“Whoa!” he says. “Wait a minute, lady! If that’s what you want, you need to be back at your hotel, and then I can call, we have a service, you’ll love …” The thought of Lucinda Quant in bed with an Elvis bot makes him shudder. Even in her present diminished form, she’d be odds on to win that one.
“Don’t panic, I don’t want your body,” she growls with a derisive laugh. “I want your belt buckle. Right now!”
“Wait,” he says. She can’t be the one! She’s not at all what he was expecting – not a suave double agent in black, not a tough Surveillance guy working for Jocelyn, not – worst case! – a Positron-sent assassin. How can he know this unlikely biddy is the right handover link? “Just a minute,” he says. “Who sent you?”
“Don’t be silly. You know who,” she says, tossing her black wig and orange Nymp horns with a hint of the coyness that must have made her a lethal flirt forty years ago. “This is gonna be my fucking comeback, so don’t screw around.”
Wait, wait, he tells himself. You can’t just roll over. “There’s a password,” he says as sternly as he can.
“Tiptoe Through the fucking Tulips,” she says. “Now do I have to pull your pants off or what?”
Stan unsnaps his belt. Lucinda takes it over to the makeup counter, puts on her reading glasses, and holds the buckle under the light. She’s got a tiny implement, like a little screwdriver. She inserts it into the top of the buckle, gives a twist, and the thing snaps open. Inside there’s a miniature black flashdrive.
She tucks the drive into a small envelope, licks it shut, whips off her hair complete with the horns, and duct-tapes the drive to the top of her fuzzy scalp, which isn’t totally bald, but close. Then she pulls the wig back on and adjusts her horns. “Thanks,” she says. “I’m off. I sure hope this has a major scandal in it. I don’t mind risking what’s left of my neck, so long as it’s worth it. Watch the news!”
She’s gone in a swirl of hibiscus floral print and Blue Suede perfume. What’s next? Stan wonders. Wait until the four guys in sunglasses arrive and start ripping out my molars?
Why can’t life hand him something plausible for a change?
The door opens again: four bald guys file in, except they don’t have sunglasses, and they’re green. They fill the dressing room. “Stan,” says the first one, advancing in back-pat stance. “Welcome to Vegas, bro!”
“Conor!” says Stan. “What the fuck!” They do the pat; something wet comes off on Stan’s cheek.
“Right,” says Conor, smiling greenly. “You remember Rikki and Jerold. It was Jerold let you in backstage.”
Handshakes, grins, whacks on the shoulder. The fourth guy says, “Stan. Well done.” Could it be Budge? Bald and green? Yes, it could.
“You guys freaked me out,” says Stan. “Turning up at the Elvis place, with my picture and all.” His honeymoon photo on the beach, the one he’d sent to Conor. That’s where they’d got it.
“Sorry about that,” says Con. “Thought we could cut some corners, make contact earlier, save time. But we missed you.”
“It came out okay in the wash,” says Budge.
“How’d you get out of Possibilibots?” Stan asks him.
“In a box, like you,” says Budge. “Hard to find an Elvis outfit my size, but we cut it up the back the way the undertakers do; plus the box was cramped, but apart from that it worked without a hitch. Our lady friend closed my lid at the Possibilibots end.”
“Let’s get you out of that dickwit Elvis suit. You look like a twat” says Conor. “Who’s got the razor?”
Stan, wearing a badly fitting Green Man suit, his head newly shaved, his face a seaweed green, is drinking a coconut water in Conor’s dressing room. Conor says the coconut water is a quick energy lift, though Stan really doesn’t need any more energy right now: he’s buzzing like a bad fuse.
On the small, blurry dressing room screen, the second Green Man show of the night is in progress. They run them through in teams, says Conor, because the act takes so much out of you. Not out of the boys, because they’re not really in it, they’re just in disguise. They can come and go backstage because everyone in Team One thinks they’re in the other team and vice versa. But Conor himself has always craved the spotlight, so he’s had himself inserted as a gong player.
