Sucker bet - James Swain [51]
An ambulance came, accompanied by two police cruisers. Hicks knew the best thing to tell the police was nothing at all, and he climbed into the back after Mr. Beauregard was wheeled in on a gurney. The EMT person was a bottled blond with a kind face. As the ambulance pulled out of the carnival grounds, she said, “We’re going to take him to a good animal hospital over in Fort Lauderdale. They deal with the circus animals when they come to town.”
“No,” Hicks said.
“Excuse me?”
“I want you to take him to a people hospital.”
“But, sir . . .”
“Please do as I say. I’ll pay you. Cash.”
The EMT woman discussed it with the driver. Hicks laid his hand on Mr. Beauregard’s forehead and tuned them out. Ten years ago, he’d found Mr. Beauregard in a strip shopping center in Louisiana, huddled in a cage. He’d bought him for a hundred dollars and moved him into a cage in his trailer, hoping to train Mr. Beauregard to do some simple tricks. But Mr. Beauregard had already been to school. Play a tune on the radio, and he would duplicate it on his ukulele. Tell him the name of a city, and he’d find it on a map. He could think, and add numbers, and he also knew things, just as people knew things—like hate and fear and jealousy and betrayal—and it had all sunk home for Hicks one day when Mr. Beauregard kicked a carnival worker in the balls for calling him a “dirty monkey.” That was when Hicks had realized that Mr. Beauregard wasn’t just a clever animal, but an evolutionary marvel. He heard the EMT woman talking to him and looked into her kind face.
“I said, we’re going to take your friend here to a regular hospital. Okay?”
Mr. Beauregard’s forehead had grown cold, and Hicks took his hand away.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said.
Opening a topless joint on South Beach had been Victor Marks’s idea.
“A man needs a place to do business,” Victor had told Rico. “It should be a strip club, too. No one knows how much money a strip club is supposed to make.”
Rico hadn’t understood Victor’s reasoning.
“You need a way to launder your money in case the IRS comes calling,” Victor explained. “That’s how your old boss, John Gotti, screwed up. He put on his tax return he sold kitchen fixtures for a living. And look at what happened to him.”
So Rico had opened Club Hedo. A former Arthur Murray Dance Studio, it sat a block removed from the beach. Every day, guys strolled in wearing flip-flops and sand stuck between their toes, paid a stripper twenty bucks to give them a lap dance, then went back to their families and their beach chairs. Weekends saw a lot of Europeans, but mostly it was the beer and T-shirt set.
It was Friday night, and the club was packed. Rico was in his office in back. Through a one-way mirror, he kept one eye on the action while watching basketball on TV.
Miami College, who he had money on, was getting slaughtered. They were a brand-new team and they stunk. The starters were freshmen, and the pressure had done a number on their heads. They hadn’t won a game all season.
His phone rang. It was big Bobby Jewel.
“You sweating through your underwear yet?” Jewel asked.
“It ain’t over till it’s over,” Rico said.
“I know who said that,” the bookie said.
“Hundred bucks says you don’t.”
“Yogi Bear.”
“It was Yogi Berra, you idiot. Yogi Bear was a cartoon character. You owe me a hundred.” Through the mirror he saw Splinters enter the club. He said good-bye to the bookie, expecting Splinters to come back and tell him how things had gone with Candy. Only, Splinters didn’t do that. Bellying up to the bar, he ordered a rum and coke and clicked his fingers to the music. The DJ liked disco, and Splinters sang along to an old Donna Summers song, having the time of his fucking life.
Rico picked up the phone and called the bar—“Send that asshole back here”—and looked at the TV. Fifty seconds left in the game, and Miami College was down by six. Splinters sauntered in. His starched white shirt was covered in tiny red dots.
“What did you do, cut her fucking head off?”
“I drowned her,” his driver said.
“In the ocean?”
“In the swamps, where