The King of Swords (max mingus) (5 page)

Max told Corrina to keep the change and walked out.

H
ot bitch, thought Carmine Desamours as he watched Corrina bend over to pick up the spoon she'd just dropped.

'You a dancer, baby? Es usted bailarin?' he whispered to her, taking in the shapeliness of her ankles, the smooth, almost mannish musculature of her calves and the width and firmness of her thighs. She was two or three inches over five feet tall-the kind of size most men would want to protect. Protect and fuck: the perfect combination in a woman. He could almost see the money he'd make off her sweet ass.

'No,' she said, turning her head round and smiling at him over her shoulder, a strand of hair falling down past her cheek. He swore right then she was the best little thing he'd seen in at least six months-a straight up Diamond with Heart potential.

'Coulda fooled me.' He smiled, still keeping his voice low so he wouldn't wake the old codger sitting snoozing at the end of the counter by the kitchen door-Al, the manager. He could see Shirley back in the kitchen smoking a cigarette, listening to a Beatles song on the radio, lost in her memories.

They'd had their grand opening on the Monday John Lennon got shot, 8 December, last year. He and his friend Sam had been their first paying customers, coming in after gator hunting out in the Glades. That was when he'd first clapped eyes on Corrina.

The diner was close to deserted as usual. He counted four other people. In the window booth near the entrance, a woman with short grey hair and a bright yellow T-shirt, nibbled on a bagel, while the man opposite her was shovelling scrambled eggs and toast into his face and talking at the same time, spraying his plate with debris. Right at the very back were two other customers-a black man dressed up like Arthur Ashe, and a broad-shouldered white guy in a leather jacket, despite the stifling humidity outdoors.

After she'd served him the first time, Corrina had come back and told Carmine the white guy stank so bad she wanted to heave. He'd sprayed the inside of her wrists with the little bottle of French aftershave he always carried around with him, telling her it would ward off any evil stench. He'd held her hands and blown the perfume dry on her skin, looking her straight in the eyes as the alcohol evaporated. He'd watched her olive skin blush purple as that little bit more of her gave in to him.

'Stinky Man no drink iss cafe,' Corrina said as she put together a clean cup and saucer, and added the spoon she'd picked up off the floor.

'Maybe he was so loaded he mistook this place for a bar,' Carmine said.

Corrina laughed and walked over to the end of the diner with the coffee pot in one hand, the crockery in the other.

He checked her figure out some more as she walked down the aisle. Unlike most white girls, she had real ass, high, round and firm like a black woman's. Nothing a man liked more than an ass like that: the better the cushion, the better the pushin'.

First he'd change her name to something commonplace, forgettable and untraceable. Next, Sam would break her in and break her down. He'd teach her to do absolutely everything she was asked to do and never say no. And when she was good and ready, he'd put her to work.

The way he saw things was very simple. In his world all women were potential hos. He rated them by looks and earning potential and categorized them by playing card suits. In order of superiority: Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades. No royalty, no faces and strictly no jokers-just numbers.

Corrina's starter Games would be with rich old white tricks who had boats named after the trophy wives they'd lost their houses to the year before and crushes on their teenage daughter's best friends. They'd treat her real nice and gentle, purr all poetic and gaga through their drool and their dentures. The sex would be undemanding but uncomfortable, what with having to pretend she was getting the monster fuck of her young life under all that soft wheezing blubber. She'd learn to work them like cash registers. She'd call them 'Big Daddy' and nickname their temperamental peckers 'Tonto' or 'Hot Rod' or 'Big Rocket' or sumsuchshit. She'd learn to feign love and attentiveness and interest, and in the process she'd grow a hard heart.

Then she'd move on to her rightful place, the escort circuit-aka the Diamond Trail. Her tricks would be younger high rollers, the ones who rented girls out for the weekend.

Starting price for a Diamond was $850 per day for a basic weekend rate, an extra $250 per day on holidays. The prices were for the girls only and excluded accommodation and transport. Carmine insisted his Cards travel and stay first class all the way, unless the trick was renting a villa or sumsuchshit, but if they could afford to do that then most likely they could afford to upgrade their Card to a Heart as well.

