He Was Her Man (6 page)

But if it went the way they’d planned, the boys’d talk about it for years. Of course, that wasn’t the important part. What was important was getting out, buying himself that new Cadillac, silver to match that new Airstream. Jesus. He’d be in gypsy heaven. His ma would be proud. Of course, she’d been dead these 20 years.

Even more important was doing Jack Graham. That was the icing on the cake. They could pull this deal off, Doc’d have this loot on top of his nest egg—and the place was here, Hot Springs, Arkansas. Adopted home of Jack Graham, who’d never been very far away from Doc’s mind since that afternoon Jack had called him out in New Orleans. Beat him up. Broke his nose. Whole bunch of Jack’s friends standing around, laughing their asses off. Big Jack, Smilin’ Jack,
he
was the one who queered the deal with that horse in the first place, if you asked Doc. Blamed it on him. Made him look small.

Well, Doc had gone to Jack’s house and left his calling card, hadn’t he? But it wasn’t enough. Whatever he’d done, it would never be enough until Jack couldn’t smile anymore. That’s why Doc wanted to do this now. Pull this job off and put an end to Jack all in one fell swoop.

It was like it was meant to be. That’s what Doc’s mama would say if she were here. She’d close her eyes, run her fingers through her gold coin necklaces. Not that gypsies believed in the phony magic they sold to the
gaji,
but they believed in signs. And this kind of symmetry was a sign. It was meant to be, marching right into the Jack’s territory to pull off this scam, grabbing the boodle while pissing in Jack’s yard. If he went ahead and took Jack out, Doc could begin his retirement relaxed.

But none of that was going to happen if he had to do a little sleepover in the county jail right now.

He grabbed Olive’s wrist.

“Owh!” she hollered. “Let go, you’re hurting me!”

At that, the dog locked onto his calf, just above his boot, her sharp teeth sinking deep. He reached over to a shelf and jerked up a quart bottle of apple juice, knocked the dog in the head with it, hard. The dog’s jaw released, and she tumbled to the floor.

“You son of a bitch!” the old woman screamed. His head snapped. She had his full attention now. Her face was bright red, her mouth trembling. He watched her hand slide down the front of her big purple-and-green muumuu, reach into her pocket and find what he was afraid she was going to find. It was a powerful gun, the Bulldog. It’d blow a man’s stomach out, splatter his brains all over the wall. He could see what would happen if he didn’t reach his hand out, grab her arm, she was holding it way out, too far from her body, asking for it practically, it wouldn’t be hard to twist the gun loose, that part was easy, she was an old woman. The part that he’d forgotten (for a similar scenario had happened before and would probably happen again, obstacles like this having a way of cluttering up the crooked streets of Doc’s life) was the sweet shock of release when he knocked her face down with one punch, grasped her fat neck from behind and squeezed. After that, it didn’t take long at all.

4

A
WHILE LATER Mickey and Doc were standing in the
big yellow kitchen of the rambling two-story house set back in the woods five miles west of Hot Springs. Built of stone sometime in the twenties, the house backed onto Lake Ouachita, a large blue lake with many fingers. Mickey and Doc had been going at it for some time now, but she hadn’t heard anything that made sense.

She said, “Explain it to me one more time, please, Doc. Now, I know I’m stupid.…”

“You can cut the sarcasm, okay? I told you, the old lady wasn’t going for it.” He was rolling up the sleeves of the white shirt he’d changed into, that and some khakis, shucking the tramp duds. “She was giving me a hassle, I decided to blow, and she came after me. I jumped in her car and hit it. Got here five minutes ahead of you, washed up.” He peered into the refrigerator. “There’s not a damned thing in here except some ketchup.”

“Furnished doesn’t mean they stock it with Doritos and all that other junk you eat. You wanted that, you should have sent the landlord a shopping list. Though I see you managed some beer. You nab that off the old lady?”

“You can get down off your high horse, okay? What’s your damn beef?” He was staring into the knotty pine cabinets now. “Ah ha!” Holding his beer in one hand he pulled out a fresh jar of Miracle Whip and a box of graham crackers with the other. Then he started opening one drawer after another, searching for a knife.

