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  Saguaro Riptide

  ( Jack Baddalach - 1 )

  Norman Partridge

  Norman Partridge

  Saguaro Riptide

  PART ONE

  The swell rises

  ONE

  When the women busted into the bathroom, Vincent Komoko knew that it was going to be nothing but bad from here on out because there was only one of him and there were two of them and both of them were wearing badges.

  The sheriff slammed the bathroom door, cutting off the howling desert wind. The room was suddenly quiet, but her voice wasn’t. She asked Vince what he’d done with his gun.

  “I lost it,” Vince said, his voice kind of sheepish. “Out there … in the storm.”

  The sheriff nodded, and the deputy stepped over the prone figure of Elvis Presley and chopped the top of Vince’s right wrist with some weird kind of nightstick that had a handle on it. Vince’s hand went numb for an instant, and in that instant the cellular phone he’d been holding clattered to the floor.

  The deputy eyed the phone like it was a big plastic cockroach that might scuttle for cover if she so much as blinked.

  But she didn’t blink, and the phone didn’t move.

  “Who were you talking to?” she asked.

  “911.” Vince pointed at the hulking figure curled in a fetal position near the toilet. “Elvis isn’t doing too good.”

  The deputy’s eyes narrowed, but Vince kept his eyes on that weird nightstick in her right hand. It was close to two feet long. The handle sprouted about six inches from one end of the thing. The stick itself shielded the length of the deputy’s forearm-one end lay flat against her elbow, the other extended a couple inches past her scarred knuckles.

  That was the end that dug into Vince’s solar plexus and knocked him against the wall.

  “I don’t want to have to ask you again,” the deputy said.

  Vince sucked a shallow breath around the pain, nodding at Elvis. “If you don’t believe me, take a look for yourself. Feel his goddamn forehead. Elvis is colder than the abominable snowman’s ass. We’ve gotta do something. There isn’t much time left.”

  “Listen, asshole. My patience is wearing real thin-”

  “Wait a second,” the sheriff interrupted. “Let’s check this out.”

  A look crossed the deputy’s face. One of those oh great, now I’ve got a Looney Tunes double-feature to deal with looks.

  The sheriff bent low and touched Elvis’s forehead, which was as white as chalk.

  “See what I mean?” Vince said. “The King’s in bad shape.”

  The sheriff nodded, straightening.

  “I mean, we’ve gotta get some help.”

  “I want you to watch this very carefully.” The sheriff grinned at Vince, then winked at the deputy.

  The deputy pivoted fast, nightstick handle whispering against her callused palm, and the long end of the stick whipped around in an arc of murderous intensity, and the head of Elvis Presley exploded.

  Elvis shrapnel rained down on Vince’s expensive Bally loafers. The sheriff stepped toward him, one snakeskin Nocona cowboy boot crushing what had once been the King’s sneering upper lip.

  ‘The stick’s called a tonfa,” she explained. “As you can see, it’s hell on plaster statues. But believe me, you put it up against flesh and blood, that’s pretty dramatic, too.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Good.” The sheriff closed in on Vince, her right boot powdering Elvis’s nose. “Now, we’ll forget all about your telephone call. Hell, we’ll forget about everything as long as you answer one little question for us: where is the money, Mr. Komoko?”

  Jesus, Vince thought, She even knows my name! This bitch must know goddamn everything! That simple realization rattled him but good, but he tried not to show it. Instead he tried to play it Steve McQueen cool, saying, “Well … I won’t tell you where the money is, but I’ll tell you where it isn’t, and it isn’t here.”

  “You mean you hid it?”

  “Hey, wait a minute. . you said I only had to answer one question.”

  The sheriff tossed her long blond braid over one shoulder in a way that might have been kind of alluring under other circumstances. “So I changed my mind. That’s a woman’s prerogative, as my momma always says. Right now I have all kinds of questions. You answer them and maybe I’m happy. . maybe we can work something out. You don’t answer them-”

  Another nod. The tonfa lashed out like the Terminator of the hardwood set and crushed Elvis’s pelvis.

