Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life Read online

  We froze there for a moment—Tamashanter, Lance, and I—struggling over not only what to do but also who to be.

  Finally, Lance took ascendance because he knew the place and we did not.

  I struck a depression in the wall with my black-fingered hand, the sliding door came open again. I stopped, took a .38 automatic from a holster at the back of dead Trapas’s belt, and strode out into the green hall.

  The doorwomen were gone. There was no guard outside the emerald doors.

  The men who had been stalking me were still there, but they seemed confused. I wasn’t supposed to be coming out that way.

  I wasn’t supposed to be coming out at all.

  There was a red-and-white Checker cab in front of the hotel. The thuggish valet was standing maybe fifteen feet away, but I didn’t trust him to get my car so I dove into the backseat of the cab and said, “Take me to the Bellagio.”

  Looking out the back window, I saw the black van pull away from the curb.

  I got out at the main entrance of the hotel and went directly to a side exit, where I knew taxis waited to be called up for clients. I got into an aqua-colored cab driven by a man named Manuel Lupa, at least that’s what his limousine identity plate said. I gave Lupa the address of my extended-stay hotel and sat back wondering what I had done to make my friends at the Steadman so angry.

  The killings didn’t seem to bother me or, at least, they didn’t affect Lance, who was in the driver’s seat—so to speak.

  Manuel let me out in front of the glass doors to my hotel.

  The black van was already there, parked across the street. They hadn’t tried to kill me yet so I ignored them as I went in and up to my fourth-floor room.

  Lying down on the hard mattress on top of the rough blue-and-tan bedspread, I gave in to the voices.

  It was a juridical gathering, a meeting of the many after the trauma of such violence. Under the roof of my awareness, they argued for a very long time.

  Some had never killed before. Others were ecstatic at the bloodshed and battle. There were calls for suicide and for going to the police. One powerful voice, that of a Spanish priest, said, “God will not forgive an unrepentant sinner.”

  “God?” I said from the rafters of my mind. “How can you talk about God when you are where you are?”

  “All deeds are divine,” Father Clemente replied in the same mental idiom. “He has placed me here to succor those lost and sundered souls.”

  For a moment, I saw and felt what that Catholic minion believed. His sense of the Deity was so intense that I could not help but defer. I felt myself fading inside my own mind. Other voices gained ascendance calling out for confession and absolution. These voices were of all religions, and some were simply devout believers. They wanted to be freed from the prison they found themselves in. The husk of my mind was for them, at that moment, an unbearable limbo.

  “No!” It was a man’s voice that cut through the moaning and wailing of religious piety and confusion.

  This pronouncement was so loud that I was forced to sit up and then get to my feet. I went to the terrace and breathed in the chill night desert air. It was late in the evening. We had been at it for hours.

  “They were going to kill us,” the new voice said above the waning din of pious complaints. “There was no choice, no crime. And we need more information before we can go to either God or the law.”

  What should we do? I thought.

  “Let’s make a call,” the as-yet-unidentified voice said.

  On the walk from my bed to the terrace, I wondered if I was schizophrenic with side orders of multiple personalities and delusions. Had I been to a place called the Steadman and killed those men? Maybe I had stayed in this room the whole time imagining deeds, actions, and crimes.

  A phone number worked its way into my thoughts.

  After pressing a nine and a one, I entered the number on a tan phone that sat on the blue desk.

  Six rings and she answered, “Yes?”

  “Anna?” the man who stopped the religious convocation said.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Ron.”

  “Ron?”

  “Tremont.”

  There was silence for a moment … two.

  “Anna.”

  “Who is this?”

  “I don’t have time to explain, A. But I can tell you that on June 24, 1999, you did something to a man named Charles Willis that I cannot repeat on any phone line.”

  “Ron?”

  “You always called me Tremolo.”

  “Ron Tremont is dead.”

  “I thought that might be the case. But here I am … sorta.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Vegas. I’m … I’m not quite myself and I need help. You can get in touch with a guy named Jack Strong at the Motorcoach Extended-Stay Motel.”

  “Your voice … it doesn’t sound like you.”

  “On Tuesdays I always brought lemon-filled doughnuts to work wherever we were, and on Fridays you bought chocolate éclairs.”

  Anna—Wolf was her last name, I knew—went quiet again.

  “Anna.”

  “How can you expect me to believe this?”

  “Your husband came out to you four years before the divorce, but you remained faithful to him and never told his secret to anyone but me.”

  “I was with you when you died,” she said.

  I suddenly remembered driving down a two-lane highway outside Cincinnati. One moment I was fine, and the next my heart felt like an expanding balloon causing a pain I’d never experienced before. I pulled to the shoulder and threw open the car door. I heaved up and out of the driver’s seat while Anna was shouting my name. Three steps into my attempted escape from the heart attack, I fell to the ground. Anna rolled me over with some difficulty because I was a fat man. The last thing I remember seeing was her face. Her coloring was dark ocher. Her race was what is called African American.

  “I was a coward at the end,” I/Ron said into the phone. “I begged you not to let me die.”

