Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

Pellerin made a stressed yet affirmative noise.

“Good. Now… my question. Is your ability such that you can control the play of seven or eight good card players so as to achieve a specific result?”

With considerable effort, holding his belly, Pellerin sat up. “How specific?”

“I’d like you to arrange it so that you and a certain gentleman outlast all the rest, and that he have a distinct advantage in chips at that point. Let’s say a four to one advantage. Then I’d like you to beat him silly. Take all his chips as quickly as you can.”

“That’s risky,” said Pellerin. “The guy could get a run of great cards. It’s hard playing heads-up from that far down. You can’t bluff effectively. Why do you want me to do it that way? If you let me play my game, I can guarantee a win.”

“Because he’ll want the game to continue if he thinks you lucked out. He’ll offer you a check, but you tell him it’s cash or nothing.”

“What if he…” Pellerin began, and Billy cut him off: “No what-ifs. Yours not to wonder why, yours but to do or die.” He looked to Clayton. “Is that Byron?”

“Tennyson,” said Clayton. “‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’”

“Yes, of course!” He gave himself a pretend-slap for having forgotten. “Well. Can you do the job, Mister Pellerin?”

“I’ll need a little luck, but… yeah. I guess I can do it.”

“We all need a little luck.” Billy popped out of the chair. “You’ll be leaving for Fort Lauderdale day after tomorrow. The Seminole Paradise Casino. I’ll have my people watching, so don’t worry about anything untoward. You will be closely watched. I’ll give Jack the details. He can tell you all about it.”

He walked away briskly, but then he turned and pointed at Jo. “I got it! Big Brother All-Stars. The seventh season. You remember, Clayton?”

Clayton said, maybe, he wasn’t sure.

“Come on, man! Erica. The tall bitch with the big rack. She played the game real sneaky.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Clayton. “Yeah, I can see it.”

The Seminole Paradise Hard Rock Hotel and Casino was a hell of a mouthful for what amounted to your basic two-hundred-dollar-per-room Florida hotel complete with fountain display and an assortment of clubs and bars notable for the indifferent quality of their cuisine and the bad taste evident in their decor. Particularly annoying was Pangaea, a club decorated with “authentic tribal artifacts” that likely had been purchased from a prop supply company. The entire complex was a surfeit of fakes. Fake breasts, fake smiles, fake youth, fake people. Why anyone would choose such a place to put a dent in their credit cards, I’ll never know—maybe it offered them the illusion that they were losing fake money.

We went down to the casino early the same afternoon we checked in, and Pellerin nabbed a chair at one of the poker tables. I watched for a while to ascertain whether he was winning—he was—and went for a stroll. I wanted to see how far my leash would stretch. There were several men hanging about who might be Billy’s people and I was interested to learn if any of them would follow me. I also wanted to get clear of the situation and gain some perspective on things. Once I reached the entrance to the grounds, I turned right and walked along the edge of the highway, working up a sweat in the hot sun, until I came to a strip mall with about twenty-five or thirty shops, the majority of them closed. It was Sunday in the real world.

A Baskin-Robbins caught my eye. The featured flavors were banana daiquiri and sangria. Sangria, for fuck’s sake! I bought two scoops of vanilla by way of protesting the lapsed integrity of ice cream flavors and ate it sitting on the curb. I tried to problem-solve, but all I did was churn up mud from the bottom of my brain. The assignment that had been forced upon us—upon Pellerin—was to attract the interest of a wealthy developer named Frank Ruddle, an excellent poker player who frequented the Seminole Paradise. Pellerin’s job was to play sloppy over the course of a couple of weeks. That way he would set himself up as a mark and Ruddle would invite him to the big cash game held each month at his Lauderdale home. According to Billy’s scenario, once Ruddle went bust, he would feel compelled to open his vault in order to obtain more cash. At this point Billy’s people would move in on the game. He wanted something from that vault. I thought it might be more of a trophy than anything of actual value, and that his real goal was purely personal. The plan was paper-thin and smacked of Billy at his most profligate. There were a dozen holes in it, a hundred ways it could go wrong, but Billy was willing to spend our lives for the chance to gain a petty victory. Had the aim of the exercise been to secure the item at any cost, it could have been far more easily achieved. That he was willing to squander an asset with (if Jo were to be believed) unlimited potential was classic late-period Billy Pitch. If we failed, it was no skin off his butt. He’d wait for his next opportunity and while away the hours throwing Tanqueray parties for his fellow reality-show addicts. And if we succeeded, he might decide that his victory would not be secure so long as we were alive. I saw a couple of outs, but the odds of them working were not good.

Across from the mall lay a vacant lot overgrown with weeds, sprinkled with scrub palmetto, and adjoining it was another, larger lot that had been cleared for construction, the future site of LuRay Condominiums—so read a sign picturing a peppy senior citizen couple who seemed as pleased as all get out that they would soon be living next door to a casino where they could blow their retirement in a single evening. Farther along was a cluster of tiny redneck dwellings set among diseased-looking palms. Squatty frame houses with shingle roofs and window-unit air conditioners and front yards littered with sun-bleached Big Wheels and swing sets. They looked deserted, but each of them harbored, I imagined, a vast corpulent entity with dyed hair and swollen ankles, who survived on a diet of game shows and carbohydrates, and went outside once a day to check the sky for signs of the Rapture. Now and then a car zipped past and, less frequently, one pulled into the mall and disgorged a porky Florida Cracker family desirous of some Burger King or a couple of bare-midriffed Britney Spears clones in search of emergency eyeliner.

This dose of reality caused the mud to settle, the sediment to wash from my thoughts, but clarity did not improve my prospects. I tossed my trash into a bin. Zombie hold ’em players and doe-eyed ladies who were a little damaged… I wanted that crap out of my head, I wanted things back the way they had been. Small Time. That was me. Yet I was content with my small-time life. I was adept at it, I was pleased with my general lack of ambition. Tentatively, I gave the trash bin a kick. It quivered in fear, and that inspired me to unload on it. The bin rolled out into the parking lot and I kept on kicking it. I crushed its plastic ribs, I flattened it and squeezed out its soggy paper-and-crumpled-plastic guts. Inside the Baskin-Robbins, people stared but didn’t appear terribly alarmed. They were accustomed to such displays. Heat drove men insane in these parts. The manager took a stand by the door, ready to defend his tubs of flavored goo, but the moment passed when I might have stormed his glassed-in fortress and engendered the headline “Five Dead in Baskin-Robbins Spree Killing—Louisiana Native Charged in Crime.” I strode out to the highway, fueled by a thin, poisonous anger, and was nearly struck by a speeding Corvette that veered onto the shoulder. Dizzy with adrenaline, I gazed off along the road. Despite the vegetation, I felt I was on the edge of a desert. Weeds stirred in a fitful breeze. One day the Great Sky Monkey, sated with banana daiquiri ice cream, would drop down from the Heavenly Banyan Tree to use the place for toilet paper. I tried to calm myself, but everywhere I cast my eye I saw omens and portents and outright promises of doom. I saw a wine bottle shattered into a spray of diamonds on the asphalt, I saw a gray-haired man poking his cane feebly at a dead palm frond, I saw a sweaty twelve-year-old girl with a mean, sexy face pedaling her bicycle full tilt toward me, and I saw a black car with smoked windows idling beside a dumpster under the killing white glare of the sun.