Shimmy Bang Sparkle(26)
“Been a little busy.” It was another way to say in the joint, and Alice nodded with a sigh. “He here?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes, the way people did when their septic tanks backed up again. “Yep. In the back. Eating lunch.”
The club smelled like piss, bad decisions, and cheap cologne. I passed the stages and the bar and went down the back hallway. Which was when I heard it.
The sound of him chewing. The motherfucking crunching.
I pushed open the door marked PRIVATE and found him sitting behind his desk, fatter than I remembered him, his double chin now so thick it made him look like he was hiding something underneath it.
His real name was Bill Lafayette, and he wasn’t from Texas at all, but somewhere outside Baton Rouge. Digging into his fat, fleshy armpits and man boobs were the straps of a shoulder holster, and I could make out the butt end of a pistol tucked in among the folds. And everywhere, I mean everywhere, was evidence of the source of that goddamned crunching. Cheese curls. Or puffs. Or whateverthefuck they were called.
He crunched down on one and scowled at me. Nearsighted by a mile. A fine dusting of cheese residue covered everything on his desk, like fingerprint powder. He had cans of the things stacked up behind him like ammo squirreled away for a siege. I took a step closer, out of the shadow of the hallway and into his office.
“Well I’ll be goddamned,” he said, sending a puff of cheese spraying across the already cheese-flecked paperwork on his desk. “Nick Norton.” He shoved another huge handful of cheese puffs into his mouth and crunched away on them. They sounded like Captain Crunch without the milk, and whenever I was around him I found myself wondering what those things must have done to the roof of his mouth. He reached across his desk for a little remote and poked at the top button with a fat orange finger. As he did, a huge industrial AC window unit off to the left shuddered to life, creating a powdery storm of orange around him like a haze.
At least he hadn’t changed. If I’d come in here and found this motherfucker a hundred pounds lighter and doing the downward dog in a room cooled only by a desk fan, I’d have had to walk back into the bar and slug back a fifth of vodka without using a glass.
Even though I hadn’t seen him since I’d gotten out, I was sick of him already. From my wallet, I took all the cash tips I’d gotten, plus some of the honest money I’d kept aside before I went away. It came to about five hundred, give or take, and I put it on his desk. He wadded it up and stuck it in his desk drawer, then sniffed and peeked into the cardboard can where his cheese puffs had been. Finding it empty, he tossed it aside onto a heap of identical cans scattered around his wastebasket like bowling pins after a strike. He shuffled through the papers on his desk and pulled out a shiny brochure. On the front was a huge diamond, square-cut and beveled on the edges, coming to a point at the bottom. As big as a golf ball. I didn’t need any explanation, but the brochure gave one anyway. In fancy museum-style letters was the heading, THE NORTH STAR: ON DISPLAY FOR THE FINAL TIME.
“What you know about this?” asked the Texan, unfurling the trifold brochure.
I knew damn near everything about the North Star. It was 589 carats. VVS1 clarity. A single blemish in the center, visible only from the top of the pavilion. A Royal Asscher cut; high crown, seventy-four facets. “Not one fucking thing.”
He snorted and coughed on what was surely a whole bunch of residual cheese puff dust stuck in his flabby throat. “Don’t lie to me, Norton. Makes you sound like a pussy.” He adjusted the gun under his man boob and cracked the knuckles of his right hand by pushing on his straightened fingers with his thumb. With his other hand, he held out the brochure for me, and it flapped in the AC.
I didn’t take it, because I knew what it said already. Any jewel thief worth the name knew about the North Star. One of the biggest diamonds in the world. Unfenceable because of its size; inconvenient, risky, but the job to beat all jobs, money-wise. If that thing were to be cleaved, even by someone with a shaky hand, whatever it yielded would be enough to disappear on for good. Underneath the cover photo of the diamond were the words, DO NOT MISS THIS CHANCE TO SEE ONE OF THE LARGEST DIAMONDS IN THE WORLD BEFORE IT DISAPPEARS INTO PRIVATE HANDS FOREVER!
“It’s a no-go. Stick to your cheese puffs.”
“Cheese curls, Norton,” he said. “Curls, far superior to puffs.” He looked longingly at the North Star with greedy, beady eyes, and back up at me. He lifted one of his great big bushy eyebrows. In the months I’d been gone, the left one had turned mostly white, while the right one hadn’t. It made him look pretty much nuts.
Dropping the brochure on his desk, he glugged his Diet Dr Pepper as the AC whirred. The bottle hissed when he pulled it from his mouth. “Welcome back to the free world, Norton. You want me to call one of the girls up for you? Get you a little”—he set down his can and made a finger-boinking gesture—“action? On the house. A welcome-back-to-town present. No charge.”
Boink, boink, boink went the demo, paired with a matching wiggle of his nonmatching eyebrows.
The finger fuck was the last straw. I’d had it with all his shit. I couldn’t take one more second of the beady-eyed stares, or the cheese powder blizzard, or offering up women like a round of drinks. I couldn’t take being tied to this asshole for one second more.
So I made a split-second decision. I pulled my keys from my pocket and began to take my motorcycle key off the ring. I thought about how right it had felt to have Stella on my bike with me; I thought about how much I’d miss doing that again. But I was determined to do this thing with her the right way, and my gambling debts had no place in that. For myself, for my future, for the sake of a clean slate, the new Nick Norton was starting the fuck over, even if he had to Uber home to do it. “My bike’s outside. Worth at least as much as I owe you. Take it, and we’re done.”