  “Ron,” she said with a kind of semi-certainty.

  “I gotta go soon, A. You still with the bureau?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “I’m in big trouble and I don’t understand it. Can you come out to Vegas?”

  “I’ll be there by tomorrow afternoon.”

  When I hung up, Ron Tremont stepped back from the forefront of consciousness. That’s how it felt. My awareness was like a pulpit or a podium that varied personalities approached in order to use their knowledge and abilities. I was always there but not necessarily in control.

  There came a knock.

  “Yes?” I said, standing to the side of the door, squatting low.

  “Mr. Strong? It’s Alberto. Tony send me up to tell you somethin’.”

  I opened the door on the red-skinned, fleshy-featured young man.

  “These bad dudes come up to Tony and said where was you at? Somebody called before then asking for Jack Strong, but they hung up. Tony figured it was the bad men that called, but he didn’t know.”

  “Who was calling?”

  “The bad dudes,” Alberto said, upset that I wasn’t getting his meaning. “Tony sent ’em to a empty suite on the eighth floor, but you got to get outta here before they find out you’re not there. Tony already split ’cause he don’t want ’em comin’ after him. He called me on his cell phone an’ told me to warn you.”

  “Is there a back way, Alberto?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Before sneaking out the service entrance of the hotel, I told Alberto that if a woman named Anna Wolf called for me to have her call and ask for Carl Rothman at the Beamer Motel after six the next day. I repeated the message twice and gave him a hundred-dollar bill.

  “My cousins Esther and Shoni work the switchboard,” he said with a smile. I noticed that an upper tooth was edged in silver. “They’ll do it.”

 
; Two twenty-three in the morning found me at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop on the dowdy end of the Strip. I was sitting hunched over a table in a booth at the back eating a chili size and searching my mind.

  Richards. Lance Richards. He’d been dead for a while. It was 2008 when Mr. Petron’s bookkeeper figured out that Lance had been skimming off the money Petron had been skimming from the big boss Ira Toneman. Lana Santini, the daytime bartender, and Richards had worked together to get a nightly bundle of twenty-dollar bills from the vig chest into their joint safe-deposit box. They’d been doing it for almost two years and had more than six hundred thousand stowed away.

  But then it came out that Lance was the one who’d been stealing. He went to Lana’s, and she gave him a shot of whiskey. That was the last memory Richards could muster. She had probably killed him. He always carried the second key to the box in his wallet when they went to the bank in Phoenix. She probably thought he always had it there. It was only after he was dead that she must have realized her mistake.

  He took the money, but Lana was the one who smuggled it out of the casino. Maybe Petron never suspected that Lance had a partner.

  Lance hungered for his lucre. He lingered near the forefront of my mind.

  Call Lana, he said silently.

  I ignored the plea, wasn’t concerned with the money.

  Who was I? What was I?

  “Mr. Strong?”

  Wearing a tailored gray suit, he was my height and well built, the color of a denizen of southern Italy, tan tending toward olive. His eyes were a brilliant green, and his hair was black and shiny.

  I gripped the pistol in my jacket pocket and took a quick look around the room. There was nobody there except a tired waitress leaning against the counter.

  “Who are you?” I, and hundreds of others, wanted to know.

  “May I sit?”

  It took me a few moments to say, “Okay.”

  He slid onto the long seat opposite me.

  “Tom Grog,” he said. “I represent an organization called the Convocation.”

  His green eyes stared into my multi ones.

  “What does that mean to us?” I recognized the plural and accepted it.

  “Why are those men after you?” he replied.

  “I think I stole some money from them a few years ago. I guess they want it back.”

  “You stole it with Lana Santini?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Tom Grog,” he said patiently.

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

  “No. I suppose not.”

  “Do you know what I am?”

  “You are the phoenix. I’m here to witness your rebirth and transformation.”

  “I could snap your neck like a twig,” Connolly Wright said from the chorus that made up the background of my mind.

  “Can you help us?” Minna Achet, another of my personas, cried.

  “Not if you break my neck,” Grog said with a frown on his lips and a twinkle in his jeweled eyes.

  “Are you the guy in the black van?” I said, taking back control.

  “My people. I drive a silver Benz.”

  “What do you want, Mr. Grog?”

  “Simply introducing myself, Mr. Strong, and possibly to offer an apology along with a little advice.”

  “Apology for what?”

  “The trouble you’re in,” he said, tilting his head slightly to the right as if gesturing toward a bow. “When Lana Santini brought you to our representative, we had no idea that the Steadman mob was after you. But now that the truth is known, you should leave Las Vegas and accomplish your tasks elsewhere.”

  “What tasks?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “Why is the ring finger on my left hand black?”

  “It’s more a chocolate brown, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Did I die?” I asked, remembering a child pleading with his mother to save his life and his leg.

  “I shouldn’t even be talking to you, Jack. My job is purely that of a watcher. I am here to observe how you integrate into society and yourself.”

  “You got to tell me what’s going on, man.”