Hearts started at $2,000 a day, and they were worth it. They were perfect in every way, like God had designed them from a wet dream-faces out of Elle and Cosmopolitan, bodies out of Playboy and Penthouse. Corrina was almost there, but not quite. Her face had a touch too much wetback about it, mostly around her mouth, which sagged slightly at the bottom when she spoke, showing too much lower gum and betraying the barrio paddling in her gene pool. He could see that side of her becoming more prominent in her looks as time went on, because one thing about the life he was about to lead her into was that it always brought out a bitch's true nature, no matter how much make-up and affectation she buried it under.

All things working out as intended, he'd keep her in play until her looks peaked. She'd already told him she'd lied about her age to get this dogshit job. She was really seventeen, not twenty-one. That didn't matter. With the right clothes and make-up, she could easily pass for twenty. And at the age she was now, provided she kept herself in good shape, avoided drink and drugs and didn't eat too much, she could be a cash cow for at least seven or eight years.

When they were done Diamonds either left the Game outright and split back to the shitholes they'd run away from, or else they carried on. He busted the lingerers down to Clubs and made them work the hotels and uptown bars. The money wasn't as good, the risks were higher and they had to turn twice the number of tricks they had before, but it was still way better than being the next suit down-Spades-and working the street, or else-the worst option of all-getting some kind of regular nine to five. He'd known a few who'd tried just that. 'Going straight,' they'd called it. Yeah, right. Within months they'd all gone straight back to him. No point in selling your soul if you don't get the right price.

It wouldn't all be smooth sailing with Corrina. He took that for granted. In his business, there were ten shitstorms to every sunny day. Any number of things could go badly wrong every time a Card went out on the Game-cops, pregnancy, VD and violence. Carmine would have the Diamond and Heart tricks checked out first to make sure they weren't pigs or feebs, and then he'd find out how much they could afford to pay and how much they had to lose. He used a PI called Clyde Beeson to do the background checks. Beeson was expensive, but he was as quick as he was thorough. It usually took him under a week to find out everything and anything about a person.

Of course, there was just no predicting people, especially the rich. Some tricks turned nasty and liked to knock a bitch about, just for the hell of it, 'cause they could. Most of the time the damage was nothing too serious-a split lip or a black eye, but occasionally they'd overstep the mark and fuck their looks up good. His operation didn't skip more than a beat or two because he'd recycle the Card back as a Club or, if they were fucked-up beyond what a reasonably priced surgeon could fix, he'd use them as Spades. In truth, that was a pretty extreme scenario and had happened only twice in the seven years he'd been running his Deck.

A hot Creole Card called Hortensia had gone out to the Caymans with a Wall Street type for the weekend and didn't come back when she was supposed to. The guy rang Carmine up and said the bitch had freaked out on him and gone AWOL that morning. Carmine sent Beeson out to look for her. He found her thirty-seven hours later, back in Miami, holed up in a shitty hotel, a loaded gun in one hand, a bottle of sleeping pills in the other, trying to decide which way out she wanted to go. Looking back and seeing the state of her now, Carmine didn't know why the bitch hadn't just gone ahead and pulled the fucking trigger. He would've done. Mr Wall Street had given her a shot which had put her to sleep while he'd tattooed the whole of the bitch's beautiful face so she looked like someone out of Kiss. Although Carmine had wanted to cut Hortensia loose, she'd begged to be kept in the Deck. Good thing he'd agreed to it too, because now she had a small but loyal clientele of weirdo freaks who went in for her kind of looks. Then there was Valerie, a Diamond who'd been jumped outside a hotel and pack-raped by a bunch of jocks in the back of a van. When they were through, they'd thrown her out at seventy miles an hour on the freeway. She survived but looked like the Elephant Man's twin sister. Carmine couldn't think of anyone who'd want to fuck that, but men never stopped surprising him. Like Hortensia, Valerie had her paying devotees.

'Su perfume es bueno,' Corrina said as she came back from serving Stinkyman, sniffing her wrist and beaming that smile at him. He thought it her worst feature. It made her look simple and stupid. He'd make her drop it.