Mickey couldn’t stand drawers being left open. Doors. Tops off jars. She went behind Doc now, closing things. “I can’t believe you’re really going to eat that—and with beer.” She wrinkled her nose.

“Look!” Doc wheeled, a cracker thick with salad dressing poking out of his face. “Are you going to ride me all the way through this job? Is that the way it’s going to be? ’Cause if it is, I can find another partner like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I don’t need you, Mick.”

“Oh, yeah?” That was a crock. Who’d been in town working the races a couple weeks back, spotted the chance of a big score?

He knew that. “Big deal. Take a finder’s fee, you can blow.” He crammed another cracker in his mouth, washed it down with the Bud. “I’m telling you, I don’t need the grief.”

“All I’m asking you is, why’d you take the old lady’s Sunliner? It doesn’t make any sense. We’ve run the lost ring how many times,
you’ve
probably done it a thousand, did you ever take a car before this? Did you ever nab something big like that you’d have to dump, something that’d tie you to the mark that easy? Besides, Jesus, Doc, we’re not thieves.”

“Ho ho ho.” The Old St. Nick laugh didn’t work with a mouth full of crackers and salad dressing. “Nope, we’re not thieves. We’re hustlers.”

Mickey sniffed and started turning side to side, her arms up, elbows bent, still wearing the yellow suit. “Con artists, Doc.
Artistes
.”

“Yeah, we’re that all right. Fancy schmanzy crooks. All the partners in the world, I got to hook up with a princess—Jesus, could you stop with the Jane Fonda? I’m talking to you.”

“And I’m listening. I’m still listening for the explanation to why it was—even if for some insane reason, some bolt of inspiration came down and struck you from the blue—you felt absolutely compelled to take that car, and I’ll admit it’s something special. I’d love it myself.” Mickey was doing toe touches now in the middle of the green-and-yellow tiled floor, still in her alligator high heels. She was proud of keeping her flexibility considering how much time she spent traveling. “What were you doing back there that took so long, anyway? Usually, you’re in, you’re out, quick as a bunny on the yak. And why it was then you passed me, had to be doing eighty? You didn’t toot the horn. I’d have pulled over, you’d have dumped the car, left it on the side of the road. What
was
all that?”

He said in a perfectly reasonable voice, “I wasn’t wearing gloves. I needed to wipe it clean. We don’t want any screwups, any way the cops can place us here.”

Mickey stopped halfway to her toes, bent back up so her body was at a perfect 90-degree angle from the waist, tilted her face. She used her sweet voice. “Doc, there’d have been no prints to leave if you hadn’t taken the car.”

He slammed the Miracle Whip down on the cabinet so hard it rang like a pistol shot. “Okay! You’re right, I’m wrong. I was wrong from the get-go on this one. So what do you want me to do? Kill myself?” He jerked open the drawer where he’d found the silver knife and pulled out a cold forged steel version, a chef’s blade, long and sharp. He held it to his neck. “Okay, Mick. Say the word. Go ahead. I fucked up, I’ll pay the price. One slice, the jugular, it’ll be a little messy for you to clean up, but so what? Yeah? That’s it? That’s why you’re taking your skirt off? You don’t want to get blood all over it?”

“No, Doc.” She gave him her slow grin. “That’s not why I’m taking my skirt off.” She paused. “My blouse.” It took a minute to undo the little glass buttons. She was wearing one of those lacy flesh-colored bras that could make a man’s heart stop. “My shoes.” Those were quick. “My stockings.” And those were real slow, her slipping the little rubber nip on the garter, letting the silk slide. Pulling them off over her red-tipped toes. You’d never catch a woman wearing pantyhose who worked a scam that depended on the weakness of men.

Olive had been right, Mickey
was
28 years old. She’d only been at the grift for four years or so. Before that she’d been a college textbook saleswoman, fresh out of school. But she’d had to give it up. It was too dull for a cute redhead who’d only signed up in the first place to meet some professor whose brains would make up for her gene pool, riddled with incest from too many generations of Savannah blueblood.

