He couldn’t be everywhere, but he could seem to be. He made eye contact with everybody he saw whom he knew, so that if they had seen anything he might like to hear, they wouldn’t need to wonder where to find him.
Little Norman returned to his car in the lot at the Sands at six in the morning. It was a bright red Corvette with an engine that could do a hundred fifty if he had been reckless enough to try it. He had bought the first one he could afford in 1960, and kept trading them in ever since, always bright red, because that was the color of the first one he had seen in Kansas City; it was the color Corvettes
Little Norman had lived in some of the big hotels downtown when he had first come to preserve the good weather. The fact that he could afford this luxury had appealed to him then. Now he lived in a three-bedroom house on the edge of town near an entrance to the Interstate. The fourteen old men were deeply conservative in their souls, and they didn’t trust a man who lived as though he didn’t intend to stay.
The traffic was sparse, and Little Norman drove home with only a couple of almost-stops at corners where he had mistimed the lights. He unlocked the door of his house and entered, punched the buttons on the panel in the wall to let his security system know who he was. Then he locked the door and walked into his bedroom.
Outside the window at the back of the living room that looked out on the empty swimming pool and the cactus plants, Wolf ducked into the darkness. “One-five-two-four: fifteen twenty-four.” He waited, then moved to the bedroom window, stooping to look through the crack in the blinds at Little Norman’s bedtime ritual. The big man carefully took off his clothes and boots and put them in the closet, then opened the drawer on the nightstand, pulled out a .45 ACP pistol that Wolf judged was a Beretta and slipped it under the pillow beside him. He disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes, then returned, climbed into bed and turned off the light with a remote control on the nightstand.
Wolf waited for a half hour, lying on the still-warm weeds beside the house, then stood up and began the walk to his motel. It was a couple of miles away, and he was tired.
The next day, Little Norman was pleased to learn that the weather in Las Vegas was still fine. He made his rounds wearing boots of crocodile and ostrich hide, and celebrated with an evening meeting with Yolanda in a room he had rented for her at the Frontier. It was after five A.M. when he compressed himself into his Corvette and drove back to his house. It wasn’t until he reached his bedroom that he learned the weather had changed. “Hello, Norman.” He didn’t have to turn his head to know who it was, but he did it anyway. He wasn’t going to go into the darkness without being man enough to look.
“Hello, kid.”
“You’re not surprised to see me.”
“I’m surprised you let me see you.” Little Norman stared at him. He looked almost the same. He wasn’t that much older-no big gut, no less hair, maybe a few wrinkles. Little Norman’s mind was full of irrelevant impressions now, each setting off thoughts that would have been distractions if it had mattered what he thought. The Butcher’s Boy would kill him, and they both knew that he wasn’t going to stand around and wait for it to happen. He would make an attempt to get to a weapon because he was Little Norman. But he wouldn’t make it in time because the man sitting in his chair holding a .45 on him was who he was. Little Norman also knew that the gun wouldn’t jam or misfire because it was the one he kept under his pillow.
The Butcher’s Boy had fooled the alarm system and sat here in the dark waiting for him. This didn’t surprise him either. Alarm systems weren’t for people like them; they were to keep out some junkie who needed your stereo. He let his eyes dart to the nightstand for the remote control, but it wasn’t there. He could have turned out the lights and taken his chances in the dark, but of course this man knew that. So it had to be the lamp itself, quick and low and hard.
“I’d like to talk to you for a minute,” said the Butcher’s Boy.
“About ten years ago? I know why you’re here. I’d be here too.”
“Okay, let’s start with ten years ago.”
“I didn’t think I was setting you up. I thought they really were going to pay you. If I’d known they were going to take you out on the Strip and kill you …” He stopped and shrugged. “You know me.”
The Butcher’s Boy nodded. “You would have made sure they didn’t fuck it up.”
“I was the best. Maybe not ten years ago, but before that.”
“You were the best once. Not a lot of people can say that, especially the ones who were.”
Little Norman nodded. “I might have been able to talk them out of it, too. I always liked you. You were the only one in the trade that seemed to really be alive. Besides me.” Little Norman kept the lamp in his peripheral vision. He was too far away to grab it; he would have to bat it at the Boy. “I’m curious, kid. I know you’re not going to tell me where you’ve been.”
“No.”
“But tell me this: did you have any fun?”
This seemed to take the Boy by surprise. “Fun?”
“Yeah. I mean, was it worth it? Ten years is a hell of a lot of time to be hiding in a hole somewhere. Did you put together any kind of a life while you were gone?”
“I liked it. It was a hell of a lot better than I thought it would be. I’d have stayed forever. It doesn’t make me any happier to be here, but at least I didn’t waste the time I had.”
“I’m glad. At least old Eddie taught you something that did you some good. Don’t tell me when you’re going to do it. Just make it in the head.”
“I’m not here for that. I’m not taking you this time, unless you can’t stand good luck and go for the lamp or something. I want you to talk to the old men.”
There was no question of who the old men were. “What for? What do you want to say to them?”
“Remind them of what happened ten years ago. I behaved like a professional. I did the job, I came here to get paid and the customer tried to chew me up.”
“They don’t give a shit about any of that. They didn’t then. They cared because of what you did after that. You buried a lot of people. It took them years to clean everything up.”