“Yeah, I know, it’s moronic,” says Conor. “But you have to admit it’s the best cover while we’re waiting to pull the job.”
“What job?” says Stan.
“Oh. She didn’t tell you? She was extra-fucking definite about you. She said you totally had to be in with us; otherwise, it would be a fail. She said you were the lynchpin.”
“Who says? You mean …” He stops himself from saying Jocelyn’s name. He glances around, then up at the ceiling: is it safe in here?
“I mean her! The Big Wazooka! She said the two of you were fucking joined at the hip.”
The Big Wazooka isn’t how Stan would have thought of Jocelyn, but it kind of fits.
“Fucked if I know,” says Conor cheerfully. “Been doing odd jobs for her since before Christ. She’s known you were my big brother ever since she saw you at the trailer joint, before you signed into that body-parts wholesaler corral. I warned you about. But I never ask her why she wants what she wants, that’s her business. Deal is I just do the job, no loose ends; then I collect, end of story, have a nice life. But I guess we find out tomorrow, about why you’re so fucking central. That’s when it’s going down.”
Stan tries to look wise. Is it possible to look wise with your face painted green? He doubts it. “What do I do?” he says. He hopes they aren’t going to rob a bank or kill anyone. “On this job? When it’s going down?”
“Figure we’ll put you on the gong,” says Conor. “Not hard to pick up, you just have to know the cues, then hit the gong with the hammer and look like a dumbass. That shouldn’t be too hard for you.”
“So I’m onstage?” says Stan. That’s not safe, everyone will be looking at him. But then, so what? He no longer has the thing in the belt buckle; he no longer has even the belt, since Rikki took away his whole Elvis outfit and tossed it into a dumpster.
“Not here,” says Conor. “Place called Ruby Slippers. It’s a retirement home clinic type of thing, lot of rich old farts warehoused or getting themselves cut and sewed. We’re the entertainment.”
“That’s all?” says Stan. “All I have to do is hit the gong?” Though he’s been to that Ruby Slippers branch as Elvis a lot, romancing old ladies, nobody will recognize him; not in his current disguise as a giant pea.
“Don’t be a fucking dummy,” says Conor. “That’s the cover! The real job is a snatch.”
“That place has fucking tight security,” says Stan.
“Hey! This is your brother you’re talking to!” says Conor. He rubs two fingers together. “Those guys get paid off! We just go there, start the green act, knock down the security for the look of it, do the snatch …”
Crap, thinks Stan. They’re kidnapping someone. That could get them shot, not to mention himself. “So, I hit the gong …”
“You got it.” says Conor. “And then, whisk-o!”
“Whisk-o?”
“The big snatcheroonie,” says Conor. “It’s genius.”
In Flight
Ed’s up front, in Business. It would look strange for Charmaine to be there too – after all, she’s only the assistant, officially. That’s Ed’s reasoning, says Jocelyn: he doesn’t want to call undue attention. Thank goodness for that, thinks Charmaine, because she would find it very, very hard to be nice to him or even civil, now that she knows what he intends to do to her. If she were beside him in Business, most likely he’d be squeezing her arm all the way to Las Vegas, plus dosing her with gin and tonic and trying to get his fingers onto her knee or look down her front, though no hope of that because she’s wearing the button-to-the-chin blouse Aurora picked out for her.
And all the time he’d be asking her if she’s feeling any less grief because of Stan. Not that he really cares about Stan, or about anything she likes or loves or doesn’t like or love, because he has no interest in who she is really. She’s mostly just a body to him, and now he wants to turn her into only a body. She might as well not have any head at all.
After feeling so sad for weeks, she’s now really angry underneath. If she had to sit with Ed she’d be sure to snap at him, and then he might figure out that she’s learned about his big plan. And then he might panic and do something weird, right on the plane. He might throw her to the floor and start ripping off her buttons, the way Max used to, but with Max she wanted him to do that, whereas with Ed it would be a very different thing, it would be awkward and quite frankly creepy.
