The dealer shoved the cards into the shoe, drew out the freshly shuffled pack and dealt quickly, but Minnie Mouse spat at Tom in Japanese. She snatched up her cards, muttering furiously. Steaming, she made a stand.

Tom stoked the pot to four thousand dollars; the other players dropped out one by one again but the girl kept pace, throwing her chips down with clattering anger each time, muttering under her breath and finally going all in, turning over pocket jacks with jack high on the table.

Tom showed her his pocket queens, and when another came up on the river, he stood up and grinned meanly at her shocked, pale face, then went to the pay window as if in a harsh, noisy dream.

Behind him the security men threw the now-hysterical Japanese girl out. He didn’t look round, but he heard her shouting receding as the cashier counted out almost $112,000.

He declined the offer of a cheque.

He declined the offer of an escort to his car.

He stepped out from between the plastic palm trees into the sultry California night and looked to the left-hand corner of the lot, where he could just see the low roof of the Lotus and the higher one of his Buick beside it. Then he turned right onto the strip and caught a cab.

‘Where to?’ the driver said.

‘Santa Ana,’ he replied.

38

THE SAWMILL WAS full. Tom couldn’t get a seat anywhere near the stage so he stood at the bar and watched the dancers over the other patrons’ heads while he knocked back two Jack Daniel’s in quick succession, then made the third last.

Despite the whiskey burning slowly through his veins, he felt shaky now the win-high was gone. In the cab he’d reorganized the money so it wasn’t in cumbersome rolls, and divided it into equal flat slabs, but $112,000 was still a lot of money to stuff into one pair of jeans and a leather jacket, and now he was aware of it padding him, bulking him up, chafing his thighs and tickling his ribs when he moved.

As the high left him, only the bitter anger remained – joined by fear. He hadn’t known what he was going to do when he left the Honolulu until the very moment he walked away from Ness instead of towards her. Everything he’d been through in the previous eighteen months had built up to that point, his future chosen on a patch of red carpet laid on asphalt between two plastic palm trees. He’d made a spur-of-the-moment decision that he was going to have to live by for ever.

There was no going back.

They might already be at his condo, turning it over, looking for the bolt, looking for the money, looking for him. He didn’t care. There was nothing there he loved, and the place usually looked like it had just been tossed by the cops anyway.

Going to Halo was not an option. Tom needed to keep as far away from Halo as he possibly could right now. He couldn’t go to the police. The money straining his pockets condemned him like a confession. A dozen people at the Honolulu could testify he’d sat down with twenty thousand dollars he hadn’t earned, and the hand of a known criminal associate on his shoulder. The money gave him options but it also made him a target.

A bigger target.

Every road seemed closed to him but this one. Tom’s mind tried to skitter away from just why he’d made his great escape to a strip club in Santa Ana instead of flying to Omaha or Oregon, building a shack and raising pigs or hunting Bigfoot for the rest of his anonymous life.

Lucia.

He told himself he wanted to see how she was holding up after the death of her sister, but the truth was that he just wanted to see her. Any place. Any time. Any reason.

Or no reason at all.

As if she’d heard his thoughts, Lucia came onstage with another black girl, and his heart lurched as it never had when he was bluffing his way to a stolen pot. Never had with Ness.

She looked slimmer. Too much slimmer. That’s how she’s holding up, Tom thought sadly. It was only a week and already she’d lost weight.

She started to dance, her eyes closed to preserve her privacy as her body became public property.

The other girl was more obvious, with a high, tight ass and hard silicone breasts, but for once the customers seemed more drawn to Lucia as she made her body a sinuous, sensuous wave of soft beauty.

When the music ended, dozens of hands reached up to touch her and to stuff bills into her G-string. Tom saw a middle-aged man grip her thigh hard as she knelt in front of him, and saw her wince, before smiling emptily over his head and taking his money.

Tom found himself at the stage. He pulled the man back by the shoulder, breaking his contact with Lucia.

‘What the fuck?’ the man said, then backed off when he saw the look in Tom’s eyes.

‘Lucia.’

She looked surprised, then angry. Then blank. She rose carefully and turned her back on him, taking bills from men on the other side of the walkway.

‘I need to talk to you.’

The music started again and two new girls walked out, hips thrust forward, shoulders back, lips parted. Lucia ignored him and headed backstage.

Tom jumped onto the stage and went after her, followed by the angry shouts of the other customers.

He grabbed her arm. ‘Lucia—’

Strong arms choked off his next words and he was yanked clear off his feet. Lucia’s face registered uncertainty before disappearing from his view and he found himself looking up into the lighting rig as the man who’d grabbed him round the neck, and somebody else, lifted him like a log and carried him roughly through a series of dark, sharp-edged corridors until he felt the night air on his face – and then the hard reality of the parking lot as they dropped him without bothering first to set him vertical.

Big hands grabbed the lapels of his jacket and the man, who reminded him very much of post-diet Ronaldo Suarez, dragged Tom’s wincing face to within an inch of his own. ‘Don’t. Touch. The fucking. Girls.’ He dropped Tom hard, so that his head bounced on the broken asphalt, and walked away. Dimly, Tom heard the back door of the Sawmill bang shut.

He lay there, getting his breath back.

As kick-outs went, that wasn’t such a bad one. And the money had broken his fall.

He started to laugh. It was true – his head hurt but nothing else did; the bolt in his jeans pocket had dug into his hip a little but otherwise he was too well padded to have suffered any injury. The thought made the laughter bubble up even more strongly and he lay there and laughed at the moon until, again, he could barely breathe, then slowly got to his feet and put his fingers to the back of his head. There was blood, but not much.

He didn’t know what to do now. Where to go. His car was back at the Honolulu; his condo was a no-go zone.

He wandered down the strip and broke into his $112,000 to buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Coke, a transaction so meagre that it set him laughing once more, so that the staff and few other customers watched him carefully while he ate.

Then he went back to the Sawmill, upended a trash can and sat on it for two hours until Lucia came out of the back door.

‘Lucia. I need to talk to you.’

‘I’m busy.’

She walked past him towards a beat-up Mitsubishi Colt.

‘Are you okay?’

She ignored him and went to unlock the car, fiddling to get the key to engage.

‘I know I said I’d call you.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Yeah, it does. And I was going to. But someone got killed. Shot.’