The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

Walter’s fingers snapped into a fist. He landed hard, on his tender elbow, and bit back a scream of pain.

He opened his hand. Nothing

The fly dipped and rolled and entered the bedroom. The music was gone now. The collection wheel on the big 35mm projector squeaked round and round, the tail of the film slapping metal.

The fly buzzed.

But Howard Hughes did not scream. Walter got up, rubbing his elbow. Maybe he was lucky. Maybe the old man was asleep, crashed out on Valium or Demerol. The way his elbow felt, Walter could use a Demerol himself. He pulled a fresh Kleenex from his jerry-rigged holster and stepped through the doorway, squinting into the bright slab of light that poured from the projector.

The collection wheel squeaked, and the film slap slap slapped, but Walter could hear the fly, too. The buzzing sound was so damn loud. The fly had to be close.

“Do you hear what I hear, Walter?”

Walter froze. The voice was low, without intonation, nothing more than a drone. For a crazy second he thought that the fly was talking to him.

“Mr. Hughes?” Walter began. “Mr. Hughes, I’m sorry.”

Alien, unfeeling laughter was the only reply. Instinctively, Walter retreated, the Kleenex now damp in his sweaty grasp.

And then the fly came streaking from the core of bright light, and it was followed by another and another and another… and the insects swarmed over Walter’s face, dipping into his ears, brushing his lips until he fell back, ashamed by the feeble screams that spilled from his lips… terrified because he had to open his lips to allow his screams to escape… and he bumped into Uncle Jack’s desk, scattering papers and knocking over a model of a Hughes OH-6A helicopter but he didn’t care… he was too busy swatting, swatting, his hands a blur but none of it was doing any good and the buzzing was now a screeching whine… and Walter wanted to shut his eyes because the flies were crawling on them, but he couldn’t… he couldn’t because what he was seeing was too horrible… so horrible that he couldn’t bring himself to blink…

Howard Hughes stood in the doorway. The harsh light from the projector bathed his knobby gray shoulders, his gnarled fingernails … and the rusty hatpin that was clenched in his bony grasp.

Hughes laughed again. That cool, droning laugh. With the long nails of his thumb and forefinger, the billionaire aviator pinched the hatpin.

His nails ran the length of the rusty pin, and a dozen dead flies joined the battle and swarmed over Walter Sands.

TWO

The tall man with the pencil-thin moustache had a chauffeur, but the chauffeur didn’t get to do much because the tall man liked to drive.

He liked to drive fast. That was what he was doing at the moment. Oh, he was doing a couple of other things as well — namely smoking a cigarette and feeling sorry for himself. The things he did for Howard Hughes. Man oh man. Like they said in the whitebread calypso songs, how low can you go…

He was going there. Arriving any minute, you got that one right.

The man’s name was Jack Morton, but he didn’t hear it very often. Shortly after arriving in Vegas with the aged Mr. Hughes and his posse of Latter-day Saints, the hotel staff at the Desert Inn had taken to calling him Jack the Mormon. A mob guy who’d been a glorified gofer in Hughes’ purchase of the Desert Inn had taken one look at the cigarette dangling from Jack’s lips and shortened the tag to Jack Mormon. Jack took to the name the way it was intended, as a kind of half-assed compliment. The mob guys thought that he was okay. He knew how to make them smile — just by lighting up a cig, or chugging a tumbler of bourbon, or sipping black coffee, or whispering a four- letter word.

Make anyone smile, make them feel like they’ve got you all figured out, and they’ll give you just what you want without any trouble at all. That was Jack Mormon’s big secret. It was also his gift. He could size people up, the same way he’d sized up Howard Hughes. No one knew Hughes better than Jack. After all, he had worked for Hughes since the billionaire’s Hollywood days. He’d started as a stand-in, a guy who could pass for the famed recluse in a pinch, but he’d come a long way since the days when he was nothing more than a wet-nosed dreamer looking for a leg up in the world.

Come a long way, hell. That was the understatement of 1970. These days, Jack held the reins of Howard Hughes’ empire. He kept things running smoothly, and there were plenty of people who liked it that way, several of whom worked in a big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. To those people, Jack Mormon was Howard Hughes.

But that was important to Jack. As a kid growing up in a flyspeck Utah town, he’d often stared at the two steel rails that cut through the desert and didn’t stop until they hit the Pacific, wondering why no one ever used those rails to escape said flyspeck. He’d always wanted to be somebody, and that was why he’d jumped a freight at seventeen. And now here he was, a lifetime away from those rails, and he was somebody, even if he was somebody else.

That in itself was something, and he wanted to hold on to it. Sometimes that meant attending to the smallest details. Like tonight. Tonight there was a small problem with Mr. Hughes’ dinner.

The chef had been detained.

Jack Mormon sucked cool menthol refreshment into his lungs, then simultaneously exhaled smoke and a dark chuckle. Dinner, you got that one right. Detained, oh yeah, that was putting a cherry on top of it. Because the chef, in this case, was a surgeon who’d had his license pulled in two states. And dinner, if you glanced at the menu, happened to be an aged lady with a blood disorder who was currently residing in a nursing home.

Yeah. Picture, if you will. That was the kind of night this was shaping up to be. Most of the boys were busy closing a deal with the CIA up at Nellis Air Force Base. Strictly dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, but no Hughes employee ever stepped onto a government installation without his own private security contingent. So when the call came in from the surgeon — hey, let’s not gild the lily, let’s call him a glorified body snatcher — Jack knew immediately that he had to handle it, even if it meant leaving the fossil who signed the checks under the not-so-watchful eye of a two hundred and forty-five pound hypochondriac who spent nearly every waking minute massaging his right elbow. Which was just like leaving Hughes alone, as far as Jack Mormon was concerned.

But this situation was every bit as delicate as the CIA deal at Nellis. It was mined with seriously explosive possibilities, and Jack was the only guy who could handle it. He certainly couldn’t hand the mess over to the nine- to-five lawyers — good breeding would go nowhere with a street cop, no matter how quaint an accent might spill from the messenger’s lips. Not likely to work in the still of this frigid night, monsieur.

So Jack Mormon was doing what he always did — thinking on his feet. Well, he was actually thinking on his butt while he was busy driving the car, but that was the kind of completely technical description that would captivate an anal-retentive like Howard Hughes. Jack was thinking, and that was the important thing. Thinking for a thing that waited on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn, hungry for its dinner, a thing that provided a pipeline to one of the most powerful portfolios know to man.

God, sometimes Jack couldn’t stand having that thing in his head.

He skipped a red light, nearly clipping a slow pickup. He slammed on the brakes and parked behind a police cruiser, intentionally penning it in behind a beige sedan. No flatfoot was going to cut things short on Jack Mormon.

Jack opened the door and stepped — as it were — once more unto the windblown breech of the November night. He sized up the situation. The disgraced surgeon — the glorified body snatcher— sat in the rear of the police cruiser. The idiot actually waved at him.

Two cops stood under a neon sign twenty feet away. ELM MANOR CONVALESCENT HOME. In Vegas, even