Sin City (22 page)

Authors: Harold Robbins

BOOK: Sin City

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When I got back to Halliday's, Moe, a casino security guard, was waiting for me.

Con had turned Morgan's wedding into a Glitter Gulch parade and celebration, with the wedding at a local church, then a parade to the club, where a private reception was taking place on the top floor of the hotel wing. The outside of the club looked like a wedding cake. Con even had “souvenir” silver dollars made with the happy couple's pictures minted on them and gave them out as compsânaturally expecting the suckers to lose another hundred for every dollar he gave them. I hadn't received an invitation to the wedding. Or the reception.

Moe had been around a long time. He was pretty embarrassed when he stopped me as I entered. “I'm sorry, Mr. Riordan, but my orders are to escort you to your room to pick up your personal effects and then out of the building. You're not to go anywhere else in the place, especially the count room.”

I paused for a moment, not knowing if I was going to laugh or explode. Poor old Moe wiped the sweat off the back of his neck with a soiled handkerchief. He had been around plenty of times when he saw me get physical with grifters and troublemakers.

“What's happened, Moe, has there been a palace coup?”

“Miss Halliday's been named president of the casino.”

“I kind of suspected that. Go tell Morgan I need to see her in my room.”

“She's at her wedding reception.”

“Then you know where to find her. Tell her I need to give her the codes.”

I was happy he didn't ask me about the codes. I didn't know any codes. What I planned to give Morgan was a piece of my mind. And Con, too, for pissing on my years of work.

When I got to my room, my bags were already packed and lined up,
ready to be taken out. Very efficient of Morgan. No doubt she searched my stuff before she had a maid pack me. But she would have come up with snake eyes. The moment I saw Con was buying into her act, I moved my loose change from the couch to a safe-deposit box.

She came in without knocking and slammed the door behind her. “How dare you interrupt my wedding with a command? What are these codes you're talking about?”

“Which question did you want me to answer first, your majesty?”

Brides always look radiant on their wedding day, but Morgan was a knockout in her wedding dress. Since she had come back from school, I kept asking myself why I had brushed her off years ago.

“I want you off of the premises. You're fired, in case you haven't noticed. And that comes from my father, too.”

“No problem. I just need to collect my severance pay.”

I pulled her toward me and she immediately began to squirm out of my arms, ready to slap my face, but I caught her hand just in time. “Why are you fighting me? I know you want it.” She bit my hand.

“You want to play rough, I can play rough, too.” I pushed her up against the wall and pinned one of her arms behind her. She beat at me with her fist until my lips connected with hers and I shoved my tongue against her teeth. She opened them long enough to clench down and bite. I managed to pull her dress up with my other hand and was surprised to find she wore nothing underneath her dress. Her nakedness excited me even more. My hand lingered on her smooth and silky bare thighs until I found her bushy pubic hair.

She bit my tongue again so hard, I tasted blood.

“Don't fight me, Morgan,” I groaned. “I know you want my cock inside you. I can see it in your eyes.”

“No, I hate you.”

I knew deep down she didn't mean those words and wanted me just as much as I wanted her.

I clamped my mouth back on her lips while my hand found her clit and I rubbed it slowly. She was dry at first until I put my finger in her hole and her fluids came and made her slippery wet with excitement. She let out a loud moan and her body shuddered against me. Her tongue now shoved past my lips and her arms came around my neck as I unzipped my pants and took out my throbbing organ. I was ready to come any minute and I plunged my cock into her cunt. She
let out a gasp. My hands were on her firm baby-smooth buttocks, and I lifted her up and down on my hard shaft.

I exploded into her, our bodies pressed together, both of us breathless in the throws of ecstasy. I looked at her face. Her eyes were clear. The wildness and anger were gone but I noticed a sort of taunting triumph in them. The sexual pleasure she experienced in her body a few moments ago was gone. Her arms and legs relaxed. I slowly lowered her, still holding her close to me.

“Morgan,” I started, and was about to apologize for my animal behavior, when she suddenly twisted away from me and hit me so hard I rocked back on my heels.

She triumphantly adjusted her dress and opened the door. Moe and another security guard were standing in the hallway.

“Escort Mr. Riordan off the premises.” She glared back at me with those powerful eyes. “Through the back door, the way he originally came to Halliday's.”

This woman wasn't satisfied with having me drawn and quartered; she wanted me chopped into eighths.

MACAO, 1982

Mr. Wan's private jet was waiting for us at the airport. Leaving Chenza in Vegas was not an option. Hong Kong and Macao were notorious money pits.