That’s what she would say.
Well, he couldn’t really do that – the floor thing with the buttons – because the flight attendants would stop him. But what if they turned a blind eye, what if they’re all his employees, what if everyone on the plane is on his side?
Calm down, Charmaine, she tells herself. That’s just foolish. Those kinds of things don’t happen in real life. It’s okay, it’s going to be fine, because Jocelyn is sitting beside her and Aurora is in the row behind them, and there’s another Surveillance person on the plane too, Jocelyn has assured her – a man, back near the exit door. And that man plus Jocelyn and Aurora, they’ll be more than a match for Ed. She doesn’t know what they’ll do, but it might involve a judo kick or something. And they have the advantage of knowing about Ed’s plan, while he doesn’t know a thing about theirs.
Or Jocelyn has the advantage of knowing about Ed’s plan. So far she hasn’t shared too much of it with Charmaine. She’s reading on her PosiPad, making notes. Charmaine has tried for an in-flight movie – how amazing it would be to see a movie that isn’t from the fifties, she hasn’t been able to watch anything like that for ages, and it would take her mind off things – but her screen isn’t working. Neither is the Recline button on her seat, and someone’s ripped most of the pages out of the in-flight magazine. In her opinion the airline people do things like that on purpose, to rub it in that you aren’t in Business. They most likely have a special team that goes through the planes at night, ripping out the pages and messing up the screens.
Charmaine looks out the window: clouds, nothing but clouds. Flat clouds, not even puffy ones. At first it was so exciting to be on a plane – she’s only ever been on one before, with Stan, going on their honeymoon. She reads the remaining piece in the magazine. What a coincidence: “Honeymoon on the Beach.” Stan got such a sunburn the first day, but at least they did one thing he really wanted, which was having sex underwater, or the lower parts of them were underwater. There were people on the beach too. Could they tell? She hoped they could, she remembers hoping that. Then they had to get their bathing suits on again, and Charmaine couldn’t find her bikini bottom because in all the turmoil she’d dropped it, and Stan had to go diving for it, and they laughed and laughed. They were so happy then. It was just like an ad.
Out the window it’s still clouds. She gets up, goes to the washroom for something to do. How thoughtless, the last person didn’t clean the sink. Really, they don’t appreciate their privileges.
It’s better to close the lid when you flush: Grandma Win told her that. Otherwise the germs fly around in the air and go up your nose.
Coming back along the aisle, she wonders which the security man. Right near the exit, Jocelyn said. She glances around but can’t see the heads back there. She reaches her seat, squeezes in past Jocelyn, who smiles at her but doesn’t say anything. Charmaine fidgets some more; then she just has to ask.
“What in the heck was he planning to
“Hungry?” Jocelyn says. “Because I am. Let’s get some peanuts. Want a soda? Coffee?” She looks at her watch. “We’ve got time.”
“Just a water,” says Charmaine. “Please. “
Jocelyn flags the flight attendant, orders some peanuts and a couple of cheese sandwiches, and the bottle of water for Charmaine with a glass of ice cubes, and a coffee for herself. Charmaine is surprised at how hungry she is; she wolfs down the sandwich in no time flat, gulps down a glass of the water.
“He has it all thought out,” says Jocelyn. “I’m supposed to knock you out on the plane, just before we land. A little something in your drink; a bit of Zolpidem, or GBH, or similar.”
“Oh,” says Charmaine. “Like, those date rape drugs.”
“Right. So you’ll go under. Then I’ll say you’ve fainted, and we call a perimedic ambulance to meet the plane and have you carried off on a stretcher. Then you’ll be taken to the clinic at Ruby Slippers Vegas, and after the brain intervention you’ll wake up, and Ed will be right beside you, holding your hand. And you’ll imprint on him and smile at him like he’s God, and throw your arms around him, and say you’re his, body and soul, and what can you do for him, such as a blowjob right there in the clinic.”
