Indian Country Noir (Akashic Noir) (31 page)

"Olive juice," he explained. "Gives a little salty taste to
the vodka. But I have to say, what I like most about it is just
saying the name of it. `A Dirty Martini, please. Straight up.'
Don't you like the sound of it?"

"And the taste."

"Did you ever tell me your name? Because I can't remember it."

"It's Lucky."

"You're kidding, right?"

"It says Lucky on my driver's license. On my birth certificate it says Lucretia, but my parents didn't realize they'd
opened the door for a lifetime of Lucretia Borgia jokes."

"I can imagine."

"You can't, because you don't know the whole story. Lucretia is bad enough, but when you attach it to Eagle Feather
it becomes really awful, and-"

"That's your last name? Eagle Feather?"

"Used to be. I chopped the Lucretia and dropped the
Feather and went in front of a judge to make it legal. Lucky
Eagle's what I wound up with, and it's still pretty dopey."

"You're Indian."

God, he was quick on the uptake, wasn't he? You just
couldn't keep anything from this dude.

"My father's half-Chippewa," she improvised, "and my
mother's part Apache and part Blackfoot, and some Swedish
and Irish and I don't know what else. I worked it all out one
time, and I'm one-third Indian."

"A third, huh?"

"Uh-huh."

"Lucky Eagle Feather," he said. She liked that he was willing to skip the Lucretia part, but still wanted to hold onto
that Feather. Made her a little bit more exotic, that's how she
figured it. A little more Indian. And hadn't he just finished
screwing a bunch of Indians out of a few thousand dollars? So
why not screw a genuine Indian for dessert?

His name, she learned, was Hank Walker. Short for Henry, but he'd been Hank since childhood. Seemed to suit him better, he told her, but it still said Henry on his driver's license.
And he'd been born in New Jersey, the southern part of the
state, near Philadelphia, but he'd moved west as soon as he
could, because that seemed to suit him better too. He indicated the Western shirt, the string tie. "Sort of a uniform," he
said, and grinned.

"It suits you," she agreed.

He lived in Nevada these days, outside of Carson City.
And right now he was driving across the country, seeking out
casinos wherever he went.

"I guess you like to play."

"When I'm on a roll," he said. "But these out-of-the-way
places, I come here for the chips as much as the action."

"The chips?"

"Casino chips. People collect them."

"You sure collected a batch at the crap table."

What people collected, he explained, just as other collected coins and stamps, were the small, denomination chips
the casinos issued, especially the one-dollar chips. At each
casino he visited, he'd buy twenty or thirty or fifty of the dollar chips, and they'd be added to his stock when he got back
home. He had a collection of his own, of course, but he also
had a business, selling chips to collectors at chip shows-who
knew there were chip shows?-and on his website.

"Ever since the government decided the tribes have the
right to run casinos," he told her, "they've been popping up
like mushrooms. And they come and they go, because not all
of the tribes know a whole lot about running a gaming operation. You belong to the tribe that's operating this place?"

She didn't.

"Well, nothing against them, and I hope they make a go of it, but there are a few things they're doing wrong." She
half-listened while he took the casino's inventory; she had
another sip of her Dirty Martini (which, all things considered,
sounded better than it tasted) and breathed in his aftershave
and an undertone of perspiration.

He finished his casino critique and reached across the
table to put his hand on hers. "Now it seems to me we've got a
decision to make. Do we have another round of drinks before
we go to my room?"

For an answer she picked up his hand, lowered her head,
and blew her warm breath into his palm. "For luck," she said
without looking up, and then her tongue darted out and she
licked his palm. His sweat, she noticed, tasted not all that different from the Dirty Martini.

He had a nice body. Barrel-chested, with a little more of a gut
than she might have preferred, and a lot of chest hair. No hair
on his back, though, and she supposed he got it waxed at the
same salon that provided his million-dollar haircuts.

Muscular arms, muscular shoulders, and that meant regular gym workouts, because he couldn't have gotten those muscles simply by throwing his own weight around. An all-over
tan, too, that probably came from a tanning bed. You could
shake your head at the artifice, or you could go with the
result-a fit, good-looking man in his late forties, who, it had
to be said, was as impressive in the sack as he'd been at the
craps table. And if he owed some of that to Viagra, well, so
what? He got her hot and he got her off, and what more could
a poor girl desire?

And the best was yet to be.

Optima futura-that was the Latin for it, and she knew
it because it had been her high school's motto. It was, she'd always thought, singularly apt, because anything the future
held had to be better than high school.

Somewhere along the way, after high school years were
just a blur, she'd come across some lines from Robert Browning, and perhaps it was the high school motto that made her
commit them to memory, but it had worked, because she remembered them still:

"Part Indian, huh? I bet I know which part is Indian."

And he reached out a hand and touched the part he had
in mind. She put her hand on top of his, rubbed his fingers
against her.

"A third Indian," she reminded him.

"So you said. You know, I was wondering-"

She put her hand on him, curled her fingers around him.
She worked him artfully, and he sighed.

"Lucky," he said. "Man, I'd say I got Lucky, didn't I? But I
think I'm tapped out for this evening."

"You think so?"

"You drained me to the dregs, babe. About all I can do
right now is sleep."

