Charlie Stella - Charlie Opera

“Whatcha need?” the redhead asked.

“Anything,” Charlie said. “A revolver if you know where I can get one. I’ll take anything, though.”

The redhead waved him around the car. He walked around the front and she opened her purse for him.

“It’s a twenty-two but it works,” she told him. “But it’s not a revolver. I can probably get you one, but it’ll take a few hours.”

“How much for that one?” Charlie asked.

The redhead shrugged. “Two hundred?”

Charlie nodded. “Deal,” he said. He peeled off four fifties.

“Hey,” the short woman said. “Don’t I get anything for the flash?”

Charlie peeled off a ten-dollar bill and handed it to the redhead. “For her efforts,” he said. “Brava, bravi.”

“Huh?” the redhead said.

Charlie hopped a cab back to the Strip, where he examined the Taurus P22 he had just purchased. The small handgun had a pop-up barrel for loading. He slipped the weapon inside the waist of his pants and had the taxi drop him a few blocks from Harrah’s. He stopped at a souvenir store to see if he might find something less dangerous than a handgun.

He ruled out the silly-looking souvenir knives and found a foot-long baseball bat with “Las Vegas Slugger” engraved on the barrel instead. He used a fresh twenty-dollar bill for the bat and a Las Vegas T-shirt that read: “Lost Wages, Nevada.”

He took his time walking back to Harrah’s. He had more than an hour before the late checkout time he knew his wife had already arranged for them. As he crossed the lobby toward the hall for the elevators, he noticed an Asian kid watching him from behind a column adjacent to the casino floor.

Charlie felt his heart beating faster as he watched the kid in the reflection from a pane of restaurant glass. He draped the T-shirt he had bought over the small baseball bat and headed for the elevators. He saw the kid pick up a house telephone in the glass reflection when he stopped to present his room key to the security guard in front of the elevator bank.

He rode the elevator wondering why they would approach him in such a public place. They had missed a perfect opportunity in a much more remote area near Samantha’s house earlier. He touched the.22 through his shirt but was hesitant to take it out. What if someone saw it? What if he had to use it?

He was glad he had bought the baseball bat. He gripped the thin end with his right hand as the elevator approached his floor.

He decided he would look for a housecleaning person once he was off the elevator. He would make believe he hd lost his key and ask to call security to let him in. He didn’t think they would wait inside his room, but there was no point in taking unnecessary risks.

When the elevator stopped and the doors opened, he saw a tall, skinny kid standing across the hall. The kid’s back was turned to Charlie, except why would anybody wait for an elevator with his back to one that had just arrived?

Charlie saw the kid was Asian about the same time he saw the knife. It missed his chin by inches when the kid swung. Charlie stepped to his right and tossed the T-shirt straight up. The Asian flinched, and Charlie was able to nail him on the forehead with the bat. The sound was distinct and loud. His eyes stared blankly as he backpedaled out of control.

Charlie saw blood on the Asian’s forehead as he followed through with a second swing, this one aimed at the side of the head. It was another hard blow but not nearly as flush as the first one. The Asian toppled over and crashed into a closed elevator door. Charlie looked around himself, wiped the blood from the bat on the T-shirt, and got out of there.

Beau Curitan sipped Diet 7UP from a can as he hunkered over the laptop on the small table in his motel room on Las Vegas Boulevard. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his left hand as he adjusted his mouse on the small pad to the right of the laptop.

“Daddy’s almost home again, honey,” he said to himself. “And I got something sweet for you.”

He smirked at the screen name he was about to start a private chat with through the CompuServe Internet program.

He typed with one finger, slowly, as he stared at the keyboard.

“You can run butt you can’t hyde,” Beau typed.

He grabbed the can of Diet 7UP while he waited for the reply. His eyebrows furrowed as he spit the last of the soda from his mouth in an effort to cough and yell “fuck” at the same time.

“Asshole!” he yelled. “I’ll give you asshole!”

Beau typed furiously then, without any regard for which keys he was striking in the heat of the moment.

“I ring yure fuckin neck you cont bihgh twat!” he typed. He said the words he meant to type aloud to himself. Then he read ONTHERUN’s response as it appeared on his screen.

“Fuck off, Beau,” the words read.

Beau slapped the laptop off the bed. He wondered if it would ever work again or if he had just cost himself another few hundred dollars.

Carol trembled with fear at her response to her husband’s Internet threat. She hoped her husband had punched the screen or kicked out the plug in anger. She hoped maybe her husband was in the bathtub and managed to pull the laptop into the water with him.

That was a better image, Carol thought as she nervously packed her laptop.

She had taken a room in a motel on her way out of Las Vegas when she realized Beau had probably traced her to the phone lines in Samantha’s apartment. The thought of harm coming to her best friend because of her ex-husband forced Carol to engage him one more time, at least for Samantha’s sake.

She was heading west. She needed Beau to follow her.

The hooker was holding her hand out for another hundred dollars for a blow job. Joey Francone wanted to slap her in the face, but he wasn’t in New York. She could make problems for him in Las Vegas.

Besides, he still had to deliver her to his boss. The blow job was just a bonus Francone figured he might pick up cheap, except she wasn’t cheap at all.

“What the hell,” he told hr. He peeled off another five twenties from his money clip. “You might as well while you’re here.”

The hooker set her bag on the night table beside the bed. “Can I get a drink first?” she asked.

“Can I take it off the top?” he asked.

“Nope,” she said.

“I didn’t think so. What’ll you have?”

“Vodka tonic. Sprite on the side, please.”

“Right,” Francone said. He picked up the phone to order the drinks from room service as the hooker excused herself into the bathroom.

He was doing the math in his head, wondering where the cost for the strap-on dildo he was no longer sure his boss was going to use on some broad was going to end. The hooker had told him stories about men who had asked for sex toys like strap-on dildos and how they almost always wanted the girls to use the paraphernalia on the men themselves. It made Francone a bit sick to think that of his boss, but the hooker seemed to know what she was talking about.

Actually, she wasn’t so bad once you got past her sarcasm. She had told him she was originally from Kansas, but Francone didn’t believe her. At least he was skeptical. After a while, once she seemed to settle down with him, the hooker did reveal an innocent side of herself. She could have been raised on a farm somewhere. Her father or brother or uncle could have raped her. She could have turned to prostitution for any number of reasons.

She opened the bathroom door as Francone rubbed his chin from thinking. She had removed her sequin dress. She wore white garter belts with a matching white lace bra.

Francone swallowed hard from how sexy she looked. “Holy shit,” escaped from his mouth.