“That so totally sucks,” Charmaine says, wrinkling her nose.
“And then you’ll live happily ever after,” Jocelyn continues in her neutral voice. “Just like in a fairy tale. And Ed will too. That must be what he thinks.”
“How do you mean, he
“Correct,” says Jocelyn. “That’s what I said. So now you can relax.”
And Charmaine does feel relaxed; her eyelids are drooping. She nods off, but then she’s awake again. Awake more or less. “Maybe I’ll have that coffee after all,” she says. “I need to wake myself up.”
“Too late,” says Jocelyn. “We’re about to land. And look, I think I see the ambulance, right on cue. I sent them an email before we took off. Feeling a little sleepy? Just lie back.”
“The ambulance? What ambulance?” says Charmaine. It’s not just sleepiness, there’s something wrong. She looks at Jocelyn and there are two Jocelyns, both of them smiling. They pat her arm.
“The ambulance that will take you to Ed’s clinic at Ruby Slippers,” she says.
, Charmaine wants to say. It must have been the water, something Jocelyn put in.
She’s fainted. I don’t know what … she was fine a minute ago. Here, let me …
Conor doesn’t seem very worried about this prospect. If anything, he’s excited. Break the window on the mobile home, talk Stan into sneaking inside with him, then, when someone comes, run away very fast, leaving Stan to explain what he’s doing with two steaks from the freezer and a lady’s underpants. Always Conor’s idea of a fun night out.
Conor and the boys have a two-bedroom Emperor Suite at Caesar’s Palace: whoever’s hired Con isn’t poor. Con says they can’t go out, to a show or a strip joint or the casinos, because he can’t run the risk of them fucking up so close to bingo. Budge says that’s fine with him, maybe they can watch a game, but there’s some grumbling from Rikki and Jerold. Con shuts that down by saying who’s running this, and if there’s a question about that he’d be happy to settle it. So the five of them end up playing Texas hold’em for grapes and pieces of cheese off the Cheese Assortment plate Con’s ordered in and drinking Singapore Slings because Con’s never had one and wants to try it, but they can only have three each because they have to be fresh for the next day.
Stan wins a moderate amount of cheese, which he eats; but after three Singapore Slings he’s out for the count and nods off on the sofa. Just as well, because there are only four beds, and he has no yen to be in any of them with someone else.
In the morning the five of them sleep in, shower, complain about their hangovers – all except Budge, who’d showed some self-restraint the night before – and order in breakfast. Rikki stands behind the door when the cart arrives, Glock at the ready like something in a cop show, just in case it’s a trap. But no, it’s only scrambled eggs, ham, toast, and coffee, wheeled in by a cheerful Caesar’s wench: they’re safe so far.
Then they get suited up and paint their heads green. Con’s hired a van; it’s in Parking with the Green Man gear already loaded into it. Before they leave, Con goes over Stan’s gong cues. Every time he points to his ear, Stan is to hit the gong. He doesn’t need to know fucking why, he only has to hit it. That shouldn’t be too hard. If Con should suddenly rush off toward, for instance, an ambulance that might, for instance, be pulling up in front of the facility, and if the other fake Green Men should rush off with him, Stan should hit the gong three more times so people think it’s all part of the show. Then he should wait for further cues. Then he should go with the flow.
Once they’re in the van Stan gets butterflies. What is the flow? Is this going to be another case of Con vanishing over the fence while Stan is left floundering?
“You missed some green at the back,” Jerold says to him. “I’ll paint it in.”
“Thanks,” says Stan. He has a crick in his neck: he’s sitting up very straight so the green from his scalp doesn’t rub off on the upholstery.
Con has a pass that gets their van in through the Ruby Slippers gate, with its motto: There’s No Place Like Home.
Inside, the road divides: Main Entrance and Reception to the left, Clinic to the right and around the corner. They park in the Visitors Disabled section at the front and lockstep inside; Con flashes his pass at the receptionist.