Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life Page 3

  A few minutes later, Rosetta came back through the bedroom door taking a deep drag off a cigarette.

  “You smoke?” I asked when she sat down next to me on the bed.

  “Not for seven years,” she said. “But after that, I don’t care. I need this cigarette.”

  She held the butt end toward me, and I took a grateful drag.

  “Baby, you don’t need to give me no money at all,” she said. “Just do that once a month, and I will consider myself a rich woman.”

  I pulled her down on top of me and kissed her eyes, which fluttered shut with each osculation.

  “Did you go to school for all that?” she asked.

  “Many.” My erection was returning.

  “I know you want it, Jack Strong. I do, too. And you know I can, but I can’t. If I go through that again, I might just die before you can get to tell me where all that money’s comin’ from.”

  “I thought you didn’t want the money.”

  “I’ll use it to feather your nest.” She kissed my lips and rolled off.

  I got up and walked for the door.

  “Where you goin’?” she demanded.

  “Into the other room until this dick goes down.”

  In the dark of the living room, I peered out between shuttered slats of the venetian blinds. The black van was parked out there, silent and still.

  I took the envelope Tom Grog had given me and tore it open. It contained six thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills and an address on Park Avenue in Manhattan.

  Manhattan. I used to sleep in various grottoes formed by huge boulders in Central Park there in the summer. In the winter, I knew every grate that spewed heated steam. My life had been contained in a Grand Union shopping cart. I had my football award from Perry High and a loaded pistol I’d found and kept.

  “Jack?”

  She had come to the doorway of the darkened room.

  “Why’d you put your robe on?”

  “You don’t wanna be lookin’ at no middle-aged woman’s skin.”

  “Take it off.”

  “How about your dick?”

  “He’ll behave as long as you don’t tickle him.”

  She let the white silk kimono fall from her shoulders, and I sat on a stuffed chair. She lowered into my lap and I gave her the money, minus ten bills.

  “What’s this for?” she asked.

  “Down payment on the money I promised.”

  Leaning over, peering into my eyes, Rosetta asked, “Where did you learn to make love like that?”

  “From a woman.”

  She smiled. “Did that woman ever tell you that it’s not a good manners to give a lady a wad of cash when she’s naked on your lap? Might give the wrong message.”

  “We struck the deal about something else before the wrestling match.”

  “I won,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  We kissed.

  “Okay,” she allowed, moving over to the green sofa placed at a perpendicular angle to my blue chair. “What are we gonna do for this money?”

  “A while ago another woman and I stole a great deal of cash from a bad man who stole the money from a worse man. She tried to kill me but failed. Now I need her key to the safe-deposit box that holds the money.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Four years.”

  “Four years? Where’ve you been all this time?”

  “Recuperating.”

  “Damn. You must’ve been somethin’ else before you got sick.”

  “I’m something else now.”

  “Is that why your skin is all patchy?” Rosetta asked. “Did she burn you with acid or somethin’?”

  “Something. Are we in?”

  Rosetta’s visage became very intent. She said, with a sneer, “All the way in.”

  After my temporary lover and partner in crime had gone to sleep, I used her phone to call a guy Lance Richards once knew.

  “Hello,” he said in the smallest possible span.

  “Roaches?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Lance.”

  Silence.

  “Roaches?”

  “Lance who?”

  “You know damn well who. You still workin’ at the Beamer Motel?”

  “Uh-uh, but my cousin Rolly is.”

  “Somebody is gonna call there for a Carl Rothman. You take the message and call this number with it.” I gave him the number of a cell phone that I’d found in Rosetta’s purse.

  “Okay. Okay. Where you been, Lance?”

  “Away.”

  “Away like the joint?”

  “Just like that. And let me tell you something, Roaches.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I still know the address of the liquor store got robbed in L.A., the one where that cop was wounded. All I got to do is say your name, and that video will be looked at next to your mug shot.”

  “You don’t have to threaten me, man.”

  “No threat. I just want you to know that even if I’m dead and cold that information will be delivered to the LAPD.”

  I hung up on the petty thief and armed robber. Roaches was a little soap-colored man who was always scratching. Whether the itching came from psoriasis or neuroses, no one knew, but the name Roaches stuck on him because he always seemed a little dirty and disheveled, you expected to see bugs darting out from a pant leg, sleeve, or collar.

  A certain glee appeared at the deprecation of the criminal, and my persona, randomly named Jack Strong, mentally shrugged off the unclean Lance Richards. I was, Jack Strong was, the top man in the pyramid of innumerable personalities that made up my mind. This certainty caused a sense of security throughout the fields of thought and feeling that comprised me, were becoming me.

  Jack Strong got up from the stuffed chair and went back to the window.

  There was another car parked in front of Rosetta’s little matchbox house—a red 1967 Mustang.

  Rosetta was sleeping when I left hours before dawn.