"I bet you're wrong."

"Oh?"

"What we did so far," she said, "was just a warm-up."

"Yeah, right."

"Can I ask you something?"

He raised his eyebrows.

"Have you ever been tied up?"

"Jesus."

"Just imagine," she said, her hands still busy. "You're tied
up, you can't move, and the entire focus is giving you pleasure.
I'll do things to you nobody's ever done to you before, Hank.
You think this has been your lucky night? You just wait."

"Uh"

"I've got all the gear in my bag," she said. "Everything we
could possibly need. You're gonna love this."

Handcuffs, silk scarves, nylon cords. She had everything she
needed, and she knew just how to employ them.

The last time she'd done this she'd given her partner a
couple of roofies first, and let the pills knock him out before
she trussed him up. That had worked fine, but she'd been
stuck with a two-hour wait for the son of a bitch to wake up,
and who needed that?

This was much simpler. And he cooperated, putting his
hands where she told him, spread-eagling himself on the bed.
And making little jokes while she did what she had to do.

By the time she was done, he was already semi-erect. She
wrapped the base with an elastic band. "Sort of a roach motel," she said. "The blood gets in and it can't get out, so you
stay firm."

"Is it safe?"

"Absolutely," she said. "It's an old Indian trick. Now you
can do something for me, and after that everything will be
entirely 100 percent for you." And she sat on his face and he
did what he was supposed to do, and he was pretty good at it
too. He didn't have to be, she was so excited right now that
great technique on his part was by no means required, but this
made it even better.

"Now that was just wonderful," she said. She went to her bag, got out the duct tape, and cut off an eight-inch length.
"I wanted to do that first," she went on, "because it's our last
chance for that particular activity."

And she slapped the tape over his mouth.

Oh, the look in his eyes! Worth the price of admission
right there. He wasn't quite sure whether this was going to
make it even more exciting for him, or whether it was maybe
something he ought to worry about.

But why worry? What good would it do? What good would
anything do?

"See, isn't this neat? You're harder than ever. And you're
going to stay that way." She mounted him, felt him swelling
impossibly larger inside her. "Mmmm, nice," she said. "Oh,
yes. Very nice."

She rode him for a long time. Her climaxes came one after
the other, and all they did was pitch her excitement higher. At
last she fell forward, her breasts crushed against his chest. A
smooth chest would have been nice, but a hairy chest was nice
too. Everything was nice when you could do whatever you
wanted, and when you knew just how it was going to end.

She got up because she wanted to be able to see his eyes
now. "I told you some lies," she said. "My name's not Lucky.
Or Lucretia, or any of that. My last name's not Eagle, or Eagle
Feather, and don't ask me how I came up with all of that on
the spur of the moment. As far as I know, I haven't got a
drop of Indian blood in me. A third Indian! How could anybody be a third anything? I mean, you've got two parents,
four grandparents, eight great-grandparents-I mean, do the
math. You're the one who knows all the odds on the craps
table, so you would have to know that you can only be half or
a fourth or an eighth or three-sixteenths or whatever you are
of anything."

She wagged a finger at him.

"You weren't paying attention, Hank. Little Henry there
was doing your thinking for you. And that's another lie I told
you, incidentally. That it's safe to wrap you up like that. If you
don't loosen it in time, you can do permanent damage."

She left the bed, reached into her purse, found the knife.
She let him see the blade. She let the tip of the blade graze his
cheek as she mounted him one more time.

"God, it's bigger than ever," she told him. "You're in pain
now, aren't you? Oh dear, I'm afraid it's going to get worse.
Well, more intense, anyway. Optima futura, you know. That's
Latin. It means the best is yet to be. For me, that is. For you,
well, maybe not."

She left with close to five thousand dollars in cash and chips,
and stopped downstairs at the cashier's cage to turn the chips
into currency. Then she got in her car and started driving.

She'd left his one-dollar chips in the room. She'd left his
credit cards too, and a gold signet ring that had to be worth
a few hundred dollars. She took the slide from his string tie,
just because she liked it, and she took her cuffs and cords and
scarves, because it would be a nuisance to replace them. But
she left the elastic band in place.

And she took the scalp, tucked away in a plastic bag. It
was just such good theater to scalp him, what with having been
drawn to his hair in the first place, and then the whole Indian
motif of their encounter. Before she was halfway done with
the process she regretted having begun it in the first place,
because even minor scalp cuts bleed like crazy, and when you
scalp a person altogether-well, the Indians probably waited
to scalp people until they were safely dead, and disinclined to
bleed, but she went ahead and finished what she'd started, and it was almost worth it when she shook the scalp in front
of him and let him gape at it.

She'd cleaned up her fingerprints, but she knew she'd left
plenty of DNA evidence, and people at the casino could furnish a description of her. But she'd been working variations
on this theme for a good long while now, and she always got
away with it, so she figured all she could do was play out the
string. And she'd ditch his scalp where it wouldn't be found,
and the scalping would guarantee a lot of press, along with a
manhunt for some unforgiving Indian seeking vengeance for
Wounded Knee.

Yes, she'd just go ahead and play out the string. Because it
kept getting better, didn't it? Optima futura. That pretty much
said it all.