  The sheriff seemed pleased with the damage. “Let’s put it this way: you don’t want to get me all shook up, Mr. Komoko.”

  “I can see that.”

  “So. . where’s the money?”

  Vince sighed. It was a simple enough question, and it had a simple enough answer, and deep in his gut Vince had known that it was a question that would be asked as soon as he’d heard a siren blasting in the desert.

  He’d stepped outside to investigate the sound. Squinting in the wind. And even though dust was blowing everywhere and everything looked kind of gray and his eyesight wasn’t the best, he’d spotted the Jeep with a cherry on top on the dirt road out by the highway.

  Only a half mile away.

  Vince figured that Jeep spelled vamoose. But it hadn’t worked out that way. The sheriff and the deputy had seen to that. One of them wasn’t much of a driver-and that was an understatement. But it was also an understatement to say that one of them was a hell of a shot. Hell, maybe both of them were. They’d have to be a couple of stone-cold Annie Oakleys to damn near punch his ticket in the middle of a howling sandstorm.

  And that was exactly what had happened.

  But that was then, and this was now, and maybe now was still open for debate. Vince considered telling the sheriff where he’d stashed the cash while a hot whipcord of pain knotted the divot in his chest that had been excavated by the deputy’s tonka … or tonfa … or whatever you called the damned thing. He wondered how much begging it would take to keep from ending up on the floor of the bathroom as a busted-up twin to Elvis should he decide to sing like the King.

  He’d only have to give up two million bucks.

  The guys in Vegas would understand.

  Sure they would.

  Vince discarded that scenario pretty quickly. The guys in Vegas would not understand. More specifically, the guys in Vegas would feed him his own balls if he lost their money.

  Better to try talking his way out of trouble with these two.

  Vince realized that he was far from the top of his game, but he still believed his reasoning abilities were above average, his grasp of logic still Visegrip-tight. And, under more agreeable circumstances, Vince might have been right. Though he was certainly capable of self-delusion, truth be told he wasn’t a stupid guy.

  But right now he was pretty tired. And whether he wanted to admit it or not his game was teetering on the edge, ready to take a one-way plunge into that biggest of all tanks. It turned out that walking into a set-up actually made him kind of nervous, and even a player of Vince’s limited experience knew that anxiety could drain the baddest bunny’s Duracells. Besides that, the windstorm had pretty much whipped him like a Jolly Roger’s mainsail. His skin was raw, as if he’d shaved every exposed inch with the dullest of razors. Ditto his lips, and he didn’t have a Chapstick in his pocket. And his eyes. . Jesus, every time he blinked, it was pure murder. Overall he felt like a peeled banana that had been rolled in ground glass.

  But the deputy wasn’t moving and the sheriff wasn’t telling her to move, and Vince figured that he still had some time. Not a lot, but some. Under other circumstances it might have been enough time to reach a solution he might find amena
ble. But under the prevailing circumstances it was simply enough time for regret to take a hand.

  So it didn’t really matter if the cause of Vince’s fatigue was job-related anxiety or minor dermatological distress or the mental impact of the deputy’s martial arts demonstration. What mattered was that his shields were definitely down.

  Tonight Vincent Komoko had nowhere to hide.

  In a matter of seconds he found himself belly to belly with the awful truth of it, the part that really ate at him but good-here he was, more alone than any man should ever be, in a big empty house in the desert with two women who saw him as nothing more than a means to an end. The only person on God’s green who might still care enough to help him was a thousand miles away, and she wasn’t even home. Or if she was home, she was hiding behind her answering machine again. And if that were the case, Vince knew that she was doing the right thing, because he’d cut out on her as quick and cold as plaster Elvis, leaving her all alone without so much as a chorus of “Suspicious Minds.”

  For the first time, Vince realized what a shitty thing that was to do. Because for the first time he knew how it felt to be truly alone. . and to be the last one to know about it.