She brought along a video of the 1952 movie
Macao,
starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, for us to watch on the plane. My mind wasn't exactly all there. I still had Morgan in the back of my mind. She had some magnetic clamp on me that affected me in the worst way. But it just wasn't in the cards for the two of us to be together.

I tried to focus on the film. I liked Mitchum. He was my kind of guy. In this movie he played a down-at-the-heels soldier of fortune and Russell was a torch singer with a big heart. They get tangled up in murder and intrigue with an unscrupulous Macao casino owner. There was also a great performance by William Bendix as a traveling salesman with more up his sleeve than contraband nylons. They sure didn't make movies like that anymore, especially with those kinds of movie stars.

“Howard Hughes made the movie,” Chenza said, “back when he owned RKO. He made Jane Russell and Mitchum into major stars.”

I didn't tell her Hughes was my father. I didn't want that part of me exposed. The only one who knew that was Embers, and he was dead now. I had arranged a high-stakes poker game for the old man, the first he'd played in decades. He died at the table, quietly, just heaving a sigh as his life oozed out. The other players with him gave me the last cards he was holding in his hand when he died: aces and eightsâa pair he wouldn't bet on.

Howard Hughes was a part of my life that I didn't want opened or revealed. When Betty and I had moved to Vegas, one day she got scared when she thought she recognized two men who entered a restaurant where we were grabbing a hamburger. It was a false alarm,
but that was the day she told me why her little finger was crooked. It killed any feeling I had for him.

Before leaving Vegas, I hired a private eye who did background checks for Halliday's to run down Windell. The last I heard of Windell, he had left the state of Nevada and gone to work for a computer company in Silicon Valley after doing a year in a Nevada pen. I hadn't seen Janelle, either, since she walked out of a Vegas bank after depositing a bag of stolen quarters. She did six months in county jail after copping a plea to an accessory charge, then disappeared from Vegas as soon as she was released.

I had no hard feelings for Windell. He tried to screw me and got his nuts in a nutcracker. But I needed him in Macao to look over the computer system at Wan's casino. Would Windell work with me if there was a buck involved? Do chickens have lips? I spoke to him on the phone and told him I'd arrange a plane ticket for a flight a week after mine. I wanted time to look over the operation before I brought Windell in.

Chenza and I landed in Hong Kong and stayed overnight at the classy hotel she selected. Nothing but the best, she said. The town was a cultural volcano for someone like me who had spent his whole life in the desert. The place vomited people, cars, noise, and pollution. We left the next morning on a private jetfoil that skipped like a water bug across the forty miles to Macao in less than an hour.

The wet-hot heat immediately pummeled us as we stepped off the jetfoil. You could fry eggs on Nevada rocks in July; in Macao, you could drown on a lungful of air. A large cockroach the size of my hand scurried near Chenza. She stepped on itâ
snap-crackle-pop
.

“Welcome to the tropics,” Chenza smiled. She wore white, the color of innocence, a deceptive color for her.

Waiting for us at the bottom of the ramp was a woman. “Mr. Wan is waiting at a restaurant,” she said. A rickshaw driver was standing nearby and he muttered something to her in Chinese. She smiled at us. “He says the roach you killed would have made a champion. We have cockroach fighting matches. When a champion dies, the little creature is laid to rest in a handsomely carved wood coffin.”

We climbed aboard the rickshaw, which took us down a line of sidewalk cafÃ©s along the wharf. Being pulled in a rickshaw down a street
in exotic Macao almost made me feel like Robert Mitchum, but Chenza was no torch singer with a heart of goldâshe had a heart of diamond with facets sharp enough to slice a pimp's conscience.

My first impression of the city was that it reminded me of a cheap whore. Everything Vegas hid, Macao flaunted: high-heeled prostitutes in red, yellow, and green silks; triad gangsters with black suits and fedoras; pimps and panhandlers putting on the hustle; blurry-eyed, cheerless gamblers heading for the boats back to Hong Kong after spending the night at smoky fan-tan tables.

We stepped out of the rickshaw in front of umbrella-covered tables and walked past plates of pungent
linguiÃ§a
and
chouriÃ§o
sausages atop white rice and steamy bowels of
cozido
, a heavy stew of chicken, meats, and vegetables. All the tables had bottles of
vinho verde,
the green Portuguese wine, on them. Two guys who never went to Sunday school eyed us as we went in.

“Wan's bodyguards?” I whispered. Chenza shrugged.

The restaurant inside was dark and cool with groaning ceiling fans and waiters shrieking orders in Chinese. Wan was at a corner table with his ever-present henchman, Ling, and another man.