  “I cannot,” he said with some regret. “All I can do, I have done. Leave Las Vegas.”

  When Grog stood up, I had every intention of stopping him. I was going to grab him and search him and maybe even torture him until he gave me the information I needed.

  But instead, I became lightheaded. I wanted to rise, but I could barely keep my face from thumping down on the Formica tabletop. I shook my head like a beast in the wild.

  For a moment, I was a creature, an animal in some deep wood.

  “You’re a powerful man, Jack Strong,” Tom Grog said. “But we have ways to subdue you if push comes to shove. You’ll be okay in a few minutes. Have a cup of coffee and leave Las Vegas.”

  I tried to speak but could not.

  “The effects won’t last long,” Grog added. “When you have your strength again, leave town. We don’t have the manpower to protect you from gangsters.” He threw a large brown envelope down on the table. “This will help.”

  I watched the suave man saunter toward the front. He said something to the waitress and then went out the door. I wanted to follow, but there was no strength in my limbs.

  When Tom Grog was gone, I felt as if my last chance to understand had left with him. There were people who wanted to kill me, but that wasn’t nearly as important as who I was, what I was, and why.

  The lethargy that my visitor had somehow induced got worse. I was looking down on the red Formica tabletop trying to keep from falling face-first into the chili bowl.

  “You okay, Sugah?” The waitress was redheaded with widely spaced cornflower blue eyes. Her skin was pale and heavily freckled from the desert sun. She was attractive but no longer young. I was sure that she had been a Las Vegas beauty, a showgirl maybe with those long legs. But at forty, her loveliness would go unappreciated in the capital of gaudiness and glitter, youth and rot.

  “What?” I said.

  “Can I get you something else, honey?”

  “Rosetta,” I said.

  “You can read at least,” she said touching her name tag with a single finger. “That’s good. I have learned not to talk to a man who can’t read.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?” My strength was returning.

  “Because either he’s been to prison or he’s on his way there.”

  At that moment, I appreciated being a repository for so many points of view. There was a seemingly natural inner desire to come to agreement among the chorus of my mind. We concurred that Rosetta had failed to attain the life she had hoped for. Too late she’d learned the lessons that beauty never lasted and that the love garnered by beauty was most often off the mark.

  “How’d you like to make fifty thousand dollars, Rosetta?” I asked.

  She took Tom Grog’s seat across from me.

  “As long as I don’t have to kill or maim my son or my mother,” she said, “I’d like it very much.”

  Rosetta looked at me in a way that beckoned my feminine side. This response was sexual and yet somehow social.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Jack.”

  “Jack what?”

  “Jack Strong.”

  “Mmm. That’s a nice name. You got ID?”

  “You think I’m lying?” I asked while taking the wallet from my pocket.

  I handed her the license I’d found after coming awake in the Motorcoach Hotel.

  She studied the picture and smiled.

  “Drugs?” she asked. “Some kind of card-counting scheme?”

  “I need you to pretend to be somebody else,” I said.

  “That’s easy. I do that most of the time anyway. I spend whole days thinkin’ I’m Madonna or Fergie. Sometimes I’m Princess Diana, but I never got killed.”

  “Do you live with you
r son?”

  “He stays with my mama on weeknights, out in the burbs where they got good public schools. I get off in ten minutes. If you want, you can take me home and tell me how I’m gonna get so rich.”

  I must have frowned because she asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “You seem very willing to get into a deal with a complete stranger.”

  “I was gonna start talkin’ to you anyway,” she explained. “You’re a good-lookin’ man, and I just spent the whole morning thinking about what I could do with just ten thousand dollars. Nobody’s knockin’ down my door or nothin’ anymore. I got responsibilities. And, anyway, if I don’t like what you got to say, then I could just say no.”

  Sex with Rosetta Jeanette Lawson was a revelation for me, actually, a series of revelations. I approached her feeling as a woman, not a particular woman in my psyche but as the female anima. My whole purpose was to pleasure her to the heights of orgasm. It was a route I knew well as a woman but hardly at all as a man. And it was exciting because, physically, I was not the woman I felt I was. I didn’t have the genitals that were crying out for satisfaction in my mind.

  And at some point, I realized—as a woman—my erection. At that moment, sex was a miracle unfolding like waves at the shore. Looking at her and looking at myself—a man with a woman’s soul, a woman with a man’s hard cock—I experienced an orgasm that wouldn’t stop, that echoed through all the personages inside me. The experience, in addition to its physical power, had the effect of bringing my disparate souls closer together. It bound us in a way so deeply satisfying I almost passed out.

  Rosetta came on that journey with me, so to speak. She was saying things, but my ears could not hear. She was pounding my thighs with the heels of her hands, but it didn’t hurt until hours later. When the climax had crested and fallen, Rosetta stumbled from the bed and into the hall.

  I crumpled on my side, half on and half off the bed. The power of the two sexes coming together inside me, and with Rosetta, too, was something I had never even suspected was possible. I shivered with intensity that was so charged that it couldn’t properly be called pleasure.