  And that was when Vincent Komoko realized-also for the very first time-that while he was more than familiar with all the right questions, he really didn’t have any answers at all.

  But he still had a gun-he’d lied about losing it in the sandstorm. A.45 automatic lay flat against his backbone, jammed under his belt.

  He went for it.

  The sheriff was faster. She spun around, her right shoulder suddenly occupying the space that had been filled by her left only a split second before. Her long blond braid whipped out as she whirled, making Vince blink at just the wrong moment, and that eye blink slowed him down just enough so that the heel of her right cowboy boot cracked against his right temple before he had a firm hold on the pistol, and it slipped out of his hand just the way the cellular phone did, but that didn’t really matter because her foot was coming back from the other direction and she was smiling now, really getting her hip into it this time, and as the heel of her Nocona boot struck his jaw the room was filled with a sound that was as brittle and awful as the long misplaced echo of tonfa cracking the plaster skull of the king of rock ’n’ roll.

  PART TWO

  The Breakers Roll

  ONE

  High noon on the Las Vegas strip.

  Cannonade rattled a hundred-plus plateglass windows.

  Freddy Gemignani stood before one of those rattling windows, staring out at Las Vegas from his penthouse suite on the twenty-sixth floor of the Casbah Hotel amp; Casino. On the other side of the Strip a British frigate was battling a pirate ship in the gigantic moat which fronted the immediate competition, an animatronically enhanced casino that was currently putting a world-class financial hurt on the operation Freddy had established back in ’59 with a little help from the Teamster’s Union pension fund.

  "Thar she fuckin’ blows,” Freddy G said, turning toward a man who was sitting alone on the expansive sofa which ran the length of the window.

  The man was on the wrong side of thirty but the right side of thirty-five. Not that he was the kind of guy who was bothered by age. He didn’t think that way. His belly was flat, and his sandy brown hair was his own, and most days he rolled out of bed without making any of the horrible hacking sounds his old man had made after he hit thrty. That wasn’t so surprising-after all, the man had never developed his father’s three-pack-a-day habit-but the fact that he could still wear jeans and a T-shirt and cowboy boots without looking like a Hollywood poseur or a redneck or a guy who should be parking cars somewhere was.

  His name was Jack Baddalach. And he didn’t bother to acknowledge Freddy G’s comment, because he knew that the casino boss wasn’t even warmed up yet.

  “Christ on a cross. Jack,” Freddy said. “This salty-dog shit is driving me nuts. I mean, you’ve heard the old stories about me-even the government boys say I’ve mellowed since the fifties. Most things I can take with a modicum of good grace. But losing money to a Mickey-fucking-Mouse abortion of a casino with a couple of dolled-up rowboats out front isn’t one of them.”

  Jack nodded. Perhaps he was agreeing that losing money was a bad thing, or that Freddy G had in fact mellowed since the glory days of the pink Cadillac and the platinum-blond starlet, or that protracted exposure to salty-dog shit would undoubtedly drive one nuts. Or it might have been that his unspoken affirmation simply conceded the point that Jesus Christ, indeed, had died on a cross.

  Not that any of it mattered. Not really. What mattered was that (1) Jack Baddalach had heard slight variations on this particular theme a dozen times or more, and (2) he thought enough of Freddy G to suffer another rerun without complaint.

  So Freddy G continued. “In the old days a guy would decide where he’d drop his load based on the essentials-which joint had the cocktail waitresses with the best tits, and which joint dressed those gals in outfits that would show off those tits to the best advantage, and which joint had one of those gals waiting for you up in your room sans outfit once you’d dropped your greenbacks. Sure, that wasn’t the whole deal-it’d be okay if you could get a decent meal cheap, or hear Frankie Laine in the big room if you felt like tearing yourself away from the tables. Maybe even shake hands with Joe Louis in the lobby or something, get in a round of golf with him if you were a high roller.”

  Freddy shrugged. “Oh, maybe you had to gild up the lily just a little bit, even then. Maybe you built a sixty-foot concrete sheik straddling the parking lot or something. That I could live with. But now. Jesus. Vegas is a different place. Pirate ships lobbing invisible cannonballs at Her Majesty’s Navy, right on the Strip.