'Solamente el major,' Carmine replied. It often ba?ed him how dumb a lot of these bitches were, believing any old shit they were told as long as the teller looked the part.

Corrina was a case in point. She thought he was a photographer from New Orleans called Louis De Ville. That's what it said on the business card he'd given her. It was a classy-looking thing-thick textured cream card with his name embossed in metallic emerald-green capitals. His profession, address and number were printed in smaller lettering below. The number and address were for a downtown office block. The office was empty but for three phones and three answering machines, each corresponding to one of his chosen identities. He had a specific profession and business card to match a target Card's dreams. They all wanted to be at least one of the impossible trinity-actress, singer or model-in that order. Accordingly, he'd pose as a talent scout, an agent or a photographer; never too big a cheese, like a director or producer, because that came over as too good to be true and even the dumbass ones'd get suspicious.

He'd already broken the ice with Corrina. He'd taken her out twice, walked her home twice. The last time he'd kissed her goodnight on the doorstep of the shithole house she rented a room in. He knew she wasn't a virgin from the way she kissed. She'd stuck her tongue in his mouth. He could have gone further with her then, but he hadn't fucked a target since the first month of his first year on the job. That had been a mistake. The intimacy had messed with his head, made it harder for him to get nasty with the bitch when she'd got out of line. He'd shared something with her, something fragile and unguarded, something that was all his and she'd tried to turn it on him. She hadn't got far, but since then he'd vowed never to let one of those bitches get close to him again. He left all that to Sam.

Corrina was going to meet Sam tonight, although she didn't know it yet.

Carmine checked his watch. It had gone 10 a.m.

The brother in the tennis-player costume settled his bill and left. He looked like he belonged in the Village People in that get-up. Carmine followed him out the door with his eyes, the slow walk across the forecourt, the way he stopped to check out his fine Mercedes coupe and then looked back at the diner to see if he could spot its owner, probably correctly guessing that it belonged to the fly-looking, green-eyed brother he'd seen as he'd left. Carmine thought the brother might be getting into the dirty-brown Camaro parked nearby, but it wasn't the right kind of ride for him. He figured him as a classier type, a Porsche or Ferrari man-if he had the bread.

A few minutes later the white guy in the leather jacket came up to the counter to pay his bill. Close-up he looked a bit of a mess. His face was pale, unshaven, sweaty and bad tempered; there were bags under his bloodshot blue eyes. Carmine could feel him scrutinizing him from the side, taking in his fine suit and shoes. It was an intense looking-over too, the kind a guy wanting to start a fight might give you to get you riled up enough to ask him what was up.

The man gave Corrina a twenty and drew a bit closer to Carmine.

The motherfucker stank like he'd fucked a skunk in a distillery: shitty bad breath, booze, cigarettes and stale sweat.

The guy's stare stayed on him until he started to feel small, like he was being looked at under a microscope.

What's with this guy? thought Carmine. Is he a pissed off redneck?

Carmine put his game face on and turned to Stinkyman and looked him straight in his squinty eyes.

Stinkyman met his glare full-on and threw it back at him.

Scary ass motherfucker! thought Carmine, but he didn't let it show. Bitch! Give this peckerwood his fucken' change so's he can be outta my damn face!

Then he saw something glinting under the guy's jacket. He broke the stare and followed the light to a pair of cuffs and the piece Stinkyman was wearing on his hip.

Shit-a cop!

Carmine felt like a pussy but he turned away, none-of-my-business, look-the-other-way, you-just-carry-on-and-act-like-I-ain't-here style. He thought about having to explain the switchblade and the roll of cash in his pockets. He thought about the cigar tube full of the beans he'd picked up from Sam's for his mother.

He'd never been in trouble with the police his whole life. He ran his business real careful and, besides, the SNBC saw to it that the right palms were greased.

The cop was still staring at him. Corrina barely had any bills in the register so she was counting out his change in quarters. He could almost feel the guy knew what he was, like he could look into his skull and read all his thoughts, see all his plans.

Bullshit, he told himself. Cops ain't psychic. They just get lucky.

Corrina was turning to give the cop his change when he told her to keep it and abruptly walked out of the diner.