She headed for Australia and Adventure, worked as a dance instructor in a disco; and one thing you could say about those big old Aussies was that they were just as macho as any bubba she’d ever met, which in a sicko way turned Mickey on even while she was spending her spare time reading Chaucer in Middle English. The Wife of Bath being her favorite, of course. In truth, Mickey was a genius, with off-the-chart scores in both verbal and mathematical aptitude, though her purest talents lay in the field of psychology, of which she had never read a word, but was a natural.

It was on a steamer trip from Sydney up through the Coral Sea with stops in New Caledonia, the Solomons, and New Guinea that Mickey encountered the Professor, a man of 80 years and vast experience, and realized that
this
was the one she’d been looking for, not to father her kids but to give birth to her whole new life.

The life of the grift, for which she had an innate talent.

On that slow boat to Sulawesi the Professor taught her many a pretty trick. Some of them were variations on the lost ring, cons that depended on an attractive girl looking like she was in a fix. Or she could use her youth and looks to sucker an older, wealthy mark into a hotel room, where they would be interrupted by her partner, the “cop,” who would shake him down.

There are a million variations on the con, but among Mickey’s favorites was the proposition bet.
Bet I can tie this cigarette in a knot without breaking it.
She was a prop hustler par excellence, with a large repertoire of challenge bets that seemed to give the mark the best of it.
Bet I can light this match and hold it to fifty without letting go or extinguishing it.
Smart gamblers were her favorite target.
Bet I can toss one of these walnuts over that five-story building.
She once snookered 10,000 bucks on a coin-guessing prop from a professional blackjack player who’d just hit it big in a Vegas casino, but those kinds of takes were few and far between.

She was a whiz at cards, too, and could clean your clock at poker. She cheated, of course, sometimes pulling the drunken mitt, where she’d appear to get a little tipsy on wine and expose her apparently losing hand, sometimes using a mirror called a twinkle or flick, a glim or light; but most of the players were so tickled by the notion of a beautiful young woman in evening clothes shuffling the cards while smoking a thin cigar (that was the Professor’s idea of cute) they never had a clue, and if they did, maybe that was the price of entertainment.

After the Professor, she’d had a number of partners, all men, all older. But she had never worked with anyone for more than six months. Conversation got awfully boring after that. She didn’t want anyone getting too close. Most of all, she’d never found a partner who shared her attitude about the job.

Mickey was always on the lookout for the main chance, whereas the big score is all that most grifters could see. Furthermore, all the grifters Mickey ever knew had spent more time than she cared to think about locked up, which made them age young, and Mickey had no plans to age at all. What she was looking for was a legal grift—like shysters or Wall Streeters—but not so cut and dried. Something with some juice to it. Some sizzle.

Now take Doc. Doc was good, but he didn’t have a clue about the main chance. She’d met him three months ago in Boca Raton, and it turned out they’d grown up on the same stretch of the South Carolina coast. He was the best she’d ever known since the Professor, who’d passed away in his sleep at the age of 82.

As grifters went, Doc was a real pro. Right now he was staring at her, slouched back against the counter, his feet wide in his cowboy boots. He was resting his elbows on the yellow Formica.

She watched him watch her. He watched her watch.

He took a deep breath. Watching Mickey undress was one of his very favorite pastimes. He really was gonna miss her.

She had one of those faces, Jesus, it was like an angel’s. Classy. That cap of red curls above that rounded forehead, smooth and cool, then those wide-spaced eyes of that incredible green, deep and pure with no flecks of gold or brown, just green. That turned-up nose with nostrils that had this cute little pear shape to them. Her mouth, God, her mouth was sweet as a plum. And what Mickey could do with that mouth,
say
with that mouth when you got down to the nitty-gritty, he’d never heard a woman say such things. And he’d known some women in his time.

Christ. Why wouldn’t he? He was old enough to be her father, easy. Maybe that was part of why she did it for him so much, that old thing about the forbidden, not that he ever would, of course, if he had a daughter, the very thought made him sick; but now there was her back, God, he loved her back, the tender bones of her spine, and though she had definition because she was such a nut about fitness, it was girl definition tapering down to a narrow waist, then flaring, there were those two little dimples, two of his favorite places in the whole wide world. Edisto, Folleys, those Sea Islands, they were great spots, but you couldn’t snuggle into them the same way you could into Mickey’s sweet places.