We took a seat at the table after a round of introductions. LuÃs Kang, the third man, was a startlingly handsome Chinese-Portuguese. Kang had movie-star looks and dressed like a roaring twenties gangster. Wan told me back in Vegas that the dress code came from dubbed American movies and Hong Kong rehashes of gangster film noir.

“Luis has an interest in our gambling industry,” Wan said.

I took notice of the strange descriptionânot that Kang owned a piece of a casino but that he had an “interest” in the industry at large. The word that struck my mind was
protection
. The two Sunday school dropouts outside were probably his boys.

Chenza ordered grilled shrimp with lemon-cognac butter, and I opted for the roast chicken with garlic sauce and a cold beer with no glass, since pouring it in a glass killed the fizz.

“Good choice for the tropics,” Wan told me. “Spicy food that equalizes your body temperature and beer to replenish your body fluids.”

The discussion was all small talk around the table. I had the distinct impression that Wan had met us at the restaurant to show me off to Kang. Something about the body language between the two â¦ polite as hell, as the Chinese do so well, but nevertheless an undercurrent,
as if neither man would ever turn his back on the other.

“I have heard much about your abilities,” Luis said to me. “Perhaps you will be able to give me lessons that will prove useful.”

“Which abilities are those?”

He tapped his nose. “Smelling out crooks.”

I could have told him that I smelled a couple right now, but instead saluted him with my beer bottle. “I've been lucky uncovering some scams in Vegas, but I don't pretend to know anything about how scams are run in a place like Macao.” I asked him a question burning in my mind. “How does this postage-stamp place survive against Red China? Couldn't their army just march in and take over any time they wanted?”

I was told it was because Macao and Hong Kong were doors to the West through which technology and money could pass to the mainland. I changed the conversation to get out of the spotlight. I wanted to observe the dynamics between Luis Kang and Wan. If politeness could be canned, these two would have enough for an assembly line. Chenza's attraction to LuÃs wasn't lost on me, either. She was literally cooing as she asked him questions about Macao. Not that I blamed her. A Chinese babe on the other side of the room had caught my eye. If Chenza hadn't been there, I would have tried to see what the fortune cookies had to say about the two of us.

As we talked, a rider on a motor scooter stopped outside the restaurant and dismounted. He wore black biker pants and jacket, the kind of cheap imitation leather a real biker would never wear. For some reason, my eye was drawn to the figure in black. Maybe it was the deliberate way he got off his scooter, the slow, methodical removal of his gloves and helmet, adjusting a biker hat so it had a rakish tilt. He walked unhurriedly to the door, slow and cocky, like Marlon Brando in
The Wild Ones
, confident, arrogant, indifferent. After he stepped inside the restaurant, I watched him from the corner of my eye. The other people in the restaurant were either too busy eating or talking to pay attention to him.

With a singular stride, he walked straight up to a table that was occupied by a heavyset Chinese man with large gem-studded rings on all of his fingers. The man was sitting alone, savoring the sticky orange duckling he was eating with his fingers. He looked up, licking his fingers, as the scooter rider approached his table. The rider paused
in front of the large man and nonchalantly pulled out a pistol.

Boom-boom-boom!
Three shots in the chest. Deafening, paralyzing.

The hubbub of voices and dishes rattling suddenly stopped. No one moved, no one spoke. Everyone of us stared, frozen in place, at the black figure and the dead man. The Chinese man still sat upright in his chair, red stains creeping through his cream-colored jacket, his eyes wide open. A trickle of blood ran down the side of his chin.

The bored killer calmly leaned across the table and shot him between the eyes. The man's head snapped back for a second before he fell facedown in his plate of orange sauce.

It all happened in a matter of seconds. I sat fixed in my chair, unable to move.

Without even looking around the restaurant, the black figure walked out, in no particular hurry, leaving behind a haze of acrid smoke and stunned silence. As soon as he closed the door, the restaurant reverberated back to its noise and activity level, as if nothing had happened.

A waiter threw a tablecloth over the body.

My face unlocked its shock and I met Wan's eyes across the table. He giggled like a queer getting goosed.

“Welcome to Macao, Mr. Riordan.”

Besides witnessing a cold-blooded murder, something else bothered me.

When the gunman had walked in, I was almost certain he was headed for our table because he had glanced in our direction.

Was he just saying hello to Wan or Luis?

“Who's the stiff?” I asked, keeping my voice from betraying my shock.

Kang smiled. “A man who runs high-roller rooms in some of the casinos. He has committed the sin of not appreciating a friend's financial assistance.”

Chenza stared at Kang, her eyes glazed over with undisguised lust.

Who says the female is not the cruelest of the species?