  “They call ’em megaresorts. Guys running around town, talking about their visions. Pirate ships, giant guitars, pyramids and castles-I could give a shit. These guys wouldn’t know vision if it bit them in the ass.”

  Freddie shook his head. “But that’s what we’ve come to these days. Guys bringing the wife and kids to town in the family wagon, like they were going to goddamn Disneyland or something.” He sighed. “And you want to know the worst of it, Jack? The most disgusting part of the whole deal?”

  Jack didn’t say anything, but he tilted his head slightly. His eyebrows did a little peekaboo act above the rims of his very dark sunglasses.

  For Freddy G, the response was sufficiently encouraging. “I’ll tell you the worst of it, boy. The goddamn fairies don’t even care if they even get laid anymore. All of them are scared of AIDS. The shmoes come all the way to Vegas, and they ride goddamn roller coasters, and they slide their fat asses down water slides, and they sleep with their wives. Christ! They bring their wives to goddamn conventions in goddamn Vegas!” Freddy laughed. “Wife’s got her husband’s balls in a jar back home. Keeps ’em in the laundry room on a high shelf. The shmoes, they don’t even ask to take ’em down anymore, ’cause the wife is always reminding ’em. You remember what happened the last time I let you have ’em. You watched ESPN for twenty hours straight, ate red meat, farted all night and practically asphyxiated me. I saw a talk show told all about it the other day-Guys who keep their balls in a jar and the women who love them. Can you believe it, boy?”

  Of course Jack didn’t believe it. He knew well enough that Freddy couldn’t make the least little point without about a half mile of exaggeration. Even so, the simple truth was that Jack had a whole lot of trouble believing even the slightest tidbit of information gleaned from the CBS Evening News, let alone a bubbleheaded talk show, but he didn’t want to take that particular detour on the conversational highway. So he simply sighed and shrugged, staying the course, casually reaching for the beer that waited on the glass cocktail table before him. The bottle was glacier-cold, but Jack didn’t lift it to his lips. Instead he held it in his left hand and rolled it back and forth across the aching knuckles of his right.

  For Freddy G, just the fact that Jack had touched
the bottle was a cue of more than sufficient proportion. The casino boss reached for a Bloody Mary that waited on the bar. He took a healthy swallow, then gobbled the celery stick, chewing loudly.

  One more time, the roar of cannonade rose from the Strip.

  One more time, the windows in Freddy’s suite rattled.

  So did Freddy.

  “Hear that. Jack? Night and fucking day, I hear it. I got the whole show memorized.” He waved his drink in the direction of the window. “Next thing, the captain of the British frigate is gonna start bellowing in that phony Charles Laughton voice of his. The limey bastard’s gonna go down with his ship, gonna sink to the bottom of briny Vegas. Gonna throw in the towel to a bunch of candy-ass pirates, every one of them a ringer for that Fabio asshole. Pumped up on steroids like a bunch of prize Herefords. Waxed chests. Hair like Gorgeous George. And dicks the size of sardines, believe you me.”

  Jack fought it, but he knew he couldn’t win. His poker face collapsed in a wide grin.

  Freddy finished off his celery, smiling slyly. “Shiver me pectorals and pass that blow-dryer, you old sea dog,” he lisped, his Liberace imitation dead-on as always. “Never knew they had Miz Clairol on the Spanish Main, didja, Matey?”

  Jack laughed at that last one and was surprised to find that laughing felt good. “Someday you’re going to get into trouble with that shit, Freddy. These days you’re politically incorrect.”

  “Christ on a cross, Baddalach. Liberace himself used to laugh at that one.”

  “Yeah, well. That was the fifties. You weren’t so mellow then, remember? You had a temper.” Baddalach shook his head. “You weren’t any funnier back then, you were just scarier.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I’d laugh like a fucking hyena if the alternative was taking a high dive off of Hoover Dam.”