  It was maybe four in the morning when I arrived at another tiny house in yet another sleepy suburb of Sin City. It looked gray in the darkness, but I knew that Lana Santini’s house was turquoise and white. Lance was so angry that for a moment he almost broke through to the podium intending to go up to her door. But I held him back and called her number from memory. It had been disconnected so I tried information. That got the call put through automatically.

  “Hello,” she said, all sleepyhead.

  It surprised me that Lance still had feelings for her.

  “Lana, it’s Lance.”

  “Oh.” Her words were flat and cautious. “I heard you were at the casino today.”

  “Yeah, I was there.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Why’d you do it, baby? Why’d you have to try and kill me?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You thought you could get the money, and Mr. Petron would be searching for me not knowing that I was buried out in the desert somewhere.”

  “I didn’t do that, Lance. I swear.”

  “You thought I kept that key in my wallet. You thought you could get away clean and leave me holding the bag in my dead, cold hands.”

  “You sound funny. You’re talking funny.”

  “I been through some shit,” Stumper Brown said through my lips. He’s the one who had been on death row. He’d hung himself from the bars of his cage rather than let the officials of the prison have the satisfaction of executing him.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked.

  “The safe-deposit box key.”

  “Half of it is mine.”

  “You lost your claim on that when you tried to kill me.”

  “I was afraid. I thought that if they caught you that they’d make you tell about me. Or … or … or you’d turn me over offering them the money using my key.”

  “Tell me something,
Lana.”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t I remember how you did it?”

  “You were unconscious,” she said mechanically. “I shot you in the heart after putting laudanum in your whiskey.”

  That made sense. But the train of thought led me on a tangent.

  Most of the personae in my head didn’t remember the moments of their deaths. Of the suicides—some did and some didn’t. But even there, they remembered the fall or pulling the trigger, falling asleep or sudden unexpected pain; my congregation of souls remembered flipping the switch but not exactly when the lights went out.

  “Lance?” Lana Santini said in my ear.

  “Yeah, babe?” I could see a light go on in the kitchen at the side of her little home.

  “That’s what you used to say to me all the time.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Yeah, babe.”

  “And then you tried to slaughter me.”

  “You would have done the same.”

  Lance retreated at the accusation. He didn’t believe it, instead felt he was the victim of the classic heartless vamp. If it were his mind alone hearing Lana’s indictment, the words would have fallen on flinty denial.

  But Lance was a member of an intimate society the likes of which had never before existed upon this earth. He was one of a multitude of minds and partial souls that judged in unavoidable concert. We all knew that Lance would have killed Lana if it were necessary. He killed his own stepbrother, Bernard, when a heist they’d planned went awry.

  “Nothing personal,” he said before pulling the trigger.

  He didn’t mourn Berry’s passing.

  He’d loved his brother more than any woman he’d ever hooked up with.

  “Lance?” Lana asked.

  “Hold up a second,” one of the many uttered.

  I couldn’t speak because I was busy experiencing a miracle going on inside me. It felt like all the cogs and gears, weights and pulleys of a great clock coming into epochal alignment. Lana’s simple declaration, Lance’s memories, and his peers’ reaction broke down a part of the immoral character that had been forged so long ago. There was a mental gasp, and part of Lance changed … actually changed. His remorse was a dark red sunset in a gaseous sky. It was beautiful and repugnant, a dying and a rebirth in the same wrenching revelation.

  “It’s like this,” I said to Lana Santini. “You betrayed me and now you got to pay.”

  “I deserve something.”

  “Yes, you do,” I agreed. “And you’re lucky that I no longer want to pay that debt in full.”

  “You’re talkin’ funny again.”

  “But you get my meaning.”

  “What do want me to do, Lance?”

  “Meet me at the bar in Tyson’s Playroom in thirty minutes.”

  “Thirty minutes? I just got out of bed.”

  “In thirty-one minutes, I call Mr. Petron and tell him about the safe-deposit box at Phoenix National Trust.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there.”

  “Come alone,” I said. “And bring the key.”

  “Okay.”

  She hung up, and I touched the red icon on Rosetta’s fancy phone.

  I sat there for the next quarter hour watching lights go on and off in Lana’s house while Lance Richards wailed at the back of the great chamber that made up the central part of my mind. He cried like a child found in the wilderness or the mother seeing her baby brought home safely. There was joy and deep sadness, repentance and inescapable shame, not at what he had done but because of the recognition of who he had been.

  Lance was giving up part of his psyche willingly. He was killing a part of himself, maybe the largest part. It was a weight dropped in deep waters; he had been tethered to a stone that was meant to drown him, but the rope had been cut. And now, in the face of his mortality, he felt a quivering fear.

  Lana came out of the front door with a largish man with sloping shoulders. He was wearing a light-colored suit but would have, most of us agreed, looked more comfortable in overalls. They got into an old Buick parked in the driveway, backed up, and drove off toward the Strip.

  There were six lights across the back of the car. This was an unusual configuration, and so I could afford to wait awhile before taking off after them.

  I followed at a distance not thinking at all. Lance was still lachrymose. This felt like healing. Lana and her contraband passenger were headed for a meeting, and I had yet to see where the chips would fall. I decided on the drive to buy gloves. My hands were the biggest giveaway I had.

  Tyson’s was a freestanding establishment with few slot machines and no other forms of gambling. People went there to drink and play pool. They didn’t want to fleece tourists or to be encumbered by any hope of instant wealth. This was a room in which a true gambler could relax.

  Lana parked the car at the curb, got out alone, and walked through the front door of the twenty-four-hour pub.

  There was no sign of the man she drove off with.

  I waited a ninety seconds and then sauntered over to the car. I loitered a few feet away while a couple came out of Tyson’s arguing. After they had moved on, a homeless man down on his luck staggered past. He was a white guy, wearing a suit that was old and tattered but fit him so well that he might have acquired it when it was new. When he stuck out a hand, I gave him a hundred-dollar bill.

  His eyes widened, and he clutched the lucre with both hands. He didn’t say anything, just rushed down the street—the money already spent.

  When he was a block away, and no one else was in sight, Sergeant William Tamashanter Mortman broke the back window of the four-door with the butt of the pistol he’d recently taken off a corpse. He reached inside, jerked the handle, and pulled the door open.

  A man-shaped form in the backseat was trying to throw off the blanket that covered it. Sergeant Mortman and I grabbed the form by the collar, pulled it out, and slammed it against the passenger’s side front door. While being astonished at my own strength, I hit the nameless Latino man in the forehead with the butt of my pistol. I figured I was doing the guy a favor. Lana would have certainly killed him once she’d recovered my key to the loot.

  After searching his pockets for weapons, I tossed the unconscious conspirator into the backseat and covered him with the blanket. Then I walked into Tyson’s feeling very good about the operation so far.

  She was sitting at the bar, as beautiful as the day Lance had met her. He had called her his golden girl because of her skin, hair, and eyes. The metallic hardness of Lana’s tanned body, copper-blonde hair, and ocher eyes made her both cold and precious. Her eyes widened when I approached. Her nostrils flared. These sexual expressions used to excite my heartless skull mate, but now both he and I knew that she could summon such physical innuendos on command.

  “You’re late,” she said.

  “I been watching you.”

  I took the stool next to her, turning slightly to check out my environs.

  The bar had nine other inhabitants, including the bulky bartender. Lance didn’t recognize any of them. Siggy Petron would have sent out the word looking for the face I wore, but I didn’t plan to spend long in that bar or the city for that matter.

  “You got the key?” I asked, still looking out across the gloom of the bar.

  “Your hair is different,” she said. “Red and curly.”

  “You have the most beautiful skin I have ever seen, Lana,” I, and most of my cohorts, remarked.

  There must have been power behind the words because, unbidden, her lips parted and she took in a quick breath. My golden executioner was looking at me, trying to see if I was who I said I was, when the compliment threw her off.

  “Are you comin’ on to me, Lance?”

  “Death fascinates all living things.”

  “You see?” she said. “The Lance I knew never said things like that.”

  “The Lance you knew liked to lick the litt
le brown mole on your left labial lip.”

  I realized that she had been tense because she relaxed at those words. Her shoulders let down a quarter inch, and a smile that any Renaissance master would have appreciated appeared.

  “Would you like to do that again?”

  “That position would leave the whole top of my head exposed.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Because I know now that I was wrong to try and kill you,” she said.

  “Because it didn’t work?”

  “No, it’s four years later and I’m still alive. You could have gone after revenge or turned me over to Mr. P anytime you wanted.”

  “Do you have the key?”

  “I’ll give it to you outside.”

  I considered pretending that I was nervous, asking her to go in the alley instead, that I didn’t want her pulling a gun on me. This last notion reminded me of a need I had.

  “Okay,” I said. “But give me your purse.”

  There was a red handbag sitting on the green-and-white marble bar. It matched her dress perfectly.

  “Can I get you anything?” the lethargic bartender asked. He was looking at my face as if it was familiar but he hadn’t placed it—yet.

  Without looking directly at him, I took a twenty from my wallet and placed it on the bar. I took Lana’s handbag with the same hand and said, “No thanks. I’m just here to meet the lady. You can keep the change.”

  I stood up and Lana did, too. She could have complained, but I didn’t know about the big man in the backseat of her car. Maybe she’d say that we could go to her house and get reacquainted with her pet mole. Maybe she’d cut her losses and have him kill me right off.

  When we got to her big western car, she saw the error in her logic, if not her ways, through the shattered back window. She made to run, but I grabbed her arm.

  “Think carefully, Miss Santini,” Jack Strong said, “because any sound you make will be your last.”

  I opened the passenger side door and ushered her in and over to the driver’s seat. When she was behind the wheel and I was settled next to her, I opened the red bag.

  There was a small .25 caliber pistol inside, chrome with a red handle. Lana was the luster of gold, but she loved rubies.